50 John MacArthur Quotes

You are the only Bible some unbelievers will ever read, and your life is under scrutiny every day. What do others learn from you? Do they see an accurate picture of your God?

We don't seek to escape this life by dreaming of heaven. But we do find we can endure this life because of the certainty of heaven. Heaven is eternal. Earth is temporal. Those who fix all their affections of the fleeting things of this world are the real escapists, because they are vainly attempting to avoid facing eternity - by hiding in the fleeting shadows of things that are only transient.

Scripture repeatedly makes clear that heaven is a realm of unsurpassed joy, unfading glory, undiminished bliss, unlimited delights, and unending pleasures. Nothing about it can possibly be boring or humdrum. It will be a perfect existence. We will have unbroken fellowship with all heaven's inhabitants. Life there will be devoid of any sorrows, cares, tear, fears, or pain.

According to Scripture, virtually everything that truly qualifies a person for leadership is directly related to character.

Life is a gift from God created in His own image.

If we could condense all the truths of Christmas into only three words, these would be the words: "God with us." We tend to focus our attention at Christmas on the infancy of Christ. The greater truth of the holiday is His deity. More astonishing than a baby in the manger is the truth that this promised baby is the omnipotent Creator of the heavens and the earth!

Love and truth must be maintained in perfect balance. Truth is never to be abandoned in the name of love. But love is not to be deposed in the name of truth... Truth without love has no decency; it's just brutality. On the other hand, love without truth has no character; it's just hypocrisy.

God made all of His creation to give. He made the sun, the moon, the stars, the clouds, the earth, the plants to give. He also designed His supreme creation, man, to give. But fallen man is the most reluctant giver in all of God's creation.

Precisely because it is so powerful, the Bible has always had its enemies. Unbelievers challenge its credibility. Skeptics question its accuracy. Moral revisionists depreciate its precepts. Religious liberals dispute its supernatural character. Cultists twist its meaning.

Where sin has been removed death can only interrupt the earthly life and usher in the heavenly.

The simplicity of the gospel gives what the complexity of human wisdom promises but never delivers.

The effectiveness of leadership is measured in terms of influence. When you see someone's influence reflected so profoundly in the lives of other people, you have identified someone who is by definition a leader.

For some reason, we think of doubt and worry as "small" sins. But when a Christian displays unbelief...or an inability to cope with life, he is saying to the world, "My God cannot be trusted," and that kind of disrespect makes one guilty of a fundamental error, the heinous sin of dishonoring God. That is no small sin.

There are basically only two kinds of religion in the world: those based on human achievement and those based on divine accomplishment. One says you can earn your way to heaven; the other says you must trust in Jesus Christ alone.

All sin results from failure to act in faith.

The more you focus on yourself, the more distracted you will be from the proper path. The more you know Him and commune with Him, the more the Spirit will make you like Him. The more you are like Him, the better you will understand His utter sufficiency for all of life's difficulties. And that is the only way to know real satisfaction.

Our responsibility is simply to make our witness faithful; it is God's responsibility alone to make it effective.

Generosity is impossible apart from our love of God and of His people. But with such love, generosity not only is possible but inevitable.

Remember that even Jesus' most scathing denunciation - a blistering diatribe against the religious leaders of Jerusalem in Matthew 23 - ends with Christ weeping over Jerusalem. Compassion colored everything He did.

Truth has no degrees or shades. A half truth is a whole lie, and a white lie is really black.

The Christian life is not adding Jesus to one's own way of life but renouncing that personal way of life for His and being willing to pay whatever cost that may require.

If Jesus, the sinless and perfect Son of God, limited Himself to speaking nothing during His incarnation except the truth He received from His Father, how much more should those who have been called into ministry speak only on the authority of divine Scripture.

Works are not necessary to earn salvation. But true salvation wrought by God will not fail to produce the good works that are its fruit.

Christlikeness is the substance of spiritual dedication.

Nowhere in Scripture do we see real gifts of the Spirit operating when someone is out of control or under some sort of supernatural seizure. Nowhere does the New Testament teach that the Spirit of God causes Christians to fall into a trance, faint, or lapse into frenzied behavior. On the contrary, "The fruit of the Spirit is... self-control".

A person who is not being purified from sin has no claim on being saved from it.

Sixteen of the thirty-eight parables of Jesus deal with money. One out of ten verses in the New Testament deals with that subject. Scripture offers about five hundred verses on prayer, fewer than five hundred on faith, and over two thousand on money. The believer's attitude toward money and possessions is determinative.

Worship is our innermost being responding with praise for all that God is, through our attitudes, actions, thoughts, and words, based on the truth of God as He has revealed Himself.

Christians are not left in the world by accident but are placed there on divine assignment from their Lord.

I am convinced, by the way, that friendships provide the most fertile soil for evangelism. When the reality of Christ is introduced into a relationship of love and trust that has already been established, the effect is powerful. And it seems that invariably, when someone becomes a true follower of Christ, that person's first impulse is to want to find a friend and introduce that friend to Christ.

God's grace is His unmerited favor toward the wicked, unworthy sinners, by which He delivers them from condemnation and death.

God must open the eyes of our understanding before we can truly know and rightly interpret His truth. His truth is available only to those with a regenerate spirit and in whom His Spirit dwells, for only the Spirit can illumine Scripture. Just as the physically blind cannot see the sun, the spiritually blind cannot see the Son. Both lack proper illumination.

People do not have to do something to go to hell; they just have to do nothing to go to hell.

A spiritual gift is a supernaturally designed ability granted to every believer by which the Holy Spirit ministers to the body of Christ. A spiritual gift cannot be earned, pursued or worked up. It is merely "received" through the grace of God.

Godly character is not the result of good intentions, wishful thinking, some mystical "zap," or even sheer Bible knowledge. It's developed through the self-disciplined application of God's Word at a very basic level, enabled and empowered by God's Spirit.

God is not a cosmic killjoy. I know some people who believe He is. They think God runs around saying, "There's one having fun; get him!" They believe God wants to rain on everybody's parade. But that isn't so. God made you. He knows how you operate best. And He knows what makes you happy. The happiness He gives doesn't stop when the party's over. It lasts because it comes from deep within.

Prayer is the spontaneous response of the believing heart to God. Those truly transformed by Jesus Christ find themselves lost in wonder and joy of communion with Him. Prayer is as natural for the Christian as breathing.

Prayers are the nerves that move the muscles of omnipotence. Prayer is not an exercise in futility because God's will, will be done in any case; prayer is the means by which God's will is carried out.

God's will may not be the perfection of the true believer's life, but it is the direction of it.

The truth of the resurrection gives life to every other area of gospel truth. The resurrection is the pivot on which all of Christianity turns and without which none of the other truths would much matter. Without the resurrection, Christianity would be so much wishful thinking, taking its place alongside all other human philosophy and religious speculation.

Worry, by nature, is the product of a lack of faith and trust in God.

God can work peace through us only if He has worked peace in us... Those who are in the best of circumstances but without God can never find peace, but those in the worst of circumstances but with God need never lack peace.

A miracle is an extraordinary event wrought by God through human agency, an event that cannot be explained by natural forces. Miracles are always designed to authenticate the human instrument God has chosen to declare a specific revelation to those who witness the miracle.

The gospel according to Jesus explicitly and unequivocally rules out easy-believism. To make all of our Lord's difficult demands apply only to a higher class of Christians blunts the force of His entire message. It makes room for a cheap and meaningless faith - a faith that may be exercised with absolutely no impact on the fleshly life of sin. That is not saving faith.

It means to preach the Bible in such a way, that the meaning of the Bible passage is presented entirely and exactly as it was intended by God. That's the challenge - the divine Word coming through the preacher.

Justification is... a completed fact for the believer; it is not an ongoing process.

Since the Fall in the Garden of Eden, temptation has been a constant, unrelenting part of human life. Men have tried to avoid and resist it with self-inflicted pain to make themselves uncomfortable and presumably humble, or by isolating themselves from other people and from physical comforts. But no person has ever found a place or a circumstance that can make him safe from temptation.

Worship is simply glorifying God; this means there is nothing required of us that cannot be done as an act of worship.

Saving faith is not just believing that Jesus lived and died. Faith that saves is the confident, continuous confession of total dependence on, and trust in Jesus Christ to meet the requirements on your behalf to give you entrance into God's Eternal Kingdom. It's the surrender of your life in complete trust to Him to do what you cannot do.

Why do Christians get sick? 1. Some sickness comes from God. 2. Some sickness comes from Satan. 3. Some sickness is chastening for sin.