Mark Dever Quotes - Page 2

The church is the gospel made visible.

A church is not a Fortune 500 company. It's not simply another nonprofit organization, nor is it a social club. In fact, a healthy church is unlike any organization that man has ever devised, because man didn't devise it.

For a Christian, our fears about the future are rooted in those places where our will differs from God's will.

I love Iain Murray's definition of worldliness: towards the end of Evangelicalism Divided, he says that worldliness consists of loving idols and being at war with God. I think that's true in the lives of too many professing Christians today.

Prayer is the preview of God's action.

We are all called to initiate involvement in each other’s lives... We covenant together to work and pray for unity, to walk together in love, to exercise care and watchfulness over each other, to faithfully admonish and entreat one another as occasion may require, to assemble together, to pray for each other, to rejoice and to bear with each other, and to pray for God’s help in all this.

Forgetfulness of God's grace is one of the greatest tools in the enemy's war against our souls.

According to the New Testament, the church is primarily a body of people who profess and give evidence that they have been saved by God's grace alone, for His glory alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Sin claims to free but in fact it kills.

If you have no interest in actually committing yourself to an actual group of gospel-believing, Bible-teaching Christians, you might question whether you belong to the body of Christ at all!

Every believer should evangelize. I know some Christians think that evangelism is only for people with special gifts for it, but I don't believe the New Testament teaches that. While Paul does say that some believers have the call to be evangelists, all of us have the responsibility of evangelism.

We should want to evangelize because of the joy that God puts in our hearts. Ultimately, that's the best reason for sharing our faith.

Once we see more of our need and understand more of what Christ has done for us, he will become more precious to us. And this, in turn, will enable our obedience far more than sheer grunt effort.

Christians are defined not by our heritage, but by our mission; not by our blood, but by His.

Membership is the church's corporate endorsement of a person's salvation.

Today is what the Lord has prepared you for.

Unbelief is like gravity, it's always pulling down on the authority of Scripture.

By the grace of God I am what I am

I heard about a pastor in a church of 5,000 people who employed two seminary students whose main responsibility was to get four new people baptized each week. When asked, "What happens if they can't meet the quota?", his response was, "Then I'll find two students who can". This man wasn't even remotely interested in true gospel preaching. He was results-driven.

If joy or urgency are missing from our presentation of the gospel, then our testimony to Christ will be missing that sort of fullness that we find in the New Testament.

We live in a time when people are increasingly skittish about evangelism - Christians and non-Christians alike. People are suspicious of evangelism, and misunderstand it, which contributes to our reluctance to share the gospel. When you add our fear of others' reactions as well as our natural laziness to the equation, it's not hard to see why we make such little progress in sharing our faith.

God's eternal plan has always been to display his glory not just through individuals but through a corporate body.

Do you want to know that your new life is real? Commit yourself to a local group of saved sinners. Try to love them. Don’t just do it for three weeks. Don’t just do it for six months. Do it for years. And I think you’ll find out, and others will, too, whether or not you love God. The truth will show itself

Evangelism is not simply looking at someone and saying, "Look, you have to become a Christian". Instead, an evangelist tells us the truth about who God is, and explains where we stand as a result of that. People can ignore us - indeed, they have every legal right to do so.

I recognize that not all of us may have the same abilities and talents in sharing the gospel. But I want to keep the heat on all of us for getting the good news out there.