REJOICE WITH THOSE WHO REJOICE, MOURN WITH THOSE WHO MOURN

'Love never stands aloof from other people's joys or pains. Love identifies with them, sings with them and suffers with them. Love enters deeply into their experiences and their emotions, their laughter and their tears, and feels solidarity with them, whatever their mood.'

John Sott, The Message of Romans, p.333.

THE BLAME GAME

'...if society becomes corrupt (like a dark night or stinking fish), there is no sense in blaming society for its corruption. That is what happens when human evil is unchecked and unrestrained. The question to ask is: where is the church? Where is the salt and light of Jesus?'

John Stott, The Living Church, p.143.

WHY I'M AN EVANGELICAL

'My sincerely held belief as an evangelical is that it is my very loyalty to Christ which requires me to hold evangelical views.'

John Stott, But I Say To You..., p.202.

SCRIPTURE & TRADITION

'The history of the church is a history of debate in which the truths of the Bible have been been successively defined so as to exclude the opinions of those who have questioned, obscured or denied them.'

John Stott, But I Say To You...Christ the Controversialist, p.35.

SAFE HERMENEUTICS

'The safest of all hermeneutical principles is to know the whole of the Scriptures.' 

John Stott, Challenges of Christian Leadership, p.43. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF REST

'Birdwatchers seldom get nervous breakdowns.'
John Stott, Challenges of Christian Leadership, p.37

TOLERANCE

'We need to make a distinction between the tolerant mind and the tolerant spirit. A Christian should always be tolerant in spirit - loving, understanding, forgiving and being patient with others, making allowances for them, and giving them the benefit of the doubt, for true love "always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres" [1 Corinthians 13:7]. But how can we be tolerant in mind of what God has clearly revealed to be wrong?'

John Stott in 'Andrew Atherstone & Andrew Goddard, Good Disagreement? Grace and Truth in a Divided Church, p.9.

THE LAW

'Not until the law has bruised and smitten us we will admit our need of the gospel to bind our wounds. Not until the law has arrested and imprisoned us we will pine for Christ to set us free. Not until the law has condemned and killed us will we call upon Christ for justification and life. Not until the law has driven us to despair of ourselves will we ever believe in Jesus. Not until the law has humbled us even to hell will we turn to the gospel to raise us to heaven.' 

John Stott, Galatians, p.93. 

SUFFERING

'I could never myself believe in God were in not for the the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as "God on the cross." In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the satue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged into God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me!'

John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p.387.  

SUFFERING

'Biblical teaching and personal experience thus combine to teach that suffering is the path to holiness or maturity. There is always an indefinable something about people who have suffered. They have a fragrance that others lack.'

John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p.369.

LOVE

'...love gives food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, help to the destitute, friendship to the lonely, comfort to the sad, provided always that these gifts are tokens of the giving of the self. For it is possible to give food, money, time and energy, and yet somehow withold oneself. But Christ gave himself. Though rich, he became poor, in order to make us rich.'

John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p.338.

IDENTITY

'Who am I? What is my "self"? The answer is that I am a Jekyll and Hyde, a mixed-up kid, having both dignity, because I was created and have been re-created in the image of God, and depravity because I still have a fallen and rebellious nature. I am both noble and ignoble, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, upright and twisted, image and child of God, and yet sometimes yielding obsequious homage to the devil from whose clutches Christ has rescued me. My true self is what I am by creation, which Christ came to redeem, and by calling. My false self is what I am by the Fall, which Christ came to destroy.' 

John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p.330.

THE CROSS & RESURRECTION

'We are not to regard the cross as defeat and the resurrection as victory. Rather, the cross was the victory won, and the resurrection [w]as [that] victory endorsed, proclaimed and demonstrated.'

John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p.274.

LOVE

'...if we are looking for a definition of love, we should look not in the dictionary, but at Calvary.'

John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p.247.

JESUS

'Learn to know Christ and him crucified. Learn to sing to him and say "Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, I am your sin. You took on you what was mine; yet set on me what was yours. You became what you were not, that I might become what I was not.'

Martin Luther in John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p.233.

FAITH & WORKS

'The tree must be first, and then the fruit. For the apples make not the tree, but the tree makes the apples. So faith first makes the person, who afterwards brings forth works.'

Martin Luther in John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p.220.

THE CROSS

'...God himself is at the heart of our answer to all three questions about the divine propitiation. It is God himself who in holy wrath needs to be propitiated, God himself in holy love undertook to do the propitiating, and God himself who in the peson of his Son died for the propitiation of our sins. Thus God took his own loving iniative to appease his righteous anger by bearing it his own self in his own Son when he took our place and died for us. There is no crudity here to evoke our ridicule, only the profundity of holy love to evoke our worship.'

John Sott, The Cross of Christ, p.204.

THE CROSS

'The the root of every caricature of the cross there lies a distorted Christology. The person and work of Christ belong together. If he was not who the apostles say he was, then he could not have done what they say he did. The incarnation is indispensable to the atonement.'

John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p.189.

SIN & SALVATION

'The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man sustituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives which belong to God alone; God accepts penalties which belong to man alone.' 

John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p.188.

THE CROSS

'...in order to save us in such a way as to satisfy himself, God through Christ substituted himself for us. Divine love triumphed over divine wrath by divine self-sacrifice. The cross was an act simultaneously of punishment and amnesty, severity and grace, justice and mercy.

Seen thus, the objections to a substitutionary atonement evaporate. There is nothing even remotely immoral here, since the substitute for the lawbreakers is none other than the divine Lawmaker himself. There is no mechanical transaction either, since the self-sacrifice of love is the most personal of all actions. And what is achieved through the cross is no merely external change of legal status, since those who see God's love there, and are united to Christ by his Spirit, become radically transformed in outlook and charcter.'

John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p.187.