Top Quotes on the Topic No One Wants to Speak About

We MUST talk about this, or there is no hope for what ails us:

One of the most avoided and denied concepts today is that of sin. We refuse to believe it exists, or that it is a problem. But it is the very thing that has ruined mankind, doomed this planet, and curses us all. The Christian gospel has two main parts: the bad news about our sinful condition, as presented here, and the good news that Jesus Christ came to deal with the sin problem. An article tomorrow will deal with quotes on that glorious reality.

Countless powerful and memorable quotes about sin exist, so I can only present a tiny sampling of them. Here then are 62 brief quotes by 34 noted Christians, past and present:

James Montgomery Boice

“There is no true approach to God without a painful awareness of one’s own sin. This is because God is holy, and we cannot approach him in his holiness without a corresponding exposure of our own corruption.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“If the Church refuses to face the stern reality of sin, it will gain no credence when it talks of forgiveness.”

“Nothing is so cruel as the tenderness that consigns another to his sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe rebuke that calls a brother back from the path of sin.”

Jerry Bridges

“Our first problem is that our attitude towards sin is more self-centered than God-centered. We are more concerned about our own ‘victory’ over sin than we are about the fact that our sin grieves the heart of God.”

“Ungodliness may be defined as living one’s everyday life with little or no thought of God, or of God’s will, or of God’s glory, or of one’s dependence on God.”

John Bunyan

“Sin is the dare of God’s justice, the rape of His mercy, the jeer of His patience, the slight of His power, and the contempt of His love.”

D. A. Carson

“Sin is not first and foremost horizontal, social (though of course it is all that): it is vertical, the defiance of almighty God. The sin that most consistently is said to bring down God’s wrath on the heads of his people or on entire nations is idolatry – the de-godding of God.”

Tim Challies

“The fact is, sin means to harden you against the love and mercy of God. In fact, the ultimate aim of each and every sin, no matter how small it seems, is to fully harden you against God…. Every sin nudges you toward a complete and utter hardness of heart. The fact is, your sin is always several steps ahead of you.”

Oswald Chambers

“Get alone with Jesus and either tell Him that you do not want sin to die out in you – or else tell Him that at all costs you want to be identified with His death.”

“It is perilously easy to have amazing sympathy with God’s truth and remain in sin.”

“A man may look all right in his ostensible religious life, he may have had a vivid religious history, but his private life may be rotten. It is a terrible thing to become blunt and insensitive. Sin destroys the power of knowing that we sin.”

“The essence of sin is the refusal to recognise that we are accountable to God at all.”          

“Our Lord never sympathised with sin; he came to ‘proclaim liberty to the captives,’ a very different thing. We have to see that we don’t preach a theology of sympathy, but the theology of a Saviour from sin.”

G. K. Chesterton

“Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.”

“Men do not differ much about what things they call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”

John Flavel

“Whatever fulness of sin be in you, there is a greater fulness of saving power in Christ.”

Matthew Henry

“Christ is hated because sin is loved.”

Ignatius

“It is impossible for a man to be freed from the habit of sin before he hates it, just as it is impossible to receive forgiveness before confessing his trespasses.”

Douglas Kelly

“Sin is a cancer that would malignantly eat up everything up, if left unarrested. Hence, the righteousness of God requires him to deal with sin. It is too big for us finite creatures to handle, so God himself deals with sin.”

Peter Kreeft

“In fact, the whole reason for hating sins is loving sinners, as the whole reason for a surgeon to hate cancer is his love for his patient’s health.”

John G. Lake

“Men tell us in these days that sin is what you think it is. Well, it is not. Sin is what God thinks it is. You may think according to your own conscience. God thinks according to His.”

C. S. Lewis

“It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.”

“Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others.”

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

“Sin is the greatest power in the world, with one exception, and this is the power of God.”

“The natural mind, as Paul says, ‘is enmity against God.’ Though he talks about God, he really hates God. And when the Son of God came on earth he hated and crucified Him. And that is the attitude of the world towards Him now.”

“When a man truly sees himself, he knows nobody can say anything about him that is too bad.”

John MacArthur

“A gospel that does not confront sin is not the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

George MacDonald

“In short, a man must be set free from the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.”

“If you will not determine to be pure, you will grow more and more impure.”

J. Gresham Machen

“Man is not merely ill, he is dead in trespasses and sins. What is really needed is a new life.”

Albert Mohler

“The disappearance of sin from our moral vocabulary is one of the hallmarks of the modern age – and of postmodern morality.”

John Owen

“I do not understand how a man can be a true believer in whom sin is not the greatest burden, sorrow, and trouble.”

“Be killing sin or it will be killing you.”

J. I. Packer

“It is true that we could not mortify sin by our own unaided efforts; but it is no less true that the Spirit will not mortify sin in us without our co-operation. He will prosper our striving, but he will not bless our sloth.”

A. W. Pink

“It is not the absence of sin but the grieving over it which distinguishes the child of God from empty professors [of faith].”

“The nature of Christ’s salvation is woefully misrepresented by the present-day evangelist. He announces a Savior from Hell rather than a Savior from sin. And that is why so many are fatally deceived, for there are multitudes who wish to escape the Lake of fire who have no desire to be delivered from their carnality and worldliness.”

John Piper

“You don’t walk out of the concentration camp of sin. You kill the guards, and cut the wire, and run till you’re out of range.”

“Sin is like spiritual leprosy. It deadens your spiritual senses so that you rip your soul to shreds and don’t even feel it.”

David Platt

“People will never know how glorious the cross is until they know how serious sin is.”

Leonard Ravenhill

“The world has lost the power to blush over its vice; the Church has lost her power to weep over it.”

“You know, we live in a day when we are more afraid of holiness than we are of sinfulness.”

“There’s one thing we need above everything else; it’s something we don’t talk about these days. We need a mighty avalanche of conviction of sin.”

“I don’t want to be saved just to make it into heaven; I want to be saved from sin; I want to be a God-directed man that in the life I have, I may live for the glory of God.”

J. C. Ryle

“Christ is never fully valued, until sin is clearly seen. We must know the depth and malignity of our disease, in order to appreciate the great Physician.”

“A scriptural view of sin is one of the best antidotes to that vague, dim, misty, hazy kind of theology which is so painfully current in the present age.”

Charles Spurgeon

“This day, my God, I hate sin not because it damns me, but because it has done Thee wrong. To have grieved my God is the worst grief to me.”

“There can hardly be goodness in a man if he is not angered by sin; he who loves truth must hate every false way.”

“The nearer a man lives to God, the more intensely has he to mourn over his own evil heart.”

“Look upon all sin as that which crucified the Saviour, and you will see every sin to be exceeding sinful.”

“How can we remember His death without sorrowing over the sin which made that death necessary?”

“That sin must die, or you will perish by it. Depend on it, that sin which you would save from the slaughter will slaughter you.”

“To get a full idea of how black sin is, you must know how bright God is. We see things by contrast.”

“If you can look on sin without sorrow then you have never looked on Christ.”

“Our imaginary goodness is more hard to conquer than our actual sin.”

“There must be a divorce between you and sin, or there can be no marriage between you and Christ.”

John Stott

“Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony.”

Billy Sunday

“Listen, I’m against sin. I’ll kick it as long as I’ve got a foot, I’ll fight it as long as I’ve got a fist, I’ll butt it as long as I’ve got a head, and I’ll bite it as long as I’ve got a tooth. And when I’m old, fistless, footless, and toothless, I’ll gum it till I go home to glory and it goes home to perdition.”

A. W. Tozer

“It is a psychological impossibility to love anything without hating its opposite. If I love holiness, I hate sin. If I love truth, I hate lies.”

Thomas Watson

“Till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.”

John Wesley

“Indeed, there is no little sin, because there is no little God to sin against.”

Susanna Wesley

“Take this rule: whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off your relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.”

[1896 words]