The human predicament involves sin. Yesterday I featured over 60 quotes on the reality of sin and the destruction it everywhere brings. But I promised a follow-up piece looking at the remedy: the cross of Christ. So here are 50 brief quotes by 34 important Christians dealing with the heart of the Christian faith:
Augustine
“As they were looking on, so we too gaze on his wounds as he hangs. We see his blood as he dies. We see the price offered by the redeemer, touch the scars of his resurrection. He bows his head, as if to kiss you. His heart is made bare open, as it were, in love to you. His arms are extended that he may embrace you. His whole body is displayed for your redemption. Ponder how great these things are. Let all this be rightly weighed in your mind: as he was once fixed to the cross in every part of his body for you, so he may now be fixed in every part of your soul.”
Albert Barnes
“Such was God’s original love for man that He was willing to stoop to any sacrifice to save him; and the gift of a Saviour was the mere expression of that love.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ.”
“The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise godfearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ.”
Jerry Bridges
“If we want proof of God’s love for us, then we must look first at the Cross where God offered up His Son as a sacrifice for our sins. Calvary is the one objective, absolute, irrefutable proof of God’s love for us.”
D. A. Carson
“Both God’s love and God’s wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax – at the cross. Do you wish to see God’s love? Look at the cross. Do you wish to see God’s wrath? Look at the cross.”
Oswald Chambers
“All of heaven is interested in the cross of Christ, hell afraid of it, while men are the only ones to ignore its meaning.”
Stephen Charnock
“When we tremble under a sense of our sins, the terrors of the Judge and the curses of the Law, let us look upon a crucified Christ, the remedy to all our miseries. His Cross has procured a crown. His passion has expiated our transgressions. His death has disarmed the Law. His blood has washed a believer’s soul. This death is the destruction of our enemies, the spring of our happiness, the eternal testimony of divine love.”
“We lost a paradise by sin, and have gained a heaven by the cross.”
James Denney
“All the suggestions of the Bible with reference to this problem [of sin] converge upon the cross. The Cross dominates everything. It interprets everything. It puts all things in their true relations to each other.”
ElisabethElliot
“To be a follower of the Crucified means, sooner or later, a personal encounter with the cross. And the cross always entails loss. The great symbol of Christianity means sacrifice and no one who calls himself a Christian can evade this stark fact.”
P. T. Forsyth
“Christ is to us just what the cross is. All that Christ was in heaven or on earth was put into what He did there… You do not understand Christ till you understand His cross.”
“The blood of Christ stands not simply for the sting of sin on God but the scourge of God on sin, not simply for God’s sorrow over sin but for God’s wrath on sin.”
“The great central, decisive thing, the last judgment of the world, is the Cross of Christ.”
Billy Graham
“God undertook the most dramatic rescue operation in cosmic history. He determined to save the human race from self-destruction, and He sent His Son Jesus Christ to salvage and redeem them. The work of man’s redemption was accomplished at the cross.”
“The heart of the Christian Gospel with its incarnation and atonement is in the cross and the resurrection. Jesus was born to die.”
Franklin Graham
“It was Christ who willingly went to the cross, and it was our sins that took him there.”
Matthew Henry
“Come, and see the victories of the cross. Christ’s wounds are your healings, His agonies your repose, His conflicts your conquests, His groans your songs, His pains your ease, His shame your glory, His death your life, His sufferings your salvation.”
Timothy Keller
“Only on the cross do you have a totally holy God and a totally loving God.”
Peter Kreeft
“Forgiveness is the reason for the crucifixion, and the crucifixion is the reason for the Incarnation.”
“God turned our greatest evil (sin) into the occasion for our greatest good (salvation); in fact He turned the greatest sin ever—deicide—into the very instrument of our greatest good, ‘Good Friday’.”
C. S. Lewis
“It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.”
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
“Look again at the cross, my friend. Take another survey. Examine it again with greater depth and profundity, and having seen the grace and the mercy and the compassion and the kindness of God, look again and this is what you will see. You will see the righteousness of God. You will see the justice of God and his holiness. It is the place of all places in the universe where these attributes of God can be seen most plainly.”
“Superficial views of the work of Christ produce superficial Christian lives.”
Martin Luther
“The great event on Calvary . . . is an eternal reminder to a power drunk generation that love is the most durable power in the world, and that it is at bottom the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. Only through achieving this love can you expect to matriculate into the university of eternal life.”
Alexander MacLaren
“We believe that the history of the world is but the history of His influence and that the center of the whole universe is the cross of Calvary.”
J. Louis Martyn
“The cross … is the watershed event for the whole of the cosmos, affecting everything after it”.
Reinhold Niebuhr
“If a gospel is preached without opposition it is simply not the gospel which resulted in the cross.”
John Owen
“There is no death of sin without the death of Christ.”
James I. Packer
“The cross of Christ is a revelation of the love of God, for it reveals what that love is prepared to suffer for the one loved. I believe that the presentation of the death of Christ as substitution exhibits the love of the cross more richly, fully, gloriously and glowingly than does any other presentation. It gets nearer to the heart of that love than any of the other pictures that the New Testament contains.”
John Piper
“Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain. What was once foolishness to us — a crucified God — must become our wisdom and our power and our only boast in this world.”
FlemingRutledge
“Christianity is unique. The world’s religions have certain traits in common, but until the gospel of Jesus Christ burst upon the Mediterranean world, no one in the history of human imagination had conceived of such a thing as the worship of a crucified man.”
“The cross, incomparably vindicated by the Resurrection, is the novum, the new factor in human experience, the definitive and world-changing act of God, that makes the New Testament proclamation unique in all the world.”
J. C. Ryle
“Take away the cross of Christ, and the Bible is a dark book.”
“Miserable indeed is that religious teaching which calls itself Christian, and yet contains nothing of the cross.”
Fulton J. Sheen
“I wonder maybe if our Lord does not suffer more from our indifference, than He did from the crucifixion.”
R. C. Sproul
“The most obscene symbol in human history is the Cross; yet in its ugliness it remains the most eloquent testimony to human dignity.”
“The sweetest fragrance, the most beautiful aroma that God has ever detected emanating from this planet, was the aroma of the perfect sacrifice of Jesus that was offered once and for all on the cross.”
Charles Spurgeon
“Leave out the cross, and you have killed off the Gospel of Jesus. Atonement by the blood of Jesus is not an arm of Christian truth; it is the heart of it.”
“The hill of comfort is the hill of Calvary; the house of consolation is built with the wood of the cross; the temple of heavenly cordials is founded upon the riven rock, riven by the spear which pierced its side. No scene in sacred history ever gladdens the soul like the scene on Calvary. Nowhere does the soul ever find such consolation as on that very spot where misery reigned, where woe triumphed, where agony reached its climax.”
“Let us go to Calvary to learn how we may be forgiven. And then let us linger there to learn how to forgive.”
John Stott
“Every time we look at the cross Christ seems to say to us, ‘I am here because of you. It is your sin I am bearing, your curse I am suffering, your debt I am paying, your death I am dying.’ Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross. All of us have inflated views of ourselves, especially in self-righteousness, until we have visited a place called Calvary. It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.”
“God could quite justly have abandoned us to our fate. He could have left us alone to reap the fruit of our wrongdoing and to perish in our sins. It is what we deserved. But he did not. Because he loved us, he came after us in Christ. He pursued us even to the desolate anguish of the cross, where he bore our sins, guilt, judgement and death. It takes a hard and stony heart to remain unmoved by love like that.”
A. W. Tozer
“When Jesus died on the cross the mercy of God did not become any greater. It could not become any greater, for it was already infinite. We get the odd notion that God is showing mercy because Jesus died. No – Jesus died because God is showing mercy. It was the mercy of God that gave us Calvary, not Calvary that gave us mercy. If God had not been merciful there would have been no incarnation, no babe in the manger, no man on a cross and no open tomb.”
“People want the benefit of the Cross but they do not want the control of the Cross.”
“The cross where Jesus died became also the cross where His apostle died. The loss, the rejection, the shame, belong both to Christ and to all who in very truth are His. The cross that saves them also slays them, and anything short of this is a pseudo-faith and not true faith at all.”
N. T. Wright
“Jesus’ death was seen by Jesus himself … as the ultimate means by which God’s kingdom was established. The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God’s kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.”
Ravi Zacharias
“Justice demands judgment. Love demands mercy. Only at the cross of Jesus do we find both. Only at the cross do we find perfect love and perfect justice in perfect intersection. That is why Jesus came. That is why Jesus was ready to die.”
“Outside of the cross of Jesus Christ, there is no hope in this world. That cross and resurrection at the core of the Gospel is the only hope for humanity. Wherever you go, ask God for wisdom on how to get that Gospel in, even in the toughest situations of life.”
Samuel M. Zwemer
“There is no mystery in heaven or earth so great as this – a suffering Deity, an almighty Saviour nailed to a Cross.”
2 Replies to “Inspiring Thoughts on the Work of Christ”
GREAT quotes. From the quick read, Oswald Chambers, Ravi Zacharias, and C.S. Lewis quotes really spoke to me but several others did as well. Augustine’s sermonizing speculation on the whys of Christ’s physical positions on the cross was devotionally moving but not exegetically sound though he clearly was reflecting on such. Thanks for this diverse collection of quotes from quotable people on the cross.
GREAT quotes. From the quick read, Oswald Chambers, Ravi Zacharias, and C.S. Lewis quotes really spoke to me but several others did as well. Augustine’s sermonizing speculation on the whys of Christ’s physical positions on the cross was devotionally moving but not exegetically sound though he clearly was reflecting on such. Thanks for this diverse collection of quotes from quotable people on the cross.
Many thanks Joe.