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As long as quick numerical growth remains the primary indicator of church health, the truth will be compromised. Instead, churches must once again begin measuring success not in terms of numbers but in terms of fidelity to the Scriptures.
Mark Dever
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Mark Dever
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 28
Erudite
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the United States of America
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More quotes by Mark Dever
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.
Mark Dever
Sadly, there are some fine Christian people who believe that the only way to advance the gospel is to pray for revival and nothing else. You don't know if they have any non-Christian friends or if they have ever shared the gospel with anybody in the last 30 years. It's depressing going to prayer meetings like that. I don't want to pray like that.
Mark Dever
The church is the gospel made visible.
Mark Dever
A gospel that in no way offends the sinner has not been understood.
Mark Dever
Sin claims to free but in fact it kills.
Mark Dever
Too often preachers want to deal with people simply at the level of publicly accessible reason. We participate with them in their own epistemology. But this is not New Testament preaching. We have a message that is not from this world it is from God. We don't know it by our own cleverness we know it because God has revealed it.
Mark Dever
There is simply so much reason to believe the good news of Jesus Christ in history, in Scripture, as well as in our own experience that it would take a leap of faith not to believe in the gospel.
Mark Dever
Most people are glad for somebody else to share their own story of how they have found spiritual help. The problems start when you begin to universalize your story - when your narrative becomes authoritative and begins affecting their lives as well.
Mark Dever
Membership is the church's corporate endorsement of a person's salvation.
Mark Dever
There is no gospel without the offence. This is God's wisdom. It never seems sensible to us in our flesh.
Mark Dever
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.
Mark Dever
We may be sinking in the North Atlantic in the most famous ship disaster of all time, but God can still use us to reach out and save others through our witness.
Mark Dever
What really concerns me is for Christians to understand the fundamentals of evangelism in a way that is helpful in the contemporary scene.
Mark Dever
It's fine to deal with people's doubts and explain why they have good reasons to believe in Christ. But until we tell them the good news of Jesus Christ, we haven't done our job. They need a saviour that God has provided them in Christ. Once they know that, we can do as much apologetics as we need to.
Mark Dever
We can't know at any given time how God will bless our faithful witness. So the apparent numerical growth of the church is never a good guide to how faithful we have been in evangelism.
Mark Dever
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.
Mark Dever
Suffering can serve us. Suffering tests our trust in God's promises. And we have a great interest in knowing the truth about our trust in Him.
Mark Dever
The church arises only from the gospel. And a distorted church usually coincides with a distorted gospel.
Mark Dever
God can use even stray, honest comments to bring people to himself.
Mark Dever
The difference between apologetics and evangelism is that in apologetics, you are answering objections that the world raises, whereas in evangelism, you are bringing the message that Christ brought. So unbelievers tend to set the agenda in apologetics, and you set the agenda in evangelism.
Mark Dever