R. C. Sproul Quotes

Spiritual depression or unhappiness in the Christian life is very often due to our failure to realize the greatness of the gospel.

The whole man is involved, the mind, the heart and the will, and a common cause of spiritual depression is the failure to realize that the Christian life is a whole life, a balanced life.

The Bible talks plentifully about joy, but it nowhere talks about a 'happy Christian.' Happiness depends on what happens; joy does not. Remember, Jesus Christ had joy, and He prayed 'that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves.'

We are chosen for joy. However hard the Christian way, it is both in the traveling and in the goal, the way of joy.

Riches can all be lost, but that happiness in your own heart can only be veiled, and it will bring you happiness again, as long as you live.

There is no happiness finally, there is no peace, there is no joy except we be right with God. The miserable Christian is wrong in his ideas as to how this rightness with God is to be obtained.

A Christian is never bored or sad. Rather, the one who loves Christ is full of joy and radiates joy.

But does not happiness come from the soul within?

Joy is the triumph of life; it is the sign that we are living our true life as spiritual beings.

You can be living in a big house, driving a nice car, going on exotic vacations and still be empty inside, crippled with fear and dread.

The joy of Being, which is the only true happiness, cannot come to you through any form, possession, achievement, person, or event - through anything that happens. That joy cannot come to you - ever. It emanates from the formless dimension within you, from consciousness itself and thus is one with who you are.

There are songs and melody that make you really happy. And there are spiritual gifts that you have - giving these gifts away sometimes gives you that feeling of inspiration. These seconds of awareness make you realize that any second can be your favorite one, and it really is up to you.

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.

Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.

Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given with our hearts.

The logic of cross and resurrection, of the new creation which gives shape to all truly Christian living, points in a different direction. And one of the central names for that direction is joy: the joy of relationships healed as well as enhanced, the joy of belonging to the new creation, of finding not what we already had but what god was longing to give us.

There are seeds of happiness planted in every human soul. Our mental attitude and disposition constitute the environment in which these seeds may germinate.

It is an unfortunate thing for the Christian to be melancholy. If there is any man in the world that has a right to have a bright, clear face and a flashing eye, it is the man whose sins are forgiven him, who is saved with God's salvation.

The degree of panic activity in my life is equal to the degree of my lack of personal spiritual experience.

Don't eat your heart.

In this century we have made remarkable material progress, but basically we are the same as we were thousands of years ago. Our spiritual needs are still very great.

Happiness is a thing honored and perfect. This seems to be borne out by the fact that it is a first principle or starting-point, since all other things that all men do are done for its sake; and that which is the first principle and cause of things good we agree to be something honorable and divine.

We are born with the seed of joy; it is up to us to nurture it.

My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face. Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: "I want a spiritual teacher.

There is a gentle element, and man may breathe it with a calm, unruffled soul, and drink its living waters, till his heart is pure; and this is human happiness.