John Calvin Quotes

For that purpose Christ instituted holy baptism, thereby to clothe you with his righteousness. It is tantamount to his saying, My righteousness shall be your righteousness; my innocence, your innocence. Your sins indeed are great, but by baptism I bestow on you my righteousness; I strip death from you and clothe you with my life.

Justification is God's declaration that we, though guilty sinners, are righteous in God's eyes.

The individual who desires to have his sins forgiven, must seek for it through the blood of Jesus. The individual who desires to get power over sin, must likewise seek it through the blood of Jesus.

The only righteousness that meets the requirements of the Law is the righteousness of Christ.

We shall never be clothed with the righteousness of Christ except we first know assuredly that we have no righteousness of our own.

To be justified means more than to be declared "not guilty." It actually means to be declared righteous before God. It means God has imputed or charged the guilt of our sin to His Son, Jesus Christ, and has imputed or credited Christ's righteousness to us.

The child of God knows his good works do not make him acceptable to God, for he was acceptable to God by Jesus Christ long before he had any good works.

Only the gospel can truly save you. The gospel doesn't make bad people good; it makes dead people alive...the gospel is God's acceptance of us based on what Christ has done, not on what we can do.

God is righteous in making the sinner righteous.

There is only one way by which I can get right with God, and that is through the death of Jesus Christ. I must get rid of the underlying idea that I can ever be right with God because of my obedience. Who of us could ever obey God to absolute perfection!

Our sins are forgiven and we are accepted as righteous by God because of both the sinless life and sin-bearing death of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is no greater motivation for dealing with sin in our lives than the realization of these two glorious truths of the gospel.

Our sins, when laid upon Christ, were yet personally ours, not his; so his righteousness, when put upon us, is yet personally his, not ours.

We acknowledge no righteousness but what the obedience and satisfaction of Christ yields us. His blood, not our faith; his satisfaction, not our believing it, is the matter of our justification before God.

The hub of Christianity is not "do something for Jesus." The hub of Christianity is "Jesus has done everything for you".

Jesus Christ does not save the worthy, but the unworthy. Your plea must not be righteousness but guilt

Jesus took your punishment, and God gave you credit for Jesus' perfection.

The Church is the place where the incompetent, the unfinished, and even the unhealthy are welcome. I believe Jesus agrees.

I offer you salvation this day; the door of mercy is not yet shut, there does yet remain a sacrifice for sin, for all that will accept of the Lord Jesus Christ. He will embrace you in the arms of His love.

It is by avoiding future sin that we retain a remission of the sins of the past.

A man will be justified by faith when, excluded from righteousness of works, he by faith lays hold of the righteousness of Christ, and clothed in it, appears in the sight of God not as a sinner, but as righteous.

Redemption is prior to righteousness. You cannot be righteous until you are first redeemed.

But privately when things got very bad I often looked into books to see whether I could find some helpful words, and one day I read, "The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required." This impressed me so deeply that I went around saying it to myself. But then I forgot which book it was.

No matter how far we may wander from the Lord’s perfect will for our lives, we are always welcome back.

I rest solely in His righteousness and in His atonement because I know there is nothing I can do to make up for my own iniquity.

When the heart is right, "for" and "against" are forgotten.