John R. Rice Quotes of the Week

To try to make one verse in a chapter contradict other verses is no way to understand the Bible. - John R. Rice

And if I were a judge who sentenced a man to the death penalty, I could still in earnest love go and plead with the man to repent of his sins and trust in Christ. And if he would not repent then, you may be sure that many more years lived in sin would not make him any better or any more likely to be saved. I have had the great joy of winning many criminals to Christ and some of them were facing death. I was not less merciful nor kind because I knew that for the good of society sin must be punished, and God's commands ought to be carried out against murderers. - John R. Rice

Incidentally, when you say that those who obey God, when the government acts for God in putting to death a criminal, are likewise murderers, you talk foolishly. Of course you know that there are more words than one for taking a life because the meaning is different. To slaughter a beast is not murder. The execution of a criminal is not murder. When God kills a sinner, or when government obeying God puts a man to death, that is not murder. - John R. Rice

To recognize a man as a Christian who denies the inspiration of the Bible, the deity of Christ, the blood atonement, the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, or Christ's literal return, is clearly forbidden in the Scriptures. To yoke up with one who is anti-Christian in these essential doctrines, whether that yoke be in marriage or in a denominational program or local church or evangelistic campaign or in lodges, is clearly forbidden. Any yoke that binds us to fellowship with unbelievers, binds us to respect their opinion, binds us to please and give some control to unbelievers, is a sinful yoke, an unequal yoke, clearly forbidden in the Word of God. - John R. Rice

But to suppose that you can win scientists by watering down Christianity, and that one can appease them and win them by concessions to their unbelief, has been proved long ago as foolish and unsuccessful. We are open to truth from any source. But the Bible is infallibly correct (aside from incidental mistakes of copyists or mistranslations). And science will never bring truth that will discredit the Word of God. - John R. Rice

Anybody who makes one Scripture contradict another Scripture has an ax to grind and is misinterpreting the Word of God. - John R. Rice

What is wrong with the modernist is not his intelligence, but his sin. Education never made a modernist and a Christ-rejecter. There are no facts in science or history which make the Bible unacceptable to an educated man. There is only a wickedness in the heart that turns people away from Christ and the Bible. Jesus very properly said in Luke 24:25, "O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken." - John R. Rice