Born February 13, 1939, Robert Charles Sproul was the second child of Robert & Mayre Sproul. He supported Pittsburgh sports teams when he was young, and was active in high school athletics until he had to drop out at age 15 to support his family. Despite this, Sproul went on to obtain degrees from several colleges and seminaries, culminating in a PhD in 2001 from Whitefield Theological Seminary. He taught in many colleges and seminaries.

Sproul was a pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America, as well as a theologian and author. He followed Reformed theology.

He married in 1960 and he and his wife, Vesta, had two children (Sherrie and Robert).

After over fifty years of ministry, R. C. Sproul died of COPD and flu at the age of 78 on December 14, 2017.

Quotes

Why do bad things happen to good people? That only happened once, and He volunteered.

Unless we know God deeply, we cannot love Him deeply. Deepening knowledge must precede deepening affection.

God’s plan never changes because He never changes and because perfection admits to no degrees and cannot be improved upon.

Nothing could be more irrational than the idea that something comes from nothing.

In His tender mercies, God has an incredible capacity to love the unlovely.

Repentance is not just turning to something, it’s turning from something.

It is one thing to believe in God; it is quite another to believe God.

There are only two ways of dying. We can die in faith or we can die in our sins.

If God is not sovereign, then God is not God.

As soon as we think God owes us mercy, we’re not thinking about mercy any more.

When there’s something in the Word of God that I don’t like, the problem is not with the Word of God. It’s with me.

A god who is all love, all grace, all mercy, no sovereignty, no justice, no holiness, and no wrath is an idol.

God does not always act with justice. Sometimes He acts with mercy. Mercy is not justice, but it also is not injustice. Injustice violates righteousness. Mercy manifests kindness and grace and does no violence to righteousness. We may see nonjustice in God, which is mercy, but we never see injustice in God.

If ever a person had room to complain of injustice, it was Jesus. He was the only innocent man ever to be punished by God. If we stagger at the wrath of God, let us stagger at the cross. Here is where our astonishment should be focused. If we have cause for moral outrage, let it be directed at Golgotha.

I’ll retire when they pry my cold, dead fingers off of my Bible.

God answered Job’s questions not with words but with Himself.

The Christian life is a life of non-conformity.

If there is no sanctification, it means that there never was any justification.

There are no draws with God, no split decisions. When we wrestle with the Almighty, we lose. He is the undefeated champion of the universe.

The problem we face is that the word holy is foreign to all languages. No dictionary is adequate to the task.

God has entrusted to us the ministry of the Word, not its results.

Only once in sacred Scripture is an attribute of God elevated to the third degree. Only once is a characteristic of God mentioned three times in succession. The Bible says that God is holy, holy, holy.

A Substitute has appeared in space and time, appointed by God Himself, to bear the weight and the burden of our transgressions, to make expiation for our guilt, and to propitiate the wrath of God on our behalf. This is the gospel.

If I want the words of eternal life, there’s only one place I can go to get them – to the One who gave His life that we might live.

Nobody was ever saved by a profession of faith. You have to possess faith.

The grounds of your justification are the perfect works of Jesus Christ. We’re saved by works, but they’re not our own.

We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners.

Without the doctrine of justification by faith alone, the gospel is not merely compromised; it’s lost altogether.

The house that is built upon the sand will crumble at the first sign of a windstorm.

The complaint that church is boring is never made by people in awe.

Right now counts forever.

Without God man has no reference point to define himself.

He is intangible and invisible. But His work is more powerful than the most ferocious wind. The Spirit brings order out of chaos and beauty out of ugliness. He can transform a sin-blistered man into a paragon of virtue. The Spirit changes people. The Author of life is also the Transformer of life.

Humanism was not invented by man, but by a snake who suggested that the quest for autonomy might be a good idea.

I do not want to drive across a bridge designed by an engineer who believed the numbers in structural stress models are relative truths.

Chance is a perfectly good word to describe mathematic possibilities, but it is only a word. It is not an entity. Chance is nothing. It has no power because it has no being; therefore, it can exercise no influence over anything. Yet, we have sophisticated scientists today who make sober statements declaring that the whole universe was created by chance. This is to say that nothing caused something, and there is no statement more anti-scientific than that. Everything has a cause, and the ultimate cause, as we have seen, is God.

There is no such “mother” as Mother Nature. Nature itself is powerless to produce life of any kind. In itself, nature is barren. The power to produce life resides in the Author of nature – God. To substitute nature as the source of life is to confuse the creature with the Creator. All forms of nature worship are acts of idolatry that are detestable to God.

Cynicism and skepticism are the crudest form of quasi-intellectualism… Let the cynic become cynical of his cynicism and the skeptic skeptical of his skepticism and join the battle.

If you’re not accountable in life that means ultimately that your life doesn’t count.

God is serious about how we worship Him, and we must be serious about it, too.

The closer we are to God, the more the slightest sin will cause us deep sorrow.