Charles Hodge Quotes

Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?

Every doer of the law and every moral worker is accursed, for he walketh in the presumption of his own righteousness.

We Protestants automatically assume that the Pharisees are the Catholics. They are the self-righteous people who have made Christianity a form of legalistic religion, thereby destroying the free grace of the Gospel. We Protestants are the tax collectors, knowing that we are sinners and that our lives depend upon God's free grace.

People who lie, particularly those who lie really big, can't do it effectively unless they feel that there's a righteous power behind what they're doing. You're entitled to lie because the end justifies the means.

I was fascinated that everybody in the story thinks that they're in the right.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

I have always lived according to my conscience, and my past is clean.

The Bible makes it clear that self-righteousness is the premier enemy of the Gospel.

The pleasures of moral purity are available to those who fancy themselves a small-church militant in an unconverted world.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so

I don't smoke, drink, do drugs or even have affairs. If I don't even swear, I should be put in a shrine and sanctified.

I hope not in works. I hope not in ethics. I hope not in baptisms or church membership. I hope in Christ alone.

It is faith alone that justifies, but faith that justifies can never be alone.

At its heart, legalism is a desire to appear holy. It is trying to be justified before men and not God.

A rigorous doctrine of imputation is not only limiting but ends up doing a disservice to the nature of grace and justification. It makes the transactions of the gospel basically juridical. In the Roman view, justification and sanctification are a seamless fabric. It is more than a question of God simply seeing us through a legal scrim of Christ's righteousness. Righteousness actually begins to transform us.

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.

We abide in God insofar as we do not sin.

One is not righteous who does much, but the one who, without work, believes much in Christ. The law says, 'Do this,' and it is never done. Grace says, 'Believe in this,' and everything is already done.

Give a man religion without reminding him of his filth, and the result will be arrogance in a three- piece suit.

Not only the adoration of images is idolatry, but also trust in one's own righteousness, works and merits, and putting confidence in riches and power. As the latter is the commonest, so it also is the most noxious.

Many have been deceived by outward appearances and have proceeded to write and teach about good works and how they justify without even mentioning faith.... Wearying themselves with many works, they never come to righteousness.

Christ was treated as we deserve that we may be treated as He deserves. He was condemned for our sins, in which He had no share, that we might be justified by His righteousness, in which we had no share. He suffered the death which was ours, that we might receive the life which was His. 'By His stripes we are healed.

Without giving up hope—that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be—we will never relax with where we are or who we are.

The gospel which they so greatly needed they would not have; the miracles which Jesus did not always choose to give, they eagerly demanded.