Quotes by Clergymen - Page 13

There is something in human pride that can stand big troubles, but we need the supernatural grace and power of God to stand by us in the little things. The tiniest detail in which we obey has all the omnipotent power of the grace of God behind it. When we do our duty, not for duty’s sake, but because we believe that God is engineering our circumstances in that way, then at the very point of our obedience the whole superb grace of God is ours.
Oswald Chambers
A thankful and a contented spirit is a continual feast. We ought to be contented, and we shall be contented, if we are in the habit of seeing God in everything, and living upon Him day by day. Oh, for a spirit of true thankfulness!
Ashton Oxenden
The Lord's questions always reveal the true me to myself.
Oswald Chambers
If thy meditation tends to fill thy note-book with notions, and good sayings, concerning God, and not thy heart with longing after him, and delight in him, for aught I know thy book is as much a Christian as thou (553).
Richard Baxter
That physician is no better than a murderer, that negligently delayeth till his patient be dead or past cure (389).
Richard Baxter
Be careful that you don't become a hypocrite by spending all your time trying to get others right with God before you worship Him yourself.
Oswald Chambers
He who is not liberal with what he has, does but deceive himself when he thinks he would be liberal if he had more
William Swan Plumer
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is, that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
Henry Ward Beecher
A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life.
Henry Ward Beecher
The love of God pays no attention to my prejudices caused by my natural individuality.
Oswald Chambers
No man is more cheated than the selfish man.
Henry Ward Beecher
Let the attitude of your life be a continual willingness to "go out" in dependence upon God, and your life will have a sacred and inexpressible charm about it that is very satisfying to Jesus. You must learn to "go out" through your convictions, creeds, or experiences until you come to the point in your faith where there is nothing between yourself and God.
Oswald Chambers
The deadliest Pharisaism today is not hypocrisy, but unconscious unreality.
Oswald Chambers
As we draw on the grace of God He increases voluntary poverty all along the line. Always give the best you have got every time; never think about who you are giving it to; let other people take it or leave it as they choose. Pour out the best you have, and always be poor. Never reserve anything; never be diplomatic and careful about the treasure God gives.
Oswald Chambers
Some of us are like the Dead Sea, always taking in but never giving out, because we are not rightly related to the Lord Jesus.
Oswald Chambers
I believe ghost story writing is a dying art.
H. Russell Wakefield
Twas now the very witching time of night,When churchyards groan, and graves give up their dead,And many a mischievous, enfranchised spriteHad long since burst his bonds of stone or lead,And hurried off, with schoolboy-like delight,To play his pranks near some poor wretch's bed,Sleeping, perhaps serenely as a porpoise,Nor dreaming of this fiendish Habeas Corpus.
Thomas Ingoldsby
The smallest thing by the influence of eternity is made infinite and eternal. We pass through a standing continent or region of ages, that are already ebfore us, glorious and perfect while we come to them. Like men in a ship we pass forward, the shores and marks seeming to go backward, though we move and they stand still. We are not with them in our progressive motion, but prevent the swiftness of our course, and are present with them in our understandings. Like the sun we dart our rays before us, and occupy those spaces with light and contemplation which we move towards, but possess not with our bodies. And seeing all things in the light of Divine knowledge, eternally serving God, rejoice unspeakable in that service, and enjoy it all.
Thomas Traherne
Thou art standing all this while at the door of eternity, and death is waiting to open the door, and put thee in(247).
Richard Baxter
With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness.
Thomas Chalmers
People will have their excitements, and a good rousing persecution used to stir things like the burning of Chicago or a Presidential election in our day.
E.P. Roe
No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on the proper occasions."Henry Ward Beecher
Henry Ward Beecher
Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion.
Charles Robert Maturin
The way of painful duty is the way of fullest comfort. Christ carrieth all our comforts in his hand : if we are out of that way where Christ is to be met, we are out of the way where comfort is to be had (312).
Richard Baxter
and the best, if not heedfully used, will prove the word. The better and keener the knife is, the sooner and deeper will it cut thy fingers, if thou take not heed (647).
Richard Baxter
When a poor soul is somewhat awakened by the terrors of the Lord, then the poor creature, being born under the covenant of works, flies directly to a covenant of works again. And as Adam and Eve hid themselves… and sewed fig leaves… so the poor sinner, when awakened, flies to his duties and to his performances, to hide himself from God, and goes to patch up a righteousness of his own. Says he, I will be mighty good now–I will reform–I will do all I can; and then certainly Jesus Christ will have mercy on me.
George Whitefield
Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.
Henry Ward Beecher
[W]hen the pleasure is at the sweetest, death is the nearest (461)[.]
Richard Baxter
The sweetest poison doth often bring the surest death (645).
Richard Baxter
Run, John, and work, the law commands,Yet give me neither feet nor hand.Much better new the Gospel brings:It bids me fly and gives me winds.
John Berridge
Conversion turns the bias of the WILL both as to means and end. The intentions of the will are altered. Now the man has new ends and designs. He now intends God above all, and desires and designs nothing in all the world, so much as that Christ may be magnified in him. He counts himself more happy in this than in all that the earth could yield, that he may be serviceable to Christ, and bring Him glory. This is the mark he aims at, that the name of Jesus may be great in the world.
Joseph Alleine
If anything keep thy soul out of heaven, which God forbid, there is nothing in the world liker to do it, than thy false hopes of being saved, while thou art yet out of the way to salvation(234). (III.III)
Richard Baxter
[I]f thou loiter when thou shouldst labour, thou wilt lose the crown. O fall to work then speedily and seriously, and bless God that thou hast yet time to do it; and though that which is past cannot be recalled, yet redeem the time now by doubling thy diligence (260).
Richard Baxter
The reason salvation is so easy to obtain is that it cost God so much. The Cross was the place where God and sinful man merged with a tremendous collision and where the way to life was opened. But all the cost and pain of the collision was absorbed by the heart of God.
Oswald Chambers
... for you will never, I trust, disconnect what you may yourselves be learning from the hope and prospect of being enabled thereby to teach others more effectually. If you do, and your studies in this way become a selfish thing, if you are content to leave them barren of all profit to others, of this you may be sure, that in the end they will prove not less barren of profit to yourselves. In one noble line Chaucer has characterized the true scholar:- "And gladly would he learn and gladly teach." Resolve that in the spirit of this line you will work and live.
Richard Chenevix Trench
[O]ur English divines are sounder in it than any in the world, generally: I think because they are more practical, and have had more wounded, tender consciences under cure, and less empty speculation and dispute (336-7).
Richard Baxter
God never estimates what we give from impulse. We are given credit for what we determine in our hearts to give; for the giving that is governed by a fixed determination. The Spirit of God revolutionises our philanthropic instincts. Much of our philanthropy is simply the impulse to save ourselves an uncomfortable feeling. The Spirit of God alters all that. As saints our attitude towards giving is that we give for Jesus Christ’s sake, and from no other motive.
Oswald Chambers
Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin
..a disability is something within you. A prejudice is something within theemployer...don’t look at yourself through their eyes. Look at yourself through your own eyes.
Richard N. Bolles
It's madness the sheep to talk peace with the wolf
Thomas Fuller
He is not concerned about making you blessed and happy right now, but He’s continually working out His ultimate perfection for you...
Oswald Chambers
Are you willing to stoop down and consider the needs and desires of little children; to remember the weaknesses and lonliness of people who are growing old; to stop asking how much your friends love you, and to ask yourself if you love them enough; to bear in mind the things that other people have to bear on their hearts; to trim your lamp so that it will give more light and less smoke, and to carry it in front so that your shadow will fall behind you; to make a grave for your ugly thougts and a garden for your kindly feelings, with the gate open? Are you willing to do these things for a day? Then you are ready to keep Christmas!
Henry Van Dyke
There are three difficulties in authorship: – to write anything worth publishing - to find honest men to publish it - and to get sensible men to read it. — Caleb C. Colton [1780-1832]
Caleb C. Colton
Inventiveness depends upon two habits of mind, which we can adopt and develop: attention andcuriosity.Attention means paying attention.....Curiosity means just that. Endlessly curious. Endlessly asking questions. Endlessly wanting to knowhow, and why?
Richard N. Bolles
But this I know. Those who seek Him will do well to look among the poor and the lowly, the sorrowful and the oppressed.
Henry Van Dyke
Who seeks for heaven alone to save his soul,May keep the path, but will not reach the goal;While he who walks in love may wander far,Yet God will bring him where the blessed are.
Henry Van Dyke
My ambition is not to leave behind me a pile of money for my heirs to quarrel about, but to find out what there is of interest in this world before I cross the border and begin to explore the other world.
George H. Hepworth
A fox should not be of the jury at a goose's trial.
Thomas Fuller
If we indulge in inordinate affection, anger, anxiety, God holds us responsible; but He also insists that we have to be passionately filled with the right emotions.
Oswald Chambers
A sentimentalist is one who delights to have high and devout emotions stirred whilst reading in an arm-chair, or in a prayer meeting, but he never translates his emotions into action. Consequently a sentimentalist is usually callous, self-centred and selfish, because the emotions he likes to have stirred do not cost him anything.
Oswald Chambers
Our Saviour's meaning, when He said, He must be born again and become a little child that will enter in the Kingdom of Heaven is deeper far than is generally believed. It is only in a careless reliance upon Divine Providence, that we are to become little children, or in the feebleness and shortness of our anger and simplicity of our passions, but in the peace and purity of all our soul. Which purity also is a deeper thing than is commonly apprehended. For we must disrobe infant-like and clear; the powers of our soul free from the leaven of this world, and disentangled from men's conceits and customs. Grit in the eye or yellow jaundice will not let a man see those objects truly that are before it. And therefore it is requisite that we should be as very strangers to the thoughts, customs, and opinions of men in this world, as if we were but little children. So those things would appear to us only which do to children when they are first born. Ambitions, trades, luxuries, inordinate affections, casual and accidental riches invented since the fall, would be gone, and only those things appear, which did to Adam in Paradise, in the same light and in the same colours: God in His works, Glory in the light, Love in our parents, men, ourselves, and the face of Heaven: Every man naturally seeing those things, to the enjoyment of which he is naturally born.
Thomas Traherne
I have never met the man I could despair of after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God.
Oswald Chambers
The Christian who is truly intimate with Jesus will never draw attention to himself but will only show the evidence of a life where Jesus is completely in control.
Oswald Chambers
Thou has heard the words of Christ. . . . Dost thou weep, when I have thee, Poor soul, what aileth thee? Dost thou weep, when I have wept so much? Be of good cheer ; thy wounds are saving, and not deadly. It is I that have made them, who mean thee no hurt : though I let out thy blood, I will not let out thy life (628).
Richard Baxter
If you are going to walk with Jesus Christ, you are going to be opposed.... In our days, to be a true Christian is really to become a scandal.
George Whitefield
The main characteristic which is the proof of the indwelling Spirit is an amazing tenderness in personal dealing, and a blazing truthfulness with regard to God’s Word.
Oswald Chambers
Spiritual maturity is not reached by the passing of the years, but by obedience to the will of God. Some people mature into an understanding of God’s will more quickly than others because they obey more readily; they more readily sacrifice the life of nature to the will of God.
Oswald Chambers
The test of mountain-top experiences, of mysticism, of visions of God and of solitariness is when you are “in the soup” of actual circumstances.
Oswald Chambers
The call of God is a call according to the nature of God; where we go in obedience to that call depends entirely on the providential circumstances which God engineers, and is not of any moment. The danger is to fit the call of God into the idea of our own discernment and say, “God called me there.” If we say so and stick to it, then it is good-bye to the development of the life of God in us.
Oswald Chambers
The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.
Oswald Chambers