Quotes by Clergymen - Page 15

The sum is this, —As thou makest conscience of praying daily, so do thou of the acting of thy graces in meditation; and more especially in meditating on the joys of heaven, To this end, set apart one hour or half hour every day, wherein thou mayst lay aside all worldly thoughts, and with all possible seriousness and reverence, as if thou wert going to speak with God himself, or to have a sight of Christ, or of that blessed place so do thou withdraw thyself into some secret place, and set thyself wholly to the following work: if thou canst, take Isaac's time and place, who went forth into the field in the evening to meditate; but if thou be a servant, or poor man, that cannot have that leisure, take the fittest time and place that thou canst, though it be when thou are private about thy labours.Were there left one spark of wit or reason, they would never sell their rest for toil, or sell their glory for worldly vanities, nor venture heaven for the pleasure of a sin (627).
Richard Baxter
As all our senses are the inlets of sin, so they are become the inlets of sorrow (99).
Richard Baxter
[T]here is no greater strengthener of sin, and destroyer of the soul, than Scripture misapplied (317).
Richard Baxter
The most dangerous mistake that our souls are capable of, is, to take the creature for God, and earth for heaven (374).
Richard Baxter
O sirs, how many souls, then, have every one of us been guilty of damning! What a number of our neighbours and acquaintance are dead, in whom we discerned no signs of sanctification, and never did once plainly tell them of it, or how to be recovered! If you had been the cause but of burning a man's house through your negligence, or of undoing him in the world, or of destroying his body, how would it trouble you as long as you lived! If you had but killed a man unadvisedly, it would much disquiet you. We have known those that have been guilty of murder, that could never sleep quietly after, nor have one comfortable day, their own consciences did so vex and torment them. O, then, what a heart mayst thou have, that hast been builty of murdering such a multitude of precious souls! Remember this when thou lookest thy friend or carnal neighbour in the face, and think with thyself, Can I find in my heart, through my silence and negligence, to be guilty of his everlasting burning in hell? Methinks such a thought should even untie the tongue of the dumb. . . . [H]e that is guilty of a man's continuing unregenerate, is also guilty of the sins of his unregeneracy. . . . Eli did not commit the sin himself, and yet he speaketh so coldly against it that he also must bear the punishment . Guns and cannons spake against sin in England, because the inhabitants would not speak. God pleadeth with us with fire and sword, because we would not plead with sinners with our tongues (410-11).
Richard Baxter
One of the penalties of sin is our acceptance of it.
Oswald Chambers
Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic.
John Henry Jowett
Never look for justice in this world, but never cease to give it.
Oswald Chambers
If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost.
Henry Ward Beecher
If any have more of the government of thee than Christ, or if thou hadst rather live after any other laws than his, if it were at thy choice, thou art not his disciple (331).
Richard Baxter
It is not what a man gets, But what a man is,That he should think of.He should first think of his character,And then of his condition.He that has character need have no fear of his condition.Character will draw condition after it.
H.W. Beecher (1813-1887)
We can only be used by God after we allow Him to show us the deep, hidden areas of our own character.
Oswald Chambers
The Holy Spirit is not in a hurry. Character is the produce of a lifetime.
John Stott
Our growth depends not on how many experiences we devour, but on how many we digest.
Ralph W Sockman
So necessary is it not only that we should be what we appear, but appear what we are.
William Jay
God works by means; and it is by his people that he principally carries on his cause in the world. They are his witnesses. They are his servants. He first makes them the subjects of his grace, and then the mediums. He first turns them from rebels into friends, and then employs them to go and beseech others to be reconciled unto God. For they know the wretchedness of a state of alienation from him. They know the blessedness of a return. They have "tasted that the Lord is gracious." Their own experience gives them earnestness and confidence in saying to those around them, "O taste, and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.
William Jay
When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
Charles Caleb Colton
Fond mother, you that will never correct a child, hear the charge, and let it thrill through your heart, exciting emotions of horror, you are a hater of your child; your foolish love is infanticide; your cruel embraces are hugging your child to death. In not correcting him, you are committing sin of the heaviest kind, and your own wickedness, in not correcting him, will at last punish yourself.
John Angell James
Ah, cruel parents indeed, who neglect the religious education of their children; more cruel in some respects than Herod; he slew the bodies of children, these murder souls; he murdered the children of others, these murder their own; he employed the agency of his servants, these do the work of slaughter themselves.
John Angell James
We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.
Henry Ward Beecher
Let those parents that desire Holy Children learn to make them possessors of Heaven and Earth betimes; to remove silly objects from before them, to magnify nothing but what is great indeed, and to talk of God to them, and of His works and ways. before they can either speak or go.
Thomas Traherne
Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.
Thomas Fuller
...God expects every man to be what he claims to be. If we say things we do not believe, and profess things we do not feel, and lay claim to things we do not possess, we are tricksters and deceivers, causing mischief and confusion in the world.
Charles Jefferson
Goodness is richer than greatness. It consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
The world did not appreciate Abraham Lincoln until he died. His great figure has been looming higher each succeeding decade. We understand Jesus better than any other generation..A great man is like a mountain, you cannot appreciate when standing at its base.
Charles Jefferson
The greatest thing in all the world is loving. The second greatest in all the world is learning.
George H. Morrison
There is something so pure and frank and noble about him that to doubt his sincerity would be like doubting the brightness of the sun.
Charles Jefferson
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
Armand Jean du Plessis Richelieu
No Centaurs here, or Gorgons look to find,My subject is of man, and human kind.
Robert Burton
Feelings are like chemicals, the more you analyze them the worse they smell.
Charles Kingsley
The heart has eyes which the brain knows nothing of
Charles Henry Parkhurst
Anger is the rising up of the heart in passionate displacency against an apprehended evil, which would cross or hinder us of some desired good.
Richard Baxter
Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry.
Henry Ward Beecher
Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.
Richard Chenevix Trench
We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.
Henry Melvill
It is terribly important to realize that the leap of faith is not so much a leap of thought as of action. For while in many matters it is first we must see then we will act; in matters of faith it is first we must do then we will know, first we will be and then we will see. One must, in short, dare to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty.
William Sloane Coffin Jr.
Oh! what a potent instrument for Satan is a misguided conscience(93)!
Richard Baxter
Of two duties we must choose the greater, though of two sins we must choose neither (556).
Richard Baxter
O blessed be the grace that makes advantages of my corruptions, even to contradict and kill themselves (648).
Richard Baxter
So then, let "Deserved" be written on the door of hell, but on the door of Heaven and life, "The free gift" (68).
Richard Baxter
The grace you had yesterday will not be sufficient for today.
Oswald Chambers
There but for the grace of God go I.
John Bradford
God's friendship is with people who know their poverty.
Oswald Chambers
If you open your mouth in the dark, you will speak while in the wrong mood--darkness is the time to listen.
Oswald Chambers
We become side-tracked if we make physical health our aim and imagine that because we are children of God we shall always be perfectly well.
Oswald Chambers
The Bible attitude is not that God sends sickness or that sickness is of the devil, but that sickness is a fact usable by both God and the devil.
Oswald Chambers
Satan takes occasion of the frailty of the bodily temple and says, 'Now you know you cannot do that; you are so infirm, you cannot concentrate your mind,' etc. Never allow bodily infirmities to hinder you obeying the commands of Jesus.
Oswald Chambers
Discouragement is disillusioned self-love, and self-love may be love for my devotion to Jesus— not love for Jesus Himself.
Oswald Chambers
Never ask another person's advice about anything God makes you decide before Him.
Oswald Chambers
His new friends did not, perhaps, realize the overpowering effect of the sudden change upon this northernbred man; the effects of the moonlight and the soft trade-wind, the life of love which surrounded him here. Love whispered to him vaguely, compellingly. It summoned him from the palm fronds, rustling dryly in the continuous breeze; love was telegraphed through the shy, bovine eyes of the brown girls in his estate-house village; love assailed him in the breath of the honey-like sweet grass, undulating all day and all night under the white moonlight of the Caribbees, pouring over him intoxicatingly through his opened jalousies as he lay, often sleepless, through long nights of spice and balm smells on his mahogany bedstead—pale grass, looking like snow under the moon.The half-formulated yearnings which these sights and sounds were begetting were quite new and fresh in his experience. Here fresh instincts, newly released, stirred, flared up, at the glare of early-afternoon sunlight, at the painful scarlet of the hibiscus blooms, the incredible indigo of the sea—all these flames of vividness through burning days, wilting into a caressing coolness, abruptly, at the fall of the brief, tropic dusk. The fundament of his crystallizing desire was for companionship in the blazing life of this place of rapid growth and early fading, where time slipped away so fast.("Sweet Grass")
Henry S. Whitehead
Some daughter of one of the gentry planters, perhaps? Those girls had the domestic virtues. But — he was comfortable enough with his good servants at Fairfield House. His yearnings had little relation to somebody to preside over his household. Somehow, to Cornelis, these young ladies of the planter gentry were not alluring, vital. The most attractive of them, Honoria Macartney, he could hardly imagine beside him perpetually. Honoria had the dead-white skin of the Caucasian creole lady whose face has been screened from the sun since infancy.("Sweet Grass")
Henry S. Whitehead
The warm, pulsing breath of the sweet grass surged through the open windows in a fashion to turn the head of a stone image. It was exotic, too sweet, exaggerated, like everything else in this climate! Cornelis turned over again, seeking a cool place on the broad bed. Then he sat up in bed, impatiently throwing off the sheet. A thin streak of moonlight edged the bed below his feet. He slipped out of bed, walked over to a window. He leaned out, looking down at the acres of undulating grass. There seemed to be some strange, hypnotic rhythm to it, some vague magic, as it swayed in the night wind. The scent poured over him in great, pulsing breaths. He shut his eves and drew it in, abandoning his senses to its effect.("Sweet Grass")
Henry S. Whitehead
One must count ones riches by the means one has to satisfy his desires.
Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles
When God gets us alone through suffering, heartbreak, temptation, disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted friendship - when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are totally speechless, unable to ask even one question, then He begins to teach us.
Oswald Chambers
If we are taught by God in affliction we are blessed. When God teaches, he applies his instruction to the heart. He commands light to shine out of darkness (2 Corinthians 4:6). The Holy Spirit brings divine truths in such a clear and convincing light that the soul sits down fully satisfied. The soul both sweetly and freely acquiesces in the revealed truths. When God teaches, the soul experiences truth as David (Psalm 119:71). Some only know notionally, but David knew by experience; he became more acquainted with the Word. He knew it more, loved it better, and was more transformed in the nature of it. Thus, Paul, “I know who I have believed” (2 Timothy 1:12) – “I have experienced his faithfulness and his all-sufficiency; I can trust my all with him. I am sure he will keep it safe to that day.” Those taught of God in affliction can speak experimentally, in one degree or another. They can speak of their communion with God (Psalm 23:4). The sweet singer of Israel had comfortable presence. Those taught of God can say: “As we have heard, so we have seen. I have experienced this word upon mine heart, and can set my seal that God is true.” God’s teaching is a powerful teaching. It conveys strength as well as light. Truth only understood needs to be put into action and practice. God’s teachings are sweet to the taste. David rolled them as sugar under his tongue, and received more sweetness than Samson from his honeycomb. Luther said he would not live in paradise without the Word, but with the Word he could live in hell itself. Teaching is sweet because it is suitable to the renewed man (Jeremiah 15:16).
Thomas Case
Till thou hast learned to suffer from a saint a well as from the wicked, and to be abused by the godly as well as the ungodly, never look to live a contented or comfortable life, nor ever think thou has truly learned the art of suffering (383).
Richard Baxter
Woe to the soul which God rejoiceth to punish! . . . . Is it not a terrible thing to a wretched soul, when it shal lie roaring perpetually in the flames of hell, and the God of mercy himself shall laugh at them; when they shall cry out for mercy, yea, for one drop of water, and God shall mock them instead of relieving them; when non in heaven or earth can help them but God, and hell shall rejoice over them in their calamity(244)?
Richard Baxter
When shall I be past these soul-tormenting fears, and cares, and griefs, and passions? When shall I be out of this frail, this corruptible, ruinous body; this soul-contradicting, insnaring, deceiving flesh? When shall I be out of this vain and vexatious world, whose pleasures are mere deluding dreams and shadowsl whose miseries are real, numerous, and uncessant? How long shall I see the church of Christ lie trodden under the feet of persecutors ; or else, as a ship in the hands of foolish guides, though the supreme Maker doth moderate all for the best? (642-3)
Richard Baxter
The sympathy which is reverent with what it cannot understand is worth its weight in gold. 69 L
Oswald Chambers
...let the past sleep, but let it sleep in the sweet embrace of Christ, and let us go on into the invincible future with Him.
Oswald Chambers