Quotes by Clergymen - Page 16

As most of us know, the proper attitude toward ourselves is called “good self-esteem.” But self-esteem isan art. An art of balance. A balance between thinking too little of ourselves, and thinking too much ofourselves.The name for thinking too much of ourselves is “egotism.
Richard N. Bolles
God's plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God's method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.
E.M.Bounds
God did not direct His call to Isaiah— Isaiah overheard God saying, ". . . who will go for Us?" The call of God is not just for a select few but for everyone. Whether I hear God’s call or not depends on the condition of my ears, and exactly what I hear depends upon my spiritual attitude.
Oswald Chambers
[T]hou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.
Robert Burton
It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries in life.
Henry Ward Beecher
Patience strengthens the spirit, sweetens the temper, stifles anger, extinguishes envy, subdues pride, bridles the tongue.
George Horne
Man is better off without the confusion and fear of psychic experience and his progress will be faster.' If telepathy ever becomes a possibility he was not sure it would be a good thing, '...for it may put us back in contact with the spirits of the dead and progress does not lie in that direction.
H. Russell Wakefield
The character, therefore, will depend upon the thoughts. I am what I think. I am what I think even more than what I do, for it is the thought that interprets the action. An act in itself good may become even bad by the thought that inspired it.
Basil W. Maturin
There is not, perhaps, a more painful exercise of the mind than that of treading, with weary and impatient pace, the entire round of thought, and arriving at the same conclusion for ever; then setting out again with increased speed and diminished strength, and again returning to the very same spot - of sending all our faculties on a voyage to discover, and seeing them all return empty, and watch the wrecks as they drift helplessly along, and sink before the eye that hailed their outward expedition with joy and confidence.
Charles Maturin
Narrow all your interests until your mind, heart, and body are focused on Jesus Christ.
Oswald Chambers
No man by mere high human wisdom would dare undertake a step for Jesus’ sake unless he knows that the Holy Spirit has directly spoken to him; and until He comes, I shall not go.
Oswald Chambers
Too many read a chapter or two in the Bible, then for lack of interest put it down for weeks at a time and never look at it. Bernard compares the study of the Word and the mere reading of it to the difference between a close friendship and a casual acquaintance. If you want genuine knowledge, he says, you will have to do more than greet the Word politely on Sundays or nod reverently when you chance to meet it on the street. You must walk with it and talk with it every day of the week. You must invite it into your private chambers, and forego other pleasures and worldly duties to spent time in its company.
William Gurnall
Paul was devoted to a Person, not a cause.
Oswald Chambers
You may often have to watch Jesus Christ wreck a life before He saves it.
Oswald Chambers
If sympathy is all that human beings need, then the Cross of Christ is an absurdity and there is absolutely no need for it. What the world needs is not "a little bit of love," but major surgery. If you think you are helping lost people with your sympathy and understanding, you are a traitor to Jesus Christ. You must have a right-standing relationship with Him yourself, and pour your life out in helping others in His way— not in a human way that ignores God.
Oswald Chambers
Never be afraid when God brings back your past. Let your memory have its way with you. It is a minister of God bringing its rebuke and sorrow to you.
Oswald Chambers
Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what you do with the best you have, Whenever you get a blessing from God, give it back to Him as a love gift. Take time to meditate before God and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship.
Oswald Chambers
Ones best success comes after their greatest disappointments.
Henry Ward Beecher
No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.
Charles Caleb Colton
Let those who smile at me, ask themselves whether they have been indebted most to imagination or reality for all they have enjoyed in life, if indeed they have ever enjoyed any thing.
Charles Robert Maturin
Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God.
Phillips Brooks
Some say that Love, at sight of human ties, Spreads his light wings and in a moment flies.
Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles
In Him we have . . . the forgiveness of sins . . . —Ephesians 1:7Beware of the pleasant view of the fatherhood of God: God is so kind and loving that of course He will forgive us. That thought, based solely on emotion, cannot be found anywhere in the New Testament. The only basis on which God can forgive us is the tremendous tragedy of the Cross of Christ. To base our forgiveness on any other ground is unconscious blasphemy. The only ground on which God can forgive our sin and reinstate us to His favor is through the Cross of Christ. There is no other way! Forgiveness, which is so easy for us to accept, cost the agony at Calvary. We should never take the forgiveness of sin, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and our sanctification in simple faith, and then forget the enormous cost to God that made all of this ours.Forgiveness is the divine miracle of grace. The cost to God was the Cross of Christ. To forgive sin, while remaining a holy God, this price had to be paid. Never accept a view of the fatherhood of God if it blots out the atonement. The revealed truth of God is that without the atonement He cannot forgive— He would contradict His nature if He did. The only way we can be forgiven is by being brought back to God through the atonement of the Cross. God’s forgiveness is possible only in the supernatural realm.Compared with the miracle of the forgiveness of sin, the experience of sanctification is small. Sanctification is simply the wonderful expression or evidence of the forgiveness of sins in a human life. But the thing that awakens the deepest fountain of gratitude in a human being is that God has forgiven his sin. Paul never got away from this. Once you realize all that it cost God to forgive you, you will be held as in a vise, constrained by the love of God.
Oswald Chambers
The proof that our relationship is right with God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not.
Oswald Chambers
He comes where He commands us to leave.
Oswald Chambers
Born in the East, and clothed in Oriental form and imagery, the Bible walks the ways of all the world with familiar feet, and enters land after land to find its own everywhere. It has learned to speak in hundreds of languages to the heart of man. It comes into the palace to tell the monarch that he is the servant of the Most High, and into the cottage to assure the peasant that he is the son of God. Children listen to its stories with wonder and delight, and wisemen ponder them as parables of life. It has a word of peace for the time of peril, the hour of darkness. Its oracles are repeated in the assembly of the people, and its counsels whispered in the ear of the lonely. The wise and the proud tremble at its warnings, but to the wounded and penitent it has a mother's voice. The wilderness and the solitary place have been made glad by it, and the fire on the hearth has lighted the reading of its well-worn pages. It has woven itself into our deepest affections, and colored our dearest dreams; so that love and friendship, sympathy and devotion, memory and hope, put on the beautiful garments of its treasured speech, breathing of frankincense and myrrh. Above the cradle and beside the grave its great words come to us uncalled. They fill our prayers with power larger than we know, and the beauty of them lingers in our ear long after the sermons which they have adorned have been forgotten. They return to us swiftly and quietly, like birds flying from far away. They surprise us with new meanings, like springs of water breaking forth from the mountain beside a long-forgotten path. They grow richer, as pearls do when they are worn near the heart. No man is poor or desolate who has this treasure for his own. When the landscape darkens and the trembling pilgrim comes to the valley named the shadow, he is not afraid to enter; he takes the rod and staff of Scripture in his hand; he says to friend and comrade, "Good-by, we shall meet again"; and comforted by that support, he goes toward the lonely pass as one who climbs through darkness into light.
Henry Van Dyke
When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a very precious message for someone else once you are back in the light.
Oswald Chambers
Consideration doth, as it were, open the door between the head and the heart: the understanding having received truths, lays them up in the memory now, consideration is the conveyer of theme from thence to the affections (571).
Richard Baxter
There was never a tutor that did professly teach Felicity, though that be the mistress of all other sciences. Nor did any of us study these things but as aliena, which we ought to have studied as our enjoyments. We studied to inform our knowledge, but knew not for what end we so studied. And for lack of aiming at a certain end we erred in the manner. Howbeit there we received all those seeds of knowledge that were afterwards improved; and our souls were awakened to a discerning of their faculties, and exercise of their powers.
Thomas Traherne
Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkest storm.
Charles Caleb Colton
Long, discursive, dry, and inane are the prayers in many pulpits. Without unction or heart, they fall like a killing frost on all the graces of worship. Death-dealing prayers they are. Every vestige of devotion has perished under their breath. The deader they are the longer they grow.
E.M.Bounds
A prayerless age will have but scant models of divine power. The age may be a better age than the past, but there is an infinite distance between the betterment of an age by the force of an advancing civilization and its betterment by the increase of holiness and Christlikeness by the energy of prayer.
E.M.Bounds
Preaching never edifies a prayerless soul.
E.M.Bounds
Public prayers of are of little value unless they are founded on or followed up by private praying.
E.M.Bounds
The praying which makes a prayerful ministry is not a little praying put in as we put flavor to give it a pleasant smack, but the praying must be in the body, and form the blood and bones. Prayer is no petty duty, put into a corner; no piecemeal performance made out of the fragments of time which have been snatched from business and other engagements of life; but it means that the best of our time, the heart of our time and strength must be given.
E.M.Bounds
Only one in a thousand sits down in the midst of it all and says—I will watch my Father mend this. God must not be treated as a hospital for our broken “toys,” but as our Father.
Oswald Chambers
When we lose sight of God we become hard and dogmatic. We hurl our own petitions at God’s throne and dictate to Him as to what we wish Him to do. We do not worship God, nor do we seek to form the mind of Christ. If we are hard towards God, we will become hard towards other people.
Oswald Chambers
We look upon prayer simply as a means of getting things for ourselves, but the biblical purpose of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself.
Oswald Chambers
To say that 'prayer changes things' is not as close to the truth as saying, 'prayer changes me and then I change things.' God has established things so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at things.
Oswald Chambers
your god may be your little Christian habit - the habit of prayer or Bible reading at certain times of your day. Watch how your Father will upset your schedule if you begin to worship your habit instead of what the habit symbolizes. We say, 'I can't do that right now; this is my time alone with God.' No, this is your time alone with your habit.
Oswald Chambers
Lack of spiritual desire should grieve us and lead us to lament its absence, to seek earnestly for its bestowal, so that our praying, henceforth, should be an expression of the soul's sincere desire.
E.M.Bounds
If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.
Phillips Brooks
Some prayers have a longer voyage than others, but they return with the richer lading at last, so that the praying soul is a gainer by waiting for an answer.
William Gurnall
The little estimate we put on prayer is evidence from the little time we give to it.
E.M.Bounds
[O]ur applications are quicker about our sufferings, than our sins(77)[.]
Richard Baxter
If every work of the day had thus its appointed time, we should be better skilled, both in redeeming time and performing duty (556).
Richard Baxter
Meditation puts reason in its authority and preeminence. It helpeth to deliver it form its captivity to the sense, and setteth it again upon the throne of the soul. When reason is silent, it is usually subject; for when it is asleep the senses domineer. . . . Reason is at the strongest when it is most in action. Now, meditation produceth reason into act (573).
Richard Baxter
It (prayer) dispels frivolity and drives away all skin-deep forms of worship, and makes worship a serious and deep-seated service, impregnating body, soul, and spirit with its heavenly infusion.
E.M.Bounds
The purpose of prayer is that we get ahold of God, not of the answer.
Oswald Chambers
Prayer is not an exercise, it is the life of the saint. Beware of anything that stops the offering up of prayer.
Oswald Chambers
Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come in you by the grace of God.
Phillips Brooks
Obedience is love, fulfilling every command, love expressing itself. Obedience, therefore, is not a hard demand made upon us, any more than is the service a husband renders his wife, or a wife renders her husband. Love delights to obey, and please whom it loves. There are no hardships in love. There may be exactions, but no irk. There are no impossible tasks for love.With what simplicity and in what a matter-of-fact way does the apostle John say: 'And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things which are pleasing in his sight.
E.M.Bounds
What a study in importunity, in earnestness, in persistence, promoted and propelled under conditions which would have disheartened any but a heroic, constant soul. [Jesus] teaches that an answer to prayer is conditional upon the amount of faith that goes to the petition. To test this, He delays the answer. the superficial pray-er subsides into silence, when thteanswer is delayed. But eh man of prayer hangs on, and on. The Lord recognizes and honors his faith, and gives him a rich and abundant answer to His faith evidencing, importunate prayer.
E.M.Bounds
Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking to God for men is greater still. He will never talk well and with real success to men for God who has not learned well how to talk to God for men.
E.M.Bounds
The ministry of prayer, if it be anything worthy of the name, is a ministry of ardor, a ministry of unwearied and intense longing after God and after his holiness.
E.M.Bounds
If we seem to get no good by attempting to draw near to Him, we may be sure we will get none by keeping away from Him.
John Newton
What a blessed habit I have found my prayer list, morning by morning, it takes me via the Throne of all Grace straight to the intimate personal heart of each one mentioned here, and I know that He Who is not prescribed by time and geography answers immediately.
Oswald Chambers
I want to tell you a growing conviction with me, and that is that as we obey the leadings of the Spirit of God, we enable God to answer the prayers of other people. I mean that our lives, my life, is the answer to someone’s prayer, prayed perhaps centuries ago.It is more and more impossible to me to have programmes and plans because God alone has the plan, and our plans are only apt to hinder Him, and make it necessary for Him to break them up. I have the unspeakable knowledge that my life is the answer to prayers, and that God is blessing me and making me a blessing entirely of His sovereign grace and nothing to do with my merits, saving as I am bold enough to trust His leading and not the dictates of my own wisdom and common sense.
Oswald Chambers
Pray the largest prayers. You cannot think a prayer so large that God, in answering it, will not wish you had made it larger. Pray not for crutches but for wings.
Phillips Brooks
Our devotions are not measured by the clock, but time is of the essence. The ability to wait, and stay, and press belongs essentially to our intercourse with God.
E.M.Bounds