Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.
If within us we find nothing over us we succumb to what is around us.
To have no loyalty is to have no dignity, and in the end, no manhood.
Faith is our relation not to what we possess but to what possesses us.
The first duty of every soul is to find not its freedom but its Master.
All religion is founded on prayer, and in prayer it has its test and measure.
It is possible to be so active in the service of Christ as to forget to love him.
It is not in our choice to spread the gospel or not. It is our death if we do not.
Prayer is never rejected so long as we do not cease to pray. The chief failure of prayer is its cessation.
The Living God alone can make us living men; the mighty God alone can make us mighty men; the loving God alone can make us consecrated men.
We shall come one day to a heaven where we shall gratefully know that God's great refusals were sometimes the true answers to our truest prayer.
The blood of Christ stands not simply for the sting of sin on God but the scourge of God on sin, not simply for God's sorrow over sin, but for God's wrath on sin.
Prayer is the atmosphere of revelation, in the strict and central sense of that word. It is the climate in which God's manifestation bursts open into inspiration.
Prayer is a weapon, a mighty weapon in a terrible conflict. Our prayers are to be a continual, conscious, earnest effort of battle, the battle against whatever is not God's will.
Prayer is, paradoxically, both a gift and a conquest, a grace and a duty. Does that not mean, is it not a special case of the truth, that all duty is a gift, every call on us a blessing, and that the task we often find a burden is really a boon?
The greatest element in life is not what occupies most of its time, else sleep would stand high in the scale. Nor is it what engrosses most of its thought, else money would be very high. The two or three hours of worship and preaching weekly has perhaps been the greatest signal influence on English life. Half an hour of prayer, morning or evening, every day, may be a greater element in shaping our course than all our conduct and all our thought.
People complain that the religious ground is unsure who have never compelled themselves to examine it with a tithe of the care spent on a contract; but they have taken current suggestions in a dreamy and hypnotised way. They will not attend, they will not force themselves to attend, gravely to the gravest things.... they read everything in a vagrant, browsing fashion. They turn on the most serious subjects the holiday, seaside, newspaper habit of mind
Our great need is not ardour to save man but courage to face God - courage to face God with our soul as it is, and with our Saviour as He is; to face God always thus, and so to win the power which saves and services man more than any other power can. We can never fully say "My brother!" till we have heartily said "My God!", and we can never heartily say "My God!" till we have humbly said "My Guilt!" That is the root of moral reality, of personal religion.