It is our failure as Christian people to understand what our church membership means—the dignity, the privilege, and the responsibility—that causes most of our troubles. Our greatest need is to recapture the New Testament teaching concerning the church.
– D. Martin Lloyd-Jones –
Most people judge the counsel they receive by the way they receive the affection of their counselor. See that you feel a tender love for your people, and then let them feel it by your speeches and see it in your dealings with them … Let them see that all you do is for their own sakes and not for your own end.
– Richard Baxter –
1615-1691
The life of the Lord in us is a spring of living water—ever flowing without variation. Nothing is wrong with the inlet: It is the outlet that is obstructed. The water of life does not spring forth because the flow has no way through. Were the outlet cleared, the water of life would flow unceasingly. What a child of God needs is not more life but more flow of life.
– Watchman Nee –
True repentance will entirely change you; the bias of your souls will be changed, then you will delight in God, in Christ, in His law, and in His people.
– George Whitefield –
True piety hath true pleasure in it.
– Matthew Henry –
from The Pleasantness of a Religious Life, 1714
Ye who love God, of every place and every denomination, wrestle for your ministers; pray for them; for why should not God even now pour out his Spirit? What is the reason why we are to be denied Pentecostal seasons? Why not this hour, as one mighty band, fall down before him and entreat him, for his Sons’ sake, to revive his drooping church? Then would all men discern that we are verily the disciples of Christ.
– Charles Spurgeon –
Satan dreads nothing but prayer … The one concern of the devil is to keep the saints from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, and prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks at our wisdom, but trembles when we pray.
– Samuel Chadwick –
The unction, the divine unction, this heavenly anointing, is what the pulpit needs and must have. This divine and heavenly oil put on it by the imposition of God’s hand must soften and lubricate the whole man—heart, head, spirit—until it separates him with a mighty separation from all earthly, secular, worldly, selfish motives and aims, separating him to everything that is pure and Godlike.
– EM Bounds –
Do we spend ten minutes a day in prayer? Do we consider it important enough for that? Ten minutes a day on our knees in prayer—when the Kingdom of heaven can be had for the asking!
Why, the wonder is not that we pray so little, but that we can ever get up from our knees if we realize our own need; the needs of our home and our loved ones; the needs of our pastor and the Church; the needs of our city—of our country—of the heathen and Mohammedan world! All these needs can be met by the riches of God in Christ Jesus.
– Unknown Christian –
from The Kneeling Christian