We must not think of the Church as an anonymous body, a mystical religious abstraction. We Christians are the Church and whatever we do is what the Church is doing. The matter, therefore, is for each of us a personal one. Any forward step in the Church must begin with the individual.
– AW Tozer –
When the church and the world can jog comfortably along together, you can be sure something is wrong. The world has not compromised—its spirit is exactly the same as it ever was. If Christians were equally as faithful to the Lord, separated from the world, and living so that their lives were a reproof to all ungodliness, the world would hate them as much as it ever did. It is the church that has compromised, not the world.
– Catherine Booth –
Playing marbles with diamonds, that’s what we are doing in the church today.
– Vance Havner –
I am convinced that many evangelicals are not truly and soundly converted. Among the evangelicals it is entirely possible to come into membership, to ooze in by osmosis, to leak through the cells of the church and never know what it means to be born of the Spirit and washed in the blood. A great deal that passes for the deeper life is nothing more or less than basic Christianity. There is nothing deeper about it, and it is where we should have been from the start. We should have been happy, joyous, victorious Christians walking in the Holy Spirit and not fulfilling the lusts of the flesh. Instead we have been chasing each other around the perpetual mountain.
What we need is what the old Methodists called a sound conversion. There is a difference between conversion and a sound conversion. People who have never been soundly converted do not have the Spirit to enlighten them. When they read the Sermon on the Mount or the teaching passages of the epistles that tell them how to live or the doctrinal passages that tell how they can live, they are unaffected. The Spirit who wrote them is not witnessing in their hearts because they have not been born of the Spirit.
– AW Tozer –
I’m not about to put up a silly skit and preach a 15-minute message on “how to cope” to a multitude of people who are dying and going to hell. I tremble at the thought.
– David Wilkerson –
The Sunday morning service shows how popular your church is.
The evening services show how popular your pastor is.
Your private prayer time shows you how popular God is!
– Leonard Ravenhill –
We are a salvation people – this is our specialty – getting people saved and keeping them saved, and then getting somebody else saved…Look at this. Clear your vision. Halt, stand still and afresh and more fully apprehend and comprehend your calling. You are to be a worker together with God for the salvation of your fellow men. What is the business of your life? Not merely to save your soul and make yourself meet for Paradise?… No, you are to be a redeemer, a savior, a copy of Jesus Christ Himself. So consecrate every awakened power to the great end of saving them. Rescue the perishing. They are all around you everywhere, crowds upon crowds, multitudes. Be skillful. Improve yourself. Study your business. Be self-sacrificing. Remember the Master. What you lose for His sake, and for the sake of the poor souls for whom He died, you shall find again. Stick to it. Having put your hand to the salvation plough, don’t look behind you
– William Booth –
I consider that the chief dangers which will confront the twentieth century will be: Religion without the Holy Spirit; Christianity without Christ; Forgiveness without regeneration; Morality without God and Heaven without Hell.
– William Booth –
Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car
– Laurence J. Peter –