… part of our failure today is religious activity that is not preceded by aloneness, by inactivity. I mean getting alone with God and waiting in silence and quietness until we are charged with God’s Spirit. Then, when we act, our activity really amounts to something because we have been prepared by God for it….
– AW Tozer –
from his article “Alone with God“
We’re suffering from a believism that never has believed and a receivism that never has received and it leads to deceivism.
– Vance Havner –
Nobody can do as much damage to the church of God as the man who is within its walls, but not within its life.
– Charles Spurgeon –
America is not dying because of the strength of humanism but the weakness of evangelism.
– Leonard Ravenhill –
A man, and a Christian man too, may keep up all the outward appearances of religion; but if he has guilt on his conscience, or allows sin in his soul, he may frequent the Lord’s house but it will be without profit; he may worship but it will be without peace.
– James Thomas Holloway –
from The Analogy of Faith
365 million+ orphans, while the church is busy building coffee shops. O Lord awaken the church with revival not caffeine.
– Heather Elyse –
In the early church, Christians never had any doubt that they must be different from the world; they, in fact, knew that they must be so different that the probability was that the world would kill them and certainly was that the world would hate them. But the tendency in the modern Church has been to play down the difference between the Church and the world. We have, in effect, often said to people: ‘As long as you live a decent, respectable life, it is quite all right to become a church member and to call yourself a Christian. You don’t need to be so very different from other people.’ [When] in fact, Christians should be easily identifiable in the world. Christ does not take us out of the world; He makes us different within the world.
– William Barclay –
from his commentary on Ephesians 1.3-4
I would walk through mud up to my knees to get to a group where nobody was showing off, where only God was present. The Early Church prayed – talked to God. When they sang, they talked to God and sang about God. Today we have programming, that awful, hateful word ‘programming’; but God is absent.
– AW Tozer –
We refuse to so strive and should not be surprised at the lack of God’s mighty stirrings. Is it not amazing that we have no problem with people wearing themselves out in sports for pleasure, work for money, politics for power, and programs for charity, but think it fanatical to so pray for souls? We would die for national freedom, but never for progress in the Kingdom of God. Is it any wonder we see so little of God’s great working? Father Nash* would pray until he had to ‘go to bed absolutely sick, for weakness and faintness, under the pressure.’ The world would have no problem with such dedication except that it was due to prayer for souls. Why should it be such a strange thing to the Church?
– J. Paul Reno –
*Father Nash was the man who prayed “under the stage” during Charles Finney’s revivals.