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 –
Get your texts from God —your thoughts, your words, from God. … It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear, and your heart full of God’s Spirit, is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.
– Robert Murray M’Cheyne –
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 –
God is not looking for brilliant men, is not depending upon eloquent men, is not shut up to the use of talented men in sending His gospel out in the world. God is looking for broken men who have judged themselves in the light of the cross of Christ. When He wants anything done, He takes up men who have come to the end of themselves, whose confidence is not in themselves, but in God.
– Henry Ironside –
There’s going to be no renewal, no revival, no awakening, until we’re willing to let Him once again break us.
– David Wilkerson –
Do not be satisfied with God’s calling or His gifts in your life. Be satisfied with Jesus Christ Himself
– Brother Yun –
from the book The Heavenly Man
I charge you never to give up the old doctrine of the blood of Christ, the complete satisfaction which that atoning blood made for sin, and the impossibility of being saved except by that blood. Let nothing tempt you to believe that it is enough to look only at the example of Christ, or only to receive the sacrament which Christ commanded to be received, for which many nowadays worship like an idol
– JC Ryle –
We need a Heaven-sent revival, a burning fire from on high, A purifying passion and a forsaking of our stubborn pride. We need a vision of eternity, of Hell and the Judgment Day, A fervent love for our Savior, that will gladly serve and obey. We need a Pentecostal purging and a breaking deep within, A vision of God Almighty and a river of tears for our nation’s sin. We need a Heaven-sent revival, a burning fire set ablaze. Yet, we’ll never see such glory, until the Church begins to pray
– David Smithers –