We should inquire once again as to what the life of faith is. It is one lived by believing in God under any circumstance: “If he slay me,” says Job, “yet would I trust in Him.” That is faith. Because I once believed, loved and trusted God I shall believe, love and trust Him wherever He may put me and however my heart and body may suffer. … Emotion begins to doubt when it senses blackness, whereas faith holds on to God even in the face of death.
– Watchman Nee –
from The Spiritual Man
But the proconsul urged him and said, “Swear, and I will release thee; curse the Christ.” And Polycarp said, “Eighty and six years have I served him, and he hath done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my king who saved me?”
– The Martyrdom of Polycarp (in 155 AD) –
If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart.
– Oswald Chambers –
To go back is nothing but death: to go forward is fear of death, and life everlasting beyond it. I will yet go forward
– John Bunyan –
from the book Pilgrim’s Progress
Live in Christ and the flesh need not fear death.
– John Knox –
Upon a life I did not live, upon a death I did not die; anothers life, anothers death, I stake my whole eternity.
– Horatius Bonar –
We teach the old-fashioned Gospel of repentance, faith, and holiness, not daring to separate what God has joined together…We teach that a man cannot be right with God while he is doing wrong to men – in short, that holiness means being saved from sin …and filled with love to God and man.
– Catherine Booth –
Perfect love is a kind of self-dereliction, a wandering out of ourselves; it is a kind of voluntary death, wherein the lover dies to himself, and all his own interest, not thinking of them, nor caring for them anymore, and minding nothing but how he may please and gratify the party whom he loves
– Henry Scougal –
Men die in darkness at your side,
Without a hope to cheer the tomb;
Take up the torch and wave it wide,
The torch that lights time’s thickest gloom.
– Horatius Bonar –