It is not great talents nor great learning nor great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God – men always preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives out of it. These can mold a generation for God.
– EM Bounds –
To learn strong faith is to endure great trials. I have learned my faith by standing firm amid severe testings.
– George Müller –
Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have, this day, done one thing because He said, Do it! or once abstained because He said, Do not do it! It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.
– George MacDonald –
Faith is taking God at His word. Those who want some sign are always getting into trouble. We want to come to this: God says it – let us believe it.
– DL Moody –
I find it most true, that the greatest temptation out of hell, is to live without temptations; if my waters should stand, they would rot. Faith is the better of the free air, and of the sharp winter storm in its face. Grace withereth without adversity. The devil is but God’s master fencer, to teach us to handle our weapons.
– Samuel Rutherford –
The more I read, the less I admire modern theology, the more I study the productions of the new schools of theological teachers, the more I marvel that men and women can be satisfied with such writings. There is a vagueness, a mistiness, a shallowness, an indistinctness, a superficiality, an aimlessness, a hollowness about the literature of the ‘broader and kinder systems’, as they are called, which to my mind stamps their origin on their face. They are of the earth, earthy.
– JC Ryle –
[God] needs no one, but when faith is present He works through anyone.
– AW Tozer –
The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best.
– David Brainerd –
We have not to produce out of our higher nature a lowliness and a patience and a purity of our own, but simply to let the pure, patient, lowly life of Jesus have its way in us by yieldingness to it and by faith in its indwelling might. “All that God wants from man is opportunity.” The whole of our relationship to His power, whether for sanctification or for service, is summed up in those words.
– Lilias Trotter –