If I be convinced that there is any equity and beauty in that command which charges others to love me, forgive me, forbear with me, and restore me in meekness, why, then, should it be a grievous command that I should pay that debt of love and tenderness to others?
– Hugh Binning –
from Christian Love, 38
Discontent is like a worm that eats the meat out of the nub, and then when the meat is eaten out of it, you have the shell.
– Jeremiah Burroughs –
(1600-1646)
The law may chain up the wolf, but it is the Gospel that changes the wolfish nature.
– Samuel Bolton –
from The True Bounds of Christian Freedom, 1645
How true it is that the holiest saint is in himself a “miserable sinner,” and a debtor to mercy and grace to the last moment of his existence!
– JC Ryle –
from Holiness, 1879
When the devil throws our sins up to us and declares that we deserve death and hell, we ought to speak thus: “I admit that I deserve death and hell. What of it? Does this mean that I shall be sentenced to eternal damnation? By no means. For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Where he is, there shall I be also.”
– Martin Luther –
Watch the kind of people that God brings around you, and you will be humiliated to find that this is His way of reviewing to you the kind of person you have been to Him.
– Oswald Chambers –
There’s one thing we need above everything else; it’s something we don’t talk about these days. We need a mighty avalanche of conviction of sin.
– Leonard Ravenhill –
The Word of God is a looking glass, to show us our spots; and the blood of Christ is a fountain to wash them away.
– Thomas Watson –
People take salvation today in such a cold, formal, matter-of-fact, business-like sort of way, that it appears as though they are doing God an honor in condescending to receive His offer of Redemption. Their eyes are dry, their sense of sin absent; nor is there any sign of penitence and contrition … But oh, if there were conviction! if they came with hearts bowed down, yea! broken and contrite, came with the cry of the guilt-laden soul: “God be merciful to me a sinner!”—came trembling with the burning life and death question of the Philippian jailor: “What must I do to be saved ?”—what converts they would be!
– Oswald J. Smith –