Did you never run to a tree for shelter in a storm, and find fruit which you did not expect? Did you never go to God for safeguard in these times, driven by outward storms, and there find unexpected fruit, the peaceable fruit of righteousness, that made you say, “Happy tempest, which cast me into such a harbor”?
– John Owen –
1616 –1683
When we shift from personal purity to personal happiness, we lose biblical hope because we are not focusing on God’s agenda, we are focusing on our own.
– NT Wright –
I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance inflict and pollute others and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me however I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely as stated above. See this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.
– Martin Luther –
concerning The Black Plague death of his day
The whole Scripture doth principally aim at this thing, that we should not doubt, but that we should hope, that we should trust, that we should believe, that God is a merciful, a bountiful, a gracious, and a patient God to his people.
– Martin Luther –
1483-1546
The Godly have a portion promised them upon their marriage to Christ, but the portion is not paid till the day of their death. The saints are promoted at death to communion with God; they have what they so long hoped for, and prayed for.
– Thomas Watson –
from The Godly Man’s Picture, 1666
The Spirit of God first imparts love; he next inspires hope, and then gives liberty; and that is about the last thing we have in many of our churches.
– Dwight L. Moody –
Faith is a living and unshakable confidence — a belief in God so assured that a man would die a thousand deaths for its sake.
– Martin Luther –
A Christian will part with anything rather than his hope; he knows that hope will keep the heart both from aching and breaking, from fainting and sinking; he knows that hope is a beam of God, a spark of glory, and that nothing shall extinguish it till the soul be filled with glory.
– Thomas Brooks –
Hope is called the anchor of the soul (Hebrews 6:19), because it gives stability to the Christian life. But hope is not simply a “wish” (I wish that such-and-such would take place); rather, it is that which latches on to the certainty of the promises of the future that God has made.
– RC Sproul –
