The first effect of a true love for Christ is our clinging to him. The believer’s soul is knit to Christ’s soul as David’s was to Jonathan’s (1 Samuel 18:1). Love produces a firm clinging to Christ crucified that makes a soul in some sense always present with Christ on the cross.
– John Owen –
from The Holy Spirit, 1674
Rose early to seek God and found Him whom my soul loveth. Who would not rise early to meet such company?
– Robert Murray M’Cheyne –
Journal Entry: February 23, 1834
If you ask me why God should love us, I cannot tell. I suppose it is because He is a true Father. It is His nature to love; just as it is the nature of the sun to shine.
– DL Moody –
A true love to God must begin with a delight in His holiness.
– Jonathan Edwards –
1709-1758 AD
Every man should keep a fair sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.
– Henry Ward Beecher –
1813-1887
Obedience to God is the most infallible evidence of sincere and supreme love to Him.
– Nathanael Emmons –
1745-1840 AD
Acquaint yourself with Christ’s love, and ye shall not miss to find new goldmines and treasures in Christ.
– Samuel Rutherford –
from The Loveliness of Christ
The great God, the former of all things, taketh part with them that fear him, and engage themselves to walk in his ways, of love, and respect, they bear unto him; so that such may boldly say, “The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me” (Hebrews 13:6).
– John Bunyan –
from All Loves Excelling, 1692
In the 1950s kids lost their innocence. They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term—the generation gap.
In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was a decade of protest—church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.
In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self. Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion. … It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference.
In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.
In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world.
In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore.
– Ravi Zacharias –