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 –
Repentance
May 5, 2015
A revival always includes conviction of sin on the part of the church. … Backslidden Christians will be brought to repentance. A revival of God is nothing else than a a new beginning of obedience to God.
– Charles Finney –
May 4, 2015
Sinned as we have as a nation, yet to our sin we have added pride in our sinning. The world has lost the power to blush over its vice; the church has lost her power to weep over it.
– Leonard Ravenhill –
January 7, 2014
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 –
November 16, 2014
The objective of the [Paul’s] life—that for which he sacrificed everything—country, kindred, honor, comfort, liberty, and life itself, was that he might know Christ! Observe that this is not Paul’s prayer as an unconverted man— that he may know Christ, and so be saved—for it follows upon the previous supplication that he might win Christ, and be found in Him. This is the desire of one who has been saved, who enjoys the full conviction that his sins are pardoned, and that he is in Christ. It is only the regenerated and saved man who can feel the desire, “That I may know Him.”
– Charles Spurgeon –
September 3, 2014
A revival breaks the power of the world and of sin over Christians … They have a new foretaste of heaven and new desires after union with God; and the charm of the world is broken, and the power of sin overcome. When the churches are thus awakened and reformed, the reformation and salvation of sinners will follow, going through the same stages of conviction, repentance, and reformation. Their hearts will be broken down and changed.
– Charles G. Finney –
July 14, 2014
It is not falling into water that drowns, but lying in it. It is not falling into sin that damns, but lying in it without repentance.
– Thomas Watson –
April 5, 2014
I had not discoursed long when the congregation melted into tears… a little boy about seven or eight years of age cried out exceeding piteously indeed and wept as though his little heart would break. I asked the little boy what he cried for. He answered ‘my sins!’ I then asked him what he wanted. He answered, ‘Christ!’ … Many of the assembled were deeply affected, groaning and sobbing; there was a great weeping and mourning.
– William Bramwell –
March 27, 2014
When the conviction as to its mental process reaches its crisis, the person, through weakness, is unable to sit or stand, and either kneels or lies down. A great number of convicted persons in this town and neighborhood, and now I believe in all directions in the north where the Revival prevails, are “smitten down”… They fall with a deep groan… with the intensely earnest plea, “Lord Jesus, have mercy on my soul!”
– The Irish Revival, 1859 –