John Wesley one day walked to his mother and asked: “Mum, define sin for me”. Her aswer was this: “Whatever weakens your reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes away your relish for spiritual things, in short, if anything increases the authority of the flesh over the spirit, that to you becomes sin, however good it is in itself.”
– Susanna Wesley –
The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world. In their effort to achieve restful adjustment to unregenerate society they have lost their pilgrim character and become an essential part of the very moral order against which they are sent to protest. The world recognizes them and accepts them for what they are. And this is the saddest thing that can be said about them. They are not lonely, but neither are they saints.
– AW Tozer –
It is not difficult to say what it is that hardens the hearts. The seed sown by the wayside could not enter the soil because it had been trodden down by the passersby. When the world, with its business and its interests, has at all times a free passage, the heart loses its tenderness.
– Andrew Murray –
Christ is a Savior for those realizing something of the exceeding sinfulness of sin …
– AW Pink –
The first and great work of a Christian is about his heart. There it is that God dwells by his Spirit, in his saints; and there it is that sin and Satan reign, in the ungodly. The great duties and the great sins are those of the heart. There is the root of good and evil: the tongue and life are but the fruits and expressions of that which dwells within.
– Richard Baxter –
1615 – 1691
Only the blood of Jesus can cleanse us, yet if we withhold ourselves from that blood, we will be unclean forever.
– AW Tozer –
If the guilt of sin is so great that nothing can satisfy it but the blood of Jesus; and the filth of sin is so great that nothing can fetch out the stain thereof but the blood of Jesus, how great, how heinous, how sinful must the evil of sin be.
– William Throsby Bridges –
What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus;
What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
– Robert Lowry –
hymn writer
Sin is a poisonous weed that throws the whole nature out of order. The inner life disintegrates; the flesh lusts after forbidden pleasures; the moral judgment is distorted so that often good appears evil and evil good; time is chosen over eternity, earth over heaven and death over life.
– AW Tozer –