The true man of God is heartsick. He is . . .
grieved at the worldliness of the Church,
grieved at the toleration of sin in the Church,
grieved at the prayerlessness in the Church.
– Leonard Ravenhill –
Confusion and impotence are the inevitable results when the wisdom and resources of the world are substituted for the presence and power of the Spirit.
– Samuel Chadwick –
Turn your soul’s vision to Jesus, and look and look at Him, and a strange dimness will come over all that is apart from Him.
– Lilias Trotter –
(note: this is the quote that inspired the song “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus”)
The root-trouble of the present distress is that the Church has more faith in the world and the flesh than in the Holy Ghost, and things will get no better till we get back to His realized presence and power.
– Samuel Chadwick –
The wonder of the grace of God is that God can take an unholy man out of a unholy world — and make that man holy — and put him back into a unholy world, and keep him holy!
– Leonard Ravenhill –
The neglected heart will soon be a heart overrun with worldly thoughts; the neglected life will soon become a moral chaos; the church that is not jealously protected by mighty intercession and sacrificial labors will before long become the abode of every evil bird and the hiding place for unsuspected corruption. The creeping wilderness will soon take over that church that trusts in its own strength and forgets to watch and pray.
– AW Tozer –
The invasion of the Church by the world is a menace to the extension of Christ’s Kingdom. In all ages conformity to the world by Christians has resulted in lack of spiritual life and a consequent lack of spiritual vision and enterprise. A secularized or self-centered Church can never evangelize the world.
– John R. Mott –
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 –