Aphorisms

God will not adapt Himself to unbelief; He adapts Himself to the heart.
Jews had to do with the seventh day of the week; Christians with the first -a mingling of time and eternity.
The flesh is always an inhabiter of the earth; for what else can it inhabit?
God was perfect love to me when I was perfect enmity to Him.
A man is never justified by experience; he is justified by faith.
The Spirit of God is never our righteousness; He is power in me; but Christ is my righteousness.
If the word of God has reached my soul, it shows not merely what is in the word, but what is in my soul.
Grace is love working where there is evil.
If any one had to be shut out of heaven because of my sins, it must be Christ, because He took them.
The experience of faith is never toward self-no faith is in my own feelings-I have faith in God.
Prophecy is never about heaven, but about earth.
Events about earth are never the fullness of Christ in heaven.
God never lowers His standard; "Do thy first works?"
Grace brought Christ where sin brought us.
Man is heartless about grace; bold about glory!
Paul never lets his mind loose in a sea of motives.
The moment religion accredits a man it is nothing: that which does not put the heart to the test costs him nothing.
Fresh truth will never lead a man to give up old truth.
Common topics of truth bring no rejection from the world; but fresh truth tries.
For the sinner, the conflict is between God and the conscience; with the believer, it is between God and the heart.
The place the saint has in the Father's house is with Christ and as Christ.
Because we are sons, God seals us. We shall never find thwarted affections in loving Christ.
The darkness of the world is religiousness: " this is your hour and the power of darkness." It was religiousness that crucified Christ. "If the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness!"
To doubt if God is for us, is unbelief.
We are fallen so low, that by some means or other man will lift himself up.
If you choose to take your place with the Lord, you must be content to be cast out by the world.
In heaven every one will have his place, and all be looking to God.
Selfishness itself can admire the unselfishness it profits by at the moment.
Would to God Christians were as honest when they have got peace, as they are while seeking it!
Man has turned God out of the world by crucifying Christ.
The law is not grace. Grace may say it is holy, just, and good.
When judgment comes grace is over forever. " Grace and truth carne by Jesus Christ." The law is neither grace nor truth. Truth is the real condition and relationship with God in everything, and with every one.
Who told the real state of man and of this world but Christ and the cross?
"The kingdom of heaven" is said because the King is in heaven. "The kingdom of God" could be said when Christ was on earth.
The law showed what man ought to be before God. The law deals with evil. In the law we find what man ought to be. The law is extracted out of the Old Testament. The law cannot mend what is broken under it.
Love finds its link wherever there is a misery-wherever there is a want.
Righteousness will reign when Christ reigns; "grace reigns through righteousness."
If I take law and judgment, there is only perdition for me; but if I take grace I am brought to God.
What I cannot escape, Christ would not escape.
We get death by disobedience, Christ by obedience.
God shows His love, not in giving us our old nature restored, but in giving us of His own nature.
Practice in scripture is always put after grace.
Paul brings out the counsels of God. John brings out the nature of God-eternal life manifested in Christ, and communicated to us.
In Paul we get the development of knowledge, in John the development of the affections.
The new nature is a dependent nature; it never could act of itself. The old man pretends to be independent.
Man gets the good thing, enjoys it, and leaves God out.
Mind cannot measure love. Mind can measure mind. Love is known by being loved.
No knowledge can love; we must be born of God to love; for " God is love."
Truth is authority.
If ministry be real, it brings the conscience to God; if false, it leads from God; it stands between God and the sinner.
The word of God never treats men's minds as competent to judge of it. The power that works men's minds is totally incapable of judging of God's word.
What I have faith in I am subject to. Christians are never put on their own minds to judge error.
Israel undertook, in terror too, what Christ undertook to do in love. All was living obedience and living love in Christ: the touching living expression of love in spite of sin.
Saul is a destroyer amongst the Jews; Paul a workman amongst the Gentiles.
When we lose the sense of God's presence, conscience sleeps, and will awakes.
Aphorisms
Jesus had the taste of heaven in everything He did, and the world cannot bear this!
We suffer here because we have a soul risen in a body that is not risen, and that is in a world at enmity with God.
Christianity alone could give great force to individuality and to conscience, and at the same time unite men under the direction of Christ, towards one center, which is Christ. This could only be possible by the Holy Spirit, who takes away selfishness, while it gives power to the conscience; giving by faith an object to the heart outside of itself-an object which acts on the individual conscience, and unites us all, through one predominant affection, to one center of affection, by one life, and one only power of the Spirit.
The Holy Spirit acts as the Spirit of union of the children of God; but conscience cannot be in society, and reject its own individual responsibility. It is individual, otherwise God could not be the master of conscience.
The Holy Spirit directs conscience toward Jesus.
If we will avoid the principles of evil, it must be through conscience; there is no other way.
The Christian who acts from conscience will avoid a thousand snares, of which he is not at all aware.
So far as the Christian enters into the ways of the world, it is a complete prostitution.
Whatever makes the world happy in spite of God, is in the spirit and course of Babylon, and for a Christian to be there is to be in Babylon.
Babylon is the spirit of worldliness, cast out far away from God, as guilty of the death of Christ, and which nevertheless gives itself up to embellish the world. All those Babylonish principles, all that your eyes may lust after for your drawing rooms and for your pleasures, all those things separate you from heaven. It is Babylon on a small scale.
What is often important to man is not so to God; for God has Christ in view.
Man glories in a truth that costs him nothing, inasmuch as it is generally received, and takes advantage of it to oppose the admission of more light which would demand faith.
Heaven is familiar with evil as judged, as with that which is good, to enjoy it.
All that happens to us is foreknown and prearranged of God, in order that His child may stand in the midst of difficulties. All I have to do is to say God is perfectly acquainted with the position I am in, and He knows the way He has prepared to extricate me from difficulties, if I remain faithful.
When Jesus was on the earth heaven looked on the earth; now that Jesus is in heaven, the Church on earth looks on high. In a yet fuller revelation, as at the conversion of Paul, it is owned as one with Jesus, who is there.
Prophecy is a revelation of future things, to act on my conscience now.
There are always warnings that we have neglected previous to chastisements.
A soul that is unconverted has no idea of a God, tender, gentle, who "wipes away tears."
It is precious to have always God's true object in view, which cannot stop short of His glory.
If one would get at the bottom of the counsels of God, one must look at His glory.
The sight of the glory sanctifies truly, and gives an object far above all that could be prepared to stop us here on earth.
We shall never walk well here below, even in the smallest details, if the great end is not constantly before our eyes.
If I have any object on this side the glory, even the welfare of the Church in detail, my soul will suffer from it.
We want faith to lose our fortune and to forgive; but if it is coming out of the society of man, it is entering into that of God.
The selfishness of the world understands the grace that is in the Christian which can forgive; but in principle that grace is foolishness to him.
If you are wishing for money, or seeking to make provision for placing your children in the world, or if you have any plans for the future, you cannot wish for the Lord Jesus to come; and if you cannot, then your hearts are not right with Jesus.
It requires more real grace and faith to pray for the Church of God than to labor and to preach; though neither can be done rightly without.
It is comparatively easy to love and feel humble when conscious of making people your debtors by service; but when there is neither energy for service, nor power to communicate, this tries what is in the heart.
Aphorisms
1. It is better to keep Christ's character than one's cloak.
2. The world never draws towards Christians, and it cannot do so, for its own nature cannot allow it; but Christians may, to their own loss, draw near the world, because the old man is still in them.
3. You cannot be in the truth if you ramble from the person of the Son of Man.
4. The things which God will separate in judgment are already separated in His mind, and they are as much so now as when they will be seen, the one in the lake of fire, and the other in heaven.
5. Christian liberty is never liberty of will: the liberty of the Holy Ghost is absolute.
6. The seventh of Romans presents the legal form of the conflict: the Galatians the Christian form of the conflict. In the seventh of Romans there is nothing about the Spirit; but Galatians speaks of the flesh lusting against the Spirit, and the Spirit lusting against the flesh. In Romans it is about the law, and not about Christ nor the Spirit.
7. There may be great activity of service without its being the service of God in the Spirit.
8. "That we should be holy and without blame before him in love," is that we should be there according to God's nature and character. For He is holy, blameless in His ways, and He is love.
9. The difference between the Holy Ghost's reasoning and the saint's is seen in this, that the Holy Ghost reasons from what God is, to what we shall experience from Him; while the saint reasons from what he is, to what he may expect from God.
10. The question of justification is presented in Romans and Galatians; divine government in the wilderness in Peter; the communication of life in John.

Aphorisms
We must not put the Holy Spirit in the place of Scripture; but we must remember that it is the Spirit, through the scripture, that gives us the knowledge of God's mind.
It is God's faithfulness that gives His mind where two or thee are gathered together; or if it be individual, it is, "If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine."
It matters not in what form I get the mind of the Lord; I am not to ask as to the form: " we have the mind of Christ." But there is need of a lowly state of soul.
I do not admit the principle that there is commandment in anything, as merely ordained, in the New Testament. Everything is binding upon me that is there; but then it is on the principle that the Holy Ghost bows my will to the mind of God.
I do not look at the Lord's table as a matter of command: it is a blessed privilege thus to remember Christ, and love makes me obedient to His will. I do not pray because I am commanded, though there may be a command. If people pray only because they are commanded, it is poor work.
It is an important thing to remember that when God's glory is concerned, one must act without a command. Moses did so when he took the tabernacle outside the camp, because Israel had set up the calf within. But one max have gathered the mind of God from His word.