vol. 2

NOTABLE QUOTES OF CHARLES H. SPURGEON —PART 2— May 20, 2008
Dear Reader, This is the second compilation of Brother Spurgeon’s quotes from my work of modernizing his sermons. All of these quotes are found in volumes of his work which were published after hewent Home to our Lordin 1892.Thus I identify them by the year and sermon number. (There may be a couple which I failed to note the year and sermon, so I simply put his initials after the quote).

If you want to read or download the sermon from which a quote comes, simply go to our site and look in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit links on the front page—each link identifies the sermon numbers in that link.
Nothing on our site is copyrighted—feel free to copy anything—but please use it only for the honor and glory of my Master, Jesus Christ.
My prayer for you and yours is Paul’s to the Ephesians 3:17-19.

Emmett O’Donnell

“If any of you think that you have a perfect child, you will find yourselves grievously mistaken—the time will come when you will discover that evil is lurking there as it is in you, the father, or in you, the mother—and it will only need a suitable opportunity to display itself! It will scarcely need fostering by ill companions—but even in a godly household where the atmosphere of piety abounds—sin will grow up in the child as naturally as weeds grow in a garden that is left to itself.”—1901, Sermon #2734

“You never need believe a man who swears—you may know that he also lies.”—1901, Sermon #2735
“We must always remember that most of the miracles of Christ are symbols and emblems of the spiritual and moral miracles that He works in the world of the heart.”—1901, Sermon #2736

“Faith in Christ is not the reception of a dry, dead orthodoxy—to believe in Jesus is not simply to be a sixteen-ounces-to-the-pound Calvinist. Saving faith is not the mere reception of a creed or form of any kind. To believe is to trust and no man truly believes—in the New Testament meaning of the word—until he is brought to trust in Christ, alone, and takes his whole religion upon trust, relying not on what he sees, nor on what he is, but on what is revealed in God’s Word—not on what he is, or can be, or shall be, nor on what he does or can do, nor on what he feels or does not feel—but relying solely on what Christ has done, is doing and shall yet do.”—1901, Sermon #2737

“O you redeemed ones…—you who have been bought by the precious blood of this steadfast, resolute Redeemer—come and think awhile of Him, that your hearts may burn within you and that your faces may be set like flints to live and die for Him who lived and died for you!”—1901, Sermon #2738

“There is no real contentment to a truly-awakened man until he is at peace with God! And it is a horrible thing for any man to be perfectly satisfied while he is under God’s wrath and in danger of eternal destruction, as he certainly is unless he has believed in the Lord Jesus Christ.”—1901, Sermon #2739
“Let us feel that when we speak with God there is reality in it and that God hears us just as surely as we hear one another—and that He is prepared to answer our petitions—I mean, literally to do so, not in some mysterious, unreal fashion, but actually and truly to give us that which is fitting for Him to bestow and right for us to ask. We cannot pray as we ought unless we believe that.”—1901, Sermon #2740

“I verily believe that the saints in Heaven, albeit they have received the crown of salvation, are not, as to its essential reality, more truly saved than the meanest and weakest Believer in Christ who is struggling through floods of temptation here upon earth.”—1901, Sermon #2741

“It was not so very long ago that I heard a minister say that he did not believe in the revival, which was then being experienced, because so many outrageous sinners had professed to be saved. He thought it was due to regular attendants at places of worship that, if anybody was saved, they should be the first—a precious piece of abominable legalism!”—1901, Sermon #2742

“It is Omnipotence which compels yonder starry orbs to obey the laws which God has made, and to travel in their appointed courses, but, to my mind, it is even more marvelous Omnipotence which leaves men free agents and controls not their will, but yet sweetly triumphs over them and wins for God the accomplishment of his Divine purposes!”—1901, Sermon #2743

“We do not repent in order to be saved, but we repent because we are saved. We do not loathe sin and, therefore, hope to be saved, but, because we are saved, we therefore loathe sin and turn altogether from it.”—1901, Sermon #2743

“Do not try to count your sins—your arithmetic will fail you if you attempt such a task as that! But if it will benefit you to go over the transgressions of your life from your youth up even until now, do so with repentant heart. And when you have added them up as best you can, and tried to conceive the total sum of your iniquities, then write at the bottom, ‘But the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification’ —‘frommany offenses’—however many they may be—though they should outnumber the sands on the seashore, or the drops that make up the ocean, yet the free gift of Divine pardon sweeps them all away!”—1901, Sermon #2744

“ It is God that writes intercession upon men’s hearts. All true prayer comes from Him, but especially that least selfish and most Christ-like form of prayer called intercession—when the suppliant forgets all about himself and his own needs—and all his pleading, his tears and his arguments are on behalf of others.”—1901, Sermon #2745

“It is under the shadow of the imperfections of the Church that wicked men find shelter from the scorching heat of their conscience. If they can detect a minister in sin. If they can discover a deacon or an elder indulging in iniquity. If they can quote a justification for sin from the lips of a Church member, how content and pleased the wicked are! They did, as it were, but walk in their transgressions before—but when they find a church member in the same path, then they run greedily in the way of iniquity.”—1901, Sermon #2746

“It is where you are that you are to fight the battle of life—not somewhere else. And it is as you are, the very man that you are, and just now, this very hour, that God calls you to work in His vineyard.”—1901, Sermon #2747

“If you have not found rest of heart, dear Friend, you have missed that blessing which is peculiar to the Gospel dispensation. If you have not found in Christ perfect quiet for your soul, you put Him on a level with Moses and you seem to make out that you will need either another sacrifice, or another something to make you clear of guilt in the sight of God.”—1901, Sermon #2748

“‘But,’ someone asks, ‘may not a man be attentive to business?’ He ought to be! He should be diligent in business, but always with this higher motive outreaching everything else—that he may win Christ and be found in Him and that his life may bring glory to the God who made him and to the Christ who redeemed him with His precious blood.”—1901, Sermon #2749

“It was said of Caesar, when he landed here, that he stumbled, but, clutching a handful of earth, he hailed it as a happy omen, saying that in taking possession of that handful of earth, he had taken all England for his own. And you, who on your bended knees fell prostrate before God in that first rich treasure of joy which came into your souls—you took possession of all the inheritance of the saints on earth and of their inheritance in Heaven, too!”—1901, Sermon #2750 “Heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people.”—1901, Sermon #2751

“I am sure our Lord Jesus Christ does not want His ministers to deliver magnificent orations, spread-eagle sermons, with long and elaborate sentences in them. He wants them to just come and talk as He talked, in all simplicity, so that the very poorest and most illiterate of their hearers may understand their meaning, embrace the Truths of God they proclaim and find everlasting life in Him of whom they speak.”—1901, Sermon #2752
“The Old Testament is not to be regarded with one jot less of reverence and love than is the New Testament—they must remain bound together, for they are the one Revelation of the mind and will of God—and woe be to the man who shall attempt to rend asunder that seamless garment of Holy Scripture!”—1901, Sermon #2753

“O you legalists who are looking to yourselves for some arguments with which to prevail with God! O you who look to your sacraments, to your outward forms, to your pious deeds and your almsgivings for something that will move the heart of God—know this, that these things are no lever that can ever move Him to 1ove! Nothing but your sin and misery can ever stir His mercy! And you look to the wrong place when you look to your merits to find a plea why He should show pity upon you!”—1901, Sermon #2754

“Is there a Christian in this place who comes up to the standard of Zacchaeus after he was converted? I do not wish to be censorious, but I doubt if there is one. Is there anybody here who gives away half his income to the poor? I think that was going a long way in Grace in the matter of almsgiving. And then remember that he was but a babe in Grace when he did that—so what he did when he grew older, I do not know.”—1901, Sermon #2755

“Ah, my Brothers and Sisters, Christ’s eyes look in the opposite direction to ours. We usually look for some goodness on the part of men before we help them, but He looks to their sin, degradation and need. He is kind to the unthankful and the evil. He justifies those who are not, in themselves, just—while we were dead in trespasses and sins, “in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” Grace, pure Grace, abounds in Him and is blessedly manifested in His mission of saving the lost.”—1901, Sermon #2756

“We have not completely conquered the spirit of the world until we can truthfully say that the commandments of God, so far from being grievous to us, are acceptable simply because they come from Him.”—1901, Sermon #2757

“Beloved, I trust that each one of you who believes in Jesus, knows what that rest of heart is which enables you to say, ‘My God, my Father, You can do nothing to me but what Infinite Love dictates, for I know that You love me even as You love Your first-born and only-begotten Son.’”—1901, Sermon #2758

“Ah, take Jesus for your theme, sit down and consider Him—think of His relation to your own soul and you will never get through that one subject!”—1901, Sermon #2759
“When a man is his own ruler, he has all the responsibility of what he does—but when he implicitly obeys Christ’s command, he is not responsible for the result of his actions—that rests with Him who gave the command.”—1902, Sermon #2760

“We fall into grievous error when we entertain this kind of idea! God’s ways are diverse—from the beginning to the end, God the Father, God the Holy Spirit and our Lord Jesus Christ act sovereignly and do not choose to follow one particular mode of action in every case.”—1902, Sermon #2761

“‘But may I lay hold on Christ,’ asks someone, ‘and trust Him thus?’ You had better ask me whether you may refuseto do so, and I will answer you in His own words, ‘He that believes not shall be damned.’ Now, if Christ pronounces condemnation upon the man who believes not, it is clear that you may believe in Him!”—1902, Sermon #2762

“If there is such a thing as free will, Luther truly hit the mark when he called free will a slave! It is only our will in bonds that is truly free.”—1902, Sermon #2763

“If you must be angry, (and you must, sometimes), take care that you do not sin when you are angry. It is rather a difficult thing to be angry and not to sin, yet, if a man were to see sin and not to be angry with it, he would sin through not being angry! If we are only angry, in a right spirit, with a wrong thing, we shall manage to obey the injunction of the Apostle, ‘Be you angry, and sin not’ (Ephesians 4:26).”—1902, Sermon #2763

“We have sometimes rejoiced greatly when we have had as many as a hundred added to this Church in a month, yet I have gone away and said to myself—‘What is that hundred, after all? It is not sufficient to keep pace with the increase of the population.’ It makes us very sad to know that the increase of sinners far exceeds the increase of the converts to God.”—1902, Sermon #2764

“He who sees even the most of this world has but the same sort of eyes that birds and beasts have—but he who knows his Bible to be true and who realizes the truth of it in his soul—has another set of eyes that can peer into another realm altogether. He sees spiritual things and around him there shines a Light which is, indeed, marvelous!”—1902, Sermon #2765

“Hosea beautifully puts it—“Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy.” We sow in righteousness, but the harvest is not given us as the effect of righteousness, it is given us by mercy! Reap in mercy!”1902, Sermon #2766
“Our blessed Lord is to be imitated by us in that He frequently sought and enjoyed retirement. His was a very busy life. He had much more to do than you and I have, yet He found abundant time for private prayer.”1902, Sermon #2767

“…among all the terrible words spoken concerning the penalty of sin, the most terrible are those which were uttered by our Lord Jesus Christ, the most loving and tender of all teachers. Measure not a man’s true tenderness of heart by his avoidance of the subject of “the wrath to come.””1902, Sermon #2768

“There are some people who seem as if they would not be converted unless they can see some eminent minister. Even that will not suit some of them—they need a special revelation from Heaven. They will not take a text from the Bible—though I cannot conceive of anything better than that—but they think that if they could dream something, or if they could hear words spoken in the cool of the evening by some strange voice in the sky, then they might be converted. Well, Brothers and Sisters, if you will not eat the apples that grow on trees, you must not expect angels to come and bring them to you!”1902, Sermon #2769

“Our Savior speaks thus, “Your faith has saved you,” because He knows that it will be understood that faith is only the connecting link with Himself—that He really works the salvation, but that the faith of the Believer is the means of obtaining it.”1902, Sermon #2770

“As captives chained to the wheels of the returning conqueror’s chariot make his triumphal procession the more illustrious, so is Christ upon the Cross the more manifestly triumphant in His Infinite Grace as He leads the restored Peter back to His Apostleship and takes the penitent thief, plucked from perdition, up with Himself into the Paradise of God!”1902, Sermon #2771

“WE do not use instrumental music in the worship of God because we consider that it would be a violation of the simplicity of our worship. We think it far better to hear the voices of Christian men and women than all the sounds which can be made by instruments. Yet I am sure there is no Christian here who would object to a minister who can play well upon an instrument and, indeed, a minister is good for nothing if he does not know how, spiritually, to give forth instrumental music!”1902, Sermon #2772

““It has become a custom, in this evil age, for certain persons to attempt to communicate with familiar spirits. If it can be done, it is strictly forbidden in this Book, yet there are some who try to have dealings with those who are in the land of spirits. Well, if they will trespass on that forbidden ground, it is possible that, one of these days, somebody will appear to them. I should not greatly wonder if their father, the devil, came up and ran away with them! They go so near his door and do their utmost to enter that they ought not to be surprised if he should appear and claim his own.”1902, Sermon #2773

“Has my Lord Jesus a visible Church anywhere on earth? Then, let me share the lot of those who are its members! What are its fortunes? Let them be mine. Is the Church dishonored and despised, maligned and persecuted? Then let me take the rough side of the hill with her—and bear the brunt of the storm with her rather than, in a cowardly manner, be ashamed of my Master and shrink from saying that I belong to Him.”—1902, Sermon #2774

“DAVID was constantly singing the praises of God’s Word, although, as I have often reminded you, he had only a small portion of the Scriptures compared with the complete Bible which we possess. If, then, it had pleased God that the Canon of Revelation should have been closed in David’s day, it would, by the aid of His Spirit, have been even then a sufficient Light of God to lead the saints of God into the way of holiness.”—1902, Sermon #2775

“We have, whenever members are given to us, a great charge, under God, to nurse them for Him and, instrumentally, to advance them in the road to Heaven. But, in all this, the Church is a poor mother, if her God is not with her. She can do nothing in bringing forth, nothing in nurturing, nothing in training, nothing in preserving and nothing, at last, in bringing her children Home, unless the Holy Spirit dwells in her and sends her strength to accomplish all.”—1902, Sermon #2776

“I cannot help saying that the queen of Sheba, in coming to Solomon, did not have anything like the inducements which are put before you in coming to Christ.”—1902, Sermon #2777
“The more hungry men are, the more fit they are for the Gospel feast! The more needy the outcast, the louder does the Gospel trumpet blow, that they who are ready to perish may come and be saved!”—1902, Sermon #2778

“I am persuaded that it is so that the simplest and most plain matter kept away from Christ will turn out to be a maze, while the most intricate labyrinth, under the guidance of Christ, will prove to have in it a straight road for the feet of all those who trust in the Infallible Wisdom of their Lord and Savior.”—1902, Sermon #2779
“What must it be to be in Heaven? Glory be to God if we are ever there, but to be in Heaven with others who are given to us—this shall be to multiply Heaven, to heap celestial mountains upon one another, to double the light of the sun, yes, to make it sevenfold, to make Heaven more than Heaven—Heaven multiplied in the Heaven of others!”—1902, Sermon #2780

“There is but one door of salvation and Christ said, ‘I am the door.’”—1902, Sermon #2781
“Certain men…go further than simply forgetting God, for they actively oppose Him. They can never seem to find language foul enough to apply to the religion of Jesus Christ. ”—1902, Sermon #2782
“The most common ties of gratitude bind us to at least thinkabout the great goodness of God to us.”—1902, Sermon #2783
“‘Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Your name give glory, for Your mercy, and for Your truth’s sake.’ That is to say, true religion does not seek its own honor.”—1902, Sermon #2784
“When I see the members of a church laying down a multiplicity of rules, I know that they are getting themselves into a multiplicity of troubles. If they will but leave rules and regulations to come up when they are needed, they will find them when they need them.”—1902, Sermon #2785
“We have heard of cases of insanity in which persons have swallowed ashes, eaten earth, devoured pins and needles and all sorts of strange things. That is only a feeble emblem of the absolute insanity of the unregenerate heart!”—1902, Sermon #2786

“You do not really preach the Gospel if you leave Christ out—if He is omitted, it is not the Gospel! You may invite men to listen to your message, but you are only inviting them to gaze upon an empty table unless Christ is the very center and substance of all that you set before them!”—1902, Sermon #2787

“I firmly believe that the better a man’s own character becomes and the more joy in the Lord he has in his own heart, the more capable is he of sympathetic sorrow and, probably, the more of it he will have. If you have room in your soul for sacred joy, you have equal room for holy grief and, depend upon it, you will have both of these emotions if the Lord has perfectly consecrated you and purposes to use you for His Glory.”—1902, Sermon #2788

“Unbelief is blind to good and to God, but it is very quick of sight to everything that is fearful and terrifying. I have known some Christians so full of unbelief that it was very difficult to give them any comfort—they were most dexterous in finding out the worst parts of their character and history—and very crafty in, as it were, seeking to neutralize the force of God’s promises by mentioning some evil thing in their own experience which seemed as if it deprived them of their right to receive the promised gift.”—1902, Sermon #2789

“Christ did not come merely to be an example—when we are dead in trespasses and sins, of what use can His example be to us?”—1902, Sermon #2790

“Have you taught for a long time in your Sunday school class and have you had only one girl saved? Do not be satisfied with that one, but, at the same time, do not forget to thank the Lord for that one. If you are not grateful to God for letting you win one soul for Him, you are not likely to be allowed to win another.”—1902, Sermon #2791
“It is not your goodnessthat will ensure an answer to your prayer—it is the greatness of your need. Even if you have sunk very low in your own esteem, till not a ray of hope seems left to you and you are shut up in the blackest darkness of despair, that is the very time for you to pray, even as the Psalmist said, ‘Out of the depths I have cried unto You, O Lord.’”—1902, Sermon #2792

“It is true that there are two ways in which men shall be made to bow the knee before God—some of them will bow unwillingly when they shall feel the weight of His iron rod—others shall bow joyfully before Him when they shall feel the power of His Grace.”—1902, Sermon #2793

“I wonder how many of us really know this great Truth of God in our inmost souls, for this is one of the weightiest matters you ever heard about in all your lives. If you think that you have any righteousness of your own, you are sadly mistaken. If you fancy that you have strength of your own which will carry you to Heaven, you are living in grievous error. You shall faint and die, ‘as a snail which melts,’ if you trust in yourselves!”—1902, Sermon #2793

“If Moses had his cleft in the rock where he could see the back parts of his God, we also have had our clefts in the rock where we have seen the full splendors of the Godhead in the Person of Christ! ”—1902, Sermon #2794

“Well, now, if we draw near to God, it will have an effect upon our common, everyday life. How? Why, first, if you will follow the run of the chapter, you will see that drawing near to God will help us toresist the devil. The injunction, and promise, ‘Resist the devil, and he will flee from you,’ are immediately followed by the words of our text, ‘Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.’”—1902, Sermon #2795 “I do not think that God’s people often go astray in the most difficult cases, for they do take themto the Lord in prayer. It is in simple matters that we make our greatest blunders, because we think we know what to do and, therefore, we do not wait upon the Lord for guidance.”—1902, Sermon #2796

“If a man is to be saved, he must turn from his sins. ‘Right about face!’ is the marching order for every sinner! There is no hope of forgiveness for him if he will continue with his face as it now is. He must turn from his sin if he would be saved.”—1902, Sermon #2797

“God never makes greater provision than will be needed, so, as there is an abundance of consolations, we may rest assured that there will also be an abundance of tribulations. There will be much fear and casting down to each of us before we see the face of God in Heaven! This disease of soul-dejection is common to all the saints—there are none of God’s people who altogether escape it.”—1902, Sermon #2798

“There are great numbers of persons, even in our own land, who are not in the way of hearing the Gospel. They have been brought up under some form of religion which they believe to be right, but, as long as they adhere to the faith of their fathers, they never hear the doctrine of free and full salvation by the Grace of God! They are content with what they hear, but there is little likelihood of their ever being converted, for the Gospel, by which men are converted, is not allowed to have access to them. Yet, notwithstanding this, it is our firm conviction that there are many among them who are the sons and daughters of God and who shall yet be brought near to Him.”—1902, Sermon #2799

“It may be natural for a scholar to consider the accuracy of your terms, but God especially marks the earnestness of your soul. There is no other place where the heart should be so free as before the Mercy Seat. There, you may talk out your very soul, for that is the best prayer that you can present. Ask not for what some tell you that you should ask, but for that which you feel the need of—that which the Holy Spirit has made you to hunger and to thirst for—ask you for that. ”—1902, Sermon #2800

“From this and many other texts of Scripture, [Hosea 3:5] we may conclude, without a shadow of a doubt, that the Jews shall, one day, acknowledge Jesus to be their King… God has great things in store for the seed of Abraham in the latter days. He has not finally cast them away and He will be true to that Covenant which He made with their fathers—and on Judaea’s plains shall roam a happy people who shall lift up their songs of praise unto Jehovah in the name of Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior! Whenever that shall happen, we, or those who will then be living, may know that the latter days have fully come because it is foretold here and in other passages that this is what will occur in the latter days.”—1902, Sermon #2801

“Is it not a sad thing that after all Christ’s love to us, we should repay it with lukewarm love to Him?”—1902, Sermon #2802

“The misery that men will suffer in the world to come will be self-created misery arising out of the fact that they loved sin so much that they brought eternal sorrow upon themselves. It must be an awful thing for a soul, in the next world, to be without God, but, as far as its own consciousness is concerned, it will be so hardened that it will abide without God, yet not realizing all that it has lost because it is, itself, incapable of knowing the beauty of holiness and the perfection of the God from whom it is separated forever.”—1902, Sermon #2803

“Even concerning those who have heard the Gospel, it can still be said, ‘They have not all obeyed the Gospel.’ And this, dear Friends, is one of the plainest proofs of the deep depravity of human nature.”—1902, Sermon #2804

“It is the Lord that quickens the wheels of commerce, or that stops them and so causes distress. It is the Lord that permits the good and the evil which happen to men. ‘Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord has not done it?’ Is there a cry or a wail in war that God does not hear? Then why should we not go to Him in every time of peril and trouble—even in the minor trials and difficulties of life? Why must we have a severe sickness in order to drive us to God? Why is it that only the very peril of life brings us to our knees?”—1902, Sermon #2805

“Unbelief is presumptuous, but faith is always humble. The more you know of Jesus as your Savior, saving you from sin, the more you will also recognize Him as your Lord.”—1902, Sermon #2806

“Christian, I say, always be asking yourself this question, but especially be asking it when you are preserved in times of more than ordinary sickness and mortality. If I am left, why am I left? Why am I not taken home to Heaven? Why do I not enter into my rest? Great Lord and Master, show me what You would have me do and give me Grace and strength to do it!”—1902, Sermon #2807

“If preaching could save a man, Judas would not have been damned. If prophesying could save a man, Balaam would not have been a castaway. We may preach with the tongues of men and of angels, yet, if we have not love, it profits us nothing. We may be even leaders of the Church in the noblest and, highest enterprises and yet, for all that, Christ may say to us, at the last, ‘I never knew you.’”—1902, Sermon #2808 “All the devotional exercises in which you can possibly engage in public or in private, with all the so called, ‘sacraments,’ thrown in, and all the priestly efficacy of which men dream—even if there were such a thing in reality—all this could not save you! ‘The just shall live by faith.’ This is the only way of living that God has ordained for sinners dead in trespasses and sins.”—1902, Sermon #2809

“Well, my Brothers and Sisters, whenever you put your hand to your brow and say, concerning anything revealed in the Scriptures, ‘I cannot comprehend it,’ lay your other hand upon your heart and say, ‘Nevertheless I believe it. It is clearly taught in the Bible and although my reason may find it difficult to explain it, and I may not be able to discover any arguments to prove the truth of it, yet I lay my reason down at my Infallible Master’s feet and trust where I cannot see.’”—1902, Sermon #2810

“To go anywhere without our God is terrible—but to die without the Presence of God would be awful beyond expression.”—1902, Sermon #2811
“The brightest thought of the most brilliant intellect will one day die out in darkness. Being made of clay and being born of woman, we cannot expect that we should last forever.”—1903, Sermon #2812
“I find that words are but poor things to describe such a theme as this—I wish that I could more worthily speak of this ‘fullness of joy’ in God’s Presence.”—1903, Sermon #2813

“The Lord Himself is the portion of His people! When Canaan was divided, there was a lot for Judah, for Simeon, for Reuben and so on—but as for the Levites, the Lord was their portion—and we are like the Levites—as many of us as who have believed in the Lord. The Lord is our portion and He is such a portion as excels everything else that we might have!”—1903, Sermon #2814

“Fearful souls are hasty souls. They judge the Lord by feeble sense, by the bitterness of the bud and not by the sweetness of the flower. They judge by the clouds of the morning, forgetting that the clouds may soon be scattered and that the sun may shine out brightly again. To them, then, that are of a hasty heart—to those who condemn themselves unjustly, who think that all things are against them and so become exceedingly fearful, say, ‘Be strong, fear not.’”—1903, Sermon #2815

“A man who is not right with his God may be sure that there is something wrong with his soul. And if this grandest of all possessions—the possession of God Himself—does not seem to you to be pre-eminently desirable, it is because your eyes are blinded and your heart is dead to the things of God and you are in ‘the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.’”—1903, Sermon #2816

“God’s promises are often so little studied by His people that they are like a great bunch of rusty keys till we really need them! And then we turn them over and we say, of some particular promise, ‘That just meets my case. Blessed be the name of the Lord, it must have been made on purpose for me!’”—1903, Sermon #2817

“If we can do little or nothing for Him in one place, let us find another spot where we can serve Him, but never let us lay down our charge till we also lay down our lives—never let us case to work until we cease to live! May this mind be in us which was also in Christ Jesus our Lord!”—1903, Sermon #2818

“If a criminal should get it into his head that he could climb up to the stars by going up the steps of a treadmill, he would be about as rational as when a poor sinner thinks of getting to Heaven by his own good works!”—1903, Sermon #2819

“O you disciples of Jesus, watch and pray, and seek to be like your Master! Pray to be kept from the evil which is in the world and, as for the rest, if men despise you, count that as part of the bargain upon which you have entered—a bargain which shall, in due season, fill you with eternal bliss!”—1903, Sermon #2820

“It is not the nature of sin to remain in a fixed state. Like decaying fruit, it grows more rotten—the corruption is sure to increase and spread.”—1903, Sermon #2821

“There is no force in the world apart from God. All the potency of attraction is simply because God lives and pour His energy into the matter that attracts. Every moment it is God who works in all things according to the good pleasure of His own will. Omnipotence is, in fact, the source of all the potency that there is in the universe. God is everywhere and, instead of being banished from the world, and the world going on without Him, if God were not here, this planet, the sun, moon and stars, would retire into their native nothingness as a moment’s foam subsides into the wave that bears it and is gone forever!”—1903, Sermon #2822

“There is such a conformity between Christ and His people that everything that is said of Christ may, in some measure, be said of His people.” —1903, Sermon #2823
“There is nothing in the world that more richly deserves to be despised, abhorred, condemned, than sin! If we look at it aright, we shall see that it is the most abominable thing, the most shameful thing in the whole universe. Of all the things that ever were, this is the thing which most of all deserves to be loathed and spurned. It is not a thing of God’s creating, remember. It is an abortion—a phantom of the night which plucked a host of angels from their thrones in Heaven, drove our first parents out of Paradise and brought upon us unnumbered miseries.” —1903, Sermon #2824

“Eloquence is easy compared with silence and, perhaps, it would not have been true of Christ that ‘never man spoke like this Man,’ if it had not also been true of Him that never man was silent like this Man.” —1903, Sermon #2825
“I fear that sometimes, in our endeavors to be sweet in disposition, we have not been strong in principle. ‘Charity’ is a word that is greatly cried up nowadays, but, often it means that in trying to be courteous, we have also been traitorous.”—1903, Sermon #2826

“I always feel, when I begin to speak of the Deity of our blessed Lord and Master, as if my heart were too full for me to give utterance to my deepest feelings and convictions. My heart is indeed inditing a good matter when I am speaking thus concerning the King, but I cannot say that my tongue is as the pen of a ready writer when it has so vast a theme to dwell upon.”—1903, Sermon #2827

“The predestination of God does not destroy the free agency of man, or lighten the responsibility of the sinner.” —1903, Sermon #2828
“God is not the God of uniformity. There is a wondrous unity of plan and design in all that He does, but there is also an equally marvelous variety.”—1903, Sermon #2829
“Beloved Friends, the very best men in the world may be slandered! And if you should hear them evilly spoken of, be you not among those who straightway condemn them.”—1903, Sermon #2830

“O Brothers and Sisters, we need to be schooled in this matter of showing sympathy with the sorrowful! No doubt, it will drag our own spirits down if we really have fellowship with those whom God has sorely afflicted in mind, but we must be willing to be dragged down—it will do us good. If the Lord sees that we are willing to stoop to the very least of His people, He will be sure to bless us.”—1903, Sermon #2831

“We are not to treat the verses of the Bible as pigeons might treat a bushel of peas—picking out one here and another there, without any thought of the surroundings of that particular passage! No, this blessed Book was written for men to read right through—and if they are to understand the meaning of it, they must read each sentence in the connection in which it is found.”—1903, Sermon #2832“It cannot be denied that the living child of God has power, but it must not be forgotten that the power of the living child of God is not in himself, but in his Heavenly Father. For it is as true of him as of any sinner ‘dead in trespasses and sins’ that, without Christ, he can do nothing. The living child of God is still as powerless as the dead sinner apart from the constant indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the constant inflowing of the Divine Life into his soul. ‘By the Grace of God’ we not only are what we are, but we also remain what we are.”—1903, Sermon #2833

“I confess that it is one of my greatest joys to find myself completely baffled when I am trying to comprehend the Character of God. Sometimes, when I have tried to preach upon the Deity of Christ, I have been fairly staggered under the burden of that stupendous Truth and I have felt the utter uselessness and poverty of human language to describe our great and terrible, yet loving Lord! And I have been glad to have it so, for, verily, God is altogether above our comprehension and none of us can speak of Him as He deserves to be spoken of!”—1903, Sermon #2834

“Christ, in associating with sinners, did not at all condone their sin. When He proved Himself to be the Friend of publicans and sinners, it was not that He would lessen the infinite distance between Divine Perfection and human guilt, but only that, coming down to man’s fallen estate, He might lift him up.”—1903, Sermon #2835

“There is a royalty in a Christian which persecution cannot burn out, which shame cannot crush, which poverty cannot root up!”—1903, Sermon #2836

“I tell you, all your church or chapel attendance, your saying of your prayers and your reading of the Bible are of no value in His sight unless your heart is right with Him. That is the point we are aiming at. In vain is all your attendance upon outward worship! In vain is your profession of being reconciled to God unless you really are! You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, or else the work of the minister is not even begun, much less completed.”—1903, Sermon #2837 “Surely a God whom we could understand would be no God!”—1903, Sermon #2838

“Mohammed may conquer by the sword, but Christ conquers by the sword which comes out of His mouth, that is, the Word of the Lord! His empire is one of love, not of force and oppression. He subdues men, but He does it by His own gentleness and kindness, never by breaking them in pieces and destroying them upon a gory battlefield.”—1903, Sermon #2839
“Beloved Friends, it will be all in vain, so far as we are personally concerned, “that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” unless He shall save us. It will be of no avail to us that Jesus shed His precious blood unless that blood washes away our guilt. It will increase, rather than diminish our misery if we hear that others are saved as long as we ourselves remain unsaved. If we are finally lost, it will not make our lot in Hell any more tolerable if we discover that there was a Propitiation for sin, although we never had a share in its expiatory effects. Of all questions in the world, it seems to me that this is the most urgent and pressing one—and that we ought not to rest until we get it satisfactorily answered and put into practice—‘How can I be a partaker in the eternal life which Jesus Christ came into the world to procure for sinners by His death?’”—1903, Sermon #2840

“WITH Christians it is not a matter of question as to whether God hears prayer or not. There is no fact in mathematics which has been more fully demonstrated than this fact in experience that God hears prayer. About some other things in Christianity, young Believers may have a question, but about the Lord’s answering prayer, even they cannot entertain a doubt while, to the old and advanced Believer who has tested the power of the Mercy Seat and proved it thousands of times, it is a matter about which he never allows a question, for he knows that, as surely as that he himself exists, and that God lives in Heaven, the prayers of puny but believing man have power to move the almighty arm of God!”—1903, Sermon #2841

“Who knows, O Teacher, when you labor even among the infants, what the result of your teaching may be? Good corn may grow in very small fields. God may bless your simple words to the babes that listen to them. How know you, O my unlettered Brother, when you stand up in the cottage meeting to talk to a few poor folk about Christ, what may follow from that effort of yours? Life or death, Heaven or Hell, may depend upon the sowing of the good seed of the Gospel! It is, it mustbe the most important event that can ever happen, if the Lord goes forth with you when you go forth as the sower went forth to sow!”—1903, Sermon #2842

“In the harvest field, there is a great company and they sing and shout together in harmony, but the sower goes forth alone. Our Savior was the great Sower—‘THE SOWER went forth to sow,’ unaccompanied. He pursued His solitary way and all day long He continued His personal task.”—1903, Sermon #2843

“Do not judge the reality of your conversion either by the suddenness of it or by the length of time which it occupied, for it is true that superficial conversions are usually sudden, although all sudden conversions are not superficial.”—1903, Sermon #2844

“I believe in instantaneous conversion. I believe that the new birth must be instantaneous, that there is a moment in which a man is dead and another moment in which he is alive and that, just as there is a certain instant in which a child is born, so there is an instant in which we become the children of God by faith in Jesus Christ.”—1903, Sermon #2845

“A religion that may be true, or may not be true, is irreligion. The only real religion is that of which you are absolutely sure, that which you have tried, tested and proved in your very soul, and know to be as true as your own existence. Doubts yield nothing to you but continual fear and trembling, starvation to your strength and restlessness to your soul.”—1903, Sermon #2846

“We consider the heathen to be very foolish for worshipping their hideous idols. Yet, you know, to be an idolater a man need not make an image of wood, or stone, or gold, for he can worship his own thoughts, his own ideas, his own notions.”—1903, Sermon #2847

“God has bid His servants preach the Gospel—and that Gospel conveys help, light and power to all who believe it—but as for forms and ceremonies, musical performances, ornate ritual, masses and the like, they are sheer deceptions through and through! Trust not the weight of a feather to them—much less your souls.”—1903, Sermon #2848

“Do not die, O you gray heads, you who have passed your threescore years and ten—do not pass away from this earth with all those pleasant memories of God’s loving kindness to be buried with you in your coffin—but let your children and your children’s children know what the everlasting God did for you! ”—1903, Sermon #2849

“Had I no conscientious objection to instrumental music in worship, I would still, I think, be compelled to admit that all the instruments that were ever devised by men, however sweetly attuned, are harsh and grating compared with the unparalleled sweetness of the human voice.”—1903, Sermon #2850

“My dear Brothers and Sisters, if you are a Believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you know that it is the will of Christ that all Believers should be baptized even as He was, do not go home and pray about it—but be baptized! If you are not a member of a Christian Church and you know that it was the practice of the early Christians to first give themselves to the Lord and afterwards to give themselves to His Church, do not tell me that you have been praying about that matter for months—cease praying about it and go and do it! It is idle to talk of praying about things which are clearly according to the will of God. Cease praying about them, and practice them.”—1903, Sermon #2851
“All the trouble in the world cannot harm you as much as half a grain of unbelief! Poverty cannot make you as poor as mistrust can and sickness cannot make you as sick as unbelief can. The greatest evil to be dreaded is that of doubting your Lord.”—1903, Sermon #2852

“I know some congregations where they are diligently observing whether there is fine oratory. I bless God that I hate oratory from my very soul! To speak His Truth clearly and simply, is all I aim at. So, if you want the beauties of rhetoric, you must seek them elsewhere.”—1903, Sermon #2853

“We shall not get back a strong race of Christians till we get back such a sturdy band of outspoken men as dare their reputation, if not their lives, upon the unvarnished testimony they give to the Truth they know, the Truth as it is in Jesus, the Truth as it burns in their own hearts and fires their tongues, the Truth as it commends itself to every man’s conscience in the sight of God!”—1903, Sermon #2854 “A prayer without Christ in it will never reach Heaven!”—1903, Sermon #2855

“Remembering the experience I then passed through, I can truly say that I know of no pain that can be felt by the body which is comparable to the terrible pangs of conscience when the searching breath of the Eternal Spirit goes through the soul and withers up all the comeliness of our own righteousness and despoils all the supposed beauty of our own good works. That is a wind which I trust we all have felt, or shall yet feel, but, still, while it blows, it is dreadful to endure.

“It is the devil who renders evil for good, yet you are sinking to his level if you continue in sin and turn not unto God who has dealt so kindly and so graciously with you.”—1903, Sermon #2857

“Make this period, when God is summoning others to Himself, to be the time when you, also, take flight to the better land—I mean not Heaven, but I mean the heart of Christ—that is the true Heaven of this life, and makes this life to be the foretaste of the unending life that is yet to come!”—1903, Sermon #2858

“There are many, nowadays, who hate nothing as much as a religious man! All the epithets in the catalog of scandal are too good for the man who offers homage to God in everything. An infidel may be reputed honest, intelligent and worthy of respect—but a genuine Christian is at once denounced as a hypocrite! Away with such a fellow—his conscience is as offensive as his creed! There is toleration for everybody who conforms to the fashion of the day, but no toleration for anyone who believes that the laws of Heaven should regulate life on earth.”—1903, Sermon #2859“God may be as much glorified by a weeping Jeremiah as by an eagle-winged Ezekiel!”—1903, Sermon #2860

“Ask an angel what he thinks of the life of a mortal and he will tell you that he remembers when the first man was made—and since then the earth has been always changing its tenants.”—1903, Sermon #2861

“Be satisfied that God is infinitely above you and that you can no more comprehend Him than your hand can hold the ocean, or your fingers grip the sun! If there were no mysteries in our holy faith, we might well believe that it was devised by men like ourselves, for, if men could fully understand it, men might have invented it.”—1903, Sermon #2862

“I have heard of ministers who can preach a sermon without mentioning the name of Jesus from beginning to end. If you ever hear such a sermon as that, mind that you never hear another from that man! If a baker once made me a loaf of bread without any flour in it, I would take good care that he should never do so again. And I say the same of the man who can preach a Christless Gospel!”—1903, Sermon #2863

“I am afraid my voice is so familiar to some of you unconverted ones that you are getting like the miller who can go to sleep, notwithstanding the click of the mill—no, who goes to sleep betterin his mill than he does anywhere else! Or like some men I have heard of, over there in Southwark, who work inside the great boilers. When a poor fellow first begins to labor in such a place, the deafening noise is horrible—he thinks he must die! But, after a while, he gets so used to the reverberation that he could well-near sleep notwithstanding all the hammering. It is much the same with hearing the Word of God! Therefore I pray you, if you have long listened to one who would gladly do you good, yield to the message he delivers to you! Before you grow so familiar with it that it loses all its power over your heart, accept it as good tidings of great joy! God grant that you may do so now! While Grace calls, do not refuse.”—1897, Sermon #2547

“O my God, let me die when I can no longer be the means of saving souls! If I can be kept out of Heaven a thousand years, if you will give me souls as my wages, let me still speak for You! But if there are no more sinners to be converted—no more to be brought in by my ministry—then let me depart and be ‘with Christ, which is far better.’”—1900, Sermon #2695

“No church can be healthy without the constant infusion of fresh blood. Unless there are new converts, you cannot see the church built up. Young converts are quick in inventing new ways of usefulness and they venture to do things which some consider ‘imprudent.’ Oh, how I love that word, ‘imprudent,’ in such a connection! I like ‘imprudent’ young people. The more ‘imprudent’ they are, in the cause of God in the judgment of stolid, cold-hearted professors, the more I rejoice in them! imprudence which believes in God and dares to do exploits in his strength, is far preferable to that prudence which has no faith and is, therefore, a poor, dead, useless thing.”—1900, Sermon #2692

“Self-complacency may be a very pleasant feeling to cherish, but he who walks near to God is a stranger to it.”—1900, Sermon #2696

“It is noteworthy how the belief of one of the Doctrines of Grace naturally leads to the belief of all the rest. The system of the Gospel is so logical, its Truths fit so well into one another, that you cannot get a right knowledge of one of them without, at once, or in a very short time, discovering the others! The Lord begins by teaching us His foundation Truth of our utter depravity—He burns it into our conscience by bitter experience and by terrible discoveries of our sinfulness—and He knows right well that the other doctrines will follow and that, when this Truth is really understood by us, it shall not be long before we have orthodox views of the whole Covenant of Grace and the great system of the Gospel of Jesus. This, I think, is one reason why the Lord gives His people revelations of their own iniquity and defilement, that they may be sound in the faith and may believe nothing but the Doctrines of Grace.”—1901, Sermon #2711

“If a thousand devils were to bind you thus with cords, so that you could not move hand or foot, yet, depend upon it, you shall slip out of the cords and come into perfect liberty—for all the devils in Hell cannot hold a soul that belongs to Christ—and you do belong to Him if you truly trust Him.”—1901, Sermon #2712

“If you are not a child of God, you will be able to do without God. But the fact that some of you cannot be happy unless you are living in the light of God’s love proves that you belong to Him. A child can be content without a stranger’s smile, but if the one who is looking at him is his father, just because he is his father’s child he must have the assurance of that father’s love, or else he cannot be happy.”—1901, Sermon #2713

“I think it is a very pleasing thing when our new converts begin to exhort us and invite us to join with them in special acts of devotion. Yet, while it is very pleasing in some respects, it sometimes brings to us a measure of rebuke. I remember how it was with me when, in the earnestness of my young heart’s affection for the Lord Jesus Christ, I spoke to some of the older Christians around me and they tried to snuff me out. A liberal supply of wet blankets was generally kept in store, in certain quarters, and brought into use whenever I went round that way. I survived that operation, however, and now that I am myself getting old, when some enthusiastic young spirit begins to wake me up, I hope I shall not quench his ardor by throwing a wet blanket over him!”—1901, Sermon #2713

“Beloved Friends, there is a great value in the prayers of God’s people, so we ought to set great store by them. If you ever wish to do me a good turn, pray for me! And if you would be the means of blessing your fellow Christians, incessantly pray for them! You may think that your petition is of small account, but it is the many ‘littles’ that make up the great whole.”—1901, Sermon #2714

“Dear Friends, beware of a Christless Christianity! Beware of trying to be Christians without living daily upon Christ! The branch may just as well try to bear fruit apart from the vine as for you to hope to maintain the reality of Christian life without continual fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ!”—1901, Sermon #2715

“Our Lord Jesus Christ gets from a good many people what they would not dare to keep back from Him, and what they can readily enough part with—it is sometimes about as much as their shoestrings cost them in a year—certainly not as much as they spend upon the smallest of their many luxuries. Yet the most of them consider that they have done all that they should when such insignificant offerings have been laid at their Lord’s feet! But, dear Friends, I hope that it will be your rule both to give as you love, and to give till you feel it.”—1901, Sermon #2716

“Ungodly men are brought low by affliction or poverty, for sinners have no immunity from suffering. Saints, also, are led into trying circumstances, for the utmost holiness will not preserve any man from trial. But what a difference there is between the downfall of the prosperous sinner and of the man whom God loves! The wicked man who continues in his wickedness, falls forever. But the righteous man, though he may fall seven times, rises up again, for he shall not fall finally. How dreadful is the language of Jehovah when speaking of the ungodly! ‘To Me belongs vengeance, and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.’”—1901, Sermon #2717

“I wish we were as liable to be called fanatics as the first Methodists were simply because men judged us to be as earnest as they were. I would be glad if we were as worthy to be called Puritans as were the men of the days of Dr. John Owen and Oliver Cromwell. For my part, I think that, nowadays, we are not Puritan enough, or precise enough and, without any hesitation, we may make the assertion, which we are sure God’s Word will support, that whatever improvements there may be in the world, there must always be a marked distinction between the children of God and the seed of the serpent!”—1901, Sermon #2719

“When you read one of the promises, you say, ‘Ah, this is indeed precious!’ Yet, remember that what our Lord has revealed in His Word is not a tenth of what He has not said! He has said many rich things, but there are still richer things. He has not said them, He cannot say them because they are not sayable, they are unutterable, they cannot be declared—at least, not at present. When you get to Heaven, you will hear them, but you cannot hear them here.”—1901, Sermon #2720
“For my part, I am determined that if all my senses were to contradict God, I would deny every one of them and sooner believe myself to be out of my right mind than believe that God could lie! And I desire to feel that in every emotion of my spirit, every throb of my heart, every thought of my brain and everything that is contrary to the plainly-revealed Truth of God, I will count myself a fool and a madman—and I will reckon God to be wise and true.”—1901, Sermon #2721

“Why have you and I, dear Friends, to learn obedience? Because there is no way of obtaining true happiness but by obedience. Sin always has sorrow at the tail of it. Happiness is obedience and obedience is happiness. If we do the will of the Lord thoroughly, then are we delivered from all evil, and enter into the joy of our Lord.”—1901, Sermon #2722

“Are you an enemy of the God of Israel? If so, you can see, in the punishment of Egypt, how He will deal with you. You cannot be victorious in this fight, so yield at once! Possibly you say, ‘No, I am not an enemy of God, yet I never think of Him.’ But He made you! He breathed into you the breath of life and yet you say that you never think of Him? What a shameful slight you thus put upon Him, His Majesty! He is here close to you at this moment. He surrounds your every step with mercy and yet you never think of Him? Shall I give you one of His own messages to remember? It is a very dreadful one—‘Consider this, you that forget God, lest I tear you in pieces and there be none to deliver.’ May none of you ever come to know what that terrible verse means!”—1901, Sermon #2723

““An ethereal joy, such as I never knew to the full, before, shall fill my spirit when once I am absent from the body, present with the Lord! Do not be afraid to die, Beloved, but rather look at death as an experience to be desired. I have not the slightest wish to escape it. Those who live till Christ comes and do not die, will have no preference over them that fall asleep in Him. Indeed, they will lose the fellowship with Him, in His death and burial, that others will have.”—1901, Sermon #2723

“Next to the Bible, the book that I value most is John Bunyan’s, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and I imagine I may have read that through perhaps a hundred times. It is a book of which I never seem to tire, but then the secret of that is, that John Bunyan’s, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” is the Bible in another shape. It is the same heavenly water taken out of this same well of the Gospel, yet you would tire even of that book at last.”—1901, Sermon #2724

“It is often a wonderful relief to be able to tell out your grief, to pull up the sluices and let the waters of sorrow run away. If no one but God shall hear it—if no human ear should listen to your complaining—yet it is a very sweet thing to unburden your heart.”—1901, Sermon #2725

“Oh, how long was my mind in bitter anguish till I came to eat the fat of Christ’s Sacrifice! And when I trusted in Him as my Substitute, He at once satisfied the demands of my intellect. I seemed to think that it was the most glorious invention possible even to God, that Christ should die,“the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.” Then I understood how God could be justified and yet be the Justifier of him that believes in Jesus—how He could pardon me and yet punish my sin—how there should be no violation of His justice and yet no limitation of His mercy because Christ stepped in and paid all my debt, so that it was justly as well as mercifully struck out from the record of God! There are some very great intellects in the world—no doubt there are much greater ones than mine—but, as far as mine is concerned, that doctrine of Christ’s Substitution perfectly satisfies me.”—1901, Sermon #2726

“Suppose us to be banished into exile, without a friend and without a helper—even there, from the end of the earth, we would find that prayer to God was still available! In fact, if there is a place nearer than another to God’s Throne, it is just the end of the earth, for the end of the earth is the beginning of Heaven.”—1901, Sermon #2728

“We need to be more like Mary, sitting at the feet of Jesus, looking up into His dear face and listening to His gracious words. The active life will have little power in it if it is not accompanied by much of the contemplative and the prayerful. There must be retirement for private prayer if there is to be true growth in Grace.”—1901, Sermon #2729

“To know Christ, to trust Christ, to love Christ—these are among the elementary principles of piety. Without all of these Graces, there is no true religion. But if these things are in us, and abound, they make us to be neither barren nor unfruitful.”—1901, Sermon #2730
“If you have no family prayer and your children do not grow up to be Christians, how can you expect that they will?”—1901, Sermon #2731
“You are sure to be heard, Beloved, if you pour out your heart before the God that hears prayer!”—1901, Sermon #2732

“If I set the unloving to read a chapter in the Bible, they will find no Savior there. But if I ask the gracious Robert Hawker to read that same portion of Scripture, he finds in it the name of Jesus from beginning to end! If I beg one who is simply a critical scholar, to study a Psalm, he sees no Messiah there—but if I set an enthusiastic lover of the Savior to read it, he sees Him, if not in every verse, still, here and there he has glimpses of His Glory!”—1901, Sermon #2733
“Do you ask, ‘To whom shall I confess my sins?’ Shall you come to me with your confession? Oh no, no, no! I could not stand that! There is an old proverb about a thing being ‘as filthy as a priest’s ear.’ I cannot imagine anything dirtier than that, and I have no wish to be a partaker in the filthiness. Go to God and confess your sin to Him—pour out your heart’s sad story in the ear of Him against whom you have offended! Say with David, ‘Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight.’”—1900, Sermon #2705

“It was truly said, ‘You cannot see God’s face and live.’ But I have been inclined to say, ‘Then let me see God’s face, and die.’ John Welsh said, when God was flooding his soul with a sense of His wondrous love, ‘Stop, Lord, stop! I am but an earthen vessel and You will break me.’ If I had been there and I could have borne no more, I would have said, ‘Do not stop, Lord! Break the poor earthen vessel, smash it to pieces, but let Your love be revealed in me!’ Oh, that I might even die of this pleasurable pain of knowing too much of God, too much of the ineffable delight of fellowship with Him! Let us be very venturesome, Beloved, and pray, ‘Show Your marvelous loving kindness.’”—1900, Sermon #2702“The Gospel is priceless in value, but it is to be had ‘without money and without price.’ The salvation of God can never be purchased. I am amazed that anyone should ever cherish the idea of a man buying a place for himself in Heaven. Why, the very streets are paved with exceedingly rich and rare gold, and a rich man’s whole fortune would not buy a single paving stone in those golden streets! There is nothing that you can ever bring to God as the purchase-money for salvation! He is infinitely rich—what does He want of yours? If you are righteous, what do you want from Him? The impossibility of salvation by human merit or good works ought to be clear to every thinking man. If we do all that God bids us do, we are doing no more than we ought to do—and even then we are unprofitable servants!”—1900, Sermon #2685

“It was a great joy to me when my sons were born, but it was an infinitely surpassing joy as, one after the other, they told me that they had sought and found the Savior! To pray with them, to point them yet more fully to Christ, to hear the story of their spiritual troubles and to help them out of their spiritual difficulties was an intense satisfaction to my soul.”—1900, Sermon #2680

“How many times a day do you praise Him [God]? I think you do get alone to pray and you would be ashamed if you did not, once, twice, or three or even more times in the day—but how often do you praise God? Now, you know that you will not pray in Heaven; there it will be all praise . Then do not neglect that necessary part of your education which is to “begin the music here.” Start at once praising the Lord.”—1900, Sermon #2679

“When God prepared the worm to destroy Jonah’s gourd, the result of its work was very sad. It left the poor man without that which had made him exceedingly glad and he was as angry and distressed as before when he had been rejoicing! I want you, dear Friends, to pause here to learn this lesson. It is God who sends your trials—do not get into your head the notion that your sickness or anything else that grieves you is from the devil. He may have a finger in it, but he is, himself, always under the supremacy of God. When Job is vexed and plagued by Satan, the archenemy cannot touch him anywhere till God gives permission. God always stands at the back of all that happens. Therefore, do not begin kicking at the secondary agent. You know that if you strike a dog with a stick, he bites at the stick—if he were a sensible dog, he would try to bite you! If you quarrel with anything that happens, your quarrel is virtually with God Himself. It is no use to quarrel with the Lord’s agent, for it is God, after all, who sends you the affliction—and ‘He does not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.’ Say, as old Eli did, when he heard the evil tidings concerning his household, ‘It is the Lord: let Him do what seems good to Him.’ Let it be with you as it was with Aaron when, as he could not speak joyfully, he did not speak at all—‘Aaron held his peace.’ It is sometimes a great thing to not be able to say anything. Silence is golden when it is the silence of a complete submission to the will of the Lord. God prepares the worm, therefore, be not angry with the poor worm, but just let the gourd go. It was God who made it to grow and He had a perfect right to take it away when He pleased.”—1897, Sermon #2504

“I have come even to love my own necessities, for they seem to be like pedestals whereon the image of Christ may stand! If I did not need Christ, how could He be my life? If I did not need food to sustain that life, how could He be the bread of life to me? The greater my necessities, the deeper is my sense of His fullness! The more I become dependent upon Him for everything, the more I see of His all-sufficiency.”—1900, Sermon #2706

“It is wonderfully condescending on God’s part to listen to us. Many of our complaints are only rubbish, yet He hears them patiently.”—1900, Sermon #2696
“No one by faith plunges into the crystal Fountain of perfect cleansing without first lamenting the filthiness which needs to be removed!”—1900, Sermon #2696

“[Psalm 51.] A Psalm of David, after Nathan had rebuked him and he had been convinced of his great guilt in having sinned with Bathsheba. The music to which this Psalm can be sung must be composed of sighs, groans, sobs and cries. I believe that many of us here present have prayed this prayer of David many times—and he who has never prayed it has need to begin to do so at once!”—1898, Sermon #2588

“I would choose my Heaven to be a Heaven of everlasting weeping for sin sooner than have a Heaven—if such a Heaven could be—consisting of perpetual laughing at the mirth of fools!”—1898, Sermon #2572

“All the other Graces within us derive strength from our faith. If faith is at a low ebb, love is sure to burn very feebly. If faith should begin to fail, then would hope grow dim. Where is courage? It is a poor puny thing when faith is weak. Take any Grace you please, and you shall see that its nourishing depends upon the healthy condition of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ! To take faith away, therefore, would be to take the fountain away from the stream—it would be to withdraw the sun from its rays if light. If you destroy the source, of course that which comes out of it ceases. Therefore, Beloved, take the utmost possible care of your faith, for I may truly say of it that out of it are the issues of life to all your Graces. Faith is that virtuous woman who clothes the whole household in scarlet and feeds them all with luscious and strengthening food. But if faith is gone, the household soon becomes naked, poor, blind and miserable. Everything in a Christian fails when faith ceases to nourish it!”—1899, Sermon #2620

“Above all, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ ‘straightway. That word, ‘straightway,’ is implied in every Gospel exhortation! We are not sent to preach to our Hearers, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ tomorrow!’ No minister of Christ is authorized to say, ‘Put off faith in Christ for a week.’ No, but our message is, ‘Behold, now is the accepted time! Behold, now is the day of salvation!’ Believe in Jesus and believe in Him now! And if the Spirit of God is really working in your spirit, you will be moved to believenow. If it is only my talk and my persuasion, you will still say, ‘Tomorrow.’ But if it is God’s Word, it will go with power to your heart and you will say, ‘Now, Lord, even now, bring my soul out of prison, that I may trust Your Son and praise Your holy name.’ For a man to delay, who has nothing to depend upon but the breath in his nostrils, is the height of folly! For a man to delay, who stands on the brink of the grave, when that grave will conduct him to Hell, is indeed terrible!”—1899, Sermon #2618

“I feel sure that I am addressing people who are not happy. The common idea of happiness that many persons have is a very strange one. When our London friends have a day’s holiday, their notion of enjoying a rest often amuses me. They pack themselves away, as tightly as they can, inside and outside a van, or an omnibus, or a carriage—and then they go as far as they can till the weary horse can scarcely move to bring them home! And, all the while, to give rest to their ears and to their hearts, somebody blows a trumpet in a fashion that evokes very little music, and they riot all the day as if they were mad and disport themselves as if London consisted of one huge Bethlehem Hospital—and that is what they call happiness!”—1899, Sermon #2630

“When Mary Magdalene first sought to hold her Lord, Jesus said to her, “Touch Me not, for I am not yet ascended to My Father.” But now He permits what He had formerly forbidden—“They came and held Him by the feet”—those blessed feet that the nails had held but three days before! He had risen from the grave and, therefore, a wondrous change had taken place in Him—but the wounds were there, still visible, and these women “held Him by the feet.” And, Beloved, whenever you get your Lord Jesus near to you, do not let Him go for any little trifle—no, nor even for a greatthing, but say, with the spouse in the Canticles, “I found Him whom my soul loves: I held Him, and would not let Him go.” The saints, themselves, will sometimes drive Christ away from those who love Him. Therefore the spouse said, “I charge you, O you daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that you stir not up, nor awake my love, till He pleases.” Be jealous lest you lose Him, when you have realized the joy, the rich delight, of having Him in your soul! You feel, at such a time as that, as if you scarcely dared to breathe—and you are so particular about your conduct that you would not venture to put one foot before the other without consulting Him, lest even inadvertently you should cause Him grief! Bow thus at His feet. Be humble. Hold Him by the feet. Be bold, be affectionate. Grasp Him, for though He is your God, He is also your Brother, bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh!”—1899, Sermon #2628

“Many, nowadays, say that we ought to blend the Church with the congregation and that it is a great pity to have any division between them. A great many good people are outside the Church—therefore try to make the Church as much like the world as you can! That is a silly trick of the devil which the wise servants of God will answer by saying, “To whom we give place for subjection, no, not for an hour!” There must always be a broad line of demarcation between the Church of Christ and the world—it will be an evil day when that line is abolished.”—1899, Sermon #2616 “Praise is the end of prayer and preaching.”—1896, Sermon #2482

“Somebody asked, the other day, why we talk about ‘Free Grace.’ Of course that is a redundant expression, for Grace must be free, but there are so many people about, nowadays, who will not understand us if they can help it, so we like to speak, not only so that they can understand us, but so that they cannot misunderstand us if they try! It is for this reason that we say, ‘Free Grace,’ that they may have it twice over and hear it with both ears. If we only speak to one of their ears, it may, as men say, go in that one and out the other—but if we speak to both their ears at once, perhaps the Truth of God may meet somewhere in the center of their brain and remain there.”—1897, Sermon #2544

“If any of you desire to know how you are to be saved, I tell you again that there is nothing for you to do in order to merit salvation—you have rather to leave off your own doing and to rest in what Christ has done! Have I put the matter plainly enough? No, I have not, for who can make it so plain that a blind man can see it? God must open the blind man’s eyes and thenhe will see it. Yet there it stands, clear and plain—salvation is the free gift of God! It is all of Grace from first to last!”—1897, Sermon #2544

“If God would but say to men, ‘I will accept unspiritual service,’ He might be the God of the whole earth at once!”—1896, Sermon #2466

“To me, it always seems to be the climax of Heaven to be with Christ forever. I believe in the Communion of Saints above and in our recognition and love of one another. I believe in all those heavenly employments that shall occupy our eternal life. I believe in a thousand sources of joy in that blest land, for there are pleasures, as well as pleasure, at God’s right hand forevermore! But, as the summit of Mont Blanc rises above the surrounding hills and with its snowy whiteness seems to pierce the very sky, so the summit of my expectation of Heaven is to be where Christ is, to behold Him, to see His face and to share His triumphant joy and rest, for “His rest shall be glorious,” and His rest and ours, too, shall be glory!”—1897, Sermon #2542

“ ‘ h that I knew where I might find Him! That I might come even to His seat! I would order my cause before Him and fill my mouth with arguments’ (Job 23:3, 4). Good men are washed towards God even by the rough waves of their grief. And when their sorrows are deepest, their high
est desire is not to escape from them, but to get at their God. ‘Oh that I knew where I might find Him!’ Job wanted to spread out his whole case
before the Lord, to argue it with Him, to present his petitions to the Most High and to find out from God why He was contending with him. It is
all right with you, Brothers and Sisters, if your face is towards your God in rough weather. It is all wrong with you, Brothers and Sisters, if the
weather is very calm and your face is turned away from your God.”—1897, Sermon #2546

“Believer in Christ, it will be well for you to make out this account because you will find that it will help youto prize your Savior more. I never look into my own heart without first, feeling shame and, afterwards, feeling greater love to Him who has eternally loved such a sinner as I am. I am sure it will drive you to your knees if you honestly search your own lives. There is enough in the history of a single week to make you prize your Redeemer more than ever if you fully realize the guilt of that one week and the greatness of His Grace in pardoning it. O Christian, if you would be driven nearer to your Lord, search and see, confess, repent and seek forgiveness. Go again to the Cross because you have again felt the burden of the sin that nailed your Savior there!”—1895, Sermon #2445

“While the gods of the heathen are pictured in their mythologies as dealing with kingdoms and with wars and with other matters upon a large scale, this gracious God of ours is so infinitely condescending that He waters the grass, feeds the cattle and listens to the cries of young ravens.”—1897, Sermon #2524

“Some persons proudly say that they are self-made men—and I generally find that they worship their makers. Having made themselves, they are peculiarly devoted to themselves. But a man who is self-made is badly made. If God does not make him anew, it would have been better for him never to have been made! That which comes of man is but a polluted stream from an impure source—out of evil comes evil, and from a depraved nature comes depravity. It is only when God makes us new creatures in Christ Jesus that it is any joy for us to be creatures at all! And all the praise must be given to Him.”—1897, Sermon #2524
“And as to hope, Beloved, why, we had hope when we began our spiritual life, and we still have hope—and that hope will continue with us—I will not say in Heaven, though I think it will, for there is something to hope for in the disembodied state. We shall hope for the Day of Resurrection and there will be something to hope for even in the resurrection, for, throughout the ages we shall have a good hope that still we shall be “forever with the Lord.” Certainly, he who knows God best fears Him most and also hopes in Him most!”—1897, Sermon #2524

“You must not try to take Christ away from His offices! Christ is not sent of God to make you a rich man—He is sent of God to make you a saved man. So you may go to Him as a Savior, for that is His office. You may go to Him as a Priest, for it is His office to cleanse, to offer sacrifice, to make intercession. Take Christ as God sets Him forth and then be it unto you even as you will.”—1896, Sermon #2446

“A dear Sister who was buried today said, when they told her that she could not live another day, ‘Does it not seem wonderful? Is it not a grand thing to know that I am going to see the Lord Jesus Christ today?’ And she lay on her bed saying this to all who came, ‘It seems too good to be true that I should be so near that for which I have longed these many years! I am going, today, to see the King in His beauty!’”—1896, Sermon #2446

“There is nothing, even in the love of martyrs, worthy of praise when compared with the exceeding love of Christ!”—1896, Sermon #2448
“O Master, You are such a glorious Lord that serving You is perfect freedom and sweetest rest!”—1896, Sermon #2449
“Learn, then, all of you who would have Christ as your Savior, that you must be willing to serveHim. We are not saved by service, but we are saved toservice.”—1896, Sermon #2449
“Holiness is another name for salvation—to be delivered from the power of self-will, the domination of evil lusts and the tyranny of Satan—this is salvation.”—1896, Sermon #2449

“I believe that the profession of consecration to God, when it is accompanied by action that I suggest to myself, may be nothing but willworship—an abomination in the sight of God! But when anyone says to the Lord, “What will You have me do? Show me, my Master, what You would have me do”—when there is a real desire to obey every command of Christ, then is there the true spirit of service and the true spirit of sonship.”—1896, Sermon #2449

“You need not to know much about Heaven—it is where Christ is, and that is Heaven enough for us.”—1896, Sermon #2449 “I believe that notwithstanding all the dreary centuries that have passed, Christ shall have the pre-eminence as to numbers as well as in every other respect—and that the multitudes who shall be saved by Him shall far transcend those who have rejected His mercy.”—1896, Sermon #2451

“When God means to save a man, He usually begins by making him sorrow on account of his evil ways. It is the sharp steel needle of the Law of God that goes through the convicted heart and draws the silken thread of comfort and salvation after it!”—1896, Sermon #2452
“When the ear is stopped up by unbelief, it matters not how wisely and how earnestly you proclaim the Truth of God—it will not affect the heart of the hearers.”—1896, Sermon #2453
“It is easy for the Lord to save a sinner, but it is impossible for a self-righteous man to be saved until he is brought down from his fatal pride.”— 1896, Sermon #2453

“O my Brothers, we shall never speak to the heart of our hearers unless what we say has been first engraved on our own hearts! The best notes of a sermon are those that are written on our own inner consciousness. If we speak of the things which we have tasted, and handled, and made our own, we speak with a certainty and with an authority which God is pleased to use for the comfort of His people.”—1896, Sermon #2455

“So, too, have I known a man’s heart to be mightily strengthened by a precious promise. Who knows the wonderful power of a text of Scripture? We used to have, 30 years ago—I do not know whether you have them now—‘poor men’s plasters’ which we used when we felt weak in the back—but a promise out of the Scripture is a poor man’s plaster, indeed! What strength it gives to the loins! How we seem to be braced up when we truly lay hold of a promise of God and it really gets a grip upon our spirit!”—1896, Sermon #2455

“A man’s prayer should be the index of his life’s history. The scenes to which he has been most accustomed should rise up vividly before his spirit when he is at the Throne of Grace.”—1896, Sermon #2455
“Divine Providence is a downy pillow for an aching head, a blessed salve for the sharpest pain. He who can feel that his times are in the hand of God need not tremble at anything that is in the hand of man!”—1896, Sermon #2455

“It has been my lot, in years past, to call upon God to help me in what men judged to be rash and imprudent enterprises, but oh, how grandly the Lord always answers to the holy courage of His people if they will but do and dare for Him! Yet, too often, He has to say, ‘You have not called upon Me, O Jacob.’”—1897, Sermon #2548

“I beg you to remember that there is no quitting of sin—there is no escaping from its power—except by contact and union with the Lord Jesus Christ. I may stand here and preach against the prevalent vices of the age, as I hope I never shall be ashamed to do, but no vice will be put down merely by my denunciation of it. I may charge this man to shake off his sins by righteousness and to escape for his life, but I have set him a task which is quite impossible to him unless I also tell him where the power is to be found by which this work is to be done.”—1897, Sermon #2549

“The way to do a great deal is to keep on doing a little. The way to do nothing at all is to be continually resolving that you will do everything.”—1897, Sermon #2549

“I do not say that either of our English versions [of the Bible] is Inspired, for there are mistakes in the translation, but if we could get at the original text, just as it was first written, I am not afraid to say that every jot or tittle—every crossed ‘t’ of it and every dot of each ‘i’—was Infallibly Inspired by God the Holy Spirit! I believe in the Infallibility and the Infinity of Holy Scripture! God Inspired the whole record, Genesis as well as Revelation, and all that is between—and He desires us to believe in one part of the Word as much as another. If you do not believe that, it will not be food to you. I am sure that it will not—it will only be a kind of emetic to you and not food. It cannot feed your soul as long as you are disputing about it. If it is not God’s Word, then it is man’s word, or the devil’s word—and if you care to live on the devil’s word, or on man’s word, I do not! But God’s Word is food for the soul that dwells with God and it cannot be satisfied with anything else.”—1898, Sermon #2577

“The thoughts of angels, or the thoughts of perfect spirits above must be something very wonderful, but, oh, the thoughts of God! If I were told that some bright angel was sent to think of me all day and all night long, that he was my Master’s servant to watch over me, I would feel pleasure in the thought, yet that would be a poor, poor thing compared with the fact that God thinks upon us and watches over us!”—1899, Sermon #2609

“My Lord Mayor is not more proud of his badge and chain than many a crossing sweeper is of his ragged trousers! Pride can live upon a dunghill as well as upon a throne! But God will hide pride from us, till, if we look about, we cannot find it and cannot see any reason for being proud.”—1896, Sermon #2453
“THE religion of Jesus is the most peaceful, mild and benevolent religion which was ever promulgated. When we compare it with any set of dogmas invented by men, there is not one of them that can stand the least comparison with it for gentleness, mildness and love. As for the religion of Mohamed, it is the religion of the vulture—but the religion of Jesus is that of the dove—all is mercy, all is mild. It is, like its Founder, an embodiment of pure benevolence, Grace and truth.”—1898, Sermon #2594

“I judge that the principal business of any minister of Christ, or of any elder of the Church of Christ, is to bear testimony to the sufferings of Christ. If the atoning sufferings of Christ are left out of a ministry, that ministry is worthless.”—1899, Sermon #2610
“Preach the Doctrines of Grace to a man who never had a sense of sin and he says, ‘I don’t believe in Calvinism.’”—1896, Sermon #2482
“It is no new thing that we should be made a laughingstock to the enemies of the Cross of Christ because we cannot do what we have formerly done and are beaten in the very field where before we have achieved great and notable victories for our Master!”—1896, Sermon #2454

“One thing I know, Christ thinks more of our sins than He does of our righteousness, for He gave Himself for our sins—I never heard that He gave Himself for our righteousness. By His most precious blood, He has put away the sins of all who trust Him. But take care that your selfrighteousness does not come in between you and the Savior, for if it does, you will be among the rich whom He will send away empty! Empty your pockets and make yourselves poor! I do not mean in money, but in spirit. Get down to spiritual poverty and beggary, for that is the onlyway to attain to spiritual riches.”—1896, Sermon #2482

“It was said, long ago, that it is the highest wisdom for a man to know himself—but I deny that. The first, the highest, the best of all wisdom is for a man to know his God. As for himself, he is but a speck, an atom, a nothing. If he truly attains a knowledge of God, he will afterwards know himself in the best possible way.”—1898, Sermon #2571

“They err from the Scriptures who make the Grace of God a reason for doing nothing—it is the reason for doing everything.”—1896, Sermon #2455

“I have been sometimes called to book for saying—yet I will venture to say it again—that if I lived in a village, or if I lived in any other place where I knew there was a Baptist or other Dissenting Chapel, before I decided to attend it, I would want to know, first, ‘Is the Gospel preached there?’ I am not so blindly wedded to any denomination whatever that I should cling to the denomination if it did not cleave to Christ! ‘Follow the Lamb wherever He goes.’”—1896, Sermon #2456

“In a free country like this, you may be almost anything that you like except a Christian. There is no liberty for you and you will find that the dogs of Hell will bark at you because you are a stranger and a foreigner in this world!”—1899, Sermon #2612

“That is a good rule for all Christians which I saw in one of our Orphanage schoolrooms—“What would Jesus do?” There cannot be a better guide than that for Believers. for our text is true with regard to Doctrine, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My Words shall not pass away.””—1899, Sermon #2636

“With utmost reverence would I say that God Himself cannot be glorified by His promises without you! If He intends to feed the hungry, then the hungry are essential to the accomplishment of His purpose! If He would clothe the naked, then there must be naked ones for Him to clothe! Is there not a mine of comfort here for you who have been almost outside hope? I trust that some of you poor lost ones will say in your hearts, if you do not utter it with your voices, “Are we really essential to God’s Glory? Does God need our poverty, our sinfulness and our nothingness in order that He may, through them, display the greatness of His Grace? Then we will certainly come to Him just as we are.” Do so, I pray you. Come! Come!! Come!!! May the Holy Spirit, by His Omnipotent Grace draw you now, for our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake! Amen.”—1900, Sermon #2657

“Ah, Lord Jesus! I never knew Your love till I understood the meaning of Your death.”—1900, Sermon #2656

“The devil himself has the faith of the head. He believes and trembles. He is as orthodox as many very learned divines. As far as the mere statement of theology is concerned, I could trust the devil to draw up a creed. I believe he is thoroughly sound and that he knows a great deal more about God’s Word than most of us do. He can quote it correctly when he pleases, although he is also an adept at misquoting it for his own ends. I do not think that the devil ever was an Arminian, or that he ever will be one—he understands the Doctrines of Grace, at least in his head, too well for that. In one respect, he is better than some Antinomians, for they believe and presume, while he believes and trembles. Still, Satan and Antinomians never would be very great enemies. I wonder that they talk about the devil tempting them—I believe that they tempt themselves, or that they tempt the devil to tempt them if he really does tempt them at all.”—1901, Sermon #2737

“If nobody is to go to Heaven until he can explain all the difficulties that anybody can suggest to him, who will ever go there? What you need is not the wisdom which can answer puzzling questions, but the faithwhich clings to Christ through thick and thin. That is the deepness of earth which will keep the Good Seed alive within your soul.”—1903, Sermon #2844
“Once more, Jehovah’s challenge, ‘Is there anything too hard for me?’ contains a lesson for you who are trying to serve the Lord. I want you also to catch the meaning and the message of my text—there is nothing too hard for God, so He can save the children in your Sunday school class. He can bless the people of the district where you visit. He can help you to talk to that dying person whom you went to see yesterday. There is nothing too hard for the Lord, so He can bless you, city missionary, to that dark slum which gives you so much anxiety. He can bless you, dear Friend, at that street corner where you scarcely get through a dozen sentences before you are interrupted. This question of Jehovah, ‘Is there anything too hard for Me?’ seems to be like a rallying cry from God to urge all His followers to press on, like heroes, without a doubt about the victory! ‘Courage, my comrades,’ said Mohammed to his troops, one day, when the battle was going against them—‘I can hear the angels coming to our rescue.’ There were no angels flying to help him, but they are always coming to aid us when we need them, for, ‘are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?’ If we are truly trusting in the living God, He will surely send the heavenly principalities and powers to help us, so that, in our weakness, His strength shall be glorified and sinners shall be saved!”—1900, Sermon #2675

“I believe in the free agency of man as much as anyone who lives, but I equally believe in the eternal purpose of God. If you ask, ‘How do you reconcile those beliefs?’ I answer, ‘They have never yet been at variance, so there is no need to attempt to reconcile them. They are like two parallel lines which will run side by side forever—man responsible because he does what he wills, and God infinitely glorious, achieving His own purposes, not only in the world of dead, inert matter, but also through those who are free agents—without changing them in the least degree, leaving them just as free as they ever were, He yet, in every jot and tittle, performs the eternal purpose of His will.’”—1900, Sermon #2670

“‘Conscience,’ when it is once defiled, ‘makes cowards of us all.’ But if we have a conscience void of offense toward God and men, that is a fountain of courage and the source of great strength.”—1901, Sermon #2738
“ Often, the blessing from Christ’s lips is the echo of the prayer which fell from ours. The blind man said, ‘Lord, that I may receive my sight.’ Echo answered, ‘Receive your sight.’”—1900, Sermon #2665

“The very dust which flies down our streets, was, much of it, once alive as part of the body of one of our forefathers! This earth is, indeed, a huge morgue. What was it that slew all these people and dug all these graves? It was sin, for, “sin, when it is finished, brings forth death.” It is no small thing that has worked all this mischief among mankind!”—1903, Sermon #2863

“When you can sing, with the Psalmist, ‘My cup runs over,’ mind that you call somebody to come and catch what spills, for if you let it run to waste, it may be said of you, ‘That man cannot be trusted with a full cup.’ So let it run over where those with empty cups may come and catch it, to moisten their parched lips! It is a good thing when the Christian, even though he has but little, can say, ‘I have not only enough, but I have a little to spare for others who have less than I have.’”—1901, Sermon #2739

“If salvation has come to your heart, you ought to be as happy as an angel! I think that there are some reasons why you should be even happier, for an angel cannot know, by personal experience, the bliss of having his sins forgiven. You, who have realized this wondrous blessing, ought to cause the wilderness and the solitary places to resound with the melody of your thanksgiving. And with the music of your grateful delight you should make even the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose. Oh, what bliss it is to be assured by the Holy Spirit, Himself, that you have passed from death unto life, and that salvation has indeed come to you!”—1900, Sermon #2665

“There are some people who have very crude and false ideas about what the work of God is in the soul. I heard one say that the sinner is to take the first step towards salvation and then good will do the rest. But I have often said and now say it, again, that the first step is the one point of difficulty! You know the French story about Saint Denis, whose head was cut off, and then it was said that he picked it up and carried it in his hands for a thousand miles? That was what the priests of the Church of Rome declared, but one of Voltaire’s followers very wittily remarked that, as for the thousand miles, there was no difficulty in that—it was only the first step that had any difficulty in it—if the saint could manage that part, the rest would be easy enough! And it is just so in the matter of salvation! If the dead man can pick his own head up—if the dead sinner can make himself alive—why, then he can do very well without God the rest of the way to Heaven! But that can never be, for Jesus Christ is Alpha as well as Omega—the first as well as the last in the sinner’s salvation.”—1900, Sermon #2662

“All day long there are opportunities for glorifying God if man really wishes to do it. If the Spirit of God is with you all day, you will feel and say to yourself, “I will give to God all my strength. These things down here—this measuring out, either by yards or by bushels—this buying and this selling—must be done by somebody and I must, by some means, earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, or the sweat of my brain. And as this is what God has given me to do, I will do it thoroughly, with a single eye to His Glory, so that no one shall ever be able to truthfully say that Christianity makes me, in any respect, a worse man than I was before I knew the Lord.” “Your God has commanded your strength,” so live unto God in everything! Let your meals be sacraments! Let your garments be vestments! Let your common utterances be a part of a great life-Psalm! And let your whole being be as a burnt-offering ascending unto the Most High, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ! Oh, for the power of the Spirit of God to help you to do this!”—1900, Sermon #2662
“If it had not been for His eternal plan whereby He purposed to give Grace to the guilty, the whole race of mankind would have been left, like the fallen angels, without hope and without mercy!”—1896, Sermon #2483

“If you do not hate every sin, you do not, with all your heart, hate anysin. They must all go. Sin, as sin, is to be abhorred, repented of and practically quitted in your life. Oh, may God help you to make sure work of your repentance! Make no profession of faith if you have not real faith—and have no repentance at all rather than sham repentance.”—1903, Sermon #2844

“Do not regard your departure out of the world as a thing to be surrounded with horror! Do not conjure up hobgoblins, evil spirits, darkness and terror! ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death,’ of which David spoke, I do not think was ever meant to be applied to dying, for it is a valley that he walksthrough and he comes out at the other side of it! And it is not the Valley of Death, but only of ‘the Shadow of Death.’ I have walked through that valley many a time—right through from one end of it to the other—and yet I have not died! The grim shadow of something worse than death has fallen over my spirit, but God has been with me, as He was with David, and His rod and His staff have comforted me. And many here can say the same! And I believe that often those who feel great gloom in going through ‘the Valley of the Shadow of Death,’ feel no gloom at all when they come to the Valley of Death itself! There has generally been brightness there for the most sorrowful spirits and those who, before coming there, have groveled in the dust, have been enabled to mount as on eagles’ wings when they have actually come to the place of their departure into the future state.”—1900, Sermon #2659

“There is such a thing as anticipating the glory tobe revealed with such a full, realizing faith that we begin to enjoy it even now! Surely, you have, at times, sat down with your fellow Believers, when the Word has been preached in the demonstration of the Spirit, and you have said,”Well, Heaven must be glorious, indeed, to be any better than this.”—1899, Sermon #2610

“Not an angel in Heaven is more certain of the eternal love of God than is the feeblest Believer upon earth! If your soul is committed to the hands of Christ, you can never perish! I speak no more strongly than His own utterances warrant, for Jesus has said, ‘My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish.’”—1901, Sermon #2741

“When the worldling dreads sin, it is because he is afraid of Hell. But the Christian is delivered from all fear of Hell and he hates sin, itself, because he fears to grieve the God he loves.”—1898, Sermon #2571
“There is never a flood for the wicked without an ark for the righteous! Never shall a storm sweep over the earth till God has prepared a great rock wherein His people may be hidden.”—1896, Sermon #2459

“I can never understand how a so-called “priest” can ask people to confess their sins to him. I would not make my ear into a common sewer for all the wealth in the world! What foulness there must be on the soul of him who has heard what others have done and who knows what sin he has himself committed! Sin, when we see what it really is, whether in ourselves or in others, horrifies us.”—1903, Sermon #2863

“Do not suppose that a man can be saved and yet know nothing about the great change that has been worked in him. It is not every man who can say for certain that he is saved, for faith is a thing of growth and assurance may not come at once. But when a man is really and completely saved, he has but to use the proper means and he may become absolutely certain of it. God the Holy Spirit is willing and waiting to give the full assurance of faith and of understanding to those who seek it at His hands.”—1900, Sermon #2665

“The God who blessed the broken sermon of Mr. Tennant can bless our imperfect work in the pulpit, the Sunday school, or anywhere else! [Read sermon for amazing stories!] And the God who saved such men as John Williams and his companion, when they least thought of such a thing happening, can also save some who have strayed in here, tonight, little dreaming what designs of love God has toward them in bringing them at this time under the sound of His Word!”—1900, Sermon #2663

“The best messengers to find Christ are the penitent tears of His saints. Tears act on Divine mercy like the magnet on the needle—the tears of the Christian find the heart of God. Go after your Master with wet eyes and He will soon come to you. There is a sacred connection between Christ and weeping eyes, for it is Christ’s office to wipe the mourner’s eyes. And whenever He sees you weeping, His fingers are eager to be wiping them. He must wipe them. He cannot bear to see the tears and, if He wipes them, He must come to you. So, the surest way to find Him is to seek Him sorrowing.”—1899, Sermon #2611

“If God does not fulfill a single promise to me for the next 50 years, I shall be perfectly satisfied to live on the promises, themselves, if my faith shall but be sustained by His Grace!”—1900, Sermon #2656

“ Into Your hands Icommit myspirit. You notice that this Psalm [31] is dedicated to the chief musician. I have studied these Psalms, not only by the hour, and by the day, but sometimes by the month, together. Some of these Psalms have been the pillow for my head at night. Others of them, like wafers made of honey, have lain in my mouth till I have sucked out of them their Divine sweetness. I have often noticed that when one of these sacred songs is dedicated to the chief musician, The Chief Musician generally appears somewhere in the Psalm—He from whom comes all the music that ever makes bleeding hearts, glad, usually shows some traces of Himself within the Psalm itself! In this instance, the living words of David were the dying words of David’s Lord—‘Into Your hands I commend My spirit.’ What David did and what the Lord Jesus Christ did, let us do, and do it every day—let us commit our spirit into the hands of our God.”—1896, Sermon #2455

“If we give any description of the world to come which is at all terrible, those who reject the Scriptures begin to cry out that we have borrowed it from Dante, or taken it from Milton! But I take leave to say that the most awful and harrowing descriptions of the woes of the lost that ever fell from human lips do not exceed or even equal the language of the loving Christ, Himself! Listen—“Cast the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” He is the true lover of men’s souls who does not deceive them! He that paints the miseries of Hell as though they were but little is seeking to murder men’s souls under the pretense of being their friend! May God give all of you Grace to trust in Jesus for yourselves and then to point others to him, for Christ’s sake! Amen.”—1899, Sermon #2643

“It is amazing how attractive a personal narrative is! If you begin to explain to some people the Doctrines of the Gospel, your audience will diminish one by one. But tell them your own experience of the power of Christ and they will listen as listened the wedding guest when “the ancient mariner” laid his hand upon him and detained him, and told him that strange legend of the sea!”—1899, Sermon #2623

“I have sometimes likened that passage in Romans to a vast suspension bridge between earth and Heaven—‘For whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren. Moreover whom He did predestinate, them He also called: and whom He called, them He also justified: and whom He justified, them He also glorified.’ If you get your foot firmly resting on that great plank of effectual calling, you may be quite sure that you will be able to cross all the rest of the bridge and will most certainly reach the other side—and be “forever with the Lord.””—1900, Sermon #2665

“If you do not really pray, do not pretend to pray. If you have no experience of the things of God, do not talk as if you had. To be a liar anywhere is hateful—but to lie in religion is the most abominable form of lying that can be!”—1903, Sermon #2844

“God is the God of all comfort—not merely of some comfort, but of allcomfort. If you need every kind of comfort that was ever given to men, God has it in reserve and He will give it to you! If there are any comforts to be found by God’s people in sickness, in prison, in need, in depression—the God of all comfort will deal them out to you according as you have need of them!”—1899, Sermon #2640

“I will go as far to say that if Divine Grace should carry us every inch of the road to Heaven but one, we would be lost because of that last inch! If, in the edifice of our soul’s salvation, there is even one stone left for us to put in its place, unassisted by God’s Grace, that building will never be completed! From first to last, all must be of Grace. I agree with the highest, doctrinalist upon this point, that there is not, and there cannot be a good thing in the heart of any man if it was not worked there by the Sovereign Grace of God.”—1901, Sermon #2741

“You may also destroy your distresses by singing praises to God. By blessing the Lord, you may set your foot upon the neck of your adversaries—you can sing yourself right up from the deeps by God’s gracious help. Out of the very depths you may cry unto the Lord till He shall lift you up, and you shall praise Him in excelsis—in the very highest—and magnify His name! I give you this as one of the shortest and surest recipes for comfort—begin to praise God. The next time that a friend comes in to see you, do not tell him how long the wind has been blowing from the North, how cold the weather is for this season of the year, how your poor bones ache, how little you have coming in and all your troubles—he has probably heard the sad story many times before! Instead of that, tell him what the Lord has done for you and make him feel that the Lord is good. Your griefs and your troubles speak for themselves, but your mercies are often dumb—so try, therefore, to give them a tongue and praise the Lord with all your heart!”—1899, Sermon #2640

“We do not think one hundredth as much about Heaven as we ought to. Most people seem to imagine we cannot know anything about it and they quote half a text, which is almost as bad as telling a lie—‘Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for them that love Him.’ There they stop! But that is not where the Scripture ends, for the Apostle went on to say, ‘But God has revealed them unto us by His Spirit: for the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.’ They quote the first half of the passage to prove that we do not know anything about Heaven, whereas the second part tells us that we doknow a great deal about it! And if we would but turn our thoughts that way, we might become almost as familiar with the inside of the gates of pearl as we are with the streets of this clouded, foggy city [London]! We may learn much about Heaven, even while we are here, if we are but willing to be taught of God.”—1899, Sermon #2648

“When the Lord Jesus Christ calls any of you effectually, you will not put off your decision till the next morning. You will not say, ‘I will wait till I can get home and pray.’ You will not even say, ‘I will wait till the end of the service and then talk with a Christian person,’ but your prayer will be, ‘Lord, help me to look to Jesus, now. I yield myself up to You this very instant. I am in a hurry about it. Lord, I am making haste to get to You! Make haste to come and save me. I would not delay a single second longer. I want to be Yours alone, and Yours at once.’ That is a mark of effectual calling, when immediate obedience is given to the call.”—1900, Sermon #2665
“When I first began to preach, this was my usual way of working. I was up in the morning early, praying and reading the Word. Then all day I was either teaching or studying hard, but at five o’clock every evening, except Saturday, I started out to preach what I had learned during the day! I used to tell the people, simply and earnestly, what I had first received into my own mind and heart—and I found that I derived greater benefit by proclaiming to others what I had learned than if I had kept it all to myself. I do not believe that you can thoroughly know the Doctrines of Grace till you begin to teach them to other people. You will soon find that they will not receive them, and so you will learn the doctrine of man’s natural depravity. You will speedily discover that your eloquence will not draw them to Christ and, in that way you will learn the Doctrine of Effectual Calling—that the Holy Spirit must, Himself, come and work upon them if they are to be saved! You will prove that some will reject Christ though you thought they were most likely to accept Him, and that others who you felt sure would refuse Him, will be the first to receive Him! There you have the great doctrine of Divine Sovereignty. You see, from your own observation, how the Lord has compassion upon whom He will have compassion and how He has mercy upon whom He will have mercy. You will never know the Truth of God in all its fullness till with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, you have attempted to inculcate it in the hearts of others. So it is a profitable duty to “declare the works of the Lord.””—1897, Sermon #2540

“I suggest to you this prayer, ‘Lord, show me the worst of my case. Put me in the place where I ought to be. Make me to feel and know what I really am and then, my Lord, break my heart if it never was broken, and heal it if it is broken. Empty me of myself and bring me to Yourself. Turn me upside down till the last drop of my self-sufficiency runs out even to the dregs, and then pour in the fullness of Your Grace in Christ Jesus till I am filled even to the brim.’”—1903, Sermon #2844

“I wish that we were all of the mind of that noble Spartan who wished to be a magistrate, but another man opposed him and received twice as many votes as he did. What did the Spartan say? ‘I am grateful that the country has better men than myself and I am glad to see that it knows where to find them when it needs them.’ So, dear Friends, be glad when God provides better men than you are to do His work. Let the preacher rejoice when another preacher excels him. That is the point to which we must all bring ourselves. Let the Sunday school teacher praise the Lord when she finds another teacher who altogether eclipses her. What a blessed thing it is for the Bible class teacher who has a large company around him, to find another Brother raised up who gets a better class than his has ever been! Bless God when it is so, dear Friends. This is one of those points that is often difficult, but it ought to be easy—and it wouldbe easyif we had love for one another! And if we have not such love, we are not Christ’s disciples.”—1899, Sermon #2650

“I do not believe in coming up to a set of rails and kneeling down to receive the bread and wine. It was never so done in our Lord’s day, nor for centuries afterwards. Look at that famous picture of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci—our Lord and His Apostles are depicted sitting around a table. So it should always be—any posture but that of sitting as much at ease as possible violates the very meaning of the supper! Is it not strange that when Christ bids men sit or recline at the supper table, they will not do so, but they will kneel? Then, as it is asupper, the first principle with many is that it must be taken in the morning before breakfast—with some people, everything must be contrary to Christ’s command! High-Churchism means high treason against Christ—that is the plain English of the matter—at least as to the symbolical teaching, though I thank God that there are many of those who fall into that error who are right at heart and true Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ.”—1897, Sermon #2542

“Honest speech is the surest token of a loving heart, but, nowadays, if a man preaches the Truth of God plainly and faithfully, men say that he is hard and unkind. But if a man glosses over the Truth of God and alters it according to his own idea of what will please men, then they say, “He is a kindly-disposed and large-hearted man.” I would be disposed to doubt whether he has any heart at all, if he will sooner see sinners damned than offend them by proclaiming the Truth! I thank God that some of us care little about offending those who offend God! If men will not yield themselves to the Lord, we want not their friendship, but we will strive to make them uneasy in their rebellion—and if they resolve to be lost, we will at least be clear of their blood.”—1899, Sermon #2652

“There is no comparison between Damon and Pythias, and a poor sinner and his Savior! Christ laid down His life, His glorious life, for a poor worm! He stripped Himself of all His splendors, then of all His happiness, then of His own righteousness, then of His own robes till He was naked to His own shame! And then He laid down His life—that was all He had left—for our Savior had not kept anything back.”—1900, Sermon #2656

“There was, just now, a host of us bowing our heads in the attitude of prayer, but how many of us were really praying? The prayer that is offered in the mass often has no prayer in it. He who would have eternal life must ask for it for himself, and by himself. It is quite right to have family prayer—I bless God that I cannot remember a time when I was not one of those who gathered night and morning in my father’s house to pray. It is a very delightful thing to have been brought up to attend Prayer Meetings and to join in public prayer with the people of God—but when a man is seeking Christ, he must pray alone.”—1896, Sermon #2458 “A sense of God’s wrath against sin is not repentance!”—1901, Sermon #2743

“The love of Christ is the grandest stimulant of the renewed nature that can be known! It enables the fainting man to revive from his swooning. It causes the feeble man to leap up from his bed of languishing and it makes the weary man strong again. Are you weary, Brothers and Sisters, and sick of life? You only need more of Christ’s love shed abroad in your heart! Are you, dear Brother, ready to faint through unbelief? You only need more of Christ’s love and all shall be well with you. I would to God that we were all filled with it to the fullest, like those Believers were on the day of Pentecost, of whom the mockers said that they were full of new wine! Peter truly said that they were not drunk, as men supposed, but that it was the Spirit of God and the love of Christ filling them with unusual power and unusual energy and, therefore, men knew not what it was! God grant to us, also, this great power, and Christ shall have all the glory of it!”—1896, Sermon #2459

“I daresay the devil finds himself at home in Hell, or wherever his dwelling place may be, but if he could be converted into a seraph, he would not stay in Hell for an hour! He would never want to go there again for pleasure, of that I am certain. And when a man who professes to be converted says that he goes into the world, and into sin, for pleasure, it is as if an angel went to Hell for enjoyment!”—1898, Sermon #2571

“Today the people of God are a remarkable people, a pilgrim race, strangers and sojourners in the world, passing on to “a city which has foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God.” If you are a true Believer in Christ, you will be sure to be noticed, questioned, quizzed, criticized, caricatured, misrepresented—never mind all that—it is the lot of all the holy seed, and the citizens of Zion must expect such treatment until the Lord Himself shall come.”—1899, Sermon #2612

“…if God will acknowledge it as His promise, shall I, to whom it is given in infinite mercy, doubt whether it is His promise or not? And shall I even venture to go further than that and, knowingit to be His promise, shall I begin to question how He can fulfill it, or whether He willfulfill it or not? God forbid! The dignity of the promise must not be insulted by our doubting it!”—1900, Sermon #2657

“It is a grand testimony to a man’s uprightness when worldlings cannot say anything against him without lying, for it shows that there is nothing of which they can truthfully accuse him! It is a noble thing for a man to be in such a position and then he can say, ‘Now have I come where I desire to be—there is no love lost between the world and me. The world is dead to me and I am dead to the world.’”—1902, Sermon #2789

“Ah, my dear Friend, repentance is not a preparationfor Grace, it is the first result of Grace working within the soul. One of the earliest products of a Divine visitation is the humbling of the heart on account of sin—and this is the beginning of true repentance.”—1901, Sermon #2743
“The doorstep of wisdom is a consciousness of ignorance and the gateway of perfection is a deep sense of imperfection.”—1899, Sermon #2624
“All that is of man [in salvation] is sure to be unraveled as all the spinning and the weaving of earthly machinery can be pulled to pieces. But the work of God’s Grace endures forever.”—1903, Sermon #2845

“Somehow, God’s people in the olden times always liked to sing the Song of Moses. By a kind of instinct they thought of the Red Sea, as if to remember the redemption that God worked out for His people when He destroyed Pharaoh and all his host. Let us go there, too, and think of the Red Sea of our Savior’s blood where all our sins were drowned!”—1898, Sermon #2578

“‘Dismiss me not from Your service, Lord,’ is a prayer we ought often to put up, for, in that service, we are far from perfect. I think I speak for all sane Christians—I do not undertake to speak for certain insane ones that abound at this time—but I believe that all sane servants of the Lord confess that they are such poor servants that their wonder is that they have not been dismissed from His service. Yet it is sweet to hear Him say, “I have chosen you, and not cast you away.’”—1896, Sermon #2483

“‘But,’ says someone, ‘there are certain districts where you cannot do any good if you try to preach the Gospel. You must fiddle to the people and drum to them—and then you must have amusements and entertainments for them, you must have penny readings and concerts.’ Very well, convert sinners that way if you can, dear Friends—I do not object to any method that results in the winning of souls! Stand on your head if that will save the people, but still, it seems to me that if God’s Word is like a fire, there is nothinglike it for burning its way! and if God’s Word is like a hammer, there can be nothinglike that Word for hammering down everything that stands in the way of Jesus Christ! Why, then, should we not continually try the Gospel and nothing but the Gospel?”—1896, Sermon #2460

“Never did a harp of Heaven sound so sweetly as when touched by the finger of some returning prodigal! Not even the songs of the angels seem to me to be so sweet as that first song of rapture which rushes forth from the inmost soul of the forgiven child of God!”—1899, Sermon #2625
“Some may think it is absurd to talk of our being “one with the Savior.” it is not absurd, because it is Scriptural.”—1898, Sermon #2572
“I know not how to estimate the worth of even one man who has power with God in prayer!”—1901, Sermon #2745

“Think not that a man like Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor of the saints, is the most hopeless of mankind. God thought not so and He brought him in penitence to His feet and made him to be not a whit behind the very chief of His servants!”—1899, Sermon #2612“There is no pretended god that has ever been supposed to make promises like those of our God. Turn to the Koran and see what Mohammed has promised. Ah, me! What a beggarly array of promises does he set before his followers! Turn to Brahma and Buddha and read all the so-called sacred books written by their priests, and see what their god: are said to have promised. You can put the essence of it all into an eggshell and not even see it then! But our God has promised more than Heaven and earth can hold! He has promised to give Himself to His people! He is the great Promiser—the mighty Promiser. I set the promises of God in comparison and contrast with all the promises that were ever made in connection with all false systems of religion under Heaven, and unhesitatingly declare that there are none that can compare for an instant with the promises of the Most High!”—1900, Sermon #2657

“No man ever spent a day with Jesus Christ without being filled with the sight of strange things!”—1899, Sermon #2614

“There is nothing truly substantial apart from God, the Everlasting One, who lives and abides forever. Depend upon it, we shall, in a short time, prove the insubstantiality of our own lives! Worms will be scrambling for our flesh and if we have not Christ as our Savior, devils will be fighting for our soul—and we, unable to help ourselves—shall have passed away from all that we once thought real with a groan because it was so false and so deceptive. ‘Verily, every man at his best state is altogether vanity.’”—1896, Sermon #2462

“This Psalm [130] ought to comfort you who are in the depths, as you see that others have had to go there, too. But mind that you follow the example of the Psalmist and, whatever you are called to suffer, never leave off praying! Whatever else you do, never neglect this one prime means of deliverance. Then you may say with David, ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto You, O Lord.’”—1898, Sermon #2579

“Scripture all through represents the acquisition of wealth as involving very solemn responsibilities and loading the soul with burdens. I do not doubt that there are some men who could never have sinned as they have done if they had not been successful in acquiring wealth. They could never have plunged into a damnation so deep as that which is theirs if they had not been able to indulge their lusts without stint.”—1896, Sermon #2462

“God’s eternal purposes are a great deep and when we try to fathom them, we utterly fail. Divine Sovereignty is an ocean without a bottom and without a shore—and all we can do is to set our sail and steer by the chart which He has given us.”—1900, Sermon #2666
“When John Knox went upstairs to plead for Scotland, it was the greatest event in Scottish history.”—1901, Sermon #2745

“I know some preachers who cannot bear to have even a baby crying during the sermon. I do not feel especially delighted with that sweet music, yet I rejoice that the good woman did not stay away from the service! As far as I am concerned, she may bring her baby, even if it should sometimes cry—I am glad to have her here that God may bless her.”—1899, Sermon #2614

“The proper place for the Word is inside, in your heart—have you got it hidden there?”—1896, Sermon #2484

“I say to the man who calls himself a priest, ‘No, Sir, I do not need any absolution from you, even though you may be a lineal descendant of the Apostles—through Judas Iscariot—for I am perfectly satisfied with the forgiveness which I have obtained by faith in Christ Jesus!”—1902, Sermon #2790

“To trust in repentance without faith would be ruinous to the soul—but to have a kind of faith without repentance, would also be ruinous. If faith never has tears in its eyes, it is a dead faith. He who has never wept because of his sin, has never really had his sin washed away. If your heart has never been broken on account of sin, I will not believe that it was ever broken fromsin. And if your heart is not broken from your sin, you are still at a distance from your God and you will never see His face with acceptance.”—1903, Sermon #2845

“What is the good of prayer if God does not hear it? Sometimes we ask God to answer our supplication. That is right, but, at the same time, remember that it may be a greater blessing for God to hear our prayers than to answer them, for if He were to make it an absolute rule that He would grant all our requests, it might be a curse rather than a blessing.”—1898, Sermon #2579

“Prayer is refreshing, but praise is even more so, for there may be and there often is, in prayer, the element of selfishness—but praise rises to a yet higher level. Prayer and praise together make up spiritual respiration—we breathe in the air of Heaven when we pray—and we breathe it out again when we praise. ‘It is good to sing praises unto our God.’””—1896, Sermon #2462

“Much prayer leads to much thanksgiving. It should be a great cause for joy when numbers of Christians unite in praying for any Christian minister, for they will also unite in praising God on his behalf when that which they asked for him is granted!”—1900, Sermon #2657
“They love the Gospel most who know it best!”—1899, Sermon #2626

“If the human mind is compared to a palace, the proper place for Christ’s Word is on the throne!”—1896, Sermon #2484“To accept the Lord’s will with absolute submission is after the manner of the Son of God, Himself, for He prayed, in the hour of His greatest agony, ‘O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me: nevertheless not as I will, but as You will.’”—1900, Sermon #2666

“I do not hesitate to say that the whole theory of evolution is more monstrously false and foolish than any other ever conceived beneath high Heaven! It is a marvelous thing that men should be able to squeeze their minds into the belief of an absurdity which, in time to come, will be ridiculed to children in the schoolroom as an instance of the credulity of their ancestors.”—1896, Sermon #2463

“Many people think they know everything and, consequently, they know nothing. I think it is Seneca who says, “Many a man would have been wise if he had not thought himself so. If he had but known himself to be a fool, he would have become wise.” The doorstep to the Temple of Wisdom is s knowledge of our own ignorance. He cannot learn aright who has not first been taught that he knows nothing.”—1899, Sermon #2615

“The more holy a man becomes, the more conscious he is of unholiness.”—1898, Sermon #2579
“O Sirs, be afraid of being afraid whenever you find yourself afraid of following the Lord Jesus Christ!”—1901, Sermon #2747
“We shall best bear our own sufferings when we find fellowship with Christ in them.”—1898, Sermon #2573

“Yes, Brothers and Sisters, God hears our sighs even if we cannot hear them ourselves! When we think we have not prayed at all, we have often prayed the best! When we imagine that our groans have been empty, they have often been the fullest! When we sigh because we think we do not sigh, God hears that sort of sighing which is only a longingto sigh! He hears the grief when the grief has no voice. He hears the sorrow when the sorrow cannot find a tongue.”—1896, Sermon #2464

“If the gospel that men teach is new, it is not true, for there is nothing that can be new and true. The Truth of God is old as the everlasting hills.”—1896, Sermon #2484

“But, Sir, if you have no concern about another man’s soul, it is time that you should have grave concern about your own! If no joy comes to you when another is saved, you have need to be saved yourself! And if the thought of the future world and the ruin of immortal souls never makes you bow your head even to the dust, you need to be born-again, for they who are born in the likeness of Christ weep over sinners, pray for sinners and seek the salvation of sinners. By this test, I beseech you to try yourselves.”—1902, Sermon #2791

“Brothers and Sisters, when you are thoroughly awake to your dangers, to your needs, to your weaknesses, then you will see Christ’s glory! He is never rightly valued until we see ourselves to be utterly valueless! Low thoughts of self make high thoughts of Christ. Lord, awake us to know what we are, for then shall we begin to see the glories of Your Son!”—1900, Sermon #2658

“Aaron held his peace when his two sons died. He got as far as that in submission to the will of the Lord. But it will be better still if, instead of simply holding your peace, you can bless and praise and magnify the Lord even in your sharpest trouble! Oh, may you be divinely helped to do so!”—1900, Sermon #2666

“ Myeyes preventthe night watches, that I might meditate in Your Word. As he[David] was up before the sun, so he was praying before they set the guards for the night watch. And when they were changing guards and he heard the cry of the hour from the watchman, he was still crying to God! And at the same time he was meditating—‘that I might meditate in Your Word.’ Ah, that is the way to cry! Meditation is very much neglected nowadays. We read, perhaps, too much. We meditate, for certain, too little. And meditation is to reading like digestion after eating. The cows in the pasture eat the grass and then they lie down and chew the cud and get all the good they can out of what they have eaten. Reading snips off the grass, but meditation chews the cud! Therefore, ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.’”—1896, Sermon #2464

“There are none so fit to comfort others as those who have once needed comfort themselves.”—1899, Sermon #2615

“We dare not come to God without Jesus Christ—that dear name should begin and end all our prayers. He is the one Mediator between God and men. He is our great High Priest and Intercessor. ‘No man comes unto the Father but by Me.’ ‘I am the Door”—the way of access to God. He is the Mercy Seat, the Propitiatory where God meets with us and hears our prayers, so that we always pray in the society of Christ. There is no true praying without it.”—1898, Sermon #2580

“We are not fit to go out to work for Christ till we truly know Him, ourselves, and also know something of the Divine power which He is prepared to give to us. It is well for us to learn the lesson ourselves before we attempt to teach it to others. Go not out unto all nations till you have first gone into your closet and had fellowship with the Master, Himself! You will blunder in your errand unless you go forth fresh from His blessed Presence.”—1896, Sermon #2465
“I am not saying a word against genuine revivals, or even against excitement—and I do not think that it is any argument against revivals that some of those who profess to be converted at them go back to the world.”—1903, Sermon #2846

“There is no promise given that if you seek the Lord tomorrow, you shall find Him. I know of no Gospel invitations available for a year or a month hence—they all have to do with this present moment. ‘Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.’”—1901, Sermon #2747

“If I have any influence over you and if you are ever inclined to believe a thing simply because I say it, I charge you, throw away such superstition and test all that I say by the Word of God. The real weight of truth consists not in what one man says, or in what another man says—the weight, the power, the substance lies in what Christ has said—that, and that alone, is the truth of God.”—1896, Sermon #2484“Even those who are clothed in the righteousness of Christ are not always quite clear about appearing before God—how much less, then, must they be who have no robe of righteousness at all, but are only clad in the rags of their own iniquities? How shall they stand in that last dread day?”—1902, Sermon #2792

“Somehow, men seem very ingenious in trying to find out reasons why they should not be saved! And all their foolish ingenuity seems to be employed in attempting to escape from this blessed Divine simplicity, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.’ May God the Holy Spirit lead them to believe in Him! He must lead them, for no man can see Christ until his eyes are Divinely opened. We may put the Truth as plainly as we can, and preach it so that we think we cannot be misunderstood, but men willmisunderstand us, even those who desire to believe in Christ, until the Holy Spirit works effectually in them!”—1900, Sermon #2667

“I can scarcely conceive it possible for any man to be a true saint, a holy man, one who is set apart unto God and sanctified in Christ Jesus, unless he is reproached while on earth for being too strict, too Puritan, or perhaps sometimes too melancholy. There must be a grave distinction between a Christian and a man of the world—and where there is no such distinction, or only a slight one—there is most solemn cause for suspicion that all is not right!”—1900, Sermon #2660

“If God’s people strive mightily, it is because God works mightily in them! Nothing can come out of a man but what God puts into Him. We work to will and to do when He works in us according to His good pleasure. Oh, for more of the agonizing of the Spirit within us, that there might be more of agonizing in our spirits for the Glory of God!”—1896, Sermon #2465

“I am glad that there are some difficult passages, [in the Bible] because they are a trial to my faith! Yet all that is essential for me to know, it seems to me, is as plain as possible when I just read it as I would read another book.”—1901, Sermon #2748

“When we enjoy the Gospel, we are sure to recommend it to others. God’s happy people are God’s working people! Those who fear and tremble and never have any joy in the Lord are generally a barren generation. But they who delight themselves in the Lord are sure to speak of Him to others and to bring others to Christ.”—1899, Sermon #2626

“There is no hymn, or Psalm, or spiritual song that could be accepted of God unless our Lord Jesus Christ was with us when it was sung. Prayers and praises, alike, must ascend to God through the merit of His atoning Sacrifice.”—1898, Sermon #2580

“Oh, that some people I know of could have their chapels burnt down! They have been stuck in a hole down a back street for the last hundred years! They are good souls and so they ought to be—they ought to be matured by now after so much storage—but if they would only come out in the street, they might do much more good than at present. ‘Oh, but there is an old deacon who does not like street-preaching!’ I know him very well! He will be gone to Heaven soon. Then, as soon as you have had his funeral sermon, turn out into the street and begin, somehow or other, to make Christ known! Oh, to break down every barrier and get rid of every restraint that hides the blessed Gospel! Perhaps we must respect these dear old Believers’ feelings just a little, but not so much as to let souls die! We must seek to bring sinners to Jesus whether we offend men or whether we please them!”—1896, Sermon #2467

“Beloved, it is only in proportion as we hold fellowship with Christ and commune with Him, that either ordinances, or doctrines, or promises can profit us.”—1896, Sermon #2485

“Man, don’t you know whether you believe or not? You may know it! One thing I know, you have no business to go to sleep till you know this once and for all, for, if you are not a Believer, you are an unbeliever! There is no middle state between the two. And if you are an unbeliever, you are ‘condemned already,’ because you have not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God!”—1900, Sermon #2667

“Let there be no mistake concerning this matter—you cannot be Christians if you thus defile yourselves. You cannot be children of God and live in filthy sin. It must not—it cannot be—and God here, by the pen of the Apostle Paul, excommunicates all who pretend to be members of His Churchand yet are guilty of the sin of fornication.”—1900, Sermon #2661

“ ‘Hear, O LORD, when I cry with my voice! Have mercy also upon me, and answer me. The Psalmist has only just begun praising when he takes to praying—and that should be a Christian’s double occupation—praising and praying! I have often said that as our life is made up of breathing in and breathing out, so we should breathe in the atmosphere of Heaven by prayer and then breathe it out, again, in praise.”—1898, Sermon #2573

“ If there is no care about making the heart go right, it must go wrong because the natural tendency of our mind is toward evil. If you leave your heart to follow its own natural impulse, it is impossible that it should seek the Lord. It is only when it ispreparedto seek the Lord that it ever seeks Him—and that preparation of the heart is from God, so that if we do not ask the Lord to prepare our hearts to seek Him, we shall never seek His face at all!”—1901, Sermon #2749

“‘To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever’ is the only worthy end of mortal man!”—1903, Sermon #2847

“No man really goes and preaches Christ without being moved by the Spirit of God to do it. It is the Spirit of God who taught us about Christ and all that we can preach, that is worth preaching, comes of the Holy Spirit in that very act. No man who truly preaches Christ can do it except by the Holy Spirit and, in his ministry he must teach the necessity of the working of the Holy Spirit. ‘’You must be born again, and born again of the Holy Spirit,’ must be his constant cry.”—1896, Sermon #2467

“You may go to the work-mongers to hear about good works, but you must come back to the Believers in Christ to find them. Their changed lives prove that the Gospel does produce the best possible results. The more we trample down human merit, the more do we exalt the merit of Christ! The more we show the absolute uselessness of good works to merit salvation, the more do we promote the highest type of morality and the more we lead men to live unto God from motives of gratitude for what He has done for them. This is a matter of fact.”—1902, Sermon #2792

“That is a grand expression—‘You have loved them, as You have loved Me.’ What? With the same love? It is even so— a love without beginninga love without change, a love without bounds, a love without end! ‘You have loved them as You have loved Me.’”—1899, Sermon #2616
“‘Do you believe?’” said the Lord Jesus to this man, and by that question He held him fast. That is the way to win souls, begin with a personal question!”—1900, Sermon #2667

“‘Oh,’ says a friend, ‘I cannot hear some ministers at all! They preach such a mingle-mangle of the Truth of God and error.’ I know they do, but it will be a strange thing if you cannot get an ear or two of wheat, even from them! There is a great deal of straw—you are not required to take that away—but it will be remarkable if you cannot pick up an ear or two of good grain. You say, ‘The error that the man preaches distresses my mind.’ No doubt it does, but the best way is to leave the lies alone and pick out the sound Truth of God—and if there is no sound Truth in the sermon, a good plan is to read it all backwards—and then it will be sure to be sound.”—1896, Sermon #2485

“Drunkenness is one of the most debasing of sins—it lowers the whole tone of the person who is held in bondage by it. We sometimes talk of a man being “as drunk as a beast,” but whoever heard of a beast being drunk? Why, it is more beastly than anything a beast ever does! I do not believe that the devil himself is ever guilty of anything like that. I never heard even him charged with being drunk! It is a sin which has no sort of excuse—those who fall into it generally fal1 into other deadly vices. It is the devil’s backdoor to Hell and everything that is hellish, for he that once gives away his brains to drink is ready to be caught by Satan for anything.”—1900, Sermon #2661

“I know that if we are truly the Lord’s, He will not allow us to forsake Him. But I must have a wholesome fear lest I should forsake Him, for who am I that I should be sure that I have not deceived myself? I may have done so and, after all, may forsake Him after the loudest professions, and even after the greatest apparent sincerity in vowing that I never will turn away from Him.”—1899, Sermon #2627

“It is a terribly sad thing to pretend to serve God without thought, without watchfulness, without care, for God is not such an One that we may rush into His Presence whenever we like, without premeditation, solemnity, or reverence.”—1901, Sermon #2749
“It ill becomes a man, who is on the brink of Hell, to be laughing and jesting!”—1896, Sermon #2468
“Great gifts are not great Graces, but great gifts require great Graces to go with them, or else they become a temptation and a snare.”—1898, Sermon #2580

“Do not attempt to make any excuse for your sin. Oh, how ready sinners are with their excuses! A man says, ‘But, Sir, I have a besetting sin.’ Do you not think that a great many people make a mistake about besetting sins? There was a man who used to get drunk and he said that it was his besetting sin. But his brother said, ‘No, Sam, it is your upsetting sin!’”—1896, Sermon #2468

“If you would have union with Christ, take care, in the next place, that you do all independence upon Him, for if, in the affairs of your soul, you set up in business for yourself, Christ will be at enmity with you. Seek not only to turn your eyes to Him for direction, but also for support. And look to Him in your prayers, in your preaching, in your hearing and in everything, for so shall Christ and your soul be agreed and you shall have fellowship with Him.”—1900, Sermon #2668

“It is well to have a good memory and that is the best memory which remembers what is best worth remembering.”—1896, Sermon #2485

“I never feel my own weakness so much as when I stand here to plead with unconverted men to yield to the Savior! If any man thinks that he can preach, let him come and try it, if by preaching he means affecting the hearts of men and bringing them to God. This must be the work of the Holy Spirit and, whatever we may do, nothing comes of it until He works the great miracle! We go back home and say, ‘Who has believed our report?’ until the arm of the Lord is revealed and then men are saved.”—1900, Sermon #2661

“Until you are like a vessel turned upside down and drained of every drop of human merit, there is no hope of salvation for you. You must sit alone and keep silent about those good works of yours, for they are all a lie and you know it. You have never done a good work in your life—you have either spoiled it by your selfish motivesbeforeit, or by some carelessness init, or by some vainglorious pride afterit. At the best, you are nothing but a boasting Pharisee, and though you may wash the outside of your cup and platter, yet your heart is full of wickedness and your soul is steeped in sin.”—1896, Sermon #2468

“You might as soon measure the moon for a suit of clothes as measure some men’s doctrine. They seem to be perpetually waxing or waning. They box the compass. They shift like the wind. That is a poor life, when it comes to the close, in which the man has been “everything by starts, and nothing long.” My dear young Friends, give yourselves up to the teaching and guidance of the Spirit of God and resolve that if you do err, it shall be unintentionally, for you wish to be right—you desire to know and to do nothing save what the Lord taught you and the Lord bade you do.”—1902, Sermon #2793

“I may further tell you that among the things that led me to Christ was the Doctrine of the Final Perseverance of the Saints. I heard that Jesus would keep the feet of His saints and I said to myself, “Then, if I give myself to Him, He will ensure the preservation of my character and He will keep me to the end.” And the only bargain I ever made with Him, when I gave myself up to Him, was that He would always have me in His holy keeping. O young men, I can recommend that plan to you! I earnestly entreat you not to commence life even with the best moral resolutions. Go straight away to the Lord Jesus and ask Him to grant you Grace that you may give yourself up wholly to Him. You cannot keep yourself, but He can keep you and He will keep you even unto the end, for He has said, ‘My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand.’”—1901, Sermon #2749

“Our Lord is very choice in His company and He does not frequent the house of the sluggard! But wherever there is one who spends and is spent for Jesus, there we may expect that Jesus will be! If we heartily serve Him, the state of mind into which we shall be brought will be congenial to His own—fellowship will be likely between the laboring Savior and His laboring servant.”—1899, Sermon #2628

“‘You know all things; You know that I love You.’ Of course He does! If you do really love Him, it is His own love in you returning to where it came!”—1900, Sermon #2669
“Let us endeavor to so adapt our style, if we are preachers of the Word, that the multitude will be willing to hear and will be able to understand, for then we may hope that with the blessing of God, many will be converted.”—1903, Sermon #2818
“Byron speaks of God’s face being mirrored in the sea, but there is not space enough for the face of Deity to be fully reflected in the broad Atlantic, or in all the oceans put together! The image of God is to be fully seen in Jesus Christ and nowhere else.”—1899, Sermon #2617

“There is one thing on earth, even now, which is perfect. Albeit that perfection was blasted by the Fall and ever since the Garden of Eden was devastated by the sin of man, perfection has gone, yet there is one thing on earth which we possess which is perfect. You all know what that is—it is the perfect will of God contained in the Sacred Scriptures. He who would be able to spell perfection in mortal language must read the Bible through, for he will find it perfect in all its parts—perfectly true, perfectly free from all error, perfect in everything that is necessary for man to know, perfect in all that can guide us to bliss, perfect in all that can warn us of dangers on the road.”—1896, Sermon #2481

“There is such a thing as self-denial ceasing to be self-denial when a man takes such pleasure in denying himself, for Christ’s sake, that the selfdenial is a greater source of joy to him than the indulgence would have been—and that is just what true service for God is!”—1900, Sermon #2662

“O Beloved, in your hour of darkness because of your sin, sit still and hold your tongue, for it is oftentimes the way of peace to the soul!”—1896, Sermon #2468
“It never occurred to Peter [Acts 2:23] that the counsel of God deprived men of the responsibility and guilt of their actions.”—1896, Sermon #2486

“ ‘Deliver me not over unto the will of my enemies: for false witnesses are risen up against me, and suchas breathe out cruelty.’ Am I addressing anyone who is being slandered? Has somebody borne false witness against you? Well, be very thankful that it is false! I do not quite understand why it is so often said, ‘You see, it is such a downright lie and that is what grieves me so.’ But, dear Friend, it is much better that it should be false than true! If anyone brings an accusation against me, I shall be glad to find that it is false. Let not that be the sting of the trouble which really is the sweetness of it—be glad that they cannot say anything against you unless they speak falsely! However, if you expect to go to Heaven without being slandered, you expect what you are not likely to get, for God Himself was slandered in Paradise! Our Lord Jesus, in whom was no fault, was slandered when He was upon the earth—His Apostles and followers in all ages have had the same treatment! And here is David saying, ‘False witnesses are risen up against me.’”—1898, Sermon #2573 “It is a high and noble thing when a man knows how to mortify sin.”—1901, Sermon #2750

“Oh, blessed be God, it is a bleeding Christ who has reconciled us even on earth! It is a bleeding Christ who has put out the fires of enmity! It is a bleeding Christ who has slain forever the warfare in our spirit against God. Now are we reconciled unto God by the death of His Son.”—1898, Sermon #2587

“Half-hearted prayers ask for a denial and usually get it.”—1900, Sermon #2662
“There is no exhibition like the exhibition of the love of God in Jesus Christ to guilty sinners!”—1896, Sermon #2468

“Virtue is like goodness frozen into ice, hard and cold. But holiness is that same goodness when it is thawed into a clear, running, sparkling stream. Virtue is the best thing that philosophy can produce, but holiness is the true fruit of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and of that alone!” —1896, Sermon #2469

“Whenever justification by faith has been uppermost in the preaching, the morals of the people have been purest and their spirituality has been brightest! But whenever the preachers have extolled the works and ceremonies of the Law, or the Arminianism which brings in something of trust in works, or human power, it is most certain that there has been a declension in point of morals, while religion itself has seemed almost ready to expire. You may go to those who preach up salvation by works to hear them talk, but you had better not go to see how they live—whereas those who preach justification by faith can boldly point to the multitudes who have accepted this Truth of God and whose godly lives prove the sanctifying power of the Doctrine!”—1900, Sermon #2670

“It sometimes puzzles me how God can have such patience with unbelievers. When He has given His only-begotten Son to bleed and die for the guilty, and He says, ‘This is My well-beloved Son, bleeding and dying for you, only trust Him’—if men say that they will not—what can be conceived of more horrible than that? And what clearer proof can there be of the desperate malignity of the human heart that it will not even accept the Son of God, Himself, when He comes dressed in robes of love to save mankind?”—1903, Sermon #2818

“When I first saw the electric light, if you had asked me what it was like, I could only have told you something about its candle-power or its brilliance in comparison with gas, but I could not have made you understand it. But what is the electric light compared with the glory of the sun to one who sees it for the first time? And what are all the suns that could ever be created compared with the wondrous blaze of the Glory of God? Yet such a marvelous light as that has fallen upon you, my Brother, my Sister—‘the light of the knowledge of the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’”—1899, Sermon #2617

“An officer was walking out of the royal presence on one occasion when he tripped over his sword. The king said to him, ‘Your sword is rather a nuisance.’ ‘Yes,’ was the officer’s reply, ‘Your Majesty’s enemies have often said so.’ May you be a nuisance to the world in thatsense—troublesome to the enemies of the King of Kings! While your conduct should be courteous and everything that could be desired as between man and man, yet let your testimony for Christ be given without any flinching and without any mincing of the matter!”—1896, Sermon #2469

“It is a great mistake to make a division between what is “sacred” and what is “secular” in a Christian’s life.”—1900, Sermon #2662

“What a melting thing the love of Christ is! Stout-hearted sinners are sometimes not even moved by the thunderbolts of God, but when they see the wounds of Jesus, that sight brings them to their knees! When they find that He loved them even while they were rejecting Him. That He died for them when they were dead in trespasses and sins. That He had their names engraved upon the palms of His hands and upon His heart even when they were blaspheming Him, and that in ‘Free Grace and dying love,’ there is a shelter provided even for them—then do they bite their lips and cover their eyes, and turn unto the Lord with deep humiliation of spirit.”—1902, Sermon #2793

“God always begins to work in a way that looks like undoing and not doing.”—1901, Sermon #2750“The Christ of the Church of Rome, as I have often told you, is a dead Christ on the Cross, or else a baby Christ in Mary’s arms—but the Christ of the Church of God is a living Christ! We say of the grave, as the angel said to the women, ‘He is not here: for He is risen, as He said.’ We say of the Cross, ‘He is not here. He has put an end to death in making an end of sin by His own death.’ The main thought concerning Christ, to those of us who really know Him, should be that He is the living Christ!”—1898, Sermon #2587

“It is curious, if the doctrine of the Gospel is such a very horrible thing that it drives people away, that at the places where it is preached there are more people than can get in, whereas where some of the modern doctrines are declared, you may see more spiders than people!”—1896, Sermon #2469

“There is no mistake about this matter—‘He that believes not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abides on him.’ And our Lord, Himself, said, ‘He that believes not shall be damned.’ That is the only message for him if he continues in his unbelief—and it shall not be altered to suit the mind of any man that lives!”—1900, Sermon #2670

“Would you keep back anything from Christ? I know you could not if He were to come into His garden! The best things that you have, you would first present to Him, and then everything that you have, you would bring to Him and leave all at His dear feet. We do not ask Him to come to the garden that we may lay up our fruits, that we may put them by and store them up for ourselves—we ask Him to come and eat them. The greatest joy of a Christian is to give joy to Christ! I do not know whether Heaven, itself, can exceed this pearl of giving joy to the heart of Jesus Christ on earth! It can match it, but not exceed it, for it is a superlative joy to give joy to Him—the Man of Sorrows, who was emptied of joy for our sakes and who now is filled u p, again, with joy as each one of us shall come and bring his share and cause to the heart of Christ a new and fresh delight!”—1896, Sermon #2475

“If you want to kill impatience turn to the Word of God, look up an appropriate text, ask to have it applied to your heart by the Holy Spirit and see whether the Grace of patience is not thus implanted within you!”—1901, Sermon #2753

“We must do as the people did at Christmas time in the olden days. It used to be the custom for the poor inhabitants in a village to go round with basins to the rich people in the parish and beg bread and other victuals of them. And the rule was that every gentleman was to fill the bowl that was brought to his door. Of course, the wisest among the poor folk brought a very large bowl for the Christmas gathering, but those who had little faith in the generosity of their wealthy neighbors took a small bowl, and that was filled. But those who took a big bowl had theirs filled too! So, dear Friends, you must always try, in your prayers, to bring a big bowl to God! Bring great faith and rest assured that, according to your faith, it shall be done unto you. If you have little faith, you shall have a little answer. If you have tolerable faith, you shall have a tolerable answer. But if you have a mighty faith, you shall have such a mighty answer that you shall wonder at it, yet you shall feel that it is according to the promise of our text, ‘Call unto Me, and I will answer you.’”—1900, Sermon #2664

“Every particle of faith that there is in the world is a sort of purifier. Wherever it goes, it has a tendency to kill that which is evil. In the spiritual sanitary arrangements which God made for this poor world, He put men of faith—and the faith of these men—into the midst of all this corruption to help to keep other men’s souls alive, even as our Lord Jesus said to His disciples, ‘You are the salt of the earth.’”—1896, Sermon #2475

“If Christ is still alive and if there is, in a certain sense, ‘much more’ power to save in His life than there was of power to reconcile in His death, (Romans 5:10), then, first, all fear of our being overcome ought to vanish. He is victorious! Therefore we shall be victorious! Christ was assaulted by all the powers of death and Hell, and yet He conquered and He lives. We, too, shall conquer, for He is in us, He is with us, He is over us—and we shall live though we die—and we shall win though we are apparently overcome.”—1898, Sermon #2587 “The greatest joy of a Christian is to give joy to Christ!”—1896, Sermon #2475

“What sin is there, in the whole world, that would be put to death if men were left to pick and choose the Agag which each one wished to save? No! Christ came to save His people from their sins—not inthem—and it is essential to salvation that sin should be repented of and, being repented of, should be renounced and that, by the help of God, we should lead a new life, under a new Master, serving from a new motive because the Grace of God has renewed our spirit!”—1900, Sermon #2670

“As I look round this place, I notice some who once were very strongly opposed to our dear Lord and Master. Ah, my Brothers and Sisters, I know who they are who now love Him most and desire to serve Him best—it is you who were formerly exceedingly mad against Him.”—1902, Sermon #2793

“ ‘She said to them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him’ (John 20:13). That was enough to make any of Christ’s loved ones weep and if ever you hear a sermon which has not Christ in it, you may well go down the aisle weeping. And if any ask why you weep, you may reply, ‘Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.’”—1896, Sermon #2475“I see God in everything—from the creeping of an aphid upon a rosebud to the fall of a dynasty! I believe that God is in the earthquake and the whirlwind, but I believe Him to be equally in the gentlest zephyr and in the fall of the sere leaf from the oak of the forest. Blessed is that man to whom there existsnothingin which he cannot see the Presence of God!”—1896, Sermon #2476

“Absolute submission is not enough—we must go on to joyful acquiescence in the will of God…It is nothing but wickedness, whatever form it assumes, when we attempt to resist the will of God.”—1896, Sermon #2476
“Study the Word, that your faith may not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God!”—1896, Sermon #2469
“It often happens that men do not obtain peace with God because they have not come low enough. The gate of Heaven, though it is so wide that the greatest sinner may enter, is, nevertheless, so low that pride can never pass through it.”—1898, Sermon #2571

“My Friend, if you would be saved, do not try to deal with God upon the footing of justice. If you do, you will first have to say that you have never sinned and that would be a lie. You will not be able to prove that assertion—your lips, your eyes, your heart, your hands, your whole conduct will all be witnesses against you! You must admit that you have sinned.”—1898, Sermon #2588

“I pray you who are offended at the Cross, not to think that you will ever get to Heaven, for God and you would not agree there, for He counts the Cross becoming, and you count it foolishness—so there is a radical difference of opinion between you two and one Heaven would not hold you! You must get agreed with God about that matter, or else, depend upon it, you will never enter the pearly gates! You must honor the Son even as you honor the Father, and honor the Son in His blood and wounds and in all His agony and death, or else you shall not come where the Father takes pleasure in the Well-Beloved.”—1899, Sermon #2619

“O you disciples of Jesus, watch and pray, and seek to be like your Master! Pray to be kept from the evil which is in the world and, as for the rest, if men despise you, count that as part of the bargain upon which you have entered—a bargain which shall, in due season, fill you with eternal bliss!”—1903, Sermon #2820

“If you want to exhibit the comfort of the Scriptures, do as Hezekiah did when Rabshakeh came with Sennacherib’s letter full of filthiness and blasphemy. “Hezekiah went up into the House of the Lord and spread it before the Lord.” This is the comfort of the Scriptures, that we may go to the Lord in the worst time of trouble and spread the whole case before the eyes of Infinite Love, expecting and being sure that God will, in some way, work deliverance for us.”—1901, Sermon #2753

“Let every man and every woman among us judge of our life, not merely from that little narrow piece of it which we, ourselves, live, for that is but a span, but let us judge it by its connection with other livesthat may come after our own! If we cannot do all we wish, let us do all we can, in the hope that someone who shall succeed us may complete the project that is so dear to our heart.”—1898, Sermon #2571

“If the Grace which we are supposed to have received has not made us to differ both from our former self and from men of the world, then it is not the true Grace of God.”—1900, Sermon #2671

“This is a matchless instance, not of pride, but of humility, that those dear lips of the heavenly Bridegroom should have to speak to His own commendation and that He should say, ‘I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.’ O human lips, why are you silent, so that Christ must speak about Himself? O human hearts, why are you so hard that you will never feel until Christ, Himself, shall address you? O human eyes, why are you so blind that you shall never see till Christ shows Himself in His own superlative light and loveliness? I think I need not defend my Master, though He used these sweet emblems to set forth Himself, for this is an instance, not of His pride, but of His humility.”—1898, Sermon #2572

“True is it, O Jesus, that there is no light of love in our hearts except the light of Your love! It is the holy fire from Your altar that must kindle the incense in the censer of our hearts. There is no living water to be drawn out of these dry wells! You, O Jesus, must supply them from the bubbling spring in Your own heart! When my heart is conscious of Your love, it loves You in return.”—1902, Sermon #2794

“‘Oh,’ said one, when he looked on one of Turner’s landscapes, ‘I have seen that view every day, but I never saw as much as thatin it.’ ‘No,’ replied Turner, ‘don’t you wish you could?’ And, when the Spirit of God trains and tutors the eyes, they see in Christ what they never saw before. But, even then, as Turner’s eyes were not able to see all the mystery of God’s beauty in nature, so neither is she most trained and educated Christian able to perceive all the matchless beauty that there is in Christ!”—1898, Sermon #2572

“I suppose that if you want to know how this twisting or wresting is done, any one of our general elections will give you the most wonderful examples of how everything that any man may say can be twisted to mean the very reverse of what he said! If there is one thing in which English people are expert beyond all others, it is in the art of misquoting, misstating and misrepresenting. As our Lord was wronged in this fashion, nobody need be surprised if the same should happen to Him. ‘This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days.’”—1898, Sermon #2573
“Believe all the Truth of God with the general company of those who hold it, but mind that you come to particularsand say, ‘What have I to do anymore with idols?’ Do not ask, ‘What has my motherto do with idols? What has my brotherto do with idols? What has myneighborto do with idols?’ but, ‘What have I to do with idols?’ Abhor selfishness and egotism, but, at the same time, be very personal and individual about your own religion! You were born alone and you will die alone—and you have need to be born again individually and personally. And it must come to a personal transaction between yourself and God.”—1898, Sermon #2574

“We are responsible to God for the use we make of our understanding, as well as for the exercise of our affections. There is nothing in the Word of God to justify men in believing what they like, and anyone who neglects to search out the Truth of God commits a sin of omission.”—1900, Sermon #2671

“You who were before dishonest, if the Grace of God has changed you, what have you to do with the tricks of trade? What have you to do with fraudulent bankruptcies? What have you to do with cheating and lying? Let each true Believer cry, ‘What have I to do anymore with idols?’”—1898, Sermon #2574

“It is good to die, at last, when we know what it is to die every day. Paul said, ‘I die daily.’ Well, if we die every day, it will not be hard to die in our last day. You will not be afraid of death if you love the Lord.”—1898, Sermon #2589
“It is nothing but wickedness, whatever form it assumes, when we attempt to resist the will of God.”—1898, Sermon #2574

“When we shall be permitted to see why God had mercy upon man and especially why, out of the human race, he had mercy upon us—why He chose us while others were suffered to perish—we shall be compelled incessantly to lift up our hands in astonishment. And even in the heavenly city, itself, joy shall sometimes be superseded by wonder, and we shall, even there, be astonished to find such matchless Grace displayed for such singular reasons.”—1901, Sermon #2754

“‘The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much,’ but they who do not hear God’s voice cannot effectually pray, for God will not hear their voice if they will not hear His. If we have been deaf to Him, He will be deaf to us. The communion necessary to prevailing prayer render it absolutely essential that we should first set ourselves to hear the voice of God and then, again, it shall be said that the Lord listened to the voice of a man, for the man first listened to the voice of the Lord.”—1899, Sermon #2622

“Oh, I bless God’s name that, though all the people in the world should lift their hands against the Most High and declare that they never would be saved, yet God could, in an instant, if so it pleased Him, make the whole of them bend their knees before Him, cry for the mercy they once rejected and seek the Savior whom once they despised! Here lies the power of the Gospel, in that it gains the mastery over man’s evil will and without his consent changes his nature, and then fully gets his consent, after his nature has been changed!”—1899, Sermon #2629

“The precepts of the Lord are so broad that they touch the secret imagination of the heart.”—1900, Sermon #2671
“It is very hard, I believe, to be a ruler over men and yet to be a servant of God. There seems to be connected with politics in every country something that besmears the mind and defiles the hand that touches it.”—1896, Sermon #2476
“We are bound, dear Friends, not only to preach Christ’s Gospel, but to also preach our experience of it.”—1902, Sermon #2796
“‘Until the day breaks, and the shadows flee away,’ says the song of the spouse [Song of Solomon 2:17]. Perhaps no text is more frequently upon my lips than is this one. I do not think that any passage of Scripture more often recurs to my heart when I am alone.”—1896, Sermon #2477
“Oh, when it comes to this—that you must have Christ, then you shall have Christ! When with every breath you seem to say, ‘Give me Christ, or else I die,’ then you shall not die, but you shall have Christ and live!”—1898, Sermon #2590
“The best cure for the cares of this life is to care much to please God! If we loved Him better, we should love the world far less, and be less troubled about our portion in it.”—1896, Sermon #2477

“Men in general do not love Christ enough, or else they would have hedged Him in with all sorts of restrictions—they would have made a franchise for Him and nobody would have been able to be saved except those who paid, I know not how much a year in taxes!”—1898, Sermon #2572

“We are to take care not to do what appears wrong in the sight of others, so as to lead them astray. We are not to be judged by other men’s consciences, but, at the same time, we are not to lead others to offend. As far as we can possibly do it, we must seek to cut off those things that are likely to do injury to others.”—1899, Sermon #2629
“Do not be ashamed of confessing your past folly. I think a man who says, ‘I was wrong,’ really says, in effect, ‘I am a little wiser, today, than I was yesterday.’ But he who never admits that he has made a mistake and who claims that he has always been in the right, has evidently never made much growth in knowledge of himself. So, do not be ashamed to say, ‘Now I believe,’ though that confession may have been preceded by many a doubt.”—1899, Sermon #2623

“Whenever anybody, who is very rich, gets up and says, ‘I am a perfect man,’ I feel inclined to say what Christ said to the young man who thought that he was perfect, ‘Sell all that you have.’ Somebody asks, perhaps, ‘Does Christ propose that test to every one of us?’ No, certainly not, but to any of us who say that we are perfect, that test may be applied. If you are such a perfect man, see if you can do as our Lord said—sell all that you have and give the proceeds to the poor.”—1900, Sermon #2671

“Truly, ‘the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence,’ but it is the violence of humble men and women who dare to act with holy boldness because they are encouraged by their God. That I, a poor sinner, should ever speak with God in a sort of bullying tone, as I have heard some do, as though they said even to their God, ‘Stand and deliver,’ this will never do! Your mouth is in the best position when it is in the dust—and your heart is nearest to prevailing with God when it is bowed even to the ground. ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto You, O Lord,’ should be the language with which we humbly approach His Throne of Grace.”—1898, Sermon #2590

“Christ on the Cross saves us when He becomes to us Christ in the heart.”—1896, Sermon #2478
“If we are ever ashamed of loving Christ, we have good reason to be ashamed of such shameful shame!”—1896, Sermon #2478

“ ‘But He turned and rebuked them, and said, Youknow not what manner of spirit you are of. For the Son of Man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but tosave them.’ (Luke 9:55, 56).If that principle had been always remembered and followed, there would have been no persecution. To
cause a man to suffer in his body, or in his estate because of his religious opinions, be they what they may, is a violation of Christianity! Consciences belong to God, alone, and it is not for us to be calling for fire, the stake, the rack or imprisonment for men because they do not believe as
we do! ‘The Son of Man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.’”—1901, Sermon #2754

“Human words, at best, are such poor things that they stagger under the mighty burden of the perfections of Christ!”—1896, Sermon #2478

“I have heard it said that there are certain Truths in God’s Word which it is better for us not to preach. It is admitted that they are true, but it is alleged that they are not edifying. I will not agree to any such plan! This is just going back to old Rome’s method. Whatever it has seemed good to God’s wisdom to reveal, it is wise for God’s servants to proclaim.”—1903, Sermon #2820

“The Truth of God never seems to have such vividness about it as when a man tells it out of his own soul. You read it in this blessed Book and you know it is true, for God has revealed it, but when you hear a godly man say, ‘I have tasted and handled this and have proved its truth,’ then, somehow, there is a still greater force in it which brings the Truth of God home to you.”—1902, Sermon #2796

“You must also remember, my Brothers and Sisters, whoever you may be, that if there is no distinction between you and the world around you, you may be certain that you are of the world, for, in the children of God there must always be some marks to distinguish them from the rest of mankind so that we can contrast them with the ungodly, and address to them the words of our text, “But you have not so learned Christ.” There is a something in them which is not to be found in the best worldling. Something which is not to be discovered in the most admirable carnal man. A something in their character which can be readily perceived and which marks them as belonging to another and higher race, the twice-born, the elect of God, eternally chosen by Him and, therefore, made to be choice ones through the effectual working of His Grace.”—1901, Sermon #2719

“Ah, dear Friends, our complaints of God are generally groundless! We get into a state of mind in which we say, ‘God has forsaken us,’ when He is really dealing with us more than He was known to do. A child who is feeling the strokes of the rod is very foolish to say, ‘My father has forgotten me.’ No, those very blows, under which he is smarting, are reminders that his father does notforget him—and your trials and your troubles, your depressions and your sorrows are tokens that you are not forgotten of God.”—1900, Sermon #2672

“If the Lord will guide you to Heaven through the words of a chimney-sweep, it would be far better than that you should go to Hell under the ministry of the most eloquent orator or the greatest bishop who ever lived. If you are brought to Jesus Christ by one who murders the Queen’s English—it is a pity that he should do that but, still, it does not matter much, so long as he does not murder the Lord’s Gospel, for the Gospel comes out straight and clear, despite his broken words.”—1898, Sermon #2590

“…for it is not God’s way to make men His servants, except so far as they willingly yield themselves to Him. He never violates the human will, though He constantly and effectually influences it.”—1899, Sermon #2631
“You know how very unacquainted many people are with the Song of Solomon—they shut up this Book of Canticles in despair and say that they cannot understand its meaning. You will find that it is just the same with every truly spiritual thing!”—1896, Sermon #2479

“The Gospel is very precious to those of us who know its power, but, beyond all question, Christ Himself is even more precious than His Gospel. It is delightful to read any promise of the Scriptures, but it is more delightful to come into communion with the faithful Promiser.”—1896, Sermon #2479

“I have heard of the ‘christening’ of babies—that is an idle superstition and a perversion of Christ’s ordinance of Believers’ Baptism—but I believe in the Christening of everything a Christian touches! Make it all Christ-like by doing everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, as the Apostle Paul says, ‘Whether therefore you eat, or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.’ Thus engrave His name upon the palms of your hands.”—1900, Sermon #2672

“That is the first part of overcoming the world—breaking loose from its bonds so that one can say, ‘I am not tied down by it any longer. By God’s Grace, I am a free man in Christ Jesus.’”—1901, Sermon #2757

“There is sure to be also about these young Christians the sweet smell of zealand, whatever may be said against zeal, I will take up the clubs for it as long as I live! In the work of God we cannot do without fire! We Baptists like water because our Master has ordained the use of it, but we must also have fire, fire from Heaven, the fire of the Holy Spirit. When I see our young men and young women full of zeal for God’s Glory, I say, ‘God bless them! Let them go ahead.’ Some of the old folk want to put a bit in the mouths of these fiery young steeds and to hold them in—but I trust that I shall always be on their side and say, ‘No, let them go as fast as they like. If they have zeal without knowledge, it is a deal better than having knowledge without zeal! Only wait a bit and they will get all the knowledge they need.’”—1896, Sermon #2480

“We have not yet sufficiently learned the value of an immortal soul if we do not feel that we would be willing to live, say 70 years, to be the means of saving one souland be willing to compass the whole globe—preaching in every city, town and village—if we might only be rewarded at the last with just one convert.”—1896, Sermon #2481

“If you are a true follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, you cannot be at ease while souls are being lost! I fear that it would not matter in the least to some professors whether a whole nation was lost or saved! They would be just as comfortable, whatever happened. But they who have the spirit of Christ and are in sympathy with Him, have hearts of companion, so that the loss of any one sinner fills them with dismay—and the penitence of any one sinner makes their heart rejoice with exceeding joy!”—1903, Sermon #2821

“The nearest thing to being saved is knowing that one is lost! When a man is really lost in his own consciousness, the next thing is for him to be saved! The end of yourself is the beginning of Christ. May the Lord cause you to know that you are thoroughly lost, and then soon you shall sing, ‘We found Christ in the woods where we lost ourselves.’”—1898, Sermon #2590

“This is the very essence of true religion—personally living with a personal Savior, personally trusting a personal Redeemer, personally crying out to a personal Intercessor and receiving personal answers from a Person who loves us and who manifests Himself to us as He does not unto the world.”—1901, Sermon #2719

“Nowhere in the whole compass of Revelation is there a promise of forgiveness to the man who continues in his iniquity!”—1902, Sermon #2797

“A man may go to Seminary, he may learn all about the letter of Scripture, but he is no minister of God if he has not sat at Jesus’ feet and learned of Him. And when he has learned of Him and the Truth of God has come home to his heart as his own personal possession given to Him by Christ, then shall he speak with more than mortal power, but not till then!”—1900, Sermon #2674

“I pray you, do not be anxious for anything that shall embalm your reputation. Embalming is for the dead—so the living may be content to let their name and fame be blown away by the same wind that blows it to them. What does our reputation matter, after all? It is nothing but the opinion or the breath of men and that is of little or no value to the child of God. Serve God faithfully and then leave your name and fame in His keeping. There is a day coming when the righteous shall shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father!”—1903, Sermon #2842

“…for when God is about to give a man a drink of the cup of salvation, He often first puts his taste right by washing out his mouth with a draught of bitters to take away the flavor of the accursed sweets of sin!”—1899, Sermon #2631

“Oh, for a burst of sunlight from the face of Christ! Then would the shadows of today soon fly away! They who have never seen Him may love modern novelties and falsehoods, but if they have beheld His face and have been won by His charms, they will hold that He who is the same, yesterday, today and forever, is infinitely to be preferred to all the inventions of men! ”—1896, Sermon #2483
“I believe that there would be much more persecution than there is if there were more real Christians. But we have become so like the world that the world does not hate us as it once did. If we would be more just, more upright, more true, more Christ-like, more godly, we would soon hear all the dogs of Hell baying with all their might against us!”—1896, Sermon #2483

“It needs more than a world of Grace to overcome the world when the world makes much of you!”—1901, Sermon #2757

“It is a good thing to praise Christ in the presence of His friends. It is, sometimes, a better thing to extol Him in the presence of His enemies. It is a great thing to praise Jesus Christ by day, but there is no music sweeter than the nightingale’s—and she praises God by night. It is well to praise the Lord for His mercy when you are in health, but make sure that you do it when you are sick, for then your praise is more likely to be genuine.”—1896, Sermon #2483

“God’s holy ones should be happy ones! No man has so much right to be happy as he that is holy. We serve the happy God—we may well be happy ourselves—and we are not to keep our happiness hidden within our own hearts. ‘Let Your saints shout for joy.’”—1898, Sermon #2590

“I would earnestly urge all Christian workers to be sure to get some time alone for the prayerful study of the Word. The more of such time that you can get, the better will it be both for yourself and for others. You know that it is impossible for a sower of seed to be always scattering, and never gathering—the seed basket must be filled again and again, or the sowing must come to an end.”—1900, Sermon #2674

“I would rather repeat the Word of God, syllable by syllable, than I would dareto think for myself apart from the revealed will of God! What are men’s thoughts, after all, but vanity educed from vanity? But the Word of the Lord endures forever—it shall abide when even Heaven and earth shall pass away!”—1896, Sermon #2483

“To my mind, it is a very melancholy thought that there should be any who do not know the sweetest thing in all the world, the best and happiest thing beneath the stars—the joy of having Christ in their heart as the hope of Glory!”—1896, Sermon #2485
“Despair is a blessed preparation for faith in Jesus! The end of the creature is the beginning of the Creator. Your extremity is God’s opportunity. Now that you are helpless and hopeless, God will come to your rescue!”—1899, Sermon #2631
“Overcome the world by patiently enduring all the persecution that falls to your lot. Do not get angry and do not become downhearted. Jests break no bones and if you had any bone broken for Christ’s sake, it would be the most honored one in your whole body!”—1901, Sermon #2757
“Our Lord Jesus Christ would not have us think little of His company and, sometimes, it is only as we miss it that we begin to appreciate the sweetness of it! If we always had high days and holidays, we might not be so thankful when our gala days come round.”—1896, Sermon #2485

“Depression of spirit is no index of declining Grace—the very loss of joy and the absence of assurance may be accompanied by the greatest advancement in the spiritual life. Mark you, if it continues month after month, and even year after year, then it is a sign of great weakness of faith—but if it comes only occasionally, as clouds pass over our sky, it is well.”—1902, Sermon #2798

“A Brother complains that there are no conversions under his ministry. Will he ask himself whether he has aimed at conversion? A Sunday school teacher says that she has seen no girls in her class brought to Christ. Has her teaching been such as to tend that way? Has Christ been set forth in His sweet attraction? Has prayer been offered that the girls might come to Christ? Have they been pleaded with? Have they been taught their lost condition? Have they been shown the excellence of Christ as a Savior? You see, if we do live in a region of means suited to ends, it is the path of wisdom to find out the means best suited to the desired end—and to use it in dependence upon God.”—1898, Sermon #2559

“Some ministers preach very finely about Christ, but that which saves sinners is preaching Christ Himself. He is our salvation and we shall never put that salvation in tangible, graspable, real form unless we go to Him and get distinctly from Himself the message we are to deliver on His behalf.”—1900, Sermon #2674

“A true sower, also, is a disseminator of the Word of God. No man is a sower unless he scatters the Truth of God. If he does not preach Truth, he is not a sower in the true meaning of that term. A man may go whistling up and down the furrows and people may mistake him for a sower, but he is not really one—and if there is not, in what we preach, the real, solid Truth of God’s Word—however prettily we may put our sweet nothings, we have not been serving the Lord. We must really scatter the Living Seed or else we are not worthy of the title of sower.”—1903, Sermon #2842

“Some men cannot endure to hear the Doctrine of Election—I suppose they like to choose their own wives, but they are not willing that Christ should select His bride, the Church!”—1898, Sermon #2590

“I shall never understand, even in Heaven, why the Lord Jesus should ever have loved me.”—1896, Sermon #2485“It would be better never to live than to live forever under conviction of sin, for the arrows of God drink up the very fountains of our life, pour fire into the blood and make us feel as if a thousand deaths were preferable to living under an awful sense of God’s wrath!”—1899, Sermon #2631

“Those of us who are called to preach the Word have often to cry to the Lord to help us to bring Christ into the assembly by our words—though, indeed, the words of any human language are but a poor conveyance for the Christ of God!”—1896, Sermon #2485
“Remember, Brothers and Sisters, that when we have once repented, we do not leave off repenting, for penitence is a Grace that is as long-lived as faith! And as long as we are capable of believing, we shall also necessarily need to repent, for we shall always be sinning.”—1896, Sermon #2486
“It is one of the grandest things in all the world when a godly man, with the simplicity of a child, believes God and fully trusts Him for everything!”—1896, Sermon #2486

“People talk of what they call, “chance,” but I never found any chance of a man’s getting to be holy without intending to be so! I never yet heard of a man doing any great good in the world if he did not mean to do it! I never heard of a man glorifying God by accident, nor of anyone getting to Heaven, as it were, by the throw of the dice, somehow finding himself there, but not knowing how it all happened.”—1899, Sermon #2632

“We would be much more restful if we did but do our God the justice of trusting Him at all times, for He can never fail us!”—1901, Sermon #2758

“To be cast down is often the best thing that could happen to us. Do you ask, ‘Why?’ Because, when we are cast down, it checks our pride. We are very apt to grow too big. It is a good thing for us to be taken down a notch or two. We sometimes rise so high, in our own estimation, that unless the Lord took away some of our joy, we should be utterly destroyed by pride.”—1902, Sermon #2798

“There can never be any reasonableness in our dreaming that there is in us any cause for pride.”—1898, Sermon #2591

“Every preacher of the Gospel should see to it that this is true concerning himself. When we pass on to the people the words which God has given to us, we supply them with real spiritual fool and so we glorify God. But if we only give them our own words, we do but mock their hunger and we dishonor God. Our blessed Master, though quite able to speak His own original thoughts, kept to the words of His Father—let us be careful to imitate His example.”—1903, Sermon #2821

“I cannot tell how God’s mind comes into contact with man’s mind, but I know that it does—that His Spirit comes into most intimate connection with our spirit and so influences our spirit that the sin, which once seemed to fascinate and charm us, loses all its attractions and delights. And the doubts and fears, which for a while depress us, have, by-and-by, no depressing power whatever! You remember how Eliphaz said to Job,‘At destruction and famine you shall laugh,’ and God often helps His servants to laugh at those very things which before seemed great burdens to them. There is nothing in your spiritual case that is too hard for the Lord—so bring it before Him in faith and prayer this very hour!”—1900, Sermon #2675

“If you hear the Gospel, dear Friends, and reject it, that is your problem, and not ours. If you are saved by it, give God the Glory—but if it proves to be a savor of death unto death to you, yours is the sin, the shame and the sorrow. The preacher cannot save souls, so he will not take the responsibility that does not belong to him.”—1903, Sermon #2842

“Brothers and Sisters, if we do not pray for sinners, for whom shall we pray? If we do not plead for the abandoned, if we do not offer supplications for those who are perverse in heart, we have omitted to pray for the very persons who most need our intercession! Let us bring these hard hearts beneath the almighty hammer! Let us, by prayer, bring these lepers beneath the healing touch of Him who, despite their loathsomeness, can say to them, ‘Be you clean!’ Let no degree of natural or inherited depravity, or of depravity that has come from long continuance in sin, hinder us from praying for all the unsaved whom we know! ‘O God, have mercy upon these guilty ones!’”—1896, Sermon #2486

“Souls are often converted through godly conversation. Simple words frequently do more good than long sermons. Disjointed, unconnected sentences are often of more use than the most finely polished periods or rounded sentences. If you would be useful, let the praises of Christ be always on your tongue. Let Him live on your lips. Speak of Him always! When you walk by the way, when you sit in your house, when you rise up and even when you lie down, it may be that you have someone to whom it is possible that you may yet whisper the Gospel of the Grace of God!”—1900, Sermon #2695

“Free thinking and free living—these are the desires of ungodly men. But when the Grace of God has renewed the heart, the soul finds its true freedom in obedience to Christ’s commands, and its best thinking while sitting at the feet of Jesus to observe His gracious Words.”—1896, Sermon #2487
“I fear that there are many Christians who lose their rest in another way, namely, through the world’sjoys. Have you ever been with a party of friends where there has been a great deal of mirth and very little Divine Grace? If so, have you not felt, when you got home, that you could not pray as you were known to do? Sometimes you have been taking your recreation properly enough, but you have not carried Christ with you as you should have done—and you have found, after a while, that your rest has gone. Laughter and merriment may do you untold harm unless they are sanctified by the Word of God and prayer—if they are so sanctified, they may not cause us to leave our rest.”—1901, Sermon #2758

“I believe, my Brothers, that if we preach Christ Crucified with crucified hearts—if we set forth Christ with earnest longing that men may see Him, they will see Him, ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.’”—1898, Sermon #2559

“It is always well to adapt our speech to those who are about us. You remember how Cobbett said that he used the English language. ‘I speak,’ he said, ‘not only so that men can understand me if they will, but so that they cannot misunderstand me if they try to do so.’”—1898, Sermon #2592

“There is no sin which you have committed which the blood of Christ cannot wash out if you believe in Him! Though you were even red with murder, black with blasphemy and covered from head to foot with the filthiness of lust, yet, on your believing in Jesus, you will be made, then and there, as white as snow! Free pardon for every kind of sin is proclaimed to every soul that will believe in Jesus Christ. “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men,” if they will only trust in Christ. So, in this sense, there is nothing too hard for the Lord. There is no sinner too guilty for the Lord to forgive when he trusts the Savior’s Sacrifice on Calvary.”—1900, Sermon #2675

“They may have cravings after other things, but nothing can satisfy the deep real need of their nature but Jesus Christ and salvation by His precious blood! He is the Bread of Life which came down from Heaven! He is the Water of Life of which, if a man drinks, he shall never thirst again! Hence, it becomes us to be often dwelling upon this theme, for it is most necessary to the sons of men. This is the subject which God the Holy Spirit delights to bless. I am sure that, other things being equal, He honors preaching in proportion to the savor of Christ that is in it. I may preach a great deal about the Church, but the Holy Spirit does not take of the things of Christ to glorify the Church. I may preach doctrine or practice apart from Christ—that would be giving the husk without the kernel—but where Jesus Christ sweetens all and savors all, there will the Holy Spirit delight to rest upon the ministry and make it quick and powerful to the conversion of men!”—1899, Sermon #2635

“It is only a pure heart that loves the pure Word of the Lord! So, if you love the Word of God because of its purity, it is an argument that your heart has been renewed by Grace.”—1896, Sermon #2487

“Any man who thinks that he can create a new heart in any other person, had better begin by creating a fly. When he has done that, then let him think that he can make a sinful man to be a new creature in Christ Jesus! Go and raise the dead, if you can. Speak to those who lie in our cemeteries and cause them to live again—and then imagine that you have within you the power to call a dead soul to spiritual life! This is the work of God alone! God’s arm must be made bare before this miracle can be worked—and our failures teach us our absolute dependence upon Him. ”—1903, Sermon #2843

“ And Your Law is the truth (Psalms 119:42) . That is what I believe this Book of God is— ‘the truth.’ I know of nothing Infallible but the Bible. Every man must have a fixed point somewhere—some believe in an infallible pope and some in an infallible church, but I believe in an Infallible Book, expounded by the Infallible Spirit who is ready to guide us into all truth—‘Your Law is the truth.’”—1896, Sermon #2487

“‘ Why do Your disciples transgress the tradition ofthe elders? For they wash not their hands when they eat bread’ (Matthew 15:2). Would you have thought that full-grown men could have made it a matter of business to come from Jerusalem down into the country to talk to Christ about the fact that His disciples did not always wash their hands before they ate their breakfasts? Yet we have men, nowadays, who make a great point of what is to be done with the so-called ‘consecrated’ bread that is left, and who are much concerned about what kind of a dress a ‘priest’ ought to wear when he is engaged in the performance of certain duties. How sad is it that such trifles as these should occupy the minds of immortal beings while men are dying and God is dishonored!”—1896, Sermon #2487

“We love because of loveliness apprehended and perceived, but Christ loved because He would impart His own loveliness to the object of His choice.”—1896, Sermon #2488

“When our soul is cast down within us we begin to have closer dealings with Christ than we had before. A long continuance of calm induces listlessness. There is a way of being wanton towards Christ. We begin to think that we can do without Him—we imagine that we have such a store of ready money that we can trade on our own account. But when gloomy doubts arise, we go back to the place where our spiritual life commenced.”—1902, Sermon #2798

“Here they come—detachment of late-comers stamping up the aisle, interrupting the first prayer. Others come straggling in all through the reading of the Scriptures. God’s Word seems so contemptible in their esteem that they tramp up the aisle as if it were some unimportant book that was being read. Then comes the singing and some join in it heartily. But others do not even know what hymn it is, for they have only just arrived. And I have known some friends, in certain places, come so late that the minister had almost finished his sermon—and they were just in time to go home with the congregation! This ought not to be the case anywhere and is not the case where all are waiting for Jesus. I like the thought of the good woman who said that she never went to a service late for it was part of her religion not to disturb the worship of other people. I wish many more agreed with her. Oh, how much loss of spirituality, how much loss of blessing has come by that straggling in, one by one, instead of all being assembled, waiting for the Savior with such due respect to His holy name that they would not think of being late!”—1898, Sermon #2593

“If, Beloved, you and I get at a distance from God. If we follow Christ afar off, as Peter did. If we grow cold in heart, if we are neglectful of prayer, if the Word of God is not the subject of our constant study, if we get worldly and carnal like so many of our fellow Christians are, we shall soon find that the rest of our soul is gone.”—1901, Sermon #2758

“I grow angry, I confess it, when I hear some men speak of Christ. They talk of my Lord in these days as if He were some common person and they have “comparative religions” in which they compare Him with I know not whom! I love my Lord so well that I must boil over with indignation when His name is disparaged.”—1896, Sermon #2488

“Our Lord Jesus Christ was bound and there flows from that fact its opposite— then His people are all free. When Christ was made a curse for us, He became a blessing to us. When Christ was made sin for us, we were made the righteousness of God in Him. When He died, then we lived. And so, as He was bound, we were set free. The type of that exchange of prisoners is seen in the fact that Barabbas was set free when the Lord Jesus Christ was given up to be crucified. And still more in His plea for His disciples in the garden, ‘If therefore you seek Me, let these go their way.’”—1903, Sermon #2822

“The first thing to do, when the throat is clear after an illness, is to sing praises to God! The first thing to do, when the eyes are brightened again, is to look up to the Lord with thankfulness and gratitude.”—1896, Sermon #2489

“As surely as Jesus lives, His feet will stand in the latter day upon Mount Olivet and He will come to gloriously reign among His ancients! This Second Coming of our Lord, not as a Sin-Offering, not in shame and humiliation, but in all the Glory of His Father and of His holy angels, makes us strike together with a joyous clash the high-sounding cymbals!”—1896, Sermon #2489

“Oh, what a blessed thing is the faith that enables the soul to postpone the present in order to obtain that blessed future! For what is the present, after all, but a fleeting show, an empty dream? But the future is eternal and incorruptible, reserved in Heaven at the right hand of God, where there are pleasures forevermore!”—1900, Sermon #2676

“I think that one of the worst enemies of the Gospel of Christ, at the present time, is to be found in the fiction of the day. People get these worthless books and sit, and sit, forgetful of the duties of this world, and of all that relates to the world to come, just losing themselves in the story of the hero or heroine. I have seen them shedding tears over things that never happened, as if there were not enough real sorrows in the world for us to grieve over.”—1903, Sermon #2843

“When Jesus Christ is lifted up, it is as God the Father would have it! It is as the Holy Spirit would have it and, where this is the case, we may expect to have seals to our ministry and souls for our hire!”—1899, Sermon #2635

“It needs a holy man to give thanks at the remembrance of a holy God. Sinners hate holiness because they dread holiness, but the saints love holiness because they have no cause to dread it and because, on the other hand, it has become a fountain of comfort and joy to them.”—1896, Sermon #2489

“Does not this lack of restfulness also decrease your power of working for Christ? You cannot plead with a sinner as you used to do. You cannot speak to the anxious as you once did for, while your own soul is in the dark, although you may wish to give light to others, you feel that you cannot do it. If you really wish to serve the Lord effectively, you must have the joy of the Lord to be your strength.”—1901, Sermon #2758

“The man who has no thanks to give ought not to be at the Table of the Lord, for it is called the Eucharist, which signifies the giving of thanks. It is intended to be a giving of thanks from beginning to end. Jesus took the bread and gave thanks. After the same manner, also, He took the cup and gave thanks. So, “Sing to the Lord, O you saints of His and give thanks.” If we would come aright to the Table of the Lord, we must be thankful saints.”—1896, Sermon #2489

“God save the man to whom a calm, itself, becomes more dangerous than a tempest!”—1896, Sermon #2490“I think I have known some persons who may have possessed a conscience, but if so, it had gone to sleep. I have great fear for religious men with sleepy consciencesand it is really amazing what mischief may be done by men who seem to be heartily religious, yet whose consciences have gone soundly asleep.”—1896, Sermon #2490

“I would rather go to Heaven doubting all the way than be lost through self-confidence. I would rather cry out in the bitterness of my spirit, “Am I sincere or not?” and cry it out every day, than write myself down among the blessed and, at last, wake up and find myself in Hell!”—1896, Sermon #2490

“The old fable speaks of the Augean stable, foul enough to have poisoned a nation, which Hercules cleansed, but our sins were fouler than that! Dunghills are sweet compared with these abominations! What a degrading task it seems for Christ to undertake—the purging of our sins! The sweepers of the streets, the dishwashers of the kitchen, the cleansers of the sewers have honorable work compared with this of purging sin! Yet the holy Christ, incapable of sin, stooped to purge our sins! I want you to meditate upon that wondrous work and to remember that He did it before He went back to Heaven. Is it not a wonderful thing that Christ purged our sins even before we had committed them? There they stood, before the sight of God, as already existent in all their hideousness—but Christ came, and purged them. This, surely, ought to make us sing the song of songs! Before I sinned, He purged my sins away—amazing and strange as it is, yet it is so! ”—1899, Sermon #2635

“What an appropriate prayer is that for you Sunday school teachers and Christian ministers to offer, ‘Open You my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Your Law’! I think that if I had, as a preacher, to make only one request to my Master, and He asked me, ‘What will you that I should do unto you?’—I would reply, ‘Lord, that I may receive my sight more fully than ever, and see Your Truth more clearly than ever,’because there is no fear about our speaking for God if our seeing is what it should be. That is the main matter and, therefore, the Lord asks each one of us, ‘What do you see?’ If our answer proves that we have seen well, it is because the Spirit of God has enlightened us and, enlightenment from God having been once received, we shall proclaim to others right gladly what God has revealed to us.”—1900, Sermon #2678

“There is a holy fear which must not be banished from the Church of God. There is a sacred anxiety which puts us to the question and examines us whether we are in the faith—and it is not to be laughed at as some would do. It is all very fine to say, “Believe that you are right, and you are right,” but if you believe that you are right and you are, all the while, wrong, you put yourself beyond the probability of ever getting right! He who believes himself to be saved when he is not, is likely to shut the door of salvation in his own face and to perish self-excluded. God save us from that fatal folly!”—1896, Sermon #2490

“Sin hardens the heart. Every sin makes room for another sin and it is always easier to sin again after you have sinned once. No, more—I might even say that it becomes almost inevitable that you will sin again after you have sinned once. Sin hardens the mind so that it does not receive the Gospel.”—1903, Sermon #2843

“The world is all scaffolding—the Church of Christ is the true building. The ultimate purpose of God is the gathering out of the world as many as He has given unto His Son, Jesus Christ, that they may have eternal life in Him and glorify Him forever.”—1902, Sermon #2799

“Do not bind Christ with cords. Beware, you who are unconverted, that you never bind Christ. You may do so by not reading His Word. You have a Bible at home, but you never read it—it is clasped, laid away in a drawer with your best pocket handkerchiefs. Is it not so? That is another picture of Christ in bonds—a poor shut-up Bible that is never allowed to speak with you—no, not even to have half a word with you, for you are in such a hurry about other things that you cannot listen to it! Untie the cords—let it have its liberty! Commune with it sometimes. Let the heart of God in the Bible speak to your own heart. If you do not, that clasped Bible, that shut-up Bible—that precious Book hidden away in the drawer—is Christ in prison and, one day, when you little expect it, you will hear Christ say, “Inasmuch as you did this to the greatest of all My witnesses, you did it unto Me.” You kept Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah and all the Prophets in prison! And all the Apostles and the Master, Himself, you bound with cords and you would not hear a word that they had to say!”—1903, Sermon #2822

“No man knows how much of devil there is asleep in him—and no man may dream that he is secure from the worst of evils unless he comes to Jesus, gets a new heart and puts himself into the keeping of the One who is better and stronger than himself.”—1896, Sermon #2490

“…it seems to me—and I shall leave it to your judgment to consider and approve what I say—that every man ought to be ashamed of not loving the Lord Jesus Christ and not trusting such a Savior as the Lord Jesus Christ is Godin human flesh, bleeding, dying, bearing the penalty of human sin and then presenting Himself freely as our Sacrifice and saying that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but shall have everlasting life! Do you push Him away from you? Will you trample on His blood and count it an unholy thing? Will you despise His Cross? It sometimes seems to me that blasphemy and adultery and murder—tremendous evils though these are—scarcely reach the height of guilt that comes through refusing the great love of Christ—thrusting Him aside whom God took from His bosom and gave up to die that men might live through Him!”—1896, Sermon #2491

“O Believer, if He has made an end of it, [sin] then there is an end to it and what more can there be of it?”—1899, Sermon #2635 “I rather like the idea of a young person, at Brighton, who asked that she might have grey horses to draw her to her funeral. Why not? Why always have black ones? Why not have the white horses of delight? Let those who linger here sorrow that their loved ones have gone, but let them not be so ungenerous as not to sympathize in the eternal joy upon which righteous souls have entered!”—1901, Sermon #2758

“To get money is well enough, if you get it that you may use it well. And to learn is right enough, if you learn with the view of teaching others. If our life is not to be wasted, there must be a living to God with a noble purpose! And they who have lived in vain with multitudes of opportunities of doing good ought to be ashamed—and such shame should bring them to the Savior’s feet in humble penitence. God give such shame as that to any here who ought to have it, that they may at once seek the name of the Lord!”—1896, Sermon #2491

“He who counts the brilliant stars, counts such dim things as our understanding—and He who numbers the very hairs of our head never fails to reckon the cries of our hearts.”—1900, Sermon #2678

[Speaking to Believers.] “Is it not a wonderful thing that God loved me, and loved you, (let us individualize it)—that God so loved us that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him might not perish, but have everlasting life? He gave His Son for you! And for me. It is as though one bartered a diamond to buy a common pebble from the brook, or gave away an empire to purchase some foul thing not worthy of being picked off a dunghill! Yet we are persuaded that He did it, and that the love of God is most clearly to be seen in the fact that He gave His Son Jesus Christ to die instead of us.”—1896, Sermon #2492

“There is nothing about death that the Believer should construe into a fear that it will separate him from the love of Christ. Christ loved you when He died—He will love you when you die! It was after death—remember that—it was afterdeath that His heart poured out the tribute of blood and water by which we have the double cure! See, then, how He loves us in death and after death!”—1896, Sermon #2492

“If we regard salvation as a means of only lifting up our race from its fall and putting it among the princes, we have made a mistake. We must remember that God’s Glory is a greater object even than man’s salvation. Not so much to save us did God give His Son, as to honor Himself and to glorify that Son of His. And we must always remember that the Gospel has for its chief aim, the glory of all the attributes of the Divine Being. He has determined to gather together, at last, all things in Christ that are in Heaven and in earth.”—1899, Sermon #2635

“I must confess that I am more afraid of life than of death. ‘Oh,’ says one, ‘but dying is such hard work.’ Do you think so? Why, dying is the endof work—it is livingthat is hard work! I am not so much afraid of dying as I am of sinning—that is ten times worse than death.”—1896, Sermon #2492

“So, Brothers and Sisters, I hope it has come to this with many of us, that Christ’s Cross is our crown. We have fallen in love with it and we gladly bear it for His sake. The very hardships that we endure in connection with Christ’s Kingdom have become a joy to us! While, as for His Glory, that is now our honor and, as for Himself, He is our Heaven!”—1901, Sermon #2760

“WHEN I look upon this great assembly of people, I think to myself—there will be many here to whom these chapters that we have read out of Solomon’s Song will seem very strange. Of course they will, for they are meant for the inner circle of Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ! This sacred Canticle is almost the central Book of the Bible. It seems to stand like the Tree of Life in the midst of the garden of Eden, in the very center of the Paradise of God. You must know Christ and love Christ, or else many of the expressions in this Book will seem to you but as an idle tale.”—1896, Sermon #2485

“It is always best for us, if there is anything to be said in our praise, not to say it ourselves, but to let somebody else say it. Brother, if your trumpeter is dead, put the trumpet away! When that trumpet needs to be blown, there will be a trumpeter found to use it—but you need never blow it yourself.”—1896, Sermon #2493

“He that sows without a plow may reap without a sickle. He who preaches the Gospel without preaching the Law of God may hold all the results of it in his hand and there will be little for him to hold.”—1903, Sermon #2843

“Do you realize, dear Hearers, you who are now hearing the Gospel, but have not received it, that God’s threats take effect at once? ‘No,’ you say, ‘He has not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.’ That is most true, yet there is a sense in which His sentence takes effect at once. For instance, ‘He that believes not is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.’ If you have heard the Gospel—and some of you have heard it many, many years—and yet have not heeded it, you will not be condemned for the first time at the Last Great Day, you are condemned even now!”—1900, Sermon #2678

“I cannot help remarking how continually the Apostle uses such expressions as, ‘in Christ,’ ‘in whom,’ ‘in Him.’ [Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians.] He will not have a doctrine apart from Christ! He will not mention a single blessing, or a single mercy without Christ! I believe there is no way of preaching Gospel doctrines truly apart from the Master. In Christ’s own days, if you had asked one of His followers what he believed, he would not have been long telling you! He would not have pointed to 50 doctrines, but he would have pointed to Christ and said, ‘I believe in Him.’”—1899, Sermon #2635

“It is an awful thing to contemplate what it would be if there were no Savior, but what difference is it if there is a Savior, but men never hear of Him?”—1903, Sermon #2822

“There is an adaptation in men, even while they are unconverted, which God has put into them for their future service. Luke, you know, was qualified to write his Gospel because he had been a physician. And Matthew was qualified to write the particular Gospel which he has left us because he had been a publican. There may be a something about your habits of life and about your constitution and your condition that will qualify you for some special niche in the Church of God in years to come. Oh, happy day when Jesus shall look upon you and call you to follow Him! Happy day when He didlook upon some of us and saw in us what His love meantto put there—that He might make of us vessels of mercy meet for the Master’s use!”—1896, Sermon #2493

“The same sun which melts wax hardens clay. And the same Gospel which melts some persons to repentance hardens others in their sins.”—1900, Sermon #2678
“You must never imagine that you are to pick and choose who is to be saved! That is not a matter that is left to you—the Lord’s choice may be very different from your choice. The way for you to ascertain God’s choice is to talk about Christ to everybody you meet— try to bring everyone to Christ. The Lord will do the sorting far better than you can. He never makes a mistake.”—1902, Sermon #2799

“And as for you, dear Friends, who are looking for signs and wonders, or else you will not believe, I wish you would give up that foolish notion, for there is no sign and no wonder which is equal to this, that Christ should say to the dead heart, “Live,” and it lives! That He should say to the unbelievingheart, “Believe,” and it believes! In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, I say to you, Sinner, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ!”And if He is really speaking by me, you willbelieve in Him and you will arise and follow Him.”—1896, Sermon #2493

“Depend upon it, if you make an idol, and God loves you, He will break it. We may sorrow and be grieved when we lose our loved ones, for we are men—but we must moderate our sorrow and bow our will to the will of the Lord—for are we not also men of God?”—1896, Sermon #2494

“God’s essential purposes cannot be altered—they must all be fulfilled. His eternal plan was formed in the foresight of all generations that shall exist, so it must stand unchanged and, inasmuch as those purposes and that plan are closely connected with the Words of Christ and, indeed, are made known to us by His Words, therefore the Words of Christ must stand forever.”—1899, Sermon #2636

“Nothing will come to you so sharply, in a time of sorrow, pain and brokenness of spirit, as a sense of sins of omission or sins of commission. When the Light of God’s Presence is gone from you, you will sadly begin to say, “Why did I do this? Why did I not do that?” Therefore, dear Friends, endeavor as much as lies in you, to live in the time of your joy that if there ever should come times of depression, you may not have to remember neglected duties or willful wickedness! ”—1896, Sermon #2494

“Anything which takes your attention away from your God is an idol—it is another god, a rival god—and so it is the most unclean thing possible! I mean just this, that, although your ordinary pursuits may be, in themselves, perfectly innocent and may be commendable if they are followed out to the Glory of God, yet if your first objective in life is yourself and what you can get out of the common things of this life, you defile them by putting them into the place which belongs alone to God!”—1896, Sermon #2495

“A great many of the devil’s servants are so disrespectful to their lord that they even deny his existence and Satan, himself, is so self-denying in this respect that he denies his own existence and sets other people to do the same. Men squeezed the Lord’s prayer very hard when they made it read, ‘Deliver us from evil,’ for it is pretty clear that it ought to be, ‘Deliver us from the Evil One.’”—1898, Sermon #2560

“When God has blessed any sermon that I have preached, I do not make it a rule to preach it again lest I might be led to put my trust in that sermon, or to have some confidence in the way in which I set forth the Truth of God, rather than in the Truth itself—though I never hesitate to preach the same sermon again and again if I feel that the Spirit leads me to do so.”—1901, Sermon #2761

“Think of that remarkable passage in Isaiah 65:24—‘It shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.’ That is quicker than the telegraph! ‘Before they call, I will answer.’ God knows what petition is in your heart! He foresees what will be the utterance of your tongue and He has the answers all ready for them. I have found many of my prayers answered years before I prayed them. ‘No,’ you say, ‘that could not be.’ Well, there was one of them that was answered more than 1,800 years before I prayed it. That was when I cried to God for a Savior and he gave me One all those centuries before I was born, even the Savior who worked out for me a complete salvation on Calvary’s accursed tree”—1900, Sermon #2678
“When the Spirit of God is gone out of that which, in itself, is right, it becomes often a cover wherein a thousand evils conceal themselves.”—1896, Sermon #2496

“It will often be of excellent use to us, for the stimulation of our faith and for the excitement of our gratitude, if we remember the might of the enemies of Christ. When we undervalue the strength of His enemies, we are apt to under-estimate His Omnipotence.” —1903, Sermon #2823
“‘Ask, and you shall receive,’ is the message that shines out with heavenly radiance over the Mercy Seat. Read it, and obey it—open your mouth wide, for God will fill it.”—1902, Sermon #2800

“I am often said to be a very old-fashioned, narrow-minded sort of person and I have not the slightest objection to the accusation. I certainly am not new-fashioned and do not intend to be, for “the old is better” and, in theology, there is nothing new that is true, and nothing true that is new! The Truth of God is as old as the everlasting hills and to that I desire to keep even to the end, and I trust that you, also, will be of the same mind.”—1899, Sermon #2636

“There will be a friend or two, on the lower platform, after the service, to talk with any of you who wish to say anything to them about your own souls and to hear from them some good words about the Lord Jesus Christ. Do not go away, even from this service, till you have sought and found the Savior!”—1900, Sermon #2678

“If you live away from your Lord and Master, in those days of terror that are yet to come, your hearts will quail for fear, and you will be like other men. If you run with them, you shall fear with them. If your strength is where their strength is, you shall be as weak as they are! But if you have learned to look up, why, even in those stormy times you shall keep to the habit of looking up! And if you have learned to lift your heads above the world, you shall keep to the habit of lifting up your heads! If your portion is in Heaven, it shall not be shaken when the earth rocks and reels to its very foundations. If your treasure is in Heaven, then your treasure shall not be lost.”—1896, Sermon #2496

“Listen to your Lord’s gracious command—‘Look up, and lift up your heads.’ What does this precept mean? First, it implies an absence of fear ‘Perfect love casts out fear: because fear has torment.’ He that fears is not made perfect in love. What cause has a Christian for fear? What is there that can harm the man whom God loves? Will He trample on His child, or allow anyone else to hurt him? No, for ‘all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.’ The sun and moon and stars. The earth and the seas. Wars and pestilences all work together for good to God’s dear children. Let us, therefore, cast out all fear!”—1896, Sermon #2496

“You may depend upon it that there will never be any improvement upon the teaching of Christ! There have been some persons who have tried to improve upon it, but they have made a signal failure of all their attempts. His ethical teaching—His teaching of morals—has impressed even some of those who have not accepted His Doctrines, or even believed in His Divinity! They have been astonished at the purity, the holiness, the love which Jesus Christ inculcated in the Laws which He laid down for the guidance of His disciples.”—1899, Sermon #2636

“We may measure our love to Him, too, by our service for Him and our sympathy with Him. What have we done for Jesus this year? What have some of you given to Him? Take stock of your gifts to the cause of Christ! I know that some of you have given even beyond your means and my Master will amply reward your liberality. But I know, also, that there are some who can talk loudly concerning the things of God, but who never seem to have had enough religion for it to have much effect upon their pockets! I will give but little for your love to Christ if you bring Him no offering as a token of your affection.”—1896, Sermon #2497

“He who created all things by the word of His power and by whom all things consist—He who counted it not robbery (not a thing to be grasped) to be equal with God—sits in an old chair to be made a mimic king and to be mocked and spat upon! All other miracles put together are not equal to this miracle! This one rises above them all and out-miracles all miracles—that God, Himself, having espoused our cause and assumed our Nature, should deign to stoop to such a depth of scorn as this!” —1903, Sermon #2824

“Our farmers know that earthly harvests are sometimes late and it is the same in spiritual husbandry! Divine Grace ensures the crop, but even the Grace of God does not guarantee that the crop shall come up tomorrow, nor just whenever we please. So, dear Friend, keep on sowing the good seed of the Kingdom of God, water it with your tears and your prayers, and then leave with God the question whether you shall see the harvest or not.”—1901, Sermon #2761

“Then, you who have found Him, be prompt in obeying Him. Do you know what David said? “I made haste, and delayed not to keep Your commandments.” If you have found the Savior by faith, be baptized according to His command and His example. Unite yourself with His people and begin at once to serve Him.”—1900, Sermon #2678

“If you must make an image, make it, if you will, of a serpent, or of an ox, but not of the Son of God who came on purpose to redeem us from this, among other sins! Let us not degrade His sacred Personage by making even itto be an image before which we prostrate ourselves! ”—1897, Sermon #2498
“My dear Brothers in the ministry, if you want to shine for Jesus, you must be made into stars to be held in His right hand! There is no possibility of your being of spiritual use to your fellow men, or exercising a ministry that shall tend to their eternal salvation, except as you are made into a light to be held in the right hand of the Lord Jesus Christ. All the education in the world, all the natural talent that any possess, all the acquired practice of oratory, all the powers which are the result of long experience can never make a good minister of Jesus Christ! The stars are in the right hand ofChrist—ministers are not made by men, but by the Lord, Himself, if they are worthy to be called ministers at all.”—1897, Sermon #2498

“The Lord Jesus has promised such great things to His people that I could keep you here all night if I were to try to repeat those gracious Words of promise which streamed out of His lips! Here is one of the sweetest of them—“All that the Father gives Me shall come to Me; and he that comes to Me I will in no wise cast out.” If you come to Him, He will not in any wise cast you out! He must, He will receive you! Heaven and earth may pass away, and they shall pass away in due time, but never shall a soul that comes to Jesus be rejected by Him! Oh, that many of you would avail yourselves of that promise this very hour!”—1899, Sermon #2636

“Some time ago, when there were a great many people about who professed to be perfect, I heard of one who had grown so conceited that she said her mind was so conformed to the will of God that there was no need for her to pray because her mind and God’s mind were so perfectly at one. Yes, and when a person imagines that he is so good that he need not pray, he had better begin by crying, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’ I daresay you have heard of those people who climb so high up the ladder that they fall down the other side—and that is exactly what people do when they begin to carry any Truth of God to extravagance and push a point beyond its legitimate issues. That which makes you cease to pray is of the devil, so say to him, ‘Get you behind me, Satan.’ The very suggestion that you can do without prayer must have come from beneath—it cannot have come from above. The more the Spirit of God teaches a Christian the things of God, the more it makes him ask in the name of Jesus Christ.”—1902, Sermon #2800

“When I am invited to preach the novel doctrines of the present age, or to try the modern methods of fighting the devil, I look these new weapons up and down—and I advise those who offer them to me to send them to the Exhibition of Inventions up in the West of London! You may see them there, but you will never see them here! The old sword suits my hand and God blesses it to the cutting and the wounding and the killing of sinners! God the Holy Spirit, who made it, uses it most effectually. So, by the Grace of God, we will keep to it—and use no other as long as we live.”—1897, Sermon #2498

“And then, you who have been serving the Savior, if you have any gooddesire inyour heart to do anything for Christ, doit. You may be dead tomorrow morning, therefore I would advise you to do something for Christ tonight. Are you going to leave something in your will for the Master’s cause? Be your own executor if you can—and whatever you think of doing, do it speedily. Do not leave anything till tomorrow that can be done today.”—1900, Sermon #2678

“There is, in a child, the instinct always to tell what it hears. I am afraid that I have not lost that instinct, myself, though I am no longer a child. I never like to be entrusted with anybody’s secrets and I generally give people notice that if they want them published abroad, they have only to communicate them to me. It stops me from being bothered with a lot of things that will be sure to get known without my telling them!”—1898, Sermon #2560

“Mockery is the unintentional homage which falsehood pays to truth. Scorn is the unconscious praise which sin gives to holiness.” —1903, Sermon #2824

“Oh, give us a conversion that speaks for itself! Give us a new heart that shows itself in a new life! If a man is not able to control his temper, or to speak the truth—if he is not a good servant, or a good master, or a good husband—do not let him think it necessary to proclaim what Christ has done for him, for, if he has done anything that was worth doing, it will speak for itself!”—1901, Sermon #2761

“I beg all of you who try to bring sinners to Christ, to stick to that old sword, the two-edged sword that goes out of Christ’s mouth! If souls are not saved by the preaching of the Truth of God, they will not be saved by the telling of lies. I have sometimes heard really awful doctrine preached at revival services and an easy-going Brother has said, ‘Well, you see, it was an evangelistic meeting.’ Yes, but you should not tell lies at evangelistic meetings! ‘Oh, but if we were to preach the same truth to these sinners that you would proclaim to a company of Believers, it would not do them any good!’ Well, then, nothing else will, depend upon it! If the Truths of God will not have any effect upon them, your toning down of those Truths, or your screwing them up will not improve them, but will spoil them. I believe that the very Gospel that comforts saints is the Gospel that saves sinners—that there is but one Gospel for all purposes and all people and that, therefore, two gospels will never be required! You have only to strike this way with one edge of the sword, and that way with the other edge of it—or to swing it to and fro like that ancient warrior did with his great two-handed sword—and you will strike sinners down right and left, smiting the self-righteous this way, and the licentious the other way! Only keep to that grand old sword which the Apostles used, which was in the martyrs’ hands, and by which Christ, Himself, triumphed, istriumphing and willtriumph even to the end.”—1897, Sermon #2498
“There are depths and there are heights where we must be alone. There are some griefs that we must keep to ourselves, as there are some raptures and experiences of which, if we were to tell them, men would say that we were fanatical and suspect that we were out of our mind! Do not be surprised, therefore, if you have sometimes to sail alone, so far as any human beings are concerned. If Christ is in the vessel with you, you cannot need any better company.”—1899, Sermon #2637

“There is no way of peace by plunging more deeply into sin, as some think they will do—drowning dull care in the flowing bowl, or endeavoring to show their hardihood by rushing into still viler forms of lust in order that they may, somehow or other, be satisfied and content. No, this disease breeds a hunger which increases as you feed it! It engenders a thirst which becomes the more intense the more you try to satisfy it.”—1897, Sermon #2499

“I would to God that men did but see that although the picture I have tried to draw is terrible, indeed, yet it is most gracious on God’spartto treat them as diseased persons needing to be cured, rather than as criminals waiting to be executed!”—1897, Sermon #2499

“Be prepared to go Home to Heaven tonight. Come, now, are all things ready for your journey? If not, pack up all the luggage, label it, and have everything ready for the start at any moment. Blessed is that man who is ready to blossom in Heaven any instant. ‘Oh,’ says one, ‘I should not like to die tonight. I believe that I am a Christian and that I am saved, but I do not feel ready to go.’ Set your house in order, then, for your house cannot be right if it is not in order! If your house is in order, why, then you are ready to die! There is no right living except living as you would wish to live it you knew that this was to be your last day. The right way to spend the next hour is so to spend it as if it were your last hour. The Lord bring us into that happy condition that it shall not matter to us one single farthing whether we live or whether we die—and may He keep us in that blessed state, for Christ’s sake! Amen.—CHS

“The pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hands because it pleased the Father to bruise Him. And, oftentimes, it shall be with the servant as it was with the Master—it shall please the Lord to bruise you and put you to grief, that in later days the pleasure of the Lord may prosper in your hands.”—1897, Sermon #2499

“Paul wrote to the Galatians that our Lord Jesus Christ “gave Himself for our sins,” upon which passage, Martin Luther observes that Christ never gave Himself for our righteousness. There was never enough of that to be worth His doing so, but He gave Himself for our sins, that He might put them away from us forever.”—1899, Sermon #2637

“A man scarcely needs to be reminded that he must breathe. It is essential to his very life that he should breathe and it is essential to our spiritual life that we should pray. I never thought it necessary to prepare a discourse to exhort you to eat, neither ought it to be necessary to exhort Christians to pray. It should be to you an instinct of your new nature, as natural to your spiritual being as a good appetite is to a man in health. There should be a holy hunger and thirst to pray.”—1902, Sermon #2800

“It is not enough to have a Bible on the shelf—it is infinitely better to have its Truths stored up within your soul. It is a good thing to carry your Testament in your pocket—it is far better to carry its message in your heart.”—1900, Sermon #2679
“As the spokes of a wheel all meet in the axle, so all the promises of God meet in the great center of the Covenant of Grace made with Christ Jesus on behalf of all His people.”—1901, Sermon #2762
“Heaven is being filled with people who have believed in Jesus—and Hell is being filled with people who meant to believe in Jesus, but did not! That is the difference between the two classes, but what a difference it will make between them when they come to die!”—1897, Sermon #2500

“There was a man in that first paradise—he was the first man, Adam, and you and I were representatively in him, for he was the federal head of the human race. But he fell and he was taken away. Do we regret this and mourn over it as though it were an irreparable calamity? By no means, for the Lord has taken away the first man, Adam, that He may establish the second Man, the Lord Jesus Christ!”—1900, Sermon #2698

“I never care to read any arguments about the Deity of Christ—I would as soon think of reading a book which sought to prove the existence of my mother! This is a matter which I know for myself. I have tried it and proved it—and felt its power.—1901, Sermon #2719

“O you who are only professorsof religion, will you shut yourselves outside the door of mercy? You will do so if you neglect to obtain that secret oil of Grace which can only be supplied by the Holy Spirit!”—1897, Sermon #2500
“’I can do nothing,’ says one. That is true. Learn that lesson well! But there is another lesson, remember, to follow it—‘I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me .’”—1897, Sermon #2502

“It is easy work to scoff at the Bible and to deny the Truth of God. I think that I could myself pose as a learned man, in that way, if ever the devil should sufficiently control me to make me feel any ambition of that sort. In fact, there is scarcely a fool in Christendom who cannot make himself a name among modern thinkers if he will but blaspheme loudly enough, for that seems to be the road to fame, nowadays, among the great mass of mankind! They are dubbed “thoughtful” who thus insult the Truth of God as the soldiers, with their spit, insulted the Christ of God.” —1903, Sermon #2824

“It takes a strong man to stand under a weight of Divine Grace here below. It needs a robust constitution to bear the weight of Divine Love even here. It is almost enough to kill a man and one may as well die of excessive joy as of excessive grief—but what will it be when our souls are so enlarged and we are so strengthened that we can enjoy God forever? Five minutes in Heaven and then let me come back—but then, if I did come back, you know, I should have heard unspeakable words which it would not be lawful for a man to utter! As I have not been there, I cannot tell you of all the wondrous things that help to make up the glory of Heaven. And if I hadbeen there, it might be unlawful for me to tell you, so I will not attempt to intrude upon that reserved ground! But what I have to say to you is, Let us allgo there and see for ourselves!”—1897, Sermon #2502

“It must be sheer superstition, utterly unwarranted by Holy Scripture, which tells us that the Lord’s Supper can only be properly received in the morningand that we ought not to eat anything before we partake of the sacred emblems! We reject all such nonsense, for we find no authority for
it in the only standard which we recognize, that is, the inspired Word of God!”—1899, Sermon #2638

“ For the LORDGod isa sun and shield: the LORDwill give grace and glory: no good thing will Hewithhold from them that walk uprightly.Take notice of the whole of that last sentence! Do not go and quote half of it and say, ‘God has promised that He will withhold no good thing.’ It is only promised to, ‘them that walk uprightly.’ And if you walk crookedly, the promise does not belong to you! It is uprightwalking that brings downrightblessing! You shall lack no good thing from God when your whole heart is made good towards God.”—1897, Sermon #2502

“To see Christ is blessed, but unless we tell what we have seen, the blessing may be like a talent in a napkin, or a candle under a bushel. I would like to come round to each one of you and to say, ‘Dear Brother, dear Sister, do you live in the light of God’s Countenance? Has Jesus Christ shone upon you? Is He your Beloved and are you His beloved?’ Then come and let Him have the use of your tongue! Let Him have the use of those bright eyes of yours to tell with beaming countenance what the Lord has done for you and what He has said that He will do for others!”—1898, Sermon #2561

“A true prayer is the echo of the eternal purpose of God.”—1902, Sermon #2800
“Everything of good that we enjoy, however little it may be, comes from God.”—1897, Sermon #2504
“When our comforts become our idols, they work our ruin. But when they make us bless God for them, then they become messengers from God which help toward our growth in Divine Grace.”—1897, Sermon #2504

“I want you to be on just such intimate terms with somebody or other in the Bible—John, if you like, or Mary. Sit at Jesus’ feet with her. Or Martha—it will not hurt you to make the acquaintance of Martha and do a great deal of serving, though I do not want you to get cumbered with it. But do find your choicest friends in the Scripture. Take the whole company of Bible saints home to your heart, let them live inside your soul. Let old Noah come in with his ark, if he likes, and let Daniel come in with his lions’ den, if he pleases—and all the rest of the godly men and women of the olden time—take them all into your very nature and be on familiar terms with them! But, most of all, be specially intimate with Him of whom they all speak, namely, Jesus Christ your blessed Lord and Master!”—1900, Sermon #2679

“Our comforts are always safest when they are enveloped in gratitude. Let us overlay the wood of our comfort with the gold plate of our gratitude—and so shall it be preserved. An ordinary comfort protected with a sheet of gratitude shall become to us a double means of Grace.”—1897, Sermon #2504

“When a man once gives himself up to sin, it is like getting into a current which bears him onward where, at first, he had no thought of going. If you wade into the waters of sin, it will not be long that you will be able to retain a foothold and, by-and-by, unless the Lord shall, in His Grace, prevent such a calamity, the rapid current will bear you away to your everlasting destruction!” —1903, Sermon #2825

“It is well, when you are glad, to rejoice as though you rejoiced not, for then you will learn, when you are sorrowful, to mourn as though you sorrowed not.”—1897, Sermon #2504
“There are some people who would never have been saved if the Holy Spirit had not broken down their refuges of lies.”—1900, Sermon #2698

“But let me remark, further, that the glory of DivineGrace is to be seen more fully by-and-by, when the whole plan of Grace shall be worked out. I take it that we have, none of us, a very clear idea of what the full design of Divine Grace is. We say it is the blessing of the elect—it is, moreover, the indirect blessing of the world through these elect ones—or, as good Elisha Coles has said, and we endorse his saying, ‘Grace gives some good things to all men, though it gives all good things to some men.’”—1901, Sermon #2763
“After the thanksgiving, it is very clear that our Divine Lord broke the bread. We scarcely know what kind of bread was used on that occasion. It was probably the thin passover cake of the Jews, but there is nothing said in Scripture about the use of leavened or unleavened bread and, therefore, it matters not which we use. Where there is no ordinance, there is no obligation and we are, therefore, left free to use the bread which it is our custom to eat.”—1899, Sermon #2638

“Many of our doubts and fears would fly away if we praised God more. And many of our trials and troubles would altogether vanish if we began to sing of our mercies. Oftentimes, depression of spirit that will not yield to a whole night of wrestling, would yield to ten minutes of thanksgiving before God! Praying is the stalk of the wheat, but praise is the very ear of it. Praying is the leaf of the rose, but praise is the rose itself, redolent with the richest perfume.”—1900, Sermon #2679

“Brothers and Sisters, pray for us, and pray for all the preachers of the Word, that they may be stars in the right hand of Christ!”—1897, Sermon #2498
“If men had kept the Covenant of the Lord—if Adam, for instance, had kept it in the Garden of Eden, the rose would have been without a thorn to tear his flesh, and the enjoyment of life would never have been marred by the bitterness of toil or grief.”—1897, Sermon #2506
“The ordinance of the Lord’s Supper is not meant for the conversion of sinners. It is not intended to lead men to salvation, but it is intended for those who are already saved, those who are converted.”—1900, Sermon #2699

“There are many people who approve of laws as far as they keep their fellow men in check, but they do not want laws for themselves. ‘Oh, says such a person, ‘of course everybody ought to be honest! My servants ought not to embezzle, they ought not to rob me, they ought to give me a good day’s work for their wage.’ When the argument is turned round and the question is about giving a good day’swagefor the work, then they talk about political economy—which means that it is absolutely necessary that men should be dishonest!”—1897, Sermon #2506

“‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’ There is something in these words of our Savior always calculated to benefit us. When we behold the sufferings of men they afflict and appall us, but the sufferings of our Savior, while they move us to grief, have about them something sweet and full of consolation. Here, even here, in this black spot of grief, we find our Heaven while gazing upon the Cross. This, which might be thought a frightful sight, makes the Christian glad and joyous. If he laments the cause, yet he rejoices in the consequences.”—1898, Sermon #2562

“As Thomas read the Deity of Christ in His wounds, so do I read the eternal glory of His people in the mockery which He endured on their behalf.” —1903, Sermon #2825
“When God writes His Law in our hearts, He writes that which will never be blotted out! Once let Him take the pen in His hand and begin to write. “Holiness unto the Lord” right across a man’s heart—and the devil, himself, can never remove that sacred line!”—1897, Sermon #2506
“One kiss from God is the soul of Heaven laid to the heart of a burdened sinner.”—1897, Sermon #2507
“Everywhere, lukewarmness in religion is to be loathed and abandoned, for it is a gross and glaring inconsistency!”—1902, Sermon #2802
“There is nothing that is so soul-strengthening as taking another look at the bronze serpent, or having another plunge in the fountain filled with blood, or feeding, once again, on the inexhaustible provision that is stored up for us in the Person of our Lord!”—1899, Sermon #2638

“If, as I have often declared to you, it is the command of God that we believe on Jesus Christ whom He has sent, you are guilty of sin every moment that you live without faith in Christ! It is commanded of you, therefore you can clearly say you have a right to it, for any man has a right to obey a Divine command!”—1901, Sermon #2763

“Salvation is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs but it is God that shows mercy! It is not the man who preaches, who accomplishes the work, but God working through the man. He could dispense with the man altogether if He pleased.”—1900, Sermon #2700
“Christ will go from you if you want Him to go. He forces Himself upon no man—the Grace of God does not violate the will of man—it acts in accordance with man’s nature and achieves the Divine purpose without disturbing the individuality of the man.”—1897, Sermon #2507

“The day will come, dear Friend, when your cheeks, all befouled with weeping, shall be washed and made fair to look upon. Your eyes may be weary with waiting and watching, and red with weeping, but that weeping shall endure only for a night. ‘Joy comes in the morning,’ as surely as the morning comes after the night! Bear your sorrows bravely, for they are appointed of your Heavenly Father in supreme wisdom. Bear them joyfully, for they will bring forth to you the peaceable fruits of righteousness.”—1897, Sermon #2508
“…he who is meek is meek without trying!”—1897, Sermon #2508

“The Lord beautifies the meek, I think, in this way—he puts into them a peace of mindwhich fiery spirits never have—and which quick spirits do not know. They are not easily ruffled or disturbed. They have, as others have, much to annoy them, but they are so put into Christ that they cannot be put out. They are rendered so deeply calm, so solidly patient by the indwelling of the Spirit of God, that they bear without seeming to bear, and that which would crush another seems to have no weight with them. The deep peace of mind of a truly meek Christian is, I think, a very beautiful thing.”—1897, Sermon #2508

“We ought to be ashamed of being ashamed of Jesus! We ought to be afraid of being afraid to acknowledge Him! We ought to tremble at trembling to confess Him and to resolve that we will take all suitable opportunities that we can find of saying, first to relatives, and then to all others with whom we come into contact, ‘We serve the Lord Christ.’”—1900, Sermon #2680 “The Church of Rome can never again be put in the ranks of Christian Churches!”—1899, Sermon #2639

“Souls convinced of sin have no time or inclination to quarrel! When a man feels that he must ‘flee from the wrath to come,’ he does not notice that someone else is not respectful to him. No, he thinks of himself as a lost sinner—and lost sinners must not be so foolish as to stand upon their dignity, nor even to insist upon their rights and privileges!”—1901, Sermon #2764 “There cannot be any Grace at all except as we know Christ!”—1900, Sermon #2700

“ISAIAH 44:21, 22. Remember these, O Jacob and Israel; for you are Myservant: I have formed you, you are Myservant: O Israel, you shall not be forgotten of Me. I have blotted out, asa thick cloud, your transgressions, and,asa cloud, your sins: return unto Me; for I have redeemed you.
Out of all the world, God had a chosen people, His own Israel, to whom He revealed Himself—but they also turned aside to idols, yet here He
bids them return to Him. Even to this day they bravely bear their protest against idols. I would to God that they also knew the Christ of God and
worshipped Him. All Believers are the true Israel after the spirit and are to maintain forever the Glory of the one only living and true God.”—
1903, Sermon #2847

“Go through the world, Beloved, blindfolded to all but Christ, and you shall do well!” —1903, Sermon #2825
“There is no bondage connected with endeavoring to be like Christ! In fact, there is no joy that ever sparkles in the eyes like the joy of a reconciled soul.”—1897, Sermon #2509

“The common sin of husbands and wives should be confessed unitedly, and there is nothing more natural, more beautiful, and more edifying than for husbands and wives to pray together, to confess sin together, and to offer thanksgiving together. In all these they may be most fittingly one. Yet there is and there must be some sin which the man shall bring before God and before God alone, feeling that even his dearest one would be an intruder in that act of personal mourning for sin. And when the Spirit of God is in the woman’s heart, she feels that, though she has no earthly secret from her husband, yet there is something between God and her soul into which even her husband cannot enter. Her mourning for her sin, when she first seeks the Savior, would be hindered by her husband’s interposition, so she gets alone. And his mourning for sin, when he first seeks the Savior, or when afterwards he is conscious of some backsliding and longs to return to his Lord, must be apart and alone.”—1897, Sermon #2510

“I would not have you go with a lukewarm heart, even to distribute tracts! I would not have you dare to visit the sick unless your heart is filled with love to Christ! Either do such work well, or do not do it at all. Either put your heart into the work, or let someone else do it.”—1902, Sermon #2802

“The tried and troubled ones who can still cry, “Blessed be the name of the Lord,” are not driven to despair, for despair shuts the mouth and makes a man sit in sullen silence, or else it opens his lips in bitter complaints and in multiplied murmurings. But, when a man can truly say,“Blessed be God,” then despair has not mastered him—he still holds his own and he has on his side far greater force than the devil and the most trying circumstances can bring to bear upon him to vanquish him. O Friends, if you are afraid of being overcome, take to praising God! If you are in trouble and do not know how to bear it, divert your thoughts by praising God! Get away from the present trial by blessing and magnifying His holy name!”—1899, Sermon #2640

“When a Christian man so lives that others see something about him which they do not perceive in themselves, that is one way in which they are often attracted towards the Christian life.”—1900, Sermon #2680

“As there are words in Heaven so high that it were not lawful for a man to utter them, so are there words down here in the deep corruption of our fallen spirits that it were not lawful for a man to utter save in the ear of the Most High! Therefore, each individual must mourn apart.”—1897, Sermon #2510
“When the two seas meet—the sea of the saved one’s gladness and the sea of the Savior’s joy—what blessed floods they make!”—1900, Sermon #2701

“ISAIAH 44:18, 19. They have not known nor understood: for Hehas shut their eyes, that they cannot see; and theirhearts, that they cannot understand. And none considers inhis heart, neither is there knowledge nor understandingto say, I have burned part of it in the fire; yes, also I have baked bread upon the coals thereof; I have roasted flesh, and eaten it: and shall I make the residue thereof an abomination? ShallI fall down to the stock of a tree?Shall I, an intelligent being, worship gold, silver, wood, or brass, however excellent may be the workmanship of it? Shall I, an immortal being, cast myself down before a piece of bread and worship that, as some do who first worship, and then eat their god? Oh, what strange infatuation!”—1903, Sermon #2847
““The idea we get of others is close upon the heels of the idea we ought to have of ourselves, except when it is a good notion—and then the less we indulge the thought as being a picture of ourselves, the better!”1902, Sermon #2766

“I take it to be an awful violation of the natural delicacy of the human mind when any person is invited to make oral confession to a priest. I can myself scarcely conceive of anything that could be more degrading to the heart and more injurious to the conscience than the infernal brazenness of heart that permits anybody to attempt such a thing! As the inspired Prophet would have said, they must have “a whore’s forehead” before they can dare to unmask their hearts before their fellow men. No, no, Brothers and Sisters, such a thing must not be so much as namedamong us! What shame remains in us ought to prevent such a shameful or shameless thing as that. Hence, our mourning must be apart.”—1897, Sermon #2510

“When a man blesses God for the bitter, the Lord often sends him the sweet. If he can praise God in the night, the daylight is not far off. There never was a heart yet that waited and wanted to praise God but the Lord soon gave it opportunities of lifting up Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs unto Him.”—1899, Sermon #2640

“If you can only pray in public, you do not pray at all! If you can only join in the general confession, you have uttered a public lie! You are only right before God when it is your own sin, felt in your own heart, confessed by yourself before your own God, unknown to anybody else and altogether known to Him.”—1897, Sermon #2510

“I do not know that the faith of Abraham, as a saint, when he offered up his son, was greater than the faith of David, as a sinner, when he believed that God could make even him whiter than snow!”—1897, Sermon #2510

“Our common talk should be much more spiritual than it often is. There is no fear of degrading sacred subjects by the frequent use of them—the fear lies much the other way—lest by a disuse of them we come to forget them. This blessed Book, the Holy Word of God, is a fit companion for your leisure as well as for your labor, for the time of your sleeping and the time of your waking. It will bless you in your private meditations and equally cheer the social hearth and comfort you when, in mutual friendship, you speak the one with the other. Those who truly love God greatly love His holy Word.”—1897, Sermon #2511

“Beware, I pray you, of being like many nominal Christians who know not Christ! Beware of that Christianity from which Christ has been eliminated! You must first receive the Master, or else it is idle to be associated with His servants. You may say that you belong to His Church, but if you are not joined to the Head, what will it avail you to claim to be in the body? If you are not vitally united to the Lord so as to become one spirit with Him, of what service will it be to you that you are reckoned among His followers and that your names are written on an earthly church roll?”—1900, Sermon #2701

“Stagnation in a church is the devil’s delight.”—1902, Sermon #2802
“Never be ashamed to speak up for your Lord, Beloved. Never blush to acknowledge that you belong to Him. No, if you blush at all, blush with shame that you do not love Him more and serve Him better.” —1903, Sermon #2825

“I look upon a murmuring spirit as the forewarning of stormy weather in a rebellious soul—and I regard a praiseful spirit as the forecast of a happy time to come to the loyal joyous soul. God has prepared the heart to receive the joy which, otherwise, it, might not have been fit to accept at his hands. Be comforted, then, dear Friends, if you find in your hearts the desire to praise God, and belief that the Lord will find in His heart the willingness to speedily bless you!”—1899, Sermon #2640

“What a blessed kind of hearing that is when a man hears with longing, wishing, hungering all the way through the sermon! When the fish are hungry, then is the time for fishing, and when souls hunger and thirst after righteousness, thenis the time for preaching!”—1897, Sermon #2512
“I do not know a stronger force in all the world than utter helplessness—for that is the end of all care. Many and many a time I have tried till my head has ached, to work out a problem in Church government, but have not discovered the solution—I could not see any way out of it. So I have just done as a schoolboy would who shuts up the two parts of his slate and puts it on the shelf. I have said to myself, ‘I will never have anything more to do with the matter, but will leave it for the Lord to solve.’ And I have found that the proposition has been worked out for me in due time.”—1903, Sermon #2848

It is God’s usual way to save men by their using the means of Grace, by their constantly, attentively, intensely, earnestly hearing the Word of God!”—1897, Sermon #2512

“‘Without faith it is impossible to please God.’ This is not popular teaching, but we never wish to teach a popular theology. It is not one that will commend itself to the natural mind of men—we never thought it would—we would have been thunderstruck if our preaching had been admired by such persons! And we would have gone home and felt that we were not sent of God to preach at all. But, nevertheless, this is true, ‘without faith it is impossible to please God.’”—1897, Sermon #2513

“God cannot reward them that seek Him on the ground of their merit, for they have none. It must, therefore, be upon the ground of Grace. This introduces into our faith, as a point of necessary belief, that we believe in Jesus Christ by whose merit we are accepted—that diligently seeking God, we find Him in Christ—and this brings to us the great Gospel reward. God bestows upon us His favor, His Grace and the blessings of His Covenant as a gracious reward, not because of ourmerit, but because of the merit of His Son, Jesus Christ! This we must believe, or we have not really come to God aright. That is the doctrine asserted in our text, ,without faith it is impossible to please God.’”—1897, Sermon #2513

“There are no good works except those that spring from a living, loving, lasting faith in God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”—1897, Sermon #2513

“Some of you pray when you are, as it were, at Calvary, but not at Gethsemane. I mean you pray when the trouble comes upon you, but not when it is on the road. Yet your Master here teaches you that to conquer at your Calvary, you must commence by wrestling at your Gethsemane. When as yet it is but the shadow of your coming trial that spreads its black wings over you, cry unto God for help.”1902, Sermon #2767

“Men are eager enough to get temporal things, but when you come to spiritual things, there are thousands of people who seem only anxious to prove that they can never be saved!”—1900, Sermon #2701

“Oh, dear Friends, if you can share the lot of Christians when they are in trouble. If you can take God andaffliction. If you can accept Christ and a cross—then your decision to be His follower is true and real! It has been tested by the afflictions and the trials which you know belong to the people of God, yet you are content to suffer with them in taking their God to be your God, too.”—1900, Sermon #2680

“No creature can be a success unless it pleases its Creator. No man can be a success unless he has treasure laid up for immortality, a mansion in Heaven, a place to abide in the islands of the blessed in the land of the hereafter. Without God , he is a complete failure in life.”—1898, Sermon #2559

“If there is anything in the world that can make sin to be more than ordinarily sinful, it is when sin is persisted in, notwithstanding the manifest warnings of God.”—1902, Sermon #2802

“One might have supposed that if men once believed the Bible to be God’s Word, and Jesus Christ to be God’s atoning Sacrifice, they would be eager to have Christ as their Savior. But it is not so. And often, as I preach, I am driven back to this conclusion at which I arrived long ago—It is not your power, Sir Preacher, that can save men. You may preach and argue, and reason as best you can, but until the arm of the Lord is revealed, and the Power of the Holy Spirit sends home the argument, that which is a mere matter of argument would be irresistible to a rationalman, yet, as a spiritual force, fails to have any influence over the carnal mind. It is not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit of the Lord that the work of salvation is accomplished! O Spirit of the living God, send home the Truth of God by Your own almighty Power, for Jesus’ sake!”—1897, Sermon #2513

“No man is so free, no man is so happy as he who loyally bows before the King of kings—to serve God is to reign! He who has God for his King, is himself a king!”—1903, Sermon #2848

“Long before a man knows that his transgressions are pardoned, God may have pardoned and blotted them out. I do not say that a man receives actual pardon in his own soul, or a sense of justification without knowing it. I cannot believe, with some, that a man may be born again without being aware of it. I know there never was a natural birth without pangs and pains—and I am equally sure that there never will be a spiritual birthwithout some suffering and some agonies. A man is not to be born again when he is asleep—he is to know it and know it, he will, at some time or other in his life! Not constantly, it may be, but nevertheless he will know, even if it is only for an hour, that he is a child of God! I think he who never had one minute of assurance, never had faith. He who never knew himself to be a child of God, who never could say, “I believe in Jesus,” never could see his sins blotted out—I think such an one does not know what faith is. It may endure for ever so short a time, but if it is real assurance, it springs from true faith and the man is saved.”—1898, Sermon #2563

“The wonder of extraordinary love is that God should make it such an ordinary thing, that He should give to us ‘marvelous loving kindness,’ and yet should give it so often that it becomes a daily blessing, and yet still remains marvelous!”—1900, Sermon #2702