vol. 3

NOTABLE QUOTES OF CHARLES H. SPURGEON ~ PART 3 ~ December 20, 2008
Dear Reader, This is the third compilation of Brother Spurgeon’s quotes from my work of modernizing his sermons. All of these quotes are found in volumes 50-53 of his work. Thus I identify them by the year and sermon number.
You may note that the first 15 pages or so represent one quote from each sermon in numerical order. After that they are mixed.
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 Pulpitlinks 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 our Master, Jesus Christ.
My prayer for you and yours is Paul’s to the Ephesians 3:17-19.

Emmett O’Donnell _________________________________

“Indeed, Brothers and Sisters in Christ, in one sense allyour prayers—that is, your prayers that ought to be answered—are already answered, for whatever there may be that you may rightly ask of God, you really have it, since in giving us Christ, He has already given us all things!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2864

“Others come to the Communion as a piece of sheer superstition, really believing, poor deluded souls, that when they take the wafer into their mouths, they actually eat the flesh of Christ. Such a monstrous doctrine as that is only fit for cannibals—it is not a Doctrine of Christianity! What a profanation of the ordinance it is to come to it with such a notion as that! If any of us have the slightest idea that to partake of what is called “the sacrament”—though there is no such name as that for it anywhere in Scripture—confers Divine Grace, let all such thoughts be banished from our minds at once!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2865

“That wise resolve within your heart which says, ‘I will arise and go to my Father,’ should be at once carried into effect, for your Father has prepared the way by which you may come back to Him and, to encourage you, He has sprinkled it with the blood of His dear Son—the surest sign and token of His love to sinners that even God, Himself, could give. Here, then, is good news from a far country. Your Father thinks of you, poor prodigal, and He has paved the way for you to come back to His own house and heart!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2866

“Accustom yourself to look towards God in Christ Jesus in your thoughts and contemplations. By the blessing of the Holy Spirit, this will breed faith in you. Set your face that way—look at God as He has revealed Himself in the Person of the great Propitiation, Jesus Christ, His Son.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2867

“You do not know, poor Soul, how glad God is when He forgives a soul. The angels sang when God made the world, but we do not read that He sang then. Yet, in the last chapter of the prophecy of Zephaniah, we read, ‘The Lord your God in the midst of you is mighty; He will save, He will rejoice over you with joy; He will rest in His love, He will joy over you with singing.’ Only think of it—the Triune God singing!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2868

“The strong desire to magnify God is acceptable to Him and is an indication of spiritual health. It is certain, in the long run, to bring blessing to our own souls and I have frequently noticed that when we earnestly desire to do something special for the Lord, He generally does something for us very much of the same kind.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2869
“When the Spirit of God goes with the Word, then the Word becomes the instrument of the conversion of the souls of men.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2870

“Many persons think a great deal about the adorning of the body, but do not think anything about the ornaments of the soul. The feeding of the physical frame engrosses much care, but the supply of spiritual food is often neglected.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2871
“The proof that Christ came into the world should be that His followers are holy! Let their character be blameless and harmless, their conduct so devoted and so full of self-sacrifice that it shall be a constant memorial of that Redeemer whose name they profess.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2872

“There is the same door of entrance for us as that which was opened to the very chief of sinners, for there is no difference between one sinner and another in the sight of God, as far as the plan of salvation is concerned. There may be many differences in other matters but, in the matter of salvation, there is nothing which places one man in a different position from another, or which allows him to be saved in any other way than the one way which God has laid down for a sinner’s salvation.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2873

“If you simply take the name of Christ upon you and call yourself His servant, yet do not obey Him, but follow your own whim, or your own hereditary prejudice, or the custom of some erroneous church—you are no servant of Christ. If you really are a servant of Christ, your first duty is to obey Him.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2874

“Let us never judge men by their talents—but by the use which they make of their powers, by the end to which they devote their talents, by the interest which they bring to those pounds which their Master has entrusted to them.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2875

“There will be no jarring note in Heaven, no whisper of human merit, no claim of a reward for good intentions—but every crown shall be cast at Jesus’ feet and every voice shall join in the ascription, ‘Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Your name be all the glory of the salvation which You have worked out for us from first to last.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2876

“Yes, Beloved, we who believe in Jesus are on the winning side—we are on the side which has God with it and Christ with it, and eternity with it—and the appointed day shall reveal that this is the conquering side!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2877
“You know right well that the value of a [Scripture] text to any soul depends upon the condition of that soul.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2878

“The true teacher should not seek to soar on the gaudy wings of brilliant oratory, pouring forth sonorous polished sentences in rhythmic harmony, but should endeavor to speak pointed Truths of God—things that will strike and stick—thoughts that will be remembered and recalled, again and again, when the hearer is far away from the place of worship where he listened to the preacher’s words.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2879

“It is in our most desperate straits that we often have our most joyous revelations. John must go to “the isle that is called Patmos” before he could have the wondrous Revelation that was there given to him.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2880
“Until a man receives faith, he may think that he has it—but when he has real faith in Jesus Christ, then he shudders as he thinks how long he has lived in unbelief—and realizes how much of unbelief is still mixed with his belief.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2881

“If any of you doubt whether there is forgiveness with God, I pray you to stand on Calvary, in imagination, and to look into the wounds of Jesus. Gaze upon His nail-pierced hands and feet, His thorn-crowned brow, and look right into His heart where the soldier’s spear was thrust—and blood and water flowed out for the double cleansing of all who trust Him.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2882

“Although blindness in part has happened unto Israel, yet, in due time, we know from the Word of God that the seed of Abraham will recognize our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as the long-promised Messiah. When that happy day comes, the Lord will give to the whole world times of amazing blessing.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2883

“Between the will of the flesh and the will of God, there is no possible question as to which is ‘the Lord’s side.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2884

“God’s power is never given to a man to be stored up unused. The heavenly food that is sent to strengthen us, like the manna given to the Israelites in the wilderness, is intended for immediate use. If the Lord sends you much, you shall have nothing beyond what you can use for Him though, blessed be His holy name, if you have but little, you shall have no need!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2885

“If you, young man, give yourself up to what is erroneously called the pursuit of pleasure, it is quite certain that you will not find rest for your soul in that direction! You have taken a dose of poison that will make your blood hot and feverish and that will cause true rest to flee from your pillow.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2886
“You cannot heal men who are not sick, or wounded. It matters not how matchless the medicine is—even though it is the substitutionary suffering of the Son of God, Himself—if it is to heal, it must heal some malady or other and, Brothers and Sisters, it is quite true that there is a dreadful disease which has attacked the whole human race! You scarcely need that I should tell you that it is the disease of sin.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2887

“The unity at Babel would have been far worse than the confusion has ever been, just as the spiritual union of Babylon, that is, Rome, the Papal system, has been infinitely more mischievous to the Church and to the world, than the division of Christians into various sects and parties could ever have been.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2888

“The Christ whose Gospel we preach is no unapproachable philosopher! The Glory of His Person reflects even a brighter luster than the dignity of His office. He appeared among men not as one who had been lifted up from the ranks to obtain a position for Himself, but as one who bowed Himself down from the Heaven of heavens that He might bring blessings to the sons of men—yet the ignorant and the illiterate may find in Him their best Friend.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2889

“Beloved Friends, let us never look upon our own unbelief as an excusable infirmity, but let us always regard it as a sin—and as a great sin, too.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2890

“Fine sermons never win souls—you may blaze away, young man, at a terrific rate with your brilliant oratory and your fine pieces of poetry and quotations from eminent authors! And your length sermon may be like the set piece at a display of fireworks, or the final burst of brightness with which it all ends—but all that will not save souls! What does save souls, then? Why, the Word of the Lord, the Truth of God as it is in Jesus!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2891

“How long I was, myself, dictating to God instead of trusting Him! I thought I must have a certain amount of conviction of sin before I could be saved. I really had it all the while, though I did not know that I had it. I thought I must feel a certain weight of guilt. I wasfeeling it and, for that very reason, I thought I was not. I might have been spared much needless suffering if I had only believed what the Lord had taught me in His Word—that I had nothing to do with feeling burdens or anything else by way of preparation for coming to Christ, but that I had to come to Him just as I was… So, poor blind ones, come to my Master, blind as you are—but do not lay down any rules or regulations as to how He is to save you, for He will do it in His own way, which is, after all, the best possible way”—Volume 50, Sermon #2892

“What Jeremiah knew was this—that the affairs of this world are not under the control of men, however much they may imagine that they are. There is a Supreme Authority to theirs and a power which rules, overrules and works according to its own beneficent will—whatever men may desire or determine to do.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2893

“Even if you reject the Word of God, you must believe that God is just. If there is a God, He must punish men for sinning against Him. How can any moral government exist if sin goes unpunished, if virtue and vice lead to the same end? Conscience, fallen though it is, and no longer like God’s candle in the soul, still has sufficient light to assure men that God must punish sin!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2894

“O Brothers and Sisters, it is a blessed proof that Divine Grace has been largely given to us when even the smallest word uttered by Jesus Christ is more precious to us than all the diamonds in the world and we feel that we only want to know what He has said and to love whatever He has spoken!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2895

“Flowers, what are they? They are but the thoughts of God solidified—God’s beautiful thoughts put into shape. Storms, what are they? They are God’s terrible thoughts written out that we may read them. Thunders, what are they? They are God’s powerful emotions just opened out that men may hear them. The world is the materializing of God’s thoughts, for the world is a thought in God’s eyes. He made it first from a thought that came from His own mighty mind and everything in the majestic temple that He has made has a meaning!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2896

“Poor Soul, groping in the dark and trying to believe in Jesus, ought not this to enable you to believe in Him? Christ has lived, loved, bled, died and now there is a reward due to Him which can only be met by the salvation of all for whom He died! See, then, how He has the Living Water and come and trust Him to give it to you freely.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2897

“Those who hold a sound creed may be destitute of precious faith and those who are able to defend the Divinity of Christ with admirable scholarship may, nevertheless, be without God in the world. To believe in Christ includes much more than a religious profession. It is so to believe the Gospel as to forsake all other beliefs for the possession of its blessed hope! It is to imbibe the spirit of the Word of God while you accept the letter of its pure teaching! Or, in other words, it is to come to Jesus and to prove, in your own souls, His power to save.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2898

“I like to think about how many people are going to be saved every time the Gospel is faithfully preached. It is not preached in vain—we deliver a message from God that never misses the mark at which He aimed it!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2899
“Remember this, Sinner, however far you may get away from God, you will have to come close to Him one of these days! You may go and pluck the fruit that He forbids you to touch and then you may go and hide yourself among the thick trees in the forest and think that you have concealed yourself—but you will have to come face to face with your Maker at some time or other!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2900

“There was never any real godly sorrow which worked repentance acceptable to God except that which was the result of the Holy Spirit’s own work within the soul.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2901
“Now, if our text [Heb. 12:4] said that without perfection of holines, no one could have any communion with Christ, it would shut every one of us out, for no one who knows his own heart ever pretends to be perfectly conformed to God’s will!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902
“The material universe is but scaffolding for the Church of Christ. It is but the temporary structure upon which the amazing mystery of redeeming love is being carried on to perfection.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2903
“That faith which is not accompanied by repentance will have to be repented of!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2904

“All that John [the Apostle] saw, he was prepared to speak of according to his ability, that others might have fellowship with him and, dear Friends, remember that if you ever learn anything of Christ—if you have any enjoyment of His Presence at any time—it is not for you, alone, but for others to share with you!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2905

“I suppose if any man looks long into the Doctrine of the Trinity, he will be like one who gazes upon the sun and will be apt, first, to be dazzled and then to be blinded by the excessive light. If a man asks that he may understand this great mystery, and refuses to believe until he does, then he will most assuredly be blinded! How can you, O man, hold the sea in the hollow of your hand? And how can you see God’s face and yet live?”—Volume 50, Sermon #2906

“Does the Holy Spirit deal with science? What is science? Another name for the ignorance of men. Does the Holy Spirit deal with politics? What are politics? Another name for every man getting as much as he can out of the nation. Does the Holy Spirit deal with these things? No, my Brothers, ‘He will receive of Mine.’ O my Brother, the Holy Spirit will leave you if you go gadding about after these insignificant trifles! He will leave you if you aim at magnifying yourself, your wisdom and your plans, for the Holy Spirit is taken up with the things of Christ!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2907

“The ship of Christ’s Church never sails so well as when she is rocked from side to side by the winds of persecution and when, at every lurch, she is well-near overwhelmed! Nothing has helped God’s Church so much as persecution—she has been increased and strengthened by it.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2908

“Christ’s kinship with His people is to be thought of with great comfort because it is voluntary.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2909

“The best of men are, all too often, trodden down as the very mire of the street, while the worst are sitting proudly in the high places of the earth! If there is a God at all—and we know that there is—there must be a time and a way of rectifying all this in another state! And so there is, as David says, ‘Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily He is a God that judges in the earth.’ And, therefore, verily there must be a time of judgment for the ungodly—even common reason seems to teach us that!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2910

“Dear Friends, all the distress that is felt by the mind when under conviction of sin is not the work of the Spirit of God, though some of it is. I cannot draw the line and say exactly how far it is the Spirit’s work but, certainly, there is a portion of this horror and distress which doesnot come from God. Therefore, learn this lesson—that it is not necessary for you to traverse the whole ground of every other sinner’s experience in passing from the kingdom of darkness into the Kingdom of God’s dear Son!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2911

“And I will venture to go even further and say that if you watch those in whom sin is said to be dead, you will find that if it is dead, it is not buried—and that it smells remarkably like other dead things which ought to be buried!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2912
“The Cross that was meant to be the death of the Savior was the death of sin! The Crucifixion of Jesus, which was supposed to be the victory of Satan, was the consummation of His victory over Satan!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2913

“There are many points and particulars in which the Gospel is offensive to human nature and revolting to the pride of the creature. It was not intended to please man. How can we attribute such a purpose to God? Why should He devise a goal to suit the whims of our poor fallen human nature? He intended to save men, but He never intended to gratify their depraved tastes.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2914 “I have preached the Gospel to you, my Brothers and Sisters, because I have believed it—and if what I have preached to you is not true I am a lost man. For me there is no joy in life and no hope in death except in that Gospel which I have continually expounded here.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2916

“There is never a moment, I suppose, at any time when the fall of feet may not be heard by listening ears that are hard by the gates of death-shade. The dead have always been coming since Abel led the way—one perpetual stream, never ceasing day nor night.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2917
“Away with superstition! Kill it by counting every place to be holy, every day to be holy and every action that you perform to be a part of the high priesthood to which the Lord Jesus Christ has called every soul that He has washed in His precious blood.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2918

“We say that we belong to Christ and we are not our own, but bought with a price. Do we live as if it were true? Come, let us take up the position now of being altogether Christ’s own sheep. If the sheep could speak it would say, ‘There is not a fragment of wool on my back that belongs to me: there is no part of me that is my own. I belong to my shepherd, and I am glad to have it so.’ You belong to Christ as absolutely as that.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2919

“‘But some Truths of God ought to be kept back from the people,’ you will say, ‘lest they should make an ill use of them.’ That is Popish doctrine! It was upon that very theory that the priests kept back the Bible from the people—they did not give it to them lest they should misuse it.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2920

“It is insulting to a man to call him a fool, but I question whether any man is saved unless he has called himselfa fool!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921

“There is to come a day when Christ shall be known and loved of every land!... You will hear no more of the name of Pope, or Patriarch, or a great religious leader receiving the chief honor. No great name set in the front of a section of the Church shall be shouted in that day—the Lord alone shall be exalted!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2922

“If we begin by doubting, our prayer will limp. Faith is the tendon of Achilles and if that is cut, it is not possible for us to wrestle with God.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2923

“There have been times with some of us in our younger days before we knew Christ, when the temptation was very strong, but the opportunity was not near. And at other times the opportunity has been before our eyes, but there was no temptation. God help the man that has the temptation and the opportunity at the same time.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2924 “A pious fraud is a most impious blasphemy.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2925

“God delights in the thought of the fervent love we gave Him when we knew first Him, our thoughtful and practical kindness towards His name, our steadfast resolve to follow Him at all lengths, our faith which took His least Word as a warrant for action and our holiness which shrank even from the approach of sin. Happy are we if these things still abide with us. But if we have lost them, the Lord, like some fond mother recalling the infant days of her children, remembers them and beckons us back to our first love and our first works. ”—Volume 51, Sermon #2926

“I am afraid that even those who are busy in the Master’s work and are not occupied much with lower things, yet overlook the necessity for love to be at leisure. Now tonight, at any rate, you that work longest and toil most and have to think the hardest can ask the Lord to make this a leisure time between you and Jesus. You are not called upon to help Martha to prepare the banquet. Just sit still—sit still and rest at Jesus’ feet and let nothing else occupy the next hour but sitting still and loving and being loved by Him.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2927

“The preacher ought to preach so that it shall be almost an impossibility for his hearer to be altogether careless. You Christian people should set such an example in your households that it shall be next door to an impossibility for son or daughter or servant to remain at peace while they remain out of God and out of Christ in a state of sin!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2928

“In these busy times, when men have so much to do in order to live, it may be of much service to them to think how certainly they must die.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929

“Let your admiration both of David and of the Lord Jesus Christ be practical—there is far too much of that kind of religion which consists in merely admiring other people, or in seeing what we, ourselves, ought to be, or in regretting that we are not what we should be—true godliness is manifested as we bring forth the fruit of the Spirit by being and doing that which we feel we ought to be and to do.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2930
“Whatever anyone else may think or say, I know that I must be saved by the Grace of God or else that I shall never be saved at all! I have not done a single good work in which I cannot see any faults—not one solitary thing which I cannot perceive to be marred and stained and, like a vessel spoiled even while it is on the potter’s wheel, not fit to be presented before God at all!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2932

“There are no suppositions and imaginations in the Gospel—it tells of positive sin, positive punishment, positive substitution and positive forgiveness, for God would not have His people reckon upon anything which is not absolutely true.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2933

“Here, surely, is A WONDER OF GRACE—‘There are last that shall be first.’ Here is Divine Sovereignty—choosing the last to make them first. Here is Sovereign Grace—forgiving the greatest sin to make the brightest saint. Here is almighty power changing the most degraded, turning the current of the most strong-minded sinner and making his soul ‘willing in the day of God’s power.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2934

“A Christian has never fully realized what Christ came to make him until he has grasped the joy of the Lord. Christ wishes His people to be happy. When they are perfect, as He will make them in due time, they shall also be perfectly happy.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2935

“It is a very blessed thing when we are able to love one another because the Divine Grace that is in any one of us sees the Grace that is in another and discerns in that other, not the flesh and blood of the Savior, but such a resemblance to Christ that it must love that other one for His sake!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2936

“Everything that has to do with Christ’s work is of real, practical, vital consequence to Believers. He is to be the food for our souls. Faith is to receive Him. Love is to embrace Him. Hope is to rejoice in Him! ”—Volume 51, Sermon #2937

“The Hindu meets the Muslim and he says, ‘No doubt you are sincere as well as we are, and you and we shall at last meet in the right place.’ They would salute the Christian, too, and say the same to him, but it is a necessity, if our religion is true, that it should denounce every other and that it should say unto those who know not Christ, ‘Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.’ Yes, it goes still further and pronounces its anathema upon those who pretend to any other way! ‘Though we or an angel from Heaven preach any other Gospel than that which you have received, let him be accursed.’ I simply mention certain other ways to assure you, in God’s name, that they are roads which lead to Hell and that none of them can bring you to Heaven—for there is only one way by which the soul can came to God and find eternal life—and that way is Christ.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2938

“You sometimes wonder that the Gospel does not spread more rapidly in the earth. But are disobedient servants likely to do their Master’s work well? If there are commands of Jesus which we persistently ignore—if there are precepts of the Savior which, year after year, we forget—if there are Doctrines and other parts of His teaching to which we turn a deaf ear, can we expect Him to bless us?”—Volume 51, Sermon #2939

“O Brothers, when you preach and no man gives heed to your message—when you teach, but the children yield not their hearts to your Lord—when you sojourn in Mesech and dwell in the tents of Kedar and meet with hard and cold hearts in every place, that thaw not even beneath the sunbeams of the love of Jesus, you are very apt to say that it does not appear that, ‘He must reign.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2940

“The music of joy and the music of Heaven should often be upon our lips in the form of Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2941
“This Supper sets forth to all who choose to see it, the painfulness of Christ’s death…That is the teaching of this Supper, that Christ’s death was a painful death, and a death on behalf of others.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2942

“Prayerless souls are Christless souls, Christless souls are Graceless souls and Graceless souls shall soon be damned souls. See your peril, you that neglect altogether the blessed privilege of prayer! You are in the bonds of iniquity, you are in the gall of bitterness. God deliver you, for His name’s sake!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2943

“Yes, dear Friend, we cannot wonder if some reject our message when so many rejected the teaching of the Master, Himself! But we must so deliver it that, at any rate, if they do refuse it, the blame shall lie entirely at their own door.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2944
“But see fair days have foul eventides and the Christ manifested during the day may become a Christ hidden during the night. Close on the heels of the intense excitement of great success comes the relapse into darkness of spirit and absence of joy.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2945

“It is very hard for young people, especially in ungodly families, to dare to call themselves followers of the Crucified! Nor is it easy for a working man, in the workshop, to bear that perpetual ‘chaffing,’ as his companions call it, which they delight to inflict on those who are better than themselves.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2946
“Happy day, happy day, when Jesus comes into the heart! Save the day when we shall be with Him where He is, I suppose there is no day that is comparable to the first one when we behold Christ and see Him as our Savior and our King!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2947

“It is very difficult to estimate the amount of darkness that may come over the human conscience and to imagine how blind a man may become, or how fully he may put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter—but certain it is that an unrenewed heart may become as darkened that, while we are going posthaste to Hell, we may imagine that we are making good headway towards Heaven!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2948

“Think over the time and the place of our Lord’s Ascension and you will have some subjects worthy of your deepest meditation.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2949

“In another sense it is true that ‘God hears not sinners,’ that is to say, He will hear none of us—no sinner among us, (and who among us is not a sinner?) in and ofourselves. If heard, it must be through the interposition of the Mediator between God and men, the Man, Christ Jesus, for up to the immediate Presence of the thrice-holy God the guilty sinner cannot come by himself.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2950

“There is not one among us who can afford to live in sin, or who can afford to die in sin. We may find a temporary pleasure in it, but it must end in eternal loss to us unless there comes a time when God’s Grace saves us from it—we cannot be truly happy while we are out of gear with God.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2951

“When a man has no self remaining, but has given himself up as a living sacrifice for Christ, that which would be a terror to another man becomes a comfort to him.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2952

“I feel that much evil comes of a mode of address which is adopted by some of my ministerial brothers in which they speak to the entire congregation as though all who were present were Christians. That is a false theory to go upon because it is not at all likely that any congregation ever gathered together will consist wholly of Christians.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2953

“If we would come to Christ, we must come away from sin. Repentance must make us turn from sin, and faith must make us turn to Christ—and we must also come away from self-righteousness if we are to come to Christ. It is very difficult for some people to part with their selfrighteousness. They have looked in the mirror till they are in love with themselves and they cannot bear to be separated from their beloved self. They feel so good, so proper, so respectable, so excellent, so amiable, so lovely and so dear to themselves that they would gladly hang about the neck of their self-righteousness and embrace it as long as they can!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2954

“If the Gospel of God is true, it can stand any quantity of questioning. I am more afraid of the deadness and lethargy of the public mind about religion than any sort of enquiry or controversy about it. As silver tried in the furnace is purified seven times, so is the Word of God—and the more it is put into the furnace, the more it will be purified—and the more beauteously the pure ore of Revelation will glitter in the sight of the faithful.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2955

“He who would be wise, in dealing with the daughters of grief, must let them tell their own story and, almost without a single sentence from you, their own story will be blessed by God to the relieving of their grief.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2956

“It is a very bad thing to live upon the past—to say, ‘I believe I am a child of God because I had certain spiritual enjoyments and experiences 10 or 12 years ago.’ Ah, such stale fare as this will not feed hungry souls. They need present enjoyment, or, at least, present confidence in the everliving God. Yet, Brothers and Sisters, we may sometimes gather fuel for today from the ashes of yesterday’s fire. Remembering the mercies of God in the past, we may rest assured concerning the present and the future.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2957

“If your pathway has been smooth of late—if temporal mercies have abounded—if spiritual comforts have been continued to you, then, O you happy saints, love the Lord!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2958
“What a blessing it was to us that when we woke up in this world, we looked up into a face that smiled upon us and to lips that, by-and-by, spoke to us of Jesus Christ! The first example that we had was one that, to this day, we wish to follow.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2959
“Cold prayers court refusal. Heaven is not to be obtained by lukewarm supplications. Heat your prayers red-hot, Brothers and Sisters! Plead the blood of Jesus! Plead like one who means to prevail—and then you shall prevail!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2960
“THIS chapter—the 8^th of Romans—is, like the Garden of Eden, full of all manner of delights. Here you have all necessary doctrines to feed upon and luxurious Truths of God with which to satisfy your soul.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2961

“THERE are some people in the world who, the moment we begin to speak of a type, try to disparage that style of speech by calling it ‘spiritualizing’ They seem to be far too wise to be able to learn anything by that mode of teaching. Yet the Holy Spirit has given us, in the Old and New Testaments, abundant instances of spiritualizing and, though He could have used new metaphors and fresh phrases in His Infinite Wisdom, He preferred to use the old historical allusions and the old historical types for the instruction of God’s people.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2962

“…the stream of Divine Grace, from where does it spring? In what mountain does it take its rise? Arminian theology, like all the ancient travelers, has failed to make the discovery. But the Gospel, as it is revealed in Scripture, plainly tells us that everything in salvation is according to the good pleasure of the Divine will.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2963

“IF we are inclined to grieve because everything around us changes, our consolation will be found in turning to our unchanging God. If we lament the ills of mortality, it will be wise for us to turn to Him “who only has immortality.” If our earthly joys fade and die, it is a blessed thing for us to be able to go to the fountain of undying joy and there to drink deep draughts of bliss, which shall cause us to forget our misery.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2964

“[Backslider] if you ask, ‘What shall we do in order to get ready to meet Him?’ I answer—Cast out the idols from your hearts! Let them all go! Love no one else and nothing else as you love Him, but give Him your whole body, soul and spirit!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2965

“Those persons who stumble at the election of some men rather than others ought equally to stumble at the fact that Christ did not redeem the fallen angels, but only fallen men—for why God chose to save men and not to save angels, who among us can tell? The only answer I know to that question is this, ‘Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Your sight.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2966

“I question whether any man ever attained to the eminence in piety that he once marked out for himself and whether we have not all had occasion to eat our words.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2967
“O Believer, whatever life of a spiritual kind you have in you, today, was given to you by God! It was not yours by nature.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2968
“When you are so foolish as to say, ‘Now I am out of the reach of temptation,’ you are in the very midst of temptation! And when you think you are not being tempted at all, you are being tempted the most by the very fancy that you are not being tempted!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2969

“Our God sets great value upon those whom He calls His jewels, as we may gather not only from their costly redemption, but from the fact that all Providence is but a wheel upon which to polish and perfect them. Those stupendous wheels, which Ezekiel saw, were but a part of the machinery of the great Lapidary by which He cuts the facets of His true brilliants and makes His diamonds ready for His crown, for is it not written that ‘all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose?’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2970

“There are many persons who have so little faith in God that they fear that the trials which will sooner or later overtake them, will also overthrow them.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2971

“It could not be possible that God would woo sinners to return to Him and yet not intend to forgive them! I cannot believe a theory so monstrous as that God would send His ministers and send His own Book, and earnestly and affectionately invite sinners to turn from their evil ways and repent of their sins and yet intend, even if they did repent, to punish them on account of their iniquity! It cannot be.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2972

“If ever you want to know what Christ means by His teaching, look at His life. You may rest assured that He never gave us a command which He was not, Himself, prepared to obey.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“LET no Christian imagine that he will ever have immunity from trouble while he continues in the body… Do not expect, dear Brothers and Sisters, that because you have been strengthened in the faith, you will therefore be loosened from the burden of the flesh—neither because you may have been the means of strengthening others, that, therefore, trouble will be light to you. Even into your ship the deep waters may come.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2974

“There are hundreds of men who might be compared—as Rowland Hill did once compare them—to hogs under an oak. ‘They eat the acorns,’ he said, ‘but they never look up and thank the oak.’ They live in this world and feed upon the bounties which God has provided for them, yet they have no thought of Him! It is His air that they breathe and it is by His power that they exhale the air—they could not exist for a single moment if it were not for Him—yet He is not in any of their thoughts!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2975

“Brothers and Sisters, the events of our history march on as rightly as a victorious legion under a skillful Leader. Do not let us arraign the wisdom of that which happens to us, or fancy that we could order our affairs in better style. Our good and ill, our joy and grief, all keep their places. ‘Neither shall one thrust another; they shall walk everyone in his path.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2976
“The man whose arm is not long enough to grasp that which lies in the land beyond the stars will have to live and die without attaining to perfect satisfaction. Man, it is not here below that God has placed that which you need. The bread for your souls must come from Heaven! That which can satisfy your immortal spirit must be Divine, like the Creator who made you!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2977

“I know certain individuals who say that they will never believe what they cannot understand. If they adhere to that determination, they will never believe in their own existence, for they certainly cannot understand that!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2978
“Christ, my Brothers and Sisters, is the point of union for all the soldiers of the Cross ”—Volume 52, Sermon #2979

“I hope that there are many in this congregation whom Jesus Christ means to bless, but they are, at present, in a state of utter prostration. They are so despondent that their spirits sink almost to the point of despair. They cannot believe that there is mercy for them—they have relinquished all hope of that. They did, at one time, have some measure of hope, but it is all gone. They are in the prostrate condition of Peter’s mother-in-law and they need Christ to do for them the two things which He did for her. First, He came into contact with herand, secondly, He gently lifted her up and completely restored her. May He do the same for you!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2980

“I have read that a spider will extract poison from the flower from which the bee extracts honey so, surely, from that very Truth of God from which a renewed heart extracts reasons for holiness, unregenerate men have been known to extract excuses for sin! If they do so, I can only say that they are ‘without excuse.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2981

“Because, then, it was the settled custom of Israel to recite or sing these Psalms, [at the Passover] our Lord Jesus Christ did the same, for He would leave nothing unfinished. Just as when He went down into the waters of Baptism, He said, “Thus it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness,” so He seemed to say, when sitting at the table, “Thus it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness. Therefore let us sing unto the Lord, as God’s people in past ages have done.” Beloved, let us view with holy wonder the strictness of the Savior’s obedience to His Father’s will! And let us endeavor to follow in His steps in all things, seeking to be obedient to the Lord’s Word in the little matters as well as in the great ones.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2982

“I cannot imagine a better promise for the wheat than that it shall be threshed—and that is the promise that is made to us if we are the Lord’s wheat—and not the enemy’s tares, ‘You shall have the threshing which shall fit you for the heavenly garner.’ You need not mourn, Beloved, that it is to be so. If you do, it will make no difference, for your Lord has declared that ‘in the world you shall have tribulation.’ Rest quite sure of that.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983

“O Lord, the great Searcher of hearts, do search us lest we should have applied to us saintly names and pass the saintly reputation and character, and hold saintly offices—and after all be cast away with the rubbish over the wall and left to be consumed forever and ever!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2984

“Brothers and Sisters, faith is an exotic in any heart where it is made to flourish—it does not grow there by nature—it must be planted by Grace.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985

“This Doctrine of Redemption tallies with the types of the old Jewish dispensation and corresponds with the prophetic descriptions of the promised Messiah, especially those wonderful chapters in Isaiah and Ezekiel in which His Character is so accurately foretold. This view of Christ dying as the great substitutionary Sacrifice for sinners cannot be dispensed with for a single moment—it seems to us to be the very essence of the Gospel.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2986

“There never did live and there never could live, a man whose entire nature could be satisfied with his worldly possessions. You know that we call the man who delights in hoarding up riches, a miser. Why do we call him by that name unless it is because he is truly miserable?”—Volume 52, Sermon #2987

“This very day, have there not been more sins than moments, more transgressions than heartbeats, more offenses than pulses? God only knows the total of the sins of man! Only His Infinite mind can reckon the iniquity that crops forth from the polluted soil and wells up from the deep spring of depravity that is hidden in the very core of our corrupt nature! Count your sins if you can, O you children of God, and then fall on your knees, bow your heads, cover your faces and say, ‘Our iniquity is indeed great.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2988

“Do not be self-confident, nor rely too much upon your own judgment, but let your mind lie open to conviction. Above all, let it be open to the heavenly Light of God! And if you do, I shall have hope concerning you, notwithstanding a thousand mistakes that you may make. An honest seeker after the Truth of God will not be long before Truth finds him and he finds Truth!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2989“It is most for your profit that you should receive the Spirit of Truth, not through the golden vessel of Christ in His actual Presence here, but through the poor earthen vessels of humble servants of God like ourselves. At any rate, whether we speak, or an angel from Heaven, the speaker matters not—it is the Spirit of God, alone, that is the power of the Word and makes that Word become vital and quickening to you.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2990

“It would be far better to have half a dozen souls really brought to Jesus Christ and enduring to the end, than to have half a dozen thousand blazing away with a false profession for a time—and then returning like the dog to his vomit, or like the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire. Our Lord’s own declaration is, ‘He that endures to the end shall be saved.’ It is that endurance, that holding out to the end, which is the point to which we would direct all our endeavors on behalf of our hearers and our converts—and the point about which we would most earnestly pray to our God.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2991

“Even the seed of Israel, circumcised and blessed with covenants and promises—and having the immediate Presence of God in their sanctuary could not keep the Law—a clear lesson to us that ‘by the deeds of the Law there shall no flesh be justified.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2992

“It is possible to endure afflictions on earth and afterwards to endure eternal damnation in Hell. Sinners may go from beds of languishing to beds of flame, from toil and poverty here to torment and all despair hereafter. There is nothing at all in sorrow that can burn out sin—there is no power in human suffering to remove the wrath of God.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2993

“The best-taught man, apart from Divine Guidance, is capable of becoming the greatest fool possible! There is a strange weakness which sometimes comes over noble spirits and which makes them infatuated with an erroneous novelty, though they fancy they have discovered some great Truth of God.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2994

“The wisdom which contemplates only this life fails even in its own sphere. Its tricks are too shallow, its devices too temporary and the whole comes down with a crash when least expected to fall!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2995
“We lose a great blessing and incur no small guilt if, professing to be the sons and daughters of our Father who is in Heaven, we never ask Him to direct our way!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996
“What we are taught to seek or shun in prayer we should equally pursue or avoid in action.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“The weary sentinel who has stood upon the watchtower all night, keeping guard in the pitiless tempest, longs to see the first streak of daylight—and he will not readily forget the moment when, in the East, he first perceived the glow which betokened the rising of the sun! He may forget that, but weshall never forget the hour when, in our deepest sorrows, we caught the first glimpse of a Savior and of His wondrous plan of salvation!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2998

“But, if ordinary life is precious, much more is the life of the soul and, therefore, it is our Christian duty never to do that which imperils either our own or other men’s souls. To us there is an imperative call from the great Master that we care for the eternal interests of others and that we, as far as we can, prevent their exposure to temptations which might lead to their fatal falling into sin.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2999

“The message, ‘Him that comes to me I will in no wise cast out,’ must be true, for it fell from the lips of Jesus! And, next, it is eminently consistent with His Character. You cannot conceive of Him as casting out a soul that came to Him. The scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman taken in the very act of adultery, yet He did not condemn her, but said to her, ‘Go, and sin no more.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3000

“We say it sincerely, for we know how sadly true it is—the natural heart of man never does and never can produce so much as one single grain that God can receive as being to His honor and glory.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3001
“If we wish to share the lot of the righteous, we must be as they are and, among other things, this text [Psa. 37:31] must be realized in our experience as it is in theirs. The Law of our God must be in our heart that our steps may not slide.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3002

“Even in His hours of keenest conflict, Christ knew that His chosen followers would leave Him alone—all would forsake Him and flee. It is true that even then, He could say, ‘Yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me,’ but apart from His Father’s Presence, His whole life may be compressed into those two sentences—‘I have trodden the winepress alone. And of the people there was none with me.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3003

“Flesh and blood, as they are, cannot inherit the Kingdom of God and cannot even guess what that Kingdom is like. This is not the place where the Christian is to be seen. This is the place of his veiling—Heaven is the place of his manifestation. This is the place of his night. Yonder is the place of his day. Our portion is on the other side of the river—our days of feasting are not yet!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3004“No man ever comes to God unless he is drawn. There is no better proof that man is totally depraved than that he needs to be effectually called. Man is so utterly ‘dead in trespasses and sins’ that the same Divine Power which provided a Savior must make him willing to accept a Savior, or else he will never be saved.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3005

“There is far more of the hand of God in our life than there is of our own hand—if our life is what it ought to be.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3006

“Beloved, we strain no metaphor when we say that there exists, between the soul of every Believer and Jesus Christ, a relationship admirably imaged in the conjugal tie. We are married to Christ. He has betrothed our souls unto Himself. He paid our dowry on the Cross. He espoused Himself unto us in righteousness, in the Covenant of Grace. We have accepted Him as our Lord and Husband. We have given ourselves up to Him and under the sweet Law of His Love we ought to dwell evermore in His house. He is the Bridegroom of our souls, and He has arrayed us in the wedding dress of His own righteousness.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3007

“It is too much the custom for ministers to address the whole assembly as “Brothers and Sisters” and to speak to a mixed multitude of men and women as if they all had a part and lot in spiritual things. It seems that if anywhere, certainly in the pulpit, there should be a wise and constant use of discrimination. The preacher should make his hearers clearly understand that there are some who fear God and some who fear him not—some who are still dead in trespasses and sins—and others who are alive unto God through the quickening power of the Holy Spirit.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3008

“The Apostle Paul has put him among the worthies in the 11^th Chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews and Paul wrote by Inspiration—therefore there can be no mistake about the fact that Samson was saved.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3009

“Brothers and Sisters, let us learn from Jacob’s experience to expect troubles, especially if we have so acted as to bring trouble upon ourselves—but let us also learn from Jacob’s action that while planning is right enough when kept within its proper bounds, prayer is much more important.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3010

“IN speaking of this important matter—confessing with the mouth what we have believed with the heart, I call your attention, first of all, to the order of the two things. Believing with the heart must come first. Confession with the mouth must and should come afterwards. To confess with the mouth what I do not believe with the heart would be hypocrisy instead of being an acceptable sacrifice. It would be an abomination in the sight of God.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3011

“First, then, it is clear, from the very wording of our text, that THE LORD HAS A PEOPLE. Isaiah does not say, in general terms that the Lord has comforted the children of men as a whole, but he says, ‘the Lord has comforted His people.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3012

“Your communion may be transient, but your corruption is perpetual. To be with Christ is but a thing of a moment with you, but to be with your corruption is a thing of every hour in the day! I pray you, keep this in mind and whenever you are in your best frame, then be doubly careful, lest you should lose your Beloved and have to cry once again, ‘I sleep, but my heart wakes!’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3013

“I may gravely question whether I am growing in Grace and under such a doubt I may search my heart to see whether I love my Lord better, or whether I have more fully conquered my sins. But one thing I do not question, namely, that being a Believer in Him, Jesus Christ is unutterably precious to my soul! If you doubt your faith, you may doubt whether Christ is precious to you, but if your faith is certain, the preciousness of Christ to your heart is quite as certain.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014

“When I see some of our young people inclining to be drunkards, I am very sorry and I blame them. But can I wonder at their conduct when I see how many parents train up their children as if they really intended to make drunkards of them—tempting them to drink and giving them their first taste of that which becomes a cause of stumbling to them?”—Volume 52, Sermon #3015

“A man infected with a deadly disease is never at ease. Whatever garments he may put on, or at whatever tables he may feast, he is still unhappy because he has the arrows of death sticking in him! Such is a man conscious of sin. Nothing can please him. Nothing can ease him till his sin is removed. But when sin is gone—when he knows that he is pardoned, he is as a bird set free from its cage!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3016

“May God grant that all of us may not only come to Christ, but may we also exercise a simple, childlike faith which takes God’s Word as it stands in this blessed Book, believes it, receives it, lives upon it, asks no questions concerning it and will allow none to be asked by others!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3017

“Sometimes, among our Primitive Methodist friends, we hear the same kind of thing—they get so carried away by the power of the Truth of God which has just been stated that they cannot refrain from crying out, ‘Glory!’ or, ‘Hallelujah!’ Throughout all Wales, this custom, which I am far from condemning, prevails through the whole sermon, often very much to the comfort of the speaker, enlivening him and cheering him on—and making him rise to greater flights than otherwise he might have taken.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3018
“If a man’s prayer is of such a character that only sovereign Grace, real pardon and true salvation will content his soul, then he shall not be put off with anything else, but he shall have that for which his soul craves.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3019

“It is one of the most unwise things under Heaven to comfort people who do not require it. When we are dealing with enquirers, our love may bring them loss if we offer them words of cheer when they need admonition or rebuke. Any comfort which keeps a soul short of Christ is dangerous.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“Never, even in the sharpest trial, can the heir of Heaven accuse God of being unfaithful to what He has promised. He told His disciples that they would have to endure tribulation—and when it came, they proved the truth of His prophecy—and everything that God does to us, whether little or great, whether sharp or kind, will prove to have been done in accordance with His faithful Word.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3022

“The Gospel of Mark is the most impulsive of all the Gospels. You are aware and I have frequently mentioned it to you, that the word eutheos, translated, ‘straightway,’ ‘forthwith,’ ‘immediately,’ is used a very great number of times by this evangelist in his Book. He is a man who does everything straightway—he is full of impulse, dash, fire, flash—the thing must be done and done at once.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3023

“Surely we make too little of our Redeemer’s death. I fear that even we, who preach most concerning it, dwell too little upon it. That we who pray, plead it too little. That we who sing, praise our Lord too little for His wondrous death and that we who live upon His Grace, yet think too little of the channel by which it flows to us!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024

“Some of the rarest pearls have been found in the deepest waters and some of the choicest utterances of Believers have come from them when God’s waves and billows have been made to roll over them. The fire consumes nothing but the dross and leaves the gold all the purer.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025

“Unless we follow Christ, and make God the great Object of our life, we only differ from the most frivolous in degree—and possibly the degree may not be so great as we suppose.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3026
“If God’s promises cannot comfort you, rest assured that no speech from the lips of man can do it. If your God shall not yield you the consolation that you need, you will go in vain to the giddy world and its pleasures and follies in the hope of finding it.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3027

“We have, moreover, in the Church of Christ, a considerable proportion of those who are always behind. Some of those are here tonight. You feel yourselves to belong to the rear because you are so weak in faith. It is a blessed thing to enjoy full assurance of faith and yet, no doubt, there are thousands in the fold of Jesus who never reach this attainment. It is a great pity that they should not reach it, for they miss much happiness and much usefulness.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3028

“I rejoice to be able to say that all that a sinner can need between here and Heaven is provided in the Gospel of Christ—all for pardon, all for the new nature, all for preservation, all for perfecting and all for glorifying is treasured up in Christ Jesus, in whom it pleased the Father that all fullness should dwell!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3029

“The preacher cannot tell you what it is to receive Christ. Human language is not adapted to convoy to the mind this deep enigma, this matchless secret. We know what it is, for ‘truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ.’ We can describe it in such a measure that our friends who have also received Christ, will know that we understand the mystery—but to the carnal mind it will ever remain a puzzle how Christ can be ‘in us the hope of glory’—how we can eat His flesh and drink His blood. They run away to some carnal interpretation and suppose that the bread is turned into flesh at the Eucharist or that the wine is transformed into blood. That iscarnaltalk and this they talk because they know not what is the mystery of this receiving Christ and this walking in Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3030

“Whenever conscience oppresses you and reminds you of your guilt, depend upon it that Christ has not lost His power to quiet conscience and to calm your fears.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3031

“I know that there are those who would like to see a new Bible, or a revised version of it. I mean a revised version of the original Scriptures to suit their depraved taste! They would gladly have what they call ‘new developments’ and ‘fresh light’ worthy of this ‘advanced’ generation! But, beloved Friends, there is nothing new in theology but that which is false—only the old is true—for the Truth of God must be old, as old as God Himself!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3032

“I must honestly confess that before I knew the Lord, or was seriously seeking Him, although I found the historical parts of the Bible interesting, a great portion of the Scriptures appeared to me to be dull and meaningless.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3033
“Bread and wine, which are but created and common things, even when placed on the table to assist us in Communion, are made into deities by the blind idolaters of this age! Could Egypt or Assyria do worse? Bread used at the ordinance is but bread and nothing other than ordinary bread. Its emblematic use imparts to it no measure or degree of sanctity, much less of Divinity! It is idolatry—flat, groveling idolatry—and nothing less, which on all sides is spreading its mantle of darkness over this land under the pretense of profoundly reverent piety!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3034

“Many of you may know but little of astronomy, but still, you see every day that God is working everywhere around us and that Heaven and earth, and land and sea are teeming with the products of His marvelous skill. The revolutions of day and night and the formation and fall of rain are indisputable proofs of the Presence of eternal power and Godhead! Let us, therefore, seek the Lord.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3034

“You remember that Zion of old was the place, above all others, where God manifested Himself. To ask the way to Zion means, therefore, to seek after God, to desire to be reconciled to God, to long to be pardoned and accepted by God.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3035
“When we are in trial and trouble, we believe the devil when he says God will forsake us. The devil, who has been a liar from the beginning, we credit—but if our God promises anything, we say, ‘Surely this is too good to be true.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3036

“For that Almighty Love which has manifested itself in restraining Grace, let us render grateful songs of thanksgiving as we look back upon our past lives, for we can scarcely tell how often we should have dishonored our character and our profession if it had not been that God came to our rescue and kept back His servants from presumptuous sins.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3037

“Need I do more than suggest to you the infinite number of ways in which the air becomes valuable, not merely as an accessory to our comfort, but as a necessity of our life? Yet, how infinitely more precious is the blood of Jesus Christ which in every way and in every place becomes efficacious to the everlasting salvation of all Believers!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3038

“Another of the Truths connected with Christ’s Gospel that is like a sharp arrow is this— the utter impossibility of self-justification.This is one of the Truths of the Gospel that we must never fail to proclaim—‘By the deeds of the Law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3039

“The poor in pocket may be blessed, or may not be blessed, as the case may be, but the poor in spiritare always blessed and we have Christ’s authority for so saying! Theirs is a poverty which is better than wealth! In fact, it is a poverty which indicates the possession of the truest of all riches.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3040

“As the sparrows were permitted to find their house under the eaves of God’s ancient Tabernacle, we, insignificant and worthless as we are, may come and build under the shelter of God’s great House of Mercy. There we may find a safe refuge from every danger, a perfect security for all time, and even for all eternity.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“Would you be saved, rich man? There is no way but that whereby the poverty-stricken pauper is also to be saved! Would you be delivered, man of intelligence? You shall be saved in the same way as the most ignorant! ‘There is none other name under Heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved,’ but Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3042

“There is a fullness of the iniquity of every individualsinnerin these days, just as there was a fullness of the iniquity of the Amorites in ancient times.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3043

“But remember, however much you have persecuted God’s saints, however harshly you may have dealt with the followers of Christ, the Lord is able to transform you into one of them… You think that it is only your child, or your wife, or your mother. But, in persecuting the members of the body of Christ, you persecute the Head!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3044

“If God says that He will make us a blessing, surely it is implied that once we were not so. Let us look back to the days of our unregeneracy. It may be that some of us were great curses to our families and to the neighborhood in which we dwelt. If so, we must look back with deep sorrow upon the past, for, albeit that God has blotted out the guilt of our iniquity, yet the consequencesof the sin still continue.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045

“Not to the idlers in Herod’s court did Jesus reveal Himself, but to hard working fishermen by the lake of Galilee. If Satan is never far away from the idle, it is pretty plain that it is no disadvantage to be busy!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3046

“When Omnipotence and Omniscience unite to sift the chaff from the wheat, you may depend upon it that the sifting wall be thoroughly done!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3047
“The Spirit was first poured upon Christ and from Him descends to all those who are in union with His adorable Person. Let us bless the name of Christ if we are united to Him—and let us look up to our Covenant Head, expecting that from Him will flow down the heavenly unction which shall anoint our souls!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3048

“A deep sense of sin is often a blessedly impelling power to drive us to the Savior. I desire never, in this world, to be free from a deep sense of the bitterness and guiltiness of sin. Even though freed from the guilt of sin by the precious blood of Jesus, I still desire to feel what an abominable thing sin is, that I may go, eagerly and passionately, to my dear Lord’s wounds, and get the one only effectual remedy for all my soul diseases.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3049

“Do not I recollect the time when I would have given my eyes for a tear and would have been willing to suffer anything if I could have but bent my knees and uttered one groan? But my heart would not yield a sigh or my eyes a tear! I turned to the Book of God but that did not move me. I listened to the preacher without emotion. It seemed as if even a dying Savior’s groans could never move a heart so base as mine—and yet I bear witness that Christ came to save such, for I do myself rejoice in His salvation! You who are lost to all feeling may well catch at this text, ‘The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3050

“When a man has kept his promise once, it does not stand good any longer—but God’s promises may be fulfilled a hundred times over and yet remain just as valid as when He first gave them. So what God did for His Church at Pentecost He is prepared to do today—and He will do it on a yet larger scale in those happy times that are yet to come, the latter days for which we look and long with joyful expectation!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3051

“David lamented the villainy of Ahithophel, but the Savior, inasmuch as He was of a more tender spirit than the son of Jesse, even more keenly felt the treachery of Judas”—Volume 53, Sermon #3052

“There never was anyone else so kind in heart as He was, yet He clearly taught the dreadful Truth of God that sinners shall be punished in Hell forever! There never can be any question about the Savior’s view of sin as being a very evil thing and of the punishment of sin as being a very terrible thing.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3053

“Nothing that man can present to God by way of sacrifice can ever purchase the blessing of forgiveness.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3054

“Have you never felt, when you have seen the faults of your own children, that you ought to lay the rod on your own back because, in some way or other, you were an accomplice in your children’s sins? How much of the ruin of many children’s souls lies at their parents’ door!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3055

“Sometimes it has been asked by unconverted men, ‘Why do you talk so much about atonement? Why could not God be generous and forgive sin outright? Why should He require the shedding of blood and the endurance of great suffering?’ Sinner, if you had a right sense of sin you would never ask such a question!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“I can truly say to every one of you that the main thing you have to do, in this world, is first to follow Christ until you find him as your Savior or, in other words, the first thing for you to do is to look to Him, to trust in Him. We live in vain if we do not live unto God and if we do not live by faith in Jesus Christ, the one and only Savior.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“And there comes even a brighter day than has ever dawned upon this poor misty earth—the day of the coming of the Son of Man, when the Sun of Righteousness shall arise, when Christ shall thrust in His golden sickle and shall reap the harvest of this world! And then shall the righteous rejoice before Him with a greater joy than ten thousand harvest years have ever known!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3058

“GOD is the poor man’s Friend. The poor man, in his helplessness and despair, leaves his case in the hands of God and God undertakes to care for him.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059
“He who is convinced that he knows nothing as he ought to know, gives up steering his ship and lets God put His hand on the rudder. He lays aside his own wisdom and cries, ‘O God, my little wisdom is cast at Your feet. Such as it is, I surrender it to You.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3060

“I learn from…that it is not the preacher’s business to seek to please his congregation. If he labors for that end, he will in all probability not attain it. But if he should succeed in gaining it, what a miserable success it would be! He must lose the favor of his Master if he should once aim at securing the favor of his fellow men. We therefore ought to preach many Truths of God which will irritate our hearers!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3061

“At the commencement of spiritual life we believe that we are nothing. As we advance, we find that we are less than nothing. May the Holy Spirit so work in you! Some of you are, perhaps, depending and thinking that you are not children of God, or else you would not be so cast down as you are. I pray you to understand this matter aright. Instead of having any reason for despondency, you will find a subject for joy, for I am sure that the Spirit is honoring Christ when He is lowering you in your own estimation.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3062

“They are the strongest who are the weakest in themselves. They are the richest who know how poor they are apart from God. They have the most Grace who know how utterly empty they would be of Grace if the Lord should ever withdraw His hand from giving it to them.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3063

“Since the time when you believed in Jesus, you have had many needs, both spiritual and temporal, but He has promised no good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly. What say you, Brothers and Sisters? Your needs have come—have the supplies come also? I am sure you will say, ‘it wasso’—strangely so—but always so!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3064

“No man ever becomes truly meek, in the Christian sense of that word, until he first knows himself and then begins to mourn and lament that he is so far short of what he ought to be. Self-righteousness is never meek. The man who is proud of himself will be quite sure to be hard-hearted in his dealings with others. To reach this rung of the ladder of the Light of God he must first set his feet upon the other two. There must be poverty of spirit and mourning of heart before there will come that gracious meekness of which our text speaks.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3065

“Whenever a thing is a sin, we need not appeal to Christ to know whether we shall commit it, for we are taught to avoid even the appearance of evil! If we consider that a thing is wrong, we have no right to do it, even though it might tend to our advantage in worldly affairs. We must not do evil that good may come, for if we were to do so, then indeed our damnation would be just!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3066

“The best man here will, at times, have painful memories of the past and to look at the past, except through the glass made red by our Savior’s precious blood, is to look upon despair—for our past transgressions would drag us down to Hell were it not for the Atoning Sacrifice of Jesus Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3067

“Brothers and Sisters, the sayings of Christ upon the Cross have a deeper meaning than that which appears upon the surface. They were texts of which His eternal life should be the sermon—they were no common words. As no word of Scripture is of private interpretation, no word of the Savior upon the Cross loses its force and significance in later times.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3068

“Depend upon it, no mutilation and no disease of man’s body was ever so sickening to the most delicate taste as sin is sickening to God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3069

“It is not easy for a man who has constantly enjoyed good health and prosperity, to sympathize with the poor and the suffering. Even our great High Priest, who is full of compassion, learned it by carrying our sorrows in His own Person. To see the sufferings of the afflicted, in many cases, would be enough to move a stone. And if we visit a hospital and come back with a more tender heart, we shall have found it a sanatorium to ourselves.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3070

“The Christian Church is the home of Christian love. When it is what it should always be, it is a family—it is ‘the household of faith,’ of which God Himself is the Father, the Lord Jesus is the Elder Brother, and all the members are Brothers and Sisters—all equal, all one in Christ Jesus, all seeking to serve the rest, laying themselves out to be servants to the whole band of Brothers and Sisters in Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3071

“Oh, infinitely better is the end of a spiritual life than the beginning! Contrast the Slough of Despond with the Celestial City and human intellect cannot fail to see how much better, how infinitely better, the end is than the beginning!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3072 ____________________________________________________

“There are two sorts of sorrow—the sorrow that rushes like a mighty torrent, and the sorrow which is, perhaps, the worse of the two, which goes drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip—like the constant dripping which wears away stones—and which makes even the boldest heart to feel the attrition.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2969

“I would not give twopence for your religion if you are a tradesman—but not fair in your dealings! I do not care if you can sing like David, or preach like Paul—if you cannot measure a yard of material with the proper number of inches, or if your scales do not weigh rightly, or your general mode of business is not straight and true—you had better make no profession of religion!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2994

“But many of you who have heard the Gospel, have not believed it…This is your greatest sin—that you have not believed on Jesus Christ, whom God has sent! Oh, that God the “My soul begs and beseeches of you to renew your prayers for me, that I may preach with greater vigor. What if my ministry should become as dull and stupid as the ministry of one-half of my Brothers Holy Spirit would convince you of the sin of unbelief and enable you to repent of it and to lay hold on Jesus Christ by a act of childlike faith, that you might live through Him!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2951

“I had sooner die than live to be such a being as many who stand up in the pulpit wholly to waste people’s time and not to win souls!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3013
“It is not said in Heaven, ‘Moral, moral, moral are You, O God!’ But, ‘Holy, holy, holy are You, O Lord!’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902
“Whatever there may be in the sealed scroll that records God’s purposes in predestination, there cannot be anything there to contradict what is written on the open scroll of Divine Revelation.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2864
“It is an unspeakable blessing to have sin forgiven.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3037
“If you could ask those Believers who are now in Heaven, they would tell you that they came through great tribulation—many of them not only washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb, but they sealed their faithfulness to Him with their own blood!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983
“If you lament your loneliness, cure it by seeking heavenly company. If you have no companions below who are holy, seek all the more to commune with those who are in Heaven where Christ sits at the right hand of God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3052

“I have sometimes heard of ministers that have been quite exhausted by the preparation of a single Sunday sermon. I am told, indeed, that one sermon on a Sunday is as much as any man can possibly prepare! It is such laborious work to elaborate a sermon! And then I say to myself, “Did my Lord and Master require His servants to preach such sermons as that?” Is it not probable that they would do a great deal more good if they never tried to do any such fine things, but just talked out of their hearts of the simplest Truths of His blessed Gospel!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2927

“There is no necessity for saints being on earth that I know of, except for the good of their fellow men. Sanctification might be completed in a moment. As for all the rest, it is already done. God ‘has made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.’ Why do we stay here, then, at all, but that we may be salt in the midst of putrefaction—light in the midst of darkness—life in the midst of death? The Church is the world’s hope!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2952

“The separation at what, is called, “religious,” from the, “secular,” is one of the greatest possible mistakes. There is no such thing as a religion of Sundays, and of chapels and churches. At least though there is such a thing, it is not worth having. The religion of Christ is a religion for seven days in the week—a religion for every place and for every act! And it teaches men, whether they eat, or drink, or whatever they do, to do all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and to the glory of God! I pray that you may be kept from falling away from thatreligion, and that you may be kept up to the mark in serving the Lord in all things, and attending diligently to the little commonplace matters of daily life.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2994

“Do not imagine that you can live for twenty, thirty, or forty years in sin and yet be just as likely to be converted as anybody else is! I know that God can, if He pleases to do so, call you at the 11^th hour as easily as at the first, but, as far as you are concerned, if you harden your neck, you have no right to expect that He will do so, but rather to expect that you shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3037

“If we can but believe in God, He will never desert us! If we can dare, God will do! If we can trust, God will never allow us to be confounded, world without end! It is sweet beyond expression to climb where only God can lead and plant the standard on the highest towers of the foe!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3052

“Just in proportion as you enter into your royal heritage and live in it, and believe in it—in this proportion Jesus Christ will be precious to you.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014

“Beloved, nothing so delights God, next to the Person of His own dear Son, as the sight of one of those whom He has made like unto the Lord Jesus! Know you not that Christ’s delights are with the sons of men and that the holiness, the patience, the devotion, the zeal, the love and the faith of His people are precious to Him?”—Volume 52, Sermon #2970

“What arrow will ever pierce the heart of sin unless it is dipped in the blood of Jesus? When I see sin punished on Christ, I see the evil of it. When I see Christ dying for my sin, I see the great motive for my dying for my sin. When I behold His griefs and pangs on my behalf, I see a reason why I should make abundant sacrifices in order that I may glorify Him. Beloved, the death of Christ is the great sin-killer and he who truly knows it and understands it, will feel its sanctifying power!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2942
“I recommend some of you, instead of praying, “Lord, give me a sense of pardoned sin. Give me a new heart. Give me to feel that You love me”—pray those prayers, by-and-by, but for the present, pray like this, “Lord, help me to believe. Lord, give me faith. Lord, drive away my unbelief.”Direct your prayers to that one point—for that is the matter in which you are lacking. Unbelief is the great stone lying at the door of your heart and preventing that door from being opened!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2881

“Do you not see that the greater your value of Christ, the greater your strength against temptation? Although the devil may tempt you with this and that, yet Jesus Christ, being more precious than all else, you say, ‘Get you behind me, Satan. You cannot tempt me while Christ is dear to my spirit.’ Oh, may you set a very high value upon Christ, that thus you may be kept firm in the day of temptation!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014

“If anyone should proclaim a religion without a sacrifice, you would soon see how quickly this building would be emptied, or any other place of worship. There are always more spiders than people where the Atonement is left out. Men must have a sacrifice—in their inmost hearts they know their absolute need of it when they seek to approach the Lord.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2951

“Christ never meant Christians to be stoics. There is a wide and grave distinction between a gracious acquiescence in the Divine will and a callous steeling of your heart to bear anything that happens without any feeling whatever. ‘You shall be sorrowful,’ says our Lord to His disciples, and ‘you shall weep and lament.’ It is through the weeping and the lamenting, oftentimes, that the very kernel of the blessing comes to us!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983

“Give me great sinners to make great saints! They are glorious raw material for Grace to work upon and when you do get them saved, they will shake the very gates of Hell!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2934

“The best sermon Paul preached was when he took bread and gave thanks. He did not do that for show. It was just in the daily course of his habitual godliness that the man of God came forth boldly before their eyes. Do not conceal your godliness from those around you! Though at first they may laugh at you and despise you, who can tell but that, like Paul, you may gain influence till they will do anything you tell them? And like Paul, by means of that influence, you may save all that are in the house and so the text may come true of you, ‘God has given you all them that sail with you.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2952

“Hark to the shriek that goes up from the midst of the Red Sea, when the waters that stood upright as a heap, suddenly descend and lock in their death-wooing arms the multitudes of Egyptian chivalry! Do you not see here the Justice of God? You do, but you do not see it so completely, because a multitude of sinners, in front, have escaped by this very destruction…for had Divine Justice slaughtered all sinners on that occasion, Israel would have been drowned as well as Egypt! ”—Volume 53, Sermon #3038

“No one man is tempted in all points exactly like another man and each man has certain trials in which he must stand alone amid the rage of war, with not even a book to help him, or a biography to assist him—no man ever having gone that way before except that one Man whose trail reveals His nail-pierced feet. He alone knows all the devious paths of sorrow. Yet, even in such by-ways, the Father is with us, helping, sustaining and giving us Grace to conquer at the close.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3052

“They [God’s people] are not all alike and they never will be! All attempts at uniformity must fail and it is very proper that they should. We need not wish to be one in the sense of uniformity, but only in the sense of unity not all one jewel, but many set in one crown. It little matters whether we shine with the sapphire’s blue, or the emerald’s green, or the ruby’s red, or the diamond’s white, so long as we are the Lord’s in the day when He makes up His jewels!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2970

“If we open our mouth wide, India may be evangelized—and China—and the new world of America and the far-distant world of Australia will feel the power of the Gospel that we take there in the name of the Lord! Let us pray, as David did long ago, that the whole earth may be filled with God’s Glory! What is the whole earth, after all, compared with the greatness of God, and with the Infinite Sacrifice that Christ has offered? Well may the Lord say to each one of us, ‘Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2879

“I like, and the world likes, a religion that will wash—a religion that will stand many showers and much rough usage. Some Christians’ joy disappears in the wear and tear of life—it cannot endure the world’s rough handling. Let it not be so with us, Beloved, but let us praise, bless and magnify the name of the Lord as long as we have any being!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2994

“I would recommend you to choose the church of which you would be a member and the pastor whom you would hear by this one thing—by how much of Christ there is in that church and how much of the savor of Christ there is in that ministry!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014

“We may also be ‘partakers of other men’s sins’ by joining a church that holds unscriptural doctrines, or that does not act according to Apostolic precedent. Some people say, ‘We belong to such-and-such a church, but we don’t approve of its teaching or its practice.’ What? You belong to it
and yet you do not approve of its principles? Out of your own mouth you are condemned!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3055“When we reach the highest point in our devotions, we still need a Savior. I do not at all like the boastful talk about ‘the higher life’ in which some people seem to revel. We cannot have too high a life, but, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner,’ is about as big a prayer as I can manage at present. And often does my soul pray with such earnestness the dying thief’s prayer that his petition is forced to my lips, ‘Lord, remember me when You come into Your Kingdom.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2941

“I solemnly believe that there are those who have not the shadow of an idea of the meaning of the words which they hear every Sabbath in a form of prayer! They repeat those prayers without any appreciation of the sense of them. They would probably not notice if the words were put in any other way. Doubtless they would get as much good out of them if they were thrown together in wild disorder, as they do out of the beautiful and magnificent array in which they are marshaled! ”—Volume 52, Sermon #2984

“The death of Christ gloriously set forth Divine Justice, because it taught manifestlythis Truth ofGod, that sin can never go without punish- ment.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3038

“Now, my Hearer, let me speak to you about your own conversion. If you have skipped the first page of the book, namely, repentance, go back and begin again, for that faith which has a dry eye and never wept for sin is not the faith of God’s elect! There must be repentance! It is an essential Grace—no man is truly saved who has not a hatred of the sin he loved before and who has not made a confession of it before God with an earnest prayer for pardon.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2928

“I will not discuss that question just now, whether the practice of teaching children a form of prayer is proper or not. I would not do it. Children should be instructed in the meaningof prayer, and their little minds should be taught to pray, but it should be rather the matter of prayer than the words of prayer that could be suggested. And I think they should be taught to use their own words and to speak to God in such phrases and terms as their own childlike capacities, assisted by a mother’s love, may be able to suggest.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2943

“But supposing you have joined a church whose doctrines are Scriptural, you may be ‘partakers of other men’s sins’ if the discipline of the church is not carried out as it should be. If we know that members are living in gross sin and do not deal with them either by way of censure or excommunication in accordance with the teaching of Christ and His Apostles, we become accomplices in their sin. I often tremble about this matter, for it is no easy task where we count our members by the thousands. But may we never wink at sin, either in ourselves or in others! May you all, Beloved, exercise a jealous oversight over one another and so help to keep one another right!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3055

“When a man imagines that all his corruptions are gone, that is no proof that he is rid of them, but only that he does not really know his true condition, for, if God were but to lift the veil that covers his eyes and let him see the great deeps of sin that are in his nature, he would soon discover that he has grave cause for fear—and he would be driven to cry out to God, ‘Oh, keep me, I beseech You, or else I shall commit spiritual suicide! I must and shall become like the vilest of apostates unless Your Sovereign Grace shall hold me on my way.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2971

“It is better to count Christ precious than it is to count orthodoxy precious. It is not loving a creed, but it is loving Jesus that proves you a Christian. You may become such a bigot that it may be only the laws of the land which keep you from burning those who differ from you, and yet you may have none of the Grace of God in your heart!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014

“Never was shame more shameful than in the experience of our Lord. Here God seemed to declare, once and for all, how shameful in His sight sin was. When sin lay but by imputation upon His own dear Son, His Son must be an object of scorn to the universe!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3038

“If there is a poor sinner here who sees the lifeboat of faith come close up to him and he is afraid to step in, if it is any comfort to you, Sinner, let me tell you that if you step into that lifeboat and are lost, I must be lost, too, for I do not know of any other way of escape!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2951

“I remember my mother saying to me, ‘I prayed that you might be a Christian, but I never prayed that you might be a Baptist.’ But, nevertheless, I became a Baptist, for, as I reminded her, the Lord was able to do for her exceedingly above what she asked or thought—and He did! She expected, of course, that I should be an Independent. Well, as long as your children are saved, you need not put any conditions as to the mode. Sooner see your son and daughter go to the Established Church, saved, than see them go to your own place of worship and be lost.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2952

“I press it on you—it seems to me to be the greatest of all inconsistencies that a man should think himself able to guide a nation and yet should lose his own soul! That he should have schemes by which to turn this world into a Paradise and yet lose Paradise for himself! That he should declaim violently against war and all sorts of evils and yet, himself should be at war with God! Himself a slave to sin! Shall he talk of freedom while he is manacled by his lusts and appetites? Shall he be enslaved by drink and yet be the champion of liberty?”—Volume 52, Sermon #2995 “The judge who winks at sin, is the abettor of sin. If the supreme Ruler does not punish sin, He becomes Himself the patron of all guilt and sin may take its rest beneath the shadow of His wings! But it is not so and, Sinner, God would have you know, and have angels know, and have devils know that however lightly any of His creatures may think of sin—and however foolishly simple man may toy with it—He knows what a vile thing it is and He will have no patience with it. ‘He will by no means spare the guilty.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“We have plenty of Baptist churches educating cowards by the score! They never come out before the whole church—that would be too trying for their nerves! They are never expected to come out boldly on the Lord’s side. Too often, Baptism is administered somewhere in a corner, when as few as possible are present and, in that way, where we ought to have lion-like men, we breed those who hide their principles and are ready to amalgamate with any sect of people so long as they can but bear the name of Christians!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2984

“To think that my case is so bad that God cannot blot out my sin is to doubt His Omnipotence and to do Him grievous dishonor. For me to despair of receiving the mercy of Christ is to do despite to that generous and self-sacrificing Savior who bled to death on Calvary’s Cross! To think that He is either unable or unwilling to forgive us is to add to our former offenses—and that which is, in itself, sinful cannot be a help to salvation!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2911

“It is a blessed temptation to find one of God’s precious promises, for you feel then as if you were tempted to pray, so as to plead it!1904, Sermon #2869

“Each Christian is a manifestation and display of some attribute or other of God—a different part may belong to each of us, but when the whole shall be combined, when all the rays of evidence shall be brought, as it were, into one great sun, and shine forth with meridian splendor—we shall see in Christian experience a beautiful Revelation of our God. ”—Volume 53, Sermon #3036

“Is there a harlot here? O poor fallen woman, I pray that Christ may so forgive you that then you will wash His feet with your tears and wipe them with the hairs of your head! Is there a thief here? Men say that you will never be reclaimed, but I pray the same Eternal Mercy which saved the dying thief to save the living thief! Have I any here who have cursed God to His face a thousand times? Return unto your God, for He comes to meet you! Say to Him, “Father, I have sinned.” Bury your head in His bosom! Receive His kiss of forgiveness, for God delights to pardon and to blot out transgression. Now that He has smitten Christ, He will not smite any sinner who comes to Him through Christ. His wrath is gone and He can now say, “Fury is not in Me.” Here, then, is a great wonder—that Christ’s precious blood can cleanse the vilest of the vile and you may now pray the prayer of the text, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.””—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“I love Protestantism, but if there is anything in this world that I have a horror of, it is that politicalProtestantism which does nothing but sneer and snarl at its fellow citizens—but which is as ignorant as a cow about what Protestantism truly is.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014
“Oftentimes the Good Shepherd, in caring for the sheep, ‘ makes us lie down,’ but He is glad when we come of our own accord that we may rest and listen to His Word.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2927

“Do not grieve the Spirit of God by unworthy doubts and mistrusts—these things will be like fiery arrows in your own soul and drink up the very life of your strength. However hard the struggle and difficult the trial, if you seek the Lord, seek Him in the confidence He deserves.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2923

“It is hard to keep to the narrow way when the broad road runs so near to it that sometimes they seem to be one! The time was when the broad road was so distinct from the narrow one that we could easily discern who was travelling to Heaven and who was going to Hell. But now the devil has engineered the broad road so very close up to the side of the narrow way that there are many people who manage to walk on both of them—they were never so pleased as when they could first take a little turn on the narrow road and then, afterwards, take another turn on the broad one.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2971

“God had one Son without sin, but He never had a son without temptation. The natural man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward—and the Christian is born to temptation just as certainly and necessarily.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“The pains of the damned in Hell are no atonement for sin! They suffer in consequenceof sin, but no atonement has been made by them, for all they have suffered has not lessened what they have to suffer. And when ten thousand times ten thousand years shall have rolled over their poor accursed heads, they will be just as far off having satisfied Divine Justice as they are now, for sin is such a dreadful thing that even Tophet cannot burn it up, though ‘the pile thereof is fire and much wood,’ and though ‘the breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone, does kindle it.’ Sin is cast into its flames and men suffer there—but all the burnings of Gehenna never did consume a single sin, and never could. Think of that! Earth, Heaven and Hell could never take away a single sin from a single soul!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“‘Tis greatly wise to talk about our last hours. The shroud, the grave, the shovel may teach us more of true wisdom than all the learned heads that ever pondered vain philosophy, or all the lips that ever uttered earth-born science!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929 “It is true that nothing could add to His Glory as God, but seeing that He assumed our Nature and became Man as well as God, He added to His Glory by all the shame He bore. There is not a reproach that pierced His heart which did not make Him more beautiful! There is not a line of sorrow that furrowed His face which did not make Him more lovely—that marred Countenance is more to be admired by us than all the comeliness of earthly beauty! He was always superlatively beautiful. His beauty was such as might well hold the angels spellbound as they looked upon Him!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983

“I do not care to what church you belong, or what creed you are ready to die for, you do not know the Truth of God unless the Person of Christ is dear to you!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014

“In these days, we know right well that there are unconverted persons in the audience and it is proper, therefore, to have one message to the saints and another message to the sinners—and to let it be seen, all through the sermon, that the preacher is aware that the Lord has made a distinction between Israel and Egypt—between them that fear Him and them that fear Him not.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2953

“The reporter has not got a sign in all his stenography, I think, by which he can record a cry. A cry is the heart’s own language with which the tongue cannot interfere. Is there anybody here that does pray and yet cannot pray—who groans before God, ‘Oh, that I might be saved’—whose only words are tears—whose only language is the anguish of his silent spirit? Ah, you are the person—the person that can cry! Cry then unto the Lord with all your might. It is said of such, ‘He sent His word and healed them.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921

“If our sins had been punished upon ourselves with the utmost rigor of the Divine law, that Law would not have been as honored throughout the entire universe of intelligent beings as it now must be when they hear that God, Himself, would sooner pay the penalty of sin than allow His Law to be broken with impunity!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2905

“Martin Luther would never have been the Martin Luther he was if it had not been for the devil. The devil was, as it were, the proof-house for Martin Luther. He must be tried and tempted by Satan and so he became fit for the Master’s use.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997
“No sinner, when converted, although God has forgiven him, can ever forgive himself—and no child of God, although God has blotted out his sin, can ever blot it out of his own memory as long as he is here on earth.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3037

“If I were to tell you that I was commissioned by God to say that if you walked from here to John o’Groat’s House in the cold and wet, barefooted and ate nothing on the way but dry bread and drank nothing but water, you would inherit eternal life, you would all be on the road tomorrow morning, if not tonight! But when I say just this, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved,” what do you do, then? Are you such a fool as to be damned because the way to be saved is too simple? My anger waxes hot against you, that you should play the fool with your own soul and be damned because it is too easy.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“I consider the form of prayer to be no more worthy of being called prayer than a coach may be called a horse. The horse will be better without the coach, travel much more rapidly and find himself much more at ease. He may drag the coach, it is true, and still travel well. Without the heart of prayer, the form is no prayer—it will not stir or move—it is simply a vehicle that may have wheels that might move, but it has no inner force or power within itself to propel it.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2943

“A little while, Sinner, and you will never have another invitation to come to Christ. A little while and there will be no outstretched arms of Him who died upon the Cross, ‘the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2953

“The man who dares not have his ship examined is the man who knows that some of the timbers are rotten! And if you do not like being examined, you are the very men who ought to put yourself through that process without a moment’s delay, obeying the injunctions of the Apostle, ‘Examine yourselves, whether you are in the faith; prove yourselves. Know you not yourselves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except you be reprobates?’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2971

“I call that real happiness which I can enjoy by the hour together in my room alone, calmly looking into things and feeling content. I call that real joy which I feel when I wake up at night and, though full of pain, can lie still and bless God for His goodness.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3016

“I believe that if we could brighten the faces of all the saints and anoint them with the oil of gladness, we would do more than anything else could do to spread Christianity. I mean if we could make the children of the King rejoice, we should cause worldlings to ask, ‘Where does this joy come from?’ And as they asked this question, we would give them the answer and so the Gospel would be sure to spread.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2941
“Regeneration is an absolute necessity before any soul can enter Heaven—and you must not be satisfied with anything short of that! Yet you may be grateful if, like Timothy, from a child you have known the Scriptures, or if, like Samuel, you have been brought up in the house of the Lord from your very early years.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3037

“God is so inflexibly just that He has never forgiven and will never forgive the sinner without having exacted the punishment for his sin! He is so strictly true to His threats and so inexorably severe in His justice, that His holy Law never relaxes its hold upon the sinner till the penalty is paid to the utmost farthing.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3054

“It is a fine word, that word, “ silly.” Hardly do I know another that is so eminently descriptive. There may be some sort of dignity in being a fool—but to be silly—to attract no attention except ridicule—is so utterly contemptible that I do not know how a more sarcastic epithet could be applied!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2984

“And we know some who when they go on the Continent, for instance, say, ‘Well, we need not be quite so exact there.’ And therefore the Sabbath is utterly disregarded and the sanctities of daily life are neglected, so reckless are they in their recreations. Well, Sirs, if your religion is not warranted to keep in any climate, it is good for nothing!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902

“No faith brings greater glory to God than the faith of the audaciously guilty when they dare to believe that God can forgive them!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2934
“If all the Believers who have ever lived, or who ever shall live, could be gathered together, we might maintain that there is not, in the whole universe, a single sin that can be laid to the charge of any soul that believes in Jesus.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2998

“Such, my Brothers and Sisters, is the true philosophy of a Christian’s life. You are to do good works as zealously as if you were to be saved by your good works—and you are to trust in the merits of Christ as though you had done nothing at all! So, too, in the service of God, though you are to work for God as if the fulfillment of your mission rested with yourselves, you must clearly understand and steadfastly believe that, after all, the whole matter, from first to last, rests with God! Without Him, all you have ever planned or performed is unavailing.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2913

“There are many very sweet conditional promises—one of them helped to save my soul at rest, it was this, ‘Look unto Me, and be you saved, all the ends of the earth.’ The condition there is, ‘Look unto Me.’ But you cannot prove it unless you look unto Christ! Here is another, ‘Whoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ What a blessed promise that is! But then you cannot prove the promise unless you call on the name of the Lord. So that, whenever we see the promise to which a condition is attached, if we wish to prove it in our own experience, we must ask of God to give us Grace to fulfill the condition!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3036

“Brothers and Sisters, the Virgin Mary was a sinner, saved by Grace, as you and I are! That Savior whom she brought forth, was a Savior to her as much as to us. She had to be washed from sin, both original and contracted, in the precious blood of her own Child, ‘the Son of the Highest.’Neither could she have entered Heaven unless He had pronounced her absolution and she had been, as we are, ‘accepted in the Beloved’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3018

“It is powerful pleading when you have Christ praying by your side and know that you have Him there—and when you feel that your prayer is not the petition of a suppliant who is pleading alone, but the utterance of one who is covered up and lost sight of in the Person of the greater Pleader—the Lord Jesus Christ. This is, indeed, seeing Christ. ‘You see Me,’ said Christ to His disciples, and we do see Him when we realize His power with us in the hour of prayer!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2953

“ But even the Man Christ Jesus, inassociation withthe Godhead, could not have taken away your sins unless He had died. I never read in Scripture that all that He did in His life could take away sin. The Savior’s life is the robe of righteousness with which His people are covered, but that is not the bath in which they are washed.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“Every Divine promise, if it is rightly viewed by faith, will make the heart leap for joy.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2864

“Dear Brothers and sisters, may you, by God’s Grace, be preserved from sin, but if sin should come upon you unawares, may your bones be broken by it and may you feel that your very heart is wounded because you have wounded your God! To repent of sin is one of the hallmarks of a Christian, but to have a hardened, untrembling heart is one of the sure marks of the reprobate who is far off from God!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2971

“And are you practically keeping Christ’s words as to the precepts of the Gospel? Have you believed on Him? Believing on Him, have you been baptized according to His command? Being baptized, do you come to His Table according to His bidding, “This do in remembrance of Me”? Or do you turn on your heels and say that these are nonessential things?”—Volume 50, Sermon #2895
“A religion without the blood of Christ in it is a lifeless religion. A religion without the Atonement and reconciliation by the blood of the Covenant has missed the most essential part of true godliness!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2928

“Do, I beseech you, put the Lord in mind of His own promises and He will most assuredly fulfill them! Here is a challenge to all the redeemed, ‘Prove Me now.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3036

“What can be our reason for calling God our Lord if we refuse to consult Him? Do not even the heathen always conclude that a god is to be consulted? Though their lying oracles have deluded them, yet have they always been right in the idea that the very thought of godhead implied guidance! And shall we turn away from Jehovah who really can guide us? While the heathen look to stocks of wood and stone, shall we confide in human oracles and neglect to consult God who knows all things?”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996

“Even if any of you are looking forward to a dreaded sickness, or to a painful operation, or to business losses which may sink you from your present comfortable position to one of great trial and poverty—think of this blessed Truth of God—‘God is faithful.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2912

“I remember the story of a felon, in those days when they used to hang people for very little indeed. A poor man, who had committed some offense, was condemned to die. While he lay waiting for the sentence, the Lord sent a choice minister of the Gospel to him and his heart was enlightened so that he found Christ. As he was on the way to the gallows, what, do you think, was this man’s cry? He was overwhelmed with joy and, lifting up his hands, he said many times, “Oh, He is a great Forgiver! He is a great Forgiver!” Death was no terror now that he had found forgiveness through Jesus Christ!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3016

“Remember what we said the other night—there is all the difference in the world between the religion that is made up of, ‘Do, do,’ and that other religion that is spelt ‘D-o-n-e, done.’ He who has the religion of, ‘It is all done,’ loves God out of gratitudeand serves Him because he is saved. But he who has the religion of ‘Do’ is always a slave, never gets salvation, but perishes in his doings—as they deserve to do who will look to themselves instead of looking to Christ!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“All the life that any Believer ever had on the face of the earth, he must have derived from the Lord Jesus Christ for he had none of his own. And when the Holy Spirit had given him this life from Jesus Christ, he could not keep it alive by his own power. He had to remain in union with Jesus if he was to continue to live, as Christ reminded His disciples, ‘Without Me, (severed from Me), you can do nothing.’ Let us recognize this fact, Beloved, that we who have seen Christ have a new life within us which we did not create and which we could not nourish and sustain, but which Jesus keeps, feeds and preserves through the gracious ministry of the Holy Spirit. And thus we live as the world does not live—it is dead in sin, but we are alive unto God by Jesus Christ!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2953

“The very thought of sin, the word of sin, the very garments spotted with the flesh should be hated by the Christian. The Lord give us to feel more and more of this! We shall only get it, however, by living more where the groans of Calvary can meet our ears and the sight of the Savior’s wounds can melt our hearts!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3038

“Blessed Savior, we rejoice that You have gained by all Your sorrows, for therefore has God highly exalted You, and given You a name which is above every name!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983
“Blessed is the man who, in his holy things, fears always—the man who is afraid when he is alone on his knees, lest he should not pray rightly—the man who is afraid lest, either in public or in private, he should act the hypocrite before his God!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2971
“Never do men give so freely to the cause of God as when they are rejoicing over pardoned sin! Keep a deep sense of your indebtedness to God alive in your soul and you will feel that you can never do enough for Him who has forgiven you so much!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“Somebody or other always seemed to object to Mary! If Martha does not do it, Judas will. To be found guilty of excess of love to Christ is such a blessed criminality that I wish we might be executed for it! It were sweet to be put to death for such a crime! It was that that Christ died of—He was found guilty of excess of love. (John 12:3-7)”—Volume 51, Sermon #2927

“We would pray better than we do if we meditated more, before prayer, upon the God whom we address in our supplications.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2943
“Beware, dear Friends, of the devil! Beware of him most when you think you have least need to beware of him!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“There are those who love the high places of the earth where they can exalt themselves. But he who is wise will choose to be numbered among the hungry whom the Lord fills with good things and not among the rich whom He sends away empty. He will delight to be reckoned among those that are of low degree, whom God exalts, even the humble and the meek—and he will not wish to be gathered with the proud, against whom the Lord has registered His solemn declaration that He will stain the pride of their glory.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2878

“Not even the unfallen seraphim can render to God purer homage than when you, a defiled and condemned sinner, dare to believe in the mercy of God in Christ Jesus and so believe as to say, with David, ‘Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2934

“Sanctification is a lifelong work, continuously effected by the Holy Spirit, but justification is done in an instant! It is as complete the moment a sinner believes as when he stands before the Eternal! Is it not a marvelous thing that one moment should make you clean?”—Volume 53, Sermon #3054

“And while it is cause for congratulation that you may not have wandered so far into sin as others, it is also cause for trembling, for verily I say unto you, publicans and harlots often enter the Kingdom of Heaven before Pharisees! Some who were the vilest of the vile have come to Christ—have penitently accepted His righteousness while others robed in their own righteousness have gone down to Hell and perished with a double destruction with the rags of their righteousness about them!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2924

“Never dream that you can be pardoned and then be allowed to live as you did before—the very wish to do so would show that you were still under condemnation.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3016

“The wrath of the Lamb is the worst thing a sinner can ever feel. “The wrath of the Lamb!” Think of that! When love turns to anger, it is cruel as the grave. To despise Incarnate Love is to entail upon yourself infinite misery! They who perish without the knowledge of Christ, perish happily compared with you! It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the Day of Judgment than for you if you have despised Christ!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3038

“When you are ill, bless God for the health you will enjoy when you get well! When you are down-hearted, bless God for the joy that you will have when He shall again lift up the light of His Countenance upon you! When you go to the grave of a Christian friend, bless God because you will meet that friend again!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2864

“The Doctrine of Final Perseverance, or the Eternal Preservation of Believers, seems to me to be written as with a beam of sunlight throughout the whole of Scripture! If that is not true, there is nothing at all in the Bible that is true, for that Truth of God is there if anything is! It is impossible to understand the Bible at all if it is not so. But it is so, glory be to God!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2953

“I know that on a certain day I shall stand before the judgment bar of Christ—but that Judgment Day is mine! I fear it not, I dread it not. I know that soon I must die, but the River of Death is mine! It is mine to wash me, that I may leave the dust of earth behind. It is a glorious river though its waters may be tinged with blackness, for it takes its rise in the mountains of love, hard by the Throne of God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3054

“I cannot see a bleeding Savior without understanding that there must be pardon! Gethsemane, Gabbatha, Golgotha—three sacred words, three irresistible arguments by which it is proved beyond controversy that there is forgiveness even for the chief of sinners!

“It is said that the bow of William the Conqueror was so strong that no man in England, except himself, could bend it. And the great bow of King Jesus is such as none of us can bend! It has the power of the Holy Spirit in it—it is the Holy Spirit, Himself, who gives force and power to the Word so that it pierces through all the sinner’s armor, the most vital part of his being and smites him even in the heart. ”—Volume 53, Sermon #3039

“When Satan tempts us, he strikes sparks on tinder. But, in Christ’s case, when the devil tempted Him, it was like striking sparks on water, yet he kept on striking. Now, if the devil goes on striking where there is no better result than that, how much more will he do it when he knows what inflammable stuff our hearts are made of? Expect it, then. Though you become ever so sanctified by the Holy Spirit and destroy sin after sin and lust after lust, you will have this great dog of Hell still barking at you!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“I cannot see a bleeding Savior without understanding that there must be pardon! Gethsemane, Gabbatha, Golgotha—three sacred words, three irresistible arguments by which it is proved beyond controversy that there is forgiveness even for the chief of sinners!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2972

“If all the mighty orators who have moved the Christian Church at once to tears and to joy, could stand here, I would defy them to weigh this burden of the Lord, or estimate its tremendous meaning, ‘Christ was made a curse for us.’ Christ a curse! Jehovah-Tsidkenu a curse! Jesus, the darling of the Father, made a curse! He, who ‘counted it not robbery to be equal with God,’ a curse! O angels, you may well marvel at this mystery, for its astounding depths you cannot fathom! Yet so it is. ‘He has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056
“The Church of God may well rejoice as she thinks of the noble army of martyrs who praise the Lord on high for, among the sweetest notes that ascend even in Heaven, are the songs that come from the white-robed throng who shed their blood rather than deny their Lord!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983

“If you have labored by other means to procure mercy, you have not found it, for no one else can give it but the one appointed Mediator. Can your “priest” grant you pardon? Did you offend the priest? Then the priest can forgive you for offending him, but he cannot forgive you for offending God. None but God in Christ Jesus can blot out sin and you must go to Him—and if you do not, you are not forgiven, whatever you may dream.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3016

“Our first parents were utter bankrupts. They left us nothing but a heritage of old debts and a propensity to accumulate yet more personal obligations. Well may we be poor who come into this world heirs of wrath with a decayed estate and tainted blood!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3040

“A doctor does not come to heal those that are healthy—he naturally looks after the sick—and a Savior does not come to save those who need no saving! He comes to save sinners, so that your sinnership, instead of being a disqualification, is, to speak broadly, a qualification! Just as filth is a qualification for being washed—just as poverty is a qualification for receiving alms—just as sickness is a qualification for medicine, so your very sin and vileness are qualifications for Christ’s work of Grace in you! I am using expressions that some will think strange, yet I am speaking, nevertheless, what is the absolute Truth of God. Does it not help to remove your unbelief to hear that Jesus is ‘mighty to save’?”—Volume 50, Sermon #2881

“There is nothing about your case that Christ cannot reach! There is in Jesus Christ something exactly adapted to the peculiarly disastrous nature of your position. He can, He will save even you, even you, if you do but trust Him now.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921
“Prayer is a living thing—you cannot find a living prayer in a dead heart. Why seek you the living among the dead, or search the sepulcher to find the signs and tokens of life? No, Sir, if you have not been made alive by the Grace of God, you cannot pray!1904, Sermon #2869

“We often fail in prayer because we come without an errand, not having thought of what our necessities are… See yourself as an abject bankrupt, weak, sick, dying—and this will make you plead. See your necessities to be deep as the ocean, broad as the expanse of Heaven—and this will make you cry. There will be no restraining of prayer, Beloved, when we have got a due sense of our soul’s poverty. But because we think we are rich, increased in goods and have need of nothing, therefore it is that we restrain prayer before God.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2943

“When sin is pardoned and the eternal safety of the soul is ensured, the next thing is to seek the purity of the soul and to secure a character that shall be worth having throughout eternity. There is no character which is worth having which is not fashioned according to the Character of Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“I learn, each day more and more, my utter inability to do good to my fellow men apart from the Spirit of God. There come to me, sometimes, cases that completely stagger me. I try, for instance, to comfort a broken heart. I seek, but in vain, all sorts of metaphors to make the Truth of God clear. I quote the promises, bow the knee in prayer and yet, after all, the poor troubled spirit has to go away still unbelieving, for only God can give it faith!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3044

“Honestly looking back upon the private life of my father and mother, I cannot recall anything in their example which it would have been unsafe for me to imitate. Well then, if I have sinned, I have sinned against a parental example which I ought to have followed and, therefore, there must be more guilt in my fifty-pence sin than in the five-hundred-pence sin of others who have not had such an example as I had!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3015

“A Christian knows that he should not go to such places of amusement as worldlings frequent—they may go without any very great mischief, but he may not. He could not feed on the fare that is provided there, for it is not to his taste and, moreover, he would not go there because he could not expect to have communion with Christ there. And he could not ask God’s blessing upon his going there.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996

“Our life has an outlook towards the Infinite—there are windows in our life that look towards God. Look out of them, O Christian! With your windows open towards God, live in the light of His Countenance and seek in all things to please and honor Him! It is your life-work to honor God, to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ, to be the instrument by which God shall illustrate His almighty power—the black foil from which He shall display the brightness of His Grace. You are to be the means of spreading abroad in this world the savor of Christ’s name—but you cannot do this unless you follow Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“Death has no sting to a Believer. Once death was the penalty of sin—sin being forgiven, the penalty ceases and Christians do not die, now, as a punishment for their sin, but they die that they may be prepared to live!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929
“What has the Gospel of Christ to do with education? You do not need a degree from a university—you do not need to be a master of arts, or bachelor of arts, in order to find Christ!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2954

“It is in being singularly qualified for the duties of our holy Christian warfare, in being singularly courageous and singularly ready with the martyr-spirit, to imperil ourselves for His service, that we may bring glory to God! God says, ‘Prove Me now.’ Saint, will you rob Him of His honor? Will you not do that which shall crown Him, in the estimation of the world, with many more crowns? Oh, prove Him, for by so doing you will glorify His name!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3036

“Oh, how great your sin has been, my Hearers! But Jesus Christ is greater still! You have gone deeply into sin, but the arm of Mercy can reach you! You have wandered far, but the eyes of Love can see you and the voice of Love calls to you now, ‘Come, come, come and welcome, come and welcome!’ Come just as you are and you will not be cast away, but be accepted in the Beloved! ‘There is forgiveness with You, that You may be feared,’ and none fear, and love, and bless, and praise God as much as those who know that there is forgiveness with Him!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2972

“I think I may congratulate you, my Brothers and Sisters in Christ, on the ingathering of converts into the Church. There is a time for rebuke and there is a time for expressing our mutual comfort in one another. Let us congratulate one another that the Spirit of God is with us as a people and with us in no mean measure.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3058

“You worship not God at all if you do not worship God alone! There must be an image-breaking in the soul if the conversion is really true.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2928

“If you have not found Christ, my dear Hearer, it is because you have not sought Him, for He said, ‘He that seeks, finds, and to him that knocks it shall be opened.’ I grant you that the blessing may be delayed for awhile—you may be some time in finding peace, perhaps through your ignorance, or through some cherished sin that you have not given up—but if you truly come to the Throne of Grace and cry in real earnest for mercy, as surely as God is in Christ Jesus, He will stretch out His silver scepter toward you and you shall touch it and find Grace in His sight.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“The promise of harvest gives joy to the earth. Rob not your Lord of the sheaves which He deserves to gather from your heart and life, but believe His Word, rest upon it and rejoice in it, realizing that His Words of promise are meant to bring you great joy!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2935

“Next, we ought to come to the Communion with a sense of self-abasement. Brothers and Sisters, we ought to think little of ourselves everywhere, but when we come to the Table of our Lord, we ought to shrink to nothing—yes, to less than nothing! In the wilderness, man did eat angels’ food, but angels never ate such food as this! Yet we are permitted to come and partake of it. So, let us sink, and sink, and sink, and sink, and sink, and sink, and sink till we are lost in wonder, love and praise that we should ever be permitted to come to this sacred feast!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2865

“It is easy to get black by sin, but remember that it is so hard to get clean that only God’s Omnipotence, in the Person of Christ, could provide a Cleanser for your sins.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“Christ keeps nothing back from His chosen. Between the heart of a true saint and Christ there are no secrets! We pour our hearts into His heart and He pours back His heart into ours. Does He not, this day, manifest Himself unto us as He does not unto the world? You know that He does! And therefore you will not ignorantly cry out, as this woman did, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore You,’ but you will intelligently bless God that, having heard the Word, and kept it, you have, first of all, as true a communion with the Savior as the Virgin had, and you have, in the second place, as true an acquaintance with the secrets of His heart as she can be supposed to have obtained!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3018

“Now, we may find Christ, in a sense, so as to know much about Him, to read about Him, to hear about Him and even to understand much about Him, yet not truly find Him. The root of the matter is to get Christ for yourself! In this respect, you must be selfish and you can thus be selfish without being sinful. You must personally lay hold of Christ if you would be saved!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“Rutherford says, in one of his letters, ‘When Christ’s dear child is carrying a burden, it often happens that Christ says, ‘Halves, My love,’ and carries half of it for him.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983
“You cannot say that Jesus Christ ever troubled His head about what He should eat, or what He should drink—His meat and His drink consisted in doing His Father’s will!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“Oh, what wonders God can do! He loves us to state the difficulty we are in, so that when He gets us out of it, we may remember that we were in such a condition! It was a real disaster and a time of real trial—and yet the Lord redeemed us from it.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2923 “God has been pleased to add to us, year by year, pretty nearly after the rate of four hundred members in a year till our numbers have been swollen beyond our most sanguine hopes. Oh, how greatly has He multiplied the people and increased our joy! Surely the Spirit of God is with us!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3058

“We are told by Luke that Jesus Christ was full of the Holy Spirit. He was full of the Holy Spirit, yet He was tempted! Why? Because the Holy Spirit is never given in vain and, if given to us, it is as a preparation for conflict in order that we may have strength proportioned to our need.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“If a man keeps the Lord’s commandments, He will have power with God in prayer. But when a man lives habitually in sin, or even occasionally falls into sin, he cannot pray so as to prevail, he cannot win the ear of God as he used to do. You know right well that if you have offended the Lord in any way, you cannot enjoy the Gospel as you did before you so sinned. The Bible, instead of smiling upon you, seems to threaten you in every text and every line—it seems to rise up, as in letters of fire, and burn its way into your conscience!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2895

“He that believes in Jesus is safe forever!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041
“Cold prayers court a denial. God hears by fire and the God that answers by fire let Him be God!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2943

“Yes, and let a man really have the fear of Hell before his eyes and a sincere desire for reconciliation with God—let his soul be really hungering after peace with God through Jesus Christ—and he will be at mercy’s door both night and day! He will hammer away at the knocker and give God no rest until He puts forth His hand and gives the Bread of Life to that poor starving suppliant. Yes, it is holy importunity that wins the day—and the spiritually hungry man gets the blessing because his importunity gives success to his pleading with God!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3019

“Some of the worst men were once, apparently, meek-hearted hearers of the Word, but they sat under the preaching of the Gospel till they grew ripe enough to deny God and curse Him. The unsanctified hearing of the Gospel has sometimes produced more gigantic specimens of sin than the deaf ear of the adder. Beware, my Hearer!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2984

“It is not the strength of your faith that saves you, but the strength of Him upon whom you rely! Christ is able to save you if you come to Him—be your faith weak or be it strong.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2954

“If you would obey Christ and so serve Him, be like He, for the sum and substance of His teaching is, “Follow Me.” Watch, then, His every footstep, and ask for Grace to put your foot down where He put His. Whatever you see to be His temper under any circumstances, cultivate that temper when you are in similar circumstances. If you want to know what you should do at any special time, think what He would have done if He had been in your place, for what He would have done is what you should do.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2874

“ Out of those who are added to the Church, there are always some who are not saved. Let us judge carefully and watch earnestly. Some come like Judas with a lie in their right hand, and put on Christ by profession who are not followers of Christ in spirit and in truth. Search yourselves, Brothers and Sisters, and if you are not Christ’s, do not dishonor His name by venturing to be called by it!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3058

“Heaven on earth can only be known by those who are saved and who know that they are saved. May that be your case and mine, beloved! Christ’s own words are, ‘He that believes and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believes not shall be damned.’ May God bless us all with the true belief which is eternal life to all who possess it, for Jesus’ sake! Amen.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2898

“Having done all that we can do by honest labor and earnest prayer, let us leave the rest with God, for He would not have His children cumbered with much serving, nor have them vexed with earthly cares.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“Cultivate more and more your love for the assemblies of the saints! We have no reverence for bricks and mortar, stones and wood, glass and iron—we do not believe in the sanctity of any one place above others—but we have a reverence for the living Temple of God, built up of living men and living women whose hearts are sanctified by the Holy Spirit!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“If we are, indeed, Christians, we have broken a great many idols, we have still some more to break and we must keep the hammer going till they are all broken!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2928

“He that gave you breath may take it back, but you may not give it up yourself! To die by your own hand is not to escape from suffering, but to plunge yourself into it forever, for we know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. Therefore he that murders himself, if he knows what he is doing, gives sure evidence that eternal life is not in him.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2917
“At this very day we have serfs in England who, with sternest toil, cannot earn enough to keep body and soul together and to maintain their families as they ought to be maintained. And where masters are thus refusing to their laborers a fair remuneration for their work, let them know that whoever may excuse them and whatever may be said of the laws of political economy, God does not judge the world by political economy!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059

“It has been often said that there are but two steps to Heaven—and that those two are but one— out ofselfand into Christ.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2954

“With some professors, presumption is a very common sin. They will go into worldly amusements and all sorts of frivolities and say, ‘Oh, we can be Christians, and yet go there!’ Can you? It may be that you can be hypocrites and go there—that is far easier than going there as Christians!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“As it is in the pulpit, so is it in the Sunday school, and so is it with all classes of Christians—there is a difference. Some seem to be all heart and others seem to have no heart at all. There are some who serve the Lord with their whole soul and others who give Him just the odds and ends of their time and strength. I pray God to raise up among us many Brothers and Sisters who shall be eminent for their Grace and consecration to Christ!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3015

“As it was with God’s ancient people in the days of Sennacherib, so is it with us. This principle holds good all along—the faith that relies upon God will bring to us both salvation and strength.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985
“Every Christian should think that what is good for himself is good for his children! He who does not labor and pray for the salvation of his own offspring has good reason to doubt whether he knows the Grace of God, himself.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“When the people of Judah came to their foes they found there were no foes. There they all lay dead! None of the men of might could raise their hands against those whom God had favored. After this fashion will God deliver you, Brothers and Sisters—in answer to prayer He will be your defense! Therefore, sing unto His name. ”—Volume 51, Sermon #2923

“Christ came to bring healing to those who are spiritually sick—you say that you are perfectly well, so you must go your own way and Christ will go in another direction—towards sinners.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059

“The joy of Jesus is, first, the joyofabiding in HisFather’s love. He knows that His Father loves Him—that He never did anything else but love Him—that He loved Him before the earth was—that He loved Him when He was in the manger and that He loved Him when He was on the cross. Now that is the joy which Christ gives to you—the joy of knowing that your Father loves you!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2935

“I charge you, Christian people, if you want your piety to be increased, never to blunt your sensibility of sin. Do not begin to look at sin in any light which takes away any of it blackness. The devil himself is not as bad as sin is, for it is sin that made the devil.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2873

“There is a certain denomination which is constantly engaged in stealing the sheep that are in other flocks—it would be much better if such people would ask the Lord, by His almighty Grace to turn lions into lambs and sheep so that they might gather their own flocks! That is the proper spirit in which all Christians should act.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2944

“O Christ of God, it could not be that You should die and yet that sinners cannot be forgiven! It would be a monstrous thing that You should have bled to death and yet that no sinner should be saved by that death! It cannot be—there must be forgiveness—there is forgiveness since Jesus died, ‘the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2882

“The noblest of the peers of Heaven were here below daily pensioners upon God’s love—they were fed, and clothed, and housed by the charity of the Lord—and they delighted to have it so.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3040

“The wear and tear of life comes not out of the Providential trials which we have to endure, but out of the unbelieving cares and burdens which we make for ourselves. You can carry easily enough the load that God appoints for you, my Brothers and Sisters, but if you let the devil sit on the top of it in the form of your own anxieties, doubts and fears, then the burden will crush you to the earth! Imitate your blessed Lord and Master, and never despair, but hope on, hope always and even if God, Himself, should seem to forsake you, yet cry, ‘My God, my God,’ even as Jesus did when God had forsaken Him!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“If Christ has taken your sins upon Himself—and He has done so if you have truly trusted Him—your sins have ceased to be! They are blotted out forever! Christ nailed to His Cross the record of everything that was against us and now, every poor sinner who is indebted to God’s Law and who trusts in Christ, may know that his debt is cancelled and that he is clear of all liability for it forever!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059 “As Christ is mine and Christ is All, I have in Christ all that I can ever desire! It is a blessed fullness, a Divine satiety, a heavenly satisfaction which the Lord gives to us when He makes our youth to be renewed like the eagles by filling our mouth with good things!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3019

“I pray you, members of this Church, and members of Christ’s body everywhere, touch nothing upon which you cannot ask God’s blessing! The moment you perceive that God cannot be consulted about a thing, turn your back upon it and say, ‘Let those who mean to damn their souls do the devil’s work! But a Christian must not and will not touch it.’ I am aware that in my saying these things, I may strike some persons who are engaged in trades which they conduct lawfully. My censure is not intended for those persons who, though in a trade which I might not choose, yet do their best to conduct it honorably. Still, I would make the censure as sweeping as it ought to be, for there are far too many men merely for gain following that which they know is damnable—and must in the end ruin their own souls!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996

“People tell us that in the pulpit, the minister should always say, ‘We,’ as editors do in writing. We would lose all our power if we did. The minister of God is to use the first person singular and constantly to say, ‘I bear eyewitness for God that, in my case, such-and-such a thing has been true.’ I will not blush nor stammer to say, ‘I bear my personal witness to the truth of Christ’s Gospel in my own case.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2955

“How much trouble Christians would save themselves if when they have committed their case into the hands of Jesus, they would leave it there and not attempt to deal with it on their own account! I say to the devil, when he comes to tempt me to doubt and fear, ‘I have committed my soul to Jesus Christ and He will keep it in safety. You must bring your accusations to Him, not to me. I am His client and He is my Counselor. Why should I have such an Advocate as He is, and then plead for myself?’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059
“Our motto must be, ‘Anywhere with Jesus, nowhere without Jesus.’ Anywhere with Jesus! Yes, even in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace! When we have the Son of God with us, the glowing coals cannot hurt us, they become a bed of roses to us when He is there! Where Jesus is, our sorrow is turned into joy.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983

“So needy are we that even in lying down to die, we need our last bed to be made for us by Mercy and our last hour to be cheered by Grace. So needy are we that if Jesus had not prepared a mansion for us in eternity, we would have no place to dwell! We are as full of needs as the sea is full of water!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3040

“Full often the Truth of God shines out the more brightly from the very fact that an error has beclouded the world with its dense shadows. Go on, then! Strive with coolness and courage! Be not daunted by the comely face, the princely figure, or the battle array of your antagonist! Let not his vaunting words deter you. Call on the name of Jehovah, the Lord of Hosts, and use, even in God’s battles, those weapons which you have tested and proved. But take care to go through with God’s work—do it thoroughly, looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of your faith—and so, Beloved, you may expect to go from strength to strength and bring glory to God!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2913

“When Noah offered a sacrifice to God, Jehovah smelled a sweet savor of rest—not in Noah’s sacrifice, but in what Noah’s sacrifice typified and symbolized—that is, in the Sacrifice of Christ.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2905

“Some glib professors talk of having got outof the 7^th of Romans—I hope they will grow in Grace until they get intothe 7^th of Romans! It seems to me as if they were in the 1^st of Romans, so they have a long way to travel before they will get into the 7^th of Romans.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2873

“…while it is, in some senses, a high privilege to have wealth, yet it involves such solemn responsibilities that a man should never have it without enquiring of God how he can rightly use it.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996
“Self-satisfaction is the death of progress. Contentment with worldly goods is a blessing, but contentment in spiritual things is a curse and a sin.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3019

“Observe that the Christian does not find comfort inhimself. ‘I am poor and needy.’ That is the top and bottom of my case. I have searched myself through and through and have found in my flesh no good thing. Notwithstanding the Grace which the Believer possesses and the hope which he cherishes, he still sees a sentence of death written upon the creature and he cries, ‘I am poor and needy.’ His joy is found in Another! He looks away from self to the consolations which the eternal purpose has prepared for him.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3040

“I might thus multiply figures and illustrations of how we commit ourselves to Christ. We do it very much in the way in which our blind friends, sitting under the pulpit, got here this evening— theycame by committing themselves to the care of guides. Some of them can walk a good long way without a guide, but others could not have found their way here tonight without some friend upon whose arm they could lean. That is the way to get to Heaven, by leaning upon Jesus.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059
“The argument which our holy religion needs at the present moment is a new appeal to the senses of men. You will ask me, ‘What is that?’ The holy living of Christians! The change which the Gospel works in men must be the Gospel’s best argument against all opposers!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2955

“There were great preachers before Luther and Calvin, before Wickliffe and Huss and Jerome—they went about preaching and preaching to great crowds, too, but they did not save souls! That was not because they could not speak and were not attractive, but because they had not this story to tell—the story that is in this Book—the story of Him who did hang upon the Cross.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921

“ To get and to holdseems to be the great end-all and be-all of some men’s being—but it can never be so with a true Christian. He, by Divine Grace, is like His Master, who, “though He was rich, yet for our sakes became poor.” His riches consisted in giving and, therefore, He was the richest man who ever lived, for He gave more than anyone else when He gave Himself that He might redeem His people!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“Why is it that we sometimes find that faith is difficult? It is because we are too proud to believe in Jesus. If we did but see ourselves as we really are, we would be willing enough to trust the Savior—but we do not like going to Heaven like blind people who need a guide, or like debtors who cannot pay a farthing in the pound. We want to have a finger in the pie. We want to do something towards our own salvation. We want to have some of the praise and glory of it. God save us from this evil spirit!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059

“If your heart begins to suck in the sweets of another man’s sin, it is unsound in the sight of God! If you can even wink at another man’s lust, depend upon it that you will soon shut your eyes on your own, for we are always more severe with other men than we are with ourselves! There must be an absence of the vital principle of godliness when we can become partakers of other men’s sins by applauding or joining with them in the approval of them! Let us examine ourselves scrupulously, then, whether we are among those who have no evidences of that holiness without which no one can see God!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902

“The blood of all the bullocks, and rams, and lambs offered in sacrifice, had possessed no real efficacy in putting away sin. They had no virtue except as types, symbols and prophecies of the one great Sacrifice that was to come!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3040

“I would have the hearts of Christians insatiable as death and the grave, for how can we stand that men should be forever lost? How can we be quiet while Hell is being filled and souls are perishing day and night? How can we be at ease while God is blasphemed, while Christ is unknown in a great part of the world, and where He is known, He is not loved?”—Volume 52, Sermon #3019

“What is there for a Christian to fear in death? It is not dying—it is living—about which we ought to be anxious, if anxious at all! But you say, ‘It is the thought of the pains of death that trouble me.’ But pains belong to life, so do not lay them upon poor death’s back! Death is the physician that eases pain! He does but lay his skeleton hand upon the patient and, straightway, the fever has departed and the sufferer is where the inhabitant shall no more say, ‘I am sick.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2998

“The salvation which Jesus gives is salvation from unbelief, salvation from a seared conscience, salvation from pride, from lust, from malice, from envy, from evil of every kind!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985
“Come close to your Lord, Beloved! I delight to come very near to Him. To touch the hem of His garment is enough for sinners, but it is not enough for saints. We need to sit at His feet with Mary and to lay our heads upon His bosom as John did.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2935
“You cannot count God’s thoughts of you. If He were only to think of us once, in tender mercy, that one thought would run on throughout eternity, for He does not retract either a thought that He thinks or a word that He utters!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3040

“While it is a very simple thing for the spiritually poor to commit themselves to Christ, let me also say that it is an act which greatly glorifies God. Christ is honored when any soul trusts in Him—it is a joy to His heart to be trusted. When the feeble cling to Him, He feels such joy as mothers feel when their little ones cling to them. Christ is glad when poor sin-sick souls come and trust Him. It was for this very purpose that He came into the world—to meet the needs of guilty sinners.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059

“Occasionally, I hear or read remarks about the great excitement caused by our Brothers, Moody and Sankey in their evangelistic services, but I must confess that I have failed to see the excitement, although I have been to several of their meetings. We Londoners do not know anything about real religious excitement—we have not begun to be excited yet, though I pray God that we soon may. I would like to see such a stir all over the metropolis, that the press would rave and rage about our fanaticism—and I shall not believe that God has done very much among us until we are accused of something like that!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2944
“I know some people who earn their living in employments which are very hazardous to their immortal souls. They are in the midst of evil, yet they tell me that God can keep them in safety there. I know that He can, but I also know that we have no right to go, voluntarily, where we are surrounded by temptation!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“We are not saved by faith itself as a meritorious work. There is no merit in believing in God and even if there were, it could not save us, since salvation by merit has been once and for all solemnly excluded.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2898

“Christ has vanquished death by dying! He has disrobed the grave of its triumphal garments by wearing its cerements Himself! He consecrated the sepulcher by slumbering in its dark recess! Death is now no more the destroying angel, the tomb no more a morgue!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929

“The best preparation that you young people can have for the highest honor and service in your future life is to bathe frequently in the Word of God and to perfume your whole life by a familiar and accurate acquaintance with Scripture Truths. Nothing else can make you so pure, or so prepared for all service which God may yet have for you to perform.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3019

“It is a bad sign concerning any man’s ministry when the children do not understand him! I always look upon it as being one of the highest compliments I ever receive when I see some little boy’s or girl’s bright eyes, that are all too apt to wander here and there, fixed upon me, while they seem to be drinking in what I have to say. There is a great lack in the preachers of the present day, in this respect, and we need to have the Master’s words to Peter, ‘Feed My lambs,’ as well as the command, ‘Feed My sheep,’ more and more impressed upon our hearts. May you, Beloved, find a place of prayer for your children where it shall be their delight to go with you and to join intelligently in the worship of God.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“If I had anything of which I could say, ‘God has not given me this,’ I hope, by Divine Grace, I would turn it out of doors. Food, raiment, health, breath, strength—everything, comes from Him and we are constantly dependent upon Him!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3060

“While Christ was here on earth, He was the great Light-Giver—and He is still the great Light-Giver! And now that His visible Presence has been withdrawn from the world, His people are to be ‘the light of the world’ by reflecting the light they have received from Him! In such works as you will be unable to perform after death, you are now to give light to the sons of men.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3032

“…this is all we ask of you—we only ask you, if you wish to join the church, to be able to confess that you are a changed character, that you are a new man, that you are willing to be obedient to Christ and to His ordinances. And then we are only too glad to receive you into our midst. Come out, come out, I pray you, you, that are hiding among the trees of the forest, come forth! Whoever is on the Lord’s side, let him come forth! It is a day of blasphemy and rebuke. He that is not with Christ is against Him, and he that gathers not with Him scatters abroad.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2955

“Those who have stood foot to foot with Apollyon and fought with him, and overcome him in the hour of temptation, will never doubt that there is a great fallen spirit who strives to lead men into sin! Satan and his myriads of followers still lie in wait for the ungodly, or openly drive them into fierce lusts and evil passions so that they sin again and again.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2886

“Do you know, in your own soul, that God has ever heard your prayers? Then bless Him and love Him all your days.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2879
“The objective of parents, preachers and teachers should be that children should be saved while they are children!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“You need to know whether you shall move to such-and-such a town. Well, is there a good Evangelical minister there? Can you hear the Word to profit in that town? If not, unless there are some very strong reasons why you should go there, you ought to remain where your soul can be best profited. A man would often be better off with less earnings where he could hear a faithful minister than with more money in a place where the Gospel is not preached. Ask the question, too, ‘Can I serve God there?’ If you cannot, what right have you to go there?”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996

“It happens to many and many a heart that after it has obtained the blessing of salvation and has been healed of the disease of sin, a time of fear occurs. After it has made its confession of faith, a season of trembling follows occurring, perhaps, as a reaction from the joy of salvation, a rebound of the spirit from excessive delight.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“God is a Sovereign and may therefore save whom He wills. And He may also save them howHe wills. Yet when He is about to save a man, He does not depart from His usual method of working, but saves him according to the way in which He is accustomed to save.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3061
“Returning to God includes turning from sin. Do you think that the prodigal, when he came back to his father, brought his dice in one hand and some other implement of sin in the other? He may come foul with the filth of the wine. He may come wretched through hunger and famine. But he must leave his riotous living, his wine-cup, his debauchery in the far country—these cannot be tolerated in his father’s house!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985

“O beloved Brothers and Sisters who are bought with the blood of Christ, we cannot, any of us, say this about our own lives! Yet we ought to be able to say it and we ought now to pray God’s blessed Spirit to enable us to concentrate all our thoughts, powers and energies upon this one objective—that we might, in all things, glorify God!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“The praise of gratitude for the past is sweet, but that praise is sweeter which adores God for the future in full confidence that it shall be well. Therefore, take down your harps from the willows, O you people, and praise you the name of the Lord, though the fig tree still does not blossom and the cattle still die in the stall and the sheep still perish from the folds—though there should be to you no income to meet your needs and you should be brought almost to necessity’s door—still bless the Lord whose mighty Providence cannot fail and shall not fail as long as there is one of His children to be provided for!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2923

“I have heard of an idiot who was, one day scouring a brass plate to get the name out, but, the more he scoured, the more clearly it shone! And when the devil tries to erase the impressions made upon my mind and heart by my mother’s tears and my father’s prayers, he is as much like an idiot as he possibly could be, for, let him scour as he may, those impressions will never be removed, but will continue to shine yet more brightly.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“In conclusion, I pray every spiritually poor heart to commit itself to God. I like to do this every morning. Satan often comes and says, ‘You are no Christian! All your supposed Christian experience is false.’ Very well, suppose it has been false? Then I will start afresh—saint or no saint! I will begin over again by trusting Christ to be my Savior. When you, dear Friend, wake tomorrow morning, let this be the first thing that you do—commit yourself to Jesus Christ for the whole of the day. Say, ‘My Lord, here is my heart which I commit to You. While I am away from home, may my heart be full of fragrance of Your blessed Presence. And when I return at night, may I still find my heart in Your kind keeping!’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059

“The Last Great Day will call me to account for every word I utter in delivering my Master’s message—and it will also call each one of you to account for the reception or rejection of that message! You young men and young women, and you graybeards will have to answer in that day for the way you deal with the message now!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2899

“I fear that some Christians need quickening for God’s service because they have so much to do for themselves. The shop shutters are down so long that there is little time for anything but business, and the ledger is such a big book that it quite hides the Bible!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2944

“Blessed be God, where Jesus rules, even the thought of death is not a cloud! If you are not under the rule of Jesus Christ, you will have many clouds, but if you are under His rule, if you have faith in Him, and live upon Him, and are a subject of His Kingdom, you will find that He is to you as ‘a morning without clouds.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2998

“If we have believed in Jesus, we need not weep, even though the dread archer may have lodged the fatal shaft quite near our heart. What is there to weep about? When a Christian has received an intimation that he is soon to be with his Savior in Glory, we may congratulate him that he is the sooner to be out of the strife and the sin—and to wear the crown of victory and glory forever! So we will not weep about that.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2956

“I have known certain timid ones who have wished to unite with the Church on the sly and to make no open confession either by word of mouth or by Baptism. I have refused to be a party to the breeding of cowards, and they have lived to thank me for what seemed a harsh demand.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“I advise you to study Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—and to preach the crucified Savior of which the Gospels and Epistles will tell you! And when you get to the Revelation, keep it in its proper place and ask the Holy Spirit to teach you the meaning of its mysteries. May God save this generation from the follies of some of the generations that have preceded it—and may we be most of all concerned about being born-again, about faith in Jesus, about preaching His Gospel and following Him all the days of our life!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“It is not a transient faith. It is not saying, ‘I was converted so many years ago.’ But it is a livingfaith, an abiding faith, a constant vital union with Christ that marks the true heir of Heaven.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2935
“How many hundreds of times have I said from the pulpit that if you cannot come to Christ with a broken heart, come to Himfora broken heart! If you cannot come as you should, come anyway that you can, in order that you may be taught to come as you ought! It is quite true that your condition is bad, but then Christ ‘came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985

“That man is like Christ who lives, not for himself, but for others. It has been all too truly said that there are some people whose first care is for themselves, and whose second care is for themselves, and whose third care is for themselves, and whose fourth care is for themselves, and so on as many times as you like to repeat it.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“We must mind, when we are preaching experience, that we do not so put the experience of the strong as to make it the standard for the weak. That is almost as wrong as to make the experience of the weak to be the standard of the strong, as some have done. The fact is, there is no experience that is a real standard of the Christian life except the experience of a change of heart and of simple faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2878

“It matters not who you may be—unless you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ you cannot have eternal life. Do not suppose, dear Hearers, that there is some secret decree of God that will override this—there is no such decree! The Truth of God with which you have to do is this, “He that believes and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believes not shall be damned.” If you do not believe in Jesus, there is no hope for you!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3061

“Oh, it is hard work to deal with sinners! It needs a sharper tool than man can keep in his toolbox. Only God Himself can break hearts—and when they are broken—only the same hand that broke them can bind them up.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3044
“If you think of the condescension of the Holy Spirit in taking of the things of Christ and showing them to us, you will not talk any more about coming down to the level of children when you talk to them.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2907

“The teachings of Christ and of His Apostles concerning sinners being saved through faith in Him are blessedly clear. The Gospels and Epistles tell us that a perfectly holy and Divine Substitute for sinners was required—and that Jesus was that Substitute and stood in the place of all His chosen people—and bore the punishment which was due for all their sins.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3053

“‘Without Me, you can do nothing,’ said Christ to His disciples—and the fruit of the Christian is practically Christ, for if the Christian brings forth the fruit of holiness, it is the glory of Christ reflected in him! If he is bright with hope, it is Christ within him who is the hope of Glory. If there are any graces in us, they are the virtues which Christ has given to us! Our green grass is Christ, Himself, appearing in us. Our verdure, our beauty, our fruit, our everythingis Christ manifest in us!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2998

“If you, dear Friend, have just come out from the world and have newly said, ‘I am on the Lord’s side,’ do not be surprised if what you have just done should, upon calm consideration, look almost like presumption. A sense of fear is natural when you see to what a service your dedication vows have bound you. At such a time, Jesus will give you the comfort of the text, ‘Be of good cheer; your faith has made you whole.’ (Luke 8:48)”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“Do you ask, ‘What shall I do to be saved?’ ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.’ That was Paul’s answer to the question and I cannot give you a better one. Believing does not take a week, or even a minute. Your heart rests and relies on Christ and Christ saves your heart. See me leaning here, with all my weight, upon this platform rail? Lean so upon Christ, with all your weight! Have done with everything but Jesus—and when you have believed on Him, then obey Him by being baptized in His name, for He put belief and Baptism together when He said, ‘He that believes and is baptized shall be saved.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2899

“Let us not only submit to the will of the Lord, but let us ask Him to grant us Grace to acquiesce in it, for in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985
“It is the work of His Spirit to change you. You are not to work a miracle and then come to show the miracle to Christ, but you are to come to Chris to have the miracle worked.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3044

“I charge all of you, men and women, in these evil days to keep close to Jesus! Follow Him with the utmost care, reverence and love. Follow Him with intense ardor and with all your heart, soul and strength—and make that the one thing for which you live! Do not let anything divert you from the straight path of obedience to your Lord, for to that you are called above everything else! If men come to you talking about mental culture and modern thought, stand firm to this, that you will follow Christ wherever He leads you!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“Brothers and Sisters, I repeat it, that Christ did not institute a memorial of His life because He would have yoube the living memorials of Himself. He has not left us any ordinance in which His acts, His words, His thoughts can be set forth before the eyes of men in visible signs—He has done better than that for He has made you to be His signs and ordinances! “You are My witnesses,” says the Lord.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2872

“When your heart is brought to rest upon what Christ has done. When, laying aside all confidence in your own works, knowledge, prayers, doing, or believing, you come to rest upon what Christ has done in its simplicity—then is Jesus Christ exalted in your heart and it must have been the work of the Spirit of Divine Grace.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3062

“Do not imagine that restoration to communion with Christ need occupy a longer time than conversion—and remember, conversion is often worked instantaneously!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2956

“Behold, as Samson carried the gates of Gaza to the top of Hebron—doors, posts, bars and all—so has Christ carried the gates of Death to the top of Heaven’s hill—posts, bars and all—and all the legions of Hell cannot bring back the trophies which our Samson has torn away!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929

“There was a young man who was impressed with the idea that he ought to preach for me one Lord’s-Day. But as I was not impressed to let him do so, he lost out and probably will continue to lose out for some little time! He had no gifts of speech, but he thought his impression was quite sufficient. When I receive a similar impression, the Revelation will be a proper one and you will have the pleasure of listening to his voice, but certainly not before that!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996

“After a seeker has found the Lord and has experienced salvation, he is sometimes tempted to question whether he is really a Believer in Jesus. He reasons within himself thus—‘My faith is so mixed with unbelief that I am ashamed of it. Why did I come to Jesus in such a way as I did? It was well to come, but oh that I had come in a more childlike spirit and that I had done Him the justice to have a greater confidence in Him!’ Do you, dear Friend, know this experience? If so, to you and to all others who are thus exercised, the comfort of our text is addressed! (Luke 8:48).”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“It is the eternal purpose of God that we shall be saved through faith in Jesus Christ and if there is no faith in Jesus Christ, that is a proof that there is no Divine Purpose to heal that soul! But where there is the Divine Purpose to heal, it is evidenced, sooner or later, by a submissive yielding to the ordained way of salvation and simple trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3061

“The things that concern your soul’s salvation are plain enough for a child to comprehend! If you are lost, it will not be a mystery that damns you—and if you are ever to be saved, it is the simplicity of the Gospel that will save you! The Truths of God that relate to your ruin through sin—and the only remedy for that ruin—through the Grace of God, are ‘as plain as a pikestaff,’ as our common proverb puts it.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3053

“Was that prophetic when the woman broke the alabaster box and filled the house with the perfume? Was that prophetic of what every repentant sinner does when his broken heart fills Heaven and earth with the sweet perfume of joy because he is saved? And when she washed the Savior’s feet and wiped them with the hair of her head, was that also prophetic? Did that show how Jesus gets His greatest honor, His purest love, His fairest worship and His sweetest solace from sinners saved by blood?”—Volume 53, Sermon #3044

“It is not poetical work to be a Royal Humane Society’s officer, seeking to pull drowning people out of the river—and there is not much poetry about our work in trying to be the means of saving your souls!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2944

“Paul says, “He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not, with Him, also freely give us all things?” What? Will He deny you bread for your body after He has given you Christ, the Bread of Heaven, for your soul? Will He deny you clothes for your body after He has clothed your soul with the robe of Christ’s perfect righteousness? Will He deny you a sufficient store of earthly goods that you may get through this world when He has already given you a mansion in the skies and a crown of life that fades not away? If we should forget our cares anywhere—surely we should do so at the Communion Table!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“Beloved, you that have been healed, do you not ascribe your healing to the secret mysterious power of the Holy Spirit? You know you give Him the glory. Hence when you wish to bring men to Christ, always honor the Holy Spirit. Do not forget to adore Him, to lean entirely upon Him for all the power with which the healing of a soul is to be accomplished. There is no faith in the world that will save except the faith which is of the operation of the Spirit of God! There is no true glance of the eye toward Christ on the Cross but such as the Spirit of God has given!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921

“There is much talk about an operation, wisely performed by an eminent surgeon upon the poor body which must soon become food for worms. Yet little or nothing is said about the soul which is so vastly more precious. The soul of an emperor or the soul of a beggar is of the same value in God’s sight. ‘Where does it take its flight when its earthly cage is broken?’ Is that a question which is never asked by some of you? If so, what arrant fools you must be! O blessed Spirit of God, teach us the solemnity of the Gospel which concerns the soul which must live forever in raptures or in woe!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3053

“I would, young people, that you would so value the Christian experience of others that you would trust Christ for yourselves! He has been a good Master to me. I have served Him now for 25 years and, blessed be His name, He has never once done me or mine an ill turn! His work is good, His wages are good and He, Himself, is best of all! Oh, that you all would trust, and love, and serve Him! [1875.]”—Volume 52, Sermon #2998

“After we are saved, we may do something in the way of almsgiving and other things to show our gratitude to God, but they are worse than useless if we begin to boast of them as a reason for our salvation.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3061
“If there is anything about the Lord’s will that you do not like, my dear Brothers and Sisters, that is a point in which you are wrong!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2906

“Quiet majesty is the characteristic of the man of faith, just as unquiet weakness is the characteristic of the unbeliever. May God make you strong, Brothers and Sisters in Christ, by taking from you the fret and the worry in which you have too long indulged—and by giving to you the quietness and confidence which shall be your strength for the future!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985

“The results of good or evil deeds will abide forever and ever, so let us beware what we do since it can never be undone.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045
“We talk of “Providences” when we have hairbreadth escapes—but are they not quite as much Providences when we are preserved from danger?”—Volume 53, Sermon #3022

“You must not expect at this time to have Grace to die with, when, perhaps, God intends you to live another 50 years. What would you do with such Grace? Where would you put it? You shall have it when you come to die. Only trust in Christ, today, and do His bidding—when the dying time shall come—the Dying Grace shall be afforded you.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2917

“Where faith is genuine, through the Holy Spirit’s power, it works a cleansing from sin, a hatred of evil, an anxious desire after holiness and it leads the soul to aspire after the image of God. Faith and holiness are inseparable.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2999
“It was God who took Jacob into Egypt and, therefore, though it took 400 years to bring Israel out of Egypt, God brought them out at last. He kills and He makes alive. He wounds and He heals. Rest in this Truth of God as a matter of absolute certainty!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3061
“Take care, Christian workers, that in this day of activity, when there is so much to do, you do not neglect the personal act of faith which unites your soul to Christ. See to this vital and all-important matter.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2898

“The very best of men have had to smart under the wounds caused by that cruel, accursed thing, slander! No quality of purity, no degree of piety can screen a man from the tongue of slander. In fact, as the birds peck most at the ripest fruit, it is often the best of men who are most slandered.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059

“There was a boy once, a very sinful child, who hearkened not to the counsel of his parents. But his mother prayed for him and now he stands to preach to this congregation every Sabbath. And when his mother thinks of her first-born preaching the Gospel, she reaps a glorious harvest that makes her a glad woman!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2896

“If you have many infirmities which make you weak, there is a way of glorying in infirmities because the power of Christ rests upon you! Suppose that you are not only weak, but that you are weakness itself—that you are nothing and nobody? When you have reached that point, the cause of your weeping will have vanished because, where you end, there God begins!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2956

“The Lord will chasten those whom He loves and His children shall suffer—you can be sure of that. It is as sure as any other thing in the world,‘You shallhave tribulation.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2974
“There is no poverty in the world so dire as the poverty of those who have been rich—and there are none who can know the value of the Savior, in His absence, but those who have enjoyed His preciousness by dwelling in His Presence.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2945

“Trust in God, Beloved, for faith in Him will keep your vision clear and your judgment sound. Trust in God and then, in the day of stern conflict, there shall be no man’s arms that shall be as strong as yours. ‘In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985
“Every good thought you have ever had, every right word you have ever spoken, every holy action you have ever done has been a mercy from God to you! He gave these blessings to you, or else you would never have had them—and I challenge you to try to count this great budget of mercies!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3022

“Good works are to be insisted on, for they have their necessary uses. James never contradicts Paul—it is because we do not understand him that we fancy he does so. Both the doctrinal Paul and the practical James spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Paul builds the tower and James puts the railing around it—Paul conducts us to the summit of God’s House and bids us rejoice in what we see there. And then James points us to the railing that is built up to keep us from overleaping the truth to our own destruction.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2999

“I believe that God will yet bring back into the fold every one of His own sheep and they shall all be saved. It is something to feel our wanderings, for if we feel ourselves to be lost, we shall certainly be saved! If we feel ourselves to have wandered, we shall certainly be brought back.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3060

“When I hear a Christian man finding fault with his minister, I always wish that the devil had found somebody else to do his dirty work.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2936

“Flatter not yourself, Sinner, with the false and foolish notion that your sin is forgotten. You may possibly forget it, but God never forgets. You may keep no record of your transgressions, but God’s recording angel does not fail to write in His Book of Remembrance, and to engrave them as‘with an iron pen and lead in the rock forever,’ as Job said concerning the preservation of his own words.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3043

“A promise in the Bible is often a promise to a deaf ear—but the promise, applied by the Spirit of God, goes right through the outer organ and penetrates to the ear of the soul! I am sure, dear Friends, that you can never be backward in prayer when God opens your ear, and puts a promise into it.1904, Sermon #2869

“No man ever knows the Spirit of God so as consciously to be aware that the Spirit is at work with him until he knows Jesus Christ. As no man comes to the Father but through the Son, so no man comes to realize and to be aware of the work of the Spirit on his soul till he knows Jesus Christ.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921

“Above all, let me admonish you young people not to be ‘unequally yoked together.’ Marriage without the fear of God is a fearful mistake. Those ill-assorted unions between Believers and unbelievers rob our churches of more members than any other popular delinquency that I know of! Seldom—I might almost say never—do I meet with a woman professing godliness who becomes joined in wedlock to a man of the world but what she goes away. She ceases to follow Jesus and we hear no more of her.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2914

“Whenever any of you have anything to do which you know is right, do it! After you have enquired of God, do not stop to consult friends, but go and do it! Take your sling and your stone and, in God’s name, sling the stone into the giant’s forehead and, like David, come back victorious, for that shall be your last answer to those who would persuade you not to do it!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996

“Sin is an everlasting thing—unless it is put away by God, Himself, for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake—no grave in the world can hide it.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3043
“I think it is well, dear Friends, to remember the Lord’s past goodness, but we must not live on that— we must go and get fresh supplies from Heaven.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2974

“God has all sorts of stones in His Temple and some of them are of such a strange shape that I am glad the placing of them is not left to me, for I could not do it! I am thankful that God never sent me into the world to make people perfect, but to use them as I find them. And I believe that He also uses them as He finds them and gradually prepares them for higher uses and for the place which He means them to occupy in His Temple above. So do not say, ‘I am wondering what this man will do and what that man will do, and what others around me will do’—but do what you can for Christ and, as for others—leave them to the Master.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“It is very sweet when the Holy Spirit shows us theloveof Christ—how intensely He loves men! How He loved them of old, for His delights were with the sons of men—not because He had redeemed them, but He redeemed them because He loved them and delighted in them!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2907

“Apart from the Atoning Sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ, there is not one sinner living in the whole world who could stand before God! It is not justice, but boundless compassion and infinite pity which put a measure to man’s iniquity and allows him to live on until he has reached that point, for sin is worthy of death in every case, and in any degree—so says the Word of the Lord.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3043 “The work of God in the soul is a lasting and an everlasting work! If you are once healed by Christ, He has worked in you an effectual cure which will hold good throughout time and throughout eternity!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“We can never understand how Father, Son and Holy Spirit can be Three and yet One. For my part, I have long ago given up any desire to understand this great mystery, for I am perfectly satisfied that if I couldunderstand it, it would not be true, because God, from the very nature of things, must be incomprehensible!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2958

“I wish that we all had more of that spirit—calm, quiet, self-possessed or, rather, God-possessed. I believe that is the best spirit for preachers to have. We can do most by way of moving others when we ourselves are firmly fixed upon a solid base. You need not fluster yourself, young man, in the way that you often do. You will not save souls by stamping your foot, thumping your Bible and shouting at the top of your voice. From the very bottom of your heart, in an earnest Spirit, tell your hearers something that is worth their hearing and pray God to put His blessing upon it!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985

“People talk about free-will Christians and tell us of persons being saved and coming to God of their own free will. It is a very curious thing, but though I have heard a great nanny free-will sermons, I never heard any free-will prayers. I have heard Arminianism in preaching and talking, but I have never heard any Arminian praying.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3060

“God never honors His servants with success without effectually preventing their grasping the honor of their work. If we are tempted to boast, He soon lays us low. He always whips behind the door at home those whom He most honors in public.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2999

“Turn not back from labor or from scorn—‘in the sweat of your face you shall eat bread’ on earth, but that bread which you eat in Heaven, so gloriously won by the Grace of God, shall be all the sweeter for the sweat that was lavished upon it! ‘Always abounding in the work of the Lord.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929

“I feel that sometimes when we are preaching, we seem to look after the scum and the riffraff and we forget many others. I would not forget one of you, my dear Hearers, who hear me Sabbath after Sabbath. God is my witness, if I thought I had missed any one of you I would be too glad to preach a sermon for that one person only, if I might but win his soul. What did I say? Preach a sermon? I would preach 50 sermons! I would preach my whole life to win one of you and think myself well paid with such a blessed reward for such easy toil. But whether you are great sinners or little sinners outwardly, remember you are all vile in the inner nature—and the same Grace is presented to you all. ‘Whoever will, let him take of the waster of life freely.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2924

“If you want to be damned out of hand, become a persecutor of the saints, for that is the quickest way to Hell! When holy Wishart was chained to the stake, he pointed to the cardinal who was gloating over the spectacle and told him that God’s wrath would shortly fall upon him—and so it came to pass, for God avenges His own elect—and sometimes does it very speedily.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3043

“It is annoying to hear persons talk flippantly of their sins before conversion as though they were proud of them. They seem to glory in them as a Greenwich pensioner might boast of his battles and his broken bones. Such things are to be mentioned with blushes and tears. Say as little as you can about those things of which you are now ashamed, and let what you say be spoken in lowliest penitence . Still, there are times when you are bound to tell out your case to the praise of the Glory of the Grace which so abounded where your sin abounded! And then you need not be afraid to tell your story, for Grace has made it end so well. Let the world know that though foully defiled, you came into contact with the Savior by simply, humbly believing in Him-and that by this simple means you are saved.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“I have heard of a minister who, wishing to bring the Truth of God home to the hearts and consciences of his people, said that he should like to pass a Reform Act—that everybody should reform one person and then all would be reformed. He meant that they should all reform themselvesbut one man said, ‘The minister is quite right! Everybody is to reform one and I am going home to reform our Mary.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“Whatever God keeps away from His servants, I do not think He ever keeps away the rod from them! He had one Son without sin, but He never had one son without chastisement. If there are many of God’s children who have not yet had any trials, I would not recommend them to pray for it—that would be very wrong. The Lord’s children need not ask to be whipped, but I would advise them to reckon that somewhere between here and Heaven, they will have to realize the truth of that saying of the Apostle, ‘If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chastens not?’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2945

“Christ, too, is exalted by the Spirit in His prophetic as well as in His priestly office. Shall I call any man master so as to take him for my teacher? All teaching which lifts up Wesley, or Calvin, or any man, living or dead, in the place of the authorized Teacher and which says that their teachings are to be taken as though they were the Infallible Revelations of Christ is not of the Spirit, of God! But that teaching which says , ‘One is your Master, even Christ., and all you are brethren ,’ and which tells us of the holy equality of all saints and that the true Teacher and the only Teacher who can speak with authority is Jesus Christ, the Son of God—such teaching you may accept as coming from God the Holy Spirit.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3062

“When I hear my Master say, ‘One of you shall betray Me,’ I may have a shrewd suspicion that He refers to Judas, but it will be wiser for me to say, ‘Lord, is it I?’ rather than to ask, ‘Lord, is it Judas?’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2936

“Scarcely ever is there a profound calm on the soul’s sea, but a storm is brewing! The sweet day so calm, so bright, shall have its fall and the dew of the succeeding night shall weep over its departure. The high hill must have its following valley and the flood-tide must retreat at ebb. Lest the soul should be beguiled to live upon itself and feed on its frames and feelings—and by neglect of watchfulness fall into presumptuous sins—railings are set around all hallowed joys, for which in eternity we shall bless the name of the Lord.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2999

“Some of us are often obliged to bring forth arguments in favor of what we believe to be the Truth of God—and there is one thing at which I always aim when I take part in a discussion—and that is to never let my opponent cause me to lose my temper. I know that in proportion as I get excited and angry, I am losing strength. I must seek to overcome my adversary by the power of the Truth of God, but, let him say what he will, I must not let him make me feel annoyed. For if he does, then to that extent he has conquered me.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985

“Our Lord Jesus Christ did not come into the world to tell us how sin was brought here, but He came to show us the only way in which sin can be got out of the world—and that is by the door which He opened in His own side. It is by His death that sin is to be expelled from the earth!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“Conflicts bring experience and experience brings that growth in Grace which is not to be attained by any other means!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2974
“To be one of the Lord’s saved ones is joy enough to bear up the heart under every affliction!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020
“Man, you must die in your sins if you continue to live in them! You cannot escape from the consequence of sin if you keep following in the pursuit of sin. Work and you shall have your wages—and ‘the wages of sin is death.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3043

“And then, O you saints, I must not forget to dwell upon the thought that you must love God the HolySpirit!Never let us forget Him, or speak of Him, as some do, as, ‘it,’ for the Holy Spirit is not, ‘it,’ or talk of Him as though He were a mere influence, for the Holy Spirit is Divine and is to be reverenced and loved equally with the Father and the Son! It was that blessed Spirit who quickened us when we were dead in trespasses and sins! It was He who illuminated us and removed our darkness and, since that time, it has been He who has taken of the things of Christ and revealed them to us.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2958

“I believe that before the foundation of the world, God chose in Christ all those whom He will eternally save. And I equally believe that whoever believes in the Lord Jesus Christ shall be eternally saved, that salvation is all of Grace and damnation is all of man’s sin—that God will have the glory of every soul that is saved, and that every lost soul will be responsible for its own ruin.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“Little as you may think I know of the joys of the world, yet so far as I can form a judgment, I can say that I would not take all the joys that earth can ever afford in a hundred years for one half-hour of what my soul has known in fellowship with Christ! We who believe in Him have our sorrows, but, blessed be God, we have our joys and they are such joys—oh, such joys with such substance in them and such reality and certainty—that we could not and would not exchange them for anything except Heaven in its fruition!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902

“Until you have humbled yourself before God and sought and found mercy, God is at war with you and you are at war with Him. There can be no peace where there is no purity. God has no peace with sin, and never can have.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2886

“I may not dictate to you whether you should sing, or read, or pray—or whether you should do this every morning or evening, or how many times a day. I shall leave this to the free Spirit that is in you, but do maintain family prayer and never let the fire on the altar of God burn low in your habitation.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2999

“Only holy Christians are useful Christians—and the preaching of Christ’s Truth must be backed up by the consistent living of Christ’s followers if it is to have its due effect upon the hearts and lives of the ungodly.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045
“If we were once to have a church fully awakened and zealous for Christ and His Truth, we should soon have the persecuting times back again.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2884

“‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.’ Our forefathers used to read this verse, ‘There is therefore now no damnation.’ One of the martyrs, being brought before a Popish bishop, heard the bishop say to him, ‘Dying in your heresy, you will be damned.’ ‘That I never shall be,’ answered the good man, ‘for there is therefore now no damnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.’ He had sought the very spirit of the text, for there is nothing that can condemn the man who is in Christ Jesus!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2974

“The mercies of God are uncountable—the ingratitude of man is unaccountable! We, Christian men and women, cannot tell how it is that we can be so stolidly indifferent when we ought to be so devoutly thankful to God for all His goodness to us.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3022

“Any man who says that he has had more revealed to him, than is in the Holy Scriptures, incurs the curse of the last chapter of Revelation! He must take care lest, since he adds to the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, ‘God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this Book.’ ‘It is finished,’ must be said concerning this Book as we close it. Not a single verse or revelation shall henceforth come of the Spirit. Until Christ comes, this Book is sealed, so far as any addition to it is concerned!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3062

“Joseph ruled Egypt for the good of Israel and, in like manner does Christ rule the whole world for the good of His people. All the arrangements of Providence are under His control. Nothing is done in the entire universe without His command or His permission. Does that statement startle you? It is, nevertheless, true!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2876

“In due season we shall die unless our Lord shall first return. The appointed hour for each of us is drawing near—what shall we do then? Why, then, Beloved, trusting in Jesus, quietness and confidence will still be our strength! We shall not send our friends running to fetch a ‘priest’ to perform some mysterious ceremony over us. Christ is all we need and as we have Him, we can die any day with perfect serenity!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985

“If our Gospel were hard, it would be easy, but because it is easy it is hard! It needs a strong hand to bring us down to this and I am praying while I am preaching to you that the Lord Jesus Christ would now send forth the ever-blessed Spirit—His own Word of Power—to bring you to Himself. Look and live!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921

“‘Be you holy,’ for so shall you serve God and serve the Church of Christ and, in the highest sense, serve your generation and serve the world!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045

“Many come here, Sabbath after Sabbath, to hear the Gospel. The immense number and the constancy of it surprise me. I do not know why the multitudes come and crowd these aisles. When I preached yesterday in Worcestershire and saw the thronging crowds in every road, I could not help wondering to see them—and the more so because they listened as though I had some novel discovery to make—they listened with all their ears, eyes and mouths! I could but marvel and thank God. Ah, but it is a dreadful thing to remember that so many people hear the Gospel and yet perish under the sound of it! Alas, the Gospel becomes to them a savor of death unto death—and there is no lot so terrible as perishing under a pulpit from which the Gospel is preached!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2999

“Oh, how you will glorify Christ if you have faith enough to take in this Divine mystery! Stagger not at electing love—it is one of the highest notes of heavenly music! Be not afraid of such a verse as this—‘I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with loving kindness have I drawn you.’ Here is marrow and fatness such as saints fed upon in days long since gone!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3062

“I wonder whether there are any here who once declared and probably believed that he was a Christian, but who has now given up even the name of Christian? If so, my Friend, one of two things is true concerning you—either you never were converted at all, and so have been a mere professor, or else, if you ever were truly converted, you will have to come back.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2975

“If you should experience a double trouble and if neither sun nor moon should give you cheer, yet you need not suspend, but may rather deepen your fellowship with the Man of Sorrows!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3046

“I have heard many strange things in the course of my life, but I have never heard one of the Lord’s servants, when he came to die, regret that he had taken Him for a Master. Nor have I ever heard one of them rail at Him because of even the heaviest blows of His hand, but, like Job, they have said, ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ Yes, as much blessed when He takes away as when He gives!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2958

“We are very bad judges of our own spiritual experiences. We often undervalue who God esteems and set great store by that which God does not prize. So it may be that Christ is really with you, dear Friend, although you are writing such bitter things against yourself and mourning His absence.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2945

“The mischief is, dear Friends, that we often stop somewhere short of God when we are seeking salvation. A Romanist, for instance, erects a crucifix and bows down before it. The original intention of the crucifix, no doubt, was to help the person who used it to remember the death of Christ…But why do I talk about this to you Protestants? Why, because many of you do just the same in other respects! You say, ‘Now, if I am to be converted, I ought to read the Bible.’ Yes, that is quite right. Read the Bible, but, if you stop at the Bible, you will no more get to God than if you stop at the crucifix!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2867

“Growing Christians think nothing of themselves, but full-grown Christians know themselves to be less than nothing.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3063

“…I know, my God, that when I shall have received my last mercy on earth, I shall receive my first enjoyment in Heaven! When I shall have had the last blessing of this mortal life, I shall have the first blessing of the life everlasting! When the goodness and the mercy that have followed me to the brink of Jordan shall cease, I shall have angels there to escort me up to the celestial hills, and to admit me to my Savior’s Presence where there are pleasures forevermore!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3022

“Brothers and Sisters, if we had more sense of our need, prayer would be more of an instinct with us—we would pray because we could not help praying!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2879

“The difficulty which many feel is this— perhaps they are not elect—and if they are not, then, even though they come to Jesus, He must cast them out. Now, that is supposing what never did occur, because no non-elect soul ever came to Jesus! But I need not go into that matter, for my text suffices without any explanation. Read the first part of the verse—‘All that the Father gives Me shall come to Me’ [John 6:36].”—Volume 52, Sermon #3000

“Many are the hills and dales between this Jericho and the city of the Great King! Let who will, be without trials, Christians will have their full share of them! But there shall come no difficulty of any kind, between here and Paradise, which shall necessitate the soul’s going anywhere but to her gracious Lord for guidance, for consolation, for strength, or for anything besides! Little know we of the walls to be leaped or the troops to be overcome—but we know full well that we never need part from the Captain of our salvation, or call in other helpers.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3046

“Whenever we want to have converts—and I hope that is always—the best thing for us to do is to ‘preach the Word.’ There is nothing better! There can be nothing more—there must be nothing less!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2870
“Never judge men by the clothes they wear, but by what they are in themselves! It is a man’s heart and, above all, it is the Grace of God that dwells within the man’s heart that you and I are to prize and love—may God help us to do so!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2936

“The one who really loves the Lord, when tempted to sin, cries with Joseph, ‘How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?’ Every act of sin arises out of the absence or the decline of the love of God, but perfect love to God leads to the perfect life with God.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2958

“Your Lord does not pray the Father to take you out of the world, but He does pray that he will keep you from the evil that is in the world. And in accordance with His prayer, it ought to be the great aim of your life that you may so live as not to be dragged down to the low level of ungodly men—yes, and not even down to the level of common Christianity—for the level of ordinary Christianity, at this day, far too closely resembles that of the church in Laodicea which was so nauseous to the Lord.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3063

“Indeed, blindness would follow upon a vision of absolute Deity—if such a vision were even possible. To dwell long upon the Doctrine of the Trinity, and to vex your mind with the various theories of that mysterious subject which men have imagined, is the sure road to Socinianism or some other heresy! But, to see God veiled in human flesh and especially to see Him revealed in the Person of the dying Mediator, is to see God in the only way in which He can to seen by mortal men. We do, not, therefore, for a moment forget that Christ’s death was the greatest possible display of God’s love to men.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2986

“In the world you shall have tribulation, but in Christ you shall have peace! Value the Holy Spirit above all things. Realize your entire dependence upon Him. Pray for fresh Grace. Venture not into the world without a fresh store of His hallowed influence. Live in the Divine Love. Seek to be filled with that blessed Spirit and then, my Brothers and Sisters, even if the strong man armed shall lay hold of you, you will not flee away—shame shall not overtake you, dismay shall not frighten your souls—and you shall stand in unblemished integrity to the end as the true servants of Jesus Christ!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3023

“There are those in Heaven who have found as hard hand-to-hand fighting in the spiritual life as we do—yet they were not vanquished, nor need we be—for the same strength which was given to them is also available for us!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3046

“This is how God saves men—by leading them to trust in Him in Jesus Christ.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2867“I sometimes pass persons who used to sit in these pews, and who were, I thought, ardent Christians. Even now some of them have respect for me, but I fear that they have none for my Master. If I get anywhere near them, they slink away, for fear I should speak to them. I wish they had as much anxiety about the grief they have caused my Lord as they have about any grief they may have caused me.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2975

“Man is unwilling to give up sin—he loves it too much—he is unwilling to be made holy for he has no time for spiritual things. God, then, must come to man, for how can man, being naturally dead, and naturally unwilling, ever come to God?”—Volume 52, Sermon #3001

“O Sinner, the day may come when God will say of you, ‘Let him have his own way.’ If He should give you up, then your doom will be sealed forever and your fate more desperate than words can describe! God help you and keep you from yourself, or else you will soon destroy yourself and go posthaste to destruction!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2924

“Having the same God and the same promises, we may expect to always see the same results. As for the future, a large part of Scripture is as yet unfulfilled. Many persons try to interpret it, but the man is not born who can explain the Revelation. Yet, whatever God has there declared will be explained by the working out of His Providence.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3064

“This Psalm [the 23^rd]is, among the other Psalms, what the lark is among the other birds—it soars and sings till it is lost in the heights to which it ascends!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2886

“Trial is absolutely necessary in order to reveal to us some of the attributes of our gracious God! We cannot, ordinarily, see the stars in the daytime, but if we go down a mine or a well, we can. And often in the deep mines or wells of trouble, as we go down, down, down, we see the brightness of our Lord Jesus Christ as we never saw it before!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2945

“Crown Him, O you daughters of Jerusalem, as the King of Sufferers, most mighty to suffer and to save! With His garments all red from the winepress, adore Him as having alone sustained the fury of His adversaries!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024
“A beggar with the Truth of God is mightier than priests and princes with a lie.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3032

“In the very best of men, there is an infernal and well-near infinite depth of depravity! Some Christians never seem to find this out. I almost wish that they might not do so, for it is a painful discovery for anyone to make—but it has the beneficial effect of making us cease from trusting in ourselves and causing us to glory only in the Lord.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2986

“‘Where sin abounded, Grace did much more abound.’ There is no unconquerable sin! There is no Dagon that shall not be broken in the presence of the Ark of God! There is no temple of the Philistines which shall not fall beneath the might of our greater Samson! We need not, as the result of temperament, or because of any sin that does so easily beset us, depart from Jesus, for Grace is equal to all emergencies.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3046

“No man knows how far God’s mercy goes, but if that mercy is given to faith, I cannot see how it can be extended to some dying men. Delirium, a wandering mind, an aching head—oh, these will give you quite enough to do in dying without having to seek your peace with God!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2917

“Although we are to scatter the seed everywhere, upon the wayside as well as upon the good ground, God never does. Common calling is addressed to every man, but effectual callingcomes only to prepared men, to those whom God makes ‘willing in the day of His power.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3001

“God will honor His Church when she has faith enough to believe in His promises.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3064

“If we give our life for others, we do not really give our life—we but pay the debt of Nature a little while before it is due. But it was altogether different in the Lord Jesus Christ’s case… It was a purely voluntary act for Christ to die at all—not merely to die on the Cross but everto die, was a voluntary act on His part and, consequently, a most singular proof of His love to us.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2959

“I tell you that one backsliding Christian does more harm to the Church of God than one minister can ever undo! And the dear children who are living near to God are often exposed to scorn through those of you that are settled upon your lees.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2926

“In our courts of law, we do not require men to answer questions which would incriminate them, but God does. And at the Last Great Day, the ungodly will be condemned on their own confession of guilt!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2900
“Brothers, if we want to have fruit in our ministry—if we want to see sinners converted—we must preach up Christ’s death! As the blacksmith strikes the hot iron upon the anvil, we must keep the hammer of the Gospel at work upon this great foundation truth, ‘Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024

“Christ said ‘ finis’to the canon of Revelation and it was closed forever! No one can add a single word to it and no one can take a word from it. We Dissenters are sometimes charged with inventing a new Gospel. We deny it. We say that our Owen, Howe, Henry, Charnock, Bunyan, Baxter, or Janeway and all that galaxy of stars of the pulpit did not pretend to say anything new—they only revived the things that Christ said—they only professed to be confirmers of the Witness, Christ Jesus”—Volume 50, Sermon #2875

“Our mothers returned thanks on their own behalf and ours, but as we look back, we are bound to return thanks, too, for that kindly care of God in our most extreme weakness—when the little candle of life was scarcely lighted and might have been so easily blown out. Then, as God took care of us in our first infancy, do You not think that He will take care of us when we get into our second childhood? We are never likely to be quite as weak as we were then, but, as the Lord guarded us at that time, will He not guard us in those dark days which are already looming before some of us? Of course He will! Therefore, be of good courage, for He shall strengthen your heart and your praise shall be continually of Him.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3022

“If we are really God’s people, it is a great consolation for us to know that—notwithstanding our many infirmities and iniquities, our many anxieties and doubts and fears as to whether, after all, we have been self-deceived or devil-deceived—God will never forsake us!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3047

“You will be wise, you young Christian professors, if you cultivate Christian companionship! Try to live with those who live with God and sit at the feet of these who sit at the feet of Christ. God may speak through them to your soul, so give heed to what they say—it may be that in giving heed to them, you will be listening to the voice of God Himself!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3063

“God save you from being able to delight yourselves in anything but your God! May He put so much bitterness into every other cup that you will be compelled to take the cup of salvation and, calling upon the name of the Lord, to drink only of that! You will be dreadful and eternal losers, whatever else you gain, if you lose the Lord!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2975

“Christians, you also are to love one another, not because of the gain which you get from one another, but rather because of the good you can do to one another.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2936

“If I ever try to secure a quiet half-hour’s meditation upon His love to me, somebody is pretty sure to come and knock at the door. But if I can keep the door-knocker still, and get alone with my Lord and only think about His love to me—not trying to elaborate any theories, or to understand any doctrines, but just sitting down with the view of loving Him who gave Himself for me—I tell you, Sirs, that this thought is positively inebriating to the soul!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2986

“When a soul sees itself, it then has the eyes with which to see Jesus. He that can see his own deformities, shall not be long before he sees the Lord’s unspeakable perfections! In that day of self-humbling, cutting away and casting down, I know the Lord alone will be exalted in your soul.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2922

“The coming of Christ into any soul, or into any church, is the death of sin and the birth of holiness!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3047

Antinomians, that is, those who are ‘against the Law,’ we are not to be numbered among them, for we can say with Paul, “The Law is holy and the Commandments holy and just and good.” And though we are carnal, and often feel ourselves ‘sold under sin,’ yet we cannot find any fault with the Law of God. If eternal life could have come by any law, it would have come by that Law—and even though that Law can now do nothing for us but condemn us, yet, as we hear its terrible sentence, we feel that the Law ‘is holy, and just, and good.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3002

“In persecuting times, the Christian has often had to literally give himself up to die, but, instead of the cause of Christ being injured by his death, he has, in that way, brought forth the “much fruit.” There have been no other such fruitful preachers of the Gospel as those who suffered at the stakes of Smithfield or died upon the rack. If you would be the means of saving others, you must make no reserve for yourself, but imitate your Master, of whom His enemies tauntingly but truly said, ‘He saved others; Himself He cannot save.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024

“Do not be afraid to argue for the Truth of God. Do not think that infidels are wise men, or that Arminians are so exceedingly learned. Stand up for the Truth—and there is so much solid learning and real Truth to be found in the Doctrines that we uphold [Doctrines of Grace] that none of you need be ashamed of them! They are mighty and must prevail! The mighty God of Jacob, by the demonstration of the Holy Spirit, make them triumphant!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2908
“O Son of God, how could You stoop so low as to take upon Yourself our nature and in that nature to bleed and die, when between us and You there was a distance infinitely greater than that between an ant and a cherub, or a moth and an archangel? Yet with no claims upon You, of Your own free will, You did yield Yourself to die because of Your amazing love to us!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2959

“God said He, alone, should be the Christian’s Master—and the rule of his conduct should be the will of the Lord as revealed in the teaching of this blessed Book. Happy will Christians be, and strong in the Lord will they become, when they get as far as that!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3063

“I pray you, as soon as you know Christ, speak out for Him and come out and show your colors. But I also beseech you never profess to follow Christ merely through the persuasion of friends!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3023
“Light thoughts of sin breed light thoughts of the Savior.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3049

“Great success is one of the worst perils of mankind. Many a man has been elevated until his brain has grown dizzy and he has fallen to his destruction. He who is to be made to stand securely on a high place has need to be put through sharp affliction. More men are destroyed by prosperity and success then by affliction and apparent failure.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2945

“Do you not see that if the richer you get and the more often you go to the Cross, it will be safe for you to be trusted with wealth? Take care to sanctify everything that God gives you by giving Him His proper portion and do not use your own portion till you have given Him His.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2975

“You would be cut off from Christ, you would be more depraved than you were before your conversion, you would be more corrupt than you were previous to your being regenerated—‘twice dead, plucked up by the roots’—if God the Holy Spirit were to withdraw from you! You must live in His life, trust in His power to sustain you and seek of Him fresh supplies when the tide of your spiritual life is running low.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3048

“The early Christian Church was very enthusiastic—they went everywhere preaching the Word. Somebody says, “Ah, they lived in the days of persecution.” But it was not the persecution which made them enthusiastic—it was their enthusiasm that brought upon them persecution for Christ’s sake!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2884

“You who have mighty founts of love welling up in your soul may come and let them flow most freely here, for here is One who is worthy of them all! And when you have loved Christ as much as you can, you have not loved Him half as much as He deserves to be loved.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3002

“The proud-hearted may, if they will, arraign their Maker. And the thing formed may say to Him who formed it, ‘Why have You made me thus?’But these men of Grace will not do so. It is enough for them if God wills anything! If He wills it, so let it be—Solomon’s throne or Job’s dunghill—they desire to be equally happy wherever the Lord may place them, or however He may deal with them!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3065

“Do you want to know where to find Christ? He is dwelling in His people and especially in His poor people, in His suffering people, in His tried people! So, when your heart is full of love to your Lord, let some of the light of it shine upon them…The moon cannot shine as brightly as the sun does, and you cannot love as much as Christ does—but you can be like the moon and shine with borrowed light—you can reflect upon others the light of the love which Christ has shed upon your own soul.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2986

“I ask you, Brothers and Sisters in Christ, to resolve, by God’s strength, that there is nothing you will not do and nothing you will not give for Him who loved you so well that He gave all He had to save you! Seek, by every means that you can use, to win souls for Christ! The man who must have conversions or he will die, will have them! The woman who feels that she must bring her class to Christ and will never rest till she does, will bring them to Christ! The Lord help us so to preach Christ and so to live for Christ and, if necessary, so to die for Christ, that we may bring forth fruit unto God—‘some a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024

“What can the ministers of the Gospel do if their people cease to pray for them? Even if their own prayers are heard, as they will be, and a measure of blessing be given, yet it will be but a scant measure compared with what it would be if all the saints united in their intercessions!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929

“Alas! Alas! If we had to deal with sane men, our preaching would be easy—but sin is a madness—such a madness that when men are bitten by it, they cannot be persuaded even though one should rise from the dead. ‘Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902
“The meek in spirit are like a photographer’s sensitive plates—as the Word of God passes before them, they desire to have its image imprinted upon their hearts. Their hearts are the fleshy tablets on which the mind of God is recorded . God is the Writer and they become living Epistles, written not with ink, but with the finger of the living God.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3065

“The Holy Spirit is the chariot wheel of prayer. Prayer may be the chariot, the desire may draw it forth, but the Spirit is the very wheel whereby it moves. He propels the desire and causes the chariot to roll swiftly on and to bear to Heaven the supplication of the saints when the desire of the heart is ‘according to the will of God.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3048

“In many churches there are so few making profession of religion that there is not much danger of this evil—but here, where we receive so many every week, there is need for wise discrimination! I do beseech you never to sit down with a religion that comes to you merely through your being talked to by your acquaintances.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3023

“There are some who read the Bible and try to systematize it according to rigid logical creeds, but I dare not follow their method and I feel content to let people say, ‘How inconsistent he is with himself!’ The only thing that would grieve me would be inconsistency with the Word of God! As far as I know this Book, I have endeavored, in my ministry, to preach to you not a part of the Truth of God, but the whole counsel of God—but I cannot harmonize it, nor am I anxious to do so. I am sure all Truth is harmonious and to my ear the harmony is clear enough—but I cannot give you a complete score of the music, or mark the harmonies on the gamut—I must leave the Chief Musician to do that.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2976

“Do not expect, Beloved, to hear voices, to see visions and to dream dreams, but rather look at Providence—see how God’s wonder-working wheels turn round and, as the wheels turn, so do you! Whichever way His hand points, go there and thus God shall guide you, for your Counselor has not yet perished!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3066

“Its [the Bible] every page is a sheet of gold! No, rather let me say that Heaven’s banknotes are here, to be cashed by them who have faith enough to bring them to the God that issued them, that He may make their souls rich to all the intents of bliss!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3002
“Practical godliness is absolutely necessary to a true Christian character—and a man is not righteous unless he does that which is righteous.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2959

“Never did water leap from the crystal fountain with half such freeness and generous liberality as Grace flows from the heart of God! He gives forth love, joy, peace and pardon—and He gives them as a king gives to a king! You cannot empty His treasury, for it is inexhaustible. He is not enriched by withholding, nor is He impoverished by bestowing!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2867

“A religion that cannot stand a little laughter must be a very rotten one.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3023
“It is a great help in prayer, when you are yourself unable to pray, to get someone whom you know to be a Christian, and who has sympathy with you, to come and pray with you.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024

“It is an easy thing to shut the mouths of ordinary lions, but it is a great deal more difficult to shut the mouth of the roaring lion of Hell who goes about seeking whom he may devour. It is a very simple matter for the Omnipotent God to make a world—He speaks and it is done! But to remake an innumerable company of His creatures who have become debased and spiritually dead—this is, indeed, a work only comparable to that which He accomplished when He “brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the Everlasting Covenant.””—Volume 50, Sermon #2880

“If ever you are asked which comes first, repentance or faith, you may answer, by another question, ‘Which spoke of a wheel moves first when the wheel begins to revolve?’ You know that they are all set in motion at the same time. So, when the hand of God sets our soul ‘going’ in the right road, it also sets our soul and often our eyes ‘weeping.’ And I believe that when our soul is really ‘going’ towards God, it is with a deepened repentance over the past and a sincere ‘weeping’ over the imperfections which it still has to lament.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3049

“We must endeavor, as much as possible, to exercise our thoughts upon all the subjects which God has given us to think upon in His Word and has applied to our hearts by the workings of the Holy Spirit. Where this is done, we shall avoid one thought thrusting another, and each will go in its own path (Joel 2:8).”—Volume 52, Sermon #2976

“Oh, what wondrous love was that which impelled the Savior onward to Gethsemane—the olive press where He was to be pressed and crushed between the millstones of Jehovah’s wrath in order that He might suffer the penalty due to our transgressions!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3003

“Personal preaching is the best kind of preaching. We are not going to avoid personalities! We are striving to reach individual cases as much as possible, that every man may hear the Word of God in his own tongue—and hear it speaking to his own heart.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3066“If it were required, as once it was, that you should be dragged into the amphitheatre to be slain by wild beasts, you must be willing to do as the Christians did then—to die such a death, if necessary, for Christ. My Lord and Master will not be content with the shell of a man—He must have his heart and soul, his entire being—and he who will not thus give himself up to Christ cannot be His disciple.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2946

“Nothing tends so greatly to oil the wheels of life as a little loving sympathy—let us always be ready with a good supply of it wherever it is needed.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2936

“If a man could eat gold, drink gold, sleep with gold, walk with gold and be robed in gold, yet, still, what is there in that metal which could satisfy the cravings of the highest part of man’s nature—that mysterious spiritual thing which is called the soul? No, there is no solid satisfaction for the soul in all the wealth in the world!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2987

“My Master knows that I would cheerfully resign, that another voice might speak to you, if that would keep alive your zeal and enthusiasm. If it is, however, not my fault, even a changed ministry would not suffice. When churches grow to a great size, people think they must always continue so, and that God will always bless them as He has done. Why, Sirs, as our first blessings came in answer to prayers—all future blessings must come in the same way!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3013

“But there is such a thing as being angry and yet not sinning—and the meek man turns his anger wholly upon the evil and away from the person who did the wrong—and is as ready to do him a kindness as if he had never transgressed at all!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3065
“A sight of Your Cross, O Jesus, makes the priests topple down like Dagon before the ark—and the sacraments that once were trusted in to be despised if placed side by side with You!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2922

“What you learn from man, you can unlearn—but what you learn of the Spirit is fixed indelibly in your heart and conscience—and not even Satan himself can steal it from you. Go, you ignorant ones, who often stagger at the Truths of Revelation—go and ask the Spirit, for He is the Guide of benighted souls!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3048

“Gratitude is a very rare thing. If any of you try to do good for the sake of getting gratitude, you will find it one of the most profitless trades in the world. If you can do good, expecting to be abusedfor it, you will get your reward, but if you do good with an expectation of gratitude in return, you will be bitterly disappointed.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2960

“The best service you can render to Christ is to imitate Him. If you want to do what will please Him—do as He did!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024
“No matter how far off a man may be from God, if there is a hearty and earnest seeking after Him through Jesus Christ, he will find Him.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2925

“Though it is evident enough that the early Christians were an uneducated company of men, yet those that were great and noble, learned and polished, did not disdain to join with them, nor will they ever in any age if the Light of Heaven shines and the love of God burns in their hearts!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2914

“Now, Christian…Do you wonder if your integrity is questioned and your most manifest virtue is misrepresented? And if the Grace which really is within you is laughed at and despised? How could the world know you when the Savior, Himself, was not discovered? As the bright gleams of His Divine Glory were almost wholly concealed, surely the weaker gleams of your earthly and human glory must be altogether hidden! That, perhaps, is the first reason why ‘it does not yet appear what we shall be.’” [1 John 3:2]—Volume 52, Sermon #3004

“Some people seem to have a notion that although sin is a very evil thing, yet if repentance is sincere and deep, it will suffice to wash out the sin. But Paul [Romans 8:34] does not say, ‘Who is he who condemns?—for I have felt the plague of sin and hated it, and wept over it and turned from it. He makes no mention whatever of his repentance as a ground of his confidence! He had truly repented, yet he never dreamed of relying upon his repentance as a reason for his justification in the sight of God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3067

“While we sometimes find the purse-proud man looking down on the poor, it quite as often happens that the poor man takes umbrage where there is no need for it and is much more wicked in his jealousies than the other in his purse-pride. Let it never be so among Christians, but lest the Brother of high degree rejoice that he is exalted and the poor that he is brought low!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2976

“If I hear blasphemy and am able to condemn it, yet do not, my silence makes me a sharer in the sin. I am always afraid lest, when I hear God’s name blasphemed, my guilty silence should make me an accomplice of the blasphemer. A rebuke need not be and should not be discourteous or disrespectful. And it should not be unduly severe, but I am afraid that nowadays we are not so likely to err by our harshness, as by failing to be faithful to our conscience and our God.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045

“According to our Lord’s testimony, [Luke 7:22-23] the preaching of the Gospel to the poor is as great a proof of His Messiahship as the raising of the dead! Then how highly it ought to be prized by them and how glad should they be who have the Gospel now preached freely in their hearing!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2876

“When a man plays the fool, let him do it for something that is worth having.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2987

“The meek-spirited man may be naturally very hot and fiery, but he has had Grace given to him to keep his temper in subjection. He does not say,“That is my constitution and I cannot help it,” as so many do. God will never excuse us because of our constitution—His Grace is given to us to cure our evil constitutions and to kill our corruptions! We are not to spare any Amalekites because they are called constitutional sins, but we are to bring them all out—even Agog who goes delicately—and slay them before the Lord who can make us more than conquerors over every sin, whether constitutional or otherwise!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3065

“In a spiritualsense, so far as anything in the nature of good works is concerned, sin has paralyzed man altogether. Indeed, it has taken his very life away from him so that he is truly said to be ‘dead in trespasses and sins.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2887

“All the water in the sea will not hurt your vessel as long as you keep it outside—the danger begins when it gets inside the ship. So it matters little what is outside you, if all is right within. Have that little bird in your bosom that sings sweetly of the love of God! Wear the flower called heart’s-ease in your buttonhole and you may go merrily through a perfect wilderness of trouble and a desert of care!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2871

“Good old Rowland Hill, when he found himself getting very feeble, said, ‘I hope they have not forgotten poor old Rowley up there.’ But he knew that he was not forgotten, nor will you be, Beloved.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2900
“No food is so palatable as that which has hunger for its sauce! To know what it is to be poor will make us more grateful if God ever gives us abundance.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025
“Self-satisfaction is the end of progress, so we are constantly to cry, “Higher, and yet still higher! Onward and upward”—and still to ask to be filled yet more completely with all the fullness of God!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2961
“Be charitable, notwithstanding all the mischief that unworthy applicants may make of your charity, remembering the command of our Savior to His disciples, ‘Give to him that asks you.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045

“There will come to every man, whoever or whatever he may be, sudden assaults of temptation—but if the Law of his God is in his heart, he will be forewarned and forearmed against them! There will also come the long sieges of temptation and many a man has fallen by little and little. But if the Law of his God is in his heart, he will be safe against even them.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3002

“Very likely if we prayed more for ministers, they would be more blessed to us. There is many a man who cannot ‘hear’ his minister and the reason may be that God never hears him pray for his minister.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929
“It is an ill sign when anyone refuses to forgive another. I have heard of a father saying that his child should never darken his door again. Does that father know that he can never enter Heaven while he cherishes such a spirit as that?”—Volume 53, Sermon #3065
“As the planet needs the sun, so man needs his God. As the eye is nothing without light, so your spirit is nothing without God. You must have God!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2987

“Self-righteousness is a great cheat. The man who gets most comfort out of it simply gets that comfort because he is ignorant! If he knew himself and knew God’s Law, and knew the demands of inflexible Justice, he would fling upon the nearest dunghill that self-righteousness of his which looks like fair white linen, but which really is, in God’s sight, nothing but filthy rags!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2977

“We all know what our own cross is. And if our Heavenly Father has appointed it for us, we must take it up and follow Christ!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2946

“Oh, privileged beyond compare is that man who has a partner in life who, with himself, rejoices in Christ and who sees all his children following in his steps, equally rejoicing in the Lord Jesus Christ! And happier still is he if all his servants are in the same blessed condition. How is it with you, Brothers and Sisters? Have you this blessing? I know that some of you have. Your house ought to be a little Heaven, for you have a church in your house! Keep the bells always ringing, ‘Holiness unto the Lord,’ and let your hearts be so many harps from which there shall constantly pour forth floods of music to the praise of Him who has so highly favored you!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2937

“You who know not where you will have a lodging tonight, if you can truly say, ‘my Redeemer,’ you need not envy the very angels of God, for in this respect, you are ahead even of them, for they can call Him, ‘Lord,’ but not ‘Redeemer’!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2909

“I am afraid we would have to present a very poor record if we gave a true account of the time we spend in prayer—yet we have no excuse to offer for being lax in this holy duty. It is not a bondage, a slavery—it is the highest privilege of the Believer’s soul to be engaged in prayer to our Heavenly Father—yet we often prefer the disastrous ease of wasting our time instead of drawing near to God in prayer!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3003

“O my Brothers in the ministry, if we are not a blessing, we are a double curse! Every so-called “place of worship” in which the true Gospel is not preached is a curse, for it is like a sepulcher full of rottenness doing nothing but harm! Worldlings more often judge Christianity by fruitless trees than by fruit-bearing trees. O preacher, be a blessing, or never enter the pulpit again!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045

“We have been born into a world where there is much sin and much sorrow, where no man can have all that he wishes—and it is a grand thing when our wishes get changed, our desires get altered and we become altogether different from what we used to be! This is the path that leads to satisfaction!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2987

“We are, all of us, remarkably good-tempered while we have our own way. But the true meekness which is a work of Grace will stand the fire of persecution and will endure the test of enmity, cruelty and wrong—even as the meekness of Christ did upon the Cross of Calvary.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3065

“That man is truly happy who can say of all his substances, be it little or be it much, ‘The Lord gave it to me.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025

“I would like, Brothers and Sisters in Christ, that you and I would so live that our very lives would preach for Jesus Christ—that people would only have to listen to our ordinary conversation, or to see the cheerfulness of our countenance, or to perceive the hopefulness of our spirit under trouble, our justness and integrity, our readiness to forgive, our zeal for God! It is good to preach with your tongue if God has called you to do so. But never forget that the best preaching in the world is done by other members of the body. So, preach with your feet—by your walk and conversation! Let your whole being be a living, powerful, irresistible illustration of the power of Jesus Christ to bless and save!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2891

“Thousands of hearers of the Gospel are constantly saying, ‘We will believe in Jesus when we feel our sins more—when we feel more repentance—when we have done this and told that, and experienced the other.’ Ah, Sirs, this plan of bringing Christ in at the end of the work—after you have accomplished the first part of it yourselves—is a most foolish mistake, and a fatal one, too!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2977

“O Sirs, if you remain what you are by nature, you may strive to do what you please, but when you have dressed out the child of nature in its finest garments, it is still only the child of nature finely dressed, but not the child of God You must be, by a supernatural birth, allied to the living God, for, if not, all the works that you may perform will not entitle you to the possession of the inheritance of the Most High.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2961

“Brother, if ever the Lord should rebuff you and seem to refuse that which you desire to offer to Him, do not sulk—do not get into a bad spirit, as some have done in similar circumstances—but know that the very essence of Christian service is to be willing notto serve in that particular way if, by not serving, God would be the more glorified!1904, Sermon #2869

“It is only as you yourselves are, in the fullest sense,saved—saved from falling into sin, saved from inward corruption, saved from error—it is only as you are conformed to the image of Christ that you can expect to be a blessing to others.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045

“It has been my lot to stand by many death beds and I can honestly say that if I wanted to enjoy the most intense pleasure that is possible on earth, I would seek out some dying saint that I might witness his rapturous joy and hear his gladsome and cheering testimony to his Lord and Savior!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2987

“The meek-spirited man is glad to know that other people are happy—and their happiness is his happiness! He will have a great number of heavens, for everybody else’s Heaven will be a Heaven to him! It will be a Heaven to him to know that so many other people are in Heaven, and for each one whom he sees there, he will praise the Lord. Meekness gives us the enjoyment of what is other people’s, yet they have none the less because of our enjoyment of it!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3065
“When a church feels it mustget a blessing—I hope we are feeling it now—in proportion as that desire grows into an agony, the Lord alone will be exalted in that day!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2922

“I do not think that we shall long plead for our sons and daughters without seeing a prayer-hearing God stretching out His hand to save them. Or if we do, we must look upon the delay as a further trial of our faith and we must intensify our prayer until it becomes an agony—and in that agony we lay hold upon the Covenant Angel and cry, ‘I will not let You go unless You bless me and my seed also.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2937

“You cannot direct your own steps for you are a cripple and cannot take even one step except as strength is given you from on high! You are like a ship upon the sea—you can make no progress except as the breath of the Divine Spirit fills the sails of your boat. How can you direct your own way when you have no power to go in it and are dependent upon God for everything?”—Volume 50, Sermon #2893

“My young Brother, you are about to become the pastor of a large church and you tremble lest you should make some great mistake and bring dishonor upon God. But if His Law is in your heart, none of your steps shall slide. You need not mind about the slipperiness of the way if the Law of your God is in your heart! Many slip when the road is not slippery, and many a man, by God’s Grace, stands fast where it seems a miracle that he stands at all.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3002

“When a man says to us, ‘I am a child of God,’ we have the right to expect that there shall be at least some trace of the Character of God visible in his walk and conversation. Come, dear Friend, with all your imperfections, are you seeking to be an imitator of God, as one of His dear children?...Do you feel that because you are a child of God, it becomes you to walk even as His first-born Son walked while He was here below? Remember that without holiness no man shall see the Lord, because without holiness no man has the evidence that he is, indeed, a child of God!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2961

“Do not, therefore, fear persecution, but rather thank God for it, and say, ‘I have to endure this that I may be a blessing to those who revile and abuse me.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045
“Plowing does not harden rocks—but preaching does harden sinners if the Gospel does not reach their hearts and, of all hardhearted men, the hardest are those who have been hardened in the fire of the Gospel.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2977

“I know that some of you seekers after salvation fancy that those good Christian people whom you very much admire must get a great deal of comfort out of the good lives that they lead. But I can assure you that this is not the case with any of them. They will all tell you that they have not the least confidence in themselves, or in their own works, but that their confidence is found in quite another direction!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3067

“I do not think that all the cherubim and seraphim in Heaven ever praised God as they have done who have died in prison for Jesus’ sake, or at the stake have poured forth their blood rather than deny Him. Be glad that you may prove your love by suffering for Christ. The ruby crown of martyrdom is not within your reach today, but be thankful if some jewels of suffering may be yours. And count it all joy when you can endure this cross for the name of Jesus Christ.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2946

“Oh, the delight of pleading with God when the heart casts forth mighty jets of supplication like a geyser in full action! How mighty is supplication when the whole soul becomes one living, hungering, expecting desire!1904, Sermon #2869

“When we come to God and are saved by Him, then ordinances take their proper place. You cannot teach a man how to live until he is born and you cannot teach him what his spiritual life is to be until he is born-again. all religious rites and ceremonies which precede the new birth go for nothing. First there must be the inward life—the broken heart, the contrite spirit—and then everything else drops into proper order.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2903

“If you want to find a heart that is as hard as steel, you must look for one that has passed through the furnace of Divine Love and has been made aware of the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, but has rejected the Truths of God that has been made known to it.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2977

“As Christ thus made known the will of God the Father to His people, so the Holy Spirit makes known to us the words of Christ. I could almost affirm that Christ’s words would be of no use to us unless they were applied to us by the Holy Spirit! Beloved, we need the application to assure our hearts that they are our own, that they are intended for us and that we have an interest in their blessedness!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3048

“Every moment that Christ is at the right hand of God, every Believer is safe. For Christ to be in Heaven and for the people for whom He died to be in Hell is utterly impossible! For Christ to be there as our Representative and yet for those whom He represents to be cast. out from the favor of God would be a monstrosity, a blasphemy which cannot be imagined for a single instant!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3067“A certain amount of sleep is necessary for the body; but prayer is just as necessary for the soul. The bed will give rest to the tired limbs, but the Mercy Seat will give refreshment to the powers and passions of the spirit. Let us get strength for service, power for endurance and might for conflict by going to the Mount of Olives with the Savior and watching and praying with Him.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3003

“Iniquity is indeed great when it is committed against experience! Men deliberately run upon the pikes of damnation—they destroy their own souls by a sort of spiritual suicide!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2988

“ You believe the Gospel istrue, butyou doubt whether it is for you. Well, no, it is not for you if you are not a sinner. If you can say, “I am not guilty,” then farewell to all hope, for Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners! If you are a sinner, surely He came to save such as you are!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2925

“Time has to do with time, but time has not to do with eternity, so, whether you, my Brother, were born to God 50 years ago and I, 25 years ago—and our young friend over there 25 daysago—it makes no difference. ‘If children, then heirs,’ because the date of birth cannot come into our reckoning when we have to do with eternal things.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2961

“If those who hate righteousness, hated Christians more heartily than they now do, it might be a token that God was more manifestly at work in us, making us more “out-and-out” for Him than we are at present.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2884
“After faith comes repentance,or, rather, repentance is faith’s twin brother and is born at the same time.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2882

“When a man is poor, unless he has brought his poverty upon himself by extravagance, or idleness, or his own wrongdoing, the man is a man for all that, and none the worse man for being poor! Indeed, some of the best of men have been as poor as their Lord was.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025

“When I talk of the glories of the love of Christ, I feel at home. When I speak of the matchless Grace of the Everlasting Covenant, my heart is well at ease. But to prove man’s sin heavy is a task too hard for me! Not that it is hard in itself. The evidence is clear, but to procure a conviction is the difficulty. The jury is not impartial. Your conscience is like an unjust judge. Oh, how hard it is to make any man believe himself to be so bad as the Word of God says he is!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2988

“Though all sinners are fools, yet there are fools of all sorts. Some are learned fools. Unconverted men, whatever they know, are only educated fools. Between the ignorant man who cannot read a letter and the learned man who is apt in all knowledge, there is small difference if they are both ignorant of Christ!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3070

“It was said of Harry the Eighth that if all the histories of all the tyrants who ever lived had been lost, you might have composed them all with the material from the life of that execrable monster! And I will venture to say that if all the biographies of all the good men and holy angels that have ever existed could be blotted out of existence or memory, they might all be written again with the material from the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, for in Him dwells all excellence and all goodness.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3004

“Truly, Brothers and Sisters, to rule over other men is a great thing. To have moral power over men is no mean matter. But to get men to so love you that they would willingly die for you—to get them to so love you that they would sooner cease to live than cease to love you—this is to occupy a glorious high throne! And such is the throne upon which Christ sits in the hearts of all His people! Such is the dominion which He wields over all the hosts that He has purchased with His precious blood!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2876

“How certain, then, is the salvation of every elect soul! It does not depend on the will of man—he is “made willing” in the day of God’s power. He shall be called at the set time and his heart shall be effectually changed, that he may become a trophy of the Redeemer’s power. That he was unwilling before is no hindrance, for God gives him the will, so that he is then of a willing mind. Thus, every heir of Heaven must be saved because the Spirit is put within him and thereby his disposition and affections are molded according to the will of God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3048

“Doctors judge their patients’ health by looking at their tongues—and we might judge of our moral and spiritual health in a similar way. Oh, what tongues some people would have if their words could blister their tongues as they ought to do! How common it is to hear scandalous words and slanderous words—and how many hearts are made to bleed, full often, by the cruel things that are said!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2932

“If Jesus pleads for me, can His Father reject me? If so, He must also reject His Son! He must refuse the authoritative requests of His onlybegotten and well-beloved Son! He must deny to Jesus that which He well deserves—and that He can never do.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3067

“Now, if you pray in one way with your lips and in another way with your lives, your lives will win the day and your children will rather be like what you are than what you ask for them to be.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2937
“If anybody could teach me how to preach better, I would gladly go to school, again, and learn how to get at some of your hearts. If they would teach me how to speak in such a vulgar style that I would lose my reputation, but be blessed to the saving of your souls, I would willingly fling my reputation to the winds! Or if I could learn the art of oratory, I would go and sit at the feet of Cicero or Demosthenes, if I could but get at your superfine hearts that need such fine words before they will be touched! But I fear that it is the oxen’s fate to go on plowing, and plowing, and plowing—and to get weary with the labor, and yet to see no result of it all.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2977

“A thousand good things come to us by the way of suffering and reproach. I think the sweetest letters which God ever sends to His children are done up in black-edged envelopes. You will find in many of those bright envelopes of His, some choice silver mercies, but if you want a great banknote of Grace, it must came to you in the mourning envelope. It is when the Lord covers the Heavens with clouds that He sends the showers of blessing upon the earth. Be glad of the clouds for the sake of the rain.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2946

“Weeping is a wondrous help to those who would find their way to the heart of God! So, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, pour out your hearts before Him—pour them out like water before the Lord and when your heart is breaking for the longing that it has, even if you shed no outward tears, you have learned the sacred art of praying and you shall receive what you have asked in so far as it is according to the will of God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3049

“Think, dear Brothers and Sisters, how can there be any wrath treasured up against God’s people when it was all poured out upon the Lord Jesus Christ, their Surety and Substitute?”—Volume 51, Sermon #2962

“He that believes on the Lord Jesus Christ shall be made clean. He shall be cleansed from all the foulness of the past—God will wipe it right out. He shall be cleansed as to his heart and his nature. To him God repeats that ancient promise, ‘A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.’ ‘How is this to be had?’ By trusting to the Divine method of cleansing the filthy, for the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanses from all sin everyone who believes in Him.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3069

“…some of our very doctrinal friends, to whom orthodoxy seems to be both the first thing and the last thing, though, as you very well know, what they call orthodoxy is simply their own doxy!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2989

“Oh, that amazing sight, that unique sight of Jesus as He is! It would be worthwhile to die a thousand painful deaths in order to get one brief glimpse of Him as He is. I do not think that Rutherford exaggerated when he talked of swimming through seven Hells to get at Christ if he could not get at Him any other way.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3004

“You may even learn something from what these busybodies say about you. It is not true, of course. But, Brother, if they had known you better, they might have said something worse that was true! They picked a fault where there was none. Well, but you know there aresome faults that they do not know and had not you better amend them lest they should pick those next time?”—Volume 51, Sermon #2918

“Brothers and Sisters, if God has saved us, let us live as in the light of the coming Day of Judgment! And may the Lord have mercy upon us in that day and honor us because first, by His Grace, He enabled us tohonor Him!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2906

“God is visiting a soul and healing it when it has enough faith in God to cast itself, with a cry, upon His mercy. I cannot hope that there is a work of Grace in you until I know that you pray. Ananias would not have believed that Paul was converted had it not been said, ‘Behold he prays!’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3070

“When the Lord has taken us away from trusting in ordinances, then He shows us what great blessings come from the ordinances when they are rightly observed. When we trust to the preacher, or the preaching, we get nothing—but when we trust in Christ alone, then He makes the preacher, the preaching and other means of Grace to be the channels of blessing to our souls!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2892

“How can we so degrade ourselves as to worship that which God has given to us? Yet you know that many make idols of their gold, their lands, their husbands, their wives, their children, or their friends!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025
“If it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom, “Fear not, little flock, be of good comfort,” the Kingdom of God you must and shall have!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2963
“They who have no heart cannot display real indignation—but where there beats a true heart of love, there must be righteous wrath against that which is unloving—holy anger against that which is unjust and true.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2910

“If God does anything, that is enough for us! If God says anything, that is enough for us! Instead of arguing and reasoning, ‘It is written,’ or‘God has said it,’ is sufficient to settle any question that concerns a Christian!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2978
“The man who thinks he has only a few sins may bring his little bill—and you who know that you have many sins may bring your big bill—but Christ’s receipt avails for one as much as the other! Even if the roll of your guilt should be many miles long, it makes no difference to the efficacy of the blood of Jesus! If the list of your sins should be long enough to go right around the world—and just one drop of the blood of Jesus should be put upon it—all that is written there would at once disappear and be gone forever! And the sinner would be saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3069

“Brothers and Sisters, I pray you to suspect that it is presumption and not the full assurance of faith if you are always ‘going,’ but never ‘weeping.’ I have already explained that this ‘weeping’ does not put aside the rejoicing, for a Christian may ‘rejoice in the Lord’ all the more while he mourns before God on account of his own shortcomings, waywardness and faultiness.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3049

“Do you now desire to live unselfishly, to live for others, to live for God? Are you prayerful? Do you come to God in prayer as Jesus did? Are you careful of your words and of your acts as Christ was? I do not ask you if you are perfect, but I do ask whether you follow the Perfect One? We are to be followers of Christ, if not with equal steps, still with steps that would be equal if they could!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2920

“Now, dear Friend, if you have been enabled to break through your former attachment to mere external ceremonies—if you have fully comprehended that true religion is not a matter of mere externals—you are “not far from the Kingdom of God.” You are one of those who are learning that ‘God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeks such to worship Him.’ I hope He is seeking you and that, before long, you will not only be nearthe Kingdom, but actuallyinit!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2989

“My testimony is that if I had to die like a dog. If this life were all and there were no hereafter, I would prefer to be a Christian for the joy and peace which, in this present life, godliness will afford.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3005

“It is no unusual thing for a little child to be the god of the family—and wherever that is the case, there is a rod laid up in store in that house. You cannot make idols of your children without finding out, sooner or later, that God makes them into rods with which He will punish you for your idolatry!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025

“The advent of Christ brings to the heart celestial beauty! Faith in Him decks us with ornaments and clothes us as with royal apparel! Better garments than Dives had, though he wore scarlet and fine linen, does Christ give to His people when He comes to them! And better fare than Dives had, though he fared sumptuously every day, does Jesus bestow upon His saints when he shines into their hearts! Oh, the glory of the sunrise of the Savior on the darkness of the human soul!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2947

“‘With God all things are possible,’ which means not only that God can do all things, but that we also can do all things when God is with us!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2963

“I have seen and often is my spirit melted at the sight of one whose sufferings seldom abate, yet whose desire to serve God never abates, but rather increases and who would give anything if activity might take the place of patience. Blessed be those weak ones whom the Lord elects to suffer, yet who still seek to serve Him! And blessed are those who actively serve Him, yet sit humbly at His feet and feel that they are less than nothing and who weep tears of joy to think that God should so honor such poor worms as they are as to permit them to do anything for His dear name’s sake!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3049

“I am always pleased to see our dear Brothers and Sisters diligent in the service of Christ. I am glad to miss many of you on the Lord’s-Day evening when I know how well you are engaged. I could spare a few more of you if you were intent upon teaching the young, or exhorting those who are out of the way. But I earnestly admonish you never to be negligent of your own souls while you are vigilant for the souls of others! If you do not get nourished with the Bread of Life yourselves, you cannot grow in Grace.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2914

“O Sirs, mere words strung together, whether they are in Hebrew, or Greek, or Latin, or English, are of no avail before God! It is the utterance of the heartthat He hears, and you must never imagine that there is any excellence in a certain arrangement of letters and sounds, or that certain men, by the use of these words, can bring down blessings from above!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2978

“There is a so-called ‘regeneration’ by a priestly ceremony which leaves the man or the child as unregenerate as he was before the ceremony had been performed! But the regeneration by the Holy Spirit entirely changes the nature of the pea-son concerned and bestows upon him or her a new heart and a right spirit. To have this high privilege is to have one of the choicest gifts of Heaven—indeed, it is that which is essential to the enjoyment of all other blessings!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3071

“There have been many remedies recommended by various quacks—some have come with their so-called ‘sacraments.’ Some with their ceremonies, some with their philosophies—but they are all quacks and their medicines have no healing power! The only cure for the wounds of sin is to be found in the stripes of Jesus.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2887
“Some people are much too big to go through Heaven’s gate. They are so wise, in their own estimation, that they are not willing to be taught even by Infinite Wisdom. Their judgment is so accurate, their intelligence is so clear, that they will not submit to be instructed by Him who is the very Wisdom of God. They think that they have within themselves the power to draw an Infallible distinction between right and wrong, between the Truth of God and error—and they will not allow even the Almighty to dictate to them, and to be the Arbiter of their lives. Ah, Brothers and Sisters, this is a sad state for anyone to be in! But it is a hopeful sign when we are teachable. If you are so, you are ‘not far from the Kingdom of God.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2989

“Do you remember a touching story, told some years ago, of a poor mother with her two little fatherless children? On a cold winter’s night they discovered an empty house, into which they went for shelter. There was an old door standing by itself, and the mother took it, placed it across a corner of the room, and told the children to creep behind it so as to get a little protection from the cold wind. One of the children said, ‘Oh Mother, what will those poor children do that haven’t got any door to set up to keep out the wind?’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025

“The Son of Man, none other than He who said, “I am meek and lowly of heart,” has come to seek and to save the lost.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3050

“Perhaps you remember Mr. Whitfield’s speech to his brother who had long been in distress of mind, who said at last, across the table, ‘George, I am lost.’ George said, ‘I am glad to hear it,’ and answering his brother’s startled expression, he continued, ‘because the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.’ That brief utterance of the Gospel lifted his brother out of despair into a clear and abiding hope in Jesus Christ!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2925

“You know that in countries where leprosy prevails, they shut up the lepers in a place by themselves, lest the terrible disease should pollute the whole district. And Hell is God’s leper colony where sinners must be confined forever when they are incurable and past hope!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3069

“Many professing Christians come to God’s House to sleep and then go home to sleep. They walk about sleeping, sleeping with their eyes open, spiritually sleeping while they are wide awake about mere secular matters. But it is as comfort to know that, while professors sleep and lambs sleep, Jesus still goes, spiritually, to the Mount of Olives. The only hope for the slumbering Church is the wakeful Savior!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3003

“Some people seem to be afraid lest we should be the means of saving some of the non-elect—but that is a fear which never troubles either my head or my heart, for I know that with all the effort and preaching in the world, we shall never bring more to Christ than Christ has had given to Him by His Father!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2937

“It is an astounding thing and a great proof of human depravity that men do not themselves seek salvation. They even deny the necessity of it and would sooner run away than be partakers of it!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3050