vol. 4

NOTABLE QUOTES OF CHARLES H. SPURGEON ~ PART 4 ~ October 14, 2009
Dear Reader, This is the fourth compilation of Brother Spurgeon’s quotes from my work of modernizing his sermons. All of these quotes are found in volumes 54-58 of his work. Thus I identify them by the year and sermon number.
You may note that the first few pages 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 Spurgeon Sermons link on the front page.
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 ________________________________

“God’s blessing is the richest gift which His creatures can receive. To be deprived of it is their greatest calamity!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3073

“One man’s fall should be another’s warning. Do you see your brother’s foot trip against a stone? Then take care how you go along that way. Do you see him yield to temptation? Then mind that your ears are closed against that which fascinated him and turned him aside from the right path. Wherein you see that he failed in anything, set a double guard upon yourself just there—and ask God to give you Grace to keep you with special keeping in that particular point which was his weakness and which may, unknown to yourself, be also your own!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3074

“…it is most important for us to learn that the smallest trifles are as much arranged by the God of Providence as the most startling events. He who counts the stars has also numbered the hairs of our heads. Our lives and deaths are predestined, but so, also, are our sitting down and our rising up.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3075

“As his exaltation does not come from the world, so neither does his depression, if he lives near to God. So it is not troublethat troubles saints—it is something far worse than that.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3076

“THERE may be some few extraordinary cases ‘where ignorance is bliss’ and where ‘’tis folly to be wise.” But for the most part, ignorance is the mother of misery—and if we had more knowledge, we would find it a tower of strength against many fears and alarms which beget sadness and sorrows in dark untutored minds. —Volume 54, Sermon #3077

“This was the glory of our Protestant ancestors in the days of Queen Mary. They went joyfully to Smithfield to be burnt for the sake of Christ and, as one of the pastors significantly said, ‘The young people went to see the others burn—and to learn the way when it should come to their turn.’ They did learn the way, too, to stand there, not consulting with flesh and blood, but being ready to be burned to ashes rather than worship the beast, or receive his mark in their foreheads! This is still the spirit that animates true faith. God’s command is her sufficient warrant. She consults not with flesh and blood.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3078
“There are no unowned men. We are, every one of us, either ranked under the banner of Prince Immanuel, to serve Him and fight His battles, or else beneath the Black Prince, Satan—enrolled to do evil and to perish in our sins! It is a very proper question, then, to ask of every man and woman, ‘To whom do you belong?’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3079

“It was the fear of man that caused Pilate’s name to become infamous in the history of the world and of the Church of God, and it will be infamous to all eternity. The fear of man led him to slay the Savior! Take care that it does not lead you to do something of the same kind.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3080

“Imagination’s utmost stretch cannot conceive of anything more gracious—and the contemplation of the most devoted Christian cannot think of any words more majestic in goodness, more tender in sympathy, more full of honey and more luscious in their sweetness than the gracious words that proceeded out of the lips of Jesus Christ!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3081

“The child Samuel was consecrated to God from his earliest days. His mother gave him to the Lord and He, Himself, confirmed the consecration. Happy is the child who is God’s child and who can say as truly as Paul said, ‘For to me to live is Christ. Such Grace is seen even in children—may it be seen in all the children of all the familiar connected with this Church!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3082

“If I cannot bend the knees of my body because I am so weak, my prayers from my bed shall be on their knees—my heart shall be on its knees and pray as acceptably as before…If we are so faint that we can only lie still and breathe, let every breath be a prayer!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3083

“God grant that they who preach Free Grace Doctrines may never get out of the habit of doing so! And may those who have almost forgotten the sound of the word, Grace—and those who never knew the music of it—be made to lose their way until they ramble into the blessed neighborhood of the Sovereign Grace of God, for I am sure that nothing but the Gospel of the Grace of God will ever drive Popery out of this country! The only antagonist that can ever overcome the self-righteousness and priestcraft of Romanism and Ritualism is a clear, bald, outspoken declaration of the great Truth of God that by the Grace of God the saints of God are what they are!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3084

“What a hopeful sign it would be even if people were excited againstreligion! Really, I would sooner that they intelligently hated it than that they were stolidly indifferent to it. A man who has enough thought about him to oppose the Truth of God is a more hopeful subject than the man who does not think at all.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3085

“The invitations of the Gospel are invitations to happiness. In delivering God’s message, we do not ask men to come to a funeral, but to a wedding feast!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3086

“The preservation of the Truth of God in our midst is owing to the direct and immediate interposition of the Almighty. And mark it well, the inward witness of the Truth in the heart of every individual Believer is an instance and evidence of the same unceasing care, inasmuch as only He can apply it to the conscience with quickening power.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3087

“Dear friend’s, let us exult in this relationship between Christ and His people! We are as weak and foolish and as full of needs as sheep can be, but we have a Shepherd who perfectly understands us, who so loves us that He will preserve to the end even the very least among us!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3088

“No preaching or teaching can equal that which is experimental. If we would impress the Gospel upon others, we must have first received it ourselves. Vainly do you attempt to guide a child in the pathway which you have never trodden, or to speak to adults of benefits of Divine Grace which you have never enjoyed. Happy is that preacher who can truly say he speaks what he does know and testifies what he has seen.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3089

“If you do not love the Bible, you certainly do not love the God who gave it to us—but if you do love God, I am certain that no other book in all the world will be comparable, in your mind, to God’s own Book. Where God’s handwriting is most plainly to be seen, there God’s servants will at once turn their eyes. When God speaks, it is the delight of our ears to hear what He says.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3090

“You are no Christian if you do not pray. A prayerless soul is a Christless soul. You have no inheritance among the people of God if you have never struggled with that Covenant Angel and come off the conqueror. Prayer is the indispensable mark of the true child of God.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3091

“Never was there anywhere else such poverty as the poverty of Christ, for it was not merely external, it was also internal. He became so poor, through bearing our sin, that He had to lose the light of His Father’s Countenance, emptying Himself of all the repute He had. He became a spectacle of scorn and shame because our shameful sin had been laid upon Him.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3092
“Whatever may happen to denominations, whatever divisions we may live to see, let it still be known that for God and His Truth we are prepared to hold our ground at any expense or at any risk.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3093

“The more of Scripture, yes, of the very words of Scripture that we can use in preaching, the better and, certainly, the more of such thing as can begin with, ‘Thus says the Lord.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3094

“THE subject which I have chosen for this morning and which may God the Holy Spirit bless to us, is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as the way of salvation. Nothing can be of more importance than this subject and, therefore, nothing will more thoroughly interest a company of practical businessmen.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3095

“If I must have a religious enemy, let me have a professed and avowed bigot, but not one of your ‘free thinkers’ or broad churchmen, as they are called, for there is nobody who can hate as they do!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3098

“If the issuing of the Law of God was specially solemn because ‘Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire,’ I venture to say that the giving of this plain, positive command, ‘This do in remembrance of Me,” is none the less solemn because it was given by “the Lord Jesus the same night in which He was betrayed.’ What other night, in the world’s history, can be more august and more solemn to Him and to us as Believers in Him, than that night when He went, with His disciples, for the last time, to Gethsemane? My Lord, as this command was given by You at such a special time, how dare I neglect it if I am indeed Your disciple? Let none of us who believe in Jesus, live in habitual disobedience to this command of His!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3099

“Here are three things which are, throughout all time, even till the dawning of eternity, always to be bestowed on Christ! The first is the gift of property—the gold of Sheba. The second is the giftof prayer and the third isthe gift ofpraise.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3100

“Our other faculties may go to sleep if they will, but when our faith swoons and our confidence staggers, things go very hard with us. Do not, however, my Brothers and Sisters, when in such a state, write yourself down as a hypocrite, for many of the most valiant soldiers of the Cross know by personal experience what this dark sensation means.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3101

“Out of all our Savior’s names—and they are all precious to us and, at certain times each one has its own peculiar charm—there is not one which rings with such sweet music as this blessed name, “Jesus.” I suppose the reason of this is that it answers to our own name, the name of sinner.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3102

“A family is not born a Church and the little ones born into the family are not born into the Church. They must be born-again before they can be members of the Church—there must have been the work of the Spirit of God in the hearts of the members of the family before they can form a Church in the house.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3103

“There are some people who cannot comfort others, even though they try to do so, because they never had any troubles themselves. It is a difficult thing for a man who has had a life of uninterrupted prosperity to sympathize with another whose path has been exceedingly rough.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3104

“The anger of God towards Believers in Jesus is forever appeased! They are so perfect, in the righteousness of Christ, that He sees no spot of sin in them.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3105

“Nothing can be more horrible, out of Hell, than to have an awakened conscience, but not to have a reconciled God—to see sin, yet not to see the Savior—to behold the deadly disease in all its loathsomeness, but not to trust the Good Physician and so to have no hope of ever being healed of our malady! Of all the miseries that can be endured in this life, this is one of the greatest.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3106

“We shall now ask you in contemplation to gaze upon the first celebration of the Lord’s Supper. You perceive at once that there was no ‘altar’ in that large upper room. There was a table. A table with bread and wine upon it, but no altar! And Jesus did not kneel—there is no sign of that—He sat down. I doubt not, after the Oriental mode of sitting, that is to say by a partial reclining, He sat down with His Apostles. Now, He who ordained this Supper knew how it ought to be observed. And as the first celebration of it was the model for all others, we may be assured that the right way of coming to this Communion is to assemble around a table—and to sit or recline while we eat and drink together of bread and wine in remembrance of our Lord!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3107

“The man who is not often lifted up with joy, nor often depressed in spirit through grief—who walks through the world in a calm and quiet atmosphere, bearing about with him a holy complacency, a calm serenity and an almost uniformity—that man is a happy man! He who journeys along without mounting up as an eagle, or without diving down into the depths of the sea—he who keeps along the even tenor of his way to his death is entitled to the name of a happy man.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3108
“Our present actions are not trifles, for they will decide our everlasting destiny. Everything we do is, to some extent, a sowing of which eternity will be the reaping.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3109

“A desire to depart, when it arises from wisdom and knowledge, and from a general survey of things below, is very proper. But when a wish to die is merely the result of passion, a sort of quarreling with God as a child sometimes quarrels with its parents, it has more of folly in it than of wisdom and much more of petulance than of piety!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3110

“Beware, my dear Hearers, first, of ever giving up spiritual benefits for anything that is carnal, or bartering eternal blessings for anything temporal. Esau came in from the chase hungry and faint. Jacob’s mess of red pottage smelt delicious to him and when he begged for it as a starving man craves food, his crafty brother sold it to him in exchange for his birthright as Isaac’s elder son. Esau’s sin consisted in his willingness to sell the Covenant blessing at such a price as that—yet have many nowadays are selling their souls just as cheaply as Esau sold his birthright!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3111

“Believers are getting to be rather scarce nowadays. Doubters have the sway—they are the men who claim to possess all the wisdom of the period. There is scarcely a single historical fact but what is now doubted. I fancy that the very existence of the human race must be a matter of question with some persons. I believe some imagine that not even they, themselves, are actually existent—certain ideas of themselves exist, but not themselves!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3112

“And, alas, there are some who are ‘appointed to death’ in a far worse sense than that for ‘to die is gain’ to us who are believers in Christ, but the ungodly feel that they are ‘appointed to death’ in a much more terrible meaning of the word, “death!””—Volume 54, Sermon #3113

“There are some persons who talk about God changing His purpose—such people do not know what God is at all. How could God change!? God must either change from a better to a worse, or from a worse to a better. If he could change from a worse to a better, He is not perfect now. And if He could change from what He is to something worse, He would not be perfect then—and He would not be God.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3114

“The power that is to fight and overcome sin is never described in the Word of God as the natural goodness of human nature.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3115

“We have so little time to live, let us live like dying men! A certain lady, staying in the parish of that devoted minister, Mr. Cecil, was asked by him to undertake some particular work. She answered him, ‘My dear Sir, I should he very glad to do it but I am not certain of being in the parish more than three months.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I am not certain of being in the parish three hours, and yet I go on with my duty and I pray you, Madam, to go on with yours.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3116

“The eyesight of faith produces, in the man who possesses it, a calm and quiet frame of mind.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3117

“Peter was in prison. It was a most unlikely thing that he should come forth from Herod’s jail, but it is a far more unlikely thing that sinners should be set free from the dungeons of sin! For the iron gate which opened into the city to turn upon its hinges of its own accord was amazing, but for a sinful heart to loathe its sin is stranger by far!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3118

“And if fallen man is unlike God, man further debased by gross sin becomes not merely unlike God, but the very opposite of God, so that you may sooner learn, from a man who has degraded himself by vice, what God is notthan what God is!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3119

“Would you, my Brothers and Sisters, have like faith [as that of Moses]? Then walk in the same path! Be much in secret prayer. Hold constant fellowship with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ, and so shall you soar aloft on wings of confidence! And so shall you also open your mouth wide and have it filled with Divine favors! And if you do not offer the same request, yet you may have equal faith to that which bade Moses say, ‘I beseech You, show me Your Glory.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3120

“My text belongs to the absolute necessities—this is a Truth of God that cannot be put aside! ‘You must be born-again.’ If you are ever to enter the Kingdom of God, or even to see it—if you are ever to be reconciled to the God whom you have so greatly offended—‘You must be bornagain.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3121

“There are some who are bent on taking away the Word of God. Well, if they discard it, “Give it to me.” There are some who want to put it up on the self, as a thing that has seen its best days. They suppose the old sword is rusty and worn out, but we can say, ‘There is none like that; give it to me!’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3122
“To this day, when Substitution is preached, and the blood of Atonement, and salvation by simple faith in Jesus, and not by ‘sacraments’ and priests and good works, men foam at the mouth with rage, for they still hate the Christ, the only Savior of the sons of men!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3123

“These Sabbath mornings and these Sabbath evenings the crowds come pouring in like a mighty ocean, filling this House of Prayer, and then they all retire again. Only here and there is a ‘somebody’ left weeping for sin, a ‘somebody’ left rejoicing in Christ, a ‘somebody’ who can say, ‘I have touched the hem of His garment and I have been made whole.’ The whole of my other hearers are not worth the ‘somebodies.’ The many of you are not worth the few, for the many are the pebbles and the few are the diamonds! The many are the heaps of husks and the few are the precious grains! May God find them out at this hour and His shall be all the praise!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3124

“The Apostle James asks, “What is your life?” and, thanks to Inspiration, we are at no great difficulty to give the reply, for Scripture, being the best interpreter of Scripture, supplies us with many very excellent answers.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3126
“No study in Scripture is more interesting or profitable to the Christian than the Revelation which is given to us concerning the Sacred Trinity and the various parts which the Divine Persons take in the work of our salvation.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3127
“Often, when a Believer groans in prayer and cannot pray, he has offered the best prayer.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3128

“It is a sorrowful matter that our Beloved Brothers and Sisters should be taken from us. We were not more but less than men if we did not sorrow. Jesus wept and by that act He sanctified our tears. It is not wrong, it is not unmanly—much less is it sinful for us to drop the tear of sorrow over the departed—yet let us help to wipe those tears away with a handkerchief of sacred consolations.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3129

“That is not an ill memory with which to come to our Lord’s Table—with our eyes full of the tears of repentance for our past sin, yet rejoicing that we are now washed and cleansed, although once we were defiled and altogether unfit to occupy the children’s place!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3130

“Christ has returned with dyed garments from Bozrah. He has trodden the winepress of God’s wrath and I may almost say that the blood which stains His apparel is the blood of your sins which He has utterly destroyed forever. Look at their number. Take all the years of your life and make each year a heap. Divide them, if you will, into groups and classes—put them under the heads of the Ten Commandments and there they lie, in ten great heaps, but every one of them destroyed!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3131

“‘Do you believe on the Son of God?’ Get hold of a man and do not let him go until you have put to him this personal question! Sunday school teachers should do this to each child in their classes—perhaps their work just needs that finishing stroke to make it effective. Parents especially should do this with every boy and girl in their family. It should be close personal work with each one. Teaching may be general but it should always be followed by a personal catechizing of those who have been taught.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3132

“I marvel at the condescension of Jesus Christ, that His people’s names are always on His lips. When we consider that notwithstanding all His exceeding Grace and affection towards them, they transgress and rebel, it appears amazing that He should mention their names, or that He should regard their persons!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3133

“But without the Spirit of God, the materialism of this world would have remained forever in chaos. Only as the Spirit came did the work of Creation begin.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3134

“Jesus wept over Jerusalem because it would not be saved, but Jesus rejoices greatly over sinners who repent! This is His joy and His crown of rejoicing—even you poor tremblers who come and look to Him upon the Cross and find life in His death, and healing in His wounds.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3135

“There is scarcely any position in life that can be said to minister to growth in Grace. How few heads encircled by a crown have ever been dedicated to God and how seldom have the beggar’s rags covered the body of a truly gracious man! Everywhere it is a cold world in which we live—and we are cold subjects in a cold world.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3136

“The greatest enemy to human souls—I think I am not wrong in saying this—is the self-righteous spirit which makes men look to themselves for salvation.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3137
“See that old chair into which the soldiers have thrust Him so that He may be seated upon a mockery of a throne? See, above all, that crown upon His head. It has rubies in it, but the rubies are composed of His own blood, forced from His blessed temples by the cruel thorns! Look, they pay Him homage, but the homage is their own filthy spit which runs down His cheeks. They bow the knee before Him, but it is only in mockery. They salute Him with the cry, “Hail, King of the Jews!” but it is done in scorn. Was there ever grief like His?”—Volume 55, Sermon #3138

“I believe in the restoration of the Jews to their own land in the last days. I am a firm believer in the gathering in of the Jews at a future time. Before Jesus Christ shall again come upon this earth, the Jews shall be permitted to go to their Beloved Palestine.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3139

“The shame of our weakness…is a very humiliating subject, but it is one that should never be far from our thoughts, for we shall never realize to the fullest, the glory of the strength which comes from God until we are deeply conscious of the shame of the weakness which is in our nature as the result of the Fall and of our own sin.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3140

“Sinner, do you want a portion in Heaven? Go straight away to Jesus and Jesus will take your cause and lay it before the Lord! It is a very sorry one as it stands by itself, but He has such a sweet way of so mixing Himself up with you and yourself with Him, that His cause and your cause will be one cause—and the Father will give Him good success—and give you good success too!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3141

“One of the most deplorable things that could ever happen to a man would be for him to be allowed to dwell comfortably in a refuge of lies until the storm of Divine Judgment should sweep both himself and his refuge away forever! Dear Hearer, may I ask whether your work is a selfrighteous one, whether you are trying to save yourself?”—Volume 55, Sermon #3142

“Let a man know that his sins are forgiven him for Christ’s name’s sake, that he is reconciled to God by the death of His Son and that between him and God there is no ground of difference—and what a joyful pilgrim he becomes! ”—Volume 55, Sermon #3143

“There are two churches in the world today. The one is the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ composed of believers in Him who worship God in spirit and in truth, whose creed is the Word of God and whose power for life and service is the indwelling Spirit of God.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3144

“If our hearts and minds were as they should be, faith in God would be a matter of course! And even now, imperfect as we are, it ought to need a crushing argument to persuade us to entertain the slightest doubt of God. It is most of all surprising that God’s children should ever doubt Him—especially those who have been so highly favored as some of us have been. Let preacher and hearer be amazed that we should ever dare to say that we find faith in God to be difficult. It is a grievous imputation upon God when we talk about faith as difficult! ”—Volume 55, Sermon #3145

“Even when we speak of tens of thousands converted, what are they in comparison with the millions all around us in this vast city? When God gives us an increase of a hundred or a 120 in a month, we are glad and thankful, but large as those numbers are, what are they compared with the perishing myriads of London alone? Why should we not have 3,000 converts in a day as on the day of Pentecost? ”—Volume 55, Sermon #3146

“I would not lay too much stress on the Church of God, but I venture to ask you, is it not written that she is “the pillar and ground of the Truth?” If, then, I withhold my confession of faith and my personal communion with the visible Church, I to that extent weaken the pillar and ground of the faith. We need confessions of faith as well as conversions.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3147

“When an ambassador comes upon the stage of action, it is evident that war is not to be waged to the bitter end. But observe that the ambassador is not an ambassador from man to God, but an ambassador from God to man! ‘We are ambassadors’—not for you, but ‘for Christ.’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3148

“All men are more or less given to boasting but it seems to be especially characteristic of Englishmen and Americans. Well, there is a right way of boasting. If you can truly say, ‘My soul shall make her boast in the Lord,’ you may boast away as much as you like!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3149

“There are some persons who seem to think more of the New Testament than they do of the Old Testament. I have met with Christians in Germany with whom it has been quite a superstition that the Evangelists were superior to the Apostles and that the Apostles were superior to the Prophets. I trust that such notions as those will never spread among us!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3150

“There are some communities of men among us—and they seem to be multiplying—who turn the Communion Table into an altar and convert the bread and wine, which are but a memorial, into the semblance of a sacrifice. I will only say that into their secret may we never enter and with their confederacy may we never be united, for their table is the table of idolatry, and their altar is little better than a sacrifice unto devils! Such offerings cannot be acceptable unto God, for those who observe them turn aside altogether from the simplicity of the Truth of God unto the cabalistic devices of Antichrist.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3151
“Righteous judgment must not be according to man’s whim or fancy, but according to the supreme Law of God—and the verdict of conscience is worth nothing unless it is so formed.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3152

“Better to be in a jail with the Lord than to be in Heaven without Him! The harps above could make no heavenly place without Jesus—and Jesus being there, the clanking fetters and the cold floor of the stony cell could not suggest a sorrow.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3153
“Every moment that an unconverted man is out of Hell, God is manifesting towards him the riches of His forbearance. And it is no small strain upon Divine Mercy when men continue to sin notwithstanding this forbearance.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3154

“Do not fall into the mistake of supposing that the opening verses of the Sermon on the Mount set forth how we are to be saved, or you may cause your soul to stumble. You will find the fullest light upon that matter in other parts of our Lord’s teaching, but here He discourses upon the question, ‘ Who are the saved?’ or, ‘What are the marks and evidences of a work of Grace in the soul?’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3155

“The utmost the Law can accomplish for our fallen humanity is to lay bare our spiritual poverty and convince us of it. It cannot by any possibility enrich a man—its greatest service is to tear him away from his fancied wealth of self-righteousness, show him his overwhelming indebtedness to God and bow him to the earth in self-despair.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3156

“It is said that he hungers and thirsts after righteousness—a double description of his ardent desire for it. Surely it would have been enough for the man to hunger for it, but he thirsts as well. All the appetites, desires and cravings of his spiritual nature go out towards what he wants above everything else, namely, righteousness. He feels that he has not attained to it himself and, therefore, he hungers and thirsts for it. And he also laments that others have not attained to it and, therefore, he hungers and thirsts for them—that they too may have it.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3157

“We would greatly err if we should say that we must be merciful in order to obtain mercy and that we must only hope to get the mercy of God through first of all being merciful ourselves. Now, in order to put aside any such legal notion—which would be clean contrary to the entire current of Scripture and directly opposed to the fundamental Doctrine of Justification by Faith in Christ—I ask you to notice that these persons are already blessed and have obtained mercy! Long before they became merciful, God was merciful to them. And before the full promise was given them, as in our text, that they should obtain yet further mercy, they had already obtained the great mercy of a renewed heart which had made them merciful! That is clear from the context of the text.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3158

“IT was a peculiarity of the great Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, that His teaching was continually aimed at the hearts of men. Other teachers had been content with outward moral reformation, but He sought the source of all the evil, that He might cleanse the spring from which all sinful thoughts, words and actions come.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3159

“Tomorrow! Oh, you cursed word, tomorrow! How has man made you cursed! I find you not in the almanac of the wise—you are only in the calendar of fools. Tomorrow! There is no such thing except in dreamland, for when that comes which we call tomorrow it will be today—and still forever, today, today,today. There is no time but that which is. Time was, is not and time to come is not.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3160

“I attribute the preponderance of the word, ‘know,’ which constitutes itself an idiom in the Epistle, [1 John] to the fact that the expressions of the Master had been treasured up by the servant.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3161

“There is many a sinner that I have met with (and I know the feeling myself) who would be glad if death could end it and if that were all. But‘there is the dread of something after death’—that wrath to come of which the Word of God speaks in such solemn tones—that fire that never shall be quenched, that worm that dies not—it is that which haunts the sinner’s conscience when he is once awakened to know his condition! And horrible as the story was in Samaria, it is not worse than the horrible fate that awaits every man who lives and dies unsaved! —Volume 55, Sermon #3162

“The choicest fruits are generally the hardest to grow—and the most spiritual engagements are the most difficult for us to manage. Beloved, we ought to have an eye to this! We ought to take care that we do not neglect these merely external things which are good enough in themselves, these outward attending to ordinances, a sermon, and so on—but we ought also to take care that while we remember these in their proper places, we do not let these things crowd out better things, but see to it that we get to Christ and enjoy living, personal fellowship with Him!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3163

“If you can revenge yourself, DON’T. If you could do it as easily as open your hand, keep it shut! If one bitter word could end the argument, ask for Divine Grace to spare that bitter word.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3164
“I know some Christians who are of a very ‘retiring’ disposition—I believe that is their favorite word. I fear the Truth of God would say they are cowardly and, therefore, they are silent when their witness should be borne. They are willing enough to bear testimony when thousands are doing the same and they can shout, ‘Hosanna,’ when all the streets are ringing with it—but not so many are prepared to witness for Christ when the hoarse cry of, ‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him!’ is heard on every side.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3165

“Oh, that men were candid toward the Gospel of Jesus Christ! But the mass of men are prejudiced—prejudiced against the Savior and against their own salvation. Men sit and make up their minds what the Gospel ought to be, and then they do not come to hear what it is but to judge what is preached by their own preconceived notions.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3166

“I suppose every Christian here knows, as a matter of theory, that he is a Christian soldier and that he has been enlisted under the banner of the Cross to fight against the powers of darkness until he wins the victory…We are all soldiers—we know that—but still, too many Christians act as if they could be the friends of the world and the friends of God at the same time.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3167

“It appeared a little mistake that Moses made when he struck the rock instead of speaking to it, and yet he could not enter into the promised rest because of his offense. A small action may involve a great principle and it is for us to be very cautious and careful, searching out what the Master’s will is, and then never halting or hesitating for any reason whatever, but doing His will as soon as we know it. Christian life should be a mosaic of minute obedience. The soldiers of Christ should be famous for their exact discipline.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3168

“We ought not to say that we hope to reach Canaan’s peaceful shore, by-and-by—we are on it now! If we have truly believed in Jesus, our condition is rightly typified by the Israelites in Canaan who had obtained their inheritance, for Jesus has obtained His inheritance and God ‘has raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3169

“It is true that God’s people are a tried people, but it is equally true that God’s Grace is equal to their trials! It is quite true that through much tribulation they enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but then they do enter, and the thought of the Kingdom that is coming sustains them in their present tribulation!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3170

“You may not know them and they may not be among the great ones of this world, but there are many who are crying day and night unto God for the preservation and the spread of His Truth! There are eyes that are weeping over sin and there are hearts that are near unto breaking for the longing that they have for the coming of the Redeemer’s Kingdom.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3171

“And oh, poor troubled Soul, you see nothing and you know but little until Christ comes to you! But if He shall arise upon you as the Sun of Righteousness, you shall know all that you need to know and perceive everything that is delightful and comforting—and so your heart shall be glad!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3172

“There are some precious experiences to which you have not yet attained, some lofty heights to which you have not yet climbed, but you ‘have received Christ Jesus the Lord.’ That is the distinguishing mark of all true Christians.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3173

“Beloved Friends, the Church of Christ needs a band of men and women full of enthusiasm who will go beyond others in devotion to the Lord Jesus. We need missionaries who will dare to die to carry the Gospel to regions beyond. We need ministers who will defy public opinion and, with flaming zeal, burn a way into men’s hearts. We need men and women who will consecrate all that they have by daring deeds of heroic selfsacrifice. Oh, that all Christians were like this, but we must at least have some!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3174

“I put up this little question in the Orphanage, for the children to read—‘What would Jesus do?’ This, if we have spiritual minds, will be one of the best guides for us when we are in difficulty as to what is the next thing for us to do. We would do good, but too many good things are present with us—which is to be first? To know the will of Jesus, and to do it, is to abide in the peace of God!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3175

“Some seek the company of the rich and the great, but it is cold comfort that any will gain from mere rank and birth. Some delight in the society of the witty, but their sparks, though they glitter for a moment, are too soon extinguished to minister comfort to mourning spirits. Some delight to associate with those who are highly esteemed among men, but surely, he is wiser who selects his companions from those who are precious in the sight of the Lord!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3176

“That blessed Doctrine of Substitution, that simple command, ‘Believe and live’—that was the glass through which my soul looked and saw God’s Salvation.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3177

“We do not read that His [Christ’s] disciples ever asked Him to teach them to preach, but we are told that, “as He was praying in a certain place, when He ceased, one of His disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray.””—Volume 56, Sermon #3178
“Paul held that it was consistent to expect the Lord to come quickly and yet to know that certain events must occur before He did come. That is just the condition, I think, to which a man’s mind will come if he diligently and impartially reads the Scriptures—especially the prophetic parts of them. The Lord will come in such an hour as we think not, yet there are clear indications of certain things which are to happen before He does come.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3179

“There will never be any mighty work come fromus unless there is first a mighty work inus—no man truly labors for souls unless the Holy Spirit has first worked mightily in him.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3180
“It is not recorded that His disciples ever said to Him, ‘Lord, teach us how to preach,’ but at least one of them was so struck with His prayers that he said, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3181
“No one begins to live the life of faith who has not also begun to pray—and as prayer is necessary at the commencement of the Christian career, so is it necessary all through. A Christian’s vigor, happiness, growth and usefulness all depend upon prayer.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3182

“There must be an intention on God’s part for us to live in a future state or else He would, out of mere benevolence, have left us ignorant of the fact of death. If He had not meant our souls to begin to prepare for another and a better existence, He would have kept us ignorant, even, of the fact that this one will pass away.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3183

“It would be the most terrible disappointment of all if our expectations concerning our souls should not be realized! It would be painful to the last degree to discover, upon our dying bed, that the good we had looked for had not come—to find that we had built our house upon the sand and that when we most needed its shelter, it was swept away!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3184

“With all our faults, imperfections and frailties, the Lord, who knows all things, knows that we do love Him. Sometimes, Brothers and Sisters, it is not easy to know whether we do love Christ, or not. I have heard many remarks about the hymn containing that line—

‘Do I love the L ord, or no?’
but I believe that every honest Christian sometimes asks that question and I think one good way of getting it answered is to go and hear a faithful minister.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3185

“We may pray to God when engaged in any occupation if it is a lawful one. And if it is not, we have no business to be in it. If there is anything we do over which we cannot pray, we ought never to dare to do it again. And if there is any occupation concerning which we have to say, ‘We could not pray while engaged in it,’ it is clear that the occupation is a wrong one.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3186

“The Church of God greatly needs not foolish confidence in herself, which would lead her to be Quixotic, but simple confidence in God which would enable her to be Apostolic, for she would go forth believing that God would be with her and great things would be accomplished by her!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3187

“Nothing can make Christ’s service sweet except love to Him—His service appears hardest to those who have hard hearts—and just as men grow right and true, they find the Lord’s yoke to be easy and His burden light. Judging Christianity from the outside, it will always seem to unregenerate men a very strict Puritanical system. But judging it from the inside, when the heart is renewed and the soul is charmed with the blessed Person of their Divine Redeemer, we love our Lord’s service and find intense delight in it.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3188

“When you have learned the Truth of God from the Scriptures, be dogmatic about it! Do not be afraid of the presumption of which venue will accuse you, or the bigotry which they will impute to you.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3189

“I do not think that this great conflict arose through our dear Master’s fear of death, nor through His fear of the physical pain and all the ignominy and shame that He was so soon to endure. But, surely, the agony in Gethsemane was part of the great burden that was already resting upon Him as His people’s Substitute—it was this that pressed His spirit down even into the dust of death. He was to bear the full weight of it upon the Cross, but I feel persuaded that the passion began in Gethsemane.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3190

“PAUL’S mode of preaching, as illustrated by this chapter, [Acts 13] was first of all to appeal to the understanding with a clear exposition of doctrinal Truths of God and then to impress those Truths upon the emotions of his hearers with earnest and forcible exhortations. This is an excellent model for revivalists. They must not give exhortation without Doctrine, for if so, they will be like men who are content with burning powder in their guns, but have omitted the shot! It is the Doctrine we preach, the Truth we deliver which God will make a power to bless men.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3191

“I must confess that, to me, it seems an instance both of the utter depravity of human nature and of the absolute insanity to which sin has driven mankind, that there are still so many persons existing in what we call this enlightened age who actually believe that we can eat the flesh of Christ and drink His blood! This is a cannibal notion which only needs to be mentioned to be denounced. Instead of having anything sacred about it, such teaching is utterly detestable—it is inconceivably idiotic and blasphemous! Idiocy and blasphemy seem to be blended together in it in about equal proportions. It is strange that such blessed words from such blessed lips should have been so shamefully misunderstood and misrepresented.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3192

“Blessed is he who can this day cast in his lot with the Son of David and share His reproach, for the day shall come when the Master’s Glory shall be reflected upon all His followers!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3193

“The people of God are here [Isaiah 51:1] described as those “that follow after righteousness.” That is the direction in which their life generally flows. They are not perfect, but they want to be. They do not love that which is unrighteous, but they desire to be right in all things both before God and before men. They are also said to be those “that seek the Lord,” that is to say, they are those who could not live without seeking the Lord in prayer, or in public or private worship. Their great object in life is to glorify God, to make Him famous among the sons of men—and they desire to devote all their time, talents and powers of every kind to His service and honor.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3194

“Many have I met with—I may say that I meet with such people every week— who are afraid that theyarehypocrites. When I encounter persons troubled with this fear, I cannot help smiling at them, for if they really were hypocrites, they would not be afraid of it and their fear of presumption argues very strongly that they are not living in it!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3195

“The Grace of God was within him [Noah] and became the source and wellspring from which flowed the righteousness for which he was so remarkable. Divine Grace is the root of every righteous character, so let Grace have the honor and glory of it!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3196

“I suppose he [David] had little more than the five Books of Moses, and yet as he opened that Pentateuch, which was to him complete in itself, he said, ‘How sweet are Your Words to my taste!’ If that first morsel so satisfied the Psalmist, surely this fuller and richer feast of heavenly dainties ought to be yet more gratifying to us! If, when God had but given him the first dish of the course, and that by no means the best, his soul was ravished with it, how should you and I rejoice with unspeakable joy, now that the King has brought on royal dainties and given us the Revelation of His dear Son!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3197

“As we fell through one representative, it was consistent with the principles upon which God was governing mankind that He should allow us to rise by another Representative! At first, we fell not by our own fault, so now, by Grace, we rise not by our own merit. Death by sin came to us through Adam when we were born, so did life come to us through Christ Jesus.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3198

“Surely the Lord does not create life in the regenerated soul without providing stores upon which it may be nourished! Where He gives life, He gives food.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3199
“What a mercy it is for us that God does not judge us by our hasty speeches! If He can see only a spark of faith amidst the dense smoke of our unbelief, He accepts it!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3200

“The sun never shone more fairly on the Church’s brow than when she worshipped God in the catacombs of Rome, or when her disciples ‘wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented.’ In our own country, those who met in secret, perpetually pestered by informers who would bring them before the magistrate for joining in prayer and song, often said, when they got their liberty, that they wished they had the days, again, when they were gathered together in the lonely house and scarcely dared to sing loudly!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3201

“They who put man’s will first know not what they say, nor whereof they affirm, for it is not of the will of man, says the Apostle in the most peremptory and positive manner—the salvation of any soul is a display of the eternal purpose and Sovereign will of God!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3202

“As you think of His pure, immaculate Nature and perfect life—love Him as you see Him bearing the burden of sins not His own, for which He came to atone!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3203

“Our blessed Redeemer instituted that simple but sublime ordinance so that we might be kept in constant remembrance of Him. The bread is nothing but bread, yet it is the very suggestive emblem of Christ’s flesh. And it shall be well with you if, after a spiritual fashion, you shall thus eat the flesh of Christ. The wine is nothing but wine, yet is it the emblem of Christ’s blood. And they are thrice blessed who experimentally understand the meaning of Christ’s words, ‘Whoever eats My flesh, and drinks My blood, has eternal life.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3204

“In different men, sin manifests its chief power in different parts of their nature. In the case of many, sin is most apparent in their eyes. That is to say, ignorance, error and prejudice have injured their mental sight.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3205
“Point me out a man who makes a profession of religion, but who is a drunk, and I will tell him at once that his profession is a lie! Show me another who says he is a follower of Christ, although he oppresses the poor, defrauds the laborer of his wages, is a covetous man who cares only for himself and shuts up his heart of compassion from his needy brethren, and I hesitate not to ask, ‘How dwells the love of God in him?’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3206

“If there is a religion concerning which all men speak well, woe be unto it, for it cannot be the religion of Christ!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3207

“We shall never be out of the way of temptation so long as we grow in this earthly garden! Our Lord Himself had a stern conflict with the adversary at the commencement of His ministry, for He came up from the waters of Baptism to be tempted of the devil, and at the close of that ministry, ‘His sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground’ in the agony of His spirit when the powers of darkness assailed Him in Gethsemane. We must expect in our measure to be conformed to His likeness in this respect. The serpent will bruise our heel as well as our Lord’s.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3208

“I wish that the ambition of every one of my fellow creatures here assembled—and, indeed, the wide world over—were this, that they might win Christ! Oh, if they did but know His preciousness, if they did but understand how happy and how blessed He makes those to be who gain Him, they, too, would give up everything else for this one desire—that they may win Christ!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3209

“…leads me to say that apart from afflictions, temptations and persecutions, the preaching of the Gospel is in itself a means of dividing the true followers of Christ from those who are only His disciples in name and, wherever there is a faithful, Christ-like ministry, you will find many going away from it for the very same reasons that those nominal disciples went away from Christ. ‘From that time many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3210

“Many of you have now for years been settled in one sphere and while you will continue to fish, I trust that more and more you will remember that you now have other duties to perform—you have to feed as well as to fish, to handle the crook as well as the net. We now leave the sea wherein we were drifted to and fro, and we abide among our own flocks, standing and feeding in the strength of the Lord. We cease not to do the work of an Evangelist, but we pay special attention to the duties of the pastor, for He who once said, ‘Cast the net on the right side of the ship,’now says to us, ‘Feed My sheep.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3211

“Wherever we are, we must come into contact with the unseen powers either for good or evil. Go where we may, we cannot shut ourselves away from them. If we could take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth, spiritual beings would still be all around us there. Doubtless there are many invisible spirits, good or evil, in our midst at this moment, and when we go forth to our homes, or tomorrow go to our business or other duties, they will still attend us—the evil spirits seeking to lead our souls astray and the holy angels carrying out their sacred commission—‘to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3212

“When we get to the great fountains of the Infinite, Eternal, Immutable Love of the Father towards His chosen people, then, indeed, we come to the fountainhead of all the streams which make glad the people of God! There is not a blessing we receive but it may be traced to the eternal purpose of God! We may see, on every single benediction of the Covenant, the stamp of the eternal purpose and decree.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3213

“And have you not noticed, dear Friends, that God’s people often behave best when they are in their worst case? Usually, when they are in imminent peril, they cry to their God to deliver them, and so they soon obtain relief—but when they make trouble for themselves by a willful fretfulness of spirit—then it is that they lose their confidence in God and, instead of playing the man, they play the fool!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3214

“I do not know—how can I tell?—what is your particular trouble, but I do believe that He who appointed it, He who measured it, He who has set its bounds and will bring you to the end of it, has a gracious design in it all! Do not think that God deals roughly with His children and gives them needless pain. It grieves Him to grieve you! ‘He does not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3215

“Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Divinely-appointed Representative of all the elect—whatever He did, He did as their Covenant Head, their Sponsor, Surety and Substitute. When He made a Covenant with God on behalf of His people, they virtually made that Covenant, too.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3216

“ALL the histories of Scripture are written for our examples, but especially the story of the Israelites in the wilderness, which is given to us at a length far exceeding the value of the narrative unless it is intended for purposes of spiritual instruction, for it occupies four books of the Old Testament and those, by no means, short ones!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3217
“If we err concerning the Deity of Christ, we err everywhere! The Gospel that does not reveal a Divine Savior is no Gospel at all—it is like a ship without a rudder—the first contrary wind that blows shall drive it to destruction and woe be to the souls that are trusting to it!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3218

“Jacob called it, ‘Peniel—that is, ‘the face of God’—because there he had seen God face to face. O Beloved, these are things tofeelrather than to speak about! To see God! Blessed, indeed, are ‘the pure in heart’ when they get this benediction fulfilled in their experience and come so into union with Christ as to be able to look to God with an eye that is not blinded with fear!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3219

“For Christ to love us when we love Him is gracious on His part, but for Him to love us when we hated Him is most wondrous of all! Strange, indeed, is it that it should have been with Him, ‘a time to love’, when with us it was, ‘a time to hate.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3220

“I need, this evening, to convince you that although there are still many sinners who seem to have no room for Christ in their hearts and lives, yet there is plenty of room for sinners in the heart and love of Christ! And I am going to give them an earnest, tender, affectionate invitation to come to Christ while “yet there is room.””—Volume 56, Sermon #3221

“It is very likely that if I had time to explain to you, my Hearer, the fullness of your sin and the utter ruin of your natural state, you would grow angry. You would have no cause to be angry, for all that I could say would fall far short of the truth about your real condition in the sight of God! And it is most solemnly important for you to know that however high you may stand in the ranks of merely moral men, you are a lost soul and a condemned soul, so long as you remain without living faith in the Lord Jesus Christ!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3222

“Let me repeat those words—if we have really believed in Jesus, we have, at this moment, the assurance of the perfect pardon of all our sins! And I will venture to put it as strongly as this and to say that yonder white-robed spirits before the eternal Throne of God are not more clear of the guilt of sin before the bar of Infallible Justice than was the dying thief the very moment that he turned his eye in faith to Christ upon the Cross of Calvary—or than you are if you are now trusting to the same Savior, or than I am as now depending alone upon the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3223

“Preaching is the great battering ram that is to shake the gates of Hell! Preaching is God’s chief method of winning souls unto Himself—‘for after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3224

“If I have not found Christ, I am in danger of death every day and of the Hell that is the everlasting prison of all unbelievers. If I have not found Christ, I am still without hope, and without God in the world—‘condemned already’—because I have not believed in the name of the onlybegotten Son of God!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3225

“When the Lord entrusts you with talents, my Brother, you are naturally inclined to be proud. But when you hear of another whom the Lord has honored far more, do not quarrel either with the Lord or with your Brother, but rejoice that there is someone whose Master thinks he may be trusted to a very high degree! And remember that the responsibilities of your own position are quite sufficient for you.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3226

“If it is Christ’s work ‘to make an end of sins,’ we may be quite sure that He will do it and that there will be an end of them for all who believe in Him! Therefore let our hearts dance for joy as His gracious Spirit assures us that our sins are as completely annihilated and put away as if they had never been committed!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3227

“I cannot say that I greatly admire the way in which some enthusiastic folk shout, ‘Glory!’ ‘Hallelujah!’ ‘Amen,’ and so on, in the midst of sermons and prayers. Yet I would sooner have a measure of that enthusiastic noise than have you constantly stifling your natural emotions and checking yourself from giving utterance to your heart’s truer feelings.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3228

“Christ’s own description of His mission was, ‘The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.’ I think that our royal Savior puts the saving before the ruling—and if I call Him, Prince, and deny Him the title of Savior, He will not thank me for such maimed and mutilated honors! No, God exalted Him to be a Prince and a Savior—and we must receive Him in both offices, or not at all.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3229

“When Jesus said, ‘“I am the Way,’ He clearly intended to exclude all other ways, so beware lest you perish in any one of them!”—Volume 56,

Sermon #3230
“Mysterious have been the workings of God’s Providence by which the mightiest monarchs and the most powerful princes have passed away so completely that they have been like the wicked man of whom David says, “I sought him, but he could not be found.””—Volume 57, Sermon #3232

“The fire meant here (Zechariah 3:2) is more awful than any flame that makes havoc of matter, and its devastations are ten thousand times more appalling! It is the fire of sin. It blazed in the heart of an angel and he became a devil. Its sparks fell into the bosom of mother Eve and into the heart father Adam—and Paradise was burned up and the world became a wilderness. Sin is a fire which destroys the comfort of mankind, here, and all the joy of mankind hereafter. It is a flame which yields no comfortable warmth. The sinner may dance in the light of it for a moment, but in sorrow will he have to lie down in it forever.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3233

“It is a grand thing to be able to argue with God in prayer! Faith grips the Angel of the Covenant, but it is by well-grounded arguments that we must wrestle with Him until we prevail.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3234

“We have the eyes of hope given to us and, looking across the narrow stream of death and beyond—that place where to carnal eyes hangs the curtain that shuts out the unseen—we, with these far-seeing eyes, behold the Glory which is yet to be revealed and we are blessed with the joys of hope! Let every Christian, therefore, when at any time he is downcast about the things of the present, refresh his soul with the thoughts of the future!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3235

“It was His [Christ] business to preach and He did preach. He was always preaching! ‘What?’ you say, ‘did He not work miracles?’ Yes, but His miracles were sermons—they were acted discourses, full of instruction. He preached when He was on the mountain. He equally preached when He sat at the table in the Pharisee’s house. All His actions were significant—He preached by every movement.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3237

““Heaven will be a place of many surprises, but the vision of our glorified King will astonish us forever! We shall be amazed to all eternity that such a wondrous Being as God’s eternal Son could ever have loved such worthless worms as we are—that so glorious a King could have stooped so low as to take up for Himself our nature—and then that He should have been willing to endure for our sakes the death of the Cross!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3238

“Those who expect to find the road to Heaven smooth and unobstructed will discover little in the experience of the ancient saints to support the expectation.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3239

“All Believers have some share in that Covenant made with Abraham, for he is the father of the faithful. We who believe in Jesus are of the seed of Abraham, not according to the flesh, but according to the promise, and we are pressed by a Covenant which like that made with, Abraham, is signed and sealed with blood even ‘the blood of the Everlasting Covenant.’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3240

“Beloved, Christ is not a Savior merely for some things, but for all things.And He does not come in to help His people simply on some days under certain assaults—but under all temptations and under all trials, He comes to their rescue! Weak as you are, He can strengthen you—and fierce though the temptation may be—He can cover you from head to foot with a panoply of proof in which you shall stand right gloriously clad and be forever safe!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3241

“The Believer in Christ is always justified as far as the Law of God is concerned, but he does not always hear the proclamation of pardon in the court of conscience!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3242

“But the idea of one God, which the Lord had graciously written upon the hearts of His elect people, though it took many an age to erase the natural lines of idolatry which Nature had imprinted there—that idea of the unity of the Godhead is a treasure handed to us by the seed of Abraham! The grand Truths which were contained in type and shadow and outward ordinance, and given to the chosen people of God, exercised a far more powerful influence over the world than, perhaps, most of us have ever dreamed.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3243

“There are some who are vulnerable as soon as any little ache or pain seizes them, yet their affliction is very light compared with that of many who never know what it is to be well and strong. Even if we are called to suffer pain, let us thank God that we have not been deprived of our reason.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3244

“God has been pleased to make the bodies of His people to be the temples of the Holy Spirit. At this very moment, in every one of you who have put your trust in the Lord Jesus, Deity resides!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3245

“Yes, there is great comfort in being able truthfully to say, ‘Our Father, who are in Heaven’—and those who are really the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty find it to be their chief delight that He thinks about them and plans all that is for their present and eternal good!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3246
“You have not gone where Jesus has not gone! No, the way in which you have gone was first trodden by Him. In all your afflictions He was afflicted and, therefore we say to you, ‘Why do you doubt?’ Your trial was peculiar to you, but not to Him!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3247

“All the work of the Holy Spirit within the heart, if I were to speak upon it in detail, would only be a testimony that the Lord keeps the Covenant of His Grace which He made with us in the Person of Jesus Christ, His Son, even as He kept with Israel that ancient Covenant which He made with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3248

“The best way of demonstrating the power of Christ to save is to trust in Him and be, yourself, saved by Him—and of all those who are sure of the Divinity of our holy faith, there are none so certain as those who feel its Divine Power upon themselves!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3249

“The men of this world are not usually content with just bread to eat and raiment to put on, they are like those daughters of the horseleech that cry, ‘Give, give!’ But when spiritual things are concerned, these insatiable cravings are not so manifest. Many are content to be wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked when they might buy of Christ all spiritual blessings without money and without price!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3250

“My dear Friends, you will never see the Tree of Life aright unless you first look at the Cross. It was there that this tree gathered strength to bring forth its later fruit. It was there, we say, that Jesus Christ, by His glorious merits and His wondrous work achieved upon the Cross, obtained power to become the Redeemer of our souls and the Captain of our salvation!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3251

“We might say that all the Lord’s Prophets who came before Christ, in a certain sense, “came by water.” That is to say, they all sought the purification of the Lord’s people… It was against sin that they all lifted up their voices, yet none of them could pardon sin and no one of them ever professed to be able to do so! Of the whole of them it must to said that they came by water only, and not by blood.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3252

“No man had fairer weather than the King of Jerusalem, [King David] yet no man ever plowed his way through soil that was more deep with mire, nor through an atmosphere more loaded with tempest than did this man of many tribulations!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3253

“So you perceive that all that the Law does is to curse—it cannot bless. In all the pages of Revelation, you will find no blessings that the Law ever gave to one who had offended it. There were blessings for those who kept it completely—though none ever did—but no blessing is ever written for one offender. Blessings we find in the Gospel, curses we find in the Law.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3254

“The Romish priest professes to make men hear the voice of the Gospel by seeing, but the Scriptural way is to make men see the Truth of God byhearing. Faith, which is the soul’s sight, comes by hearing.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3255
“ Fallen man, whether he knows it or not, is spiritually a beggar.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3256

“Can it be worthwhile to sin yourselves into Hell? Can there be any supposable pleasure that can ever compensate you for everlasting pain ? If so, then choose the pleasures of sin for a season, but rest assured that for all these things, God will bring you into judgment!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3258

“‘God so loved the world’ is a very wide expression, but we must not make it wider than Scripture makes it, for remember how the verse goes on, ‘God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Himshould not perish, but have everlasting life.’ Withoutfaith, Christ is not ours. His blood cannot cleanse us, His life cannot quicken us. We must have faith to get at the blessings of salvation.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3259

“O my Brothers and Sisters in Christ, plead this promise, ‘I will strengthen them,’ for so shall you get your courage renewed until you, who are now timid as the deer, shall become bold as a lion! ”—Volume 57, Sermon #3260
“Shame on the preacher who does not bend the bow with all his might and throw his whole strength of spirit, soul and body into his efforts to win souls!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3262

“If you do only those duties which I stand here and write out to you so plainly that you cannot help seeing them, why, is there any great forwardness or fidelity of purpose in it? But if you go to that grand old Book and on your knees say to your Lord and Master, ‘I want to do all that I can to show how my heart loves You—teach me what You would have me do,’ this manifests a sincerity which is indisputable!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3263

“God had one Son without sin, but never a son without affliction. Let us not ask to be the first, but be content to share the position of those whose inheritance is to be ours forever in the Paradise of our God.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3264
“Faith is not a Grace of luxury but a Grace of necessity. We must have it and if we had it not, we should not be the people of God at all! The common habit of the Christian, then, is a habit of trusting. The Christian’s walk is faith and his life is faith!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3265

“Let us, for the ten-thousandth time, state our own solemn conviction that it is time for England to wake up, and solemnly rebuke the priestcraft that seems rising up in our midst! No man has any right to call himself, in any exclusive sense, a priest.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3266

“The shadow of God is not the occasional resort, but the constant abiding place of the saint. Here we find not only our consolation, but our habitation—not only a loved haunt, but a home. We ought never to be out of the shadow of God. It is to dwellers, not to visitors, that the Lord promises His protection. ‘He that dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3267

“Repentance is necessary, but much which is called by that name is not the true. Terrors of conscience are not repentance—though they may lead to it. And though you may never have been filled with alarm, yet if you are sorry for sin, hate sin and would be rid of it, root and branch, your repentance is genuine. The thing to be enquired of is not quantity but quality. For even deep repentance is not an absolutely essential to salvation.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3268

“A man may not be sure of anything outside him, for eyes and ears may deceive—but he is always pretty well assured of anything within him, for that which he perceives in his own consciousness he is very tenacious about.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3269
“IT is an old saying and possibly a true one, that every man is seeking after happiness. If it is so, then every man should read this Psalm, (Psalm 1), for this directs us where happiness is to be found in its highest degree and purest form!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3270
“Dear Children, do not refuse to be taught by God! But on the contrary, let this be your resolve, “My Father, You shall be the Guide of my youth.” Ask the Lord to teach you, for as surely as He taught David, He is willing to teach you!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3271

“IT is a wonderful proof of our Savior ’s deep attachment to His people that having made their salvation sure, He is also anxious concerning their present state of mind. He wishes that His people should be not only safe, but happy—that they should not be merely saved, but that they should rejoice in His salvation!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3272

“If we are truly humble, we shall cast our care upon God and, by that process, our joy will be exalted! We are slow to submit to the hand of God and oftentimes our care is fretful rebellion against our heavenly Father’s will. We determine to carve for ourselves, and so we cut our fingers!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3273

“It is no small mercy to have life preserved and health restored, especially if the end of life would be to us the beginning of eternal death and that our soul, when separated from the body, would have no ‘better land’ to enter, and no right to a place in the home of the blessed where sickness is unknown!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3274

“‘Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above’—nothing from human nature, nothing from mere free agency. Good and perfect gifts are flowers too rich and rare to spring up of themselves upon the dunghill of human nature.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3275

“It used to be more common than it is now for godly men and women to spend hour after hour in solemn meditation upon the agonies of Christ upon the Cross. I tried, one day when I was alone, to get a vivid realization of that awful tragedy—and I succeeded to the breaking of my own heart—but I cannot describe the scene to you. That is a matter for private meditation rather than for public speech.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3276

“Several of the blind men of Scripture are very interesting individuals. There was one of the them, you remember—the man born blind—who baffled the Pharisees by answering them with cool courage mixed with shrewdness and mother wit. Well might his parents say that he was of age, for he had all his wits about him. Blind as he had been, he could see a great deal—and when his eyes were opened, he proved beyond all dispute that his questioners deserved the name of ‘blind Pharisees” which the Lord Jesus gave them!’—Volume 57, Sermon #3277

“He [David] had committed the horrible sin of adultery, which is so shameful a sin that we can only allude to it with bated breath. It is a sin which involves much unhappiness to others besides the ones who commit it. And it is a sin which, although the guilty ones may repent, cannot be undone. It is altogether a most foul and outrageous crime against God and man—and they who have committed it do indeed need to be washed!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3278
“What are we, my Brothers and Sisters, and what is our Father’s house? What if ten thousand of us should fall merely to fill a ditch for Him to march over? What if He took the whole of us and crushed us to the dust—if He were lifted an inch higher, it were none too costly for such an One as He is, who has redeemed us unto God by His precious blood!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3279

“The Son of God, with strong crying and tears making known His requests unto His Father, is one of the greatest marvels in all the ages! What a wondrous stoop it was that Jesus, the unsinning Son of God, the thrice-holy One, the Anointed, the Christ, for whom prayer is to be made continually, should Himself have prayed to His Father!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3280

“Practically, my business is to say to those of you who profess to be the Lord’s people, take care that you maintaina broad wall of separation between yourselves and the world. I do not say that you are to adopt any peculiarity of dress, or to take up some singular style of speech. Such
affectation genders, sooner or later, hypocrisy.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3281

“I do not know how some professing Christians will be able be join in the supplication that slavery may be abolished, [request by Evangelical Association for “Prayer Week” in January, 1864] but we can fervently unite in it with a pure heart! May the Lord graciously hear that prayer. And if He shall hear it from the battlefields of America, we shall bless his name even for the scourge of war if that accursed slavery can be ended!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3282

“Though with the teaching of the Holy Spirit, every year’s experience will make the Christian riper, yet without that teaching it is possible that each year may make a Christian not more ripe, but more rotten.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3283
“No Doctrine in the whole Word of God has more excited the hatred of mankind than the truth of the absolute Sovereignty of God.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3284
“You are not yet in Heaven—do not dream that you are. It would be a pity for a sailor to expect the sea to be as stable as the land, for the sea will be the sea to the end and the world will be the world to you as long you are in it.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3285

“Christ tells us that the only way to enter the Church is through Himself. He is the door, the only door. There is no other mode of admission into His Church but through Himself. Let it be understood, then, once and for all, that wecannot get intothe Church of Christ throughBaptism.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3287

“Comrades in the Lord’s work, it is essential that we learn our own inability! It is profitable to feel that without our Lord we can do nothing—but that the Lord can do very well without us!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3289

“‘The hand of the Lord’ is also a humblinghand. When God lays His afflicting hand upon us, He takes away much of our fancied beauty and lets us see the ugliness of our natural deformity. We thought we were very patient until we had need of patience—and then we found what a murmuring, discontented spirit we had within us!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3290

“Every attribute of God shines in the sea although the more spiritual and precious are but dimly seen, these being reserved to be manifested in Christ Jesus the Lord, before whose feet the sea crouched in reverence!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3291
“The main weapon which Christ wielded was ‘the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3292
“What exquisite pain it must have caused our first parent—how keenly it must have touched the fine sensibilities of their nature—to have had to offer sacrifice! Probably they had never seen death until they brought their first victim to the altar of God.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3293
“Heaven is a place and state of perfect rest, yet it is not the rest of silence and stagnation! In one sense, they rest not day nor night, yet they serve God continually—and that is perfect rest!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3294

“It is a lamentable fact that some have fancied that this simple ordinance of the Lord’s Supper has a certain magical, or at least physical power about it, so that by the mere act of eating and drinking this bread and wine, men can be made partakers of the body and blood of Christ!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3295

“But our Judah-Jesus, if I may so call Him, stands before His Father’s face—and whatever our desire or our request may be, provided it is a right one—it is sure to be granted when Jesus pleads for us before the Throne of God!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3296

“You may be a nominal Christian and have the good esteem of all men, but if you are a true disciple of Jesus, obeying Him from the heart, openly avowing His cause and diligently testifying His Truth, you will meet with bitter hostility in all sorts of places and among all sorts of people! Rest assured that until Christ comes again, it will be true that if you were of the world, the world would love its own, but because you are not of the world, but Christ has chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3297

“Whenever we mention the name of the Holy Spirit, let us do it with holy awe and reverence, remembering that it is the Spirit that quickens, it is the Spirit that instructs, it is the Spirit that sanctifies, it is the Spirit that preserves, it is the Spirit that makes us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light! So unto the ever-blessed Spirit of God as well as unto the well-beloved Son of God be Glory and honor, praise and power, forever and ever!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3298

“…Jesus died that He might deliver His people from the power of Satan. He came on purpose that He might destroy the power of sin in His people and make them so free that they should not serve sin, but become a people zealous for good works.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3299
“Be wise, my Brothers and Sisters, and let it be said of you as it was said of them of old, ‘They that feared the Lord spoke often, one to another,’for there is comfort to be found in the society of God’s saints—let the times be ever so perilous and dark.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3300

“As all the water outside a vessel can do it no harm until it enters the vessel, itself, so outward persecutions cannot really injure the Church of God. But when the mischief oozes into the Church and the love of God’s people grows cold—ah, then the boat is in sore distress!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3301

“May the Holy Spirit graciously reveal to us the unsafe, treacherous, boggy pit that would swallow us up if we doubt that God is ‘able to dothis’—and may He enable us to realize that it is safe walking and happy walking when we walk by faith!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3302
“Taking an enlarged view of the Law of the Lord today and holding in our hands two Testaments, both the Old and the New, what a marvelous Book the Bible is! Earth does not contain an equal wonder!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3303
“The Law, like a candle, shows me my blackness, but that same Revelation, of which the Law is only a part, also shows me the precious blood of Jesus which takes all my blackness away and makes me whiter than snow!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3304

“‘Do you understand these things?’ then, is a question which may be asked and should be asked often of every worshipper, for it is only so far as we enter into religious worship, understandingwhat we are doing, and casting our hearts into it, that it can be at all acceptable to God.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3305

“It is a sickening thought that while Christians frequently quarrel, we never hear of devils doing so. The Church of God is divided but the kingdom of darkness appears to be one.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3306
“The condition of our Grace does not always coincide with the state of our joys. We may be rich in faith and love, and yet have so low an esteem of ourselves as to be much depressed.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3307

“I do not know any theme upon which one might dilate with greater joy than that of the Omnipotent energy of God as displayed in the salvation of sinners, yet it must always be understood that we proclaim this Truth in complete harmony with the responsibility of man and his absolute free agency.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3308

“Had it not been for the salvation of men, I know not that we had ever known our Lord as the Destroyer of Death or the Overcomer of Satan and, certainty, if He had not saved the lost, I am unable to perceive what Glory there would have been in the overcoming of the world, or in the creation of all things new. The salvation of men was the prize of His life’s race—for this He girded up His loins and distanced every adversary! The salvation of the lost was ‘the joy which was set before Him,’ for the sake of which He ‘endured the Cross, despising the shame.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3309

“The great practical end of the Gospel is to bring the human heart into obedience to Christ and to make the stubborn will acknowledge allegiance to His sway.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3310
“People hang crosses round their necks and wear them as ornaments—I wonder whether they would make ornaments of gallows? Yet it means that.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3311

“But while prejudice is thus very foolish, it is also very frequent. There are many persons who put an extinguisher on the candle and then try to light it. For instance, in listening to a certain preacher, they make up their mind that he cannot say anything that can be beneficial to them—and then they wonder that they are not edified!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3312
“It is not enough for us to say, ‘I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, I am saved.’ That is notthe end of it all, otherwise religion were a grand piece of selfishness!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3313

“One truly excellent man, whom we all very highly esteem, declared that when travelling up the Rhine, he did not look at the landscape because he desired to have his thoughts completely taken up with spiritual things. I cannot condemn the good man, yet I think that as I am dwelling in my Father’s House, I ought to take delight in my Father’s works—and I must be a strange sort of child if I think it is a token of my affection for my Father not to care to look at the garden which He has laid out or the House which He has built!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3314

“The joy in harvest rightly consists in part in the reward of earnest labor—may such be the joy we find in serving our Lord!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3315

“Do you not see the breakers ahead, Sinner? Are you not afraid of dying and more afraid of living? Do not the storms and trials of life drive you to desire something better than the vain world can give you? And does not the prospect of the afterlife alarm you? Then I hope that to your belabored soul Christ is the desired haven!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3316

“Now, surely it would suffice were I to sound this trumpet again and again with its celestial monotone. If you heard nothing but the same unvarying notes and did but remember them, believe them and come to God in consequence of them—there would be enough of sermon in the text without further exposition or comment. ‘He delights in mercy.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3317

“Of course the first thing the minister needs is to be taught of the Spirit, but then the question is—How does the Spirit teach? He teaches, no doubt, mainly through the Word and through our own experimental acquaintance with that Word.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3318

“We differ greatly and need differing situations in order to fruitfulness—the place which would suit one might be too trying for another. Friend, the Lord has planted you in the right spot—your station may not be the best in itself, but it is the best for you! We are in the best possible position for some present service at this moment—the Providence of God has put us on a vantage ground for our immediate duty!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3319

“I know there are some of you who belong to very strange families, where the name of God is scarcely ever mentioned, except in profanity, where Christ is not loved and where His Cross is not reverenced, and yet you are saved. Perhaps it was curiosity that brought you here to hear that odd man who says such strange things against the world’s popish church—or for some other reason you dropped in here and God blessed you.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3320

“To praise God without praying to Him would be impossible. To pray to God without praising Him would be ungrateful.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3321

“Where, O God, shall Jonahs be found that shall move this Nineveh? Oh, when shall it ever be that a voice shall startle the slumbering millions? When, great Lord, when, from the highest to the lowest, shall Your Gospel have some respect and get an attentive hearing from the sons of men?”—Volume 58, Sermon #3322

“When the Lord Jesus put to sea on the Galilean Lake, we read that there were with Him many other little boats—and when the calm came for His ship, they were in the calm, too. And so it is a good thing if you are not in the Church, yet to have some sort of connection with it—a great thing for the age to have the Church of God in it, for God will take care of a nation often for the sake of His people. As He would have spared Sodom had there been righteous men found in it, so does He spare nations for the sake of His saints.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3323

“Knowledge is good, but understanding is better. To know may be of little service unless we have the inner and deeper knowledge with it and understand what we know. These pastors shall feed you with knowledge and understanding.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3324
“The Savior’s Sacrifice is a full fountain of hope for hearts that sorrow for sin. No mourner need despond, much less despair, since God has executed the sentence of His wrath upon the Great Substitute, that He might freely accept every sinner that believes!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3325

“It has been said that he who well understands the distinction between the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace is a master of divinity. I am persuaded that most of the mistakes which men make concerning the Doctrines of Scripture are based upon fundamental errors with regard to the Covenants of Law and of Grace.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3326

“Friends, if at any time the pottage should seem very sweet and we should be very hungry—if the world’s gain should be almost necessary to our livelihood and we are tempted to do an unrighteous thing to get it—let us take care, for Esau could not undo the terrible act of selling his birthright and neither could we if we were permitted to do so!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3327
“It seems to be the theory of some theologians that none ought to have been invited but those who were sure to come. They hold, as we rejoice to hold, that there is an Election of Grace. In holding the Doctrines of Grace with a firm grasp, they do well, but they err when they teach that the invitation is to be restricted to the chosen, for here [Matthew 22:8-10] it is as clear as daylight that the first invitation was given to those who never were in the Election of Grace at all!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3328

“It [Christ’s spilt blood] opened the gates of Heaven to sinners, it was sprinkled on the consciences of Believers and made sinful men to be “accepted in the Beloved” even before it had dropped in bloody sweat in Gethsemane, or had been made to flow in streams under the lash in Gabbatha, or had been poured forth from the five sacred wounds upon the Cross of Calvary!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3329

“There are some texts of Scripture that may yield their treasures of instruction, comfort, or direction after deep study and holy meditation—but there are others which are marvelously free in the giving forth of their sweetness, calling for little else than a heart that loves and longs to hear God speak!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3330

“Observe, then, that all other knowledge may be useful enough in itself, but if it does not concern Christ, it cannot be called savingknowledge.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3331

“How vain, then, are the boasts and professions of some persons who assert themselves to be the children of God and yet live in sin! There is no perceivable difference in their conduct—they are just what they used to be before their pretended conversion. They are not changed in their actions, even in the least degree, and yet they do most positively affirm that they are the called and living children of God! Let such know that their professions are lies, that falsehood is the only groundwork that they have for their hopes, for wherever the Grace of God is, it makes a difference!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3332

“To those who love Him, Jesus Christ becomes a savor of life unto life. To those who are rebellious and continue to despise Him, He becomes a savor of death unto death. Our Savior, then, has an influence upon all those with whom He comes in contact and association.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3333

“Christ will save you, but a part of the agreement on your part must be this, ‘You are not your own, but are bought with a price.’” If you would have Christ’s blood to redeem you, you must give yourself up to Christ—your body, your soul, your spirit, your substance, your talents, your time, your all. You must from this day be Christ’s servant, come what may.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3334

“He who can say concerning all things, ‘Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Your sight,’ is shod for all ways and weathers, and may march on undismayed. Fully conformed to the Divine will, saints are invulnerable and invincible, ‘none shall be weary nor stumble among them, neither shall the laces of their shoes be broken.’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3143

“Do not judge harshly all who are in need—no doubt there are all too many instances in which poverty is the result of idleness or drunkenness—but there are other cases in which poverty is blameless and even honorable.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3184

“You might go for 50 years to some places of worship and never hear the word, ‘elect’ ever mentioned! Modern ministers seem to be ashamed of the grand old Doctrine of Election, but it was not so with the Apostles and the early Christians! They were accustomed to speak of one another as the elect of God. The Doctrine of Election was most precious to their hearts and, therefore, Peter writes, ‘elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father’ (1 Peter 1:2).”—Volume 56, Sermon #3223

“As the minister without reading will have but little power, so will it be with Christians in general. ‘Give attendance to reading’ (1 Tim 4:13) is an exhortation which I would press upon most of you, especially those of you who have leisure and who are not called to exhausting labors which take up all your time… I am not, however, going to keep so closely to my text as merely to exhort you to read. I want to ask you to read God’s Word!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3318

“Sinner, I am happy in standing here as the ambassador of my King—and yet while I rejoice, I tremble less you should reject the message that He has sent to you in the greatness of His Grace, for my King is not to be trifled with—He deals severely with those who spurn His mercy!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3284

“You and I are like Jacob. The Lord said to Him, ‘The land whereon you lie, to you will I give it.’ You have only to lie down upon a promise and you may claim it for yourself—it is yours by the Magna Charta of faith! Go to the Bible and whatever promise you find there addressed to a child of God, stretch yourself upon it and so make it your own—and it will be so!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3175

“It is not often that I can hear a sermon, but when I do, I have sometimes had seasons of very gracious refreshing to my soul. I remember one Sabbath morning listening to a man who was by no means literate. And as I listened, I felt the tears streaming down my cheeks as I realized afresh how precious Christ was to me! And I envied the good people who could hear the Gospel preached Sabbath by Sabbath and who had not to stand up and deliver it to others—and go without spiritual food themselves.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3136

“…the highest glory of any man’s life is that he is honorable to God and useful to men. The first considerations of a saved soul should be, ‘How can I best magnify Him who has saved me? How can I be most useful to my fellow men in promoting the cause of the Lord Jesus Christ?’ We must always hold this before us, as a test when an offer comes to us—will it really be for the glory of God and the good of men?”—Volume 56, Sermon #3208

“Do not think first of the desires of your heart, but think first of delighting yourself in your God! If you have accepted Him as your Lord, He is yours, so delight in Him and then He will give you the desires of your heart.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3232
“We believe in the real, literalsubstitutionof Christ in the place of all whom He had covenanted to save, and as many as believe in Him may know assuredly that their sins were transferred from them and laid upon Him!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3192

“If you would always be babes, then sit still and have this word and that put into your mouths, forms of prayer composed for your use and unintelligible creeds compiled for you to repeat! But if you would grow into men in Christ Jesus, come to the Book and keep and seek out the commands of God with full purpose of heart to obey them!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3263

“Perhaps I may have in this congregation some who have in them everything that is good except anything good towards God, Himself. How is it, now, that you can live as God’s creatures and think of everybody else but not of the God that made you?”—Volume 58, Sermon #3320

“Those whom we dearly love must be beyond suspicion as to their reciprocal affection. As to a doubt whether there is a Christ, or whether He is the Son of God, or whether He loved us and gave Himself for us, this may be indulged in by those who love not—but where love is supreme it sits in state like God upon the cherubim—and the Dagon of doubt falls down and is broken in pieces! ”—Volume 55, Sermon #3161

“‘In the world you shall have tribulation’ is as sure fact as that in Christ you shall have peace! ”—Volume 58, Sermon #3285

“Restrain not prayer at any time, even when the sun shines brightly upon you, but be sure that you pray when the midnight darkness surrounds your spirit. Prayer is most needed in such an hour as that, so be not slack in it, but pour out your whole soul in earnest supplication to your God and say to yourself, ‘Now above all other times I must pray with the utmost intensity.’ For consider how Jesus prayed in Gethsemane.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3190

“If you are not guilty, the Savior will not save you! If you are not a sinner, you have no part in Christ. If you can say, ‘I have kept the Law from my youth up and am not a transgressor,’ then we have no Gospel blessings to set before you.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3089

“I do not think that we can always account for the great success of one preacher and the non-success of another by anything that we can see. We have to fall back upon the Sovereignty of God and say, ‘God wills it and, therefore, it is.’…He exercises His power not according toourwill, but according to His own will—we must never forget that.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3146

“We have not to preach repentance after the manner or in the nature of Moses, or Jonah, or John the Baptist—we have to preach repentance in the name of Jesus Christ. What does this mean?”—For answer, see Volume 56, Sermon #3224
“As the high priest of old blessed the people, so should those whom God has made to be priests and kings unto Himself—a privilege that pertains to all saints—exercise the function of blessing the people by desiring good things for them!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3179
“If by reading the Scriptures we were only always reminded of the Holy Spirit. If we got no other good from the Scripture, itself, except the turning of our souls to think upon that Divine and blessed One, that would be, in itself, an inestimable blessing!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3318

“A man who does not obey God’s commands may talk about righteousness, even the righteousness which is of faith, but it is clear that he does not possess it, for faith works by love—and the righteousness which is by faith is proved by obedience to God. ‘Noah did according unto all that the Lord commanded him,’ and so proved that he was righteous before God.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3196

“Unless we put every wreath of laurel upon the King’s own head, He will speedily withdraw any power with which He entrusted us—and we shall be as weak as Samson was when the Spirit of God had departed from him.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3284
“One reason why Romanism is popular is because it allows a man to get a deputy to do his thinking for him—and to do his praying for him. But what a poor affair it is with the man who keeps his brains in somebody else’s head and carries his heart in somebody else’s bosom!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3263

“That which is down in the heart will come up into the mouth—and you may rest assured that men are fairly judged by the common current of their conversation.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3232
“Blessed are they who are enjoying the liberty wherewith Christ makes His people free and who, therefore, come boldly right up to the Throne of Grace!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3182

“As we think that the Son of God became the Son of Mary in order that He might die for us, that He might take our place, and die in our place, what can we need more to chase away our fears, to fulfill our hopes and to confirm our faith? If any of you need more than that, it is not possible for us to present it to you, or even to imagine it! What the Son of God said was finished has been finished and, therein our souls may rest, and rest forever!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3192

“A man no longer quibbles at God’s Justice when the Law once gets inside his heart—it shuts his mouth except for groans and sighs—and he has plenty ofthem.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3115

“That is the correct thing nowadays—unsectarianism! Which, being translated means—it does not signify which is which, whether it is right or wrong, it matters not one atom whether you obey God or obey man, whether you belong to a Church which is apostate from the Truth, or one that holds the Truth of God! Unsectarianism, my Friends, is treason to God and to God’s Word!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3263

“Not to pray because you do not feel fit to pray is like saying, ‘I will not take medicine because I am too ill.’ Pray for prayer! Pray yourself, by the Spirit’s assistance, into a praying frame! It is good to strike when the iron is hot, but some make cold iron hot by striking. We have sometimes eaten till we have gained an appetite, so let us pray till we pray. God will help you in the pursuit of duty, not in the neglect of it.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3083

“I quarry out the Truth when I read, but I smelt the ore and get the pure gold out of it when I meditate!...For lack of meditation the Truth of God runs by us and we miss and lose it. Our treacherous memory is like a sieve—and what we hear and what we read runs through it and leaves but little behind—and that little is often unprofitable to us by reason of our lack of diligence to get thoroughly at it. I often find it very profitable to get a text as a sweet morsel under my tongue in the morning and to keep the flavor of it, if I can, in my mouth all day!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3318

“Oh, it is a blessed thing to feel that you are living, not as a servant of man, nor of the Church, nor of a sect, or party, but of Him whose precious blood has bought you!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3174

“…for that is not acceptable prayer in which a man seeks to make his own will prevail over the will of God! That is presumption and rebellion—not the cry of a true child of God. You may beseech Him to grant your request, ‘if it is possible,’ but you may not go beyond that! You must still cry, with your Lord, ‘Nevertheless. not as I will, but as You will.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3190

“Solomon truly said, ‘He that trusts in his own heart is a fool.’ And David just as truly said, ‘But he that trusts in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about.’ You need never lack Divine guidance, for you can have it by asking for it! God is willing to guide you if you will only seek His guidance. See to it, then, that you practice the text in the sense of asking counsel of God—‘Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3212

“Every Believer in the Lord Jesus is a trophy of the strength as well as of the mercy of God. It took as much Omnipotence to snatch him from the fire as it needs to make a world—and every Believer may feel that he is a brand plucked from the fire. (Zechariah 3:2).”—Volume 57, Sermon #3233
“This world cannot be the friend of the friend of God unless, indeed, Belial can have concord with Christ—and this we know is impossible!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3285

“No man ever comes to God except by Jesus, who is the way of salvation. There may be other channels, but this is the only navigable one. Our boats draw too much water to get to God along the shallow straits of human learning. We shall be wise to keep to the deep waters of redeeming love, for by this channel God came to us. ”—Volume 58, Sermon #3321

“…just as the ravens fed Elijah, but were still unclean ravens, so you and I may be serviceable in the Lord’s cause to some extent and yet, after all, be utter strangers to the things of Christ. ”—Volume 57, Sermon #3264
“I urge upon everyone who knows the Truth of God to pray daily for a deeper understanding of its innermost meaning, that he may know the marrow and fatness of the Covenant, may dig into the mines of Revelation and turn up those masses of gold which surface readers never discover!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3161

“The servants of Christ are not to preach repentance on their own authority, or even on the authority of the Church of Christ, but they are to preach it on the authority of the Church’s ascended Head!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3224

“No doubt there were many brave utterances like that historic saying of Latimer, ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man! We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s Grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ Surely these men had food to eat of which the poor puny professors of these days seem not to have tasted! They were made strong for suffering through partaking of this food, indeed, and drink, indeed, whereof if a man eats and drinks abundantly, he shall be fitted to perform such exploits as were worked by the heroes of faith of whom Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Hebrews.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3192

“Resignation is good, but perfect acquiescence is better, and happy—thrice happy is the man who feels it. No silver sandals were ever so precious, no covering of golden mail adorned with precious stones were so glorious to look upon as a mind molded to the Divine Will, perfectly in tune with the mind of the Lord Most High!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3143

“Albeit we are not saved by works, yet the ultimate result of salvation must always be work. The causeof salvation lies in Grace, but the effectof salvation appears in working. As sure as ever the Grace of God fills a soul, that soul desires to see others brought in. ”—Volume 55, Sermon #3147

“The only salvation that can redeem from Hell is a salvation which comes from Heaven! Eternal salvation must come from an eternal God. Salvation that makes you a new creature must be the work of Him who sits upon the Throne of God and makes all things new!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3321

“Even if we do not always use the words, ‘If the Lord wills,’ ‘If God pleases,’ ‘If we are spared,’ or similar expressions, let the spirit of them always be in our mind so that we do not think and speak unconditionally concerning the unknown future!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3184

“Dear young people, take care that you start right in your Christian life by being much in prayer! A profession of faith that does not begin with prayer will end in disgrace. If you come to join the Church, but do not pray to God to uphold you in consistency of life, and to make your profession sincere, the probability is that you are already a hypocrite!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3178

“The same sun which melts wax hardens clay. The influences which tend to make some people better, make other people a great deal worse. Some of you have thus trifled with your own conscience. Should you be saved tonight, you would be brands plucked out of the fire, and may we not hope that you shall be? Will not some of us pray for it? ”—Volume 57, Sermon #3233

“Whatever God gives you, be grateful for, for if too proud to take from the raven’s mouth, it will be well for you to go without until your hunger consumes your pride. God promises His people enough, but not more than enough, and even that enough may not come to us in the way we would choose.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3264

“It was the mighty power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in Him by which Jesus overcame the world—and that same quiet power, if it dwells in us, will make us win the same victory by faith.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3285

“Whatever post the Lord Jesus commits to you, take care that you hold it till He comes, or till you, yourself, are called Home to the heavenly head-quarters. Hold fast, as with a grip of steel, every Doctrine which the Lord has taught you whether others approve of it or not! Hold fast, also, and endeavor, by the aid of God’s Spirit, to put into practice every precept of the Lord. Value the practical part of Christianity as well as the doctrinal—and prize them both beyond gold. Be not of the mind of those who say of Christ’s rules, ‘These are of little consequence.’ No! Your Master’s command cannot be a trifle! And the spirit which thinks little of anything which Jesus commands is an evil spirit!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3188

“When Heaven’s gates are opened wide and the celestial sunshine comes streaming through, it falls upon the eyes that have been illuminated by the Holy Spirit—that is true spiritual communion—and the glorified spirits above do but know that bliss to the fullest in knowing God and rejoicing in the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3212

“Read the Bible as a man reads his relation’s will—to find what legacy there is in it for himself. Do with the Bible as the sick man does with the doctor’s prescription—follow it by personally doing what it bids you. Ask God not to let your Bible be another man’s Bible, but your own Bible—God’s own mouth speaking to your soul of the things which make for your peace.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3318 “Were you, my dear Hearer, ever pardoned by God for Christ’s sake? Then you are pardoned forever! But if not, I pray that you may repent and believe the Gospel this very hour.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3224

“O Sirs, if you want to be strong to live, or work, or suffer for Jesus, you must feed upon Jesus! It is only in the strength of this food and this drink that one can, in these days, live an honest and upright life. It is only in the force derived from this food and this drink that anyone can bear a bold and faithful testimony for Jesus. And, mark you, it is only by feeding upon such food and such drink as this that one will be able to face death with a brave countenance and look forward to the unseen world with eyes undimmed!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3192

“It is a merciful thing that God forgives drunkenness. Some of those who have wallowed in it have been saved.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3233

“What unexpected turns there have been in the lives of those who have trusted in God! You who are trusting in yourselves may help yourselves as best you can, but you who are trusting in God have ample reasons to expect that God will come to your assistance! ”—Volume 56, Sermon #3183

“It is an honor to be allowed to serve Christ, but God will bestow still further honor upon those who faithfully serve Him!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3285

“A part of our Savior’s victory was that He obtained angelic help. Those prayers of His prevailed with His Father, ‘and there appeared an angel unto Him from Heaven, strengthening Him.’ I know not how he did it, but in some mysterious way the angel brought Him succor from on high. We do not know that angel’s name and we do not need to know it—but somewhere among the bright spirits before the Throne of God there is the angel who strengthened Christ in Gethsemane. What a high honor for him! The disciples missed the opportunity that Christ put within their reach, but the angel gladly availed himself of the opportunity as soon as it was presented to him.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3190

“There have been authentic cases of men who have seemed to be very zealous and to burn with the pure celestial fire, who have no doubt been the means of directing others to Heaven, but have not been, themselves, saved! Too many ministers are like the signposts on country roads—they hold out their hands and point the way, but never take the road themselves! They, like the post, still stand where they always did!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3264

“Let us always remember that when we pray aright, we deal with God on terms of Grace—and answers to our petitions come to us not according to what we deserve, but according to His Infinite Mercy and Grace in Christ Jesus our Lord!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3182
“If you cannot preach at home because your practice runs counter to your preaching, do not preach at all—for a man has no right to talk and instruct others it he cannot, at least in some measure, live out what he teaches!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3103

“Our pilgrimage may be a tiresome one, but it is safe! We cannot trace the river upon which we are sailing, but we know it ends in floods of bliss at last! We cannot track the roads, but we know that they all meet in the great metropolis of Heaven, in the center of God’s universe! God help us to pursue the true pilgrimage of a pious life!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3126

“How Mr. John Newton, whenever he entered the pulpit to preach the Gospel of the Grace of God, must have felt astounded to find himself preaching it after having been such a blasphemer and everything else that was vile! And how John Bunyan, honest John Bunyan, when talking to the chief of sinners, must have felt as he would say, “the water standing in his eyes,” as he thought how he, too, had been a Jerusalem sinner, and yet ‘Grace abounding’ had met with him!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3322

“Faith is not that mere cold, barren thing which says, ‘The creed is true,’ and then doubles it up and forgets it, or puts it on the shelf all the week to be taken down only on Sundays—it is a loving trust in Christ which changes the heart and affects the entire life! It is the grandest, greatest power ever seen on earth, for by it the Holy Spirit displays His might in the salvation of men!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3095

“Some have said that it is good only to pray when you feel moved to pray, but I would rather say that you should pray to feel moved to prayWhen you feel that you cannot pray is the very time when you should pray, for when you canpray there may be less need for prayer than when you feel that you cannot pray!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3136

“The worldling’s Bible is the Christian. He never reads the Book, but he reads the disciple of Christ and he judges the Christian religion by the lives of its professors! The world will learn better and will more likely be brought to know Christ when the lives of Christians are better, and when the Bible of the Christian Life shall be more in accordance with the Bible of Christian Doctrine!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3318“If the Doctrine that is preached glorifies the Creator, and abases the creature, there are some of our hearers who at once get angry! They cannot endure the extolling of our glorious Lord and Master. Our praise of Him makes discord in their ears. If we would prate about the dignity of human nature. If we would extol that poor foolish creature, the son of Adam, they would be pleased enough! ”—Volume 56, Sermon #3210

“O my Brothers and Sisters, what a great blessing it is to be made to know our own weakness! To empty the sinner of his folly, his vanity and conceit is no easy matter. Christ can easily fill him with wisdom and prudence, but to get him empty—this is the work!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3269

“And, oh, you young people, what a mercy it is to see you willing to come and hear the Word! But have you all heard it with your inward ears? Have you looked to my Master? Oh, it is sweet to come to Christ in the early morning of life, to have a long day of happiness before you! May it be the blessedness of each one of you! It is vain to look at the Door unless you enter. God give you Grace to come in if you have never entered before! ”—Volume 58, Sermon #3287

“The highest way of living is to live for Jesus and altogether for Jesus, not caring what this man says or how the other judges, but feeling that asHe has bought us with His blood and we are His from the crown of our head to the sole of our feet, we, therefore, acknowledge no master but our
Redeemer! Brothers and Sisters, do you live for Jesus in that fashion? Do we not perform many actions under the impulse of secondary motives?”—Volume 55, Sermon #3174

“The personal obligation of each individual before God is a lesson which all should learn. It is taught us in our Baptism, for there each Believer makes his own confession of faith and, by his own act and deed, avows himself to be dead with Christ. Pure Christianity knows nothing of proxies, or sureties in Baptism! After our profession of faith is made, the Believer is responsible for his own religious acts and cannot employ priests or ministers to perform his religion for him. He must himself, pray, search the Scriptures, commune with God and obey the Lord Jesus. True religion is a personal thing.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3193

“We sometimes talk of a man being ‘as drunk as a beast,’ but who ever heard of a beast being drunk? Why it is more beastly than anything a beast ever does! I do not believe that the devil himself is ever guilty of anything like that. I never heard even him charged with being drunk. It is a sin which has no sort of excuse—those who fall into it generally fall into other deadly vices.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3233

“Men cannot know God until they see the brightness of His Glory revealed in the Person of Jesus Christ. To theists and polytheists, those who believe in one God and those who worship ‘gods many and lords many,’ we have but one message, even that which our Lord Himself delivered, “Repent you, and believe the Gospel.” And already, many of them, by Divine Grace, have repented and received the remission of their sins in Christ’s name!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3224

“All the attempts that have ever been made to describe the joy and glory of Heaven have necessarily been failures—and if we were to attempt again, we should fall far below that which God has revealed to us by His Spirit—for eye has not seen, nor ear heard that which He has prepared for them that love Him!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3323

“There is such pleasure in honoring Christ and in winning souls, that I can scarcely believe that any of you have ever tasted it if you are not hungering after more of it! Did you ever win a soul to Christ? Did you ever get a grip of the hand of spiritual gratitude? Did you ever see the tear starting from the eye when the convert said, ‘Bless you! I shall remember you in Heaven, for you have brought me to Christ’? Oh, my dear Friend, you will not be satisfied merely with this, for this is a kind of food that makes men hungry! Oh, that you had a rich banquet of it and yet wanted still more!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3147

“Whenever you can see Christ’s hand in it, it makes the bitter sweet and heavy things soon grow light! Go to your sickbed as you hope to go to your deathbed—through the Door, that is, through Christ.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3287

“Well now, Beloved, if the Lord shall bring us into deep waters and cause us to pass through fiery trials—if His Spirit shall enable us to pray as Jesus did, we shall see something like the same result in our own experience! We shall rise up from our knees strengthened for all that lies before us, and fitted to bear the Cross that our Lord may have ordained for us. In any case, our cup can never be as deep or as bitter as His was—there were in His cup some ingredients that never will be found in ours. The bitterness of sin was there, but He has taken that away for all who believe in Him. His Father’s wrath was there, but He drank that all up and left not a single dreg for any one of His people.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3190

“Out of fellowship with Jesus springs the higher state of absolute certainty as to Divine things!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3161

“He [the truly blessed man] is subject to like passions and tempted in all points as we are, and yet he is blessed! Only a man, but much more than he would have been had not God blessed him! ”—Volume 57, Sermon #3270
“It is not said that the gate of Mercy will open at the first knock. If it were, there would be no room for the virtue of importunity!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3183

“I remember meeting a man who told me that he could never see spiritually until he had lost his natural eyesight! And there have, doubtless, been many who were never rich until they became poor, and others who were never happy until their earthly happiness was blighted and blasted, and then they sought and found true happiness in Jesus. What a blessed disappointment it is that leads us to a Savior’s love!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3184

“We ought to receive nothing as vital religious truth except it is sent us from above! And however much we may respect the pastor or the teacher, we must not so give up our judgment to any man as to receive his teaching merely because he chooses to utter it. Bring every form of the Truth of God that is delivered to you, though it may glitter with oratory and seem reasonable and proper, to the test of Scripture!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3318

“I have almost ceased to wonder when the swearer is converted, or when the harlot is saved—not because it is not a mighty act of Grace, but because it is common enough to be often repeated. God’s mercy is extended very freely to such sinners as these, but there is a wonder which I do not often see. I do see it, though not often—I wish I could. It is whena self-righteousreligious man gets saved.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3233

“It is very easy to pick holes in other people’s work, but it is far more profitable to do better work yourself. Is there a fool in all the world that cannot criticize? Those who can themselves do good service are but as one in a thousand compared with those who can see faults in the labors of others. Therefore, if you are wise, my Brothers and Sisters, do not quibble as others, but arise and smite the Philistines!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3193

“Speak up for the blessed Truth of God and stand to your gun—this will gall the enemy and protect yourself. Rally to the colors and wrap them around your heart when they seem to be in peril—I mean, the blood-red colors of the Cross of Christ!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3188

“How many infants that might have grown up to be spiritual giants have been strangled by our procrastination! You nurse the little child of resolve, but seldom does it grow into the man of practical action! Get about it, get about it now! You cannot help your friend when you have once gone up in your chariots of fire, so help him now and let him tell you what you should do for him.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3116

“If you ever try to fight with sin in your own strength, or on a legal footing, or because you feel that you will be condemned if you do not overcome those sins, you will be as weak as water! The way of victory is through the blood of the Lamb. There is no killing sin except by throwing the blood of Christ upon it. When once the blood of Christ comes into contact with the besetting sin, that sin withers straight away! Go to your spiritual conflicts through the Door.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3287

“To suffer poverty for Christ’s sake is a very different thing from suffering poverty in the abstract. To be despised for the Gospel’s sake is a different thing from being despised for any other reason for, to be reproached for Christ is honor—and to suffer for Christ is pleasure!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3110

“Our trials and troubles, afflictions and adversities, are among the best medicines of our Great Physician. A trial has been love’s reply to earnest desire. God’s wisdom often chooses to give us a head wind to prevent our rushing upon sunken rocks.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3321
“The life of Christ is in you by reason of His death. For you the Holy Spirit has so worked in you that the life of God is within you and you can never die! Because Christ lives, you must also live.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3092
“Yes, that which God appoints is right—and mustbe right. Distance ordained of Heaven is better than nearness of our own choosing!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3175

“As God’s Grace saved the chief of sinners, that Grace can save you, my Friend, however great a sinner you have been! There may have come in here tonight, as they often do, those who are not usually found in places of worship. My Brother or my Sister, for as such I regard you, sinner as you are, I have to tell you that if you will repent of your sin and trust in Jesus as your Savior, you shall go out of this house justified, even as the publican went out of the Temple of old after he had, from the depths of his soul cried, ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner!’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3224

“The first thought of the truly blessed man is how he can best glorify the name of Christ and in so doing he avoids ‘the counsel of the ungodly.’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3270
“You Sunday school teachers will always teach well when you go down to the schoolroom through the Door, that is, having been with Christ, having sought and enjoyed His company.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3287

“Do you know what became of Demas, Simon Magus, Alexander the coppersmith and others who turned aside from the faith in the days of the Apostles? Remember those terrible, yet inspired words, ‘If we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation which shall devour the adversaries.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3212

“To be born twice is to escape the second death, but to be born only once is to fall into the second death forever. Are you born-again? If so, you are Christ’s!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3079

“What if you are no gainer by obeying your God? He who bids you do it is your Maker and Preserver! What if you should lose everything through obeying Him? Would it not be better to lose the whole world than to lose your own soul, for what will you give in exchange for your soul? The very thought of weighing self-interest against the authority of God should be revolting to all right-minded men!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3078

“‘Then they that feared the Lord spoke often, one to another,’ and it is very good that they should do so. Our talk is, alas, too often very frivolous—there is much chaff but little wheat. If we would but talk more of Scripture and establish it as a fashion among Christians, we would grow much faster and stronger, and be wiser in the things the Kingdom.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3318

“The tear of penitence and the prayer of the seeking soul are evidences of the working of Almighty Grace… And when the poor soul at last, driven by necessity, throws itself flat at the foot of the Cross and rests its hope wholly and alone on Jesus, then we my say of it, ‘Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire? And when, in the midst of many a conflict and soul-struggle, the heart flings away its idols and resolves to love Christ, and vows in His strength to be devoted to His service, we may say again with pleasure, ‘Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3233

“A Christian should seek the help of his Brothers and Sisters, but, at the same time, if he is called to a service for his Lord and they will not aid him, let him not be alarmed, but let him consider that if he has God with him he has all the allies he needs!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3193

“We cannot expect that men will come and make an application of the Truth of God to themselves. We must, having our heart glowing and our souls on fire with love to them, seek to bring the Truth to bear upon them, to impress it upon their hearts and consciences as in the sight of God and in the place of Christ.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3191

“Theological conflicts and ecclesiastical squabbles would utterly disappear if we were shod with the true spirit of the Gospel of Peace. An unwillingness to think harshly of any Christian is a sandal most easy to the feet, protecting it from many a thorn. Wear it in the church, wear it in all holy service, wear it in all fellowship with Christians and you will find your way among the brethren greatly smoothed!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3143

“If I have preached without the Holy Spirit I have preached in vain. If I have gone to my prayer chamber, no matter how earnest I desired to be, I have prayed in vain unless the Spirit of God has been upon me. This anointing is the Christian’s supreme need!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3266
“It is a great blessing for us to be emptied of self that God may be All-in-All, for then our infirmities cease to be drawbacks and rise into qualifications through Divine Grace!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3289
“Have not these ears often heard the songs of dying saints as they have rejoiced because the love of God was shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Spirit? Yes, a sense of acceptance in the Beloved is an ‘everlasting consolation.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3179

“The Gospel does not make us stoics—it makes us Christians. Still, you must remember that there is a moderation in grief. The Quaker was right who, when he saw a lady fretting on the sofa some year or so after her husband was dead, still harboring grief without a token of resignation, said to her, ‘Madam, I see you have not yet forgiven God.’ Sometimes grief is not a sacred feeling, but only a murmur of rebellion against the Most High.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3116

“Only a few weeks ago we went out of doors and saw nothing but the earth wrapped in a winding-sheet of snow, or, perhaps, the dull, black ground soaking in rain. Where were the myriads of leaves that now clothe the trees? And where the kingcups and daisies which bedeck the meadows and make them bright as cloth of gold? Where was all this wealth of flowers? Where all this music of song birds? God came! He breathed in pity on the frozen brooks and loosed the waters from their icy chains. He unbound the iron bonds of winter. He made the world look up and laugh with flowers.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3321
“I believe that wherever two or three disciples of Christ meet together it is competent for them to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. That ordinance is not, as some think it to be, a church ordinance, to be confined to the official assembling of all Believers—but wherever two or three are met in Christ’s name, there He is—and where He is, there may the emblems of His broken body and shed blood be partaken of in memory of Him!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3224

“That is the short road to true knowledge—to pray. Study is good, no doubt, for the acquisition of knowledge. But praying is the best way to obtain true wisdom!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3212

“Death used to be as a black cavern in the mountains. Men said that many were the footsteps into it, but that there were none fromit. It was an awful, all-devouring cavern, but Jesus has, by passing through it, turned the cavern into a tunnel! He went in at the gloomy side, but He remained not in the heart of the earth—He re-appeared at the other side. So that, death is now all on the way to Heaven and immortality!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3175

“I say again that there is an essential difference between the nature of a Christian and the nature of a worldling—you cannot make a true Christian into a worldling and you cannot make a worldling into a Christian! A natural man must be born-again before he can become a Christian—and then he will not be the same man that he was before, but a new creature in Christ Jesus!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3234

“The Christian is not to shut himself up and become a hermit, and think that thereby he can cultivate holiness! That is unholiness! Christian holiness is social—the light of the world, the salt of the earth! We are to be in the world, though not of it—our priesthood is exercised in the street, the shop, the family and at the fireside—by day and night, to offer up prayers and praises and thanksgivings unto God—and so be perpetually a priest.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3266 “Those whom no man can pity and no man can help, God can love and save!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3321

“I cannot tell you how much I owe to the Monday evening Prayer Meetings and the other Prayer Meetings that are held so frequently in connection with our work here. I do hope that we shall never have them less frequently, for those Prayer Meetings have been the strength of this pulpit. The pillars on which our ministry rests are, under God, the prayers of our people! If you want to be warm spiritually, you must keep up the spirit of prayer.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3136

“Dear Brothers, may we have given to us the spirit of discrimination that we may know the precious from the vile, for if we do so as preachers we shall be as God’s mouth! And may we as hearers have the same discrimination, that we may always be able to receive that which is of God, and to reject at once with solemn determination that which is according to the spirit of the world and not after Jesus Christ!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3161

“O Brothers and Sisters, we must be nothing, or the Lord will not use us!...Oh, to be nothing! To lie at His feet and then, full of His power, because emptied of our own, to move forward to victory! May the Lord work in us to will and to do of His good pleasure—then shall we work out a glorious destiny to His praise!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3289

“It was good for him [Jacob] to go limping on his thigh after his victory—to make him know that it was not by his own strength that he had prevailed with God. And so it was a good thing for Eleazar to feel weary, [2 Sam 23:9, 10] for he would now understand where the strength came from with which he smote the Philistines. Eleazar only failed when there was spoil to be divided—and if you and I only shrink back when there is praise to be awarded, we need not be troubled, for there are plenty who have never done anything else who will be quite ready to claim the credit of all that is achieved!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3193

Here is His handiwork all around us, most fair and beautiful, yet the fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God,’ and proves himself to be a fool by saying it!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3234

“I have always found that an earnest Gospel ministry and a prayerful united Church will have God’s blessing when others will not have it. Go on, Sunday school teachers, go on, tract distributors! Go on, Evangelists—go on, all of you who are laboring for Christ—keep, each one, to his own service and even if it has been night with you and you have taken nothing, still keep on at your toil! Probably the best way to bring the Master to you is to labor for Him with all your might.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3146

“That which is in the well will come up in the bucket, and that which is in the heart will come up on the tongue. An unbridled tongue denotes an unrenewed heart. Oh, that God would always give us Grace in our heart to move our tongue aright! Then, as the water guides the whole ship, our tongue will guide our whole body and the whole of our manhood will be under holy government and control.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3212 “Beloved, the servants of God must frequently meet with ingratitude, unkind treatment, harsh words and cruel speeches from those whom they try to serve! And sometimes God’s own people are a greater plague to God’s ministers than are all the rest of the world besides. ”—Volume 54, Sermon #3110

“The Lord Jesus has a monopoly on mercy! If you will depend upon the uncovenanted mercy of God—the mercy of God apart from Christ—you shall find that you have depended upon a reed and built your house upon sand!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3191
“When you feel disinclined to pray, let it be a sign to you that prayer is doubly necessary! Pray for prayer!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3289

“God makes much of salvation, oh, that we also did! We may recount and rehearse the story of our rescue from universal destruction—and we need not be afraid or ashamed of repeating it. As the Holy Spirit repeats the words we have here, [Genesis7:14] you and I may often proclaim the story of our salvation and dwell upon the minute particulars of it, for every item of it is full of instruction!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3196

“Beloved, all the Attributes of God sparkle with consolation to the eyes of faith. There is nothing in the Most High to discourage the man who can say, “My Father, my God, in You do I put my trust.” None who have trusted in Him have ever been confounded. Therefore if your soul sinks within you, remember the Nature, Character, and Attributes of God.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3101

“The Church does not often fish, but when she does, she catches her best fish. If we could but launch out a little more into the deep and the working population—and the openly sinning population could be more fully touched with the Gospel, who knows but we might find leaders for Israel’s hosts and men of valor—men who love much because they have had much forgiven!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3322

“The Holy Spirit always works with this aim and objective—to lead sinners to admire, adore and trust in Jesus Christ! His Omnipotence bends itself to this end, that Jesus Christ may be glorified in the hearts and lives of sinners saved by His Grace!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3127

“Do you think God would make us so dissatisfied with this world if He did not mean to satisfy us with another and a better one? Surely not! The very fact that we are strangers and sojourners upon the earth proves that we have a country of our own that is very different from this wildernessworld through which we are passing!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3234

“You know that there are more flies caught with honey than with vinegar—and there are more souls brought to Christ by happy Christians than there ever will be by all the dreadful gloom and solemnity which some people find it necessary to put on!—Volume 54, Sermon #3076
“It is only when we can say with David, ‘My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise,’ that there is the music of deep and lasting joy in the songs that we send up to Heaven!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3225

“If we do not know what it is to love, then we do not, in the Scriptural sense, know what it is to live! We are dead! Hatred is the cerement in which the dead soul is wound up, the grave clothes in which it is put away in the tomb. But love is the garment of life in which a truly quickened spirit arrays itself. The one who is full of hatred dwells in darkness, but he that loves, abides in the light. Note how love and life and light are most blessedly linked to one another.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3266

“I do not quite like that saying of Addison, ‘Come here, young man, and see how a Christian can die.’ It looks too theatrical. But I should like it to be so with us that men might turn aside to see how a Christian can live! O Lord and giver of peace, grant us Your peace, and Grace to keep it, even to the end!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3175

“And when you become downcast, as I often am after having obtained a great blessing, do not be so very terribly alarmed about it. What does it matter? The work is over! You can afford to be laid low before God. It will be well for you to know how empty and how weak you are, that you may ascribe all Glory to the Lord alone. He is almighty, however weak you may be.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3193

“Do not, I pray you, ever set Jesus Christ up so high as to imagine that His Manhood was not like yours, so that He cannot sympathize with you—for then you cannot sympathize with Him!...But the text is equally clear in the description of Christ’s Godhead.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3088

“The blood of former pilgrims stains the way to Glory, yet from all perils to our feet the preparation of the Gospel of Peace will guard us! From fears within and fighting without, Gospel peace will surely deliver us. Perhaps we are more vexed with little trials than with great ones—certainly we bear them with far less equanimity—but a peaceful heart protects alike from tiny thorns and terrible rocks. Everyday vexations as well as extraordinary tribulations we shall bear cheerfully when the peace of God keeps our heart and mind!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3143“Silence to man and prayer to God are the best cures for the evil of slander. It is of little use to appeal to our fellows on the matter of slander, for the more we stir it, the more it spreads. It is of no avail to appeal to the honor of the slanderer, for they have none, and the most piteous demands for justice will only increase their malignity and encourage them to fresh insult!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3322

“If any of you are to be saved, God must save you. Sinner, you are lost, and lost beyond recovery by any hand but that which is Divine and Omnipotent! ‘It is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs, but of God that shows mercy.’ Let that text roll like thunder over the heads of those who think that they can save themselves. The Lord must do it from first to last! His is the first act of Grace when He quickens the spiritually dead—and His must be the last act of Grace when we lay down our vile bodies and our spirit enters into the joy of our Lord!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3084

“Without Christ you are an unpardoned sinner, a condemned sinner and, before long you will be a sinner judged, sentenced and cast into Hell! Do you not know that?”—Volume 56, Sermon #3209

“You will be saved, not by repenting and tears! Not by wailing and works! Not by doing and praying, but coming, believing, simply depending upon what Jesus Christ has done! When your soul says by faith what Christ said in fact, ‘It is finished,’ you are saved and you may go your way rejoicing!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3191

“The greatest boldness in prayer is perfectly consistent with the lowest self-humiliation…We are to come boldly to the Throne of Grace, yet always with submission in our hearts, even as our Lord, Himself, prayed, ‘Nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3182

“The faith which we have has been handed down to us by martyrs’ hands all along the ages—not through the corrupt Church of Rome—but down along the line of martyrs and confessors who have sealed their testimony with their blood! And that testimony is still with us this day! Search God’s Word and if we teach you anything that is inconsistent with it, then reject us as we would have you reject all false teachers!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3179

“It is a strange country, this. If a poor woman in a red cloak passes a farm and for sixpence tells a servant girl her fortune, she is put in prison. And I will not say but what she deserves it—yet a gentleman may stand up before his thousands and pretend to turn bread and wine into the flesh and blood of God, and to have power to pardon sin, and I have never heard of any punishment for so gross an imposition! It is infinitely more gross than anything the poor ignorant witch has ever practiced! It is not in us to pardon sin. If you had offended us, we might pardon your offenses against ourselves, but offenses against God must be forgiven by God, Himself. ”—Volume 55, Sermon #3162

“All the Prophets, or nearly all of them, when they had visions from God, fell flat on their faces! John, himself, though he had leaned on Jesus’ bosom—when he saw the Master in Patmos, writes these very instructive words—‘When I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead.’ Now, the Lord has work for us to do, but He does not want us to be always lying at His feet as dead! Consequently, He withholds from us the full radiance of His Glory!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3323

“When a friend once gave Martin Luther a large sum of money, he stood at the Church door and gave it all away to the poor because, he said, that he had made up his mind to have his portion in the next world—and not in this. There is nothing in the sinner’s lot, either here or hereafter, that you and I have any cause to envy!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3234

“There is a very precious link between the instrument of your salvation and yourself which you ought never to forget. Surely we can never cease to thank God for the man or the woman whom He used to lead us out of darkness into His marvelous Light!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3225

“Why, the Christian, above all men, should have what the world calls his, ‘holidays and bonfire nights’—his days of rejoicing, times of holy laughter, seasons of overflowing delight. No, I think he should strive to have them always, for we are told, ‘Delight yourself in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart’!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3270

“We could as easily create a world as present a fervent prayer without the Spirit of God! We need to have this written upon our hearts, for only so shall we offer those inwrought supplications which the Lord hears with delight.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3289

“The only way of breaking with sin is to unite with Christ. No man does in heart part with sin till he is one with his Savior—and that comes by trusting Him, simply trusting Him. When you trust Him, He delivers you from sinful habits and no longer allows you to be the slave of evil. ‘If the Son, therefore, shall make you free, you shall be free, indeed.’ Seek that freedom! May He bestow it upon every one of us and then may we become heroes for Christ—and He shall have the glory, forever and ever! Amen.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3193
“We need, nowadays, dear Friends, to have a little less talk about what men are and much more actual living unto Jesus. The Lord work it in us by His Spirit!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3174

“I have heard of a preacher who thought that whatever came first into his head was good enough for his people. On one occasion, he informed one of his officers, at the end of his sermon, that he had never thought of it before he entered the pulpit. And the good elder replied, ‘I thought so while listening to you. I thought that if you had considered it beforehand, you would never have said what you did.’ We all need to wash and mend our nets—I mean that we all need to do Christ’s work in the best possible way—and that is the way in which we are most likely to be privileged with His Presence.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3146

“If you are in the dark you will not see the filth upon your garments, but the brighter the light the more you will see every spot—and the more you will mourn over it.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3323
“Oh, yes, the world is a heap of chaff! The only solid treasure is to be found in Christ! But if you neglect Him, you neglect all that is worth having!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3209

“Be as much as you can with the saints of God. I have sometimes spent an hour with a congenial spirit, a man whose heart has been warm with love to his Master, and when he has gone I have felt that I could bless God for having had the privilege of talking with him, yet that very man has said that he thanked God for that hour because of the good he had got from me—while it seemed to me as if I had got all the good and had given nothing in return.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3136

“The Holy Spirit never sets His seal to a prayerless religion! It has not in it that of which He can approve. It must be truly said of a man, ‘Behold, he prays,’ before the Lord bears such testimony concerning him as He bore concerning Saul of Tarsus, ‘He is a chosen vessel unto Me, to bear My name before the Gentiles.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3178

“The ill words of Christians often make texts for sinners, and thus God is blasphemed out of the mouths of His own Beloved children! Let it not be so with any of you, Beloved.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3234

“Perhaps you have lost one who was very dear to you. Let it comfort your heart that it was the Lord who took away your loved one. There is an empty chair in your house and every time you look at it your eyes fill with tears—yet never forget that it was the Lord who called to Himself the one who used to occupy that chair.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3184

“When we think of all the Lord’s goodness to us, we cry out, somewhat as David did, ‘Who are we, O Lord, and what is our house, that You have done such great things for us?’ If we have ‘the hand of the Lord’ upon us in this sense, it will not crush us, nor drive us to despondency or death—it will make us realize our own nothingness while it will also give us a grateful sense of our Lord’s loving kindness and condescension in dealing so graciously with us!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3290

“You cannot even live in God’s service as I do, but in serving Christ, Himself, you get as Martha did—cumbered with much serving. Oh, that the heart were always on the mountain with Christ—no, I won’t say that—were it even in the garden, as long as it were but with Him—in Gethsemane, or on Tabor—it would matter little as long as we could stay with Him!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3323

“A preacher once told me that he had read the Bible through 20 times on his knees and had never found the Doctrine of Election there. Very likely not. It is a most uncomfortable position in which to read. If he had sat in an easy chair, he would have been better able to understand it. To read on one’s knees is like a Popish penance! Besides, he read in the wrong way—if instead of 20 times galloping through, he had read once and pondered continually—he probably would have seen clearer than he evidently did.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3270

“Remember, Believer in Jesus, that your heart was, by nature, as black as the heart of Judas! Whatever sin there may have been in any other man, the germ of that sin was in your nature—there was no superiority about you, by nature, to any other member of the human race. However excellent your parents may have been—and God forbid that I should disparage them—it is still true, ‘That which is born of the flesh is flesh.’ It must be so. From defilement—and that is in the parents—there can only come defilement. There cannot be a crystal stream from an impure fountain.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3194

“Is there a harlot here? Is there a drunk here? Is there one here who has cursed God? Is there one here who has been dishonest? Is there one here over whom all these sins have rolled? Why, if you believe, your sins, which are many, are all forgiven you! And though there should be brought before us one so guilty that we might well stay away from him, yet if he can but trust Christ, Christ will not stay away from him, but will receive him!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3191
“Further than this, let me remind you, my dear Reader, that if you have not Christ, nothing else will be of use for you. A profession of religion will only be a sort of respectable pall to throw over the corpse of your dead soul! No, a profession of religion, if you have not Christ in it, will be a swift witness against you to condemn you! What right have you to profess to be a follower of Christ unless Christ is in you the hope of Glory?”—Volume 56, Sermon #3209

“We may take it for granted that God’s Providential dispensations will always tend in that direction and that the ponderous wheels full of eyes are always revolving in such a way as to work out the eternal purposes of Grace in the salvation of those whom Christ has redeemed. But, for all that, thepower which God mostly blesses is the energy of the Holy Spirit exerted through the preaching of the Gospel of Christ—not by kings and princes, or learned doctors or eloquent men—but through the Gospel as preached by humble and earnest Believers, illustrated by gracious and holy lives, and supported by fervent and unceasing prayers!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3188

“Some of you used to follow Jesus very closely and to be very warm friends of His—have you been growing cold towards Him? Oh, let this no longer be the case! If you have found Him, follow Him and follow Him ‘wherever He goes.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3225

“Our mercies which pass unobserved are probably ten times as numerous as those which we perceive! It is well, therefore, at least at the close of every day, to look back upon all the mercy that has been given to us during the day—and to realize that “the hand of the Lord” is still upon us in the evening, shielding us from all harm, guiding us in His own good way and providing most generously for all our needs!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3290

“The inward meditation [of God’s Word] is the thing that makes the soul rich towards God. This is the godly man’s occupation. Put the spice into the mortar by reading, beat it with the pestle of meditation—so shall the sweet perfume be exhaled.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3270
“I have not the least particle of faith in rambling spirits. Those who are in Heaven will not care to be wandering in these foggy regions! And those in Hell cannot leave their dread abode.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3128
“If you are not spared, but perish, it will not be because God is not merciful to you but because you are not merciful to yourselves!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3324

“Mr. Bunyan describes the City of Mansoul as sending Mr. Wet-Eyes as one of her ambassadors to the Prince Emanuel—and he is still a most acceptable ambassador to the King of kings! He who knows how to weep his heart out at the foot of the Cross shall not be long without finding mercy. Tears are diamonds that God loves to behold!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3234

“The poorest Christian has power with God in supplication. We do not undervalue that, but still, if the Lord does not help you in answer to those prayers and if it does not become a personalmatter with yourself so that you pray, you will be guilty of a superstitious reliance upon the prayers of others—having made a god of them—and God will be grieved with you for having done so. No prayers of all the saints on earth could save a single soul unless that soul fled for refuge to the hope set before it in the Gospel in the Person of Jesus Christ.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3162

“To some people it seems to be a dreadful thing to give a man such a bad opinion of himself, but, indeed, it is the greatest blessing that could come to him, for when he despairs of himself, he will fly to Christ to save him!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3115

“All who believe in Him, [JESUS CHRIST] in whatever visible Church they may be, make up the one Church of Jesus Christ which He has redeemed from among men with His precious blood. And in the latter days He will have that Church to be His reward.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3144

“If you want to wither your happiness forever, you have only to go and be yoked with an unbeliever…We do not often talk about these things when we are preaching, but we ought to talk about them a great deal more than we do. I do beseech you, Christian young people, if you hope to have God’s blessing, take care that you do not get ‘unequally yoked with unbelievers.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3103

“That is the chief business of our coming together in these great assemblies—that we may be brought into real, close, personal contact with God and see His power and His Glory in the sanctuary! As for the Preacher, he is no more account than the lad with the five barley loaves and two small fishes! But if the Master will add His blessing, the multitudes shall be fed spiritually even as the thousands were then fed literally—and He shall have all the Glory!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3290

“Old age should never be looked upon with dismay by us—it should be our joy.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3183“The Scripture has put the two side by side, ‘These shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous unto life eternal.’ The same word applies to both. As long as Heaven shall shine, so long Hell shall burn! As long as saints are happy, so long shall those whose impenitence has made them castaways be wretched!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3324

“How many sermons have been preached before people and how few have been preached atthem! Yet the sermons that are preached beforeus are good for nothing, but the sermons that are preached at us are the only ones that are likely to be blessed to us!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3210

“It is very easy for you to get conceited and proud, but it would help to preserve you from such folly and sin if you would only remember what you used to be before the Grace of God made such a change in you. Then you would not want to sing to your own praise and glory, but you would walk humbly before the Lord and give all the honor to him for what Grace has worked in you. This will make it a most profitable exercise for us to look back to see what we were before our conversion.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3194

“I must frankly confess that of all my expectations of Heaven, I will cheerfully renounce ten thousand things if I can but know that I shall have perfect holiness, for if I may become like Jesus Christ as to His Character—pure and perfect—I cannot understand how any other joy can be denied me! If we shall have that, surely we shall have everything! This, then, is our hope—that ‘we shall be like He, for we shall see Him as He is.’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3235

“This [Genesis 7:23] is the counterpart of what will follow the preaching of the Gospel—those who are in Christ shall live, shall rise, and reign with Him forever—but none of those who are outside of Christ shall live. ‘Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.’—Volume 56, Sermon #3196

“Try to crush the Church of Christ and the more you try to crush it, the more it will live and flourish! Seek to exterminate the Christians and in the futile attempt you shall multiply them like the stars of the sky or the sands of the seashore! There is no way of killing the life of God when it is once implanted in the heart of a Believer in Jesus! All the devils in Hell, if they set all their demoniacal powers to work to blow out the feeblest light that ever glowed in a Christian’s heart, could not put it out even if they took an age to do it.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3176

“May I ask whether there are not some here who do not meditate on God’s Word at all? If so, then this solemn thought will seize us—f you have not the blessedness of God’s Word, you must inherit its curse! Let us see to it and now, beginning at the Cross of Jesus Christ, study the mystery of His wounds for our sin, and then go on afterward to meditate in His Law day and night.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3270

“Holy anxiety to be found sincere and acceptable with God prevents all self-confidence. ”—Volume 58, Sermon #3325

“No doubt there are certain marks and evidences of the Christian life for which it is quite right to talk, yet it is better to look at the marks of the Savior’s wounds and to see the evidences of God’s Love manifested in the Person and work of His well-beloved Son. It is much more profitable to look at the Creator than at the creature. If you must bring self in at all, let it only be as Ezekiel did when he said, ‘The hand of the Lord was upon me in the evening.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3290

“Alas, some have even sold their souls for the cup of the drunkard. The intoxicating cup which is very rarely, if ever, a benefit to anyone, even when taken in what is called moderation, leads to the certain damnation of many if they touch a single drop of it. It has allured thousands into the jaws of Hell! They could not resist its spell when once it fell upon them. It is, alas, only too true that men who were once honorable and loving husbands and fathers, have become brutes and monsters! No, I slander the brutes when I compare them with many men whom I have seen, who have seemed, through strong drink, to have made themselves into incarnate fiends!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3111

“If I have found Him, how shall I prove that I prize Him? First, let me be willing to lose all that I havefor Him. Does my present position in life involve me in sin? Then let me leave it rather than grieve my Lord. Is my business an evil one? Then let me renounce it at once, for if I do not, I shall have to renounce Him! Have I any companions who are the enemies of Christ? Then I dare not call them my friends. Is there some dear one with whom I have entered into such close association that it will draw me away from Christ? Then, while I can, let me break the connection, for I must give up all for the Christ who gave up all for me!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3225

“I believe that many professing Christians are cold and uncomfortable because they are doing nothing for their Lord. But if they actively served Him, their blood would begin to circulate spiritually and it would be well with them.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3136

“If you get wealth, who gives you power to get it? And if you have health, who is it that preserves your strength of limb and the blood that still leaps within your veins? He has but to will it and you would be a paralytic, or a consumptive like so many others. Your children are spared to you—bless God for each of them, for it is He that spares them! Your husband or your wife, your brother or your friend, the joys that cluster around the hearth—all these come to you through Him. They are common mercies, we say, but we would not think them so common if we had to miss them for a while! Let us bless God and see His hand in them all, and say, ‘Great Father, even my nether springs are in you.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3213

“Ah, that evening will soon come to everyone of us when we shall have to bid farewell to the fond pursuits of the day—that ‘night’ of which our Savior said that then, ‘no man can work.’ And when that night comes on and we begin to feel its chilly dews settling upon our dying brow. When the hoar-frost of death shall be upon every limb, how blessed it shall be to have a bright and glowing lamp within our soul which will owe none of its brilliance to sun or moon, but to the Lord God who gives us the Light that shall last forever!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3290

“Our Lord Jesus Christ was thus perpetually, constantly and wholly the butt of slander and of scorn! He was permanently standing in the pillory to be ill-treated by the hands of them whom His power had created, and whom His own love had spared! What a ‘contradiction of sinners against Himself!’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3327

“The man who is partially like Christ has only a partial view of Christ. You might almost know your own character by your view of Jesus. If your eye sees not inexpressible beauty in Him, it is your eyes that are to blame, for He is altogether lovely. And when the eyes of our inward nature shall come to see Jesus as He is, then we may depend upon it that we are like He is!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3235

“Were the Covenant founded upon works, it would fail! If it depended upon ourselves, it would surely break down! But if it is the ‘Everlasting Covenant, ordered in all things, and sure,’ it cannot fail! If the promise is the promise of God who cannot lie, He will surely keep it unto the end. We ought not, therefore, to be burdened with this anxiety, but simply go on in the path of daily watchfulness and humble dependence upon the preserving power of the Lord Jesus Christ—and so we shall find that we shall get safely to Heaven after all!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3098

“Christian, you can doanythingwhen the joy of the Lord is within you! Like a roe, or a young hart, you leap over mountains and make them as stepping stones across the brook! The heaviest tempest that can lower over you cannot chill or dismay your courage, for your strong wings pierce it and mount above it all into the clear blue sky of fellowship with your God! ”—Volume 57, Sermon #3272

“’ Untoyou is preached the forgiveness of sins.’ My dear Friend, it is no small privilege to be where the message of the forgiveness of sins can yet be heard. Unto you is preached the forgiveness of sins, but not to the tens of thousands and millions who have gone the way of all flesh, unpar
doned and unsaved! How is it that you are spared?”—Volume 56, Sermon #3191

“We are all proud. Pride can hide under a beggar’s rags as well as under an alderman’s robes. Pride is a weed that will grow on a dunghill as well as in a palace garden, but it ought never to be allowed to grow in the heart of a Christian!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3194
“Brothers and Sisters, we are generally too fast with our tongues when anybody accuses us! I am afraid we are not always so quick to defend our Master as we are to defend ourselves.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3327

“I hope none of you, my brethren, are under the idea that if you are unconverted and join a church, that will help you. Oh, how I have wasted my labor here if I have led any of you to believe that! I charge you, if you are not a friend of Christ, not to come among his friends or declare yourself to be one by a lying profession!...A man may be damned fast enough without being a hypocrite! What need of that? Join yourselves to God’s people when you have joined yourselves to Christ—but not till then.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3162

“Yes, let the canons of law be altered and Acts of Parliament be burned in the fire, but let the Word of God stand fast forever! If any man preaches any other Gospel than that we have received, instead of saying, ‘No doubt he is an excellent, but a mistaken man,’ let us say with Paul, ‘Let him be accursed!’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3263

“The habit of daily prayer must be maintained. It is well to have regular hours of devotion and to resort to the same place for prayer, as far as possible. Still, the spirit of prayer is better than the habit of prayer. It is better to be able to pray at all times than to make it a rule to pray at certain times and seasons.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3186

“Under the old dispensation, instrumental music seemed more congruous than it does now with the spiritual worship into which we have been introduced. If we must ever have instrumental music in our worship, let it be the same—the very same as David had. And then I, for one, though I should still think it we going back to the old dispensation long since superseded, would put up with it!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3290

“If any man can say, ‘I am sure of Heaven, and I am proud of it,’ he may take my word for it that he is secure of Hell! If your religion puffs you up, puff your religion away, for it is not worth a puff!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3235
“There are no set times for prayer—one hour is as good as any other for coming to the Throne of Grace. Whenever the Spirit of God inclines the heart to pray, the ear of God is open to hear our supplications—and the mouth of God is open to grant us gracious answers of peace!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3182

“Let the word, ‘compromise,’ with regard to evil never even cross your thoughts! Our Lord and Master made no compromises. He told us that it would be better to pluck out our right eye and cut off our right hand rather than that they should cause us to offend. Give your heart so fully up to Jesus, my Beloved Brothers and Sisters, that you are altogether separated from this world! Let the world know whereyou are, whatyou are and take care that youknow where it is and what it is! Be not, I pray you, conformed to this world!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3188

“ Love is the chief endowment for a pastor.You mustlove Christ if you mean to serve Him in the capacity of pastors.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3211

“It is one of the most beautiful exhibitions of a Christian spirit when a Christian man admires the gifts and graces of others more than he admires his own! When, instead of thinking of anything in which he excels others, he delights in those things in which they excel him.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3226

“Every child of God is born-again with a tear in his or her eyes. Dry-eyed faith is not the faith of God’s elect. He who rejoices in Christ, at the same time mourns for sin! Repentance is joined to faith by loving bonds, as the Siamese twins were united in one.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3325

“Father, those boys of yours are not yet what you could wish, but they must feel your godly example. Perhaps when you lie beneath the sod, they will recollect what you used to be. Fill the house with the odor of true religion! Fill the parlor and the drawing room, the bedchamber and the kitchen with hallowed conversation! I say again, not with mere talk and Pharisaic pretense, but with real holy living and true godly communion! And depend upon it, you are doing for your children and your servants the best thing in your power to do! Give them teaching, give them warning and entreaty, but still, the actual perfuming with godliness must arise from your own holy living—it must be begotten of the ointment poured on Jesus’ feet!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3174

“When the trumpet of the Resurrection sounds, the sea must give up her dead and myriads will stand upon the waves, as on a sea of glass, to be judged!... God has but to speak it, and though the bodies may have been devoured by fish, or dissolved into their separate atoms by the perpetual beating of the surf, yet when He speaks it, frames shall be refashioned, life shall come back at His call and our dead men shall live, and in their flesh shall they see God, who, before they died, had learned to say, ‘I know that my Redeemer lives.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3291

“Do you ask, ‘What is there that will bring Christ to a Church and keep Him there?’ I reply, in a word, prayer. There is no force in nature that is equal to the power of prayer! The law of gravitation holds the planets in their orbits and links the sun to all the spheres that circle round Him, but prayer has before now made gravitation, itself, cease to exert its energy. ‘Sun, stand you still upon Gibeon,’ said Joshua—who had first spoken to the Lord about the matter—‘and you, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon’—and sun and moon stood still!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3146

“As Jesus is the Forerunner to Heaven, rest assured that those for whom He is the Forerunner will in due time follow Him there.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3102

“Some young converts imagine that as soon as they believe in Christ and find peace with God, they will be perfect and have no more sin within them. Such an erroneous idea will only prepare them for a great disappointment, for conversion is not the end of the battle with sin—it is only the beginning of that battle. From the moment that a man believes in Jesus, and is thereby saved, hebeginshis life-long struggle against his in- bred sins.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3115

“I am afraid some Christians do not want to know too much of Christ’s commands. There might be some very awkward ones and they do not want to attend to some of them. They are very pleased if they can get some minister to say that some of Christ’s commands are non-essential and unimportant! Ah, dear Friends, he is a traitor to his Master if he dares to say that anything that Christ says is unimportant!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3235

“He is the worthy receiver under the Gospel who comes feeling his unworthiness and accepts the Gospel provision as a gift of Divine Grace—but he who will not come because he thinks the Gospel unworthy of him, shows himself to be unworthy of it!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3328
“Obedience to the will of God is the pathway to perpetual honor and everlasting joy!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3266

“The more pleading with God that there is, the more power will there be in pleading with men, for the Holy Spirit will come upon us while we are pleading and so we shall be fitted and qualified to do the work to which we are called of God!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3178“There is not one joy in our best and happiest time but comes from God. In our choicest moments, when we are most like our Lord and most free from the encumbrances of the earth, never, even then, have we anything good that is to be ascribed to ourselves! If it be good, it all comes from God.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3213

“‘Look,’ says the scholar, as he points to the volumes on his shelves, ‘I have searched through all these and all the learning that is there is mine.’ ‘Ah,’ says Death, as he smites him with his cold hand, ‘who can tell the difference between the skull of the learned and the skull of the ignorant when the worm has emptied them both?’ But the Christian, when he can point upwards and say, ‘I love my Savior,’ has a possession which is surely his forever! Death may come, and willcome, even to him, but all that Death can do is open the door to admit the Christian into still fuller enjoyment of that which was already his!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3185

“O Beloved, if you recall your own condition as sinners, you will love those who are still ‘in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity,’and your great desire will be to bring them to Jesus even as you, yourself, were brought to Him.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3194

“The sea is the Lord’s and, therefore, I may confess my sin to Him when I am out on the oceanand He will hear me, for He is there! I may weep the tear of penitence and He will see me, for God is there! Out at sea I may cry, ‘My Father,’ and He will hear His child! Brother, you may find Jesus at sea for He was at home on the waves and a companion of seafaring men! The Lake of Galilee was familiar with His voice and saw His answer to the prayer, ‘Lord, save me, or I perish!’ The sea around you waits to hear you pray and to see God’s wonders on the deep!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3291

“That God rules man as a builder rules his stones and timber, is the idea of idiots, but that He leaves them men, in full possession of their freedom, and yet achieves the purposes of His Grace is the Truth of God! He has mysterious cords of love and bands of a man with which to draw men—they are compelled to come in, but yet ‘the people willingly offer themselves.’ It is a paradox, and so is every Truth of God, if we are willing to see it all. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is high, I cannot attain unto it and, therefore, I accept it as all the more clearly in harmony with the attributes of Him whose ways are past finding out.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3328

“It is written that He was ‘seen of angels,’ and it must have been with awe and wonder that they gazed upon Him from the manger to the tomb! We read, also, ‘which things the angels desire to look into’—and there must have been many mysteries which even their lofty intelligence could not comprehend until He explained it to them! They delight to praise and worship Him! And they help to swell the mighty chorus of adoring homage that is always ascending to Him.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3180

“As we shall get near the spirit-world and the soul will begin to strip off her material garment to enter on a new form of life, how shall we feel as we enter the unknown world? Shall we cry out, ‘It is a Spirit!’ as we salute the first who meets us? It may be so, but then a sweet voice will destroy death’s terror, end all our alarms and this shall be its utterance, ‘It is I; be not afraid.’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3128

“If we have looked sad for a while, let us now be brightened by thoughts of Christ! At any rate, let us not be satisfied until we have shaken off this lethargy and misery, and have once again come into the proper and healthy state in which a child of God should always be found, namely, a state of spiritual joy!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3272

“The Church of God, then, when Christ receives her as His bride, will be dressed in the imputed righteousness which comes to her by faith! It is the righteousness which Jesus Christ spent His life to work out, the righteousness which never had a stain upon it, for Jesus Christ is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. Oh, blessed be God for this glorious fact that Jesus Christ will have a Church of this kind forever! This also is one of ‘the true sayings of God.’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3144

“Our business, [preachers] since the Spirit of God is upon us, is not to teach politics, save only in so far as these immediately touch the Kingdom of Christ, and there the Gospel is the best weapon. Nor is it our business to be preaching mere morals and rules of duty—our ethics must be drawn from the Cross—and begin and end there! ”—Volume 57, Sermon #3237

“When God’s servants go after sinners, sinners come after Christ! That is God’s usual rule. ‘By the foolishness of preaching,’ which there includes all sorts of Christian teaching, the Lord ordains to save them that believe.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3328
“All Believers are of the true Israel. Abraham was the father of the faithful. The faithful, or the believing, are, therefore, Abraham’s seed according to the promise!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3164

“Love to Him will breed a love for all His sheep and your love for them will give you power over them.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3211“Well, just as all right-minded people would be sure to think of Christ when under the olive groves, so ought we to compel men, whether they are right-minded or not, to think of the Lord Jesus Christ when they come into association with ourselves! Not because we are always talking about religion, but because we are always practicingit.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3176

“Men go astray from God by nature, but they only return to God through Grace. ”—Volume 55, Sermon #3148
“Why is it that the Word of God is Christ’s sword? Surely it is because that Word tells us about Him—He is the text of which the Bible is the sermon!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3292

“When one who professes to be a Christian lives as worldings live, there is grave reason to fear that he is a worldling, notwithstanding his profession! If we are to know him by his fruits, which is our Lord’s Infallible test, how can we imagine that he is a partaker of the Divine Life when he acts as he does? Inconsistency of life casts a very serious doubt upon many who call themselves the children of God.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3226

“I know that we are trusting in Jesus if we are saved, but do we trust Him as He deserves to be trusted? He has given us the most convincing proof of His love that can possibly be conceived—how is it that we do not always rest in His love, feel quite confident about that love, lean our whole weight upon that love and live in the full conviction that that love is altogether our own?”—Volume 54, Sermon #3092

“There is, certainly, enough in the Gospel for any one man, enough to fill any one life, to absorb all our thought, emotion, desire and energy—yes, infinitely more than the most experienced Christian and the most intelligent teacher will ever be able to bring forth!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3237

“Sometimes, when I have been preaching, I have had this thought in my mind, ‘I will not tell my Hearers that God can save the greatest sinners because He saved John Bunyan and John Newton, but I will tell them that He can save all other sinners because He saved me.’ When I have had that thought uppermost in my mind, I have found that I could preach with great tenderness to those who were out of the way.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3194

“Long before the Redemption price had been paid, I doubt not that Christ was honored by the saints in Heaven, for they knew that their coming there was on the same ground and footing as the saints do now! I believe, therefore, that long before He lived and died on earth, they cast their crowns at His feet and said, “You are worthy.””—Volume 58, Sermon #3329

“We will never cease to speak of the precious blood of Jesus! There are certain people who cannot bear to hear it mentioned, but a bloodless theology is a lifeless theology, and a ministry that can do without mentioning the blood of Christ has no power to bless the sons and daughters of men.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3198

“Satan rides on the back of carnal care and so obtains entrance into the soul. If he can distract our minds from the peace of faith by temporal cares, he will get an advantage over us.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3273

“There has been spreading in this country and in other lands, also, the idea of universal salvation—and mark you, wherever that doctrine spreads, vice must and will spread as the natural and inevitable consequence! When men are taught to believe in ultimate universal salvation, their immediate and legitimate inference is, ‘Then we may live as we like and all will be right in the end.’ And they will live as they like, but all will not be right in the end! They are ambassadors of the devil who teach that lying doctrine—and they will have to answer for it at the Judgment Bar of God.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3111

“For a man to lead others like himself into temptation is bad enough—but to sow the vile seed of vice in hearts that are as yet untainted by any gross, actual sin [the children] is a hideous piece of wickedness!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3237

“A man may think he has an experience of his own emptiness—no, he may truly possess it—but if it does not drive him to Christ, if he does not come and rest on the Lord Jesus, all his experiences are of no saving value! The foundation of the soul’s salvation is not experience of any or every kind, but the finished work, the meritorious blood and righteousness of our Lord and Savior!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3331

“May the Lord teach us—thundering at us, if necessary—what sin means! May He teach it to us so that the lesson shall be burned into our souls and we shall never forget it! ”—Volume 58, Sermon #3293

“There is no way for us to get a revival-fire but from God, Himself. If anybody can “get up a revival,” as it has been said that they do, in any other way, it is not worth having! The only kind of revival that is worth having is that which has come down from God, not that which has been got up by men.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3136
“We have in all our congregations a certain number of hearers who make great professions for a time, but afterwards go back and leave us. The reason very often being that the preaching has sifted them out from the wheat and proved that they are only chaff. I know that some of you feel very uncomfortable when I am preaching the Doctrine of Election or any of the other great Doctrines of Sovereign Grace. I am very sorry for any of you who cannot appreciate those glorious Truths of God in which my soul delights itself to the fullest—and I would earnestly and solemnly urge you to examine yourselves to see whether you have ever had Divine Grace in your hearts at all if you do not love to hear the Doctrines of Grace preached!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3210

“And if there are any degrees in Glory, you who want the high ones may have them. The lowest degree that I can perceive in Scripture is, “that they may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My Glory”—and that lowest degree is as high as my most vivid imagination can carry me!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3129

“If at any time, through infirmity or weakness, I should teach you anything which is contrary to this Book, cast it from you! Hurl it away as chaff is driven from the wheat—if it is mine and not my Master’s, cast it away! Though you love me, though I may have been the means of your conversion to God, think no more of what I say than of the very strangers in the street if it is not consistent with the teachings of the Most High! Our guide is His written Word, let us keep to this.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3263

“It fills my soul with pleasure to think that I am sent to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ to poor lost souls! There is no joy like it, except that of seeing them actually saved!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3328
“That work which filled the Savior’s heart and hands is noble work for us. It were worth living for and worth dying for to be the instruments in the Spirit’s hands of bringing souls into a state of Grace!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3089

“Brothers and Sisters, I say, and I am afraid I may well say it with tears, that much of our conversation would not do for God to hear! And though He does hear it, yet it would not do for Him to write a Book of Remembrance concerning it, for it would be far better that it should be blotted out.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3116

“When God gives you a little light, prize it. Thank Him for it and ask for more. If you have got starlight, ask for moonlight. When you have got moonlight, do not sit down and weep because it is only moonlight, but ask Him for more, and He will give you sunlight, and when you have got that, be grateful, and He will give you yet more! He will make your day to be as the light of seven days, and the days of your mourning shall be ended.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3195

“To show you that salvation is not by human merit, God was pleased to cast it entirely upon covenant arrangements. In that Covenant made between Himself and His Son, there was not a word said about our actions having any merit in them! We were regarded as though we were not, except that we stood in Christ and we were only so far parties to the Covenant as we were in the loins of Christ on that august day. We were considered to be the seed of the Lord Jesus Christ, the children of His care, the members of His own body.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3293

“If you realized your true condition in God’s sight, you would find time for prayer somehow or other, for you would feel that you must pray! It never occurred to Peter, as he was beginning to sink, that he had no time for prayer. He felt that he must pray—his sense of danger forced him to cry to Christ, ‘Lord, save me.’ And if you feel as you should feel, your sense of need will drive you to prayer and you will never again say, ‘I have no time for prayer.’ It is not a matter of timeso much as a matter ofheart—if you have the heart to pray, you will find the time.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3186

“If Nature’s fingers could nimbly spin a garment that should cover human nakedness, it would be of no use. All that Nature spins, God must unravel before a soul can be clothed in the righteousness of Christ! It is not your doings, Man—it is Christ’s doings that must save you! Not your tears, but Christ’s blood! Not your feelings, not anything in you or from you! Listen, you who have an ear to hear it—‘Salvation is of the Lord’—from first to last!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3177

“It is not enough to know aboutChrist, it is knowing Christ Himselfthat alone saves the soul!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3331

“It was the complaint of Jeremiah, ‘Even the sea monsters draw out the breast. They give suck to their young ones: the daughter of my people is become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness.’ Let not such a charge lie against any one of us! Our design and objective should be that our children, while they are yet children, should be brought to Christ! And I ask those dear Brothers and Sisters here present who love the Lord not to doubt about the conversion of their little ones, but to seek it at once with all their hearts!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3237

“When we are railed at by graceless men and they slander us, we may say to ourselves, ‘Well, well, if they did but know us altogether and could see our hearts, they could perhaps have said something worse against us—so we will be well content to bear this.’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3164 “If you have faith to bring your weakness before God with the sense of a child towards Him, you surely must prevail. Come, them, you timid trembling children of your Father who is in Heaven, use this plea—‘Will You break a leaf that is driven to and fro?’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3269

“Now, remember, you will never know the fullness of Christ until you know the emptiness of everything else but Christ!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3073

“Oh, how delightful this Bible looks to me when I see the blood of Christ sprinkled upon it! Every leaf would have flashed with Sinai’s lightning and every verse would have rolled with the thunders of Horeb if it had not been for Calvary’s Cross! But now, as you look, you see on every page your Savior’s precious blood! He loved you and gave Himself for you, and now you who are sprinkled with that blood and have by faith rested in Him, can take that precious Book and find it to be green pastures and still waters to your souls!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3293

“It will be of no use to you that you were regular in your private prayers, that you were good to the poor, that you were generous to the Church, that you were constantly in your attendance upon the outward means of Grace. I say, as I said before, that all these are but a painted pageantry for your soul to go to Hell in, unless you have Christ! You may as surely go down to the Pit by the religious road as by the irreligious. If you have not Christ, you have not salvation, whatever else you may have.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3209

“Every sinner is guilty of high treason against the majesty of Heaven, for he does, as far as he can, snatch from God’s hand the scepter of Sovereignty and pluck from His brow the crown of universal dominion!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3148

“To call a horse an angel will not make him an angel. And to call a man a Christian will not make him a Christian. You may label, enroll, number the unsaved as much as you like, but you will not make even one of them a Christian by that process any more than putting the name, ‘olive tree,’ on a fig tree will change its nature and make it produce olives!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3226

“You may hold all the creed and be orthodox—and then be no better than the devil, for I suppose that the devil is a very sound theologian. He surely knows the Truth. He believes and trembles! But you may know it and nottremble—and so you may fall short of one virtue which even the devil possesses!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3331

“I always think, when I come away from the deathbed of a child of God, that I have added to my previous stack of facts proving the faithfulness of my God! I would believe the Bible without a single fact to back it up, but there is a vast quantity of external as well as internal evidence of the Truth of the Scriptures. I would believe my God if He never gave me anything to see with my eyes or to hear with my ears. His own Word should be enough for me, but these blessed sounds and scenes, these cheering sights and holy triumphs make it not merely a matter of faith to believe the Gospel, but also a matter of common sense. It seems impossible to doubt when you see the evident power there is about true godliness and the majestic might that dwells in faith to strengthen the weak against the last grim foe.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3144

“Have you a longing in your soul to be the means of bringing others to Christ? In order to accomplish this, it is imperatively necessary that you should have a knowledge of Jesus! Let it be a heart knowledge. You tell sometimes your children to learn their lessons by heart. You cannot learn Christ in any other way! Christ cannot be learned in the head. Only love can learn love—and Christ is Love incarnate! It is by loving Him and communing with Him that you will get to understand Him. You must learn Him by heart. ”—Volume 54, Sermon #3085

“I shall never be able to outrun the goodness and mercy of my God! I shall always have closely attendant upon me His goodness to supply my needs and His mercy to forgive my sins.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3199
“Holy Scripture gives you a wardrobe full of choice garments and they all smell of myrrh and aloe and cassia because Christ has worn them!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3292
“Think much of little mercies since you deserve none. Do not throw away these pearls because they are not the greatest that were ever found, but keep them, thank God for them, and then soon He will send you the best treasures from the treasury of His Grace.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3195

“And let me tell you, dear Reader, that your repentance, if it does not lead you to Christ, will need to be repented of! And your faith, if it is not based upon His atoning Sacrifice, is a faith that is not the faith of God’s elect! And all your convictions of sin—all the visions that have scared you, all the fears that have haunted you—will only be a prelude to something worse unless you get Christ!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3209

“But what is the Scripture’s great theme? Is it not, first and foremost, concerning Christ Jesus? Take this Book and distil it into one word—and that one word will be Jesus! The Book, itself, is but the body of Christ and we may look upon all its pages as the swaddling bands of the infant Savior, for if we unroll the Scripture, we come upon Jesus Christ Himself.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3272
“You know something of Him. Oh, may God give the Grace to add to your knowledge, trust, and then shall you have true saving faith!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3331

“I have noticed that whenever there is a revival in the Church, there is almost certain to be a hypocrite hidden away among the converts. If you have a garden, you must have noticed that the snails come out after rain—and after a revival, slimy hypocrites are pretty sure to appear—but what if they do? The Lord Jesus Christ did not leave off preaching because He knew that there was a Judas among His Apostles! And if we should have a Judas in our ranks, should that make us give up our work for Christ? No! But if there are in our midst some people who are good for nothing, let us try all the more to find out those who will be good for something.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3136

“Poor Mariner, give up clinging to that wreck on the rocks! Poor Sinner, give up clinging to your works and to your sins! There is room in the Gospel lifeboat for you and all who will put themselves under the care of the great Captain of Salvation, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3221

“Slander is no uncommon injury for the children of God to bear. That which false tongues glibly utter, ungenerous minds easily credit—and a pure conscience is exquisitely sensitive…The longest trees cast the longest shadows and those who stand the highest are often said by men of the world to be the most base. God was slandered in Paradise—why should we expect to escape being slandered in the midst of this world of sinners?”—Volume 57, Sermon #3239

“This is the Gospel that we preach—that whoever believes in Jesus Christ is reconciled to God through the death of His Son. Peace is possible! O blessed news! Blessed are the people that know this joyful sound! Bright should be the eyes of those who see the feet of the messengers that bring the glad tidings of peace possible between man and God!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3148

“What is there for any man to preach about if he leaves Jesus Christ out of his sermon? A discourse without Christ in it is delusion and a sham—a mere playing with immortal souls, a mockery both of God and man!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3292

“Oh, it is the happiest and most blessed condition to lie passive in God’s handsand know no will but His—to feel a self-annihilation in which self is not destroyed but is absorbed into God so that we delight in the inner man in the will of God and always say, ‘Father, Your will be done.’ This is a hard lesson—far easier to preach about than to practice—and a great deal easier to think of when you have learned it than to carry it out.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3164

“Outspoken Truths of God makes half the world angry! The Light of God blinds their eyes! ”—Volume 56, Sermon #3191
“I tell you this—faith comes by hearing and by hearing the Word of God—and when to these is added earnest seeking, you shall not be long without finding Him!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3331

“I have noticed, when the showers are falling, that you who try to keep a few pots of flowers in this smoky London, set them out to get the benefit of the rain. And you not only put out the large plants, but you put out the little ones, too, so that the precious drops may fall on them. Let your little children, like the little pots of flowers, be put under the gracious showers of the sanctuary and who knows how largely God my bless them? If children cannot understand all that is said, I think that where the preaching is what it should be, even a small child will remember something and perhaps understand it better, by-and-by.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3082

“Let us imitate Puritan theology in its soundness and Puritan living in its holiness, but not in its gloom—if, indeed, it was gloomy, which I very much question.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3103

“I would not alter my preaching in order to retain any individual, however eminent or influential he might be. Others may fish for him if they like, but I shall not. My business is to declare my Master’s message exactly as He has revealed it to me in His Word and by His Spirit!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3210

“Surely there is no greater comfort under Heaven than a sense of sin forgiven and of reconciliation to God by the death of His Son! ”—Volume 56, Sermon #3227

“We generally exhaust our thoughts upon the second cause and vent our indignation upon the framer of mischief. We are angry with the person who has caused us our loss, or put us to shame, instead of knowing that God uses even the wicked to chastise His people!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3239

“The best of men cannot live upon themselves. Our hearts are like the fire in the Interpreter’s house which the enemy tried to quench, but blazed the more because a man stood behind the wall and fed the flame from a vessel of oil in his hands. His is a secret and mysterious power—the work of the Holy Spirit—who ‘works in us to will and do of God’s good pleasure.’ In ourselves we are as weak as we can be, and left to ourselves would soon fall into some sin.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3270

“That little mound outside Jerusalem’s gate explains your very existence! The world itself was created that Christ might die on Calvary! This earth was to be a sort of stage upon which Christ was to take the principal part in the greatest drama that the whole universe has ever witnessed! The world was made by Him and for Him—and it will remain until His great purpose of love and mercy is fully accomplished!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3180

“Where God really justifies, He really sanctifies, too! And where there is a remission of sin, there is also the forsaking of it. Where God has blotted out transgression, He also removes the love of it, and makes us seek after holiness and walk in the ways of the Lord.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3332

“My Brothers, learn the art of loving men to Christ! We are drawn towards those who love us and when the most callous feel “that man loves us,” they are drawn to you at once—and as you are nearer to the Savior than they are—you are drawing them in the right direction.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3211

“Some of you profess to be Christians, and yet you have never come forward to avow it! You have been afraid to unite yourselves with the Christian Church! Your Master bids you confess Him. The mode of confession which He prescribes is that you be baptized in His name—and yet, though He has saved you, you stand back and are disobedient.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3195

“I hope that there is never a Sunday but what I teach this one Doctrine and, until this tongue is silent in the grave, I shall know no other Gospel than just this—Trust Christ and you shall live! The bloody Sacrifice of Calvary is the only hope of sinners! Look there and you shall find the Star of Peace guiding you to everlasting day! But turn your backs upon Christ and you have turned your back upon Heaven—you have courted destruction, you have sealed your doom! It is by the sprinkling of the blood, then, that we are saved.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3293

“When one of our dear friends, who has lately gone to Heaven, was very ill, one of his sons prayed with him. He began in a very proper way, ‘Almighty Father, Maker of Heaven and earth, our Creator’—but his sick father stopped him and said, ‘My dear boy, I am a poor sinner and I need God’s mercy. Say, ‘Lord, save him.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3186
“The world has an eagle’s eye for a Christian’s faults! It tries to see faults where there are none—and where there are small faults, it is sure to magnify them! For my part, I am very glad it is so, and I say, let the world watch us—it will help us to be the more exact in our conduct. If we are ashamed to be seen anywhere, it must be because we have good reason to be ashamed! Let us endeavor to live so that we need not be ashamed.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3188

“Christians are not all thought and all emotion—they are practical men and women—and seek to work for God. But did any of us ever do a good work in our own strength? We have done many works in our own strength, but were they good for anything? The Savior shall decide that question. ‘Without Me you can do nothing,’ He says. You can bring forth fruit without Him, but your fruits are as the vines of Sodom and of the fields of Gomorrah. Only that is right which comes from Him. When He blesses us, our actions done for Him are accepted through Him.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3213

“If you have lost a dear friend, heal your sorrow by giving yourself more earnestly than ever to God’s cause and to the propagation of ‘the Truth of God as it is in Jesus.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3116
“The discerning of the hand of God [in our afflictions] is a sweet lesson in the school of experience.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3239
“Christ has gathered some of His choicest clusters from the valley of poverty. Many eminent saints have never owned a foot of land, but lived upon their weekly wage and found scant fare at that.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3319

“Certain courses of action are the very reverse of casting all your care upon God, and one is indifference. Whatever virtue there may be in stoicism, it is unknown to the true child of God. ‘I don’t care,’ may be an appropriate expression for an atheist to use, but it is not suitable for a Christian!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3273

“There are some of you who will find in me a swift witness against you at the bar of God! If you should say that you never heard the Gospel, I will testify that you have heard it plainly and faithfully declared time after time. I have not preached as I wish I could, but you have always been able to understand my message! I have not sought to find gaudy words and polished periods with which I might tickle your ears, but in God’s name, I have told you that unless you repent and believe, you shall surely perish! And I have preached to you the love of Jesus and pointed you to His wounds and bid you look unto Him and live.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3221
“Perhaps you are only a poor servant, or a humble working man living and laboring in obscurity—or possibly a young child or a maiden scarcely known beyond your own family circle, yet believe me—when you see the Lord Jesus Christ in His beauty, as He is revealed to you by the light of the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ is glorified!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3127

“Now, you need not ask tonight whether you are God’s elect. I ask another question—Do you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? If you do, you are His elect—if you do not, the question is not to be decided by us yet. If you are God’s chosen ones, you will know it by your trusting in Jesus. Simple as that trust is, it is the Infallible proof of election! God never sets the brand of faith upon a soul whom Christ had not bought with His blood. And if you believe, all eternity is yours! Your name is in God’s Book, you are a favored one of Heaven, the Divine decrees all point to you—go your way and rejoice!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3191

“Every soul saved by Grace, every soul brought home to Glory is the result and the reward of almighty labor. He who spoke and it was done in the making of the material world made not His Church so easily. It was with His word that He made this world, but it was the Incarnate Word that was necessary to the new creation! No blood needed to be spilt for the making of this earth in all its pristine beauty and glory, but the new heavens and the new earth could be cemented by nothing less than the product of almighty suffering.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3294

“Is there anything in the world that is worthy to be compared with the incalculable mercy of forgiven sin? What if I am poor? Yet I am forgiven! What if I am sickly? Yet I am forgiven! What if I shall soon die? Yet I am forgiven! Our sin being forgiven, the very sting of death is drawn and, therefore, we can sing, ‘Thanks be to God, which gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3227

“You, working man, are the only one on your street who comes to the House of God—well, mind that you come boldly—be not ashamed of being different! And when, in your workshop, you hear the cursing and reviling of the wicked, let them know whose colors you wear and who is your King. But be careful that your life is so consistent that they cannot pick holes in it—and then you need not mind being a speckled bird among them, as Noah was in his generation!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3196

“Whenever I go to a bank with a check, I pass it to the clerk at the counter, take up the cash he gives me and go about my business. That is how I like to pray. I take to the Lord one of His promises and I say to Him, “Lord, I believe Your promise and I believe that You will fulfill it to me.”And then I go my way knowing that I have the answer to my petition, or that it will come in due time.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3144

“I had never known the loathsomeness there was in my heart if the spade of tribulation had not turned over the green sods of my profession and made me see therein holes and places where loathsome things did creep and crawl within.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3239

“It is a pity when Truth has to be extracted from us with as much difficulty as a decayed tooth. That is the best wine which flows most freely from the grape and that is the best testimony which a man bears with cheerful spirit because he values the Truth in his own soul, and would have others prize it too!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3165

“The means may change, but the God of the means changes not! He will supply your needs. Stand in your proper place, do your duty, obey His will and He will not fail you, but bring you safely to the place where fears shall never come to you anymore.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3098
“What would be the worth of the opinions of all the men in the world as to the state of a soul before God?”—Volume 55, Sermon #3137

“If you really love the sheep, you will be ready to spend your life for them or even to lay it down for their sakes. Love, then, I take to be the chief endowment of the pastor—although having that, I trust you will not fall short in any other respect but be thoroughly furnished unto every good work.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3211

“There are many people who would like Jesus to save them, but when? Ah, that is the point which they have not settled yet. A young man says, ‘I should like Christ to save me when I grow older, when I have seen a little more of life.’ You mean when you have seen a great deal more of death, for that is all you will see in the world—there is no real life except that which is in Christ Jesus!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3186

“Jesus Christ and Him Crucified should be the Alpha and the Omega of every sermon! Even if the preacher is not preaching Christ directly, he ought to be preaching Him indirectly, proclaiming the Truths of God in such a way that it shall eitherdrawthe sinner or else drivehim to the heart of Christ!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3292

“Possibly, if an angel were to take my place here next Lord’s-Day, there would be many of you who would be very pleased with the change. But I think by the time two or three Sabbaths had passed, you would want your old friend back again, because you would feel that there was, after all, a warmth of brotherhood within the human being’s breast which you could never expect to find in cherubim or seraphim!”—Volume 55, Sermon “This is the sum and substance of the matter—if our character cannot endure the scrutiny of those who are around us in our home, how can we hope to stand at the bar of God when all that we have done shall be published before the assembled universe?”—Volume 56, Sermon #3196

“If we are not fruitful to His praise, how shall we excuse ourselves? Where shall we hide our guilty heads? Shall yonder sea suffice to lend us briny tears wherewith to weep over our ingratitude?”—Volume 58, Sermon #3319

“Those individuals who try to caricature our doctrinal sentiments are in the habit of saying that we teach that God has chosen a few to be saved and left the great majority of mankind to perish. They know that we have never said any such thing! And they also know that no man of any standing in our denomination has ever said any such a thing. On the contrary, we believe that God has ordained a countless host, so numerous that no man can number it, who shall be everlastingly saved! And we think we have some warrant for believing that the number of the saved will vastly exceed the number of the lost, that in all things Christ may have the preeminence.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3221

“If the Lord did not look after us in our best days, we would perish by the sunstroke of too much prosperity! And if He did not watch us in our worst days, we should be frost-killed by the cruel Arctic winds of adversity! ”—Volume 57, Sermon #3270

“I could sit at Calvary and weep, but I could not sit there without singing! It is strange, yet is it true that in the hour of our greatest grief, we soon find comfort in the place where grief reached its climax. Calvary was the very summit of sorrow for our dear Lord and Savior, yet it is the death of sorrow to His people! And the Cross, which caused Him unspeakable agony, brings consolation and joy to all who put their trust in Him!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3227

“It was my God who bled for me on Calvary, that I might live with Him forever! Oh, what consolation there is in this Truth of God, that He who was smitten instead of us, was most truly God as well as most certainly Man!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3088

“If it is a battle of your own, leave it alone! In everything else, if you want a thing done, do it yourself! But in the matter of your own character, if you need it defended, leave it alone! God will take care of it and the less you stir in that matter, the better will it be for you—and the more for God’s Glory!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3239

“People have often said that the Doctrine of Election ought not to be preached lest it should prove to be a stumbling block in the way of sinners coming to Christ, yet I can testify that we have had scores of souls brought to the Savior and added to this Church through sermons upon Election, Predestination and those other great Truths of God in which many of us believe and rejoice!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3292

“He [Noah] fashioned his life by the will of God, not by the will of his fellow men, nor by his own will and, Beloved, this is the way for us to be righteous before God, when He brings us, by His Grace, to desire to live according to His will and to His praise and glory! I fear that many professors go blundering on, not stopping to pray, ‘Lord, show us what You will have us do.’ Noah did not act thus—he was righteous before God, righteous with respect to God, righteous in God’s sight!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3196

“There was a crest and motto which some of the old Reformers used to use, and which I commend to any of you who are under this trial of slander. It was an anvil with a number of hammers, all broken, lying around. And this was the motto when translated, “ The anvil breaks many hammers.” And how does it do this?...The anvil simply endures the blows—just keeps its place and lets the hammers fall, fall, fall until they are broken upon their handles! And this is exactly what the Savior did. They, the accusers, were the hammers, He was the anvil. And who shall say that the anvil did not break the hammers in pieces, that the silence of the Savior was not far more eloquent than all the clamor of the evil multitude?

‘He held His peace,’ it is said of Him.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3327

“The worst of human nature is that though it cannot lift a finger for its own salvation, it thinks it can do it all—and though its only place is the place of death and it is a mercy when it comes to burial, yet that same human nature is so proud that it would, if it could, be its own redeemer!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3101

“You cannot put your finger upon a single passage of Scripture which proves that you will be lost, so do not believe that it must be so till you have it from God’s own mouth! Never imagine that you are excluded from His pardoning mercy till He, Himself says that you are—and He has never said that yet.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3111

“I am persuaded, from my own experience, that the more I live upon God, alone, the more I truly live and the less I know of anything like power, or wisdom, or anything of the sort pertaining to myself, the better! The more I decrease and He increases, the more do I grow up in the Lord in all things. May we, then, each one of us, adopt this sweet motto and always say, All my springs which are within me, as well as those of which I drink, are in my God.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3213
“We have heard men say that children are not born in sin, nor shapen in iniquity, but that they have inherent Grace—but we have never yet met with the man who has found so wonderful a child!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3081

“It is something very delightful to consider that Father, Son and Spirit all cooperate to give us comfort. I can understand their cooperating to make the world. I can understand their cooperation in the salvation of a soul. But I am astonished at this same united action in so comparatively small a matter as the comfort of Believers! Yet the Holy Three seem to think it a great matter that Believers should be happy, or they would not work together to cheer disconsolate spirits.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3189

“Christ on the Cross is a yet fuller type of what man would have become had sin been let alone. It brings manhood ever lower and lower until it plucks his very life out of him and lays him dead beneath the clods of the valley. Sin’s only throne is a mock one! Its only crown is a painful one and its only reward is sorrow and shame. In Jesus, mocked by the soldiers, we see what sin had brought our race to and all that sin could do for us.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3138

“Mercies and miseries alike operate for the growth of faith! Some of us have been called upon to trust God on a large scale and that necessity has been a great help towards fruit-bearing. The more troubles we have, the more is our vine dug about—and the more nourishment is laid to its roots. If faith does not ripen under trial, when will it ripen? Our afflictions fertilize the soil wherein faith may grow.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3319

“You have already had the righteousness of Christ imputed to you, so may the Spirit of God impart that righteousness to you that you may live unto God, and before God, fearless and careless of what men may say against you so long as you are right in the sight of the Most High! May the Lord graciously give us such a righteousness as this! And, Beloved, we must have it, we must have it, for without holiness shall no man see the Lord! Our own righteousness can never save us—we must have the righteousness of Christ.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3196

“It is thought by some that Popery will swallow the Church of Christ just as the whale swallowed Jonah. But if it should do so, the Church would come back again as surely as Jonah was cast up upon the dry land! There is no sword fashioned that can smite the Church of God, nor will there ever be one! There will be a Church as long as there is a world—and when this world is burned up, the Church shall shine more brightly than ever—and it shall keep on shining to all eternity, and be a rest for God forever!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3294

“Oh, the misery of sinning to a child of God! Do not dream that we can ever have any pleasure in sin—the worldling may, but the Believer never can. To him it is a deadly viper that will fill his veins with burning poison!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3270

“Though our Lord Jesus Christ has only one Church, a part of its members, I believe, may be found in every denomination—but they owe not their standing to the fellowship they hold with denominations. There is one great denomination, ‘the Church of the living God,’ to which every true Believer must belong.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3093

“Let us not desire honor among men. In the Church of God the way upward is downward. He that will do the lowest work shall have the highest honor. Our Master washed His disciples’ feet and we are never more honored than when we are permitted to imitate His example.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3221

“There is no greater mockery than to call a sinner a free man. Show me a CONVICT toiling in the chain gang and call him a free man if you will! Point out to me the galley slave chained to the oar and smarting under the taskmaster’s lash whenever he pauses to draw a breath, and call him a free man if you will, but never call a sinner a free man, even in his will, so long as he is the slave of his own corruptions!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3240

“We must not think that our hope lies in what is in the sinner. I heard a man preach about the adaptation of the sinner to the Gospel and I thought he was very foolish, for what is there in the sinner but everything that is opposed to the Gospel, everything uncongenial, everything that would put the Gospel to death if it could?”—Volume 56, Sermon #3213

“If Adam had kept the Law, we would have been blessed by his keeping it. He broke it and we have been cursed through him. Now the Second Adam, Christ Jesus, has kept the Law—we are, therefore, if Believers, represented in Christ and blessed with the results of the obedience of Jesus Christ to His Father’s will. He said of old, “Lo, I come to do Your will, O God! Your Law is My delight.” He has done that will and the blessings of Grace are now freely given to the sons of men! ”—Volume 58, Sermon #3326

“Do you not think that Abel must have felt very strange when he went to Heaven? How startled the angels must have been when they saw the first soul redeemed by blood in Glory all by himself! I think they must have hushed their songs awhile to ask all about him.”—Volume 58, Sermon “And I can assure you that I never address you without feeling that it would be better for me to engage in breaking stones on the road, or in any job, however hard it might be, than to have to preach the Gospel because if I am unfaithful to the many souls committed to my charge, what must be my portion at the last? Whether you think so or not, to me it seems that every sermon involves me in most dire peril unless Divine Grace makes me faithful.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3148

“The natural man can go through the world and not see God at all. Yes, and he will even have the audacity to deny that God is there! And he may go further, still, and say that there is no God at all! David says that such a man is a fool, but the modern name for him is, ‘philosopher.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3117

“How dreary and dreadful is the state of man by nature—and how painfully conscious he is of his true condition when the Holy Spirit reveals it to him! Then is he, indeed, like a prisoner in a ‘pit wherein is no water.’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3240
“Oh, do make your households to be like flower gardens—plant no thorns and root out all ill weeds of discontent! Depend upon it, household happiness is a great means of promoting household holiness!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3103
“To be obedient to God is the surest way to be victorious over wicked men! Keep God’s Word and God will guard your head in the day of danger.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3144

“Christ is also very pleased with the fruit ofhope, and we are so circumstanced that we ought to produce much of it. The aged ought to look forward, for they cannot expect to see much more on earth. Time is short and eternity is near—how precious is a good hope through Divine Grace!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3319

“Or if the Lord calls a Sister to Himself, she is to be silent in the Church Meeting, but she belongs to the Divine Priesthood and her prayers and praises will go up with as much acceptance before God, through Jesus Christ, as if she were an eminent Divine, or the most gifted of the saints! All God’s children are priests and this is the song of all in Heaven and all on earth who are truly saved—‘He has made us kings and priests unto God, and we shall reign forever and ever.’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3266

“We may be reckoned righteous by our neighbors and friends, but if we are not washed in the precious blood of Jesus, if we are not robed in the righteousness of Christ, if our lives have not within them the evidences of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, our friends’ favorable judgment will avail us nothing when the all-seeing eyes of God beholds us as we really are! I pray with all my heart that we may, each one of us, be righteous before God even as Noah was in his generation.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3196

“If all things were made by Him and for Him, how is it possible for us to get away from the conviction that He is, indeed, God? I will not attempt to argue about the matter, but whatever others may say or do, as for me, Jesus of Nazareth is my Lord and my God—and I will love and adore, and worship Him forever and ever!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3180

“Can anyone see the slightest resemblance between the Master’s sitting down with the 12 and the “mass” of the Roman community? The original rite is lost in the superimposed ritual! Superstition has produced a sacrament where Jesus intended a fellowship.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3295

“Jesus—Man, yet God. Jesus—allied to us in ties of blood—oh, here is a reason for holy mirth! Here is Christmas all the year round! There is great joy to us in His nativity, for by it man has been taken by God into union with Himself! Jesus the Savior! Here is death to the groans of pain—an end to the moans of despair!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3272

“When a man goes to his business to make money, he goes there with all his wits about him—but frequently, when men come to prayer and Christian service—they leave their minds behind and do not act as if they were transacting real business with God. Elisha, when he said, ‘Set on the great pot,’ expected God to fill it! He was sure it would be so and he waited in all patience till dinner was ready. O Church of God, set on the pot, and the great pot, too! Say, ‘The Lord will bless us.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3187

“In our natural state we wore chains, not upon our limbs, but upon our hearts—fetters that bound us and kept us from God, from rest, from peace, from holiness—from anything like freedom of heart and conscience and will! The iron entered into our soul and there is no other slavery as terrible as that. As there is no freedom like the freedom of the spirit, so is there no slavery that is at all comparable to the bondage of the heart.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3240

“Yes, Beloved, if God did not choose the base things of this world, He would never have chosen us! If He had respect unto the countenance of men. If God were a respecter of persons, where had you and I been this day? We had never been instances of His love and mercy!”—Volume 58,“The Jesuits have held the theory that the end sanctifies the means. And so those—I was going to say diabolical beings—suppose they are glorifying God when they heap lies, pile on pile! One of the chief qualifications for a priest is to be able to tell a lie without the slightest sign of blushing—and I must give some of them credit for great proficiency in the art.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3165

“I can understand a man in business who only lives to make money, being crushed when he becomes a bankrupt. But I cannot understand your being like that, my dear Brother, if you live to glorify God in your business and in everything else! I can comprehend a worldly man saying, ‘I have nothing left on earth now that my darling is dead.’ But I cannot comprehend your saying it, my Brother or Sister, for your sins are forgiven!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3227

“When we cease to pray for blessings, God has already ceased to bless us—but when our souls pour out floods of prayer, God is certain to pour out floods of mercy.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3240
“I think that if a Christian is to grow to the full stature of a man in Christ, he must be subjected to the strong winds of trial and temptation. The dross must be separated from the gold by the fierce heat of the furnace.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3214
“Oh, it is good to be with Christ, today, for then we shall be with Him tomorrow! It is good to be with Him in the stocks, for if we can bear the reproach, we shall one day be with Him on His Throne to share the Glory!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3297

“Can there be anything much worse than indifference to the Lord Jesus Christ? He is so loving and gentle, and so tender of heart that to be indifferent to Him is to cut Him to the quick! Oh, had He been indifferent to us—when there was no other eye to pity us and no other arm to save us—if He had been indifferent to us, then, instead of meeting in this place tonight to hear of Him, we would, all of us, have been in Hell! But He was not indifferent to us, so let none of us be so cruel as to be indifferent to Him!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3138

“If you want to civilize the world, it must be by preaching the Gospel! If you want to have men well instructed as to the right and the wrong, it must be by this Divine Instruction which only God, Himself, can impart.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3326

“Sometimes I begin to wonder that I find anybody alive! At the head of such a vast congregation as this, there are so many journeys to the tomb for me to make that I feel, perhaps, more than any of you, that I live in a dying world! Standing with my foot once or twice a week on the edge of the grave and saying, “Dust to dust, and ashes to ashes,” over so many of my fellow mortals, I dare not look upon you as living men, but only as men who are soon to die! Would God that I could add of all of you that I look upon you as men who are going to the land of the living where they never die!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3079

“How blessed it is for you to live with the consciousness that you have left everything in His hands, casting your burden upon the Lord, and making it your only burden to pray to Him and serveHim all the days of your life!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3239

“We [preachers] must show in ourselves that faith in our God is a healing medicine, or man will not believe us! We shall make Christ, Himself, seem to be a pretender unless we practically prove that we have been healed by Him. Let your people see in you what comes of trusting Christ! Let them see what cheerfulness, what hopefulness, what buoyancy of spirit come to those who trust Christ and cast all their cares upon Him.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3273

“Oh, it was a blessed thing when standing at the foot of the Cross, and calling upon the name of the Lord, you could wash your mouth clear of those bitter aloes of repentance and conviction of sin with the cup of consolation—the cup of salvation! After that first bitter draught which purged the mouth so Divinely and made it ready to receive the sweetness of the Word, then it was that on one happy day, looking up and seeing the flowing of the precious blood, you perceived your mouth to be filled with honey, instead of vinegar, for you saw the vinegar transferred to Christ, and the gall and the wormwood given to Him, while you drank of the ‘wines on the lees,’ yes, ‘the wines on the lees, well refined.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3197

“I have all necessary authority! I speak according to this blessed Book, but I have none at all if I wander from it. Regard not a single syllable that any man, or even an angel from Heaven may say to you if it is not according to Scripture! But when the humblest of us speak according to God’s Word, woe be to those who reject the Truth! The Gospel has such majesty in it that it demands acceptance from all who hear it!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3148

“If, when wrestling with the Angel as Jacob did, you can come off victor, you need not be afraid to wrestle with the very devil, himself, for you will be more than a match for him through the Lord Jesus Christ!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3241

“Oh, there are times when you and I, Beloved, are obliged to keep the bridle on our tongue, lest we should murmur against God!”—Volume 58, “May you make angels envious of you if envy can ever pierce their holy minds! You can submit for Christ’s sake to sufferings which it is not possible for seraphim or cherubim to endure!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3297

“Do not tell me about your grand cathedrals with all the splendor of their architecture! The best altar in the world is a broken and a contrite heart and the truest cathedral is a soul that is rejoicing in the indwelling God! When the Holy Spirit comes and reveals Christ in the soul, there is the Altar, there is the Temple, there is the true worship for which God cares beyond all else—and that is really glorifying Christ!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3127

“Now, my young Friends, you have heard that So-and-So and So-and-So have turned back, like Pliable, to the City of Destruction—‘will you also go away?’ Will the tide also sweep you away, or will you, by the Grace of God, swim against it? There it goes, broad and deep! Upon its surface is the foam of pleasure, but in its depths is the damnation of Hell—will you also float adown it as multitudes of others are doing, or will you stem the current—‘Strong in the strength which God supplies through His eternal Son’?”—Volume 56, Sermon #3210

“Again, the Scripture is given to us to produce in us experiences, every one of which is meant to promote our joy. ‘Why,’ says one, ‘all Christian experience is not joyful!’ I grant you that, but remember that all a Christian’s experience is not Christianexperience. Christians experience a great deal because they are not such Christians as they ought to be. Beloved, there is a mourning which comes from the Spirit of God, but it is a joyous mourning, if I may use so strange a phrase.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3272

“To see the righteousness of God in having tried us. To clearly discern His wisdom, His goodness, His truth, His faithfulness in having afflicted us—and more and more to see how suited to our case is the fullness of righteousness which is treasured up in Christ Jesus—this is the Divine result from all our troubles! So may it be with us till the last wave of trouble breaks over us and we enter into everlasting rest!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3239

“May God send to this church men—and women, too—of this order—‘strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might!’ To whom the joy of the Lord shall be their strength, who shall go about their Father’s business with all their might—that might which is given them of God—and do great exploits for our greater David while He is in the wilderness and needs their aid!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3297

“‘My Beloved is mine.’ So although I may have but little, I will be satisfied with it! And though I may be so poor that the world will pass me by and never notice me, yet I will live quite content in the most humble obscurity because, ‘my Beloved is mine,’ and He is more than all the world to me.’ ‘Whom have I in Heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside You.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3185

“You are afraid of dying, you say, because of the pains of death. No, they are the pains oflife—of life struggling to continue! Death has no pain— death itself is but one gentle sigh—the fetter is broken and the spirit fled. The best moment of a Christian’s life is His last one, because it is the one that is nearest Heaven!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3332

“God denies nothing to a fervent heart when it can plead His promise and lay hold upon Him by the hand of faith.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3241

“Out of millions of God’s people living in different countries, under different forms of government and in different ages—all of them of different temperaments and constitutions—their trials must take all kinds of shapes. As in the kaleidoscope, there must be a vast variety in the tribulations of the Lord’s people and yet there never has arisen a single case in which there has not been a promise which, word for word, and letter for letter, met the case in hand!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3189
“The work of reformation is slow—you can lead men to sin as rapidly as you like, that is downhill work—but to get them to toil with you uphill toward the right is not so easy.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3089

“The more I consider the Doctrine of Substitution, the more is my soul enamored of the matchless wisdom of God which devised this system of salvation! As for a hazy atonement which atones for everybody in general, and for nobody in particular—an atonement made equally for Judas and for John—I care nothing for it. But a literal, substitutionary Sacrifice—Christ vicariously bearing the wrath of God on my behalf—this calms my conscience with regard to the righteous demands of the Law of God and satisfies the instincts of my nature which declare that, as God is just, He must exact the penalty of my guilt!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3086

“If I were to assert that this Tabernacle grew up by chance, without either architect or builder, I would be a liar as well as a fool! But I should have just as much reason to say that as to declare that the universe came into existence without the fiat of the great Creator. Men who deny the plain teaching of Scripture upon this point are indeed fools!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3274

“Christ also instituted a simple supper of bread and wine to be a memorial of His death. But the mockers have changed that ordinance into the sacrifice of the “mass,” a thing for “priests” to perform, saying that they make the bread and wine into the actual fleshand bloodof Jesus Christ! Oh, these are dreadful horrors! I sometimes marvel that the earth does not open and swallow up these mockers and that Almighty God still allows these abominations to continue! Surely the mockery of Christ by the Praetorian guard was not such a crime as this!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3138

“The teaching of the Lord’s Supper is just this—that while we have many ways of COMMUNION WITH CHRIST, yet the receiving of Christ into our souls as our Savior is the best way of communion with Him.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3295

“The very essence of Popery, that which is so hateful in it to us and we believe so obnoxious to the Lord, is not so much its outward rites and ceremonies as its inward spirit of setting up human merit. There are two merits—your own merit and the merit of Christ. If you trust your own merit, you do in fact proclaim that you are opposed to Christ’s way of saving by His merits!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3333

“We waste far too much of our time upon trifles—it would be well if the love of Jesus so engrossed our thoughts that it engrossed our conversation, too!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3228

“Many an important step which I have taken, and which God has blessed, has been taken because of a vow that I have made to Him when my soul was in trouble. And I sometimes think that trouble is, in my own case, always a preparation for entering upon some new path of duty, or beginning some new enterprise for my dear Lord and Master.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3214

“Was it not Dr. Gordon who, when he lay dying, said that the secret of strength in faith in Christ was having no faith in ourselves? I am inclined to think that the problem of weak faith in God is our having too much self-reliance.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3241

“My Lord is such a One that if a beggar asks a penny of Him, He gives him gold! And if you ask only for the pardon of sins, He will give you all the Covenant blessing which He has been pleased so bounteously to provide for the necessities of His people! Come, poor guilty one—needy, helpless, broken and bruised—come by faith and let your weakness plead with God through Jesus Christ!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3269

“My dear Brothers and Sisters, whenever you hear a sermon in which our God is spoken well of and His Glory is set before you, are you not happy? Do you not go from the place of worship and say, ‘Thank God I was there! God was in the midst of the temple. The Word of God was preached and my heart is satisfied’? And, on the other hand, whenever you hear a sermon in which man is magnified and the nobility of human nature is held up and God is put anywhere or nowhere, how do you feel about that? I am certain that you say, ‘That word which only glorifies such a poor fallen creature as man, my soul abhors.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3197

“We have many ways of communing, the one with the other, but there is no way of mutual communing like the common reception of the same Christ in the same way!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3295

“There are some professors who seem to delight to tell us of a new discovery in science which is supposed to destroy our faith. Science makes a wonderful discovery and straightaway we are expected to doubt what is plainly revealed in the Word of God! Considering that the so-called‘science’ is continually changing and that it seems to be the rule for scientific men to contradict all who have gone before them—and that if you take up a book upon almost any science, you will find that it largely consists of repudiations of all former theories—I think we can afford to wait until the scientific men have made up their minds as to what science really is! In any event, we have no cause to be distressed concerning science, so let no Christian’s heart fail him—and let him not raise any alarm in the camp of Christ!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3188

“All doings bear fruit of one kind or another, and sinful doings bear bitter and deadly fruit! (Micah 7:13). Woe to the man who is made to eat the fruit of his own doings! That which men eat on earth they may have to digest in Hell—and there shall they lie forever digesting the terrible morsels which they ate with so much gusto here below!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3239

“Be not deceived, my Brothers and Sisters—I cannot and you cannot turn over the leaves of the book of destiny! It is impossible for us to force our way into the cabinet chamber of the Eternal! I hope you are not deluded by superstitious ideas that you have had a Revelation made to you, or that there has been some special sound or dream which makes any one of you think you are a Christian!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3326

“Beloved Brothers and Sisters in Christ, I do firmly believe that a deep and clear sense of sin is necessary to a right estimation of the power of pardoning love. I am sure that it is a great blessing to us when we have a deep sense of our sinnership. God forbid that we should ever pray as the Pharisee did, ‘God, I thank you, that I am not as other men are.’ Far better would it be for us to imitate the publican, and cry, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3115

“Have you a spiritual taste, dear Hearer? It is one thing to hear the Word. It is another thing to tasteit. Hearing the Word is often blessed, but tasting it is a more inward and spiritual thing—it is the enjoyment of the Truth in the innermost parts of our being! Oh, that we were all as fond of the Word as were the old mystics who chewed the cud of meditation till they were fattened upon the Word of the Lord and their souls grew strong in the Divine Love! I am sure of this—the more you know of God’s Word, the more you will love it!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3144

“I have heard of a wife walking home with her husband from a place of worship. He was an ungodly man. She had often prayed for him and he went with her to hear the sermon. She had been praying that he might be blessed and yet, in walking home, she was foolish enough to begin criticizing the sermon…at last he stopped her and said, “My dear wife, you have often prayed to God that I might be blessed. God has blessed that sermon to me this morning and I cannot bear to hear you speak of it as you have been speaking.” I know this is a fault with many Christians—not that we ministers care at all what you say about us, except for the evil you often do in spoiling to others that which does not happen to suit your fastidious taste, for you may in that way be doing the devil’s work.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3103

“Now mark this—those who are once redeemed are always redeemed! The price of their redemption was paid upon Calvary and that great transaction can never be reversed. I dare to put it very strongly and to say that they were as fully redeemed when they were dead in trespasses and sins as they will be when they stand in the full blaze of Jehovah’s Presence before the eternal Throne of God! They were not, then, conscious of their redemption, but their unconsciousness did not alter the fact of their redemption!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3242

“Oh, it is a mercy when in a gracious sense, the soul is thus covered with shame, a hallowed shame on account of its many sins! I would pray that this terrible text [Psalms 132:18] may be fulfilled in the sweetest possible manner by your being covered with shame for sin!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3333

“We are not saved by our works, but when we are saved, we are saved from sin, saved from disobedience, saved from unholiness, saved from selfishness— saved in order that we may live no longer unto ourselves but unto Him that loved us and gave Himself for us. ”—Volume 56, Sermon #3188

“Heavenly fingers touching like strings within our hearts bring forth the same notes, for we are the products of the same Maker and tuned to the same praise! Real harmony exists among all the true people of God—Christians are one in Christ!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3295
“They are indeed fools who prefer the pleasures of sin to the joys of eternity, for such pleasures will soon end—and then everlasting misery will be their portion.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3274

“Do you limit the Holy One of Israel? Do you think He needs our numbers? Do you think He is dependent upon human strength? I tell you, our weakness is a better weapon for God than our strength1 The Church in the Apostolic times was poor and mostly made up of unlearned and ignorant men—but she was filled with power. What name that would have been famous in ordinary history do you find among her first members? Yet that humble Church of fishermen and common people shook the world!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3187

“The Gospel is a source of joy to those who proclaim it, for unto us who are less than the least of all saints, is this Grace given—that we should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3086
“To be clothed with pain would be far less dreadful than to be clothed with shame. I would sooner at any time feed the acute pain that is possible in the body than feel shame, for a prick of the conscience is worse than the thrust of the surgeon’s knife!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3333
“If a man will not come where there is a fire, is it surprising that he cries that he cannot get warm? The neglect of the means of Grace causes many to enquire, ‘Lord, where are Your former loving kindnesses?’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3242
“We know so little of what the word, ‘Heaven,’ means that we cannot adequately appreciate the tremendous sacrifice that the Son of God must have made in order to become the Son of Mary.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3228

“The Word of God is communicated by the Holy Spirit and by the same Spirit it must be ministered to us. Even after His Resurrection, it was through the Holy Spirit that Christ gave commandments unto His Apostles. As it was given, so it must be received, not in words, only, but in power and demonstration of the Spirit—and so shall it be sweet to your taste!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3197

“A man will readily sit down and sympathize with a friend’s griefs, but if he sees him honored and esteemed, he is apt to regard him as a rival and does not readily rejoice with him. This ought not to be! Without effort we ought to be happy in our Brother’s happiness. If we are ill, be this our comfort, that many are in robust health! If we are faint, let us be glad that others are strong in the Lord!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3295

“No, my Brothers and Sisters, we cannot go back to the world and to sin! We must cleing to Christ, for there is nowhere else for us to go if we should ever leave Him. Respectable carelessness refuses us and disreputable sin rejects us after we are once united to Christ! Even the world could not endure us when once we have lost our taste for its follies and its sins. We cannot go back, we have burnt our boats and destroyed our bridges—the only course left to us is to follow our glorious Leader wherever He goes before us here and then to follow Him forever in that blest state where it shall be impossible for us to go away from Him!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3210

“It is a blessed thing to have no liking for such fare as the world can set before you, for those who are satisfied with such food as that will find that they have to digest it in Hell—and long enough will they be in doing so.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3274

“Seek first God and His righteousness, and the help of friends will be added afterwards. Straight forward makes the best running. Out of all troubles, the surest deliverance is from God’s right hand. Therefore from all troubles, the readiest way to escape is to draw near to God in prayer. Go, not to this friend or that, but pour out your story before God.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3164

“If you would be saved by the blood of Jesus, you are not from this day to choose your own pleasures, nor your own ways, nor your own thoughts, nor to serve yourselves, nor live for yourselves or your own aggrandizement. If you would be saved, you must believe what He tells you, do what He bids you and live only to serve and honor Him. I am ashamed to have to say that a great many Christian professors seem to be false to this, their agreement, but, as my Lord will take no less, I dare ask no less of you.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3334

“I dare to say that there is nothing in the Father, there is nothing in the Son and there is nothing in the Holy Spirit which should make any truly repenting and believing sinner say, “Mercy is not for me.” On the contrary, there is a great attraction about each blessed Person of the Divine Trinity to draw sinners to Himself.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3111

“While we worship the Lord, alone, the temple of our heart will be filled with His Glory. But if we set up an idol upon His Throne, we shall soon hear the rushing of wings and the Divine Voice saying, ‘Let Us go from here.’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3242

“And when true religion shall have fully operated upon all classes of mankind, none shall need to toil like slaves. They shall only need to perform such an amount of labor as shall be healthful and endurable. When no man oppresses his fellow, the work of gathering what God gives will be no hardship, but a wholesome exercise! The sweat of labor will then be a blessed medicine.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3149

“Get rid of that fear of death, Beloved, for it is not becoming in a Christian. The Believer’s heart should be so stayed upon the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Resurrection and the Life, that he should leave himself in his Heavenly Father’s hands to live or die, or to wait till the Lord shall come—just as the Lord shall please.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3098

“It was the Spirit of God who gave success to Jesus Christ’s ministry—and if you, dear Friend, would be saved—it is only the Holy Spirit who can take away from you the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh! ”—Volume 58, Sermon #3298
“Pray for your ministers, but remember that the comfort cannot come from them. It may come throughthem, but it must come from the Master, Himself. With that exhortation, we will come back to the words of the text, and the gracious promise, ‘ As one whomhismother comforts, so will I comfort you, and you shall be comforted inJerusalem.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3189
“Whatever else you question, always believe God!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3145

“Who is ashamed to be a Christian? Yes, who is ashamed to be a Nonconformist Christian? Who is ashamed to be called by the name of that Church to which he belongs? If there are any such here, let them sneak out by the back way, for cowards are not needed in the army of God! But if you know that you are followers of Christ, glory in that blessed fact and never blush at being put to shame for it! No, rather count ‘the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt.’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3138

“Hereby our growth in Grace may be ascertained. Is God’s Word very sweet to me this day? Is it like honey to my mouth? Very many of God’s children cannot say this. They can say it as a general rule, but not, perhaps, at the very moment of their present experience. It is a pretty sure sign of growth in spiritual life if God’s Word is more sweet to us than it used to be.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3197

“I can never forget that blessed text, ‘Look unto Me, and be you saved, all the ends of the earth,’ for that was the message that brought peace to my troubled spirit! And no doubt many of you have similar memories concerning the texts which were used by God for your deliverance. It is the Word of God, applied by the Holy Spirit, that is the means of healing sin-sick souls! ”—Volume 57, Sermon #3274

“If Judah was praised because his intercession prevailed with Jacob, much more shall Jesus be praised because His intercession prevails with Jehovah! Clap your hands, O you saints, at the remembrance of His prevalence on your behalf when you sought Him out of the depths of your despair! And praise Him that He still lives to carry on His people’s cause above!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3296
“How many congregations there are in which the greatest threat to the people would be a sermon about the Lord Jesus Christ and especially about His substitutionary Sacrifice!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3127

“If everything that we have already received has come from God, let us surrender ourselves and all we have to God! As He has made us, let us live for our Creator! As He has worked all our works in us, let us give up to Him our spirit, soul and body as our reasonable service. Debtors to Free Grace as we are. If others talk about good works, let us go and do them! While the idle dream of self-righteousness leads some men to make sacrifices, let gratitude for Free Grace compel us to make still greater sacrifices.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3084

“The blood of Israel hangs in great clots upon the skirts of Rome and will bring down upon that thrice-accursed system the everlasting wrath of the Most High! ”—Volume 57, Sermon #3243

“A man left to himself would break his back under the crushing burden that rests upon him, but that would not have happened to him if he had cast his burden upon the Lord. Many have lost their reason because they tried to carry their cares, themselves, instead of casting all their care upon Him who could easily have carried them and their cares, too.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3214

“It was a brave thing to be a Columbus to discover a new world, but it is a happier thing to go to a country that has been discovered many hundreds of years, where civilization has provided for the supply of all our needs. Christ was the Columbus of Heaven and He has made it ready for us who are to follow Him there when our turn shall come to emigrate to the better land!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3102

“To a true Believer in Jesus, the thought of departing from this world and going to be ‘forever with the Lord,’ has nothing of gloom associated with it! This earth is the place of our banishment and exile—Heaven is our home!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3228

“A prick in the heart [Acts 2:37] is very painful. To be pricked anywhere is not a thing to be desired, but a prick in the heart would not merely be painful, but, in a natural and literal sense, it would be fatal. There are a great many different kinds of impressions made by preachers upon their hearers, but blessed is that preacher who makes a wound right in their hearts!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3094

“You have a notion, perhaps, some of you, that you will sneak into Heaven as secret Christians. Take care that if you try that you do not find yourselves at another gate than the gate of pearl! Christ came not to save those cowardly souls who will not acknowledge Him. His own words are, ‘He that denies Me before men, him will I deny before My Father who is in Heaven.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3334

“As it is with the poor, so is it with the rich—the heart has more to do with making us happy than our possessions have. He whose soul is full of God, faith and contentment, is a truly rich man! The reflection that we can, after all, gather no more than God gives, should make us restful and contented. It teaches us our dependence upon God and tends to lessen our self-confidence, to moderate our desires and to abate our cares.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3149

“Ah, Beloved, there are no gatherings of the people anywhere else like those who come to Christ! It is no small thing that, all these years, the multitudes have gathered in this house, Sabbath by Sabbath, and why do they come? I confidently affirm that the only reason why such crowds gather here is because the preacher’s theme is Christ! Feebly as he sometime preaches, his unvarying theme is the Cross, the precious blood, the all-sufficient Sacrifice of Christ offered once for all on Calvary! This is a theme which never palls upon the ear! This is a subject which never grows stale. ‘We preach Christ Crucified,’ for this is the magnet that draws the people to Him.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3296

“Sorrow for sin is a sweet sorrow, do not desire to escape it! I think Rowland Hill was right when he said that his only regret in going to Heaven would be that he could no more repent. True evangelical repentance is food to the saintly soul! I do not know, Beloved, when I am more perfectly happy than when I am weeping for sin at the foot of the Cross, for that is the safest place in which I can stand.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3272

“Christian, Christ made you for Himself! Yes, He has twice made you for Himself! Therefore lay yourself out for Him—body, soul and spirit—spend all your time, and all your strength, and all your means for Him and Him alone1. So you will be in accord with the great purpose of your creation.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3180

“You cannot see the stars in the daytime, but I am told that if you went down a well, even in the daytime, you could see them from there. God often takes His people down the well of affliction and then they can see the stars of the promises. Some of the promises are written in sympathetic ink—if you hold the parchment up to the fire of affliction, they will become visible—but till then, the page will be as if they were never written there at all.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3197

“Do not think that Christ needs a high degree of faith to establish a union between Himself and a sinner, for a grain of mustard seed of faith is sufficient for salvation, though certainly not for the highest degree of comfort. If you can but trust Christ and love Christ, then let not Satan stop you from saying, in the words of the text, [Song of Solomon 2:16] ‘My Beloved is mine.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3185
“It were far better to not be a Christian than to think Popery to be Christianity, for it is one of the vilest forms of idolatry that ever came from the polluted heart of man!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3243

“The Church nowadays is, for the most part, too strong, too wise, too self-dependent to do much. Oh, that she were more God-reliant! Even those whom you call great preachers will be great evils if you trust to them! This I know—we ought never to complain of weakness, or poverty, or lack of prestige—but should consecrate to God what we have.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3187

“I do not believe you have ever been cured by Christ unless you need to do something to show how grateful you are to Him. A saved soul feels the sacred burdening of love and longs to consecrate itself and all it has to God’s Glory! And if there is one thing that is more difficult than another, the grateful soul says, ‘That is what I should like to do for Christ, to prove my love to Him’””—Volume 57, Sermon #3274

“Will you sell your souls to escape from a fool’s laughter? Then, what a fool you must be! What? Are you so thin-skinned that you cannot bear to be questioned, or to be asked whether you are a follower of the Lord Jesus? Ah, Sir, you shall have that thin skin of yours tormented more than enough in the world to come, whensham, which you dread so much, shall be your everlasting portion! O Soul, how can you sell Christ for the applause of men? How can you give Him up for the laughter of fools?”—Volume 56, Sermon #3209

“Whenever we get a missionary society whose main business it is to pray, we shall have a society whose distinguishing characteristic will be that it is the means of saving a multitude of souls!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3178

“I have had to confess and have mentioned it at ministers’ meetings often, and have heard others confess that familiarity with sacred things is a temptation, very often, to lead us to read our Bibles for our congregations and not for ourselves—and to pray ex officio instead of praying with our whole hearts to God, ourselves, as though we ourselves needed the blessing!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3163

“By nature you are spiritually dead—and only the Spirit of God can give you spiritual life. By nature you are spiritually blind—and only the Spirit of God can give you spiritual sight. Even the work of Christ on the Cross does not avail for you until the Holy Spirit takes of the things of Christ and reveals them to you.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3298

“O wondrous Fall, which would have broken us hopelessly had it not been for still more marvelous Grace! O wondrous restoration which has lifted us up and made us more perfect than we were before we were broken—and elevated us to a Glory of which we could never have dreamed had we lived with Adam and Eve in Paradise and remained in innocence forever!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3115

“ Others have proven their love to their Lord by the way in which theyhave given of their substance to His cause. They have not only given a tithe of all they had to the great Melchizedek, but they have counted it a high privilege to lay all that they had upon His altar, counting that their gold was never so golden as when it was all Christ’s and that their lands were never so valuable to them as when they were gladly surrendered to Him!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3228

“What is faith but the first look at Christ? And what is remembering Him but continuing to look at Him? At any rate, if it is not the same thing, the one act leads up to the other, for never did any soul truly remember Christ without its faith growing.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3130

“Bind your troubles into one burden and then roll it upon the Lord! With your mercies, do just the opposite—cut the string and open the package—they will be no more, but they will give you more joy as you count them and examine them one by one. Take care that your faith grasps the whole mass of blessing stored away in the promise—and mind that you believe that it shall be even as God has told you. ”—Volume 55, Sermon #3145

“Beloved, let us repeat what we have said a thousand times before, that national religion is altogether a dream! That even the idea of family religion, excellent as it is, is yet often but a mere idea. The only godliness worth having is personal godliness and the only religion which will really effect salvation is that which is vital and personal to the individual. ‘You must be born-again.’ Now there is no way of being born-again by proxy! The Church of England may invent its “sponsors” at will, but God has nothing to do with such things! I pray you, never let the souldamning lie of another man standing for you be tolerated in your soul for a single second!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3137

“The spouse does not here (Song of Solomon 2:3) say that she reached up to the tree to gather its fruit, but she sat down on the ground in intense delight—and the fruit came to her where she sat. It is wonderful how Christ will come down to souls that sit beneath His shadow!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3267

“Oh, if it were for nothing else but that our Savior was of the Jews, we ought to love them and make them the subject of our prayers and of our earnest efforts!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3243
“You can only gather what the Lord grants you. Before preaching, I was trying to find food for you all and I began to pray for it because I remembered that I could only gather for you what the Lord my God gave me. If I bring more than that, it will only be chaff of my own and not good winnowed corn from His garner. I often need to think of this, for I have to feed a great multitude with spiritual meat almost every day in the week. Where is the poor minister to get the supply from if the Lord does not bring it to him?”—Volume 55, Sermon #3149

“Everything that is evil lurks within the heart of everyone that is born of a woman! Education may restrain it, imitation of a good example may have some power in holding the monster down, but the very best of us, apart from the Grace of God, placed under certain circumstances which would cause the evil within us to be developed rather than restrained, would soon prove to a demonstration that our nature was evil, and only evil, and that continually! ”—Volume 56, Sermon #3198

“If there is anything that you can do, work as if everything depended upon you—and then trust in God remembering that everything really depends upon Him!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3214

“You must look to Christ, or He will not save you! You must trust in Christ, or His precious blood will not be applied to you! But you will never look to Him or trust in Him unless the Father who sent Him, shall draw you to do so by His Spirit effectually working in you.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3298

“The happiest Church Meetings that we ever have are those when there are many converts coming forward to tell what the Lord has done for their souls! Now the Lord Jesus very dearly loves His Church—she is His spouse—and as a good husband loves to please his wife, so Jesus loves to please His Church! And nothing can please His Church so much as to see sinners saved! So I think that is one good reason why we may expect that He will save many of you.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3111