Given a man full of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed in one grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has been driven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred into unwearied energy.
If our faith in God is not the veriest sham, it demands, and will produce, the abandonment sometimes, the subordination always, of eternal helps and material good.
To pursue joy is to lose it. The only way to get it is to follow steadily the path of duty, without thinking of joy, and then, like sheep, it comes most surely unsought, and we ‘being in the way,’ the angel of God, bright-haired joy, is sure to meet us.
Love is the only fire that is hot enough to melt the iron obstinacy of a creatures’s will.
The mystery of the universe, and the meaning of God’s world, are shrouded in hopeless obscurity, until we learn to feel that all laws suppose a lawgiver, and that all working involves a Divine energy.
Kindness does not require us to be blind to facts or to live in fancies, but it does require us to cherish a habit of goodwill, ready to show pity if sorrow appears, and slow to turn away even if hostility appears.
He that has his trust set upon God does not need to dread anything except the weakening or the paralyzing of that trust.
Love is the foundation of all obedience.
Unbelief is criminal because it is a moral act, an act of the whole nature.-Belief or unbelief is a test of a man’s whole spiritual condition, because it is the whole being, affections, will, conscience, as well as the understanding, which are concerned in it.
Do not let the empty cup be your first teacher of the blessings you had when it was full. Do not let a bard place here and there in the bed destroy your rest. Seek, as a plain duty, to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life.
Faith is the sight of the inward eye.
Our work, abiding, shall bring to us the endless glory with which God at last overpays the toils, even as now He overanswers the poor prayers of His laboring servants.
Christ by His intercession is able to save thee beyond the horizon and largest compass of thy thoughts, even to the utmost. In danger Christ lashes us to Himself, as Alpine guides do when there is perilous ice to get over.
Christ’s voice sounds now for each of us in loving invitation; and dead in sin and hardness of heart though we be, we can listen and live. Christ Himself, my brother, sows the seed now. Do you take care that it falls not on, but in, your souls.
Grieve not the Christ of God, who redeems us; and remember that we grieve Him most when we will not let Him pour His love upon us, but turn a sullen, unresponsive unbelief towards His pleading grace, as some glacier shuts out the sunshine from the mountain-side with its thick-ribbed ice.
Be sure that your soul is never so intensely alive as when in the deepest abnegation it waits hushed before God .
God keeps giving Himself as long as we bring that into which He can pour Himself. And when we stop bringing, He stops giving.
Heaven is endless longing, accompanied with an endless fruition-a longing which is blessedness, a longing which is life.
If you want to live in this world, doing the duty of life, knowing the blessings of it, doing your work heartily, and yet not absorbed by it, remember that the one power whereby you can so act is, that all shall be consecrated to Christ, and done for His sake.
In such a world as this, with such hearts as ours, weakness is wickedness in the long run. Whoever lets himself be shaped and guided by any thing lower than an inflexible will, fixed in obedience to God, will in the end be shaped into a deformity, and guided to wreck and ruin.