The Holy Spirit’s main ministry is not to give thrills but to create in us Christlike character.
There is nothing more irreligious than self-absorbed religion.
We must learn to measure ourselves, not by our knowledge about God, not by our gifts and responsibilities in the church, but by how we pray and what goes on in our hearts. Many of us, I suspect, have no idea how impoverished we are at this level. Let us ask the Lord to show us.
Joy is a condition that is experienced, but it is more than a feeling; it is, primarily, a state of mind.
It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the most profound unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. God became man; Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this truth of the incarnation.
Read two old books for every new one.
Wisdom is the power to see, and the inclination to choose, the best and highest goal, together with the surest means of attaining it.
Underlying the preaching of the Puritans are three basic axioms: 1. The unique place of preaching is to convert, feed and sustain, 2. The life of the preacher must radiate the reality of what he preaches, 3. Prayer and solid Bible study are basic to effective preaching.
The worlds greatest need is the personal holiness of Christian people.
I never get to the end of mortifying sin because sin in my heart, where it’s still marauding even though it’s no longer dominant, sin in my heart is constantly expressing itself in new disorderly desires.
You can know a lot about God and godliness and still not know God.
God then does not profess to answer in Scripture all the questions that we, in our boundless curiosity, would like to ask about Scripture. He tells us merely as much as He sees we need to know as a basis for our life of faith.
For dishonest thinking, however well-intentioned, can only discredit the cause it serves, and must in the long run boomerang disastrously on those who indulge in it.
Fanciful spiritualizing, so far from yielding God’s meaning, actually obscured it. The literal sense is itself the spiritual sense, coming from God and leading to Him.
There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me.
Think against your feelings; unmask the unbelief they have nourished; let evangelical thinking correct emotional thinking.
The Holy Spirit is God the evangelist.
There are two sorts of sick consciences, those that are not aware enough of sin and those that are not aware enough of pardon.
But man’s eyes are blind through sin, and he can discern no part of God’s truth till the Spirit opens them. Inner illumination, leading directly as it does to a deep, inescapable conviction, is thus fundamental to the Spirit’s work as a teacher.
But to read all Scripture narratives as if they were eye-witness reports in a modern newspaper, and to ignore the poetic and imaginative form in which they are sometimes couched, would be no less a violation of the canons of evangelical literalism than the allegorizing of the Scholastics was.