The apostolic church thought more about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ than about death and heaven. The early Christians were looking, not for a cleft in the ground called a grave but for a cleavage in the sky called Glory.
The cross is the centre of the world’s history; the incarnation of Christ and the crucifiction of our Lord are the pivot round which all the events of the ages revolve. The testimony of Christ was the spirit of prophecy, and the growing power of Jesus is the spirit of history.
In heaven after ages of ages of growing glory, we shall have to say, as each new wave of the shoreless, sunlit sea bears us onward, It doth not yet appear what we shall be.
If life has not made you by God’s grace, through faith, holy – think you, will death without faith do it? The cold waters of that narrow stream are no purifying bath in which you may wash and be clean. No! no! as you go down into them, you will come up from them.
Man’s course begins in a garden, but it ends in a city.
A picture without sky has no glory. This present, unless we see gleaming beyond it the eternal calm of the heavens, above the tossing tree tops with withering leaves, and the smoky chimneys, is a poor thing for our eyes to gaze at, or our hearts to love, or our hands to toil on.
To pursue joy is to lose it. The only way to get it is to follow steadily the path of duty.
All that this world knows of living lies in giving – and more giving; He that keeps, be sure he loses -Friendship grows by what it uses.
Remember that vision on the Mount of Transfiguration; and let it be ours, even in the glare of earthly joys and brightnesses, to lift up our eyes, like those wondering three, and see no man any more, save Jesus only.
Let the current of your being set towards God, then your life will be filled and calmed by one master-passion which unites and stills the soul.
Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side.
The true confidence which is faith in Christ, and the true diffidence which is utter distrust of myself – are identical.
Embrace in one act the two truths-thine own sin, and God’s infinite mercy in Jesus Christ.
Life should be a constant vision of God’s presence. Here is our defense against being led away by the gauds and shows of earth’s vulgar attractions.
Seek to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life.
And so, in calm expectation of a blessed future and a finished work which will explain the past, in honest submission of out way to God, in supreme delight in Him who is the gladness of our joy, the secret of tranquillity will be ours.
The message of love can never come into a human soul, and pass away from it unreceived, without leaving that spirit worse, with all its lowest characteristics strengthened, and all its best ones depressed, by the fact of rejection.
Surely Scripture is right when it makes the sin of sins that unbelief, which is at bottom nothing else than a refusal to take the cup of salvation. Surely no sharper grief can be inflicted upon the Spirit of God than when we leave His gifts neglected and unappropriated.
He who has the Holy Spirit in His heart and the Scripture in his hands has all he needs.
Every life has dark tracts and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas.
Ah, there is nothing more beautiful than the difference between the thought about sinful creatures which is natural to a holy being, and the thought about sinful creatures which is natural to a self-righteous being. The one is all contempt; the other, all pity.