| “If any of you think that you have a perfect child, you will find yourselves grievously mistaken—the time will come when you will discover that evil is lurking there as it is in you, the father, or in you, the mother—and it will only need a suitable opportunity to display itself! It will scarcely need fostering by ill companions—but even in a godly household where the atmosphere of piety abounds—sin will grow up in the child as naturally as weeds grow in a garden that is left to itself.”—1901, Sermon #2734
“You never need believe a man who swears—you may know that he also lies.”—1901, Sermon #2735
“We must always remember that most of the miracles of Christ are symbols and emblems of the spiritual and moral miracles that He works in the world of the heart.”—1901, Sermon #2736
“Faith in Christ is not the reception of a dry, dead orthodoxy—to believe in Jesus is not simply to be a sixteen-ounces-to-the-pound Calvinist. Saving faith is not the mere reception of a creed or form of any kind. To believe is to trust and no man truly believes—in the New Testament meaning of the word—until he is brought to trust in Christ, alone, and takes his whole religion upon trust, relying not on what he sees, nor on what he is, but on what is revealed in God’s Word—not on what he is, or can be, or shall be, nor on what he does or can do, nor on what he feels or does not feel—but relying solely on what Christ has done, is doing and shall yet do.”—1901, Sermon #2737
“O you redeemed ones…—you who have been bought by the precious blood of this steadfast, resolute Redeemer—come and think awhile of Him, that your hearts may burn within you and that your faces may be set like flints to live and die for Him who lived and died for you!”—1901, Sermon #2738
“There is no real contentment to a truly-awakened man until he is at peace with God! And it is a horrible thing for any man to be perfectly satisfied while he is under God’s wrath and in danger of eternal destruction, as he certainly is unless he has believed in the Lord Jesus Christ.”—1901, Sermon #2739
“Let us feel that when we speak with God there is reality in it and that God hears us just as surely as we hear one another—and that He is prepared to answer our petitions—I mean, literally to do so, not in some mysterious, unreal fashion, but actually and truly to give us that which is fitting for Him to bestow and right for us to ask. We cannot pray as we ought unless we believe that.”—1901, Sermon #2740
“I verily believe that the saints in Heaven, albeit they have received the crown of salvation, are not, as to its essential reality, more truly saved than the meanest and weakest Believer in Christ who is struggling through floods of temptation here upon earth.”—1901, Sermon #2741
“It was not so very long ago that I heard a minister say that he did not believe in the revival, which was then being experienced, because so many outrageous sinners had professed to be saved. He thought it was due to regular attendants at places of worship that, if anybody was saved, they should be the first—a precious piece of abominable legalism!”—1901, Sermon #2742
“It is Omnipotence which compels yonder starry orbs to obey the laws which God has made, and to travel in their appointed courses, but, to my mind, it is even more marvelous Omnipotence which leaves men free agents and controls not their will, but yet sweetly triumphs over them and wins for God the accomplishment of his Divine purposes!”—1901, Sermon #2743
“We do not repent in order to be saved, but we repent because we are saved. We do not loathe sin and, therefore, hope to be saved, but, because we are saved, we therefore loathe sin and turn altogether from it.”—1901, Sermon #2743
“Do not try to count your sins—your arithmetic will fail you if you attempt such a task as that! But if it will benefit you to go over the transgressions of your life from your youth up even until now, do so with repentant heart. And when you have added them up as best you can, and tried to conceive the total sum of your iniquities, then write at the bottom, ‘But the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification’—‘from many offenses’—however many they may be—though they should outnumber the sands on the seashore, or the drops that make up the ocean, yet the free gift of Divine pardon sweeps them all away!”—1901, Sermon #2744
“It is God that writes intercession upon men’s hearts. All true prayer comes from Him, but especially that least selfish and most Christ-like form of prayer called intercession—when the suppliant forgets all about himself and his own needs—and all his pleading, his tears and his arguments are on behalf of others.”—1901, Sermon #2745
“It is under the shadow of the imperfections of the Church that wicked men find shelter from the scorching heat of their conscience. If they can detect a minister in sin. If they can discover a deacon or an elder indulging in iniquity. If they can quote a justification for sin from the lips of a Church member, how content and pleased the wicked are! They did, as it were, but walk in their transgressions before—but when they find a church member in the same path, then they run greedily in the way of iniquity.”—1901, Sermon #2746
“It is where you are that you are to fight the battle of life—not somewhere else. And it is as you are, the very man that you are, and just now, this very hour, that God calls you to work in His vineyard.”—1901, Sermon #2747
“If you have not found rest of heart, dear Friend, you have missed that blessing which is peculiar to the Gospel dispensation. If you have not found in Christ perfect quiet for your soul, you put Him on a level with Moses and you seem to make out that you will need either another sacrifice, or another something to make you clear of guilt in the sight of God.”—1901, Sermon #2748
“‘But,’ someone asks, ‘may not a man be attentive to business?’ He ought to be! He should be diligent in business, but always with this higher motive outreaching everything else—that he may win Christ and be found in Him and that his life may bring glory to the God who made him and to the Christ who redeemed him with His precious blood.”—1901, Sermon #2749
“It was said of Caesar, when he landed here, that he stumbled, but, clutching a handful of earth, he hailed it as a happy omen, saying that in taking possession of that handful of earth, he had taken all England for his own. And you, who on your bended knees fell prostrate before God in that first rich treasure of joy which came into your souls—you took possession of all the inheritance of the saints on earth and of their inheritance in Heaven, too!”—1901, Sermon #2750
“Heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people.”—1901, Sermon #2751
“I am sure our Lord Jesus Christ does not want His ministers to deliver magnificent orations, spread-eagle sermons, with long and elaborate sentences in them. He wants them to just come and talk as He talked, in all simplicity, so that the very poorest and most illiterate of their hearers may understand their meaning, embrace the Truths of God they proclaim and find everlasting life in Him of whom they speak.”—1901, Sermon #2752
“The Old Testament is not to be regarded with one jot less of reverence and love than is the New Testament—they must remain bound together, for they are the one Revelation of the mind and will of God—and woe be to the man who shall attempt to rend asunder that seamless garment of Holy Scripture!”—1901, Sermon #2753
“O you legalists who are looking to yourselves for some arguments with which to prevail with God! O you who look to your sacraments, to your outward forms, to your pious deeds and your almsgivings for something that will move the heart of God—know this, that these things are no lever that can ever move Him to 1ove! Nothing but your sin and misery can ever stir His mercy! And you look to the wrong place when you look to your merits to find a plea why He should show pity upon you!”—1901, Sermon #2754
“Is there a Christian in this place who comes up to the standard of Zacchaeus after he was converted? I do not wish to be censorious, but I doubt if there is one. Is there anybody here who gives away half his income to the poor? I think that was going a long way in Grace in the matter of almsgiving. And then remember that he was but a babe in Grace when he did that—so what he did when he grew older, I do not know.”—1901, Sermon #2755
“Ah, my Brothers and Sisters, Christ’s eyes look in the opposite direction to ours. We usually look for some goodness on the part of men before we help them, but He looks to their sin, degradation and need. He is kind to the unthankful and the evil. He justifies those who are not, in themselves, just—while we were dead in trespasses and sins, “in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” Grace, pure Grace, abounds in Him and is blessedly manifested in His mission of saving the lost.”—1901, Sermon #2756
“We have not completely conquered the spirit of the world until we can truthfully say that the commandments of God, so far from being grievous to us, are acceptable simply because they come from Him.”—1901, Sermon #2757
“Beloved, I trust that each one of you who believes in Jesus, knows what that rest of heart is which enables you to say, ‘My God, my Father, You can do nothing to me but what Infinite Love dictates, for I know that You love me even as You love Your first-born and only-begotten Son.’”— 1901, Sermon #2758
“Ah, take Jesus for your theme, sit down and consider Him—think of His relation to your own soul and you will never get through that one subject!”—1901, Sermon #2759
“When a man is his own ruler, he has all the responsibility of what he does—but when he implicitly obeys Christ’s command, he is not responsible for the result of his actions—that rests with Him who gave the command.”—1902, Sermon #2760
“We fall into grievous error when we entertain this kind of idea! God’s ways are diverse—from the beginning to the end, God the Father, God the Holy Spirit and our Lord Jesus Christ act sovereignly and do not choose to follow one particular mode of action in every case.”—1902, Sermon #2761
“‘But may I lay hold on Christ,’ asks someone, ‘and trust Him thus?’ You had better ask me whether you may refuse to do so, and I will answer you in His own words, ‘He that believes not shall be damned.’ Now, if Christ pronounces condemnation upon the man who believes not, it is clear that you may believe in Him!”—1902, Sermon #2762
“If there is such a thing as free will, Luther truly hit the mark when he called free will a slave! It is only our will in bonds that is truly free.”— 1902, Sermon #2763
“If you must be angry, (and you must, sometimes), take care that you do not sin when you are angry. It is rather a difficult thing to be angry and not to sin, yet, if a man were to see sin and not to be angry with it, he would sin through not being angry! If we are only angry, in a right spirit, with a wrong thing, we shall manage to obey the injunction of the Apostle, ‘Be you angry, and sin not’ (Eph 4:26).”—1902, Sermon #2763
“We have sometimes rejoiced greatly when we have had as many as a hundred added to this Church in a month, yet I have gone away and said to myself—‘What is that hundred, after all? It is not sufficient to keep pace with the increase of the population.’ It makes us very sad to know that the increase of sinners far exceeds the increase of the converts to God.”—1902, Sermon #2764
“He who sees even the most of this world has but the same sort of eyes that birds and beasts have—but he who knows his Bible to be true and who realizes the truth of it in his soul—has another set of eyes that can peer into another realm altogether. He sees spiritual things and around him there shines a Light which is, indeed, marvelous!”—1902, Sermon #2765
“Hosea beautifully puts it—“Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy.” We sow in righteousness, but the harvest is not given us as the effect of righteousness, it is given us by mercy! Reap in mercy!”1902, Sermon #2766
“Our blessed Lord is to be imitated by us in that He frequently sought and enjoyed retirement. His was a very busy life. He had much more to do than you and I have, yet He found abundant time for private prayer.”1902, Sermon #2767
“…among all the terrible words spoken concerning the penalty of sin, the most terrible are those which were uttered by our Lord Jesus Christ, the most loving and tender of all teachers. Measure not a man’s true tenderness of heart by his avoidance of the subject of “the wrath to come.””1902, Sermon #2768
“There are some people who seem as if they would not be converted unless they can see some eminent minister. Even that will not suit some of them—they need a special revelation from Heaven. They will not take a text from the Bible—though I cannot conceive of anything better than that—but they think that if they could dream something, or if they could hear words spoken in the cool of the evening by some strange voice in the sky, then they might be converted. Well, Brothers and Sisters, if you will not eat the apples that grow on trees, you must not expect angels to come and bring them to you!”1902, Sermon #2769
“Our Savior speaks thus, “Your faith has saved you,” because He knows that it will be understood that faith is only the connecting link with Himself—that He really works the salvation, but that the faith of the Believer is the means of obtaining it.”1902, Sermon #2770
“As captives chained to the wheels of the returning conqueror’s chariot make his triumphal procession the more illustrious, so is Christ upon the Cross the more manifestly triumphant in His Infinite Grace as He leads the restored Peter back to His Apostleship and takes the penitent thief, plucked from perdition, up with Himself into the Paradise of God!”1902, Sermon #2771
“WE do not use instrumental music in the worship of God because we consider that it would be a violation of the simplicity of our worship. We think it far better to hear the voices of Christian men and women than all the sounds which can be made by instruments. Yet I am sure there is no Christian here who would object to a minister who can play well upon an instrument and, indeed, a minister is good for nothing if he does not know how, spiritually, to give forth instrumental music!”1902, Sermon #2772
““It has become a custom, in this evil age, for certain persons to attempt to communicate with familiar spirits. If it can be done, it is strictly forbidden in this Book, yet there are some who try to have dealings with those who are in the land of spirits. Well, if they will trespass on that forbidden ground, it is possible that, one of these days, somebody will appear to them. I should not greatly wonder if their father, the devil, came up and ran away with them! They go so near his door and do their utmost to enter that they ought not to be surprised if he should appear and claim his own.”1902, Sermon #2773
“Has my Lord Jesus a visible Church anywhere on earth? Then, let me share the lot of those who are its members! What are its fortunes? Let them be mine. Is the Church dishonored and despised, maligned and persecuted? Then let me take the rough side of the hill with her—and bear the brunt of the storm with her rather than, in a cowardly manner, be ashamed of my Master and shrink from saying that I belong to Him.”—1902, Sermon #2774
“DAVID was constantly singing the praises of God’s Word, although, as I have often reminded you, he had only a small portion of the Scriptures compared with the complete Bible which we possess. If, then, it had pleased God that the Canon of Revelation should have been closed in David’s day, it would, by the aid of His Spirit, have been even then a sufficient Light of God to lead the saints of God into the way of holiness.”—1902, Sermon #2775
“We have, whenever members are given to us, a great charge, under God, to nurse them for Him and, instrumentally, to advance them in the road to Heaven. But, in all this, the Church is a poor mother, if her God is not with her. She can do nothing in bringing forth, nothing in nurturing, nothing in training, nothing in preserving and nothing, at last, in bringing her children Home, unless the Holy Spirit dwells in her and sends her strength to accomplish all.”—1902, Sermon #2776
“I cannot help saying that the queen of Sheba, in coming to Solomon, did not have anything like the inducements which are put before you in coming to Christ.”—1902, Sermon #2777
“The more hungry men are, the more fit they are for the Gospel feast! The more needy the outcast, the louder does the Gospel trumpet blow, that they who are ready to perish may come and be saved!”—1902, Sermon #2778
“I am persuaded that it is so that the simplest and most plain matter kept away from Christ will turn out to be a maze, while the most intricate labyrinth, under the guidance of Christ, will prove to have in it a straight road for the feet of all those who trust in the Infallible Wisdom of their Lord and Savior.”—1902, Sermon #2779
“What must it be to be in Heaven? Glory be to God if we are ever there, but to be in Heaven with others who are given to us—this shall be to multiply Heaven, to heap celestial mountains upon one another, to double the light of the sun, yes, to make it sevenfold, to make Heaven more than Heaven—Heaven multiplied in the Heaven of others!”—1902, Sermon #2780
“There is but one door of salvation and Christ said, ‘I am the door.’”—1902, Sermon #2781
“Certain men…go further than simply forgetting God, for they actively oppose Him. They can never seem to find language foul enough to apply to the religion of Jesus Christ. ”—1902, Sermon #2782
“The most common ties of gratitude bind us to at least think about the great goodness of God to us.”—1902, Sermon #2783
“‘Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Your name give glory, for Your mercy, and for Your truth’s sake.’ That is to say, true religion does not seek its own honor.”—1902, Sermon #2784
“When I see the members of a church laying down a multiplicity of rules, I know that they are getting themselves into a multiplicity of troubles. If they will but leave rules and regulations to come up when they are needed, they will find them when they need them.”—1902, Sermon #2785
“We have heard of cases of insanity in which persons have swallowed ashes, eaten earth, devoured pins and needles and all sorts of strange things. That is only a feeble emblem of the absolute insanity of the unregenerate heart!”—1902, Sermon #2786
“You do not really preach the Gospel if you leave Christ out—if He is omitted, it is not the Gospel! You may invite men to listen to your message, but you are only inviting them to gaze upon an empty table unless Christ is the very center and substance of all that you set before them!”— 1902, Sermon #2787
“I firmly believe that the better a man’s own character becomes and the more joy in the Lord he has in his own heart, the more capable is he of sympathetic sorrow and, probably, the more of it he will have. If you have room in your soul for sacred joy, you have equal room for holy grief and, depend upon it, you will have both of these emotions if the Lord has perfectly consecrated you and purposes to use you for His Glory.”— 1902, Sermon #2788
“Unbelief is blind to good and to God, but it is very quick of sight to everything that is fearful and terrifying. I have known some Christians so full of unbelief that it was very difficult to give them any comfort—they were most dexterous in finding out the worst parts of their character and history—and very crafty in, as it were, seeking to neutralize the force of God’s promises by mentioning some evil thing in their own experience which seemed as if it deprived them of their right to receive the promised gift.”—1902, Sermon #2789
“Christ did not come merely to be an example—when we are dead in trespasses and sins, of what use can His example be to us?”—1902, Sermon #2790
“Have you taught for a long time in your Sunday school class and have you had only one girl saved? Do not be satisfied with that one, but, at the same time, do not forget to thank the Lord for that one. If you are not grateful to God for letting you win one soul for Him, you are not likely to be allowed to win another.”—1902, Sermon #2791 “It is not your goodness that will ensure an answer to your prayer—it is the greatness of your need. Even if you have sunk very low in your own esteem, till not a ray of hope seems left to you and you are shut up in the blackest darkness of despair, that is the very time for you to pray, even as the Psalmist said, ‘Out of the depths I have cried unto You, O Lord.’”—1902, Sermon #2792
“It is true that there are two ways in which men shall be made to bow the knee before God—some of them will bow unwillingly when they shall feel the weight of His iron rod—others shall bow joyfully before Him when they shall feel the power of His Grace.”—1902, Sermon #2793
“I wonder how many of us really know this great Truth of God in our inmost souls, for this is one of the weightiest matters you ever heard about in all your lives. If you think that you have any righteousness of your own, you are sadly mistaken. If you fancy that you have strength of your own which will carry you to Heaven, you are living in grievous error. You shall faint and die, ‘as a snail which melts,’ if you trust in your-selves!”—1902, Sermon #2793
“If Moses had his cleft in the rock where he could see the back parts of his God, we also have had our clefts in the rock where we have seen the full splendors of the Godhead in the Person of Christ! ”—1902, Sermon #2794
“Well, now, if we draw near to God, it will have an effect upon our common, everyday life. How? Why, first, if you will follow the run of the chapter, you will see that drawing near to God will help us to resist the devil. The injunction, and promise, ‘Resist the devil, and he will flee from you,’ are immediately followed by the words of our text, ‘Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.’”—1902, Sermon #2795
“I do not think that God’s people often go astray in the most difficult cases, for they do take them to the Lord in prayer. It is in simple matters that we make our greatest blunders, because we think we know what to do and, therefore, we do not wait upon the Lord for guidance.”—1902, Sermon #2796
“If a man is to be saved, he must turn from his sins. ‘Right about face!’ is the marching order for every sinner! There is no hope of forgiveness for him if he will continue with his face as it now is. He must turn from his sin if he would be saved.”—1902, Sermon #2797
“God never makes greater provision than will be needed, so, as there is an abundance of consolations, we may rest assured that there will also be an abundance of tribulations. There will be much fear and casting down to each of us before we see the face of God in Heaven! This disease of soul-dejection is common to all the saints—there are none of God’s people who altogether escape it.”—1902, Sermon #2798
“There are great numbers of persons, even in our own land, who are not in the way of hearing the Gospel. They have been brought up under some form of religion which they believe to be right, but, as long as they adhere to the faith of their fathers, they never hear the doctrine of free and full salvation by the Grace of God! They are content with what they hear, but there is little likelihood of their ever being converted, for the Gospel, by which men are converted, is not allowed to have access to them. Yet, notwithstanding this, it is our firm conviction that there are many among them who are the sons and daughters of God and who shall yet be brought near to Him.”—1902, Sermon #2799
“It may be natural for a scholar to consider the accuracy of your terms, but God especially marks the earnestness of your soul. There is no other place where the heart should be so free as before the Mercy Seat. There, you may talk out your very soul, for that is the best prayer that you can present. Ask not for what some tell you that you should ask, but for that which you feel the need of—that which the Holy Spirit has made you to hunger and to thirst for—ask you for that. ”—1902, Sermon #2800
“From this and many other texts of Scripture, [Hosea 3:5] we may conclude, without a shadow of a doubt, that the Jews shall, one day, acknowledge Jesus to be their King… God has great things in store for the seed of Abraham in the latter days. He has not finally cast them away and He will be true to that Covenant which He made with their fathers—and on Judaea’s plains shall roam a happy people who shall lift up their songs of praise unto Jehovah in the name of Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior! Whenever that shall happen, we, or those who will then be living, may know that the latter days have fully come because it is foretold here and in other passages that this is what will occur in the latter days.”—1902, Sermon #2801
“Is it not a sad thing that after all Christ’s love to us, we should repay it with lukewarm love to Him?”—1902, Sermon #2802
“The misery that men will suffer in the world to come will be self-created misery arising out of the fact that they loved sin so much that they brought eternal sorrow upon themselves. It must be an awful thing for a soul, in the next world, to be without God, but, as far as its own consciousness is concerned, it will be so hardened that it will abide without God, yet not realizing all that it has lost because it is, itself, incapable of knowing the beauty of holiness and the perfection of the God from whom it is separated forever.”—1902, Sermon #2803
“Even concerning those who have heard the Gospel, it can still be said, ‘They have not all obeyed the Gospel.’ And this, dear Friends, is one of the plainest proofs of the deep depravity of human nature.”—1902, Sermon #2804
“It is the Lord that quickens the wheels of commerce, or that stops them and so causes distress. It is the Lord that permits the good and the evil which happen to men. ‘Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord has not done it?’ Is there a cry or a wail in war that God does not hear? Then why should we not go to Him in every time of peril and trouble—even in the minor trials and difficulties of life? Why must we have a severe sickness in order to drive us to God? Why is it that only the very peril of life brings us to our knees?”—1902, Sermon #2805
“Unbelief is presumptuous, but faith is always humble. The more you know of Jesus as your Savior, saving you from sin, the more you will also recognize Him as your Lord.”—1902, Sermon #2806
“Christian, I say, always be asking yourself this question, but especially be asking it when you are preserved in times of more than ordinary sickness and mortality. If I am left, why am I left? Why am I not taken home to Heaven? Why do I not enter into my rest? Great Lord and Master, show me what You would have me do and give me Grace and strength to do it!”—1902, Sermon #2807
“If preaching could save a man, Judas would not have been damned. If prophesying could save a man, Balaam would not have been a castaway. We may preach with the tongues of men and of angels, yet, if we have not love, it profits us nothing. We may be even leaders of the Church in the noblest and, highest enterprises and yet, for all that, Christ may say to us, at the last, ‘I never knew you.’”—1902, Sermon #2808
“All the devotional exercises in which you can possibly engage in public or in private, with all the so called, ‘sacraments,’ thrown in, and all the priestly efficacy of which men dream—even if there were such a thing in reality—all this could not save you! ‘The just shall live by faith.’ This is the only way of living that God has ordained for sinners dead in trespasses and sins.”—1902, Sermon #2809
“Well, my Brothers and Sisters, whenever you put your hand to your brow and say, concerning anything revealed in the Scriptures, ‘I cannot comprehend it,’ lay your other hand upon your heart and say, ‘Nevertheless I believe it. It is clearly taught in the Bible and although my reason may find it difficult to explain it, and I may not be able to discover any arguments to prove the truth of it, yet I lay my reason down at my Infallible Master’s feet and trust where I cannot see.’”—1902, Sermon #2810
“To go anywhere without our God is terrible—but to die without the Presence of God would be awful beyond expression.”—1902, Sermon #2811
“The brightest thought of the most brilliant intellect will one day die out in darkness. Being made of clay and being born of woman, we cannot expect that we should last forever.”—1903, Sermon #2812
“I find that words are but poor things to describe such a theme as this—I wish that I could more worthily speak of this ‘fullness of joy’ in God’s Presence.”—1903, Sermon #2813
“The Lord Himself is the portion of His people! When Canaan was divided, there was a lot for Judah, for Simeon, for Reuben and so on—but as for the Levites, the Lord was their portion—and we are like the Levites—as many of us as who have believed in the Lord. The Lord is our portion and He is such a portion as excels everything else that we might have!”—1903, Sermon #2814
“Fearful souls are hasty souls. They judge the Lord by feeble sense, by the bitterness of the bud and not by the sweetness of the flower. They judge by the clouds of the morning, forgetting that the clouds may soon be scattered and that the sun may shine out brightly again. To them, then, that are of a hasty heart—to those who condemn themselves unjustly, who think that all things are against them and so become exceedingly fearful, say, ‘Be strong, fear not.’”—1903, Sermon #2815
“A man who is not right with his God may be sure that there is something wrong with his soul. And if this grandest of all possessions—the possession of God Himself—does not seem to you to be pre-eminently desirable, it is because your eyes are blinded and your heart is dead to the things of God and you are in ‘the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.’”—1903, Sermon #2816
“God’s promises are often so little studied by His people that they are like a great bunch of rusty keys till we really need them! And then we turn them over and we say, of some particular promise, ‘That just meets my case. Blessed be the name of the Lord, it must have been made on purpose for me!’”—1903, Sermon #2817
“If we can do little or nothing for Him in one place, let us find another spot where we can serve Him, but never let us lay down our charge till we also lay down our lives—never let us case to work until we cease to live! May this mind be in us which was also in Christ Jesus our Lord!”— 1903, Sermon #2818
“If a criminal should get it into his head that he could climb up to the stars by going up the steps of a treadmill, he would be about as rational as when a poor sinner thinks of getting to Heaven by his own good works!”—1903, Sermon #2819
“O you disciples of Jesus, watch and pray, and seek to be like your Master! Pray to be kept from the evil which is in the world and, as for the rest, if men despise you, count that as part of the bargain upon which you have entered—a bargain which shall, in due season, fill you with eternal bliss!”—1903, Sermon #2820
“It is not the nature of sin to remain in a fixed state. Like decaying fruit, it grows more rotten—the corruption is sure to increase and spread.”—1903, Sermon #2821
“There is no force in the world apart from God. All the potency of attraction is simply because God lives and pour His energy into the matter that attracts. Every moment it is God who works in all things according to the good pleasure of His own will. Omnipotence is, in fact, the source of all the potency that there is in the universe. God is everywhere and, instead of being banished from the world, and the world going on without Him, if God were not here, this planet, the sun, moon and stars, would retire into their native nothingness as a moment’s foam subsides into the wave that bears it and is gone forever!”—1903, Sermon #2822
“There is such a conformity between Christ and His people that everything that is said of Christ may, in some measure, be said of His people.” — 1903, Sermon #2823
“There is nothing in the world that more richly deserves to be despised, abhorred, condemned, than sin! If we look at it aright, we shall see that it is the most abominable thing, the most shameful thing in the whole universe. Of all the things that ever were, this is the thing which most of all deserves to be loathed and spurned. It is not a thing of God’s creating, remember. It is an abortion—a phantom of the night which plucked a host of angels from their thrones in Heaven, drove our first parents out of Paradise and brought upon us unnumbered miseries.” —1903, Sermon #2824
“Eloquence is easy compared with silence and, perhaps, it would not have been true of Christ that ‘never man spoke like this Man,’ if it had not also been true of Him that never man was silent like this Man.” —1903, Sermon #2825
“I fear that sometimes, in our endeavors to be sweet in disposition, we have not been strong in principle. ‘Charity’ is a word that is greatly cried up nowadays, but, often it means that in trying to be courteous, we have also been traitorous.”—1903, Sermon #2826
“I always feel, when I begin to speak of the Deity of our blessed Lord and Master, as if my heart were too full for me to give utterance to my deepest feelings and convictions. My heart is indeed inditing a good matter when I am speaking thus concerning the King, but I cannot say that my tongue is as the pen of a ready writer when it has so vast a theme to dwell upon.”—1903, Sermon #2827
“The predestination of God does not destroy the free agency of man, or lighten the responsibility of the sinner.” —1903, Sermon #2828
“God is not the God of uniformity. There is a wondrous unity of plan and design in all that He does, but there is also an equally marvelous varie-ty.”—1903, Sermon #2829
“Beloved Friends, the very best men in the world may be slandered! And if you should hear them evilly spoken of, be you not among those who straightway condemn them.”—1903, Sermon #2830
“O Brothers and Sisters, we need to be schooled in this matter of showing sympathy with the sorrowful! No doubt, it will drag our own spirits down if we really have fellowship with those whom God has sorely afflicted in mind, but we must be willing to be dragged down—it will do us good. If the Lord sees that we are willing to stoop to the very least of His people, He will be sure to bless us.”—1903, Sermon #2831
“We are not to treat the verses of the Bible as pigeons might treat a bushel of peas—picking out one here and another there, without any thought of the surroundings of that particular passage! No, this blessed Book was written for men to read right through—and if they are to understand the meaning of it, they must read each sentence in the connection in which it is found.”—1903, Sermon #2832 “It cannot be denied that the living child of God has power, but it must not be forgotten that the power of the living child of God is not in himself, but in his Heavenly Father. For it is as true of him as of any sinner ‘dead in trespasses and sins’ that, without Christ, he can do nothing. The living child of God is still as powerless as the dead sinner apart from the constant indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the constant inflowing of the Divine Life into his soul. ‘By the Grace of God’ we not only are what we are, but we also remain what we are.”—1903, Sermon #2833
“I confess that it is one of my greatest joys to find myself completely baffled when I am trying to comprehend the Character of God. Sometimes, when I have tried to preach upon the Deity of Christ, I have been fairly staggered under the burden of that stupendous Truth and I have felt the utter uselessness and poverty of human language to describe our great and terrible, yet loving Lord! And I have been glad to have it so, for, verily, God is altogether above our comprehension and none of us can speak of Him as He deserves to be spoken of!”—1903, Sermon #2834
“Christ, in associating with sinners, did not at all condone their sin. When He proved Himself to be the Friend of publicans and sinners, it was not that He would lessen the infinite distance between Divine Perfection and human guilt, but only that, coming down to man’s fallen estate, He might lift him up.”—1903, Sermon #2835
“There is a royalty in a Christian which persecution cannot burn out, which shame cannot crush, which poverty cannot root up!”—1903, Sermon #2836
“I tell you, all your church or chapel attendance, your saying of your prayers and your reading of the Bible are of no value in His sight unless your heart is right with Him. That is the point we are aiming at. In vain is all your attendance upon outward worship! In vain is your profession of being reconciled to God unless you really are! You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, or else the work of the minister is not even begun, much less completed.”—1903, Sermon #2837
“Surely a God whom we could understand would be no God!”—1903, Sermon #2838
“Mohammed may conquer by the sword, but Christ conquers by the sword which comes out of His mouth, that is, the Word of the Lord! His empire is one of love, not of force and oppression. He subdues men, but He does it by His own gentleness and kindness, never by breaking them in pieces and destroying them upon a gory battlefield.”—1903, Sermon #2839
“Beloved Friends, it will be all in vain, so far as we are personally concerned, “that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” unless He shall save us. It will be of no avail to us that Jesus shed His precious blood unless that blood washes away our guilt. It will increase, rather than diminish our misery if we hear that others are saved as long as we ourselves remain unsaved. If we are finally lost, it will not make our lot in Hell any more tolerable if we discover that there was a Propitiation for sin, although we never had a share in its expiatory effects. Of all questions in the world, it seems to me that this is the most urgent and pressing one—and that we ought not to rest until we get it satisfactorily answered and put into practice—‘How can I be a partaker in the eternal life which Jesus Christ came into the world to procure for sinners by His death?’”— 1903, Sermon #2840
“WITH Christians it is not a matter of question as to whether God hears prayer or not. There is no fact in mathematics which has been more fully demonstrated than this fact in experience that God hears prayer. About some other things in Christianity, young Believers may have a question, but about the Lord’s answering prayer, even they cannot entertain a doubt while, to the old and advanced Believer who has tested the power of the Mercy Seat and proved it thousands of times, it is a matter about which he never allows a question, for he knows that, as surely as that he himself exists, and that God lives in Heaven, the prayers of puny but believing man have power to move the almighty arm of God!”—1903, Sermon #2841
“Who knows, O Teacher, when you labor even among the infants, what the result of your teaching may be? Good corn may grow in very small fields. God may bless your simple words to the babes that listen to them. How know you, O my unlettered Brother, when you stand up in the cottage meeting to talk to a few poor folk about Christ, what may follow from that effort of yours? Life or death, Heaven or Hell, may depend upon the sowing of the good seed of the Gospel! It is, it must be the most important event that can ever happen, if the Lord goes forth with you when you go forth as the sower went forth to sow!”—1903, Sermon #2842
“In the harvest field, there is a great company and they sing and shout together in harmony, but the sower goes forth alone. Our Savior was the great Sower—‘THE SOWER went forth to sow,’ unaccompanied. He pursued His solitary way and all day long He continued His personal task.”—1903, Sermon #2843
“Do not judge the reality of your conversion either by the suddenness of it or by the length of time which it occupied, for it is true that superficial conversions are usually sudden, although all sudden conversions are not superficial.”—1903, Sermon #2844
“I believe in instantaneous conversion. I believe that the new birth must be instantaneous, that there is a moment in which a man is dead and another moment in which he is alive and that, just as there is a certain instant in which a child is born, so there is an instant in which we become the children of God by faith in Jesus Christ.”—1903, Sermon #2845
“A religion that may be true, or may not be true, is irreligion. The only real religion is that of which you are absolutely sure, that which you have tried, tested and proved in your very soul, and know to be as true as your own existence. Doubts yield nothing to you but continual fear and trembling, starvation to your strength and restlessness to your soul.”—1903, Sermon #2846
“We consider the heathen to be very foolish for worshipping their hideous idols. Yet, you know, to be an idolater a man need not make an image of wood, or stone, or gold, for he can worship his own thoughts, his own ideas, his own notions.”—1903, Sermon #2847
“God has bid His servants preach the Gospel—and that Gospel conveys help, light and power to all who believe it—but as for forms and ceremonies, musical performances, ornate ritual, masses and the like, they are sheer deceptions through and through! Trust not the weight of a feather to them—much less your souls.”—1903, Sermon #2848
“Do not die, O you gray heads, you who have passed your threescore years and ten—do not pass away from this earth with all those pleasant memories of God’s loving kindness to be buried with you in your coffin—but let your children and your children’s children know what the everlasting God did for you! ”—1903, Sermon #2849
“Had I no conscientious objection to instrumental music in worship, I would still, I think, be compelled to admit that all the instruments that were ever devised by men, however sweetly attuned, are harsh and grating compared with the unparalleled sweetness of the human voice.”— 1903, Sermon #2850
“My dear Brothers and Sisters, if you are a Believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you know that it is the will of Christ that all Believers should be baptized even as He was, do not go home and pray about it—but be baptized! If you are not a member of a Christian Church and you know that it was the practice of the early Christians to first give themselves to the Lord and afterwards to give themselves to His Church, do not tell me that you have been praying about that matter for months—cease praying about it and go and do it! It is idle to talk of praying about things which are clearly according to the will of God. Cease praying about them, and practice them.”—1903, Sermon #2851
“All the trouble in the world cannot harm you as much as half a grain of unbelief! Poverty cannot make you as poor as mistrust can and sickness cannot make you as sick as unbelief can. The greatest evil to be dreaded is that of doubting your Lord.”—1903, Sermon #2852
“I know some congregations where they are diligently observing whether there is fine oratory. I bless God that I hate oratory from my very soul! To speak His Truth clearly and simply, is all I aim at. So, if you want the beauties of rhetoric, you must seek them elsewhere.”—1903, Sermon #2853
“We shall not get back a strong race of Christians till we get back such a sturdy band of outspoken men as dare their reputation, if not their lives, upon the unvarnished testimony they give to the Truth they know, the Truth as it is in Jesus, the Truth as it burns in their own hearts and fires their tongues, the Truth as it commends itself to every man’s conscience in the sight of God!”—1903, Sermon #2854
“A prayer without Christ in it will never reach Heaven!”—1903, Sermon #2855
“Remembering the experience I then passed through, I can truly say that I know of no pain that can be felt by the body which is comparable to the terrible pangs of conscience when the searching breath of the Eternal Spirit goes through the soul and withers up all the comeliness of our own righteousness and despoils all the supposed beauty of our own good works. That is a wind which I trust we all have felt, or shall yet feel, but, still, while it blows, it is dreadful to endure.
“It is the devil who renders evil for good, yet you are sinking to his level if you continue in sin and turn not unto God who has dealt so kindly and so graciously with you.”—1903, Sermon #2857
“Make this period, when God is summoning others to Himself, to be the time when you, also, take flight to the better land—I mean not Heaven, but I mean the heart of Christ—that is the true Heaven of this life, and makes this life to be the foretaste of the unending life that is yet to come!”—1903, Sermon #2858
“There are many, nowadays, who hate nothing as much as a religious man! All the epithets in the catalog of scandal are too good for the man who offers homage to God in everything. An infidel may be reputed honest, intelligent and worthy of respect—but a genuine Christian is at once denounced as a hypocrite! Away with such a fellow—his conscience is as offensive as his creed! There is toleration for everybody who conforms to the fashion of the day, but no toleration for anyone who believes that the laws of Heaven should regulate life on earth.”—1903, Sermon #2859 “God may be as much glorified by a weeping Jeremiah as by an eagle-winged Ezekiel!”—1903, Sermon #2860
“Ask an angel what he thinks of the life of a mortal and he will tell you that he remembers when the first man was made—and since then the earth has been always changing its tenants.”—1903, Sermon #2861
“Be satisfied that God is infinitely above you and that you can no more comprehend Him than your hand can hold the ocean, or your fingers grip the sun! If there were no mysteries in our holy faith, we might well believe that it was devised by men like ourselves, for, if men could fully understand it, men might have invented it.”—1903, Sermon #2862
“I have heard of ministers who can preach a sermon without mentioning the name of Jesus from beginning to end. If you ever hear such a sermon as that, mind that you never hear another from that man! If a baker once made me a loaf of bread without any flour in it, I would take good care that he should never do so again. And I say the same of the man who can preach a Christless Gospel!”—1903, Sermon #2863
“I am afraid my voice is so familiar to some of you unconverted ones that you are getting like the miller who can go to sleep, notwithstanding the click of the mill—no, who goes to sleep better in his mill than he does anywhere else! Or like some men I have heard of, over there in Southwark, who work inside the great boilers. When a poor fellow first begins to labor in such a place, the deafening noise is horrible—he thinks he must die! But, after a while, he gets so used to the reverberation that he could well-near sleep notwithstanding all the hammering. It is much the same with hearing the Word of God! Therefore I pray you, if you have long listened to one who would gladly do you good, yield to the message he delivers to you! Before you grow so familiar with it that it loses all its power over your heart, accept it as good tidings of great joy! God grant that you may do so now! While Grace calls, do not refuse.”—1897, Sermon #2547
“O my God, let me die when I can no longer be the means of saving souls! If I can be kept out of Heaven a thousand years, if you will give me souls as my wages, let me still speak for You! But if there are no more sinners to be converted—no more to be brought in by my ministry—then let me depart and be ‘with Christ, which is far better.’”—1900, Sermon #2695
“No church can be healthy without the constant infusion of fresh blood. Unless there are new converts, you cannot see the church built up. Young converts are quick in inventing new ways of usefulness and they venture to do things which some consider ‘imprudent.’ Oh, how I love that word, ‘imprudent,’ in such a connection! I like ‘imprudent’ young people. The more ‘imprudent’ they are, in the cause of God in the judgment of stolid, cold-hearted professors, the more I rejoice in them! imprudence which believes in God and dares to do exploits in his strength, is far preferable to that prudence which has no faith and is, therefore, a poor, dead, useless thing.”—1900, Sermon #2692
“Self-complacency may be a very pleasant feeling to cherish, but he who walks near to God is a stranger to it.”—1900, Sermon #2696
“It is noteworthy how the belief of one of the Doctrines of Grace naturally leads to the belief of all the rest. The system of the Gospel is so logical, its Truths fit so well into one another, that you cannot get a right knowledge of one of them without, at once, or in a very short time, discovering the others! The Lord begins by teaching us His foundation Truth of our utter depravity—He burns it into our conscience by bitter experience and by terrible discoveries of our sinfulness—and He knows right well that the other doctrines will follow and that, when this Truth is really understood by us, it shall not be long before we have orthodox views of the whole Covenant of Grace and the great system of the Gospel of Jesus. This, I think, is one reason why the Lord gives His people revelations of their own iniquity and defilement, that they may be sound in the faith and may believe nothing but the Doctrines of Grace.”—1901, Sermon #2711
“If a thousand devils were to bind you thus with cords, so that you could not move hand or foot, yet, depend upon it, you shall slip out of the cords and come into perfect liberty—for all the devils in Hell cannot hold a soul that belongs to Christ—and you do belong to Him if you truly trust Him.”—1901, Sermon #2712
“If you are not a child of God, you will be able to do without God. But the fact that some of you cannot be happy unless you are living in the light of God’s love proves that you belong to Him. A child can be content without a stranger’s smile, but if the one who is looking at him is his father, just because he is his father’s child he must have the assurance of that father’s love, or else he cannot be happy.”—1901, Sermon #2713
“I think it is a very pleasing thing when our new converts begin to exhort us and invite us to join with them in special acts of devotion. Yet, while it is very pleasing in some respects, it sometimes brings to us a measure of rebuke. I remember how it was with me when, in the earnestness of my young heart’s affection for the Lord Jesus Christ, I spoke to some of the older Christians around me and they tried to snuff me out. A liberal supply of wet blankets was generally kept in store, in certain quarters, and brought into use whenever I went round that way. I survived that operation, however, and now that I am myself getting old, when some enthusiastic young spirit begins to wake me up, I hope I shall not quench his ardor by throwing a wet blanket over him!”—1901, Sermon #2713
“Beloved Friends, there is a great value in the prayers of God’s people, so we ought to set great store by them. If you ever wish to do me a good turn, pray for me! And if you would be the means of blessing your fellow Christians, incessantly pray for them! You may think that your petition is of small account, but it is the many ‘littles’ that make up the great whole.”—1901, Sermon #2714
“Dear Friends, beware of a Christless Christianity! Beware of trying to be Christians without living daily upon Christ! The branch may just as well try to bear fruit apart from the vine as for you to hope to maintain the reality of Christian life without continual fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ!”—1901, Sermon #2715
“Our Lord Jesus Christ gets from a good many people what they would not dare to keep back from Him, and what they can readily enough part with—it is sometimes about as much as their shoestrings cost them in a year—certainly not as much as they spend upon the smallest of their many luxuries. Yet the most of them consider that they have done all that they should when such insignificant offerings have been laid at their Lord’s feet! But, dear Friends, I hope that it will be your rule both to give as you love, and to give till you feel it.”—1901, Sermon #2716
“Ungodly men are brought low by affliction or poverty, for sinners have no immunity from suffering. Saints, also, are led into trying circumstances, for the utmost holiness will not preserve any man from trial. But what a difference there is between the downfall of the prosperous sinner and of the man whom God loves! The wicked man who continues in his wickedness, falls forever. But the righteous man, though he may fall seven times, rises up again, for he shall not fall finally. How dreadful is the language of Jehovah when speaking of the ungodly! ‘To Me belongs vengeance, and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.’”—1901, Sermon #2717
“I wish we were as liable to be called fanatics as the first Methodists were simply because men judged us to be as earnest as they were. I would be glad if we were as worthy to be called Puritans as were the men of the days of Dr. John Owen and Oliver Cromwell. For my part, I think that, nowadays, we are not Puritan enough, or precise enough and, without any hesitation, we may make the assertion, which we are sure God’s Word will support, that whatever improvements there may be in the world, there must always be a marked distinction between the children of God and the seed of the serpent!”—1901, Sermon #2719
“When you read one of the promises, you say, ‘Ah, this is indeed precious!’ Yet, remember that what our Lord has revealed in His Word is not a tenth of what He has not said! He has said many rich things, but there are still richer things. He has not said them, He cannot say them because they are not sayable, they are unutterable, they cannot be declared—at least, not at present. When you get to Heaven, you will hear them, but you cannot hear them here.”—1901, Sermon #2720
“For my part, I am determined that if all my senses were to contradict God, I would deny every one of them and sooner believe myself to be out of my right mind than believe that God could lie! And I desire to feel that in every emotion of my spirit, every throb of my heart, every thought of my brain and everything that is contrary to the plainly-revealed Truth of God, I will count myself a fool and a madman—and I will reckon God to be wise and true.”—1901, Sermon #2721
“Why have you and I, dear Friends, to learn obedience? Because there is no way of obtaining true happiness but by obedience. Sin always has sorrow at the tail of it. Happiness is obedience and obedience is happiness. If we do the will of the Lord thoroughly, then are we delivered from all evil, and enter into the joy of our Lord.”—1901, Sermon #2722
“Are you an enemy of the God of Israel? If so, you can see, in the punishment of Egypt, how He will deal with you. You cannot be victorious in this fight, so yield at once! Possibly you say, ‘No, I am not an enemy of God, yet I never think of Him.’ But He made you! He breathed into you the breath of life and yet you say that you never think of Him? What a shameful slight you thus put upon Him, His Majesty! He is here close to you at this moment. He surrounds your every step with mercy and yet you never think of Him? Shall I give you one of His own messages to remember? It is a very dreadful one—‘Consider this, you that forget God, lest I tear you in pieces and there be none to deliver.’ May none of you ever come to know what that terrible verse means!”—1901, Sermon #2723
““An ethereal joy, such as I never knew to the full, before, shall fill my spirit when once I am absent from the body, present with the Lord! Do not be afraid to die, Beloved, but rather look at death as an experience to be desired. I have not the slightest wish to escape it. Those who live till Christ comes and do not die, will have no preference over them that fall asleep in Him. Indeed, they will lose the fellowship with Him, in His death and burial, that others will have.”—1901, Sermon #2723
“Next to the Bible, the book that I value most is John Bunyan’s, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and I imagine I may have read that through perhaps a hundred times. It is a book of which I never seem to tire, but then the secret of that is, that John Bunyan’s, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” is the Bible in another shape. It is the same heavenly water taken out of this same well of the Gospel, yet you would tire even of that book at last.”—1901, Sermon #2724
“It is often a wonderful relief to be able to tell out your grief, to pull up the sluices and let the waters of sorrow run away. If no one but God shall hear it—if no human ear should listen to your complaining—yet it is a very sweet thing to unburden your heart.”—1901, Sermon #2725
“Oh, how long was my mind in bitter anguish till I came to eat the fat of Christ’s Sacrifice! And when I trusted in Him as my Substitute, He at once satisfied the demands of my intellect. I seemed to think that it was the most glorious invention possible even to God, that Christ should die, “the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.” Then I understood how God could be justified and yet be the Justifier of him that believes in Jesus—how He could pardon me and yet punish my sin—how there should be no violation of His justice and yet no limitation of His mercy because Christ stepped in and paid all my debt, so that it was justly as well as mercifully struck out from the record of God! There are some very great intellects in the world—no doubt there are much greater ones than mine—but, as far as mine is concerned, that doctrine of Christ’s Substitution perfectly satisfies me.”—1901, Sermon #2726
“Suppose us to be banished into exile, without a friend and without a helper—even there, from the end of the earth, we would find that prayer to God was still available! In fact, if there is a place nearer than another to God’s Throne, it is just the end of the earth, for the end of the earth is the beginning of Heaven.”—1901, Sermon #2728
“We need to be more like Mary, sitting at the feet of Jesus, looking up into His dear face and listening to His gracious words. The active life will have little power in it if it is not accompanied by much of the contemplative and the prayerful. There must be retirement for private prayer if there is to be true growth in Grace.”—1901, Sermon #2729
“To know Christ, to trust Christ, to love Christ—these are among the elementary principles of piety. Without all of these Graces, there is no true religion. But if these things are in us, and abound, they make us to be neither barren nor unfruitful.”—1901, Sermon #2730
“If you have no family prayer and your children do not grow up to be Christians, how can you expect that they will?”—1901, Sermon #2731
“You are sure to be heard, Beloved, if you pour out your heart before the God that hears prayer!”—1901, Sermon #2732
“If I set the unloving to read a chapter in the Bible, they will find no Savior there. But if I ask the gracious Robert Hawker to read that same portion of Scripture, he finds in it the name of Jesus from beginning to end! If I beg one who is simply a critical scholar, to study a Psalm, he sees no Messiah there—but if I set an enthusiastic lover of the Savior to read it, he sees Him, if not in every verse, still, here and there he has glimpses of His Glory!”—1901, Sermon #2733
“Do you ask, ‘To whom shall I confess my sins?’ Shall you come to me with your confession? Oh no, no, no! I could not stand that! There is an old proverb about a thing being ‘as filthy as a priest’s ear.’ I cannot imagine anything dirtier than that, and I have no wish to be a partaker in the filthiness. Go to God and confess your sin to Him—pour out your heart’s sad story in the ear of Him against whom you have offended! Say with David, ‘Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight.’”—1900, Sermon #2705
“It was truly said, ‘You cannot see God’s face and live.’ But I have been inclined to say, ‘Then let me see God’s face, and die.’ John Welsh said, when God was flooding his soul with a sense of His wondrous love, ‘Stop, Lord, stop! I am but an earthen vessel and You will break me.’ If I had been there and I could have borne no more, I would have said, ‘Do not stop, Lord! Break the poor earthen vessel, smash it to pieces, but let Your love be revealed in me!’ Oh, that I might even die of this pleasurable pain of knowing too much of God, too much of the ineffable delight of fellowship with Him! Let us be very venturesome, Beloved, and pray, ‘Show Your marvelous loving kindness.’”—1900, Sermon #2702 “The Gospel is priceless in value, but it is to be had ‘without money and without price.’ The salvation of God can never be purchased. I am amazed that anyone should ever cherish the idea of a man buying a place for himself in Heaven. Why, the very streets are paved with exceedingly rich and rare gold, and a rich man’s whole fortune would not buy a single paving stone in those golden streets! There is nothing that you can ever bring to God as the purchase-money for salvation! He is infinitely rich—what does He want of yours? If you are righteous, what do you want from Him? The impossibility of salvation by human merit or good works ought to be clear to every thinking man. If we do all that God bids us do, we are doing no more than we ought to do—and even then we are unprofitable servants!”—1900, Sermon #2685
“It was a great joy to me when my sons were born, but it was an infinitely surpassing joy as, one after the other, they told me that they had sought and found the Savior! To pray with them, to point them yet more fully to Christ, to hear the story of their spiritual troubles and to help them out of their spiritual difficulties was an intense satisfaction to my soul.”—1900, Sermon #2680 “How many times a day do you praise Him [God]? I think you do get alone to pray and you would be ashamed if you did not, once, twice, or three or even more times in the day—but how often do you praise God? Now, you know that you will not pray in Heaven; there it will be all praise.Then do not neglect that necessary part of your education which is to “begin the music here.” Start at once praising the Lord.”—1900, Sermon #2679
“When God prepared the worm to destroy Jonah’s gourd, the result of its work was very sad. It left the poor man without that which had made him exceedingly glad and he was as angry and distressed as before when he had been rejoicing! I want you, dear Friends, to pause here to learn this lesson. It is God who sends your trials—do not get into your head the notion that your sickness or anything else that grieves you is from the devil. He may have a finger in it, but he is, himself, always under the supremacy of God. When Job is vexed and plagued by Satan, the archenemy cannot touch him anywhere till God gives permission. God always stands at the back of all that happens. Therefore, do not begin kicking at the secondary agent. You know that if you strike a dog with a stick, he bites at the stick—if he were a sensible dog, he would try to bite you! If you quarrel with anything that happens, your quarrel is virtually with God Himself. It is no use to quarrel with the Lord’s agent, for it is God, after all, who sends you the affliction—and ‘He does not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.’ Say, as old Eli did, when he heard the evil tidings concerning his household, ‘It is the Lord: let Him do what seems good to Him.’ Let it be with you as it was with Aaron when, as he could not speak joyfully, he did not speak at all—‘Aaron held his peace.’ It is sometimes a great thing to not be able to say anything. Silence is golden when it is the silence of a complete submission to the will of the Lord. God prepares the worm, therefore, be not angry with the poor worm, but just let the gourd go. It was God who made it to grow and He had a perfect right to take it away when He pleased.”—1897, Sermon #2504
“I have come even to love my own necessities, for they seem to be like pedestals whereon the image of Christ may stand! If I did not need Christ, how could He be my life? If I did not need food to sustain that life, how could He be the bread of life to me? The greater my necessities, the deeper is my sense of His fullness! The more I become dependent upon Him for everything, the more I see of His all-sufficiency.”—1900, Sermon #2706
“It is wonderfully condescending on God’s part to listen to us. Many of our complaints are only rubbish, yet He hears them patiently.”—1900, Sermon #2696
“No one by faith plunges into the crystal Fountain of perfect cleansing without first lamenting the filthiness which needs to be removed!”— 1900, Sermon #2696
“[Psalm 51.] A Psalm of David, after Nathan had rebuked him and he had been convinced of his great guilt in having sinned with Bathsheba. The music to which this Psalm can be sung must be composed of sighs, groans, sobs and cries. I believe that many of us here present have prayed this prayer of David many times—and he who has never prayed it has need to begin to do so at once!”—1898, Sermon #2588
“I would choose my Heaven to be a Heaven of everlasting weeping for sin sooner than have a Heaven—if such a Heaven could be—consisting of perpetual laughing at the mirth of fools!”—1898, Sermon #2572
“All the other Graces within us derive strength from our faith. If faith is at a low ebb, love is sure to burn very feebly. If faith should begin to fail, then would hope grow dim. Where is courage? It is a poor puny thing when faith is weak. Take any Grace you please, and you shall see that its nourishing depends upon the healthy condition of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ! To take faith away, therefore, would be to take the fountain away from the stream—it would be to withdraw the sun from its rays if light. If you destroy the source, of course that which comes out of it ceases. Therefore, Beloved, take the utmost possible care of your faith, for I may truly say of it that out of it are the issues of life to all your Graces. Faith is that virtuous woman who clothes the whole household in scarlet and feeds them all with luscious and strengthening food. But if faith is gone, the household soon becomes naked, poor, blind and miserable. Everything in a Christian fails when faith ceases to nourish it!”—1899, Sermon #2620
“Above all, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ‘straightway. That word, ‘straightway,’ is implied in every Gospel exhortation! We are not sent to preach to our Hearers, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ tomorrow!’ No minister of Christ is authorized to say, ‘Put off faith in Christ for a week.’ No, but our message is, ‘Behold, now is the accepted time! Behold, now is the day of salvation!’ Believe in Jesus and believe in Him now! And if the Spirit of God is really working in your spirit, you will be moved to believe now. If it is only my talk and my persuasion, you will still say, ‘Tomorrow.’ But if it is God’s Word, it will go with power to your heart and you will say, ‘Now, Lord, even now, bring my soul out of prison, that I may trust Your Son and praise Your holy name.’ For a man to delay, who has nothing to depend upon but the breath in his nostrils, is the height of folly! For a man to delay, who stands on the brink of the grave, when that grave will conduct him to Hell, is indeed terrible!”— 1899, Sermon #2618
“I feel sure that I am addressing people who are not happy. The common idea of happiness that many persons have is a very strange one. When our London friends have a day’s holiday, their notion of enjoying a rest often amuses me. They pack themselves away, as tightly as they can, inside and outside a van, or an omnibus, or a carriage—and then they go as far as they can till the weary horse can scarcely move to bring them home! And, all the while, to give rest to their ears and to their hearts, somebody blows a trumpet in a fashion that evokes very little music, and they riot all the day as if they were mad and disport themselves as if London consisted of one huge Bethlehem Hospital—and that is what they call happiness!”—1899, Sermon #2630
“When Mary Magdalene first sought to hold her Lord, Jesus said to her, “Touch Me not, for I am not yet ascended to My Father.” But now He permits what He had formerly forbidden—“They came and held Him by the feet”—those blessed feet that the nails had held but three days before! He had risen from the grave and, therefore, a wondrous change had taken place in Him—but the wounds were there, still visible, and these women “held Him by the feet.” And, Beloved, whenever you get your Lord Jesus near to you, do not let Him go for any little trifle—no, nor even for a great thing, but say, with the spouse in the Canticles, “I found Him whom my soul loves: I held Him, and would not let Him go.” The saints, themselves, will sometimes drive Christ away from those who love Him. Therefore the spouse said, “I charge you, O you daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that you stir not up, nor awake my love, till He pleases.” Be jealous lest you lose Him, when you have realized the joy, the rich delight, of having Him in your soul! You feel, at such a time as that, as if you scarcely dared to breathe—and you are so particular about your conduct that you would not venture to put one foot before the other without consulting Him, lest even inadvertently you should cause Him grief! Bow thus at His feet. Be humble. Hold Him by the feet. Be bold, be affectionate. Grasp Him, for though He is your God, He is also your Brother, bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh!”—1899, Sermon #2628
“Many, nowadays, say that we ought to blend the Church with the congregation and that it is a great pity to have any division between them. A great many good people are outside the Church—therefore try to make the Church as much like the world as you can! That is a silly trick of the devil which the wise servants of God will answer by saying, “To whom we give place for subjection, no, not for an hour!” There must always be a broad line of demarcation between the Church of Christ and the world—it will be an evil day when that line is abolished.”—1899, Sermon #2616
“Praise is the end of prayer and preaching.”—1896, Sermon #2482
“Somebody asked, the other day, why we talk about ‘Free Grace.’ Of course that is a redundant expression, for Grace must be free, but there are so many people about, nowadays, who will not understand us if they can help it, so we like to speak, not only so that they can understand us, but so that they cannot misunderstand us if they try! It is for this reason that we say, ‘Free Grace,’ that they may have it twice over and hear it with both ears. If we only speak to one of their ears, it may, as men say, go in that one and out the other—but if we speak to both their ears at once, perhaps the Truth of God may meet somewhere in the center of their brain and remain there.”—1897, Sermon #2544
“If any of you desire to know how you are to be saved, I tell you again that there is nothing for you to do in order to merit salvation—you have rather to leave off your own doing and to rest in what Christ has done! Have I put the matter plainly enough? No, I have not, for who can make it so plain that a blind man can see it? God must open the blind man’s eyes and then he will see it. Yet there it stands, clear and plain—salvation is the free gift of God! It is all of Grace from first to last!”—1897, Sermon #2544
“If God would but say to men, ‘I will accept unspiritual service,’ He might be the God of the whole earth at once!”—1896, Sermon #2466
“To me, it always seems to be the climax of Heaven to be with Christ forever. I believe in the Communion of Saints above and in our recognition and love of one another. I believe in all those heavenly employments that shall occupy our eternal life. I believe in a thousand sources of joy in that blest land, for there are pleasures,as well as pleasure, at God’s right hand forevermore! But, as the summit of Mont Blanc rises above the surrounding hills and with its snowy whiteness seems to pierce the very sky, so the summit of my expectation of Heaven is to be where Christ is, to behold Him, to see His face and to share His triumphant joy and rest, for “His rest shall be glorious,” and His rest and ours, too, shall be glory!”—1897, Sermon #2542
“‘Oh that I knew where I might find Him! That I might come even to His seat! I would order my cause before Him and fill my mouth with arguments’(Job 23:3, 4). Good men are washed towards God even by the rough waves of their grief. And when their sorrows are deepest, their highest desire is not to escape from them, but to get at their God. ‘Oh that I knew where I might find Him!’ Job wanted to spread out his whole case before the Lord, to argue it with Him, to present his petitions to the Most High and to find out from God why He was contending with him. It is all right with you, Brothers and Sisters, if your face is towards your God in rough weather. It is all wrong with you, Brothers and Sisters, if the weather is very calm and your face is turned away from your God.”—1897, Sermon #2546
“Believer in Christ, it will be well for you to make out this account because you will find that it will help you to prize your Savior more. I never look into my own heart without first, feeling shame and, afterwards, feeling greater love to Him who has eternally loved such a sinner as I am. I am sure it will drive you to your knees if you honestly search your own lives. There is enough in the history of a single week to make you prize your Redeemer more than ever if you fully realize the guilt of that one week and the greatness of His Grace in pardoning it. O Christian, if you would be driven nearer to your Lord, search and see, confess, repent and seek forgiveness. Go again to the Cross because you have again felt the burden of the sin that nailed your Savior there!”—1895, Sermon #2445
“While the gods of the heathen are pictured in their mythologies as dealing with kingdoms and with wars and with other matters upon a large scale, this gracious God of ours is so infinitely condescending that He waters the grass, feeds the cattle and listens to the cries of young ra-vens.”—1897, Sermon #2524
“Some persons proudly say that they are self-made men—and I generally find that they worship their makers. Having made themselves, they are peculiarly devoted to themselves. But a man who is self-made is badly made. If God does not make him anew, it would have been better for him never to have been made! That which comes of man is but a polluted stream from an impure source—out of evil comes evil, and from a depraved nature comes depravity. It is only when God makes us new creatures in Christ Jesus that it is any joy for us to be creatures at all! And all the praise must be given to Him.”—1897, Sermon #2524 “And as to hope, Beloved, why, we had hope when we began our spiritual life, and we still have hope—and that hope will continue with us—I will not say in Heaven, though I think it will, for there is something to hope for in the disembodied state. We shall hope for the Day of Resurrection and there will be something to hope for even in the resurrection, for, throughout the ages we shall have a good hope that still we shall be “forever with the Lord.” Certainly, he who knows God best fears Him most and also hopes in Him most!”—1897, Sermon #2524
“You must not try to take Christ away from His offices! Christ is not sent of God to make you a rich man—He is sent of God to make you a saved man. So you may go to Him as a Savior, for that is His office. You may go to Him as a Priest, for it is His office to cleanse, to offer sacrifice, to make intercession. Take Christ as God sets Him forth and then be it unto you even as you will.”—1896, Sermon #2446
“A dear Sister who was buried today said, when they told her that she could not live another day, ‘Does it not seem wonderful? Is it not a grand thing to know that I am going to see the Lord Jesus Christ today?’ And she lay on her bed saying this to all who came, ‘It seems too good to be true that I should be so near that for which I have longed these many years! I am going, today, to see the King in His beauty!’”—1896, Sermon #2446
“There is nothing, even in the love of martyrs, worthy of praise when compared with the exceeding love of Christ!”—1896, Sermon #2448
“O Master, You are such a glorious Lord that serving You is perfect freedom and sweetest rest!”—1896, Sermon #2449
“Learn, then, all of you who would have Christ as your Savior, that you must be willing to serveHim. We are not saved byservice, but we are saved toservice.”—1896, Sermon #2449
“Holiness is another name for salvation—to be delivered from the power of self-will, the domination of evil lusts and the tyranny of Satan—this is salvation.”—1896, Sermon #2449
“I believe that the profession of consecration to God, when it is accompanied by action that I suggest to myself, may be nothing but will-worship—an abomination in the sight of God! But when anyone says to the Lord, “What will You have me do? Show me, my Master, what You would have me do”—when there is a real desire to obey every command of Christ, then is there the true spirit of service and the true spirit of sonship.”—1896, Sermon #2449
“You need not to know much about Heaven—it is where Christ is, and that is Heaven enough for us.”—1896, Sermon #2449
“I believe that notwithstanding all the dreary centuries that have passed, Christ shall have the pre-eminence as to numbers as well as in every other respect—and that the multitudes who shall be saved by Him shall far transcend those who have rejected His mercy.”—1896, Sermon #2451
“When God means to save a man, He usually begins by making him sorrow on account of his evil ways. It is the sharp steel needle of the Law of God that goes through the convicted heart and draws the silken thread of comfort and salvation after it!”—1896, Sermon #2452
“When the ear is stopped up by unbelief, it matters not how wisely and how earnestly you proclaim the Truth of God—it will not affect the heart of the hearers.”—1896, Sermon #2453
“It is easy for the Lord to save a sinner, but it is impossible for a self-righteous man to be saved until he is brought down from his fatal pride.”— 1896, Sermon #2453
“O my Brothers, we shall never speak to the heart of our hearers unless what we say has been first engraved on our own hearts! The best notes of a sermon are those that are written on our own inner consciousness. If we speak of the things which we have tasted, and handled, and made our own, we speak with a certainty and with an authority which God is pleased to use for the comfort of His people.”—1896, Sermon #2455 “So, too, have I known a man’s heart to be mightily strengthened by a precious promise. Who knows the wonderful power of a text of Scripture? We used to have, 30 years ago—I do not know whether you have them now—‘poor men’s plasters’ which we used when we felt weak in the back—but a promise out of the Scripture is a poor man’s plaster, indeed! What strength it gives to the loins! How we seem to be braced up when we truly lay hold of a promise of God and it really gets a grip upon our spirit!”—1896, Sermon #2455
“A man’s prayer should be the index of his life’s history. The scenes to which he has been most accustomed should rise up vividly before his spirit when he is at the Throne of Grace.”—1896, Sermon #2455
“Divine Providence is a downy pillow for an aching head, a blessed salve for the sharpest pain. He who can feel that his times are in the hand of God need not tremble at anything that is in the hand of man!”—1896, Sermon #2455
“It has been my lot, in years past, to call upon God to help me in what men judged to be rash and imprudent enterprises, but oh, how grandly the Lord always answers to the holy courage of His people if they will but do and dare for Him! Yet, too often, He has to say, ‘You have not called upon Me, O Jacob.’”—1897, Sermon #2548
“I beg you to remember that there is no quitting of sin—there is no escaping from its power—except by contact and union with the Lord Jesus Christ. I may stand here and preach against the prevalent vices of the age, as I hope I never shall be ashamed to do, but no vice will be put down merely by my denunciation of it. I may charge this man to shake off his sins by righteousness and to escape for his life, but I have set him a task which is quite impossible to him unless I also tell him where the power is to be found by which this work is to be done.”—1897, Sermon #2549
“The way to do a great deal is to keep on doing a little. The way to do nothing at all is to be continually resolving that you will do every-thing.”—1897, Sermon #2549
“I do not say that either of our English versions [of the Bible] is Inspired, for there are mistakes in the translation, but if we could get at the original text, just as it was first written, I am not afraid to say that every jot or tittle—every crossed ‘t’ of it and every dot of each ‘i’—was Infallibly Inspired by God the Holy Spirit! I believe in the Infallibility and the Infinity of Holy Scripture! God Inspired the whole record, Genesis as well as Revelation, and all that is between—and He desires us to believe in one part of the Word as much as another. If you do not believe that, it will not be food to you. I am sure that it will not—it will only be a kind of emetic to you and not food. It cannot feed your soul as long as you are disputing about it. If it is not God’s Word, then it is man’s word, or the devil’s word—and if you care to live on the devil’s word, or on man’s word, I do not! But God’s Word is food for the soul that dwells with God and it cannot be satisfied with anything else.”—1898, Sermon #2577
“The thoughts of angels, or the thoughts of perfect spirits above must be something very wonderful, but, oh, the thoughts of God! If I were told that some bright angel was sent to think of me all day and all night long, that he was my Master’s servant to watch over me, I would feel pleasure in the thought, yet that would be a poor, poor thing compared with the fact that God thinks upon us and watches over us!”—1899, Sermon #2609
“My Lord Mayor is not more proud of his badge and chain than many a crossing sweeper is of his ragged trousers! Pride can live upon a dunghill as well as upon a throne! But God will hide pride from us, till, if we look about, we cannot find it and cannot see any reason for being proud.”— 1896, Sermon #2453
“THE religion of Jesus is the most peaceful, mild and benevolent religion which was ever promulgated. When we compare it with any set of dogmas invented by men, there is not one of them that can stand the least comparison with it for gentleness, mildness and love. As for the religion of Mohamed, it is the religion of the vulture—but the religion of Jesus is that of the dove—all is mercy, all is mild. It is, like its Founder, an embodiment of pure benevolence, Grace and truth.”—1898, Sermon #2594
“I judge that the principal business of any minister of Christ, or of any elder of the Church of Christ, is to bear testimony to the sufferings of Christ. If the atoning sufferings of Christ are left out of a ministry, that ministry is worthless.”—1899, Sermon #2610
“Preach the Doctrines of Grace to a man who never had a sense of sin and he says, ‘I don’t believe in Calvinism.’”—1896, Sermon #2482
“It is no new thing that we should be made a laughingstock to the enemies of the Cross of Christ because we cannot do what we have formerly done and are beaten in the very field where before we have achieved great and notable victories for our Master!”—1896, Sermon #2454
“One thing I know, Christ thinks more of our sins than He does of our righteousness, for He gave Himself for our sins—I never heard that He gave Himself for our righteousness. By His most precious blood, He has put away the sins of all who trust Him. But take care that your self-righteousness does not come in between you and the Savior, for if it does, you will be among the rich whom He will send away empty! Empty your pockets and make yourselves poor! I do not mean in money, but in spirit. Get down to spiritual poverty and beggary, for that is the onlyway to attain to spiritual riches.”—1896, Sermon #2482
“It was said, long ago, that it is the highest wisdom for a man to know himself—but I deny that. The first, the highest, the best of all wisdom is for a man to know his God. As for himself, he is but a speck, an atom, a nothing. If he truly attains a knowledge of God, he will afterwards know himself in the best possible way.”—1898, Sermon #2571
“They err from the Scriptures who make the Grace of God a reason for doing nothing—it is the reason for doing everything.”—1896, Sermon #2455
“I have been sometimes called to book for saying—yet I will venture to say it again—that if I lived in a village, or if I lived in any other place where I knew there was a Baptist or other Dissenting Chapel, before I decided to attend it, I would want to know, first, ‘Is the Gospel preached there?’ I am not so blindly wedded to any denomination whatever that I should cling to the denomination if it did not cleave to Christ! ‘Follow the Lamb wherever He goes.’”—1896, Sermon #2456
“In a free country like this, you may be almost anything that you like except a Christian. There is no liberty for you and you will find that the dogs of Hell will bark at you because you are a stranger and a foreigner in this world!”—1899, Sermon #2612
“That is a good rule for all Christians which I saw in one of our Orphanage schoolrooms—“What would Jesus do?” There cannot be a better guide than that for Believers. for our text is true with regard to Doctrine, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My Words shall not pass away.””—1899, Sermon #2636
“With utmost reverence would I say that God Himself cannot be glorified by His promises without you! If He intends to feed the hungry, then the hungry are essential to the accomplishment of His purpose! If He would clothe the naked, then there must be naked ones for Him to clothe! Is there not a mine of comfort here for you who have been almost outside hope? I trust that some of you poor lost ones will say in your hearts, if you do not utter it with your voices, “Are we really essential to God’s Glory? Does God need our poverty, our sinfulness and our nothingness in order that He may, through them, display the greatness of His Grace? Then we will certainly come to Him just as we are.” Do so, I pray you. Come! Come!! Come!!! May the Holy Spirit, by His Omnipotent Grace draw you now, for our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake! Amen.”—1900, Sermon #2657
“Ah, Lord Jesus! I never knew Your love till I understood the meaning of Your death.”—1900, Sermon #2656
“The devil himself has the faith of the head. He believes and trembles. He is as orthodox as many very learned divines. As far as the mere statement of theology is concerned, I could trust the devil to draw up a creed. I believe he is thoroughly sound and that he knows a great deal more about God’s Word than most of us do. He can quote it correctly when he pleases, although he is also an adept at misquoting it for his own ends. I do not think that the devil ever was an Arminian, or that he ever will be one—he understands the Doctrines of Grace, at least in his head, too well for that. In one respect, he is better than some Antinomians, for they believe and presume, while he believes and trembles. Still, Satan and Antinomians never would be very great enemies. I wonder that they talk about the devil tempting them—I believe that they tempt themselves, or that they tempt the devil to tempt them if he really does tempt them at all.”—1901, Sermon #2737
“If nobody is to go to Heaven until he can explain all the difficulties that anybody can suggest to him, who will ever go there? What you need is not the wisdom which can answer puzzling questions, but the faith which clings to Christ through thick and thin. That is the deepness of earth which will keep the Good Seed alive within your soul.”—1903, Sermon #2844
“Once more, Jehovah’s challenge, ‘Is there anything too hard for me?’ contains a lesson for you who are trying to serve the Lord.I want you also to catch the meaning and the message of my text—there is nothing too hard for God, so He can save the children in your Sunday school class. He can bless the people of the district where you visit. He can help you to talk to that dying person whom you went to see yesterday. There is nothing too hard for the Lord, so He can bless you, city missionary, to that dark slum which gives you so much anxiety. He can bless you, dear Friend, at that street corner where you scarcely get through a dozen sentences before you are interrupted. This question of Jehovah, ‘Is there anything too hard for Me?’ seems to be like a rallying cry from God to urge all His followers to press on, like heroes, without a doubt about the victory! ‘Courage, my comrades,’ said Mohammed to his troops, one day, when the battle was going against them—‘I can hear the angels coming to our rescue.’ There were no angels flying to help him, but they are always coming to aid us when we need them, for, ‘are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?’ If we are truly trusting in the living God, He will surely send the heavenly principalities and powers to help us, so that, in our weakness, His strength shall be glorified and sinners shall be saved!”—1900, Sermon #2675
“I believe in the free agency of man as much as anyone who lives, but I equally believe in the eternal purpose of God. If you ask, ‘How do you reconcile those beliefs?’ I answer, ‘They have never yet been at variance, so there is no need to attempt to reconcile them. They are like two parallel lines which will run side by side forever—man responsible because he does what he wills, and God infinitely glorious, achieving His own purposes, not only in the world of dead, inert matter, but also through those who are free agents—without changing them in the least degree, leaving them just as free as they ever were, He yet, in every jot and tittle, performs the eternal purpose of His will.’”—1900, Sermon #2670
“‘Conscience,’ when it is once defiled, ‘makes cowards of us all.’ But if we have a conscience void of offense toward God and men, that is a fountain of courage and the source of great strength.”—1901, Sermon #2738
“ Often, the blessing from Christ’s lips is the echo of the prayer which fell from ours. The blind man said, ‘Lord, that I may receive my sight.’ Echo answered, ‘Receive your sight.’”—1900, Sermon #2665
“The very dust which flies down our streets, was, much of it, once alive as part of the body of one of our forefathers! This earth is, indeed, a huge morgue. What was it that slew all these people and dug all these graves? It was sin, for, “sin, when it is finished, brings forth death.” It is no small thing that has worked all this mischief among mankind!”—1903, Sermon #2863
“When you can sing, with the Psalmist, ‘My cup runs over,’ mind that you call somebody to come and catch what spills, for if you let it run to waste, it may be said of you, ‘That man cannot be trusted with a full cup.’ So let it run over where those with empty cups may come and catch it, to moisten their parched lips! It is a good thing when the Christian, even though he has but little, can say, ‘I have not only enough, but I have a little to spare for others who have less than I have.’”—1901, Sermon #2739
“If salvation has come to your heart, you ought to be as happy as an angel! I think that there are some reasons why you should be even happier, for an angel cannot know, by personal experience, the bliss of having his sins forgiven. You, who have realized this wondrous blessing, ought to cause the wilderness and the solitary places to resound with the melody of your thanksgiving. And with the music of your grateful delight you should make even the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose. Oh, what bliss it is to be assured by the Holy Spirit, Himself, that you have passed from death unto life, and that salvation has indeed come to you!”—1900, Sermon #2665
“There are some people who have very crude and false ideas about what the work of God is in the soul. I heard one say that the sinner is to take the first step towards salvation and then good will do the rest. But I have often said and now say it, again, that the first step is the one point of difficulty! You know the French story about Saint Denis, whose head was cut off, and then it was said that he picked it up and carried it in his hands for a thousand miles? That was what the priests of the Church of Rome declared, but one of Voltaire’s followers very wittily remarked that, as for the thousand miles, there was no difficulty in that—it was only the first step that had any difficulty in it—if the saint could manage that part, the rest would be easy enough! And it is just so in the matter of salvation! If the dead man can pick his own head up—if the dead sinner can make himself alive—why, then he can do very well without God the rest of the way to Heaven! But that can never be, for Jesus Christ is Alpha as well as Omega—the first as well as the last in the sinner’s salvation.”—1900, Sermon #2662
“All day long there are opportunities for glorifying God if man really wishes to do it. If the Spirit of God is with you all day, you will feel and say to yourself, “I will give to God all my strength. These things down here—this measuring out, either by yards or by bushels—this buying and this selling—must be done by somebody and I must, by some means, earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, or the sweat of my brain. And as this is what God has given me to do, I will do it thoroughly, with a single eye to His Glory, so that no one shall ever be able to truthfully say that Christianity makes me, in any respect, a worse man than I was before I knew the Lord.” “Your God has commanded your strength,” so live unto God in everything! Let your meals be sacraments! Let your garments be vestments! Let your common utterances be a part of a great life-Psalm! And let your whole being be as a burnt-offering ascending unto the Most High, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ! Oh, for the power of the Spirit of God to help you to do this!”—1900, Sermon #2662
“If it had not been for His eternal plan whereby He purposed to give Grace to the guilty, the whole race of mankind would have been left, like the fallen angels, without hope and without mercy!”—1896, Sermon #2483
“If you do not hate every sin, you do not, with all your heart, hate any sin. They must all go. Sin, as sin, is to be abhorred, repented of and practically quitted in your life. Oh, may God help you to make sure work of your repentance! Make no profession of faith if you have not real faith— and have no repentance at all rather than sham repentance.”—1903, Sermon #2844
“Do not regard your departure out of the world as a thing to be surrounded with horror! Do not conjure up hobgoblins, evil spirits, darkness and terror! ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death,’ of which David spoke, I do not think was ever meant to be applied to dying, for it is a valley that he walks through and he comes out at the other side of it! And it is not the Valley of Death, but only of ‘the Shadow of Death.’ I have walked through that valley many a time—right through from one end of it to the other—and yet I have not died! The grim shadow of something worse than death has fallen over my spirit, but God has been with me, as He was with David, and His rod and His staff have comforted me. And many here can say the same! And I believe that often those who feel great gloom in going through ‘the Valley of the Shadow of Death,’ feel no gloom at all when they come to the Valley of Death itself! There has generally been brightness there for the most sorrowful spirits and those who, before coming there, have groveled in the dust, have been enabled to mount as on eagles’ wings when they have actually come to the place of their departure into the future state.”—1900, Sermon #2659
“There is such a thing as anticipating the glory to be revealed with such a full, realizing faith that we begin to enjoy it even now! Surely, you have, at times, sat down with your fellow Believers, when the Word has been preached in the demonstration of the Spirit, and you have said, ”Well, Heaven must be glorious, indeed, to be any better than this.”—1899, Sermon #2610
“Not an angel in Heaven is more certain of the eternal love of God than is the feeblest Believer upon earth! If your soul is committed to the hands of Christ, you can never perish! I speak no more strongly than His own utterances warrant, for Jesus has said, ‘My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish.’”—1901, Sermon #2741
“When the worldling dreads sin, it is because he is afraid of Hell. But the Christian is delivered from all fear of Hell and he hates sin, itself, because he fears to grieve the God he loves.”—1898, Sermon #2571
“There is never a flood for the wicked without an ark for the righteous! Never shall a storm sweep over the earth till God has prepared a great rock wherein His people may be hidden.”—1896, Sermon #2459
“I can never understand how a so-called “priest” can ask people to confess their sins to him. I would not make my ear into a common sewer for all the wealth in the world! What foulness there must be on the soul of him who has heard what others have done and who knows what sin he has himself committed! Sin, when we see what it really is, whether in ourselves or in others, horrifies us.”—1903, Sermon #2863
“Do not suppose that a man can be saved and yet know nothing about the great change that has been worked in him. It is not every man who can say for certain that he is saved, for faith is a thing of growth and assurance may not come at once. But when a man is really and completely saved, he has but to use the proper means and he may become absolutely certain of it. God the Holy Spirit is willing and waiting to give the full assurance of faith and of understanding to those who seek it at His hands.”—1900, Sermon #2665
“The God who blessed the broken sermon of Mr. Tennant can bless our imperfect work in the pulpit, the Sunday school, or anywhere else! [Read sermon for amazing stories!] And the God who saved such men as John Williams and his companion, when they least thought of such a thing happening, can also save some who have strayed in here, tonight, little dreaming what designs of love God has toward them in bringing them at this time under the sound of His Word!”—1900, Sermon #2663
“The best messengers to find Christ are the penitent tears of His saints. Tears act on Divine mercy like the magnet on the needle—the tears of the Christian find the heart of God. Go after your Master with wet eyes and He will soon come to you. There is a sacred connection between Christ and weeping eyes, for it is Christ’s office to wipe the mourner’s eyes. And whenever He sees you weeping, His fingers are eager to be wiping them. He must wipe them. He cannot bear to see the tears and, if He wipes them, He must come to you. So, the surest way to find Him is to seek Him sorrowing.”—1899, Sermon #2611
“If God does not fulfill a single promise to me for the next 50 years, I shall be perfectly satisfied to live on the promises, themselves, if my faith shall but be sustained by His Grace!”—1900, Sermon #2656
“Into Your hands I commit my spirit.You notice that this Psalm [31] is dedicated to the chief musician. I have studied these Psalms, not only by the hour, and by the day, but sometimes by the month, together. Some of these Psalms have been the pillow for my head at night. Others of them, like wafers made of honey, have lain in my mouth till I have sucked out of them their Divine sweetness. I have often noticed that when one of these sacred songs is dedicated to the chief musician, The Chief Musician generally appears somewhere in the Psalm—He from whom comes all the music that ever makes bleeding hearts, glad, usually shows some traces of Himself within the Psalm itself! In this instance, the living words of David were the dying words of David’s Lord—‘Into Your hands I commend My spirit.’ What David did and what the Lord Jesus Christ did, let us do, and do it every day—let us commit our spirit into the hands of our God.”—1896, Sermon #2455
“If we give any description of the world to come which is at all terrible, those who reject the Scriptures begin to cry out that we have borrowed it from Dante, or taken it from Milton! But I take leave to say that the most awful and harrowing descriptions of the woes of the lost that ever fell from human lips do not exceed or even equal the language of the loving Christ, Himself! Listen—“Cast the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” He is the true lover of men’s souls who does not deceive them! He that paints the miseries of Hell as though they were but little is seeking to murder men’s souls under the pretense of being their friend! May God give all of you Grace to trust in Jesus for yourselves and then to point others to him, for Christ’s sake! Amen.”—1899, Sermon #2643
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