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  NOTABLE QUOTES, VOL. 1-5
  by Ch Spurgeon
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A five-volume collection of selected Spurgeon quotations on preaching, ministry,
and the Christian life, capturing his sense of awesome responsibility and
accountability before vast congregations.

  Chapters: 10

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 00 Notable Quotes
    2. vol. 1
    3. vol. 2
    4. vol. 2 contd
    5. vol. 3
    6. vol. 3 contd
    7. vol. 4
    8. vol. 4 contd
    9. vol. 5
   10. vol. 5 contd

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  CHAPTER 1: 00 NOTABLE QUOTES
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Notable Quotes vol 1-5 from his sermons By Charles Spurgeon PRAY THE HOLY SPIRIT
WILL USE THESE QUOTES TO BRING MANY TO A SAVING KNOWLEDGE OF JESUS CHRIST


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  CHAPTER 2: VOL. 1
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NOTABLE QUOTES OF CHARLES H. SPURGEON Preaching — Awesome Responsibility

“Often, when I come in at the door and my eyes fall on this vast congregation, I
feel a tremor go through me to think that I should have to speak to you all and
be, in some measure, accountable for your future state. Unless I preach the
Gospel faithfully and with all my heart, your blood will be required at my
hands. Do not wonder, therefore, that when I am weak and sick, I feel my head
swim when I stand up to speak to you, and my heart is often faint within me. But
I do have this joy at the back of it all—God does set many sinners free in this
place! Some people reported that I was mourning that there were no conversions.
Brothers and Sisters, if you were all to be converted tonight, I should mourn
for the myriads outside! That is true, but I praise the Lord for the many who
are converted here. When I came last Tuesday to see converts, I had 21 whom I
was able to propose to the Church—and it will be the same next Tuesday, I do not
doubt. God is saving souls! I am not preaching in vain. I am not despondent
about that matter—liberty is given to the captives and there will be liberty for
some of them, tonight! I wonder who it will be? Some of you young women over
yonder, I trust. Some who have dropped in here, tonight, for the first time. Oh,
may this first opportunity of your hearing the Word in this place be the time of
beginning a new life which shall never end—a life of holiness, a life of peace
with God!”—1894, Sermon #2371 A King Like David

“God promised to David that his seed should always sit upon his throne, but if
Jesus dies, then is that Covenant broken? That Jesus’ reign may endure forever,
He must live. Though He bows His head in death, yet must He live. He must rise
again, otherwise the King is gone, the throne is vacant, the Covenant has
failed. Jesus must rise from the dead, else how can He save His people? Can a
dead Christ save us? The Church of Rome continually sets before us Christ either
as a Baby in His mother’s arms, or else as a Man dead on the Cross. Neither of
these is a true portrait of Christ! He is no more a Baby and He is no more dead!
He sits on the Throne of God, reigning and ruling, and He will come, the second
time, without sin, unto salvation! The living Christ is our hope! It is
witnessed of Him that He lives at the right hand of God and, as I quoted to you
just now, it is for this reason that‘He is able, also, to save them to the
uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever lives to make intercession
for them.’”—1894, Sermon #2366

“A curious fact can be proved by abundant evidence, namely, that the boast of
human perfection is closely followed by obscenity and licentiousness!”—1893,
Sermon #2326 Knowing God in Christ

“Whenever you get one inch above the ground in your own esteem, you are that
inch too high!”—1895, Sermon #2395

“No one knows the true God in the real sense of knowledge except through Jesus
Christ, for no man comes unto the Father but by the Son. But even if he could
know God, in a measure, apart from the Revelation of Him in Christ Jesus, it
would be a knowledge of terror that would make him flee away and avoid God! It
would not be life to our souls to know God apart from His Son, Jesus Christ! We
must know the Christ whom He has sent or our knowledge does not bring eternal
life to us.”—1895, Sermon #2396

“In the greatness of our troubles there may often be space for the greater
display of the goodness of God!”—1895, Sermon #2408 “All the fear in the world
that is worth having is the result of pardoned sin.”—1895, Sermon #2422

Witnesses

“Dear Sunday school teachers, wait upon God for that which you are to teach—take
it warm with love out of the very mouth of God—and then speak it for God out of
your own mouth. Good will surely come of such teaching as that!”—1892, Sermon
#2286

“Sanctification is the great open separator of Christians from the world!”—1893,
Sermon #2313 “There are many prayers that it would not be right to pray in
public, but they are very dear to God’s ear in private.”—1894, Sermon #2380

“If you hear a real Gospel sermon, it directs you to look to Jesus Christ. That
teaching which leads you to think of the priest and to think of the church,
whatever there may be about them that is good, is not ‘the doctrine of God our
Savior.’”—1895, Sermon #2416

“It is well to preach as I do, with my lips. But you can all preach with your
feet and by your lives—and that is the most effective preaching! The preaching
of holy lives is living preaching! The most effective ministry from a pulpit is
that which is supported by godliness from the pew! God help you to do
this!”—1895, Sermon #2432

Family Life

“There is a great deal in the way in which a man walks in his house. It will not
do to be a saint abroad and a devil at home! There are some of that kind. They
are wonderfully sweet at a Prayer Meeting, but they are dreadfully sour to their
wives and children. This will never do! Every genuine Believer should say, and
mean it, ‘I will walk within my house with a perfect heart.’ It is in the home
that we get the truest proof of godliness. ‘What sort of a man is he?’ said one
to George Whitefield, and Whitefield answered, ‘I cannot say, for I never lived
with him.’ That is the way to test a man—to live with him.”—1894, Sermon #2362

“Family prayer and the pulpit are the bulwarks of Protestantism! Depend upon it,
when family piety goes down, the life of godliness will become very low. In
Europe, at any rate, seeing that the Christian faith began with a converted
household, we ought to seek after the conversion of all our families and to
maintain within our houses the good and holy practice of family worship.”—1891,
Sermon #2222

“If you ask for wealth, you may not get it, for it is a small and paltry thing
which the Lord may not care to give you. But if you ask for eternal life, you
shall have it, for this is a great thing and God delights to give the greatest
blessings to those who come to Him by Christ Jesus, so that, what might seem to
hinder should now encourage!”—1894, Sermon #2380

Prayer

“Suppose you open your mouth wide in prayer. “I cannot,” says one. Well, open
your mouth and God will fill it with prayer and then, when you have prayed the
prayer that He has given you, He will fill it with answers! God gives prayer as
well as the answer to prayer! Only open your mouth and, as it were, make a
vacuum for God to fill. God loves to look for emptiness where He may stow away
His Grace.”—1894, Sermon #2380

“Prayer is the longing of the soul to hold communion with the Most High, the
desire of the heart to obtain blessings at His hands.”—1895, Sermon #2433
“Philip was a searcher after Christ in the place where Christ loves to be—in the
pages of Scripture—and you must be the same if you desire to find Jesus!”—1894,
Sermon #2375

“I think it is a great lesson to learn in spiritual things, to believe in Christ
and His finished salvation, quite as much as when you are down as when you are
up, for Christ is not more Christ on the top of the mountain than He is in the
bottom of the valley. And He is no less Christ in the storm at midnight than He
is in the sunshine of the day. Do not begin to measure your safety by your
comfort—but measure it by the eternal Word of God which you have believed and
which you know to be true—and on which you rest, for still here, within the
little world of our bosom, ‘he that observes the wind shall not sow; and he that
regards the clouds shall not reap.’”—1892, Sermon #2264 Revelation Complete

“Now as to that which was a complete Revelation, it is blasphemous to suppose
that there can be any more revealed than has been made known in the Person and
work of Jesus Christ the Son of God!”—1894, Sermon #2358 “The great destroyer of
man is the will of man. I do not believe that man’s free will has ever saved a
soul, but man’s free will has been the ruin of multitudes. ‘You would not,’ is
still the solemn accusation of Christ against guilty men. Did He not say, at
another time, ‘You will not come unto Me, that you might have life’? The human
will is desperately set against God and is the great devourer and destroyer of
thousands of good intentions and emotions which never come to anything permanent
because the will is acting in opposition to that which is right and true.”—
1894, Sermon #2381

“Notice, that it was a prayer that came before anything else. It does not say
that Nehemiah set a watch and then prayed, but,‘nevertheless we made our prayer
unto our God, and set a watch.’ Prayer must always be the fore horse of the
team! Do whatever else is wise, but not until you have prayed! Send for the
physician if you are sick, but first pray. Take the medicine if you have a
belief that it will do you good, but first pray. Go and talk to the man who has
slandered you, if you think you ought to do so, but first pray. ‘Well, I am
going to do so and so,’ says one, ‘and I shall pray for a blessing on it
afterwards.’ Do not begin it until you have prayed! Begin, continue and end
everything with prayer, but especially begin with prayer. Some people would
never begin what they are going to do if they prayed about it first, for they
could not ask God’s blessing upon it.

Direction

“Is there anybody here who is going out of this Tabernacle to a place where he
should not go? Will he pray first? He knows that he cannot ask a blessing on it
and, therefore, he ought not to go there! Go nowhere where you cannot go after
prayer! This would often be a good guide in your choice of where you should go.
Nehemiah first prayed and then set a watch.”—1892, Sermon #2254

“It is a sad affliction when in our solemn assemblies the brilliance of the
Gospel Light is dimmed by error. The clearness of the testimony is spoiled when
doubtful voices are scattered among the people and those who ought to preach the
Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth, are preaching doctrines which
are the imaginations of men and the inventions of the age!”— 1887, Sermon #1990

“If you are going to die, die praying! Do not let the fear of death stop your
praying, that would be folly, indeed!”—1895, Sermon #2433 Living Spiritually

“This is how we live spiritually—we breathe in the air by prayer, and we breathe
it out by praise! This is the holy respiration of a Christian’s life! Prayer and
praise must be mingled in a divinely wise proportion and then they make a sweet
incense, acceptable to God. I hope we can say that we have never finished
praying but that we feel we must begin singing, and that we have never finished
singing but that we must begin praying! What a blessed interchange this makes
for the whole of life!”—1895, Sermon #2396

“I say, again, that detailed obedience is the surest evidence that the Lord has
forgiven your sin. For instance, ‘He who believes and is baptized shall be
saved.’ Do not omitany part of that precept.And if Christ bids you come to His
Table and thus remember Him, do not live in neglect of that command. At the same
time, remember to live soberly, righteously, honestly, godly in this present
evil age, for if you do not, if there is not a detailed obedience, there may be
a fear that, after all, the Lord has never said to you, ‘Your sins are forgiven
you.’””—1893, Sermon #2337

“God bless you, dear hearers! We shall never, all of us, meet again on
earth—that is not possible among these thousands from all quarters of the
globe—but may the sincere penitent prayer of all the unsaved among us be so
heard that we may all meet in Heaven! Amen and Amen.”—1895, Sermon #2433
Christian Giving

“Our gifts are not to be measured by the amount we contribute, but by the
surplus kept in our own hands. The two mites of the widow were, in Christ’s
eyes, worth more than all the other money cast into the treasury, for, ‘she of
her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living.’”— 1891, Sermon
#2234

“Hear the Gospel, only mind that what you hear is the Gospel. You can hear some
very smart sermons and very clever sermons and, as a rule, I may say that the
cleverer they are, the worse they are! Where you see so much of the man, you
will see very little of His Master.”—1893, Sermon #2327

Devotion

“Do not be satisfied, any of you, with half a conversion! I am afraid that there
are a great many who have not much more than half a conversion. I know a man—I
hope he is converted, but I wish that the Lord would convert his temper. He
prays very nicely, but you should see him when he is red in the face with anger
at his wife! I know a man—I hope he is a Christian, it is not for me to
judge—but I wish that the Lord would convert his pocket. It needs a button taken
off, for it is very difficult to get it open! It is very easy to put something
in, but hard to get anything out for any good purpose.”—1893, Sermon #2315

“Think not of the sinner, or of the greatness of his sin, but think of the
greatness of the Savior!”—1895, Sermon #2434 “If you get condemnation out of the
Gospel, you put the condemnation into it yourselves! It is not the Gospel, but
your rejection of it, that will condemn you.”—1893, Sermon #2300

“Some people imagine that if they read so many chapters of the Bible every day,
it will be much to their profit—but it is not so if the reading is a mere
mechanical exercise. It will be far better to read a tenth as much and weigh it,
and let it take possession of brain and heart.”—1891, Sermon #2184

“All ministries, therefore, must be subjected to this test—if they do not
glorify Christ, they are not of the Holy Spirit.”—1894, Sermon #2382 “Never let
us fall into the false notion that if we magnify Christ, we are depreciating the
Father. If any lips have ever spoken concerning the Christ of God so as to
depreciate the God of Christ, let those lips be covered with shame!”—1894,
Sermon #2382

Reminding God

“There is no pleading with God like reminding Him of His Covenant! Get a hold of
a promise of God, and you may pray with great boldness, for the Lord will not
run back from His own Word—but get a hold of the Covenant and you may plead with
the greatest possible confidence!”— 1895, Sermon #2398

“Prayer should be the natural outflow of the soul—you should pray because you
must pray, not because the set time for praying has arrived— but because your
heart must cry unto your Lord.”—1895, Sermon #2437

“Dear Friends, in the service of God, impropriety is often piety. It was said
that Mr. Rowland Hill, “rode upon the back of Order and Decorum.” “Well,” he
said, “I will try to make that true,” so he called his two horses Order and
Decorum and thus, if he did not ride on their backs, he made them pull him to
and from Surrey Chapel. Order and decorum are hardly worth more than to be used
as horses.”—1893, Sermon #2323 Christ’s Death

“The death of Christ was predetermined in the counsel of God and yet it was,
nonetheless, an atrocious crime on the part of ungodly men! The Omnipotence and
Providence of God are to be believed, but man’s responsibility is not,
therefore, to be questioned. Our afflictions may come distinctly from man, as
the result of persecution or malice, and yet they may come with even greater
certainty from the Lord and may be the necessary outcome of His special love to
us.”—1892, Sermon #2237

“Childhood in Grace is a sweet budding time with many rare beauties and
delights.”—1895, Sermon #2410 “If He commands, let us obey. His command is that
we are to believe in His name and to be baptized in His name—let us not be
disobedient to any part of His holy will.”—1895, Sermon #2410 “Praise is the
beauty of a Christian. What wings are to a bird, what fruit is to the tree, what
the rose is to the thorn, that is praise to a child of God.”—1895, Sermon #2437

Meditation

“‘My meditation of Him shall be sweet.’ ‘Of Him’—that is, of the Well-Beloved of
the Father, of the Well-Beloved of the Church, of the Well-Beloved of my own
soul—of Him who loved me, in whose blood I have washed my robes and made them
white. It is meditation ‘of Him’ that is sweet—not merely of doctrine about Him,
but of Him, of Himself—‘my meditation of Him.’ Not merely of His offices, and
His work, and all that concerns Him, but of His own dear Self! There lies the
sweetness and the closer we come to His blessed Person, the more truly have we
approached the very center of bliss!”—1895, Sermon #2403

“If you believe, [in God], your belief will kill your sinning, or else your
sinning will kill your believing! The greatest argument against the Bible is an
unholy life—and when a man will give that up, he will convict himself.”—1893,
Sermon #2305 “The man who talks about his experience as a Christian, who never
does anything for Christ, is, I am afraid, only an idle dreamer.”—1894, Sermon
#2384

“Beloved, you must know the bitterness of sin before you can know the
blessedness of forgiveness! And you must have such a sight of sin as shall break
your heart before you can understand the blessedness of the Divine covering,
that sacred cover which hides sin effectually, blots it out, and even makes it
cease to be. ‘Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is
covered.’”—1892, Sermon #2284

Children

“Children need to learn the doctrine of the Cross that they may find immediate
salvation. I thank God that in our Sunday school we believe in the salvation of
children as children! How very many has it been my joy to see of boys and girls
who have come forward to confess their faith in Christ! And I again wish to say
that the best converts, the clearest converts, the most intelligent converts we
have ever had have been the young ones! And, instead of there being any
deficiency in their knowledge of the Word of God and the Doctrines of Grace, we
have usually found them to have a very delightful acquaintance with the great
cardinal Truths of Christ. Many of these dear children have been able to speak
of the things of God with great pleasure of heart and force of understanding. Go
on, dear teachers, and believe that God will save your children! Be not content
to sow principles in their minds which may possibly develop in later years, but
be working for immediate conversion! Expect fruit in your children while they
are children! Pray for them that they may not run into the world and fall into
the evils of outward sin—and then come back with broken bones to the Good
Shepherd. But that they may, by God’s rich Grace, be kept from the paths of the
Wicked One and grow up in the fold of Christ—first as lambs of His flock—and
then as sheep of His hand.” —1887, Sermon #1988

Live Near

“We do not live near enough to God, do we? I know that some of you wait upon Him
day and night and you abide under the shadow of the Almighty, but I fear that
there are some workers who forget to do this. We should work with the hands of
Martha, but yet keep near the Master with the heart of Mary! We need a
combination of activity and meditation. When we get that—when we inwardly retire
for consultation with our Lord and then come out actively to labor for our
Lord—then shall we be good stewards in the little part of the great house with
which He has entrusted us.”—1895, Sermon #2440

“Some sermons which I have heard, though faultlessly orthodox, have contained
nothing that could convert anybody—for there has been nothing to touch the
conscience or heart. Others, though very clever and profound, have had no
possible bearing on the needs of the hearers and so it was little wonder that
they were without result.”—1891, Sermon #2222

“Let the purpose of God, for which you ought to adore Him every day, be
plenteously fulfilled in you, and let it be seen that He has chosen you to know
Christ that you may make Him known to others!—1887, Sermon #1996

“If Christ has healed you, obey Him! Obey Him at once, obey Him exactly, obey
Him in everything, be it little, or be it great! If some say it is nonessential,
remember that what is not essential to salvation may be essential to obedience!
Do it if Jesus commanded it. Do it whether it appears to you to be essential or
not!... if He puts it to you, ‘He that believes and is baptized shall be saved,’
believe and be baptized. Be obedient unto Him who deserves to be obeyed.”—1895,
Sermon #2417 Divine Forgiveness

“There is the same power with God to forgive sin as there used to be, for the
blood of Jesus is as powerful to cleanse as it ever was! Note, also, that there
is the same power of the Holy Spirit to change your nature as there ever was. He
who turned Saul of Tarsus from an enemy into an Apostle can do just the same
with you. Of old, conversion was likened to the raising of the dead and He who
has quickened many a dead soul can quicken your dead soul, and raise you from
the dead! It was also called a new creation, and He who made all things new in
other men can make all things new in you! ”—1895, Sermon #2411

“When one said to me, the other day, ‘I cannot trust Christ,’ I enquired, ‘Can
you trust me?’ And when the quick reply was, as it ought to be from a hearer to
a minister, ‘Yes, Sir, I do trust you,’ I said, ‘Well, then, you certainly can
trust the Lord Jesus Christ, for He is infinitely more worthy of being trusted
than ever I can be.’”—1893, Sermon #2338

“Men are going to Heaven or to Hell and it is time that we came to close grips
with them about this all-important matter. God help us to do so!”—1893, Sermon
#2327

“The Egyptians have been counted the most degraded people of this world in their
worship. They worshipped onions, till Juvenal says, “O blessed people, who grow
their gods in their own gardens!” But I do not think they were quite so degraded
as the man that worships himself. If I could bring my soul to worship an onion,
I could never degrade myself low enough to worship myself. A man who makes
himself his own God is mad!”—1892, Sermon #2252

“O Lord Jesus, hold Your Cross before my closing eyes! O blessed Redeemer, what
will a man do in death who has not Your death to be the death of his sin? How
can a man live who has never seen You lay down Your life in His place, ‘the Just
for the unjust, to bring us to God’?”—1891, Sermon #2207

Chastisement

“In the smart of the sorrow lies the blessing of the chastisement!...There is
not a more profitable instrument in all God’s house than the rod!...A chastened
spirit is a gracious spirit—and how shall we obtain it unless we are chastened?
Like our Lord Jesus, we learn obedience by the things which we suffer! God had
one Son without sin, but He never had a son without sorrow—and he never will
while the world stands. Let us, therefore, bless God for all His dealings and,
in a filial spirit, confess, ‘You, Lord, have chastened me.’”—1892, Sermon #2237

“If the professed followers of Christ happen to meet in some fine building and
worship God with grand music and gorgeous rituals, then the people of the world
put up with them! They may go even so far as to patronize them, though, even
then, their respect is chiefly called forth, not on behalf of the people, but
because of the building, the fine music and the carriages. The carriages are
especially important, for without a certain number of them at the door, it is
deemed impossible to have a proper display of cultured Christianity!”—1891,
Sermon #2219 Believe What You Preach

“Oh, Beloved, if we are called to preach, we must believe what we preach, or
else we had better give it up! “I believed, therefore have I spoken,” is a text
which should be written over every minister’s study door, and over his pulpit,
too.”—1893, Sermon #2297

“Let us ask for wisdom and discretion in doing that which is right. Firmness of
purpose should be adorned with gentleness of manner in carrying it out.”—1893,
Sermon #2291 “You will find all true theology summed up in these two short
sentences—salvation is all of the Grace of God—damnation is all of the will of
man.”—1895, Sermon #2411

“No sin, whatever it is, shall ruin any man if he shall come to Christ for
mercy. Though you are black as Hell’s midnight through iniquity, yet if you will
come to Christ, He is ready to cleanse you. It is sin, after all, that lies at
the door and blocks your way to the Savior.”—1895, Sermon #2411 Salvation the
Same

“At this time, the salvation of our Lord Jesus Christ is the same as it was in
all ages. Jesus Christ still saves sinners from the guilt, the power, the
punishment and the defilement of sin. Still, “there is none other name under
Heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.” Jesus Christ still makes all
things new. He creates new hearts and right spirits in the sons of men and
engraves His Law upon the tablets which once were stone, but which He has turned
into flesh. There is no new salvation! Some may talk as if there were, but there
is not! Salvation means to you, today, just what it meant to Saul of Tarsus on
the way to Damascus. If you think it has another meaning, you have missed it
altogether!”—1894, Sermon #2358 “A man who worships his belly is a worse
idolater than the one who worships a god of wood! A man who worships gold and
silver, if that gold and silver should take the shape of sovereigns and
shillings, is not a bit more justified in his idolatry than if he had made it
into the shape of a calf and had bowed before it in idolatrous homage and
reverence.”—1894, Sermon #2384

“That experience which a man boasts of is an experience he ought to be ashamed
of!”—1892, Sermon #2274 Communion with Christ

“Let me say, concerning the wine of communion with Christ, that it is never so
sweet to a man as when he treads the grapes out himself—‘My meditation of Him
shall be sweet.’”—1895, Sermon #2403 “All the works that we can ever do, be they
what they may, can never bring such Glory to God as a single act of trust in
Him!”—1893, Sermon #2305

“Oh, what a Heaven will Heaven be to some of God’s people who spend the most of
their time on a hard bed, made harder by their lying long upon it, and who have
none of the comforts of this life and, perhaps, not too much of the comforts of
the life to come! One hour with our God will make up for everything.”—1893,
Sermon #2292

“Breaking and bruising are fit treatment for the nature of men, especially for
the new nature. When God has put sweetness into our hearts, it is then that
breaking develops the sweetness.”—1895, Sermon #2419

Prayer Meeting

“Well, you may try to do without Prayer Meetings if you like, but my solemn
conviction is that, as these decline, the Spirit of God will depart from you and
the preaching of the Gospel will be of small account. The Lord will have the
prayers of His people to go with the proclamation of His Gospel if it is to be
the power of God unto salvation—and there is no change in this matter since
Paul’s day! Jesus Christ is ‘the same yesterday, and today, and forever.’”—1894,
Sermon #2358

“No man has such need to pray as the man who does not care to pray. When you can
pray and long to pray—why, then, you willpray! But when you cannot pray and do
not wish to pray—why, then, you must pray, or evil will come of it! He is on the
brink of ruin who forgets the Mercy Seat. When the heart is apathetic towards
prayer, the whole man is sickening from a grievous disease. How can we be weary
of prayer? It is essential to life! When a man grows weary of breathing, surely
he is near to dying! When a man grows weary of praying, surely we ought to pray
anxiously for him, for he is in an evil case.”—1891, Sermon #2189

“The Spirit of God does not work by sleepy men! He loves to have us alive,
ourselves, and then He will make others alive by us. See to this, dear
Brothers.”—1892, Sermon #2246

Family Heritage

“Some of us owe a great deal to our brothers and all of you have reason to thank
God that you are the son of such an one, or that you are the father of such an
one, or the sister of such an one, or the brother of such an one. There is a
special mercy, probably, in your domestic position, and if there is, do not
cease to praise God that He has given you to be associated in life with those
who are associated with Him! May our children be His children! May our friends
be His friends! May our brothers be our Brothers in Christ!”—1895, Sermon #2412

“For real business at the Mercy Seat, give me a homemade prayer, a prayer that
comes out of the deeps of my heart, not because I invented it, but because God
the Holy Spirit put it there and gave it such a living force that I could not
help letting it come out!”—1892, Sermon #2254 Men Unanimous in Evil

“It is amazing how unanimous bad men can be. It has always struck me as a very
startling thing that you have never heard of any division among the devils in
Hell. There are no sects among the devils—they seem to work together with an
awful unanimity of purpose in their wicked design. In this one thing they seem
to excel the family of God. Oh, that we were as hearty and united in the service
of God as wicked men are in the service of Satan!”—1892, Sermon #2254

“Just in proportion to the quantity of faith that there is in what we do, in
that proportion will it be acceptable with God!”—1892, Sermon #2264

“Another beauty which God puts on the meek is contentment. They that are of a
quiet and gentle spirit through the Grace of God are satisfied with their lot.
They thank God for little—they are of the mind of the godly woman who ate the
crust of bread and drank a little water, and said—‘What? All this, and Jesus
Christ, too?’ There is a great charm about contentment, while envy and greed are
ugly things in the eyes of those who have anything like spiritual perception. So
meekness, through bringing contentment, beautifies us.”—1895, Sermon #2421

“There was never yet a bitter in the cup of life but what a meditation upon
Christ would overcome that bitterness and turn it into sweetness!”— 1895, Sermon
#2403 Secret Disciples

“Some of you who love the Lord have never yet told anybody. You are secret
Christians—you hide away behind pillar and post. Oh, but God’s Word is very
sweet to you, you say, as you eat your morsel of bread in the corner! So it is,
but you would have another and a greater sweetness if you would come out and
avow that you love the Lord! I am sure you would. In fact, there is many a child
of God who never enjoys the full sweetness of religion because he has not had
the courage to confess Christ before men. I wish that some of you halting ones,
you who are much-afraid and fearing, would obey the whole of the Gospel. You
know the Gospel—‘He who believes and is baptized shall be saved.’ ‘With the
heart man believes unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made
unto salvation.’”—1893, Sermon #2340

“Those myriads of graves in the wilderness are as sure a token of God’s hatred
of sin as the drowning of Pharaoh’s chariots and horsemen in the Red Sea!
Beware, then, of having a form of faith which does not purify your lives, a
profession of belief in Christ which allows you to live in sin with impunity,
for if you have this, however near you may seem to be to the people of God—even
if you are counted in with them—yet God will not reckon you as His, for He is
the same Lord who ‘afterward destroyed them that believed not.’”—1895, Sermon
#2412

Walk Humbly

“Observe that we are told to walk humbly with God. It is of no use walking
humbly away from God. I have seen some people very proudly humble, very boastful
of their humility. They have been so humble that they were proud enough to doubt
God! They could not accept the mercy of Christ, they said. They were so humble.
In truth, theirs was a devilish humility, not the humility that comes from the
Spirit of God.”—1893, Sermon #2328

“If a man gives himself to the Church, he must not, therefore, suppose that he
has given himself to God. To give himself to thepeople of God, before giving
himself, first, to God, will do the man no good. It will, indeed, do him a
positive injury. The man who acts in this way is either self-deceived, or else a
deceiver—he does wrong to God, to the Church, to himself and is thus a threefold
offender! You have no right to either of the ordinances of God if you do not
belong to Him—they are only for Believers—and until you first give yourself to
the Lord, you have no right to be reckoned among the people of God! If you come
to the Lord’s Table as an unbeliever, so far from getting any good there, you
will eat and drink condemnation to yourself, for you cannot discern the Lord’s
body and, therefore, you cannot rightly use the bread and cup which are the
emblems of His broken body and poured out blood. Dear Friend, keep that first
thing first! First give yourself to the Lord and then give yourself to us by the
will of God.”—1891, Sermon #2234 “It is disobedience, and not obedience which
prompts us to select from the commands of Christ which ones we care to
obey.”—1893, Sermon #2317 The Power of the Gospel

“It is God’s Word that saves souls, not our comment upon it, however correct
that comment may be! Let us, then, be scrupulously careful to honor the Holy
Spirit by taking the weapon which He has prepared for us, believing in the full
Inspiration of the sacred Scriptures and expecting that God will prove their
Inspiration by their effect upon the minds and hearts of men.”—1892, Sermon
#2246

“We often pray for Christians in adversity and it is right that we should do so,
but it is even more necessary to pray for Christians in prosperity, for they run
the risk of gradually becoming soft, like Hannibal’s soldiers destroyed by
Capuan holidays, who lost their valor in their luxury. Many a man who was an
out-and-out Christian when he was lower down in life has, when prosperous,
become much too great a gentleman to associate with those who were his honored
Brothers and Sisters before.”—1891, Sermon #2217

“It is a fine thing, when you are slandered, not to hear it. And it is a better
thing to never reply to it. I have always tried to possess one deaf ear and one
blind eye—and I believe that the deaf ear is the better ear, and the blind eye
by far the more useful of the two. Do not remember the injury that is done to
you, try to forget it and pass it over. Do not go about the world determined to
grasp every red-hot iron that any fool holds out before you. Let it alone! It
will be for your own good and for God’s Glory to be very patient under the
slander of the wicked.”—1894, Sermon #2385

Faith

“Faith is not the trifle that some think it to be. This holy trust in God is the
heart and soul of all true experimental godliness.”—1893, Sermon #2305

“God has a heavy hand for His sinful children. Other fathers may spoil their
children with indulgence, but the Lord will not spoil His children. If we sin,
we shall feel the weight of God’s hand. We ought to thank Him for this, for
though it brings great sorrow, yet it brings great safety to us. The worst thing
that can happen to a man is to be allowed to sin and yet to be happy in
it.”—1892, Sermon #2284

“The forms of evil are many—I need not mention them, for, if I did, I might omit
one and then, perhaps, the person who is under its influence might fancy that I
did not think it to be a sin!”—1893, Sermon #2306 A Good Dog

“You all remember, therefore I need not tell you again, the story that we had
about the doctor at one of our hospitals, a year or two ago. He healed a dog’s
broken leg and the grateful animal brought other dogs to have their broken legs
healed. That was a good dog—some of you are not half as good as that dog! You
believe that Christ is blessing you, yet you never try to bring others to Him to
be saved! That must not be the case any longer. We must excel that dog in our
love for our species and it must be our intense desire that if Christ has healed
us, He should heal our wife, our children, our friends, our neighbors—and we
should never rest till others are brought to Him!”—1892, Sermon #2260

“Brothers and Sisters, it is always a gain to us in our experience when we get
farther and farther away from every dependence but the Lord!”— 1893, Sermon
#2300

“There may be an evil spirit in yonder bottle, but nobody will get drunk upon it
if you keep the cork in! So there may be evil thoughts in your hearts, but they
will not injure other people if you do not, as it were, draw the cork by
uttering them! It is always well to think twice before you speak once.”—1894,
Sermon #2387

Heaven A City

“Why is Heaven called a city? Because it is a place of fellowship where men meet
one another!”—1893, Sermon #2291

“Men may change their churches and only change their refuge of lies. But if they
come to Christ, whatever church they are in, if they have found Him and are
trusting in Him and in Him, alone, their peace will be like a river and their
righteousness as the waves of the sea!”—1892, Sermon #2271

“Dust we are and that dust hastens to dissolve—and so to return to the kindred
dust of the earth. Under our feet are our graves and above us are the stars
which will soon look down upon our silent tombs. The trees cast their leaves,
but they grow green, again. We shed our life’s glories once and they return no
more! Thus the trees outlive us and beneath their shade we are reminded that man
is far more frail than the tree which he fells with the axe. Yes, the very grass
which he mows outlives the mower! Man is a mere shadow—we have scarcely time to
say that we are before we are not! Are we not foolish if we place our reliance
upon such a feeble creature, so weak that his breath, his unsubstantial
breath—is essential to his life? Who are you, O man, that trusts in man? If you
have half a grain of wisdom left, how can you quit the ever-living God and put
your reliance upon a poor creature who is as the grass—that today is and
tomorrow is cast into the oven? Go, rest on a reed, or ride on a moth, or build
on a bubble—but rely not on a man!”—1887, Sermon #1984

Preach Christ

“Try, Brother, whether it will not sweeten your mouth if you begin to preach
Christ! Perhaps you have been too quiet and too silent. Get up and speak for
Jesus and see whether the honey does not come into your mouth at once! In the
olden times, they pictured the orator with bees buzzing round his lips, storing
up the honey that dropped from his sweet utterances. This may be but a fable
concerning the human talker, but certainly it is true of the man who preaches
Christ—that his lips drop honey, and the more he speaks of his dear Lord and
Master, and the less he tries, with human eloquence, to magnify himself—the more
of sacred sweetness shall there be in every word that he utters!”—1893, Sermon
#2340

“You will never have peace in death, I do not see how you are to have solid rest
in life, without a sharp, crisp, clearly-cut idea of how Christ is the salvation
of God!”—1893, Sermon #2293 “There is no University for a Christian like that of
sorrow and trial.”—1893, Sermon #2300

“There are some things we must always pray for with submission as to whether it
is the will of God to bestow them upon us—but for the salvation of men and women
we may ask without fear. God delights to save and to bless and when the faith is
given to us to expect an immediate answer to such a prayer, thrice happy we are!
Seek such faith even now, I beseech you, ‘even now.’”—1892, Sermon #2249

Worth Dying For

“If you go over to Scotland and see where the Covenanters’ graves are, anybody
who thinks according to the spirit of this age will say that they were just a
Lot of fools to have been so stubborn and so strict about doctrine as to die for
it. Why, really, there is not anything in the new philosophy that is worth dying
for! I wonder whether there is any “modern thought” doctrine that would be worth
the purchase of a cat’s life.”— 1893, Sermon #2317

“Let me give you a little piece of advice—do not think of yourself, but think of
your Lord! Or, if you must think of yourself, for every time you give an eye to
self, give twice that time to Christ! Then shall your meditation of Him be
sweet.”—1895, Sermon #2403

“He may worship God who shouts till the earth rings, again, and God may accept
him, but he may worship God as truly who sits in silence before the Most High
and says not even a word. It is the spiritual worship which is most acceptable
to God, not the external in any shape or form. It is the heart that has
fellowship with the Lord and it needs little in the way of expressing
itself—neither has God tied it down to this way or that. It may find its own
methods of utterance so long as it is truly “moved by the Holy Spirit.”—1892,
Sermon #2239

“Of course, we shall not all attain to the same stature that Abraham reached,
neither shall we all be tried by the same tests that were applied to him, but
every one of us shall be tested, like Abraham, if, indeed, we are Believers in
God.—1891, Sermon #2223 Spirit’s Work

“All the good that is ever done in the world is worked by the Holy Spirit and,
as the Holy Spirit honors Jesus Christ, so He puts great honor upon the Holy
Spirit. If you and I try, either as a Church or as individuals, to do without
the Holy Spirit, God will soon do without us. Unless we reverently worship Him
and believingly trust in Him, we shall find that we shall be like Samson when
his locks were shorn. He shook himself as he had done before, but when the
Philistines were upon him, he could do nothing against them. Our prayer must
always be, ‘Holy Spirit, dwell with me! Holy Spirit, dwell with Your servants!’
We know that we are utterly dependent upon Him. Such is the teaching of our
Master and Jesus Christ is ‘the same yesterday, and today, and forever.’”—1894,
Sermon #2358

“When God hides His face from His people, it is almost always behind clouds of
dust which they have made themselves. You will have sorrow enough in the
ordinary way to Heaven—do not make an extra rod for your own back.”—1892, Sermon
#2284

“When I lie dying, when heart and flesh are failing me, when I shall have little
else to think of but my Lord and the eternal state, then shall thoughts of Him
pull up the floodgates of the river of bliss and let the very joy of Heaven into
my heart! And, by His Grace, I shall be eager to be up and away! I shall not
dread the pains, and groans, and dying strife of which some talk so much—but the
sweetness of “my meditation of Him” shall make me forget even the bitterness of
death, itself.”—1895, Sermon #2403

Imitate Christ

“‘The Imitation of Christ’ is a wonderful book upon the subject which every
Christian should read. It has its faults, but its excellences are many. May we
not only read the book, but write it out anew in our own life and character by
seeking in everything to be like Jesus! It is a good thing to put up in your
house the question, ‘What would Jesus do?’ It answers nine out of 10 of the
difficulties of moral casuistry. When you do not know what to do and the Law
does not seem very explicit upon it, put it so—‘What would Jesus do?’ Here,
then, stands the case—by your creation in Christ you come to exhibit faith in
Him, love to Him and imitation of Him—and all these are the means by which good
works are produced in you. You are ‘created in Christ Jesus unto good
works.’”—1891, Sermon #2210

“If there are any difficulties in the faith of Christ, they are not one-tenth as
great as the absurdities in any system of unbelief which seeks to take its
place! I do not hesitate to say that the whole doctrine of Evolution, with which
many men are fascinated today, is ten thousand times more absurd than the most
ridiculous travesty of what is taught in the Word of God and, that it requires
more faith, and also far greater gullibility than to believe any doctrine which
is deduced from Holy Scripture.”—1893, Sermon #2306 A Good Fall “It is a good
fall when a man falls on his knees.”—1887, Sermon #1992

“Now all this I put before you in simple language, believing what I say, and
trusting that if I describe your case, you will know that I mean it for you. I
have heard of a preacher who was so fearful lest he should be thought personal,
that he said to his congregation, “Lest any of you should think that what I have
said was meant for you, I would observe that the sermon I am preaching was
prepared for a congregation in Massachusetts.” I can plead nothing of the sort!
I refer to you, my Hearer, in the most pointed manner. I will attend to
Massachusetts, if ever the Lord sends me there, but just now I mean YOU. Oh,
that you may have Grace to take home these thoughts to yourselves, for if you
do, they will, by the Spirit’s power, bring the light of hope into your
souls!”—1891, Sermon #2203 “The open volume of the Word of God is our open
evidence of salvation!”—1893, Sermon #2297

Trials

“You say, O Sir, you do not know what my trial is!’ No, I do not, but your
heavenly Father does, and if He loved you when you were ungodly, will He cast
you away, now that He has shed His love abroad in your heart? ‘Oh, but I have
lost the very staff of bread! I do not know how I am to get a living.’ No, but
you have the living God to depend upon and, after giving His Son to save you, He
will surely give you bread! He will not let you famish. ‘Ah, but, my dear Sir,
the beloved of my heart is laid low! There is, in the cemetery, the dearest
object of my affection.’ Is it really so? I thought that He left the dead some
time ago. I thought that the dearest object of your affection had gone up to the
right hand of the Father. Is it not so? ‘Ah, that is not what I mean, Sir! I
mean that I have lost one whom I fondly loved.’ I know that you have, but do you
think that the Lord has turned against you because He has permitted this trial
to come upon you? How can He ever desert those for whom He died? And if He died
for them when they were ungodly, will He not live for them, now that He has shed
His love abroad in their hearts by the Holy Spirit?”— 1893, Sermon #2340

“And He gave it again to the minister, and sat down. Their practice was to sit
down to speak, while the people usually stood to hear—a very good custom,
indeed. If we did the same, perhaps we should have fewer of our hearers going to
sleep.”—1893, Sermon #2330

“If you could understand your religion, it would be one that did not come from
God—it would have been made by a man of limited capacity, like yourselves, who
was, therefore, able to make what you can comprehend. But inasmuch as there are
mysteries in your faith, to the top of which you cannot climb, be thankful that
you need not climb them.”—1893, Sermon #2303

Hearts Pricked

“Prick the heart—yes, with but a needle’s point—and life will go! And prick the
heart of faith—yes, even with the smallestdoubt—and the life of joy is gone! The
joy of faith and the strength of faith, yes, and the life of faith, are gone
when you distrust the Word of the Lord! —1887, Sermon #1979

“We are sure that the Gospel we have preached is not after men because men do
not take to it. It is opposed, even to this day. If anything is hated bitterly,
it is the out-and-out Gospel of the Grace of God, especially if that hateful
word, Sovereignty is mentioned with it! Dare to say, “He will have mercy on whom
He will have mercy, and He will have compassion on whom He will have
compassion,” and furious critics will revile you without stint! The modern
religionist not only hates the doctrine of Sovereign Grace, but he raves and
rages at the mention of it! He would sooner hear you blaspheme than preach
Election by the Father, Atonement by the Son, or Regeneration by the Spirit! If
you want to see a man worked up till the Satanic is clearly uppermost, let some
of the new divines hear you preach a Free-Grace sermon! A Gospel which is after
men will be welcomed by men—but it needs a Divine operation upon the heart and
mind to make a man willing to receive into his utmost soul this distasteful
Gospel of the Grace of God!—1891, Sermon #2185

Dying

“Beloved friends, we cannot be ready to die unless we have been taught how to
live! We who are active, and have talents to use, and health and strength with
which to use those talents, must go on with ‘the greatest fight in the world’
till we can say, with Paul, ‘I have fought a good fight.’”—1892, Sermon #2285

“In Heaven they have no will but God’s will! Their will is to serve Him and
delight themselves in Him. And if you and I do not learn, here below, what
obedience to God is, and practice it, and carry it out, how can we hope to be
happy in the midst of obedient spirits?”—1893, Sermon #2317

“There are many more flies caught with honey than with vinegar and there are
many more sinners brought to Christ by happy Christians than by doleful
Christians!”—1895, Sermon #2405

Active Church

“We need to have a Church in which all the members do something, in which all do
all they can, in which all are always doing all they can—for this is what our
Lord deserves to have from a living, loving people bought with His precious
blood! If He has saved me, I will serve Him forever and ever. And whatever lies
in my power to do for His Glory, that shall be my delight to do, and to do at
once!”—1892, Sermon #2275

“I have known the Lord, now, for some 40 years, or thereabouts. When I first
came to Him, I came as a sinner, without any works of my own which I could
trust, or any experience upon which I could rely. And I just rested my whole
weight upon the finished work of Christ. Now, after 40 years of service, and
nearly 40 years of preaching the Gospel, have I any works of my own to add to
what Christ has done? I abhor the thought of such a thing! Have I even the
weight of a pin’s head that I dare put into the scale with my Lord’s merits?
Accursed be the idea!”—1893, Sermon #2293

“There is no preparation for the work of God like being with God! Go up into the
solitude with Christ and then, when He calls you, you will be fit to go forth
for Him and tell what you have seen with Him in the Holy Mount.”—1891, Sermon
#2218 “There is joy in Hell when a saint grows idle! There is gladness among
devils when we cease to pray, when we become slack in faith and feeble in
communion with God.—1893, Sermon #2303 Pray for the Preacher

“Lord, help us who cannot preach to pray for the man who does! Have you, dear
Friend, who cannot preach, made a point of praying for the pastor of the Church
to which you belong? It is a great sin on the part of Church members if they do
not daily sustain their pastor by their prayers!”—1892, Sermon #2261

“I like to see a man keep to the old things, but even in doing so he may make a
mistake, for there may be old things that can be supplanted by newer and better
things. Keep your eyes lifted up to God, with whom nothing is old, and nothing
is new! Wait at His footstool. Submit your heart, like a tablet, for Him to
write upon it all His instructions. And then do as He has said.”—1892, Sermon
#2280

“But the Lord’s Supper is as much needed for the sake of others. We are to show
Christ’s death that others may know about it, that others may be impressed by
it, that others may be saved by it!”—1893, Sermon #2307 Reasons for Unbelief

“I venture to say that there is no fact, however palpable to all the senses, but
what you can, if you like, find reasons for not believing it to be a fact. If
somebody were to assert that I am not here and that I am not speaking, I have no
doubt that, with proper pay, a lawyer could be found to prove it—and what a
lawyer could do, a great many, who are not learned in the law—could do as
well.”—1893, Sermon #2304

“Let me caution you against a very common expression. I hear converts
continually told to give their hearts to Jesus. It is quite correct and I hope
they will do so. But your first concern must be not what you give to Jesus, but
what Jesus gives to you! You must take Him from Himself as a gift to you—then
will you truly give your heart to Him.”—1892, Sermon #2259

“Unless the Grace of God prevents, that which is best, rots into that which is
worst. You could not make a devil except with an angel for the raw material—a
Judas Iscariot could only be produced out of an Apostle of Jesus Christ.”—1895,
Sermon #2412

Submission

“I believe that a man of God—under trial and difficulty and affliction, bearing
up, and patiently submitting with holy acquiescence, and still rejoicing in
God—is a real preacher of the Gospel, preaching with an eloquence which is
mightier than words can ever be and which will find its secret and silent way
into the hearts of those who might have resisted other arguments! Oh, do, then,
listen to the text, for it is a command from God—‘Rejoice in the Lord
always!’””—1895, Sermon #2405

“Come and take Christ—and you have found God. No man believes in Christ and
remains without the favor of God.”—1892, Sermon #2272

“It is folly to be singular, except when to be singular is to be right! And to
be eccentric is not commendable, unless the eccentricity consists in not being
concentric with any kind of evil way! In spite of all the apostate crowds, these
brave men would not yield—not they! Though millions bowed, what had that to do
with them? My dear Hearers, I ask you to cultivate a brave personality. In the
service of God, things cannot go by the counting of heads. You must follow the
Lord’s will wherever it leads you, whether you go alone or not.”—1891, Sermon
#2217 Promised Deliverance

“If there is a promise of deliverance to you and you cannot see the way in which
you are to be delivered, you may not, therefore, doubt the promise, for that
would dishonor the Lord who spoke it.”—1887, Sermon #1998

“If you do not know spiritual things, ask God to let you know them. But you are
out of court as a witness—you cannot prove a negative, nor can your negative
disprove our positive! We cannot argue with you who are dead in sin and have not
received, as yet, spiritual senses. What can you know? Why should we dispute
with the blind concerning colors? How can we discuss music with the deaf? —1887,
Sermon #1979

“A dead thing must not be brought to the altar of God! Remember, that under the
Jewish law, they never offered fish upon the altar because they could not bring
it there alive. Everything brought to God as a sacrifice must be alive. Its
blood must be poured out warm at the altar’s foot.”1892, Sermon #2239

“Beloved, you may think yourself ready for any service or any trial, but you are
not unless Divine Grace has done great things for you. Then every act performed
by Grace becomes, through Grace, an apprenticeship for a greater one! “—1891,
Sermon #2223 “The pastures of the Great Shepherd are wide, but the sweetest
grasses grow close to His pierced feet.” —1887, Sermon #1982

Hallelujah

“I think that the common use of the word, ‘Hallelujah,’ or, ‘Praise the Lord,’
is simply profane. Surely, this is not a word to be dragged in the mire—it
should be pronounced with solemn awe and sacred joy.”—1893, Sermon #2321

“The Lord has helped us in the past, He is helping us in the present and we
believe that He will help us all the way through. He will help you, too, if you
just follow His Word and, by a simple faith, do the right thing. I believe that
we have reason to expect interpositions of Providence to help us when we are
called to suffer for Christ’s sake.”—1891, Sermon #2217

“It is worth while to listen to what Solomon has to say…and to listen carefully
to what so experienced a man as Solomon has to say to young men. But I must
remind you that a greater than Solomon is here, for the Spirit of God inspired
the Proverbs! They are not merely jewels from earthly mines, but they are also
precious treasures from the heavenly hills, so that the advice we have, here, is
not only the counsel of a wise man, but the advice of that Incarnate Wisdom who
speaks to us out of the Word of God! Would you become the sons of wisdom? Come
and sit at the feet of Solomon! Would you become spiritually wise? Come and hear
what the Spirit of God has to say by the mouth of this wise man!”—1895, Sermon
#2406

Big Troubles

“It is a glorious thing to have a big trouble, a great Atlantic billow that
takes you off your feet and sweeps you right out to sea—and lets you sink down
into the depths, into old ocean’s lowest caverns, till you get to the
foundations of the mountains—and there see God and then come up again to tell
what a great God He is and how graciously He delivers His people! He will
deliver you, He must deliver you. The argument of the text is this, ‘In due time
Christ died for the ungodly,’ therefore, in due time He must help the
godly.”—1893, Sermon #2341

“There are some who think that to kneel at the Communion is the most reverent
posture. So it is, and I doubt not that God accepts their reverence—but it is a
most unscriptural posture. There is more presumption than reverence in it, for
to alter the ordinance of Christ, even on the pretense of reverence, is not
justifiable! When our Lord first of all instituted the Supper, they did not sit
down as we do, but they reclined as the Orientals still do, at their ease, so
much at their ease that the head of John was on the breast of Jesus.”—1893,
Sermon #2307

“I had a friend who had learned the way to put a peculiar meaning upon that
passage of Scripture, ‘Let not your right hand know what your left hand does.’
He thought that the best way was to have money in both pockets—put one hand into
each pocket—and then put both hands on the collection plate. I never objected to
this interpretation of the passage.”—1892, Sermon #2264

Modern Thought

“I say to myself, after being badgered and worried through the week by the men
of modern thought—‘I will go my way and preach Christ’s Gospel and win souls.’
One lifting up of Jesus Christ Crucified is more to me than all the quibbling of
the men who are wise above what is written! Converts are our unanswerable
arguments! ‘Happy is the man,’ says the Psalm, ‘that has his quiver full of
them: they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.’ Blessed is the man who has
many spiritual children born to God under his ministry, for his converts are his
defense.”—1887, Sermon #1990

“When a man has been a gross offender, there will be a conversion which men and
angels and devils will be sure to see—and this is one of the open evidences that
he is a Christian.”—1893, Sermon #2297

“The Holy Spirit still exists, works and teaches in the Church. And we have a
test by which to know whether what people claim to be revelation is revelation
or not—“He shall receive of Mine.” The Holy Spirit will never go farther than
the Cross and the coming of the Lord. He will go no farther than that which
concerns Christ. “He shall receive of Mine.” When, therefore, anybody whispers
in my ear that there has been revealed to him this or that, which I do not find
in the teaching of Christ and His Apostles, I tell him that we must be taught by
the Holy Spirit. His one vocation is to deal with the things of Christ! If we do
not remember this, we may be carried away by quirks, as many have been. Those
who will have to do with other things, let them—but as for us, we shall be
satisfied to confine our thoughts and our teaching within these limitless
limits—“He shall take of Mine, and shall show it unto you.”—1891, Sermon #2213

All I Need

“I have heard all the news I need when I have heard of eternal salvation by
Jesus Christ! ”—1893, Sermon #2293 “I may doubt my washing, but not when I
believe in the cleansing virtue of the precious blood! It may be difficult to
believe in my salvation, but not to believe in my Savior!”—1891, Sermon #2199

“God blessed William Huntington, the coal-heaver, to many souls, though he
preached a very strong Calvinism, while, at the same time, He was blessing some
who preached a very weak Arminianism—but remember, God blesses neither the
Calvinism nor the Arminianism—but the Christ that is in the sermon!”—1891,
Sermon #2218

Dumb Despair

“Despair is dumb—where there is a cry of prayer there is a crumb of
hope!...There is not only hope for a man, but hope in a man as long as he can
pray.”—1891, Sermon #2193

“We long to see the people saved, but in order to that, they must be born again
and this we cannot, ourselves, accomplish. Change a stone into flesh? Try that
at home with a piece of stone on your table before you attempt it with the hard
hearts of men!”—1891, Sermon #2218

“‘And you shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.’ So, the
more of it the better! If your sorrow is to be turned into joy, then the more
sorrow, the more joy! Happy is he who endures trial, since his trial is to be
turned into happiness!”—1892, Sermon #2272 “In Him [Jesus Christ] you have
redemption—out of Him you are in bondage.”—1891, Sermon #2207 Let the Dirt Dry

“All the dirt that falls upon a good man will brush off when it is dry—but let
him wait till it is dry—and not dirty his hands with wet mud. ‘Cease you from
man, whose breath is in his nostrils.’” —1887, Sermon #1984

“A little religion is a very dangerous thing—drink deep if you would come to the
sweetness of it. It is bitter at the top; but when you drink it to the very
depths, the lees thereof are the choicest cordial for a fainting spirit.—1893,
Sermon #2303“Oh, my Brothers and Sisters, you will not do better, after all,
than to quote Scripture, especially in prayer! There are no prayers so good as
those that are full of the Word of God! May all our speech be flavored with
texts!”—1893, Sermon #2310

Mercies

“Mercies should be remembered. It is a great wrong to God when we bury His
mercies in the grave of unthankfulness. Especially is this the case with
distinguishing mercies, wherein the Lord makes us to differ from others. Light,
when the rest of the land is in darkness! Life, when others are smitten with the
sword of death! Liberty from an iron bondage! O Christians, these are not things
to be forgotten! Abundantly utter the memory of distinguishing mercies!
Discriminating Grace deserves unceasing memorials of praise!”—1891, Sermon #2204

One Step

“To come to Jesus, or rather to receive Jesus who has come to us, is the one
essential step into eternal salvation.”—1891, Sermon #2203 Flattering Devil

“Of all the devils in the world, I hate a roaring devil least, but a flattering
devil is the worst devil that ever a man meets! When the world pretends to love,
understand that it now hates you more cordially than ever and is carefully
baiting its trap to catch you and ruin you! Beware of the Judas kiss with which
the Christ was betrayed and with which you will be betrayed unless you are well
upon your guard. In the world and from the world you will have
tribulation!”—1887, Sermon #1994

Avoid Evil

“If God chooses to turn evil into good, as He often does, that is no reason why
we should do evil and it is no justification of sin! The murder of Christ at
Calvary has brought the greatest possible benefit to us, yet it was a high crime
against God, the greatest of all crimes, when man turned deicides and slew the
Son of God!”—1892, Sermon #2255

“What can you do, you children, playing with your little wooden swords—what can
you do against men covered from head to foot with the steel mail of the habit of
sin? Sunday school teachers, teach your children more and more the pure Word of
God! And preachers, do not try to be original, but be content to take of the
things of Christ and show them to the people, for that is what the Holy Spirit,
Himself does—and you will be wise to use His method and His sword. No sinner
around you will be saved except by the knowledge of the great Truths contained
in the Word of God. No man will ever be brought to repentance, to faith and to
life in Christ, apart from the constant application of the Truth through the
Spirit.”—1891, Sermon #2201

“All that is said in the Word of God to sinners in general is meant for each
sinner in particular when He comes and takes it to himself by his own individual
faith.”—1895, Sermon #2413 The Father’s Will

“…There stands the text and I believe that it is my Father’s wish that “all men
should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.”…But I know, also, that
He does not will it, so that He will not save any of them unless they believe in
His dear Son, for He has told us over and over that He will not. He will not
save any man unless he forsakes his sins and turns to Him with full purpose of
heart—that I also know. And I know, too, that He has a people whom He will save,
whom by His eternal love He has chosen and whom by His eternal power He will
deliver. I do not know how that squares with this—that is another of the things
I do not know. If I go on telling you of all that I do not know and of all that
I do know, I will guarantee you that the things that I do not know will be a
hundred to one of the things that I do know!”—1880, Sermon #1516

“Christ and His Gospel will always be spoken against. If you know a gospel which
is approved by the age and patronized by the learned, that gospel is a
lie!”—1893, Sermon #2293

“Whenever we have to praise God, what do we do? We simply say what He is! “You
are this and You are that.” There is no other praise. We cannot fetch anything
from anywhere else and bring it to God—the praises of God are simply the facts
about Himself! If you want to praise the Lord Jesus Christ, tell the people
about Him.”—1891, Sermon #2213

“Not only are we, ourselves, in the hand of the Lord, but all that surrounds us.
Our times make up a kind of atmosphere of existence—and all this is under Divine
arrangement. We dwell within the palm of God’s hand. We are absolutely at His
disposal and all our circumstances are arranged by Him in all their details. We
are comforted to have it so.”—1891, Sermon #2205 Our Friends

“No man or woman can afford to be the friend of a man who is not a friend of
God! If He does not love God, quit his company, for he will do you no good. Say
with David, ‘I will not know a wicked person.’”—1894, Sermon #2362

“Do you value yourself according to your prayers? Then your prayers have no
value in them! When you think that your prayers are only broken words, hideous
moans and wretched desires, then you begin to form a right estimate of them and
thus you are on true ground where the Lord of Truth can meet you.”—1887, Sermon
#1992 “The backbone of the preaching of Christ is a conviction of the Truth of
Christ.”—1892, Sermon #2285 Holy Familiarity

“There is a holy familiarity with God which cannot be too much enjoyed, but
there is a flippant familiarity with God which cannot be too much abhorred! The
Lord is King. His will is not to be questioned! His every Word is Law. Let us
never question His Sovereign right to decree what He pleases and to fulfill the
decree—to command what He pleases and to punish every shortcoming.”—1891, Sermon
#2195 “The prerogative to give life or to take it away must remain with the Most
High. The wit and wisdom of man are altogether powerless to bestow life upon
even the tiniest insect! We know of a surety, doctrinally, and we know it with
equal certainty by experience, that we can do nothing towards the quickening of
men apart from the Spirit of God. If He does not come and give life, we may
preach till we have not another breath left, but we shall not raise from the
tomb of sin even the soul of a little child, or bring a single sinner to the
feet of Christ!”—1892, Sermon #2246

“It is said that an ambassador is a gentleman who is sent abroad to lie for the
good of his country. I suppose that common saying is so nearly true that we need
not correct it. And a politician is often a gentleman who has learned the art of
concealing his thoughts, or who expresses opinions which he trusts will be in
accordance with those of his constituency!”—1895, Sermon #2413 Established
Church

“I believe in an established Church—not established by acts of Parliament—but
established by the purpose and by the Presence of God in the midst of it.”—1894,
Sermon #2363

Baptism

“Read the New Testament impartially and you will always find that those who were
baptized were Believers. They believed in the Lord Jesus Christ and then they
were baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Spirit.”—1893, Sermon #2339

“Oftentimes, I believe that this little matter of Believers’ Baptism is the test
of the sincerity of our profession of love to Him. It would have been all the
same, it may be, if the Lord Jesus Christ had said, ‘Pick up six stones off the
ground and carry them in your pocket and you shall be saved.’ Somebody would
have said, ‘That stone-picking is a non-essential.’ It becomes essential as soon
as Christ commands it! It is in this way that Baptism, if not essential to your
salvation, is essential to your obedience to Christ. If you have become His
disciple, you are bound to obey all your Master’s commands—‘Whatever He says
unto you, do it.’”—1893, Sermon #2339 “You pray, dear Friend, do you? But you
never speak to the individual for whom you pray. Is your prayer sincere? I will
not question it. But your prayer has hardly reached that pitch of passionate
earnestness which will secure an answer, for if you were in downright earnest,
you would go to the person for whom you pray and explain the way of
salvation!”—1891, Sermon #2214 “Try to cheer another heart and you will go the
nearest way to cheer your own.”—1893, Sermon #2322 Prayer & Faith

“Beloved Friends, we may well continue to praise God, for our God continues to
give us causes for praise!”—1893, Sermon #2296

“It might be quite a mistake if you were to give up your business under the
notion that you would be more with Christ if you became a city missionary, or a
Bible-woman, or a colporteur, or a captain in the Salvation Army, or whatever
other form of holy service you might desire! Keep on with your business! If you
can black shoes well, do that! If you can preach sermons badly, donot do
that!”—1892, Sermon #2262

“There are, in truth, but two denominations upon this earth—the Church and the
world—those who are justified in Christ Jesus and those who are condemned in
their sins.”—1887, Sermon #1987

“One grain of this faith is worth more than a diamond the size of the world—yes,
though you should thread such jewels together, as many as the stars of Heaven
for number, they would be worth nothing compared with the smallest atom of faith
in Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God!”— 1892, Sermon #2259

Wandering Minds

“Some of us know what it is, even in those wanderings of our mind in sleep, not
to quit the holy ground of communion with our Lord. It is not always so, but it
is sometimes so, and even then, when the mind has lost power to control its
thoughts, even the thoughts seem to dance, like Miriam, to the praise of God!
Oh, happy men, whose religion is their protection even in their sleep!”—1895,
Sermon #2406

“While a man is living in his sin, he is out of his mind, he is beside himself.
I am sure that it is so. There is nothing more like madness than sin and it is a
moot point among those who study deep problems, how far insanity and the
tendency to sin go side by side, and whereabouts it is that great sin and entire
loss of responsibility may touch each other. I do not intend to discuss that
question at all, but I am going to say that every sinner is morally and
responsibly insane and, therefore, in a worse condition than if he were only
mentally insane.”—1895, Sermon #2414

“For Your Law is my delight. God will not let a man die who delights in His Law!
You are the sort of man who shall live. If you love the Law of God, the Word of
God, the will of God, the way of God, He will not let you die! There are none
too many of your sort in the world, so the Lord will keep you alive so long as
you can serve Him here.”—1895, Sermon #2415 Spirit’s Work

“John 16:13— Howbeit when He, the Spirit of Truth is come, He will guide yon
into all Truth: for He shall not speak of Himself; but whatever He shall hear,
that shall He speak: and He will show you things to come. See, my dear Brothers
in the ministry, how little store the Holy Spirit sets by originality? We have
men, nowadays, straining to be original! Strain the other way, for listen, ‘He
shall not speak of Himself’—not even the Holy Spirit—‘He shall not speak of
Himself; but whatever He shall hear, that shall He speak.’ He is the Repeater of
the Father’s message, not the inventor of His own! So let it be with us
ministers. We are not to make up a Gospel as we go along, as I have heard some
say. We are not to shape it to the times in which we live, and suit it to the
congregations to which we speak. God forbid! Let this be true of every one of
us, ‘He shall not speak of Himself; but whatever He shall hear, that shall He
speak’”—1893, Sermon #2307

“Because that Gospel is preached, there is hope for you! When there is no hope,
there will be no presentation of the Gospel. God must, by an edict, suspend the
preaching of the Gospel before He can suspend the fulfillment of the Gospel
promise to every soul that believes! Since there is a Gospel, take it! Take it
now, even now. God help you to do so!—1892, Sermon #2249“Your Sunday schools are
admirable, but what is their purpose if you do not teach the Gospel in them? You
get children together and keep them quiet for an hour-and-a-half, and then send
them home—but what is the good of it?”—1887, Sermon #1987

“A congregation is a strange aggregate—it is like the gatherings of a net, or
the collections of a dredge. If it is a very large one, it is especially
remarkable. What strange varieties of creatures meet in the Noah’s ark of a
crowded House of Prayer! If anybody could write the histories of all gathered
here, the result would be a library of singular stories.”—1887, Sermon #1991

Lost Family

“I think I heard a friend over there fetch a deep sigh as I quoted those last
words of my text. I know what it meant—it meant that he has not all his house
converted. Ah, dear Brother, I cannot sympathize with you by experience, for I
thank God that I have had all my house brought to Christ, but it must be a great
sorrow to have that biggest boy of yours acting as he does, or to have that dear
girl, of whom you had such bright hopes, turning aside to crooked ways! Let me
ask you a question—Have you had faith about your house? Remember that Paul said
to the jailor, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved, and
your house.” May God give you faith about your house! You have had faith about
yourself and you are saved—exercise faith about your children! Cry to God to
give you faith about them! Pray believingly that they may be led to have faith
for themselves and so may be saved.”—1892, Sermon #2275

“If you have not faith enough in Christ to say that you believe in Him, I do not
think that you have faith enough in Christ to take you to Heaven, for it is
written concerning the place of doom, “the fearful,” (that is, the cowardly),
and unbelieving, shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and
brimstone.”—1892, Sermon #2275

“Sin and sorrow are wedded in the very nature of things and there is no dividing
them. They that sow iniquity shall reap the same. Turn as it may, the river of
wickedness at last falls into the sea of wrath! He that sins must smart unless a
Savior can be found to be his Surety and to smart for him.”—1887, Sermon #1992

Leave it There

“A humble desire is one which leaves everything in God’s hands. The man who has
it, says, ‘Now, though I desire this, it may be it is not a right desire. Lord,
I desire only to desire what I ought to desire! My desire is that Your desire
should be written on my heart, that I may desire what You desire.’ Your will be
done in my soul, in my body, in my circumstances and in me, in all
respects.”—1894, Sermon #2342

“Last winter, at Mentone, I went out in a boat where I was assured that there
were shoals of fish. And I had a line, I should think it was 150 feet long—and
after waiting hour after hour and never feeling the fish bite—I gave up the
useless occupation. I think every minister is bound to give up the spiritual
fishery in any particular place if, after many days’ toil, he has caught nothing
for Christ. Rachel says, ‘Give me children, or I die!’

Christ’s servant says, ‘Give me converts, or I die!’ Indeed, we are dead as far
as our ministry is concerned unless God blesses it.”—1892, Sermon #2265
“‘Ignorance is the mother of devotion,” according to the Church of Rome.
‘Ignorance is the mother of error,’ according to the Word of God.”— 1891, Sermon
#2214

Still Waters

“There are green meadows and there are still waters, but I believe they are
mostly to be found in the places where trials most abound!”—1894, Sermon #2367

“I remember that within a week after I had found joy and peace in believing, I
began to feel the uprisings of inbred sin and I cried out, ‘O wretched man that
I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ I did not know that
such a sigh and cry could never come out of an unbelieving heart—that there must
be a new heart and a right spirit within the man to whom sin is a burden and who
loathes it! I did not know that, then, and I wondered whether I could be a child
of God at all!”—1893, Sermon #2296 “To me it is a boundless solace that I live
in the prayers of thousands. I will not say which does the better service—the
man that preaches, or the man that prays—but I know this, that we can do better
without the voice that preaches than without the heart that prays. The petitions
of our bed-ridden Sisters are the wealth of the Church! The kind of service
which seems most commonplace among men is often the most precious unto

“Oh, that some poor soul would get his first mouthful of Christ tonight! Take
Him! I have seen a hungry child sent by his mother to the baker’s. There is a
little piece of bread put in as a “makeweight,” and the poor child eats it on
the way home. I give you leave to do that tonight! Carry the Truth of God away
with you and keep it! But eat a bit as you go home. Lay hold on Christ
tonight—now—before you leave the Tabernacle. May His Grace enable you to do it!
And then sit down and eat, and eat, and eat forever of this precious,
inexhaustible provision of God’s Infinite Love—and to Him shall be Glory forever
and ever! Amen.”—1892, Sermon #2278 Those Who Stay Behind

God. Therefore, as for those who cannot come into the front places of warfare,
deny them not seats of honor, since, after all, they may be doing the greater
good.”—1891, Sermon #2208 “Prayer is a gift from God as well as an appeal to
God. Even prayer for mercy is not a cause, but a result! Divine Grace is at the
back of prayer and at the base of prayer.”—1887, Sermon #1992

“That it came from Christ is the best thing about the best thing that ever came
from Christ! That He saves me is, somehow, better than my being saved. It is a
blessed thing to go to Heaven, but I do not know that it is not a better thing
to be in Christ and so, as the result of it, to get into Heaven.”—1891, Sermon
#2213

“Prayer is the thermometer of Divine Grace.”—1891, Sermon #2189 “A man who lives
near to God ought to be able to go from his counting-house to his closet with a
happy heart! ”—1893, Sermon #2297

Cannot See

“Though I heard the Gospel from my childhood and was brought up upon the very
knee of piety, I did not understand what I must do to be saved till I heard that
text preached from—‘Look unto Me and be you saved, all the ends of the earth.’ I
do not believe that my ignorance was the fault of the preacher. It was certainly
not the fault of my father, or my mother—and not the fault of the Bible which I
had read through, again and again—it was the fault of these dim eyes that I
could not see! Go on! Go on, you preachers of the Word! Spread abroad the
knowledge of this great fact, that, ‘He that believes on the Son has everlasting
life.’”—1891, Sermon #2214

“All things are ordained of God and are settled by Him, according to His wise
and holy predestination. Whatever happens here happens not by chance, but
according to the counsel of the Most High! The acts and deeds of men below,
though left wholly to their own wills, are the counterpart of that which is
written in the purpose of Heaven.”—1891, Sermon #2205

“There is a story told of me and of some person—I never knew who it was—who
desired to see me on a Saturday night when I had shut myself up to make ready
for the Sabbath. He was very great and important and so the maid came to say
that someone desired to see me. I bade her say that it was my rule to see no one
at that time. Then he was more important and impressive, still, and said, “Tell
Mr. Spurgeon that a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ desires to see him
immediately!” The frightened servant brought the message but the sender gained
little by it, for my answer was, “Tell him I am busy with his Master and cannot
see servants now.” Sometimes you must use strong measures. Did not our Lord tell
His messengers, on one occasion, to salute no man on the way? Courtesy must give
place to devotion! It is incumbent on you that you should be alone with your
Lord in prayer—and if intruders force an entrance—they must be sent about their
business.”—1887, Sermon #1993 Our Sufficiency

“The work that you felt you could not do will have more acceptance with God than
that which you performed in your ordinary strength.”— 1894, Sermon #2343 “I bear
my witness that some of the best things I have ever learned from mortal lips, I
have learned from bedridden saints!”—1894, Sermon #2367

“God’s Grace can keep you abstaining from sin, but, if you begin sinning, oh,
how one sin draws on another! One sin is the decoy or magnet for another sin,
and draws it on, and one cannot tell, when he begins to descend this slippery
slide, how quickly and how far he may go!”—1895, Sermon #2414

“If you have found Christ, the man who was the means of leading you to Christ
has a claim upon you that he should know of it. Oh, the joy of my heart, the
other day, when I saw some 24 who were my spiritual children! I felt, then, that
I was receiving large wages at the Master’s hands. Many get good from the
minister and yet they never let him know of it! This is not doing as they would
be done by. It is rather like cheating us of the reward of our ministry. To know
that God is blessing us is a great comfort and stimulus. Do not muzzle the mouth
of the ox that treads out the corn!—1887, Sermon #1996 Purpose, Not Chance

“Blessed is that man who has done with chance, who never speaks of luck, but
believes that from the least, even to the greatest, all things are ordained of
the Lord. We dare not leave out the least event! The creeping of an aphid upon a
rosebud is as surely arranged by the decree of Providence as the march of a
pestilence through a nation. Believe this, for if the least is omitted from the
supreme government, so may the next be, and the next, till nothing is left in
the Divine hands. There is no place for chance, since God fills all
things.”—1891, Sermon #2205

“Inconsistent professors are the greatest stumbling blocks to the spread of the
cause of Christ!”—1892, Sermon #2248 “There is no greater mercy that I know of
on earth than good health except it is sickness—and that has often been a
greater mercy to me than health.”—1892, Sermon #2259

Witnessing

“‘But,’ says one, ‘I know if I were to try to speak to any of my neighbors,
[about Christ] I should break down.’ Friend, I am not careful in that matter,
nor need you be. If you are in real earnest, you might possibly do more by a
break-down than by anything else. Only break the ice and begin—and you shall
find my text to be true in your case, also, and out of weakness you, too, shall
be made strong. God does not need your strength—He has more than enough power of
His own! He asks for your weakness—He has none of that, Himself, and He is
longing, therefore, to take your weakness and use it as the instrument in His
own mighty hand! Will you not yield your weakness to Him and receive His
strength?”—1891, Sermon #2209

“If the devil never roars, the Church will never sing! God is not doing much if
the devil is not awake and busy. Depend upon it, that a working Christ makes a
raging devil! When you hear ill reports, cruel speeches, threats, taunts and the
like, believe that the Lord is among His people and is working
gloriously.”—1891, Sermon #2196

“I would sooner be a toad under a rock than be a Christian who tries to conceal
his Christianity…It is not life to have to ask another man’s permission to
think. If there is any misrepresentation, if there is any scorn, if there is any
contempt for being a Christian, let me have my share of it, for a Christian I
am, and I wish to be treated like the rest.”—1887, Sermon #1996 “These are days
when we need men of principle—men who can put their foot down and keep it
down—men who cannot be turned aside. They call this firmness, ‘bigotry.’ It is,
however, only another name for Christian manliness! If you dare to do right and
face a frowning world, you shall have God’s commendation, ‘Well done, good and
faithful servant.’”—1892, Sermon #2272

Miscellaneous

“It is often worth while being afflicted in order to experience the great loving
kindness of God which He bestows so abundantly on us in the hour of trouble and
perplexity. Yes, God turns our fasts into feasts, and we are glad in the midst
of our sorrow! We can praise and bless His name for all that He does.”—1892,
Sermon #2248

“Those are the true saints who help to spread the Gospel of Christ! A holy life
is a missionary enterprise. An unstumbling life is an incentive to others to run
along the heavenly road, trusting in the Divine Power to guard them, also, from
stumbling.”—1893, Sermon #2296

“If the devil comes to you and you get into an argument with him, he will beat
you, for he is a very ancient lawyer and he has been at the business for so many
ages that you cannot match him. Send Him to your Advocate! Refer him to the
Wonderful, the Counselor! Always shelter beneath this fact, “My times are in His
hands. I have left the whole business to Another and I cannot dishonor Him by
meddling.” Satan knows the Christ too well to go to Him—he knows the taste of
His broadsword, of, “It is written.” He will not contest with Jesus if we leave
Him to plead the causes of our soul!”—1891, Sermon #2205

Comforter

“Blessed be His name that He has arranged that one Person of the Sacred Trinity
should undertake this office of Comforter, for no man could ever perform its
duties. We might as well hope to be the Savior as to be the Comforter of the
hear-broken!”—1892, Sermon #2260

“The Word of God is not bound by the binding of preachers, but it happens to the
persecuted as to Israel in Egypt—‘The more they afflicted them, the more they
multiplied.’ Probably the Church of God has never had better times, certainly
she has never had happier times, than during periods of persecution. Those were
the days of her purity and, consequently, her glory. When she has been in the
dark, God has been her light— and when she has been driven to and fro by the
cruelties of men—then has she most effectually rested under the shadow of the
Almighty!—1887, Sermon #1998

“And Judas, also, which betrayed Him, knew the place: for Jesus ofttimes
resorted there with His disciples.Our Lord went there to pray and Judas knew
that this was His custom. Are we such men of prayer that others know where we
pray? Have you some familiar place where you go to meet your Lord? I am afraid
that many know where we trade and many know where we preach but, perhaps, few
know where we pray. God grant that we may be often at the Mercy Seat! We would
be better men and women if we were more frequently at the Throne of
Grace.”—1894, Sermon #2368

Obedience

“We are not saved by obedience, for obedience is the result of salvation! We are
saved by faith, because faith leads us to obey! Faith is weakness clinging to
strength and becoming strong through so doing.”—1891, Sermon #2209 “Have I a
right to be desiring to go to Heaven if I can do any good to you here? Is it not
more of a Heaven to be outside of Heaven than inside if you can be doing more
for God outside than in?”—1892, Sermon #2262 “A whole-hearted consecration, a
child-like confidence, a deep-toned submission—these will make us ready for
suffering, whatever it may be.”—1892, Sermon #2285 “Often have I said to myself,
as I have come along to this place, ‘I shall have a picked congregation.’ The
Lord has an election of Grace and He has also an election of hearers!”—1894,
Sermon #2348

“Trust deeds and confessions of faith are useful in their way, even as laws are
useful to society, but as laws cannot secure obedience to themselves, so
articles of belief cannot create faith, or secure honesty. And to men without
conscience, they are not worth the paper they are written upon.”—1891, Sermon
#2182 Faithful Watchman

“My Brother in the Gospel, what if you and I should keep back some painful part
of God’s message and God should do so to us, and more, also? I cannot bear to be
lost and yet I shall be lost if I decline to warn others of their danger and of
the doom of unbelief! I cannot bear to be cast away forever from the Presence of
God, yet this woe will be unto me if I preach not the Gospel and do not declare
the whole counsel of God! The result of unbelief and sin in others will fall on
us if we do not warn them! O Sirs, if we are unfaithful, God will deal with us
at the Day of Judgment as He will deal with the wicked—this is an awful outlook
for us! May we never dare to tone down the more severe parts of the Gospel and
flatter men in their sins, for if we do this, God will mete out to us a portion
with the condemned! If we have sown pillows for their armholes and rocked their
cradles by our smooth speech, their eternal ruin shall lie at our door! How
shall we bear it when God shall “do so to us, and more, also,” because we kept
back His message from the sons of men who so much needed it? Let us resolve that
come what will, we will keep back nothing of the Truth of God which the Lord has
entrusted to us.”—1891, Sermon #2184

“When you fancy that you are out of gunshot, there is an enemy close at hand.
When you dream that the road is safe, there is a pitfall just before you. When
you say, “I am perfectly holy,” the very pride that makes you say so is an
indication of a deadly cancer of self-righteousness that is eating into your
very soul!”—1892, Sermon #2274

Needed Blessing

“Sometimes God’s work goes on so well that we have much cause for gratitude and
yet we feel that the pace might be greatly quickened. A sermon that could save a
hundred could as readily save a thousand if God blessed it to that extent. The
same Truth of God which sways one mind could sway a million minds if applied by
the Great Spirit. There is no reason why the sowing of the Lord’s Word should
not bring forth a hundred-fold instead of twenty-fold. We may not dream that the
Spirit of the Lord is straitened! When God is with us, all things are possible.
When the Lord fires His saints with zeal, His own work never lags behind. God is
never behind the desires of His people—in fact, their longings are prophecies of
His giving. When we cry day and night, God will work day and night. When saints
groan and sigh for revival, it is because the revival is already come and has
begun within their souls! When the whole company of the faithful shall glow
together with passionate desire and importunate prayer, we may know that our
redemption draws near!”—1891, Sermon #2189

“When one knows that his times are in God’s hands, he would not change places
with a king! No, nor even with an angel!”—1891, Sermon #2205 “The Romans said of
a certain peace that they enjoyed, ‘a god has given it to us.’ Behold, the Son
of God has given us that deep repose which, as Believers, we have a right to
enjoy and which, I trust, we enjoy tonight! ”—1893, Sermon #2298 Faith Born at
the Cross

“Faith is born at the Cross of Christ!...Doubt becomes harder than faith when
the Cross is visible! When Christ is set forth evidently crucified among us,
each one of us should cry, ‘Lord, I believe, for Your death has killed my
unbelief.’”—1892, Sermon #2281

“If we add to our Churches by becoming worldly, by taking in persons who have
never been born again. If we add to our Churches by accommodating the life of
the Christian to the life of the worldling, our increase is worth nothing at
all—it is a loss rather than a gain! If we add to our Churches by excitement, by
making appeals to the passions rather than by explaining the Truth of God to the
understanding. If we add to our Churches otherwise than by the power of the
Spirit of God making men new creatures in Christ Jesus, the increase is of no
worth whatever! ”— 1892, Sermon #2265

“All the exercises of faith about mercy must always be tethered to the Cross.
Mercy flows through Christ alone.”—1891, Sermon #2199

Awake

“A man who is asleep cannot be said to look and yet it is, ‘unto them that look
for Him,’ that the Lord comes with salvation. We must be wide awake to
look!...It ought to be a daily disappointment when our Lord does not
come—instead of being, as I fear it is, a kind of foregone conclusion that He
will not come just yet.—1891, Sermon #2194

“Pray, Brothers and Sisters, pray! Pray much that the Lord may go before to
prepare the hearers, but equally that He may go before to prepare the
preachers.”—1894, Sermon #2348

“If salvation had been by works, our Lord could not have said to the thief,
dying at His side, “Today shall you be with me in Paradise.” That man could do
no works! His hands and feet were fastened to the cross and he was in the
agonies of death. No, it must be of Grace, all-conquering Grace—and the modus
operandi must be by faith, or else for dying men the Gospel is a mockery!”—1891,
Sermon #2210

“I hope, Beloved, you do not think of God’s Sovereignty as tyranny or imagine
that He ever could or would will anything but that which is right. Neither will
we admit into our minds a suspicion of the incorrectness of the Word of God in
any matter whatever, as though the Lord, Himself, could err. We will not have it
that God, in His Holy Book, makes mistakes about matters of history, or of
science, any more than He does upon the great truths of salvation! If the Lord
is God, He must be Infallible! And if He can be described as in error in the
little respects of human history and science, He cannot be trusted in the
greater matters!”—1890, Sermon #2195

Substitution

“Then asked He them, again, Whom do you seek, And they said, Jesus of Nazareth.
Do they return to the fray? Having once felt Christ’s Divine Power, do they
summon courage enough to attack Him again? Yes, for there is no limit to the
malice and impudence of the human heart!”— 1894, Sermon #2368

“You notice that I am always preaching that Doctrine of Substitution. I cannot
help it, because it is the only Truth of God that brought me comfort. I should
never have gotten out of the Dungeon of Despair if it had not been for that
grand Truth of Substitution! I hope that no young lady is going to ask me to
write in her album this week. That request is made to me, I do not know how many
days in the week, and I always write this verse in all the albums—

‘Ever since by faith I saw the stream Your flowing wounds supply, Redeeming love
has been my theme, And shall be till I die.’”—1893, Sermon #2309

Sanctification

“Sanctification, in its operation upon our character, consists of three things.
First, we die to sin. A wondrous death! By this Jesus strikes at the heart of
evil. The death of Christ makes us die to sin. After this comes burial. We are
buried with Christ and of this burial, Baptism is the type and token. Covered up
to be forgotten, we are to sin as a dead shepherd to his flock. As the sheep
pass over the dead shepherd’s grave, or even feed thereon, yet he regards them
not—so our old sins and habits come about us, but we, as dead men, know them no
more. We are buried to them! To complete our actual sanctification we receive
heavenly quickening. “If we are dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also
live with Him.” Yes, we do live in Him and byHim, for, “He that believes in Him
has everlasting life.” I trust you know what this means. Have you been thus
dead, thus buried with Christ? Are you now thus quickened in the likeness of His
Resurrection? This is your joyful privilege if you are, indeed, Believers in
Christ and joined unto the Lord in one spirit.”—1891, Sermon #2197

“God has only to give you what you want to make you feel the emptiness of
it!...You will generally notice that when the Believer gets near to God, tastes
the unseen joys and eats the bread that was made in Heaven, all the feasts of
earth, all its amusements and all its glories seem very flat, stale and
unprofitable!”—1891, Sermon #2225 Hope in the Lord

“My message to every man or woman who desires salvation, ‘Let Israel hope in the
Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him is plenteous redemption.’
Do not begin by hoping in mercy and redemption, for these are not to be found
apart from the Lord—but go at once to that Divine Person with whom there is
mercy and plenteous redemption—then both of those will be granted to you. I wish
I knew how to put this so plainly that every bewildered and cast-down spirit
would catch my meaning and accept its counsel. I would also have preachers learn
a lesson from the point I have been driving at. Let them not so much preach
sinners to Christ as preach Christ to sinners. I am persuaded that a full and
clear declaration of what Jesus is, as to His Person, offices, Character, work
and authority would do more to produce faith than all our exhortations. ‘Whoever
believes in Him has everlasting life’—but how shall they believe unless they
hear of Him?”—1891, Sermon #2199

“Believe in prayer and you will pray believingly.”—1891, Sermon #2209 “The
practical effect of Christianity is happiness, therefore let it be spread abroad
everywhere!”—1894, Sermon #2352

“What an ornament to a Church, her converts are! These are our jewels! We care
nothing for gorgeous architecture or grand music in the worship of God! Our true
building is composed of our converts—our best music is their confession of
faith. May God give us more of it!”—1892, Sermon #2265

Works Salvation

“And, next, I think it will be admitted by all, that the way of salvation by
good works would be self-evidently unsuitable to a considerable number. I will
take a case. I am sent for, in an emergency, and it is the dead of night. A man
is dying, smitten suddenly by the death-blast. I go to his bedside, as
requested. Consciousness remains, but he is evidently in mortal agony. He has
lived an ungodly life—and he is about to die. I am asked by his wife and friends
to speak to him a word that may bless him. Shall I tell him that he can only be
saved by good works? Where is the time for works? Where is the possibility of
them? While I am speaking, his life is struggling to escape him! He looks at me
in the agony of his soul and he stammers out, ‘What must I do to be saved?’
Shall I read to him the moral Law? Shall I expound to him the Ten Commandments
and tell him that he must keep all these? He would shake his head and say, ‘I
have broken them all; I am condemned by them all!’ If salvation is of works,
what more have I to say? I am of no use here. What can I say? The man is utterly
lost! There is no remedy for him. How can I tell him the cruel dogma of ‘modern
thought’ that his own personal character is everything? How can I tell him that
there is no value in belief, no help for the soul in looking to Another—even to
Jesus, the Substitute? There is no whisper of hope for a dying man in the hard
and stony doctrine of salvation by works!”— 1891, Sermon #2210

“On a dying bed, it must be none but Jesus—let it be none but Jesus on your bed,
tonight, before you fall asleep. Do not dare to close your eyes till you have
committed your soul into the keeping of Him who still holds out His hands, as He
did upon the Cross, that He may receive you with open arms and save you with an
everlasting salvation! Amen.”—1893, Sermon #2333

“Did you ever hear of the man who used to prepare the potatoes before he planted
them in his garden? He always boiled them—they never grew, for he had prepared
all the life out of them! Now, many a boiled sermon is brought out to the
people, but it never grows. It is elaborated and prepared so much that nothing
will ever come out of it. The Lord loves to bless living words spoken in simple
language out of an earnest heart. The man who speaks thus does not get the
glory—the glory goes to God—and thus there is room for the works of God to be
manifested.”— 1893, Sermon #2310

Bread Not Eaten “Christ as bread, yet not eaten, becomes Christ
dishonored.”—1894, Sermon #2350

“If you are a preacher, do not think of what you will preach about the next
time—think of what you are going to preach about now. It is always quite enough
to get one sermon at a time —you need not have a store, because if you get a lot
piled away somewhere, there will be a stale odor about them! Even the manna that
came down from Heaven bred worms and stank—so will your best sermons, even if
the message is God-given.

Talking to Me

“Last Sunday week, a little boy came to this Tabernacle for the first time. So,
when I stood up and began to preach, the little fellow said to his nurse,
“Nurse, is Mr. Spurgeon talking to me?” I wish you would all say that, if my
words apply to you, for I am talking to some of the members of the Church when I
say that I am ashamed of you who never come to the Prayer Meetings! I do not
mean this rebuke for you who live at a very great distance, or who are fully
occupied with your families or business cares—for you would be wrong to come.
God forbid that I should ask you to present to Him one duty stained with the
blood of another duty! But there are some who might be here, and ought to be
here at our Prayer Meetings and they are spiritually suffering positive mischief
in their own souls through their absence, besides the loss that they are causing
to the treasury of the Church—for the wealth of the Church lies in the power of
intercession!”—1892, Sermon #2288 And if it does not come down from Heaven, but
from your own brain, it will go bad still more quickly! Tell the people about
Christ! Lead them to Jesus and do not trouble about what you will say next time,
but wait till next time comes—and it shall be given you in the same hour what
you shall speak.”—1891, Sermon #2216

“It is a dangerous thing for some people to be made much of in this world—their
hands soon get turned and they begin to think too much of themselves. He who
thinks that he is somebody is nobody—and he whose head swims because of his
elevation will soon have it broken because of his tumbling down from his lofty
position. Daniel was a man greatly beloved and God showed him His great love by
setting him in high places and keeping him there in safety.”—1892, Sermon #2256
Preacher Nothing

“O Brothers and Sisters, think nothing of us who preach to you! If ever you do,
our power will be gone. If you begin to suppose that such and such a minister,
having been blessed of God to so many thousands will necessarily be the means of
the conversion of your friend, you are imputing to a son of man what belongs
only to the Son of God! And you will assuredly do that pastor or that minister a
serious mischief by tolerating in your heart so idolatrous a thought! We are
nothing! You are nothing. “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says
the Lord of Hosts,” is a message that should make us lie in the dust and utterly
despair of doing anything in and of ourselves, seeing that all the power is of
God, alone! It will do us good to be very empty, to be very weak, to be very
distrustful of self—and so to go about out Master’s work.”—1892, Sermon #2246

“As I look back upon my own history, little did I dream, when first I opened my
mouth for Christ, in a very humble way, that I should have the honor of bringing
thousands to Jesus. Blessed, blessed be His name! He has the Glory of it. But I
cannot help thinking that there must be some other lad here, such a one as I
was, whom He may call by His Grace to do service for Him. When I had a letter
sent to me by the deacons of the church at New Park Street, to come up to London
to preach, I sent it back by the next post, telling them that they had made a
mistake, that I was a lad of 19 years of age, happy among a very poor and lowly
people in Cambridgeshire who loved me, and that I did not imagine that they
could mean that I was to preach in London! But they returned it to me and said
that they knew all about it, and I must come. Ah, what a story it has been since
then, of the goodness and loving kindness of the Lord!”—1891, Sermon #2216
Subtlety of Satan

“This is the chief aim of the enemy’s assaults—to get rid of Christ, to get rid
of the Atonement, to get rid of His suffering in the place of men! They say they
can embrace the rest of the Gospel, but what, ‘rest,’ is there? What is there
left? A bloodless, Christless Gospel is neither fit for the land nor for the
dunghill—it neither honors God nor converts the sons of men.”—1894, Sermon #2368

“When the world patronizes the Church, the Church will need tenfold Grace to
maintain her spirituality, just as on an ocean steamer any speed beyond a
certain limit, is only attained by an expenditure of power altogether out of
proportion to the increase of the distance traveled. ‘Woe unto you, when all men
shall speak well of you!’ Such praise is not for good soldiers of Jesus Christ!
If the enemy begins to love one of the king’s generals, the king may half
suspect that his general is turning traitor. God save us from such treachery!
‘Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man loves
the world, the love of the Father is not in him.’” —1891, Sermon #2225

“When you who are living in unchastity and dishonesty speak badly of Christ and
of Christians, you only speak after your own manner—and we cannot wish you to
alter your tone till God has changed your heart!”—1893, Sermon #2304

“Do you not think that when we read a story like that of Jonathan and David, it
should stir up in us the desire, not so much to have such a friend, as to be
such a friend as Jonathan was to David? Any man can selfishly desire to have a
Jonathan, but he is on the right track who desires to find a David to whom he
can be a Jonathan!”—1893, Sermon #2336

“When you receive Christ into your heart, He cannot be taken away from
you!”—1894, Sermon #2350 “All our infirmities, whatever they are, are just
opportunities for God to display His gracious work in us.”—1893, Sermon #2310

“A man picked himself up from the gutter and rolled up against Mr. Rowland Hill
one night as he went home, and he said, ‘Mr. Hill, I am pleased to see you, Sir.
I am one of your converts.’ Rowland said, ‘I thought it was very likely you
were. You are not one of God’s converts, or else you would not be drunk.’ There
is a great lesson in that answer. My converts are no good. Rowland Hill’s
converts could get drunk—but the converts of the Spirit of God—those are really
renewed in the spirit of their mind, by a supernatural operation! And these are
a real increase to the Church of God.”—1892, Sermon #2265

“I never met with a man that served God who complained of his wages. No, it is
so much a work of Grace that the work, itself, is a gift to us. The privilege of
serving God—yes, call it the high honor, the delight, the great gain of being a
servant of God—if there were no other reward, this would suffice us!—1891,
Sermon #2227 Sorrow’s Cure

“Sorrow ceases to be sorrow when once there is in the heart a sweet sense of the
infinite love of Christ!”—1894, Sermon #2370

“I remember when the Lord put that precious ointment upon my wounded spirit.
Nothing ever healed me until I understood that He died in my place—died that I
might not die! And now, today, my heart would bleed itself to death were it not
that I believe that He, ‘His own Self bore our sins in His own body on the
tree.’”—1892, Sermon #2260

“Spasms of any sort are not desirable things, least of all spasmodic religion! I
want a revival that keeps on every day in the year, all the years in the
century! That is the kind of revival that glorifies God—not a temporary ripple
on the surface—but a great swell that comes rolling up from the depths! May God
send it! He can do such a work by His Spirit and there are indications that He
is going to permit us to see greater things than ever. All these many years, in
this place, souls have been saved in one continued stream by the preaching of
the Gospel—scarcely ever more and very seldom less—but oh, for a grand spring
tide, a mighty flood that shall bring many to Christ and to the Church! Then it
shall be that God will get to Himself a glorious and an everlasting name.”—1891,
Sermon #2229

Weakness

“Prayer is not for God’s information, but for our instruction!”—1894, Sermon
#2372 “It has been well said that the angels excel in strength, but the saints
excel in their weakness. When we are most weak, and Christ strengthens us, then
are the most excellent virtues produced.”—1894, Sermon #2351

“Remember that there is no salvation promised to an unconfessed faith. I boldly
put it according to the Word of God. “If you shall confess with your mouth the
Lord Jesus, and shall believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the
dead, you shall be saved.” There is no question that confession is here
required. And again it is clearly stated, “He that believes and is
baptized”—which is the confession that Christ requires— “shall be saved.” And
though confession with the mouth and baptism cannot save, yet the faith to which
the promise is made is a faith that dares to confess and come out! —1891, Sermon
#2230 Rejoice in Tribulation

“May you and I, when we are tried, be able, through faith in God, to meet
trouble with the same brave thoughts and speeches! We cannot show our courage
unless we have difficulties and troubles. A man cannot become a veteran soldier
if he never goes to battle. No man can get his sea legs if he lives always on
land. Rejoice, therefore, in your tribulations, because they give you
opportunities of exhibiting a believing confidence and, thereby, glorifying the
name of the Most High. But take heed that you have faith, true faith in God—do
not become a puppet of impressions— much less a slave of the judgments of
others. To have David’s faith, you must be as David. No man may take up a
confidence of his own making— it must be a real work of the Spirit and growth of
Grace within—grasping with living tendrils the promise of the living God.”—1892,
Sermon #2237 “There would be nobody to receive mercy if nobody were
guilty.”—1894, Sermon #2372 God’s Love

“We cannot speak of it fully. All the Apostles and Prophets and saints of God
have been trying to speak out the love of God as manifested in Christ, but they
have all failed! I say, with great reverence, that the Holy Spirit, Himself,
seems to have labored for expression and, as He had to use human pens and mortal
tongues, even He has never spoken to the fullest the measure and value of God’s
unspeakable gift! It is unspeakable to men by God, Himself! God can give it, but
He cannot make us fully understand it! We have need to be like God, Himself, to
comprehend the greatness of His gift when He gives us His Son!”—1892, Sermon
#2247

“It is a mark of wonderful transformation in the character of some men, when
their heart begins to go a little outside their own ribs and they can feel for
the sorrow of other men!”—1892, Sermon #2248

“The society of the world is not helpful to a holy heart.”—1893, Sermon #2299
“There are some Brothers who, in preaching, are as timid as mice—but on a
political platform they can roar like lions! Had not they better take to what
they like best and give up the work at which they are not at home? For my part,
I believe that I am like Paul when he says that he was “separated unto the
Gospel of God.” I am set apart unto the Gospel, cut off from everything else so
that I may preach the glorious Gospel of the blessed God to the perishing sons
of men!—1892, Sermon #2257 “A rejoicing heart soon makes a praising
tongue.”—1893, Sermon #2310

Divine Presence “That man may expect to have presence of mind who has the
Presence of God.”—1894, Sermon #2351

“When the organ peals out its melodious tones, but the heart is not in the
singing, do you think that God has ears like a man, that can be tickled with
sweet sounds? Why have you brought Him down to your level? He is spiritual! The
music that delights Him is the love of a true heart, the prayer of an anxious
spirit! He has better music than all your organs and drums can ever bring to
Him! If He wanted music, He would not have asked you, for winds and wave make
melodies transcendently superior to all your chief musicians can compose! Does
He want candles when His torch makes the mountains to be great altars smoking
with the incense of praise to the God of Creation? Oh, Brothers and Sisters, I
fear that it has been true of many who externally appeared to be devout—“when
they knew God, they glorified Him not as God!” Weep over your sins— then have
you glorified Him as God! Fall on your face and be nothing before the Most
High—then you have glorified Him as God! Accept His righteousness. Adore His
bleeding Son. Trust in His infinite compassion. THEN you have glorified Him as
God, for, “God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit
and in truth.” How far, my dear Hearers, have you complied with that
requisition?”—1892, Sermon #2257

“Even as a voice, John was not original. That straining after originality of
which we see so much of today finds no warrant among the true servants of God.
Even though John is only a voice, yet he is a voice that quotes the Scriptures:
‘Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the Prophet Isaiah.’ The more of
Scripture we can voice, the better. Our words, what are they? They are but air.
His Word, what is it? It is, ‘Grace and Truth.’ May we continually be lending a
voice to the great Words of God that have gone before!”—1892, Sermon #2259

“Perhaps David might have been excused from teaching Solomon, as he was already
so wise, but the fact that he did instruct him teaches us that the wisest child
needs to be taught the things of God!—1892, Sermon #2280

Cry for Mercy

“‘Be merciful unto me,’ is the prayer you must learn to pray if you hope to
enter the Kingdom of God.”—1894, Sermon #2372 “It needs the Trinity to make a
Christian! And when you have got a Christian, it needs the Trinity to make a
prayer! You cannot pray a single prayer aright without Father, Son and Holy
Spirit.”—1892, Sermon #2267

“I take leave to contradict those who say that salvation is an evolution! All
that ever can be evolved out of the sinful heart of man is sin—and nothing else!
Salvation is the free gift of God, by Jesus Christ, and the work of it is
supernatural. It is done by the Lord, Himself, and He has power to do it,
however weak, no, however dead in sin, the sinner may be!”—1892, Sermon #2269

“O Beloved, a little trouble arises, an unforeseen difficulty occurs—and where
is your faith? A little persecution, the idle banter of an unbeliever, the
sarcasm of an agnostic—and where is your faith? Is it not so with many, that
while in good company they can almost brag of their faith, but if the company is
changed, they certainly have no faith to brag of?”—1892, Sermon #2271

“I frequently hear persons exhorted to give their hearts to Christ, which is a
very proper exhortation. But that is not the Gospel. Salvation comes from
something that Christ gives you, not something that you give to Christ. The
giving of your heart to Christfollows after the receiving from Christ of eternal
life by faith.”—1892, Sermon #2273

“The best help you can give men socially is to help them religiously—and the
best religious help is to preach the Gospel to them.”—1892, Sermon #2275 Our
Portion

“David did not expect to pass through life without experiencing difficulties. He
had to fight Goliath and he had to go into the cave of Adullam. He expected to
have troubles and he certainly was not disappointed. Nor will you be. Do not
reckon that God will give you a life without difficulty! Tell me, if you can, of
any child of His who ever had such a portion? He had one Son without sin, but no
son without sorrow. No, that Son who had no sin was the Man of Sorrows and
acquainted with grief—so you must expect the Lord to deal with you as He does
with the rest of His household.”—1894, Sermon #2372

“When two saints are talking together, Jesus is very likely to come and make the
third one in the company! Talk of Him and you will soon talk with Him.”—1892,
Sermon #2279

“‘He humbled Himself.’ In His own heart there were, frequently, great struggles.
And those struggles drove Him to prayer. He even lost consciousness of God’s
Presence, so that He cried in sore anguish, “My God, My God, why have You
forsaken Me?”All this was because He still humbled Himself. I do not know how to
speak to you upon this great subject! I give you words, but I pray the Holy
Spirit to supply you with right thoughts about this great mystery! I have
already said that it was condescension enough for Christ to be found in fashion
as a Man. But after that, He still continued to descend the stairway of
condescending love by humbling Himself yet more and more!”—1892, Sermon #2281

“Ah, dear Friends, it is nothing but keeping faithful to God that will enable
you to treat death as a friend!”—1892, Sermon #2285

Conversion

“If our preaching does not turn men from drunkenness to sobriety, from thieving
to honesty, from unchastity to purity, then our Gospel is not worth a button!
But if it does all this, then this shall be the evidence that it comes from God,
seeing that in the world so sorely diseased by sin, it works the wondrous
miracle of curing men of these deadly evils!”—1894, Sermon #2352

“Leave your character with God—it is safe, there. Men may throw mud at it, but
it will never stick long on a true Believer—it shall soon come off and you shall
be the more glorious for men’s slander.”—1894, Sermon #2356

“If it were certain that God did not pardon sin, everybody would despair, and
so, again, there would be nobody to fear Him, for a despairing heart grows hard
like the nether millstone. Because they have no hope, men go on to sin worse and
worse—but there is forgiveness with God that He may be feared. The devils never
repent, for there is no pardon for them. There is no Gospel preached in Hell
and, consequently, there is no relenting, no repenting, no turning towards God
among lost spirits. But there is forgiveness with Him that He may be feared by
you. What a wonderful effect pardon has upon a man!”—1895, Sermon #2422 PRAY THE
HOLY SPIRIT WILL USE THESE QUOTES TO BRING MANY TO A SAVING KNOWLEDGE OF JESUS
CHRIST


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  CHAPTER 3: VOL. 2
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NOTABLE QUOTES OF CHARLES H. SPURGEON —PART 2— May 20, 2008 Dear Reader, This is
the second compilation of Brother Spurgeon’s quotes from my work of modernizing
his sermons. All of these quotes are found in volumes of his work which were
published after hewent Home to our Lordin 1892.Thus I identify them by the year
and sermon number. (There may be a couple which I failed to note the year and
sermon, so I simply put his initials after the quote).

If you want to read or download the sermon from which a quote comes, simply go
to our site and look in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit links on the front
page—each link identifies the sermon numbers in that link. Nothing on our site
is copyrighted—feel free to copy anything—but please use it only for the honor
and glory of my Master, Jesus Christ. My prayer for you and yours is Paul’s to
the Ephesians 3:17-19.

Emmett O’Donnell

“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’ —‘frommany 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 refuseto 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’
(Ephesians 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 thinkabout 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 goodnessthat 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 yourselves!”—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 toresist 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 themto 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 variety.”—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 mustbe 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 betterin 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 believenow. 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 greatthing, 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 thenhe 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

“ ‘ h 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 high est 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 youto 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 ravens.”—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 by service, 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 willworship—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 everything.”—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 selfrighteousness 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 faithwhich 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 anysin.
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 walksthrough 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 tobe 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 Icommit myspirit. 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

“It is amazing how attractive a personal narrative is! If you begin to explain
to some people the Doctrines of the Gospel, your audience will diminish one by
one. But tell them your own experience of the power of Christ and they will
listen as listened the wedding guest when “the ancient mariner” laid his hand
upon him and detained him, and told him that strange legend of the sea!”—1899,
Sermon #2623

“I have sometimes likened that passage in Romans to a vast suspension bridge
between earth and Heaven—‘For whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate to
be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many
brethren. Moreover whom He did predestinate, them He also called: and whom He
called, them He also justified: and whom He justified, them He also glorified.’
If you get your foot firmly resting on that great plank of effectual calling,
you may be quite sure that you will be able to cross all the rest of the bridge
and will most certainly reach the other side—and be “forever with the
Lord.””—1900, Sermon #2665

“If you do not really pray, do not pretend to pray. If you have no experience of
the things of God, do not talk as if you had. To be a liar anywhere is
hateful—but to lie in religion is the most abominable form of lying that can
be!”—1903, Sermon #2844

“God is the God of all comfort—not merely of some comfort, but of allcomfort. If
you need every kind of comfort that was ever given to men, God has it in reserve
and He will give it to you! If there are any comforts to be found by God’s
people in sickness, in prison, in need, in depression—the God of all comfort
will deal them out to you according as you have need of them!”—1899, Sermon
#2640

“I will go as far to say that if Divine Grace should carry us every inch of the
road to Heaven but one, we would be lost because of that last inch! If, in the
edifice of our soul’s salvation, there is even one stone left for us to put in
its place, unassisted by God’s Grace, that building will never be completed!
From first to last, all must be of Grace. I agree with the highest, doctrinalist
upon this point, that there is not, and there cannot be a good thing in the
heart of any man if it was not worked there by the Sovereign Grace of
God.”—1901, Sermon #2741

“You may also destroy your distresses by singing praises to God. By blessing the
Lord, you may set your foot upon the neck of your adversaries—you can sing
yourself right up from the deeps by God’s gracious help. Out of the very depths
you may cry unto the Lord till He shall lift you up, and you shall praise Him in
excelsis—in the very highest—and magnify His name! I give you this as one of the
shortest and surest recipes for comfort—begin to praise God. The next time that
a friend comes in to see you, do not tell him how long the wind has been blowing
from the North, how cold the weather is for this season of the year, how your
poor bones ache, how little you have coming in and all your troubles—he has
probably heard the sad story many times before! Instead of that, tell him what
the Lord has done for you and make him feel that the Lord is good. Your griefs
and your troubles speak for themselves, but your mercies are often dumb—so try,
therefore, to give them a tongue and praise the Lord with all your heart!”—1899,
Sermon #2640

“We do not think one hundredth as much about Heaven as we ought to. Most people
seem to imagine we cannot know anything about it and they quote half a text,
which is almost as bad as telling a lie—‘Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared
for them that love Him.’ There they stop! But that is not where the Scripture
ends, for the Apostle went on to say, ‘But God has revealed them unto us by His
Spirit: for the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.’ They
quote the first half of the passage to prove that we do not know anything about
Heaven, whereas the second part tells us that we doknow a great deal about it!
And if we would but turn our thoughts that way, we might become almost as
familiar with the inside of the gates of pearl as we are with the streets of
this clouded, foggy city [London]! We may learn much about Heaven, even while we
are here, if we are but willing to be taught of God.”—1899, Sermon #2648

“When the Lord Jesus Christ calls any of you effectually, you will not put off
your decision till the next morning. You will not say, ‘I will wait till I can
get home and pray.’ You will not even say, ‘I will wait till the end of the
service and then talk with a Christian person,’ but your prayer will be, ‘Lord,
help me to look to Jesus, now. I yield myself up to You this very instant. I am
in a hurry about it. Lord, I am making haste to get to You! Make haste to come
and save me. I would not delay a single second longer. I want to be Yours alone,
and Yours at once.’ That is a mark of effectual calling, when immediate
obedience is given to the call.”—1900, Sermon #2665 “When I first began to
preach, this was my usual way of working. I was up in the morning early, praying
and reading the Word. Then all day I was either teaching or studying hard, but
at five o’clock every evening, except Saturday, I started out to preach what I
had learned during the day! I used to tell the people, simply and earnestly,
what I had first received into my own mind and heart—and I found that I derived
greater benefit by proclaiming to others what I had learned than if I had kept
it all to myself. I do not believe that you can thoroughly know the Doctrines of
Grace till you begin to teach them to other people. You will soon find that they
will not receive them, and so you will learn the doctrine of man’s natural
depravity. You will speedily discover that your eloquence will not draw them to
Christ and, in that way you will learn the Doctrine of Effectual Calling—that
the Holy Spirit must, Himself, come and work upon them if they are to be saved!
You will prove that some will reject Christ though you thought they were most
likely to accept Him, and that others who you felt sure would refuse Him, will
be the first to receive Him! There you have the great doctrine of Divine
Sovereignty. You see, from your own observation, how the Lord has compassion
upon whom He will have compassion and how He has mercy upon whom He will have
mercy. You will never know the Truth of God in all its fullness till with all
your heart, mind, soul and strength, you have attempted to inculcate it in the
hearts of others. So it is a profitable duty to “declare the works of the
Lord.””—1897, Sermon #2540

“I suggest to you this prayer, ‘Lord, show me the worst of my case. Put me in
the place where I ought to be. Make me to feel and know what I really am and
then, my Lord, break my heart if it never was broken, and heal it if it is
broken. Empty me of myself and bring me to Yourself. Turn me upside down till
the last drop of my self-sufficiency runs out even to the dregs, and then pour
in the fullness of Your Grace in Christ Jesus till I am filled even to the
brim.’”—1903, Sermon #2844

“I wish that we were all of the mind of that noble Spartan who wished to be a
magistrate, but another man opposed him and received twice as many votes as he
did. What did the Spartan say? ‘I am grateful that the country has better men
than myself and I am glad to see that it knows where to find them when it needs
them.’ So, dear Friends, be glad when God provides better men than you are to do
His work. Let the preacher rejoice when another preacher excels him. That is the
point to which we must all bring ourselves. Let the Sunday school teacher praise
the Lord when she finds another teacher who altogether eclipses her. What a
blessed thing it is for the Bible class teacher who has a large company around
him, to find another Brother raised up who gets a better class than his has ever
been! Bless God when it is so, dear Friends. This is one of those points that is
often difficult, but it ought to be easy—and it wouldbe easyif we had love for
one another! And if we have not such love, we are not Christ’s disciples.”—1899,
Sermon #2650

“I do not believe in coming up to a set of rails and kneeling down to receive
the bread and wine. It was never so done in our Lord’s day, nor for centuries
afterwards. Look at that famous picture of the Last Supper by Leonardo da
Vinci—our Lord and His Apostles are depicted sitting around a table. So it
should always be—any posture but that of sitting as much at ease as possible
violates the very meaning of the supper! Is it not strange that when Christ bids
men sit or recline at the supper table, they will not do so, but they will
kneel? Then, as it is asupper, the first principle with many is that it must be
taken in the morning before breakfast—with some people, everything must be
contrary to Christ’s command! High-Churchism means high treason against
Christ—that is the plain English of the matter—at least as to the symbolical
teaching, though I thank God that there are many of those who fall into that
error who are right at heart and true Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ.”—1897,
Sermon #2542

“Honest speech is the surest token of a loving heart, but, nowadays, if a man
preaches the Truth of God plainly and faithfully, men say that he is hard and
unkind. But if a man glosses over the Truth of God and alters it according to
his own idea of what will please men, then they say, “He is a kindly-disposed
and large-hearted man.” I would be disposed to doubt whether he has any heart at
all, if he will sooner see sinners damned than offend them by proclaiming the
Truth! I thank God that some of us care little about offending those who offend
God! If men will not yield themselves to the Lord, we want not their friendship,
but we will strive to make them uneasy in their rebellion—and if they resolve to
be lost, we will at least be clear of their blood.”—1899, Sermon #2652

“There is no comparison between Damon and Pythias, and a poor sinner and his
Savior! Christ laid down His life, His glorious life, for a poor worm! He
stripped Himself of all His splendors, then of all His happiness, then of His
own righteousness, then of His own robes till He was naked to His own shame! And
then He laid down His life—that was all He had left—for our Savior had not kept
anything back.”—1900, Sermon #2656

“There was, just now, a host of us bowing our heads in the attitude of prayer,
but how many of us were really praying? The prayer that is offered in the mass
often has no prayer in it. He who would have eternal life must ask for it for
himself, and by himself. It is quite right to have family prayer—I bless God
that I cannot remember a time when I was not one of those who gathered night and
morning in my father’s house to pray. It is a very delightful thing to have been
brought up to attend Prayer Meetings and to join in public prayer with the
people of God—but when a man is seeking Christ, he must pray alone.”—1896,
Sermon #2458 “A sense of God’s wrath against sin is not repentance!”—1901,
Sermon #2743

“The love of Christ is the grandest stimulant of the renewed nature that can be
known! It enables the fainting man to revive from his swooning. It causes the
feeble man to leap up from his bed of languishing and it makes the weary man
strong again. Are you weary, Brothers and Sisters, and sick of life? You only
need more of Christ’s love shed abroad in your heart! Are you, dear Brother,
ready to faint through unbelief? You only need more of Christ’s love and all
shall be well with you. I would to God that we were all filled with it to the
fullest, like those Believers were on the day of Pentecost, of whom the mockers
said that they were full of new wine! Peter truly said that they were not drunk,
as men supposed, but that it was the Spirit of God and the love of Christ
filling them with unusual power and unusual energy and, therefore, men knew not
what it was! God grant to us, also, this great power, and Christ shall have all
the glory of it!”—1896, Sermon #2459

“I daresay the devil finds himself at home in Hell, or wherever his dwelling
place may be, but if he could be converted into a seraph, he would not stay in
Hell for an hour! He would never want to go there again for pleasure, of that I
am certain. And when a man who professes to be converted says that he goes into
the world, and into sin, for pleasure, it is as if an angel went to Hell for
enjoyment!”—1898, Sermon #2571

“Today the people of God are a remarkable people, a pilgrim race, strangers and
sojourners in the world, passing on to “a city which has foundations, whose
Builder and Maker is God.” If you are a true Believer in Christ, you will be
sure to be noticed, questioned, quizzed, criticized, caricatured,
misrepresented—never mind all that—it is the lot of all the holy seed, and the
citizens of Zion must expect such treatment until the Lord Himself shall
come.”—1899, Sermon #2612

“…if God will acknowledge it as His promise, shall I, to whom it is given in
infinite mercy, doubt whether it is His promise or not? And shall I even venture
to go further than that and, knowingit to be His promise, shall I begin to
question how He can fulfill it, or whether He willfulfill it or not? God forbid!
The dignity of the promise must not be insulted by our doubting it!”—1900,
Sermon #2657

“It is a grand testimony to a man’s uprightness when worldlings cannot say
anything against him without lying, for it shows that there is nothing of which
they can truthfully accuse him! It is a noble thing for a man to be in such a
position and then he can say, ‘Now have I come where I desire to be—there is no
love lost between the world and me. The world is dead to me and I am dead to the
world.’”—1902, Sermon #2789

“Ah, my dear Friend, repentance is not a preparationfor Grace, it is the first
result of Grace working within the soul. One of the earliest products of a
Divine visitation is the humbling of the heart on account of sin—and this is the
beginning of true repentance.”—1901, Sermon #2743 “The doorstep of wisdom is a
consciousness of ignorance and the gateway of perfection is a deep sense of
imperfection.”—1899, Sermon #2624 “All that is of man [in salvation] is sure to
be unraveled as all the spinning and the weaving of earthly machinery can be
pulled to pieces. But the work of God’s Grace endures forever.”—1903, Sermon
#2845

“Somehow, God’s people in the olden times always liked to sing the Song of
Moses. By a kind of instinct they thought of the Red Sea, as if to remember the
redemption that God worked out for His people when He destroyed Pharaoh and all
his host. Let us go there, too, and think of the Red Sea of our Savior’s blood
where all our sins were drowned!”—1898, Sermon #2578

“‘Dismiss me not from Your service, Lord,’ is a prayer we ought often to put up,
for, in that service, we are far from perfect. I think I speak for all sane
Christians—I do not undertake to speak for certain insane ones that abound at
this time—but I believe that all sane servants of the Lord confess that they are
such poor servants that their wonder is that they have not been dismissed from
His service. Yet it is sweet to hear Him say, “I have chosen you, and not cast
you away.’”—1896, Sermon #2483

“‘But,’ says someone, ‘there are certain districts where you cannot do any good
if you try to preach the Gospel. You must fiddle to the people and drum to
them—and then you must have amusements and entertainments for them, you must
have penny readings and concerts.’ Very well, convert sinners that way if you
can, dear Friends—I do not object to any method that results in the winning of
souls! Stand on your head if that will save the people, but still, it seems to
me that if God’s Word is like a fire, there is nothinglike it for burning its
way! and if God’s Word is like a hammer, there can be nothinglike that Word for
hammering down everything that stands in the way of Jesus Christ! Why, then,
should we not continually try the Gospel and nothing but the Gospel?”—1896,
Sermon #2460

“Never did a harp of Heaven sound so sweetly as when touched by the finger of
some returning prodigal! Not even the songs of the angels seem to me to be so
sweet as that first song of rapture which rushes forth from the inmost soul of
the forgiven child of God!”—1899, Sermon #2625 “Some may think it is absurd to
talk of our being “one with the Savior.” it is not absurd, because it is
Scriptural.”—1898, Sermon #2572 “I know not how to estimate the worth of even
one man who has power with God in prayer!”—1901, Sermon #2745

“Think not that a man like Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor of the saints, is the
most hopeless of mankind. God thought not so and He brought him in penitence to
His feet and made him to be not a whit behind the very chief of His
servants!”—1899, Sermon #2612“There is no pretended god that has ever been
supposed to make promises like those of our God. Turn to the Koran and see what
Mohammed has promised. Ah, me! What a beggarly array of promises does he set
before his followers! Turn to Brahma and Buddha and read all the so-called
sacred books written by their priests, and see what their god: are said to have
promised. You can put the essence of it all into an eggshell and not even see it
then! But our God has promised more than Heaven and earth can hold! He has
promised to give Himself to His people! He is the great Promiser—the mighty
Promiser. I set the promises of God in comparison and contrast with all the
promises that were ever made in connection with all false systems of religion
under Heaven, and unhesitatingly declare that there are none that can compare
for an instant with the promises of the Most High!”—1900, Sermon #2657

“No man ever spent a day with Jesus Christ without being filled with the sight
of strange things!”—1899, Sermon #2614

“There is nothing truly substantial apart from God, the Everlasting One, who
lives and abides forever. Depend upon it, we shall, in a short time, prove the
insubstantiality of our own lives! Worms will be scrambling for our flesh and if
we have not Christ as our Savior, devils will be fighting for our soul—and we,
unable to help ourselves—shall have passed away from all that we once thought
real with a groan because it was so false and so deceptive. ‘Verily, every man
at his best state is altogether vanity.’”—1896, Sermon #2462

“This Psalm [130] ought to comfort you who are in the depths, as you see that
others have had to go there, too. But mind that you follow the example of the
Psalmist and, whatever you are called to suffer, never leave off praying!
Whatever else you do, never neglect this one prime means of deliverance. Then
you may say with David, ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto You, O
Lord.’”—1898, Sermon #2579

“Scripture all through represents the acquisition of wealth as involving very
solemn responsibilities and loading the soul with burdens. I do not doubt that
there are some men who could never have sinned as they have done if they had not
been successful in acquiring wealth. They could never have plunged into a
damnation so deep as that which is theirs if they had not been able to indulge
their lusts without stint.”—1896, Sermon #2462

“God’s eternal purposes are a great deep and when we try to fathom them, we
utterly fail. Divine Sovereignty is an ocean without a bottom and without a
shore—and all we can do is to set our sail and steer by the chart which He has
given us.”—1900, Sermon #2666 “When John Knox went upstairs to plead for
Scotland, it was the greatest event in Scottish history.”—1901, Sermon #2745

“I know some preachers who cannot bear to have even a baby crying during the
sermon. I do not feel especially delighted with that sweet music, yet I rejoice
that the good woman did not stay away from the service! As far as I am
concerned, she may bring her baby, even if it should sometimes cry—I am glad to
have her here that God may bless her.”—1899, Sermon #2614

“The proper place for the Word is inside, in your heart—have you got it hidden
there?”—1896, Sermon #2484

“I say to the man who calls himself a priest, ‘No, Sir, I do not need any
absolution from you, even though you may be a lineal descendant of the
Apostles—through Judas Iscariot—for I am perfectly satisfied with the
forgiveness which I have obtained by faith in Christ Jesus!”—1902, Sermon #2790

“To trust in repentance without faith would be ruinous to the soul—but to have a
kind of faith without repentance, would also be ruinous. If faith never has
tears in its eyes, it is a dead faith. He who has never wept because of his sin,
has never really had his sin washed away. If your heart has never been broken on
account of sin, I will not believe that it was ever broken fromsin. And if your
heart is not broken from your sin, you are still at a distance from your God and
you will never see His face with acceptance.”—1903, Sermon #2845

“What is the good of prayer if God does not hear it? Sometimes we ask God to
answer our supplication. That is right, but, at the same time, remember that it
may be a greater blessing for God to hear our prayers than to answer them, for
if He were to make it an absolute rule that He would grant all our requests, it
might be a curse rather than a blessing.”—1898, Sermon #2579

“Prayer is refreshing, but praise is even more so, for there may be and there
often is, in prayer, the element of selfishness—but praise rises to a yet higher
level. Prayer and praise together make up spiritual respiration—we breathe in
the air of Heaven when we pray—and we breathe it out again when we praise. ‘It
is good to sing praises unto our God.’””—1896, Sermon #2462

“Much prayer leads to much thanksgiving. It should be a great cause for joy when
numbers of Christians unite in praying for any Christian minister, for they will
also unite in praising God on his behalf when that which they asked for him is
granted!”—1900, Sermon #2657 “They love the Gospel most who know it best!”—1899,
Sermon #2626

“If the human mind is compared to a palace, the proper place for Christ’s Word
is on the throne!”—1896, Sermon #2484“To accept the Lord’s will with absolute
submission is after the manner of the Son of God, Himself, for He prayed, in the
hour of His greatest agony, ‘O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass
from Me: nevertheless not as I will, but as You will.’”—1900, Sermon #2666

“I do not hesitate to say that the whole theory of evolution is more monstrously
false and foolish than any other ever conceived beneath high Heaven! It is a
marvelous thing that men should be able to squeeze their minds into the belief
of an absurdity which, in time to come, will be ridiculed to children in the
schoolroom as an instance of the credulity of their ancestors.”—1896, Sermon
#2463

“Many people think they know everything and, consequently, they know nothing. I
think it is Seneca who says, “Many a man would have been wise if he had not
thought himself so. If he had but known himself to be a fool, he would have
become wise.” The doorstep to the Temple of Wisdom is s knowledge of our own
ignorance. He cannot learn aright who has not first been taught that he knows
nothing.”—1899, Sermon #2615

“The more holy a man becomes, the more conscious he is of unholiness.”—1898,
Sermon #2579 “O Sirs, be afraid of being afraid whenever you find yourself
afraid of following the Lord Jesus Christ!”—1901, Sermon #2747 “We shall best
bear our own sufferings when we find fellowship with Christ in them.”—1898,
Sermon #2573

“Yes, Brothers and Sisters, God hears our sighs even if we cannot hear them
ourselves! When we think we have not prayed at all, we have often prayed the
best! When we imagine that our groans have been empty, they have often been the
fullest! When we sigh because we think we do not sigh, God hears that sort of
sighing which is only a longingto sigh! He hears the grief when the grief has no
voice. He hears the sorrow when the sorrow cannot find a tongue.”—1896, Sermon
#2464

“If the gospel that men teach is new, it is not true, for there is nothing that
can be new and true. The Truth of God is old as the everlasting hills.”—1896,
Sermon #2484

“But, Sir, if you have no concern about another man’s soul, it is time that you
should have grave concern about your own! If no joy comes to you when another is
saved, you have need to be saved yourself! And if the thought of the future
world and the ruin of immortal souls never makes you bow your head even to the
dust, you need to be born-again, for they who are born in the likeness of Christ
weep over sinners, pray for sinners and seek the salvation of sinners. By this
test, I beseech you to try yourselves.”—1902, Sermon #2791

“Brothers and Sisters, when you are thoroughly awake to your dangers, to your
needs, to your weaknesses, then you will see Christ’s glory! He is never rightly
valued until we see ourselves to be utterly valueless! Low thoughts of self make
high thoughts of Christ. Lord, awake us to know what we are, for then shall we
begin to see the glories of Your Son!”—1900, Sermon #2658

“Aaron held his peace when his two sons died. He got as far as that in
submission to the will of the Lord. But it will be better still if, instead of
simply holding your peace, you can bless and praise and magnify the Lord even in
your sharpest trouble! Oh, may you be divinely helped to do so!”—1900, Sermon
#2666

“ Myeyes preventthe night watches, that I might meditate in Your Word. As
he[David] was up before the sun, so he was praying before they set the guards
for the night watch. And when they were changing guards and he heard the cry of
the hour from the watchman, he was still crying to God! And at the same time he
was meditating—‘that I might meditate in Your Word.’ Ah, that is the way to cry!
Meditation is very much neglected nowadays. We read, perhaps, too much. We
meditate, for certain, too little. And meditation is to reading like digestion
after eating. The cows in the pasture eat the grass and then they lie down and
chew the cud and get all the good they can out of what they have eaten. Reading
snips off the grass, but meditation chews the cud! Therefore, ‘read, mark, learn
and inwardly digest.’”—1896, Sermon #2464

“There are none so fit to comfort others as those who have once needed comfort
themselves.”—1899, Sermon #2615

“We dare not come to God without Jesus Christ—that dear name should begin and
end all our prayers. He is the one Mediator between God and men. He is our great
High Priest and Intercessor. ‘No man comes unto the Father but by Me.’ ‘I am the
Door”—the way of access to God. He is the Mercy Seat, the Propitiatory where God
meets with us and hears our prayers, so that we always pray in the society of
Christ. There is no true praying without it.”—1898, Sermon #2580

“We are not fit to go out to work for Christ till we truly know Him, ourselves,
and also know something of the Divine power which He is prepared to give to us.
It is well for us to learn the lesson ourselves before we attempt to teach it to
others. Go not out unto all nations till you have first gone into your closet
and had fellowship with the Master, Himself! You will blunder in your errand
unless you go forth fresh from His blessed Presence.”—1896, Sermon #2465 “I am
not saying a word against genuine revivals, or even against excitement—and I do
not think that it is any argument against revivals that some of those who
profess to be converted at them go back to the world.”—1903, Sermon #2846

“There is no promise given that if you seek the Lord tomorrow, you shall find
Him. I know of no Gospel invitations available for a year or a month hence—they
all have to do with this present moment. ‘Behold, now is the accepted time;
behold, now is the day of salvation.’”—1901, Sermon #2747

“If I have any influence over you and if you are ever inclined to believe a
thing simply because I say it, I charge you, throw away such superstition and
test all that I say by the Word of God. The real weight of truth consists not in
what one man says, or in what another man says—the weight, the power, the
substance lies in what Christ has said—that, and that alone, is the truth of
God.”—1896, Sermon #2484“Even those who are clothed in the righteousness of
Christ are not always quite clear about appearing before God—how much less,
then, must they be who have no robe of righteousness at all, but are only clad
in the rags of their own iniquities? How shall they stand in that last dread
day?”—1902, Sermon #2792

“Somehow, men seem very ingenious in trying to find out reasons why they should
not be saved! And all their foolish ingenuity seems to be employed in attempting
to escape from this blessed Divine simplicity, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus
Christ, and you shall be saved.’ May God the Holy Spirit lead them to believe in
Him! He must lead them, for no man can see Christ until his eyes are Divinely
opened. We may put the Truth as plainly as we can, and preach it so that we
think we cannot be misunderstood, but men willmisunderstand us, even those who
desire to believe in Christ, until the Holy Spirit works effectually in
them!”—1900, Sermon #2667

“I can scarcely conceive it possible for any man to be a true saint, a holy man,
one who is set apart unto God and sanctified in Christ Jesus, unless he is
reproached while on earth for being too strict, too Puritan, or perhaps
sometimes too melancholy. There must be a grave distinction between a Christian
and a man of the world—and where there is no such distinction, or only a slight
one—there is most solemn cause for suspicion that all is not right!”—1900,
Sermon #2660

“If God’s people strive mightily, it is because God works mightily in them!
Nothing can come out of a man but what God puts into Him. We work to will and to
do when He works in us according to His good pleasure. Oh, for more of the
agonizing of the Spirit within us, that there might be more of agonizing in our
spirits for the Glory of God!”—1896, Sermon #2465

“I am glad that there are some difficult passages, [in the Bible] because they
are a trial to my faith! Yet all that is essential for me to know, it seems to
me, is as plain as possible when I just read it as I would read another
book.”—1901, Sermon #2748

“When we enjoy the Gospel, we are sure to recommend it to others. God’s happy
people are God’s working people! Those who fear and tremble and never have any
joy in the Lord are generally a barren generation. But they who delight
themselves in the Lord are sure to speak of Him to others and to bring others to
Christ.”—1899, Sermon #2626

“There is no hymn, or Psalm, or spiritual song that could be accepted of God
unless our Lord Jesus Christ was with us when it was sung. Prayers and praises,
alike, must ascend to God through the merit of His atoning Sacrifice.”—1898,
Sermon #2580

“Oh, that some people I know of could have their chapels burnt down! They have
been stuck in a hole down a back street for the last hundred years! They are
good souls and so they ought to be—they ought to be matured by now after so much
storage—but if they would only come out in the street, they might do much more
good than at present. ‘Oh, but there is an old deacon who does not like
street-preaching!’ I know him very well! He will be gone to Heaven soon. Then,
as soon as you have had his funeral sermon, turn out into the street and begin,
somehow or other, to make Christ known! Oh, to break down every barrier and get
rid of every restraint that hides the blessed Gospel! Perhaps we must respect
these dear old Believers’ feelings just a little, but not so much as to let
souls die! We must seek to bring sinners to Jesus whether we offend men or
whether we please them!”—1896, Sermon #2467

“Beloved, it is only in proportion as we hold fellowship with Christ and commune
with Him, that either ordinances, or doctrines, or promises can profit
us.”—1896, Sermon #2485

“Man, don’t you know whether you believe or not? You may know it! One thing I
know, you have no business to go to sleep till you know this once and for all,
for, if you are not a Believer, you are an unbeliever! There is no middle state
between the two. And if you are an unbeliever, you are ‘condemned already,’
because you have not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of
God!”—1900, Sermon #2667

“Let there be no mistake concerning this matter—you cannot be Christians if you
thus defile yourselves. You cannot be children of God and live in filthy sin. It
must not—it cannot be—and God here, by the pen of the Apostle Paul,
excommunicates all who pretend to be members of His Churchand yet are guilty of
the sin of fornication.”—1900, Sermon #2661

“ ‘Hear, O LORD, when I cry with my voice! Have mercy also upon me, and answer
me. The Psalmist has only just begun praising when he takes to praying—and that
should be a Christian’s double occupation—praising and praying! I have often
said that as our life is made up of breathing in and breathing out, so we should
breathe in the atmosphere of Heaven by prayer and then breathe it out, again, in
praise.”—1898, Sermon #2573

“ If there is no care about making the heart go right, it must go wrong because
the natural tendency of our mind is toward evil. If you leave your heart to
follow its own natural impulse, it is impossible that it should seek the Lord.
It is only when it ispreparedto seek the Lord that it ever seeks Him—and that
preparation of the heart is from God, so that if we do not ask the Lord to
prepare our hearts to seek Him, we shall never seek His face at all!”—1901,
Sermon #2749

“‘To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever’ is the only worthy end of mortal
man!”—1903, Sermon #2847

“No man really goes and preaches Christ without being moved by the Spirit of God
to do it. It is the Spirit of God who taught us about Christ and all that we can
preach, that is worth preaching, comes of the Holy Spirit in that very act. No
man who truly preaches Christ can do it except by the Holy Spirit and, in his
ministry he must teach the necessity of the working of the Holy Spirit. ‘’You
must be born again, and born again of the Holy Spirit,’ must be his constant
cry.”—1896, Sermon #2467

“You may go to the work-mongers to hear about good works, but you must come back
to the Believers in Christ to find them. Their changed lives prove that the
Gospel does produce the best possible results. The more we trample down human
merit, the more do we exalt the merit of Christ! The more we show the absolute
uselessness of good works to merit salvation, the more do we promote the highest
type of morality and the more we lead men to live unto God from motives of
gratitude for what He has done for them. This is a matter of fact.”—1902, Sermon
#2792

“That is a grand expression—‘You have loved them, as You have loved Me.’ What?
With the same love? It is even so— a love without beginninga love without
change, a love without bounds, a love without end! ‘You have loved them as You
have loved Me.’”—1899, Sermon #2616 “‘Do you believe?’” said the Lord Jesus to
this man, and by that question He held him fast. That is the way to win souls,
begin with a personal question!”—1900, Sermon #2667

“‘Oh,’ says a friend, ‘I cannot hear some ministers at all! They preach such a
mingle-mangle of the Truth of God and error.’ I know they do, but it will be a
strange thing if you cannot get an ear or two of wheat, even from them! There is
a great deal of straw—you are not required to take that away—but it will be
remarkable if you cannot pick up an ear or two of good grain. You say, ‘The
error that the man preaches distresses my mind.’ No doubt it does, but the best
way is to leave the lies alone and pick out the sound Truth of God—and if there
is no sound Truth in the sermon, a good plan is to read it all backwards—and
then it will be sure to be sound.”—1896, Sermon #2485

“Drunkenness is one of the most debasing of sins—it lowers the whole tone of the
person who is held in bondage by it. We sometimes talk of a man being “as drunk
as a beast,” but whoever heard of a beast being drunk? Why, it is more beastly
than anything a beast ever does! I do not believe that the devil himself is ever
guilty of anything like that. I never heard even him charged with being drunk!
It is a sin which has no sort of excuse—those who fall into it generally fal1
into other deadly vices. It is the devil’s backdoor to Hell and everything that
is hellish, for he that once gives away his brains to drink is ready to be
caught by Satan for anything.”—1900, Sermon #2661

“I know that if we are truly the Lord’s, He will not allow us to forsake Him.
But I must have a wholesome fear lest I should forsake Him, for who am I that I
should be sure that I have not deceived myself? I may have done so and, after
all, may forsake Him after the loudest professions, and even after the greatest
apparent sincerity in vowing that I never will turn away from Him.”—1899, Sermon
#2627

“It is a terribly sad thing to pretend to serve God without thought, without
watchfulness, without care, for God is not such an One that we may rush into His
Presence whenever we like, without premeditation, solemnity, or
reverence.”—1901, Sermon #2749 “It ill becomes a man, who is on the brink of
Hell, to be laughing and jesting!”—1896, Sermon #2468 “Great gifts are not great
Graces, but great gifts require great Graces to go with them, or else they
become a temptation and a snare.”—1898, Sermon #2580

“Do not attempt to make any excuse for your sin. Oh, how ready sinners are with
their excuses! A man says, ‘But, Sir, I have a besetting sin.’ Do you not think
that a great many people make a mistake about besetting sins? There was a man
who used to get drunk and he said that it was his besetting sin. But his brother
said, ‘No, Sam, it is your upsetting sin!’”—1896, Sermon #2468

“If you would have union with Christ, take care, in the next place, that you do
all independence upon Him, for if, in the affairs of your soul, you set up in
business for yourself, Christ will be at enmity with you. Seek not only to turn
your eyes to Him for direction, but also for support. And look to Him in your
prayers, in your preaching, in your hearing and in everything, for so shall
Christ and your soul be agreed and you shall have fellowship with Him.”—1900,
Sermon #2668

“It is well to have a good memory and that is the best memory which remembers
what is best worth remembering.”—1896, Sermon #2485

“I never feel my own weakness so much as when I stand here to plead with
unconverted men to yield to the Savior! If any man thinks that he can preach,
let him come and try it, if by preaching he means affecting the hearts of men
and bringing them to God. This must be the work of the Holy Spirit and, whatever
we may do, nothing comes of it until He works the great miracle! We go back home
and say, ‘Who has believed our report?’ until the arm of the Lord is revealed
and then men are saved.”—1900, Sermon #2661

“Until you are like a vessel turned upside down and drained of every drop of
human merit, there is no hope of salvation for you. You must sit alone and keep
silent about those good works of yours, for they are all a lie and you know it.
You have never done a good work in your life—you have either spoiled it by your
selfish motivesbeforeit, or by some carelessness init, or by some vainglorious
pride afterit. At the best, you are nothing but a boasting Pharisee, and though
you may wash the outside of your cup and platter, yet your heart is full of
wickedness and your soul is steeped in sin.”—1896, Sermon #2468

“You might as soon measure the moon for a suit of clothes as measure some men’s
doctrine. They seem to be perpetually waxing or waning. They box the compass.
They shift like the wind. That is a poor life, when it comes to the close, in
which the man has been “everything by starts, and nothing long.” My dear young
Friends, give yourselves up to the teaching and guidance of the Spirit of God
and resolve that if you do err, it shall be unintentionally, for you wish to be
right—you desire to know and to do nothing save what the Lord taught you and the
Lord bade you do.”—1902, Sermon #2793

“I may further tell you that among the things that led me to Christ was the
Doctrine of the Final Perseverance of the Saints. I heard that Jesus would keep
the feet of His saints and I said to myself, “Then, if I give myself to Him, He
will ensure the preservation of my character and He will keep me to the end.”
And the only bargain I ever made with Him, when I gave myself up to Him, was
that He would always have me in His holy keeping. O young men, I can recommend
that plan to you! I earnestly entreat you not to commence life even with the
best moral resolutions. Go straight away to the Lord Jesus and ask Him to grant
you Grace that you may give yourself up wholly to Him. You cannot keep yourself,
but He can keep you and He will keep you even unto the end, for He 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, neither shall any man pluck them out
of My hand.’”—1901, Sermon #2749

“Our Lord is very choice in His company and He does not frequent the house of
the sluggard! But wherever there is one who spends and is spent for Jesus, there
we may expect that Jesus will be! If we heartily serve Him, the state of mind
into which we shall be brought will be congenial to His own—fellowship will be
likely between the laboring Savior and His laboring servant.”—1899, Sermon #2628

“‘You know all things; You know that I love You.’ Of course He does! If you do
really love Him, it is His own love in you returning to where it came!”—1900,
Sermon #2669 “Let us endeavor to so adapt our style, if we are preachers of the
Word, that the multitude will be willing to hear and will be able to understand,
for then we may hope that with the blessing of God, many will be
converted.”—1903, Sermon #2818 “Byron speaks of God’s face being mirrored in the
sea, but there is not space enough for the face of Deity to be fully reflected
in the broad Atlantic, or in all the oceans put together! The image of God is to
be fully seen in Jesus Christ and nowhere else.”—1899, Sermon #2617

“There is one thing on earth, even now, which is perfect. Albeit that perfection
was blasted by the Fall and ever since the Garden of Eden was devastated by the
sin of man, perfection has gone, yet there is one thing on earth which we
possess which is perfect. You all know what that is—it is the perfect will of
God contained in the Sacred Scriptures. He who would be able to spell perfection
in mortal language must read the Bible through, for he will find it perfect in
all its parts—perfectly true, perfectly free from all error, perfect in
everything that is necessary for man to know, perfect in all that can guide us
to bliss, perfect in all that can warn us of dangers on the road.”—1896, Sermon
#2481

“There is such a thing as self-denial ceasing to be self-denial when a man takes
such pleasure in denying himself, for Christ’s sake, that the selfdenial is a
greater source of joy to him than the indulgence would have been—and that is
just what true service for God is!”—1900, Sermon #2662

“O Beloved, in your hour of darkness because of your sin, sit still and hold
your tongue, for it is oftentimes the way of peace to the soul!”—1896, Sermon
#2468 “It never occurred to Peter [Acts 2:23] that the counsel of God deprived
men of the responsibility and guilt of their actions.”—1896, Sermon #2486

“ ‘Deliver me not over unto the will of my enemies: for false witnesses are
risen up against me, and suchas breathe out cruelty.’ Am I addressing anyone who
is being slandered? Has somebody borne false witness against you? Well, be very
thankful that it is false! I do not quite understand why it is so often said,
‘You see, it is such a downright lie and that is what grieves me so.’ But, dear
Friend, it is much better that it should be false than true! If anyone brings an
accusation against me, I shall be glad to find that it is false. Let not that be
the sting of the trouble which really is the sweetness of it—be glad that they
cannot say anything against you unless they speak falsely! However, if you
expect to go to Heaven without being slandered, you expect what you are not
likely to get, for God Himself was slandered in Paradise! Our Lord Jesus, in
whom was no fault, was slandered when He was upon the earth—His Apostles and
followers in all ages have had the same treatment! And here is David saying,
‘False witnesses are risen up against me.’”—1898, Sermon #2573 “It is a high and
noble thing when a man knows how to mortify sin.”—1901, Sermon #2750

“Oh, blessed be God, it is a bleeding Christ who has reconciled us even on
earth! It is a bleeding Christ who has put out the fires of enmity! It is a
bleeding Christ who has slain forever the warfare in our spirit against God. Now
are we reconciled unto God by the death of His Son.”—1898, Sermon #2587

“Half-hearted prayers ask for a denial and usually get it.”—1900, Sermon #2662
“There is no exhibition like the exhibition of the love of God in Jesus Christ
to guilty sinners!”—1896, Sermon #2468

“Virtue is like goodness frozen into ice, hard and cold. But holiness is that
same goodness when it is thawed into a clear, running, sparkling stream. Virtue
is the best thing that philosophy can produce, but holiness is the true fruit of
the Gospel of Jesus Christ and of that alone!” —1896, Sermon #2469

“Whenever justification by faith has been uppermost in the preaching, the morals
of the people have been purest and their spirituality has been brightest! But
whenever the preachers have extolled the works and ceremonies of the Law, or the
Arminianism which brings in something of trust in works, or human power, it is
most certain that there has been a declension in point of morals, while religion
itself has seemed almost ready to expire. You may go to those who preach up
salvation by works to hear them talk, but you had better not go to see how they
live—whereas those who preach justification by faith can boldly point to the
multitudes who have accepted this Truth of God and whose godly lives prove the
sanctifying power of the Doctrine!”—1900, Sermon #2670

“It sometimes puzzles me how God can have such patience with unbelievers. When
He has given His only-begotten Son to bleed and die for the guilty, and He says,
‘This is My well-beloved Son, bleeding and dying for you, only trust Him’—if men
say that they will not—what can be conceived of more horrible than that? And
what clearer proof can there be of the desperate malignity of the human heart
that it will not even accept the Son of God, Himself, when He comes dressed in
robes of love to save mankind?”—1903, Sermon #2818

“When I first saw the electric light, if you had asked me what it was like, I
could only have told you something about its candle-power or its brilliance in
comparison with gas, but I could not have made you understand it. But what is
the electric light compared with the glory of the sun to one who sees it for the
first time? And what are all the suns that could ever be created compared with
the wondrous blaze of the Glory of God? Yet such a marvelous light as that has
fallen upon you, my Brother, my Sister—‘the light of the knowledge of the Glory
of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’”—1899, Sermon #2617

“An officer was walking out of the royal presence on one occasion when he
tripped over his sword. The king said to him, ‘Your sword is rather a nuisance.’
‘Yes,’ was the officer’s reply, ‘Your Majesty’s enemies have often said so.’ May
you be a nuisance to the world in thatsense—troublesome to the enemies of the
King of Kings! While your conduct should be courteous and everything that could
be desired as between man and man, yet let your testimony for Christ be given
without any flinching and without any mincing of the matter!”—1896, Sermon #2469

“It is a great mistake to make a division between what is “sacred” and what is
“secular” in a Christian’s life.”—1900, Sermon #2662

“What a melting thing the love of Christ is! Stout-hearted sinners are sometimes
not even moved by the thunderbolts of God, but when they see the wounds of
Jesus, that sight brings them to their knees! When they find that He loved them
even while they were rejecting Him. That He died for them when they were dead in
trespasses and sins. That He had their names engraved upon the palms of His
hands and upon His heart even when they were blaspheming Him, and that in ‘Free
Grace and dying love,’ there is a shelter provided even for them—then do they
bite their lips and cover their eyes, and turn unto the Lord with deep
humiliation of spirit.”—1902, Sermon #2793

“God always begins to work in a way that looks like undoing and not
doing.”—1901, Sermon #2750“The Christ of the Church of Rome, as I have often
told you, is a dead Christ on the Cross, or else a baby Christ in Mary’s
arms—but the Christ of the Church of God is a living Christ! We say of the
grave, as the angel said to the women, ‘He is not here: for He is risen, as He
said.’ We say of the Cross, ‘He is not here. He has put an end to death in
making an end of sin by His own death.’ The main thought concerning Christ, to
those of us who really know Him, should be that He is the living Christ!”—1898,
Sermon #2587

“It is curious, if the doctrine of the Gospel is such a very horrible thing that
it drives people away, that at the places where it is preached there are more
people than can get in, whereas where some of the modern doctrines are declared,
you may see more spiders than people!”—1896, Sermon #2469

“There is no mistake about this matter—‘He that believes not the Son shall not
see life; but the wrath of God abides on him.’ And our Lord, Himself, said, ‘He
that believes not shall be damned.’ That is the only message for him if he
continues in his unbelief—and it shall not be altered to suit the mind of any
man that lives!”—1900, Sermon #2670

“Would you keep back anything from Christ? I know you could not if He were to
come into His garden! The best things that you have, you would first present to
Him, and then everything that you have, you would bring to Him and leave all at
His dear feet. We do not ask Him to come to the garden that we may lay up our
fruits, that we may put them by and store them up for ourselves—we ask Him to
come and eat them. The greatest joy of a Christian is to give joy to Christ! I
do not know whether Heaven, itself, can exceed this pearl of giving joy to the
heart of Jesus Christ on earth! It can match it, but not exceed it, for it is a
superlative joy to give joy to Him—the Man of Sorrows, who was emptied of joy
for our sakes and who now is filled u p, again, with joy as each one of us shall
come and bring his share and cause to the heart of Christ a new and fresh
delight!”—1896, Sermon #2475

“If you want to kill impatience turn to the Word of God, look up an appropriate
text, ask to have it applied to your heart by the Holy Spirit and see whether
the Grace of patience is not thus implanted within you!”—1901, Sermon #2753

“We must do as the people did at Christmas time in the olden days. It used to be
the custom for the poor inhabitants in a village to go round with basins to the
rich people in the parish and beg bread and other victuals of them. And the rule
was that every gentleman was to fill the bowl that was brought to his door. Of
course, the wisest among the poor folk brought a very large bowl for the
Christmas gathering, but those who had little faith in the generosity of their
wealthy neighbors took a small bowl, and that was filled. But those who took a
big bowl had theirs filled too! So, dear Friends, you must always try, in your
prayers, to bring a big bowl to God! Bring great faith and rest assured that,
according to your faith, it shall be done unto you. If you have little faith,
you shall have a little answer. If you have tolerable faith, you shall have a
tolerable answer. But if you have a mighty faith, you shall have such a mighty
answer that you shall wonder at it, yet you shall feel that it is according to
the promise of our text, ‘Call unto Me, and I will answer you.’”—1900, Sermon
#2664

“Every particle of faith that there is in the world is a sort of purifier.
Wherever it goes, it has a tendency to kill that which is evil. In the spiritual
sanitary arrangements which God made for this poor world, He put men of
faith—and the faith of these men—into the midst of all this corruption to help
to keep other men’s souls alive, even as our Lord Jesus said to His disciples,
‘You are the salt of the earth.’”—1896, Sermon #2475

“If Christ is still alive and if there is, in a certain sense, ‘much more’ power
to save in His life than there was of power to reconcile in His death, (Romans
5:10), then, first, all fear of our being overcome ought to vanish. He is
victorious! Therefore we shall be victorious! Christ was assaulted by all the
powers of death and Hell, and yet He conquered and He lives. We, too, shall
conquer, for He is in us, He is with us, He is over us—and we shall live though
we die—and we shall win though we are apparently overcome.”—1898, Sermon #2587
“The greatest joy of a Christian is to give joy to Christ!”—1896, Sermon #2475

“What sin is there, in the whole world, that would be put to death if men were
left to pick and choose the Agag which each one wished to save? No! Christ came
to save His people from their sins—not inthem—and it is essential to salvation
that sin should be repented of and, being repented of, should be renounced and
that, by the help of God, we should lead a new life, under a new Master, serving
from a new motive because the Grace of God has renewed our spirit!”—1900, Sermon
#2670

“As I look round this place, I notice some who once were very strongly opposed
to our dear Lord and Master. Ah, my Brothers and Sisters, I know who they are
who now love Him most and desire to serve Him best—it is you who were formerly
exceedingly mad against Him.”—1902, Sermon #2793

“ ‘She said to them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where
they have laid Him’ (John 20:13). That was enough to make any of Christ’s loved
ones weep and if ever you hear a sermon which has not Christ in it, you may well
go down the aisle weeping. And if any ask why you weep, you may reply, ‘Because
they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.’”—1896,
Sermon #2475“I see God in everything—from the creeping of an aphid upon a
rosebud to the fall of a dynasty! I believe that God is in the earthquake and
the whirlwind, but I believe Him to be equally in the gentlest zephyr and in the
fall of the sere leaf from the oak of the forest. Blessed is that man to whom
there existsnothingin which he cannot see the Presence of God!”—1896, Sermon
#2476

“Absolute submission is not enough—we must go on to joyful acquiescence in the
will of God…It is nothing but wickedness, whatever form it assumes, when we
attempt to resist the will of God.”—1896, Sermon #2476 “Study the Word, that
your faith may not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God!”—1896,
Sermon #2469 “It often happens that men do not obtain peace with God because
they have not come low enough. The gate of Heaven, though it is so wide that the
greatest sinner may enter, is, nevertheless, so low that pride can never pass
through it.”—1898, Sermon #2571

“My Friend, if you would be saved, do not try to deal with God upon the footing
of justice. If you do, you will first have to say that you have never sinned and
that would be a lie. You will not be able to prove that assertion—your lips,
your eyes, your heart, your hands, your whole conduct will all be witnesses
against you! You must admit that you have sinned.”—1898, Sermon #2588

“I pray you who are offended at the Cross, not to think that you will ever get
to Heaven, for God and you would not agree there, for He counts the Cross
becoming, and you count it foolishness—so there is a radical difference of
opinion between you two and one Heaven would not hold you! You must get agreed
with God about that matter, or else, depend upon it, you will never enter the
pearly gates! You must honor the Son even as you honor the Father, and honor the
Son in His blood and wounds and in all His agony and death, or else you shall
not come where the Father takes pleasure in the Well-Beloved.”—1899, Sermon
#2619

“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

“If you want to exhibit the comfort of the Scriptures, do as Hezekiah did when
Rabshakeh came with Sennacherib’s letter full of filthiness and blasphemy.
“Hezekiah went up into the House of the Lord and spread it before the Lord.”
This is the comfort of the Scriptures, that we may go to the Lord in the worst
time of trouble and spread the whole case before the eyes of Infinite Love,
expecting and being sure that God will, in some way, work deliverance for
us.”—1901, Sermon #2753

“Let every man and every woman among us judge of our life, not merely from that
little narrow piece of it which we, ourselves, live, for that is but a span, but
let us judge it by its connection with other livesthat may come after our own!
If we cannot do all we wish, let us do all we can, in the hope that someone who
shall succeed us may complete the project that is so dear to our heart.”—1898,
Sermon #2571

“If the Grace which we are supposed to have received has not made us to differ
both from our former self and from men of the world, then it is not the true
Grace of God.”—1900, Sermon #2671

“This is a matchless instance, not of pride, but of humility, that those dear
lips of the heavenly Bridegroom should have to speak to His own commendation and
that He should say, ‘I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.’ O
human lips, why are you silent, so that Christ must speak about Himself? O human
hearts, why are you so hard that you will never feel until Christ, Himself,
shall address you? O human eyes, why are you so blind that you shall never see
till Christ shows Himself in His own superlative light and loveliness? I think I
need not defend my Master, though He used these sweet emblems to set forth
Himself, for this is an instance, not of His pride, but of His humility.”—1898,
Sermon #2572

“True is it, O Jesus, that there is no light of love in our hearts except the
light of Your love! It is the holy fire from Your altar that must kindle the
incense in the censer of our hearts. There is no living water to be drawn out of
these dry wells! You, O Jesus, must supply them from the bubbling spring in Your
own heart! When my heart is conscious of Your love, it loves You in
return.”—1902, Sermon #2794

“‘Oh,’ said one, when he looked on one of Turner’s landscapes, ‘I have seen that
view every day, but I never saw as much as thatin it.’ ‘No,’ replied Turner,
‘don’t you wish you could?’ And, when the Spirit of God trains and tutors the
eyes, they see in Christ what they never saw before. But, even then, as Turner’s
eyes were not able to see all the mystery of God’s beauty in nature, so neither
is she most trained and educated Christian able to perceive all the matchless
beauty that there is in Christ!”—1898, Sermon #2572

“I suppose that if you want to know how this twisting or wresting is done, any
one of our general elections will give you the most wonderful examples of how
everything that any man may say can be twisted to mean the very reverse of what
he said! If there is one thing in which English people are expert beyond all
others, it is in the art of misquoting, misstating and misrepresenting. As our
Lord was wronged in this fashion, nobody need be surprised if the same should
happen to Him. ‘This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to
build it in three days.’”—1898, Sermon #2573 “Believe all the Truth of God with
the general company of those who hold it, but mind that you come to
particularsand say, ‘What have I to do anymore with idols?’ Do not ask, ‘What
has my motherto do with idols? What has my brotherto do with idols? What has
myneighborto do with idols?’ but, ‘What have I to do with idols?’ Abhor
selfishness and egotism, but, at the same time, be very personal and individual
about your own religion! You were born alone and you will die alone—and you have
need to be born again individually and personally. And it must come to a
personal transaction between yourself and God.”—1898, Sermon #2574

“We are responsible to God for the use we make of our understanding, as well as
for the exercise of our affections. There is nothing in the Word of God to
justify men in believing what they like, and anyone who neglects to search out
the Truth of God commits a sin of omission.”—1900, Sermon #2671

“You who were before dishonest, if the Grace of God has changed you, what have
you to do with the tricks of trade? What have you to do with fraudulent
bankruptcies? What have you to do with cheating and lying? Let each true
Believer cry, ‘What have I to do anymore with idols?’”—1898, Sermon #2574

“It is good to die, at last, when we know what it is to die every day. Paul
said, ‘I die daily.’ Well, if we die every day, it will not be hard to die in
our last day. You will not be afraid of death if you love the Lord.”—1898,
Sermon #2589 “It is nothing but wickedness, whatever form it assumes, when we
attempt to resist the will of God.”—1898, Sermon #2574

“When we shall be permitted to see why God had mercy upon man and especially
why, out of the human race, he had mercy upon us—why He chose us while others
were suffered to perish—we shall be compelled incessantly to lift up our hands
in astonishment. And even in the heavenly city, itself, joy shall sometimes be
superseded by wonder, and we shall, even there, be astonished to find such
matchless Grace displayed for such singular reasons.”—1901, Sermon #2754

“‘The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much,’ but they who do
not hear God’s voice cannot effectually pray, for God will not hear their voice
if they will not hear His. If we have been deaf to Him, He will be deaf to us.
The communion necessary to prevailing prayer render it absolutely essential that
we should first set ourselves to hear the voice of God and then, again, it shall
be said that the Lord listened to the voice of a man, for the man first listened
to the voice of the Lord.”—1899, Sermon #2622

“Oh, I bless God’s name that, though all the people in the world should lift
their hands against the Most High and declare that they never would be saved,
yet God could, in an instant, if so it pleased Him, make the whole of them bend
their knees before Him, cry for the mercy they once rejected and seek the Savior
whom once they despised! Here lies the power of the Gospel, in that it gains the
mastery over man’s evil will and without his consent changes his nature, and
then fully gets his consent, after his nature has been changed!”—1899, Sermon
#2629

“The precepts of the Lord are so broad that they touch the secret imagination of
the heart.”—1900, Sermon #2671 “It is very hard, I believe, to be a ruler over
men and yet to be a servant of God. There seems to be connected with politics in
every country something that besmears the mind and defiles the hand that touches
it.”—1896, Sermon #2476 “We are bound, dear Friends, not only to preach Christ’s
Gospel, but to also preach our experience of it.”—1902, Sermon #2796 “‘Until the
day breaks, and the shadows flee away,’ says the song of the spouse [Song of
Solomon 2:17]. Perhaps no text is more frequently upon my lips than is this one.
I do not think that any passage of Scripture more often recurs to my heart when
I am alone.”—1896, Sermon #2477 “Oh, when it comes to this—that you must have
Christ, then you shall have Christ! When with every breath you seem to say,
‘Give me Christ, or else I die,’ then you shall not die, but you shall have
Christ and live!”—1898, Sermon #2590 “The best cure for the cares of this life
is to care much to please God! If we loved Him better, we should love the world
far less, and be less troubled about our portion in it.”—1896, Sermon #2477

“Men in general do not love Christ enough, or else they would have hedged Him in
with all sorts of restrictions—they would have made a franchise for Him and
nobody would have been able to be saved except those who paid, I know not how
much a year in taxes!”—1898, Sermon #2572

“We are to take care not to do what appears wrong in the sight of others, so as
to lead them astray. We are not to be judged by other men’s consciences, but, at
the same time, we are not to lead others to offend. As far as we can possibly do
it, we must seek to cut off those things that are likely to do injury to
others.”—1899, Sermon #2629 “Do not be ashamed of confessing your past folly. I
think a man who says, ‘I was wrong,’ really says, in effect, ‘I am a little
wiser, today, than I was yesterday.’ But he who never admits that he has made a
mistake and who claims that he has always been in the right, has evidently never
made much growth in knowledge of himself. So, do not be ashamed to say, ‘Now I
believe,’ though that confession may have been preceded by many a doubt.”—1899,
Sermon #2623

“Whenever anybody, who is very rich, gets up and says, ‘I am a perfect man,’ I
feel inclined to say what Christ said to the young man who thought that he was
perfect, ‘Sell all that you have.’ Somebody asks, perhaps, ‘Does Christ propose
that test to every one of us?’ No, certainly not, but to any of us who say that
we are perfect, that test may be applied. If you are such a perfect man, see if
you can do as our Lord said—sell all that you have and give the proceeds to the
poor.”—1900, Sermon #2671

“Truly, ‘the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence,’ but it is the violence of
humble men and women who dare to act with holy boldness because they are
encouraged by their God. That I, a poor sinner, should ever speak with God in a
sort of bullying tone, as I have heard some do, as though they said even to
their God, ‘Stand and deliver,’ this will never do! Your mouth is in the best
position when it is in the dust—and your heart is nearest to prevailing with God
when it is bowed even to the ground. ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto You, O
Lord,’ should be the language with which we humbly approach His Throne of
Grace.”—1898, Sermon #2590

“Christ on the Cross saves us when He becomes to us Christ in the heart.”—1896,
Sermon #2478 “If we are ever ashamed of loving Christ, we have good reason to be
ashamed of such shameful shame!”—1896, Sermon #2478

“ ‘But He turned and rebuked them, and said, Youknow not what manner of spirit
you are of. For the Son of Man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but tosave
them.’ (Luke 9:55, 56).If that principle had been always remembered and
followed, there would have been no persecution. To cause a man to suffer in his
body, or in his estate because of his religious opinions, be they what they may,
is a violation of Christianity! Consciences belong to God, alone, and it is not
for us to be calling for fire, the stake, the rack or imprisonment for men
because they do not believe as we do! ‘The Son of Man is not come to destroy
men’s lives, but to save them.’”—1901, Sermon #2754

“Human words, at best, are such poor things that they stagger under the mighty
burden of the perfections of Christ!”—1896, Sermon #2478

“I have heard it said that there are certain Truths in God’s Word which it is
better for us not to preach. It is admitted that they are true, but it is
alleged that they are not edifying. I will not agree to any such plan! This is
just going back to old Rome’s method. Whatever it has seemed good to God’s
wisdom to reveal, it is wise for God’s servants to proclaim.”—1903, Sermon #2820

“The Truth of God never seems to have such vividness about it as when a man
tells it out of his own soul. You read it in this blessed Book and you know it
is true, for God has revealed it, but when you hear a godly man say, ‘I have
tasted and handled this and have proved its truth,’ then, somehow, there is a
still greater force in it which brings the Truth of God home to you.”—1902,
Sermon #2796

“You must also remember, my Brothers and Sisters, whoever you may be, that if
there is no distinction between you and the world around you, you may be certain
that you are of the world, for, in the children of God there must always be some
marks to distinguish them from the rest of mankind so that we can contrast them
with the ungodly, and address to them the words of our text, “But you have not
so learned Christ.” There is a something in them which is not to be found in the
best worldling. Something which is not to be discovered in the most admirable
carnal man. A something in their character which can be readily perceived and
which marks them as belonging to another and higher race, the twice-born, the
elect of God, eternally chosen by Him and, therefore, made to be choice ones
through the effectual working of His Grace.”—1901, Sermon #2719

“Ah, dear Friends, our complaints of God are generally groundless! We get into a
state of mind in which we say, ‘God has forsaken us,’ when He is really dealing
with us more than He was known to do. A child who is feeling the strokes of the
rod is very foolish to say, ‘My father has forgotten me.’ No, those very blows,
under which he is smarting, are reminders that his father does notforget him—and
your trials and your troubles, your depressions and your sorrows are tokens that
you are not forgotten of God.”—1900, Sermon #2672

“If the Lord will guide you to Heaven through the words of a chimney-sweep, it
would be far better than that you should go to Hell under the ministry of the
most eloquent orator or the greatest bishop who ever lived. If you are brought
to Jesus Christ by one who murders the Queen’s English—it is a pity that he
should do that but, still, it does not matter much, so long as he does not
murder the Lord’s Gospel, for the Gospel comes out straight and clear, despite
his broken words.”—1898, Sermon #2590

“…for it is not God’s way to make men His servants, except so far as they
willingly yield themselves to Him. He never violates the human will, though He
constantly and effectually influences it.”—1899, Sermon #2631 “You know how very
unacquainted many people are with the Song of Solomon—they shut up this Book of
Canticles in despair and say that they cannot understand its meaning. You will
find that it is just the same with every truly spiritual thing!”—1896, Sermon
#2479

“The Gospel is very precious to those of us who know its power, but, beyond all
question, Christ Himself is even more precious than His Gospel. It is delightful
to read any promise of the Scriptures, but it is more delightful to come into
communion with the faithful Promiser.”—1896, Sermon #2479

“I have heard of the ‘christening’ of babies—that is an idle superstition and a
perversion of Christ’s ordinance of Believers’ Baptism—but I believe in the
Christening of everything a Christian touches! Make it all Christ-like by doing
everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, as the Apostle Paul says, ‘Whether
therefore you eat, or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.’
Thus engrave His name upon the palms of your hands.”—1900, Sermon #2672

“That is the first part of overcoming the world—breaking loose from its bonds so
that one can say, ‘I am not tied down by it any longer. By God’s Grace, I am a
free man in Christ Jesus.’”—1901, Sermon #2757

“There is sure to be also about these young Christians the sweet smell of
zealand, whatever may be said against zeal, I will take up the clubs for it as
long as I live! In the work of God we cannot do without fire! We Baptists like
water because our Master has ordained the use of it, but we must also have fire,
fire from Heaven, the fire of the Holy Spirit. When I see our young men and
young women full of zeal for God’s Glory, I say, ‘God bless them! Let them go
ahead.’ Some of the old folk want to put a bit in the mouths of these fiery
young steeds and to hold them in—but I trust that I shall always be on their
side and say, ‘No, let them go as fast as they like. If they have zeal without
knowledge, it is a deal better than having knowledge without zeal! Only wait a
bit and they will get all the knowledge they need.’”—1896, Sermon #2480

“We have not yet sufficiently learned the value of an immortal soul if we do not
feel that we would be willing to live, say 70 years, to be the means of saving
one souland be willing to compass the whole globe—preaching in every city, town
and village—if we might only be rewarded at the last with just one
convert.”—1896, Sermon #2481

“If you are a true follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, you cannot be at ease
while souls are being lost! I fear that it would not matter in the least to some
professors whether a whole nation was lost or saved! They would be just as
comfortable, whatever happened. But they who have the spirit of Christ and are
in sympathy with Him, have hearts of companion, so that the loss of any one
sinner fills them with dismay—and the penitence of any one sinner makes their
heart rejoice with exceeding joy!”—1903, Sermon #2821

“The nearest thing to being saved is knowing that one is lost! When a man is
really lost in his own consciousness, the next thing is for him to be saved! The
end of yourself is the beginning of Christ. May the Lord cause you to know that
you are thoroughly lost, and then soon you shall sing, ‘We found Christ in the
woods where we lost ourselves.’”—1898, Sermon #2590

“This is the very essence of true religion—personally living with a personal
Savior, personally trusting a personal Redeemer, personally crying out to a
personal Intercessor and receiving personal answers from a Person who loves us
and who manifests Himself to us as He does not unto the world.”—1901, Sermon
#2719

“Nowhere in the whole compass of Revelation is there a promise of forgiveness to
the man who continues in his iniquity!”—1902, Sermon #2797

“A man may go to Seminary, he may learn all about the letter of Scripture, but
he is no minister of God if he has not sat at Jesus’ feet and learned of Him.
And when he has learned of Him and the Truth of God has come home to his heart
as his own personal possession given to Him by Christ, then shall he speak with
more than mortal power, but not till then!”—1900, Sermon #2674

“I pray you, do not be anxious for anything that shall embalm your reputation.
Embalming is for the dead—so the living may be content to let their name and
fame be blown away by the same wind that blows it to them. What does our
reputation matter, after all? It is nothing but the opinion or the breath of men
and that is of little or no value to the child of God. Serve God faithfully and
then leave your name and fame in His keeping. There is a day coming when the
righteous shall shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father!”—1903,
Sermon #2842

“…for when God is about to give a man a drink of the cup of salvation, He often
first puts his taste right by washing out his mouth with a draught of bitters to
take away the flavor of the accursed sweets of sin!”—1899, Sermon #2631

“Oh, for a burst of sunlight from the face of Christ! Then would the shadows of
today soon fly away! They who have never seen Him may love modern novelties and
falsehoods, but if they have beheld His face and have been won by His charms,
they will hold that He who is the same, yesterday, today and forever, is
infinitely to be preferred to all the inventions of men! ”—1896, Sermon #2483 “I
believe that there would be much more persecution than there is if there were
more real Christians. But we have become so like the world that the world does
not hate us as it once did. If we would be more just, more upright, more true,
more Christ-like, more godly, we would soon hear all the dogs of Hell baying
with all their might against us!”—1896, Sermon #2483

“It needs more than a world of Grace to overcome the world when the world makes
much of you!”—1901, Sermon #2757

“It is a good thing to praise Christ in the presence of His friends. It is,
sometimes, a better thing to extol Him in the presence of His enemies. It is a
great thing to praise Jesus Christ by day, but there is no music sweeter than
the nightingale’s—and she praises God by night. It is well to praise the Lord
for His mercy when you are in health, but make sure that you do it when you are
sick, for then your praise is more likely to be genuine.”—1896, Sermon #2483

“God’s holy ones should be happy ones! No man has so much right to be happy as
he that is holy. We serve the happy God—we may well be happy ourselves—and we
are not to keep our happiness hidden within our own hearts. ‘Let Your saints
shout for joy.’”—1898, Sermon #2590

“I would earnestly urge all Christian workers to be sure to get some time alone
for the prayerful study of the Word. The more of such time that you can get, the
better will it be both for yourself and for others. You know that it is
impossible for a sower of seed to be always scattering, and never gathering—the
seed basket must be filled again and again, or the sowing must come to an
end.”—1900, Sermon #2674

“I would rather repeat the Word of God, syllable by syllable, than I would
dareto think for myself apart from the revealed will of God! What are men’s
thoughts, after all, but vanity educed from vanity? But the Word of the Lord
endures forever—it shall abide when even Heaven and earth shall pass
away!”—1896, Sermon #2483

“To my mind, it is a very melancholy thought that there should be any who do not
know the sweetest thing in all the world, the best and happiest thing beneath
the stars—the joy of having Christ in their heart as the hope of Glory!”—1896,
Sermon #2485 “Despair is a blessed preparation for faith in Jesus! The end of
the creature is the beginning of the Creator. Your extremity is God’s
opportunity. Now that you are helpless and hopeless, God will come to your
rescue!”—1899, Sermon #2631 “Overcome the world by patiently enduring all the
persecution that falls to your lot. Do not get angry and do not become
downhearted. Jests break no bones and if you had any bone broken for Christ’s
sake, it would be the most honored one in your whole body!”—1901, Sermon #2757
“Our Lord Jesus Christ would not have us think little of His company and,
sometimes, it is only as we miss it that we begin to appreciate the sweetness of
it! If we always had high days and holidays, we might not be so thankful when
our gala days come round.”—1896, Sermon #2485

“Depression of spirit is no index of declining Grace—the very loss of joy and
the absence of assurance may be accompanied by the greatest advancement in the
spiritual life. Mark you, if it continues month after month, and even year after
year, then it is a sign of great weakness of faith—but if it comes only
occasionally, as clouds pass over our sky, it is well.”—1902, Sermon #2798

“A Brother complains that there are no conversions under his ministry. Will he
ask himself whether he has aimed at conversion? A Sunday school teacher says
that she has seen no girls in her class brought to Christ. Has her teaching been
such as to tend that way? Has Christ been set forth in His sweet attraction? Has
prayer been offered that the girls might come to Christ? Have they been pleaded
with? Have they been taught their lost condition? Have they been shown the
excellence of Christ as a Savior? You see, if we do live in a region of means
suited to ends, it is the path of wisdom to find out the means best suited to
the desired end—and to use it in dependence upon God.”—1898, Sermon #2559

“Some ministers preach very finely about Christ, but that which saves sinners is
preaching Christ Himself. He is our salvation and we shall never put that
salvation in tangible, graspable, real form unless we go to Him and get
distinctly from Himself the message we are to deliver on His behalf.”—1900,
Sermon #2674

“A true sower, also, is a disseminator of the Word of God. No man is a sower
unless he scatters the Truth of God. If he does not preach Truth, he is not a
sower in the true meaning of that term. A man may go whistling up and down the
furrows and people may mistake him for a sower, but he is not really one—and if
there is not, in what we preach, the real, solid Truth of God’s Word—however
prettily we may put our sweet nothings, we have not been serving the Lord. We
must really scatter the Living Seed or else we are not worthy of the title of
sower.”—1903, Sermon #2842

“Some men cannot endure to hear the Doctrine of Election—I suppose they like to
choose their own wives, but they are not willing that Christ should select His
bride, the Church!”—1898, Sermon #2590

“I shall never understand, even in Heaven, why the Lord Jesus should ever have
loved me.”—1896, Sermon #2485“It would be better never to live than to live
forever under conviction of sin, for the arrows of God drink up the very
fountains of our life, pour fire into the blood and make us feel as if a
thousand deaths were preferable to living under an awful sense of God’s
wrath!”—1899, Sermon #2631

“Those of us who are called to preach the Word have often to cry to the Lord to
help us to bring Christ into the assembly by our words—though, indeed, the words
of any human language are but a poor conveyance for the Christ of God!”—1896,
Sermon #2485 “Remember, Brothers and Sisters, that when we have once repented,
we do not leave off repenting, for penitence is a Grace that is as long-lived as
faith! And as long as we are capable of believing, we shall also necessarily
need to repent, for we shall always be sinning.”—1896, Sermon #2486 “It is one
of the grandest things in all the world when a godly man, with the simplicity of
a child, believes God and fully trusts Him for everything!”—1896, Sermon #2486

“People talk of what they call, “chance,” but I never found any chance of a
man’s getting to be holy without intending to be so! I never yet heard of a man
doing any great good in the world if he did not mean to do it! I never heard of
a man glorifying God by accident, nor of anyone getting to Heaven, as it were,
by the throw of the dice, somehow finding himself there, but not knowing how it
all happened.”—1899, Sermon #2632

“We would be much more restful if we did but do our God the justice of trusting
Him at all times, for He can never fail us!”—1901, Sermon #2758

“To be cast down is often the best thing that could happen to us. Do you ask,
‘Why?’ Because, when we are cast down, it checks our pride. We are very apt to
grow too big. It is a good thing for us to be taken down a notch or two. We
sometimes rise so high, in our own estimation, that unless the Lord took away
some of our joy, we should be utterly destroyed by pride.”—1902, Sermon #2798

“There can never be any reasonableness in our dreaming that there is in us any
cause for pride.”—1898, Sermon #2591

“Every preacher of the Gospel should see to it that this is true concerning
himself. When we pass on to the people the words which God has given to us, we
supply them with real spiritual fool and so we glorify God. But if we only give
them our own words, we do but mock their hunger and we dishonor God. Our blessed
Master, though quite able to speak His own original thoughts, kept to the words
of His Father—let us be careful to imitate His example.”—1903, Sermon #2821

“I cannot tell how God’s mind comes into contact with man’s mind, but I know
that it does—that His Spirit comes into most intimate connection with our spirit
and so influences our spirit that the sin, which once seemed to fascinate and
charm us, loses all its attractions and delights. And the doubts and fears,
which for a while depress us, have, by-and-by, no depressing power whatever! You
remember how Eliphaz said to Job,‘At destruction and famine you shall laugh,’
and God often helps His servants to laugh at those very things which before
seemed great burdens to them. There is nothing in your spiritual case that is
too hard for the Lord—so bring it before Him in faith and prayer this very
hour!”—1900, Sermon #2675

“If you hear the Gospel, dear Friends, and reject it, that is your problem, and
not ours. If you are saved by it, give God the Glory—but if it proves to be a
savor of death unto death to you, yours is the sin, the shame and the sorrow.
The preacher cannot save souls, so he will not take the responsibility that does
not belong to him.”—1903, Sermon #2842

“Brothers and Sisters, if we do not pray for sinners, for whom shall we pray? If
we do not plead for the abandoned, if we do not offer supplications for those
who are perverse in heart, we have omitted to pray for the very persons who most
need our intercession! Let us bring these hard hearts beneath the almighty
hammer! Let us, by prayer, bring these lepers beneath the healing touch of Him
who, despite their loathsomeness, can say to them, ‘Be you clean!’ Let no degree
of natural or inherited depravity, or of depravity that has come from long
continuance in sin, hinder us from praying for all the unsaved whom we know! ‘O
God, have mercy upon these guilty ones!’”—1896, Sermon #2486

“Souls are often converted through godly conversation. Simple words frequently
do more good than long sermons. Disjointed, unconnected sentences are often of
more use than the most finely polished periods or rounded sentences. If you
would be useful, let the praises of Christ be always on your tongue. Let Him
live on your lips. Speak of Him always! When you walk by the way, when you sit
in your house, when you rise up and even when you lie down, it may be that you
have someone to whom it is possible that you may yet whisper the Gospel of the
Grace of God!”—1900, Sermon #2695

“Free thinking and free living—these are the desires of ungodly men. But when
the Grace of God has renewed the heart, the soul finds its true freedom in
obedience to Christ’s commands, and its best thinking while sitting at the feet
of Jesus to observe His gracious Words.”—1896, Sermon #2487 “I fear that there
are many Christians who lose their rest in another way, namely, through the
world’sjoys. Have you ever been with a party of friends where there has been a
great deal of mirth and very little Divine Grace? If so, have you not felt, when
you got home, that you could not pray as you were known to do? Sometimes you
have been taking your recreation properly enough, but you have not carried
Christ with you as you should have done—and you have found, after a while, that
your rest has gone. Laughter and merriment may do you untold harm unless they
are sanctified by the Word of God and prayer—if they are so sanctified, they may
not cause us to leave our rest.”—1901, Sermon #2758

“I believe, my Brothers, that if we preach Christ Crucified with crucified
hearts—if we set forth Christ with earnest longing that men may see Him, they
will see Him, ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.’”—1898, Sermon #2559

“It is always well to adapt our speech to those who are about us. You remember
how Cobbett said that he used the English language. ‘I speak,’ he said, ‘not
only so that men can understand me if they will, but so that they cannot
misunderstand me if they try to do so.’”—1898, Sermon #2592

“There is no sin which you have committed which the blood of Christ cannot wash
out if you believe in Him! Though you were even red with murder, black with
blasphemy and covered from head to foot with the filthiness of lust, yet, on
your believing in Jesus, you will be made, then and there, as white as snow!
Free pardon for every kind of sin is proclaimed to every soul that will believe
in Jesus Christ. “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men,”
if they will only trust in Christ. So, in this sense, there is nothing too hard
for the Lord. There is no sinner too guilty for the Lord to forgive when he
trusts the Savior’s Sacrifice on Calvary.”—1900, Sermon #2675

“They may have cravings after other things, but nothing can satisfy the deep
real need of their nature but Jesus Christ and salvation by His precious blood!
He is the Bread of Life which came down from Heaven! He is the Water of Life of
which, if a man drinks, he shall never thirst again! Hence, it becomes us to be
often dwelling upon this theme, for it is most necessary to the sons of men.
This is the subject which God the Holy Spirit delights to bless. I am sure that,
other things being equal, He honors preaching in proportion to the savor of
Christ that is in it. I may preach a great deal about the Church, but the Holy
Spirit does not take of the things of Christ to glorify the Church. I may preach
doctrine or practice apart from Christ—that would be giving the husk without the
kernel—but where Jesus Christ sweetens all and savors all, there will the Holy
Spirit delight to rest upon the ministry and make it quick and powerful to the
conversion of men!”—1899, Sermon #2635

“It is only a pure heart that loves the pure Word of the Lord! So, if you love
the Word of God because of its purity, it is an argument that your heart has
been renewed by Grace.”—1896, Sermon #2487

“Any man who thinks that he can create a new heart in any other person, had
better begin by creating a fly. When he has done that, then let him think that
he can make a sinful man to be a new creature in Christ Jesus! Go and raise the
dead, if you can. Speak to those who lie in our cemeteries and cause them to
live again—and then imagine that you have within you the power to call a dead
soul to spiritual life! This is the work of God alone! God’s arm must be made
bare before this miracle can be worked—and our failures teach us our absolute
dependence upon Him. ”—1903, Sermon #2843

“ And Your Law is the truth (Psalms 119:42) . That is what I believe this Book
of God is— ‘the truth.’ I know of nothing Infallible but the Bible. Every man
must have a fixed point somewhere—some believe in an infallible pope and some in
an infallible church, but I believe in an Infallible Book, expounded by the
Infallible Spirit who is ready to guide us into all truth—‘Your Law is the
truth.’”—1896, Sermon #2487

“‘ Why do Your disciples transgress the tradition ofthe elders? For they wash
not their hands when they eat bread’ (Matthew 15:2). Would you have thought that
full-grown men could have made it a matter of business to come from Jerusalem
down into the country to talk to Christ about the fact that His disciples did
not always wash their hands before they ate their breakfasts? Yet we have men,
nowadays, who make a great point of what is to be done with the so-called
‘consecrated’ bread that is left, and who are much concerned about what kind of
a dress a ‘priest’ ought to wear when he is engaged in the performance of
certain duties. How sad is it that such trifles as these should occupy the minds
of immortal beings while men are dying and God is dishonored!”—1896, Sermon
#2487

“We love because of loveliness apprehended and perceived, but Christ loved
because He would impart His own loveliness to the object of His choice.”—1896,
Sermon #2488

“When our soul is cast down within us we begin to have closer dealings with
Christ than we had before. A long continuance of calm induces listlessness.
There is a way of being wanton towards Christ. We begin to think that we can do
without Him—we imagine that we have such a store of ready money that we can
trade on our own account. But when gloomy doubts arise, we go back to the place
where our spiritual life commenced.”—1902, Sermon #2798

“Here they come—detachment of late-comers stamping up the aisle, interrupting
the first prayer. Others come straggling in all through the reading of the
Scriptures. God’s Word seems so contemptible in their esteem that they tramp up
the aisle as if it were some unimportant book that was being read. Then comes
the singing and some join in it heartily. But others do not even know what hymn
it is, for they have only just arrived. And I have known some friends, in
certain places, come so late that the minister had almost finished his
sermon—and they were just in time to go home with the congregation! This ought
not to be the case anywhere and is not the case where all are waiting for Jesus.
I like the thought of the good woman who said that she never went to a service
late for it was part of her religion not to disturb the worship of other people.
I wish many more agreed with her. Oh, how much loss of spirituality, how much
loss of blessing has come by that straggling in, one by one, instead of all
being assembled, waiting for the Savior with such due respect to His holy name
that they would not think of being late!”—1898, Sermon #2593

“If, Beloved, you and I get at a distance from God. If we follow Christ afar
off, as Peter did. If we grow cold in heart, if we are neglectful of prayer, if
the Word of God is not the subject of our constant study, if we get worldly and
carnal like so many of our fellow Christians are, we shall soon find that the
rest of our soul is gone.”—1901, Sermon #2758

“I grow angry, I confess it, when I hear some men speak of Christ. They talk of
my Lord in these days as if He were some common person and they have
“comparative religions” in which they compare Him with I know not whom! I love
my Lord so well that I must boil over with indignation when His name is
disparaged.”—1896, Sermon #2488

“Our Lord Jesus Christ was bound and there flows from that fact its opposite—
then His people are all free. When Christ was made a curse for us, He became a
blessing to us. When Christ was made sin for us, we were made the righteousness
of God in Him. When He died, then we lived. And so, as He was bound, we were set
free. The type of that exchange of prisoners is seen in the fact that Barabbas
was set free when the Lord Jesus Christ was given up to be crucified. And still
more in His plea for His disciples in the garden, ‘If therefore you seek Me, let
these go their way.’”—1903, Sermon #2822

“The first thing to do, when the throat is clear after an illness, is to sing
praises to God! The first thing to do, when the eyes are brightened again, is to
look up to the Lord with thankfulness and gratitude.”—1896, Sermon #2489

“As surely as Jesus lives, His feet will stand in the latter day upon Mount
Olivet and He will come to gloriously reign among His ancients! This Second
Coming of our Lord, not as a Sin-Offering, not in shame and humiliation, but in
all the Glory of His Father and of His holy angels, makes us strike together
with a joyous clash the high-sounding cymbals!”—1896, Sermon #2489

“Oh, what a blessed thing is the faith that enables the soul to postpone the
present in order to obtain that blessed future! For what is the present, after
all, but a fleeting show, an empty dream? But the future is eternal and
incorruptible, reserved in Heaven at the right hand of God, where there are
pleasures forevermore!”—1900, Sermon #2676

“I think that one of the worst enemies of the Gospel of Christ, at the present
time, is to be found in the fiction of the day. People get these worthless books
and sit, and sit, forgetful of the duties of this world, and of all that relates
to the world to come, just losing themselves in the story of the hero or
heroine. I have seen them shedding tears over things that never happened, as if
there were not enough real sorrows in the world for us to grieve over.”—1903,
Sermon #2843

“When Jesus Christ is lifted up, it is as God the Father would have it! It is as
the Holy Spirit would have it and, where this is the case, we may expect to have
seals to our ministry and souls for our hire!”—1899, Sermon #2635

“It needs a holy man to give thanks at the remembrance of a holy God. Sinners
hate holiness because they dread holiness, but the saints love holiness because
they have no cause to dread it and because, on the other hand, it has become a
fountain of comfort and joy to them.”—1896, Sermon #2489

“Does not this lack of restfulness also decrease your power of working for
Christ? You cannot plead with a sinner as you used to do. You cannot speak to
the anxious as you once did for, while your own soul is in the dark, although
you may wish to give light to others, you feel that you cannot do it. If you
really wish to serve the Lord effectively, you must have the joy of the Lord to
be your strength.”—1901, Sermon #2758

“The man who has no thanks to give ought not to be at the Table of the Lord, for
it is called the Eucharist, which signifies the giving of thanks. It is intended
to be a giving of thanks from beginning to end. Jesus took the bread and gave
thanks. After the same manner, also, He took the cup and gave thanks. So, “Sing
to the Lord, O you saints of His and give thanks.” If we would come aright to
the Table of the Lord, we must be thankful saints.”—1896, Sermon #2489

“God save the man to whom a calm, itself, becomes more dangerous than a
tempest!”—1896, Sermon #2490“I think I have known some persons who may have
possessed a conscience, but if so, it had gone to sleep. I have great fear for
religious men with sleepy consciencesand it is really amazing what mischief may
be done by men who seem to be heartily religious, yet whose consciences have
gone soundly asleep.”—1896, Sermon #2490

“I would rather go to Heaven doubting all the way than be lost through
self-confidence. I would rather cry out in the bitterness of my spirit, “Am I
sincere or not?” and cry it out every day, than write myself down among the
blessed and, at last, wake up and find myself in Hell!”—1896, Sermon #2490

“The old fable speaks of the Augean stable, foul enough to have poisoned a
nation, which Hercules cleansed, but our sins were fouler than that! Dunghills
are sweet compared with these abominations! What a degrading task it seems for
Christ to undertake—the purging of our sins! The sweepers of the streets, the
dishwashers of the kitchen, the cleansers of the sewers have honorable work
compared with this of purging sin! Yet the holy Christ, incapable of sin,
stooped to purge our sins! I want you to meditate upon that wondrous work and to
remember that He did it before He went back to Heaven. Is it not a wonderful
thing that Christ purged our sins even before we had committed them? There they
stood, before the sight of God, as already existent in all their hideousness—but
Christ came, and purged them. This, surely, ought to make us sing the song of
songs! Before I sinned, He purged my sins away—amazing and strange as it is, yet
it is so! ”—1899, Sermon #2635

“What an appropriate prayer is that for you Sunday school teachers and Christian
ministers to offer, ‘Open You my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of
Your Law’! I think that if I had, as a preacher, to make only one request to my
Master, and He asked me, ‘What will you that I should do unto you?’—I would
reply, ‘Lord, that I may receive my sight more fully than ever, and see Your
Truth more clearly than ever,’because there is no fear about our speaking for
God if our seeing is what it should be. That is the main matter and, therefore,
the Lord asks each one of us, ‘What do you see?’ If our answer proves that we
have seen well, it is because the Spirit of God has enlightened us and,
enlightenment from God having been once received, we shall proclaim to others
right gladly what God has revealed to us.”—1900, Sermon #2678

“There is a holy fear which must not be banished from the Church of God. There
is a sacred anxiety which puts us to the question and examines us whether we are
in the faith—and it is not to be laughed at as some would do. It is all very
fine to say, “Believe that you are right, and you are right,” but if you believe
that you are right and you are, all the while, wrong, you put yourself beyond
the probability of ever getting right! He who believes himself to be saved when
he is not, is likely to shut the door of salvation in his own face and to perish
self-excluded. God save us from that fatal folly!”—1896, Sermon #2490

“Sin hardens the heart. Every sin makes room for another sin and it is always
easier to sin again after you have sinned once. No, more—I might even say that
it becomes almost inevitable that you will sin again after you have sinned once.
Sin hardens the mind so that it does not receive the Gospel.”—1903, Sermon #2843

“The world is all scaffolding—the Church of Christ is the true building. The
ultimate purpose of God is the gathering out of the world as many as He has
given unto His Son, Jesus Christ, that they may have eternal life in Him and
glorify Him forever.”—1902, Sermon #2799

“Do not bind Christ with cords. Beware, you who are unconverted, that you never
bind Christ. You may do so by not reading His Word. You have a Bible at home,
but you never read it—it is clasped, laid away in a drawer with your best pocket
handkerchiefs. Is it not so? That is another picture of Christ in bonds—a poor
shut-up Bible that is never allowed to speak with you—no, not even to have half
a word with you, for you are in such a hurry about other things that you cannot
listen to it! Untie the cords—let it have its liberty! Commune with it
sometimes. Let the heart of God in the Bible speak to your own heart. If you do
not, that clasped Bible, that shut-up Bible—that precious Book hidden away in
the drawer—is Christ in prison and, one day, when you little expect it, you will
hear Christ say, “Inasmuch as you did this to the greatest of all My witnesses,
you did it unto Me.” You kept Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah and all the Prophets in
prison! And all the Apostles and the Master, Himself, you bound with cords and
you would not hear a word that they had to say!”—1903, Sermon #2822

“No man knows how much of devil there is asleep in him—and no man may dream that
he is secure from the worst of evils unless he comes to Jesus, gets a new heart
and puts himself into the keeping of the One who is better and stronger than
himself.”—1896, Sermon #2490

“…it seems to me—and I shall leave it to your judgment to consider and approve
what I say—that every man ought to be ashamed of not loving the Lord Jesus
Christ and not trusting such a Savior as the Lord Jesus Christ is Godin human
flesh, bleeding, dying, bearing the penalty of human sin and then presenting
Himself freely as our Sacrifice and saying that whoever believes in Him shall
not perish, but shall have everlasting life! Do you push Him away from you? Will
you trample on His blood and count it an unholy thing? Will you despise His
Cross? It sometimes seems to me that blasphemy and adultery and
murder—tremendous evils though these are—scarcely reach the height of guilt that
comes through refusing the great love of Christ—thrusting Him aside whom God
took from His bosom and gave up to die that men might live through Him!”—1896,
Sermon #2491

“O Believer, if He has made an end of it, [sin] then there is an end to it and
what more can there be of it?”—1899, Sermon #2635 “I rather like the idea of a
young person, at Brighton, who asked that she might have grey horses to draw her
to her funeral. Why not? Why always have black ones? Why not have the white
horses of delight? Let those who linger here sorrow that their loved ones have
gone, but let them not be so ungenerous as not to sympathize in the eternal joy
upon which righteous souls have entered!”—1901, Sermon #2758

“To get money is well enough, if you get it that you may use it well. And to
learn is right enough, if you learn with the view of teaching others. If our
life is not to be wasted, there must be a living to God with a noble purpose!
And they who have lived in vain with multitudes of opportunities of doing good
ought to be ashamed—and such shame should bring them to the Savior’s feet in
humble penitence. God give such shame as that to any here who ought to have it,
that they may at once seek the name of the Lord!”—1896, Sermon #2491

“He who counts the brilliant stars, counts such dim things as our
understanding—and He who numbers the very hairs of our head never fails to
reckon the cries of our hearts.”—1900, Sermon #2678

[Speaking to Believers.] “Is it not a wonderful thing that God loved me, and
loved you, (let us individualize it)—that God so loved us that He gave His
only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him might not perish, but have
everlasting life? He gave His Son for you! And for me. It is as though one
bartered a diamond to buy a common pebble from the brook, or gave away an empire
to purchase some foul thing not worthy of being picked off a dunghill! Yet we
are persuaded that He did it, and that the love of God is most clearly to be
seen in the fact that He gave His Son Jesus Christ to die instead of us.”—1896,
Sermon #2492

“There is nothing about death that the Believer should construe into a fear that
it will separate him from the love of Christ. Christ loved you when He died—He
will love you when you die! It was after death—remember that—it was afterdeath
that His heart poured out the tribute of blood and water by which we have the
double cure! See, then, how He loves us in death and after death!”—1896, Sermon
#2492

“If we regard salvation as a means of only lifting up our race from its fall and
putting it among the princes, we have made a mistake. We must remember that
God’s Glory is a greater object even than man’s salvation. Not so much to save
us did God give His Son, as to honor Himself and to glorify that Son of His. And
we must always remember that the Gospel has for its chief aim, the glory of all
the attributes of the Divine Being. He has determined to gather together, at
last, all things in Christ that are in Heaven and in earth.”—1899, Sermon #2635

“I must confess that I am more afraid of life than of death. ‘Oh,’ says one,
‘but dying is such hard work.’ Do you think so? Why, dying is the endof work—it
is livingthat is hard work! I am not so much afraid of dying as I am of
sinning—that is ten times worse than death.”—1896, Sermon #2492

“So, Brothers and Sisters, I hope it has come to this with many of us, that
Christ’s Cross is our crown. We have fallen in love with it and we gladly bear
it for His sake. The very hardships that we endure in connection with Christ’s
Kingdom have become a joy to us! While, as for His Glory, that is now our honor
and, as for Himself, He is our Heaven!”—1901, Sermon #2760

“WHEN I look upon this great assembly of people, I think to myself—there will be
many here to whom these chapters that we have read out of Solomon’s Song will
seem very strange. Of course they will, for they are meant for the inner circle
of Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ! This sacred Canticle is almost the
central Book of the Bible. It seems to stand like the Tree of Life in the midst
of the garden of Eden, in the very center of the Paradise of God. You must know
Christ and love Christ, or else many of the expressions in this Book will seem
to you but as an idle tale.”—1896, Sermon #2485

“It is always best for us, if there is anything to be said in our praise, not to
say it ourselves, but to let somebody else say it. Brother, if your trumpeter is
dead, put the trumpet away! When that trumpet needs to be blown, there will be a
trumpeter found to use it—but you need never blow it yourself.”—1896, Sermon
#2493

“He that sows without a plow may reap without a sickle. He who preaches the
Gospel without preaching the Law of God may hold all the results of it in his
hand and there will be little for him to hold.”—1903, Sermon #2843

“Do you realize, dear Hearers, you who are now hearing the Gospel, but have not
received it, that God’s threats take effect at once? ‘No,’ you say, ‘He has not
dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.’ That
is most true, yet there is a sense in which His sentence takes effect at once.
For instance, ‘He that believes not is condemned already, because he has not
believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.’ If you have heard the
Gospel—and some of you have heard it many, many years—and yet have not heeded
it, you will not be condemned for the first time at the Last Great Day, you are
condemned even now!”—1900, Sermon #2678

“I cannot help remarking how continually the Apostle uses such expressions as,
‘in Christ,’ ‘in whom,’ ‘in Him.’ [Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians.] He
will not have a doctrine apart from Christ! He will not mention a single
blessing, or a single mercy without Christ! I believe there is no way of
preaching Gospel doctrines truly apart from the Master. In Christ’s own days, if
you had asked one of His followers what he believed, he would not have been long
telling you! He would not have pointed to 50 doctrines, but he would have
pointed to Christ and said, ‘I believe in Him.’”—1899, Sermon #2635

“It is an awful thing to contemplate what it would be if there were no Savior,
but what difference is it if there is a Savior, but men never hear of
Him?”—1903, Sermon #2822

“There is an adaptation in men, even while they are unconverted, which God has
put into them for their future service. Luke, you know, was qualified to write
his Gospel because he had been a physician. And Matthew was qualified to write
the particular Gospel which he has left us because he had been a publican. There
may be a something about your habits of life and about your constitution and
your condition that will qualify you for some special niche in the Church of God
in years to come. Oh, happy day when Jesus shall look upon you and call you to
follow Him! Happy day when He didlook upon some of us and saw in us what His
love meantto put there—that He might make of us vessels of mercy meet for the
Master’s use!”—1896, Sermon #2493

“The same sun which melts wax hardens clay. And the same Gospel which melts some
persons to repentance hardens others in their sins.”—1900, Sermon #2678 “You
must never imagine that you are to pick and choose who is to be saved! That is
not a matter that is left to you—the Lord’s choice may be very different from
your choice. The way for you to ascertain God’s choice is to talk about Christ
to everybody you meet— try to bring everyone to Christ. The Lord will do the
sorting far better than you can. He never makes a mistake.”—1902, Sermon #2799

“And as for you, dear Friends, who are looking for signs and wonders, or else
you will not believe, I wish you would give up that foolish notion, for there is
no sign and no wonder which is equal to this, that Christ should say to the dead
heart, “Live,” and it lives! That He should say to the unbelievingheart,
“Believe,” and it believes! In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, I say to
you, Sinner, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ!”And if He is really speaking by
me, you willbelieve in Him and you will arise and follow Him.”—1896, Sermon
#2493

“Depend upon it, if you make an idol, and God loves you, He will break it. We
may sorrow and be grieved when we lose our loved ones, for we are men—but we
must moderate our sorrow and bow our will to the will of the Lord—for are we not
also men of God?”—1896, Sermon #2494

“God’s essential purposes cannot be altered—they must all be fulfilled. His
eternal plan was formed in the foresight of all generations that shall exist, so
it must stand unchanged and, inasmuch as those purposes and that plan are
closely connected with the Words of Christ and, indeed, are made known to us by
His Words, therefore the Words of Christ must stand forever.”—1899, Sermon #2636

“Nothing will come to you so sharply, in a time of sorrow, pain and brokenness
of spirit, as a sense of sins of omission or sins of commission. When the Light
of God’s Presence is gone from you, you will sadly begin to say, “Why did I do
this? Why did I not do that?” Therefore, dear Friends, endeavor as much as lies
in you, to live in the time of your joy that if there ever should come times of
depression, you may not have to remember neglected duties or willful wickedness!
”—1896, Sermon #2494

“Anything which takes your attention away from your God is an idol—it is another
god, a rival god—and so it is the most unclean thing possible! I mean just this,
that, although your ordinary pursuits may be, in themselves, perfectly innocent
and may be commendable if they are followed out to the Glory of God, yet if your
first objective in life is yourself and what you can get out of the common
things of this life, you defile them by putting them into the place which
belongs alone to God!”—1896, Sermon #2495

“A great many of the devil’s servants are so disrespectful to their lord that
they even deny his existence and Satan, himself, is so self-denying in this
respect that he denies his own existence and sets other people to do the same.
Men squeezed the Lord’s prayer very hard when they made it read, ‘Deliver us
from evil,’ for it is pretty clear that it ought to be, ‘Deliver us from the
Evil One.’”—1898, Sermon #2560

“When God has blessed any sermon that I have preached, I do not make it a rule
to preach it again lest I might be led to put my trust in that sermon, or to
have some confidence in the way in which I set forth the Truth of God, rather
than in the Truth itself—though I never hesitate to preach the same sermon again
and again if I feel that the Spirit leads me to do so.”—1901, Sermon #2761

“Think of that remarkable passage in Isaiah 65:24—‘It shall come to pass, that
before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.’
That is quicker than the telegraph! ‘Before they call, I will answer.’ God knows
what petition is in your heart! He foresees what will be the utterance of your
tongue and He has the answers all ready for them. I have found many of my
prayers answered years before I prayed them. ‘No,’ you say, ‘that could not be.’
Well, there was one of them that was answered more than 1,800 years before I
prayed it. That was when I cried to God for a Savior and he gave me One all
those centuries before I was born, even the Savior who worked out for me a
complete salvation on Calvary’s accursed tree”—1900, Sermon #2678 “When the
Spirit of God is gone out of that which, in itself, is right, it becomes often a
cover wherein a thousand evils conceal themselves.”—1896, Sermon #2496

“It will often be of excellent use to us, for the stimulation of our faith and
for the excitement of our gratitude, if we remember the might of the enemies of
Christ. When we undervalue the strength of His enemies, we are apt to
under-estimate His Omnipotence.” —1903, Sermon #2823 “‘Ask, and you shall
receive,’ is the message that shines out with heavenly radiance over the Mercy
Seat. Read it, and obey it—open your mouth wide, for God will fill it.”—1902,
Sermon #2800

“I am often said to be a very old-fashioned, narrow-minded sort of person and I
have not the slightest objection to the accusation. I certainly am not
new-fashioned and do not intend to be, for “the old is better” and, in theology,
there is nothing new that is true, and nothing true that is new! The Truth of
God is as old as the everlasting hills and to that I desire to keep even to the
end, and I trust that you, also, will be of the same mind.”—1899, Sermon #2636

“There will be a friend or two, on the lower platform, after the service, to
talk with any of you who wish to say anything to them about your own souls and
to hear from them some good words about the Lord Jesus Christ. Do not go away,
even from this service, till you have sought and found the Savior!”—1900, Sermon
#2678

“If you live away from your Lord and Master, in those days of terror that are
yet to come, your hearts will quail for fear, and you will be like other men. If
you run with them, you shall fear with them. If your strength is where their
strength is, you shall be as weak as they are! But if you have learned to look
up, why, even in those stormy times you shall keep to the habit of looking up!
And if you have learned to lift your heads above the world, you shall keep to
the habit of lifting up your heads! If your portion is in Heaven, it shall not
be shaken when the earth rocks and reels to its very foundations. If your
treasure is in Heaven, then your treasure shall not be lost.”—1896, Sermon #2496

“Listen to your Lord’s gracious command—‘Look up, and lift up your heads.’ What
does this precept mean? First, it implies an absence of fear ‘Perfect love casts
out fear: because fear has torment.’ He that fears is not made perfect in love.
What cause has a Christian for fear? What is there that can harm the man whom
God loves? Will He trample on His child, or allow anyone else to hurt him? No,
for ‘all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are
the called according to His purpose.’ The sun and moon and stars. The earth and
the seas. Wars and pestilences all work together for good to God’s dear
children. Let us, therefore, cast out all fear!”—1896, Sermon #2496

“You may depend upon it that there will never be any improvement upon the
teaching of Christ! There have been some persons who have tried to improve upon
it, but they have made a signal failure of all their attempts. His ethical
teaching—His teaching of morals—has impressed even some of those who have not
accepted His Doctrines, or even believed in His Divinity! They have been
astonished at the purity, the holiness, the love which Jesus Christ inculcated
in the Laws which He laid down for the guidance of His disciples.”—1899, Sermon
#2636

“We may measure our love to Him, too, by our service for Him and our sympathy
with Him. What have we done for Jesus this year? What have some of you given to
Him? Take stock of your gifts to the cause of Christ! I know that some of you
have given even beyond your means and my Master will amply reward your
liberality. But I know, also, that there are some who can talk loudly concerning
the things of God, but who never seem to have had enough religion for it to have
much effect upon their pockets! I will give but little for your love to Christ
if you bring Him no offering as a token of your affection.”—1896, Sermon #2497

“He who created all things by the word of His power and by whom all things
consist—He who counted it not robbery (not a thing to be grasped) to be equal
with God—sits in an old chair to be made a mimic king and to be mocked and spat
upon! All other miracles put together are not equal to this miracle! This one
rises above them all and out-miracles all miracles—that God, Himself, having
espoused our cause and assumed our Nature, should deign to stoop to such a depth
of scorn as this!” —1903, Sermon #2824

“Our farmers know that earthly harvests are sometimes late and it is the same in
spiritual husbandry! Divine Grace ensures the crop, but even the Grace of God
does not guarantee that the crop shall come up tomorrow, nor just whenever we
please. So, dear Friend, keep on sowing the good seed of the Kingdom of God,
water it with your tears and your prayers, and then leave with God the question
whether you shall see the harvest or not.”—1901, Sermon #2761

“Then, you who have found Him, be prompt in obeying Him. Do you know what David
said? “I made haste, and delayed not to keep Your commandments.” If you have
found the Savior by faith, be baptized according to His command and His example.
Unite yourself with His people and begin at once to serve Him.”—1900, Sermon
#2678

“If you must make an image, make it, if you will, of a serpent, or of an ox, but
not of the Son of God who came on purpose to redeem us from this, among other
sins! Let us not degrade His sacred Personage by making even itto be an image
before which we prostrate ourselves! ”—1897, Sermon #2498 “My dear Brothers in
the ministry, if you want to shine for Jesus, you must be made into stars to be
held in His right hand! There is no possibility of your being of spiritual use
to your fellow men, or exercising a ministry that shall tend to their eternal
salvation, except as you are made into a light to be held in the right hand of
the Lord Jesus Christ. All the education in the world, all the natural talent
that any possess, all the acquired practice of oratory, all the powers which are
the result of long experience can never make a good minister of Jesus Christ!
The stars are in the right hand ofChrist—ministers are not made by men, but by
the Lord, Himself, if they are worthy to be called ministers at all.”—1897,
Sermon #2498

“The Lord Jesus has promised such great things to His people that I could keep
you here all night if I were to try to repeat those gracious Words of promise
which streamed out of His lips! Here is one of the sweetest of them—“All that
the Father gives Me shall come to Me; and he that comes to Me I will in no wise
cast out.” If you come to Him, He will not in any wise cast you out! He must, He
will receive you! Heaven and earth may pass away, and they shall pass away in
due time, but never shall a soul that comes to Jesus be rejected by Him! Oh,
that many of you would avail yourselves of that promise this very hour!”—1899,
Sermon #2636

“Some time ago, when there were a great many people about who professed to be
perfect, I heard of one who had grown so conceited that she said her mind was so
conformed to the will of God that there was no need for her to pray because her
mind and God’s mind were so perfectly at one. Yes, and when a person imagines
that he is so good that he need not pray, he had better begin by crying, ‘God be
merciful to me a sinner.’ I daresay you have heard of those people who climb so
high up the ladder that they fall down the other side—and that is exactly what
people do when they begin to carry any Truth of God to extravagance and push a
point beyond its legitimate issues. That which makes you cease to pray is of the
devil, so say to him, ‘Get you behind me, Satan.’ The very suggestion that you
can do without prayer must have come from beneath—it cannot have come from
above. The more the Spirit of God teaches a Christian the things of God, the
more it makes him ask in the name of Jesus Christ.”—1902, Sermon #2800

“When I am invited to preach the novel doctrines of the present age, or to try
the modern methods of fighting the devil, I look these new weapons up and
down—and I advise those who offer them to me to send them to the Exhibition of
Inventions up in the West of London! You may see them there, but you will never
see them here! The old sword suits my hand and God blesses it to the cutting and
the wounding and the killing of sinners! God the Holy Spirit, who made it, uses
it most effectually. So, by the Grace of God, we will keep to it—and use no
other as long as we live.”—1897, Sermon #2498

“And then, you who have been serving the Savior, if you have any gooddesire
inyour heart to do anything for Christ, doit. You may be dead tomorrow morning,
therefore I would advise you to do something for Christ tonight. Are you going
to leave something in your will for the Master’s cause? Be your own executor if
you can—and whatever you think of doing, do it speedily. Do not leave anything
till tomorrow that can be done today.”—1900, Sermon #2678

“There is, in a child, the instinct always to tell what it hears. I am afraid
that I have not lost that instinct, myself, though I am no longer a child. I
never like to be entrusted with anybody’s secrets and I generally give people
notice that if they want them published abroad, they have only to communicate
them to me. It stops me from being bothered with a lot of things that will be
sure to get known without my telling them!”—1898, Sermon #2560

“Mockery is the unintentional homage which falsehood pays to truth. Scorn is the
unconscious praise which sin gives to holiness.” —1903, Sermon #2824

“Oh, give us a conversion that speaks for itself! Give us a new heart that shows
itself in a new life! If a man is not able to control his temper, or to speak
the truth—if he is not a good servant, or a good master, or a good husband—do
not let him think it necessary to proclaim what Christ has done for him, for, if
he has done anything that was worth doing, it will speak for itself!”—1901,
Sermon #2761

“I beg all of you who try to bring sinners to Christ, to stick to that old
sword, the two-edged sword that goes out of Christ’s mouth! If souls are not
saved by the preaching of the Truth of God, they will not be saved by the
telling of lies. I have sometimes heard really awful doctrine preached at
revival services and an easy-going Brother has said, ‘Well, you see, it was an
evangelistic meeting.’ Yes, but you should not tell lies at evangelistic
meetings! ‘Oh, but if we were to preach the same truth to these sinners that you
would proclaim to a company of Believers, it would not do them any good!’ Well,
then, nothing else will, depend upon it! If the Truths of God will not have any
effect upon them, your toning down of those Truths, or your screwing them up
will not improve them, but will spoil them. I believe that the very Gospel that
comforts saints is the Gospel that saves sinners—that there is but one Gospel
for all purposes and all people and that, therefore, two gospels will never be
required! You have only to strike this way with one edge of the sword, and that
way with the other edge of it—or to swing it to and fro like that ancient
warrior did with his great two-handed sword—and you will strike sinners down
right and left, smiting the self-righteous this way, and the licentious the
other way! Only keep to that grand old sword which the Apostles used, which was
in the martyrs’ hands, and by which Christ, Himself, triumphed, istriumphing and
willtriumph even to the end.”—1897, Sermon #2498 “There are depths and there are
heights where we must be alone. There are some griefs that we must keep to
ourselves, as there are some raptures and experiences of which, if we were to
tell them, men would say that we were fanatical and suspect that we were out of
our mind! Do not be surprised, therefore, if you have sometimes to sail alone,
so far as any human beings are concerned. If Christ is in the vessel with you,
you cannot need any better company.”—1899, Sermon #2637

“There is no way of peace by plunging more deeply into sin, as some think they
will do—drowning dull care in the flowing bowl, or endeavoring to show their
hardihood by rushing into still viler forms of lust in order that they may,
somehow or other, be satisfied and content. No, this disease breeds a hunger
which increases as you feed it! It engenders a thirst which becomes the more
intense the more you try to satisfy it.”—1897, Sermon #2499

“I would to God that men did but see that although the picture I have tried to
draw is terrible, indeed, yet it is most gracious on God’spartto treat them as
diseased persons needing to be cured, rather than as criminals waiting to be
executed!”—1897, Sermon #2499

“Be prepared to go Home to Heaven tonight. Come, now, are all things ready for
your journey? If not, pack up all the luggage, label it, and have everything
ready for the start at any moment. Blessed is that man who is ready to blossom
in Heaven any instant. ‘Oh,’ says one, ‘I should not like to die tonight. I
believe that I am a Christian and that I am saved, but I do not feel ready to
go.’ Set your house in order, then, for your house cannot be right if it is not
in order! If your house is in order, why, then you are ready to die! There is no
right living except living as you would wish to live it you knew that this was
to be your last day. The right way to spend the next hour is so to spend it as
if it were your last hour. The Lord bring us into that happy condition that it
shall not matter to us one single farthing whether we live or whether we die—and
may He keep us in that blessed state, for Christ’s sake! Amen.—CHS

“The pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hands because it pleased the
Father to bruise Him. And, oftentimes, it shall be with the servant as it was
with the Master—it shall please the Lord to bruise you and put you to grief,
that in later days the pleasure of the Lord may prosper in your hands.”—1897,
Sermon #2499

“Paul wrote to the Galatians that our Lord Jesus Christ “gave Himself for our
sins,” upon which passage, Martin Luther observes that Christ never gave Himself
for our righteousness. There was never enough of that to be worth His doing so,
but He gave Himself for our sins, that He might put them away from us
forever.”—1899, Sermon #2637

“A man scarcely needs to be reminded that he must breathe. It is essential to
his very life that he should breathe and it is essential to our spiritual life
that we should pray. I never thought it necessary to prepare a discourse to
exhort you to eat, neither ought it to be necessary to exhort Christians to
pray. It should be to you an instinct of your new nature, as natural to your
spiritual being as a good appetite is to a man in health. There should be a holy
hunger and thirst to pray.”—1902, Sermon #2800

“It is not enough to have a Bible on the shelf—it is infinitely better to have
its Truths stored up within your soul. It is a good thing to carry your
Testament in your pocket—it is far better to carry its message in your
heart.”—1900, Sermon #2679 “As the spokes of a wheel all meet in the axle, so
all the promises of God meet in the great center of the Covenant of Grace made
with Christ Jesus on behalf of all His people.”—1901, Sermon #2762 “Heaven is
being filled with people who have believed in Jesus—and Hell is being filled
with people who meant to believe in Jesus, but did not! That is the difference
between the two classes, but what a difference it will make between them when
they come to die!”—1897, Sermon #2500

“There was a man in that first paradise—he was the first man, Adam, and you and
I were representatively in him, for he was the federal head of the human race.
But he fell and he was taken away. Do we regret this and mourn over it as though
it were an irreparable calamity? By no means, for the Lord has taken away the
first man, Adam, that He may establish the second Man, the Lord Jesus
Christ!”—1900, Sermon #2698

“I never care to read any arguments about the Deity of Christ—I would as soon
think of reading a book which sought to prove the existence of my mother! This
is a matter which I know for myself. I have tried it and proved it—and felt its
power.—1901, Sermon #2719

“O you who are only professorsof religion, will you shut yourselves outside the
door of mercy? You will do so if you neglect to obtain that secret oil of Grace
which can only be supplied by the Holy Spirit!”—1897, Sermon #2500 “’I can do
nothing,’ says one. That is true. Learn that lesson well! But there is another
lesson, remember, to follow it—‘I can do all things through Christ which
strengthens me .’”—1897, Sermon #2502

“It is easy work to scoff at the Bible and to deny the Truth of God. I think
that I could myself pose as a learned man, in that way, if ever the devil should
sufficiently control me to make me feel any ambition of that sort. In fact,
there is scarcely a fool in Christendom who cannot make himself a name among
modern thinkers if he will but blaspheme loudly enough, for that seems to be the
road to fame, nowadays, among the great mass of mankind! They are dubbed
“thoughtful” who thus insult the Truth of God as the soldiers, with their spit,
insulted the Christ of God.” —1903, Sermon #2824

“It takes a strong man to stand under a weight of Divine Grace here below. It
needs a robust constitution to bear the weight of Divine Love even here. It is
almost enough to kill a man and one may as well die of excessive joy as of
excessive grief—but what will it be when our souls are so enlarged and we are so
strengthened that we can enjoy God forever? Five minutes in Heaven and then let
me come back—but then, if I did come back, you know, I should have heard
unspeakable words which it would not be lawful for a man to utter! As I have not
been there, I cannot tell you of all the wondrous things that help to make up
the glory of Heaven. And if I hadbeen there, it might be unlawful for me to tell
you, so I will not attempt to intrude upon that reserved ground! But what I have
to say to you is, Let us allgo there and see for ourselves!”—1897, Sermon #2502

“It must be sheer superstition, utterly unwarranted by Holy Scripture, which
tells us that the Lord’s Supper can only be properly received in the morningand
that we ought not to eat anything before we partake of the sacred emblems! We
reject all such nonsense, for we find no authority for it in the only standard
which we recognize, that is, the inspired Word of God!”—1899, Sermon #2638

“ For the LORDGod isa sun and shield: the LORDwill give grace and glory: no good
thing will Hewithhold from them that walk uprightly.Take notice of the whole of
that last sentence! Do not go and quote half of it and say, ‘God has promised
that He will withhold no good thing.’ It is only promised to, ‘them that walk
uprightly.’ And if you walk crookedly, the promise does not belong to you! It is
uprightwalking that brings downrightblessing! You shall lack no good thing from
God when your whole heart is made good towards God.”—1897, Sermon #2502

“To see Christ is blessed, but unless we tell what we have seen, the blessing
may be like a talent in a napkin, or a candle under a bushel. I would like to
come round to each one of you and to say, ‘Dear Brother, dear Sister, do you
live in the light of God’s Countenance? Has Jesus Christ shone upon you? Is He
your Beloved and are you His beloved?’ Then come and let Him have the use of
your tongue! Let Him have the use of those bright eyes of yours to tell with
beaming countenance what the Lord has done for you and what He has said that He
will do for others!”—1898, Sermon #2561

“A true prayer is the echo of the eternal purpose of God.”—1902, Sermon #2800
“Everything of good that we enjoy, however little it may be, comes from
God.”—1897, Sermon #2504 “When our comforts become our idols, they work our
ruin. But when they make us bless God for them, then they become messengers from
God which help toward our growth in Divine Grace.”—1897, Sermon #2504

“I want you to be on just such intimate terms with somebody or other in the
Bible—John, if you like, or Mary. Sit at Jesus’ feet with her. Or Martha—it will
not hurt you to make the acquaintance of Martha and do a great deal of serving,
though I do not want you to get cumbered with it. But do find your choicest
friends in the Scripture. Take the whole company of Bible saints home to your
heart, let them live inside your soul. Let old Noah come in with his ark, if he
likes, and let Daniel come in with his lions’ den, if he pleases—and all the
rest of the godly men and women of the olden time—take them all into your very
nature and be on familiar terms with them! But, most of all, be specially
intimate with Him of whom they all speak, namely, Jesus Christ your blessed Lord
and Master!”—1900, Sermon #2679

“Our comforts are always safest when they are enveloped in gratitude. Let us
overlay the wood of our comfort with the gold plate of our gratitude—and so
shall it be preserved. An ordinary comfort protected with a sheet of gratitude
shall become to us a double means of Grace.”—1897, Sermon #2504

“When a man once gives himself up to sin, it is like getting into a current
which bears him onward where, at first, he had no thought of going. If you wade
into the waters of sin, it will not be long that you will be able to retain a
foothold and, by-and-by, unless the Lord shall, in His Grace, prevent such a
calamity, the rapid current will bear you away to your everlasting destruction!”
—1903, Sermon #2825

“It is well, when you are glad, to rejoice as though you rejoiced not, for then
you will learn, when you are sorrowful, to mourn as though you sorrowed
not.”—1897, Sermon #2504 “There are some people who would never have been saved
if the Holy Spirit had not broken down their refuges of lies.”—1900, Sermon
#2698

“But let me remark, further, that the glory of DivineGrace is to be seen more
fully by-and-by, when the whole plan of Grace shall be worked out. I take it
that we have, none of us, a very clear idea of what the full design of Divine
Grace is. We say it is the blessing of the elect—it is, moreover, the indirect
blessing of the world through these elect ones—or, as good Elisha Coles has
said, and we endorse his saying, ‘Grace gives some good things to all men,
though it gives all good things to some men.’”—1901, Sermon #2763 “After the
thanksgiving, it is very clear that our Divine Lord broke the bread. We scarcely
know what kind of bread was used on that occasion. It was probably the thin
passover cake of the Jews, but there is nothing said in Scripture about the use
of leavened or unleavened bread and, therefore, it matters not which we use.
Where there is no ordinance, there is no obligation and we are, therefore, left
free to use the bread which it is our custom to eat.”—1899, Sermon #2638

“Many of our doubts and fears would fly away if we praised God more. And many of
our trials and troubles would altogether vanish if we began to sing of our
mercies. Oftentimes, depression of spirit that will not yield to a whole night
of wrestling, would yield to ten minutes of thanksgiving before God! Praying is
the stalk of the wheat, but praise is the very ear of it. Praying is the leaf of
the rose, but praise is the rose itself, redolent with the richest
perfume.”—1900, Sermon #2679

“Brothers and Sisters, pray for us, and pray for all the preachers of the Word,
that they may be stars in the right hand of Christ!”—1897, Sermon #2498 “If men
had kept the Covenant of the Lord—if Adam, for instance, had kept it in the
Garden of Eden, the rose would have been without a thorn to tear his flesh, and
the enjoyment of life would never have been marred by the bitterness of toil or
grief.”—1897, Sermon #2506 “The ordinance of the Lord’s Supper is not meant for
the conversion of sinners. It is not intended to lead men to salvation, but it
is intended for those who are already saved, those who are converted.”—1900,
Sermon #2699

“There are many people who approve of laws as far as they keep their fellow men
in check, but they do not want laws for themselves. ‘Oh, says such a person, ‘of
course everybody ought to be honest! My servants ought not to embezzle, they
ought not to rob me, they ought to give me a good day’s work for their wage.’
When the argument is turned round and the question is about giving a good
day’swagefor the work, then they talk about political economy—which means that
it is absolutely necessary that men should be dishonest!”—1897, Sermon #2506

“‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’ There is something in these words
of our Savior always calculated to benefit us. When we behold the sufferings of
men they afflict and appall us, but the sufferings of our Savior, while they
move us to grief, have about them something sweet and full of consolation. Here,
even here, in this black spot of grief, we find our Heaven while gazing upon the
Cross. This, which might be thought a frightful sight, makes the Christian glad
and joyous. If he laments the cause, yet he rejoices in the consequences.”—1898,
Sermon #2562

“As Thomas read the Deity of Christ in His wounds, so do I read the eternal
glory of His people in the mockery which He endured on their behalf.” —1903,
Sermon #2825 “When God writes His Law in our hearts, He writes that which will
never be blotted out! Once let Him take the pen in His hand and begin to write.
“Holiness unto the Lord” right across a man’s heart—and the devil, himself, can
never remove that sacred line!”—1897, Sermon #2506 “One kiss from God is the
soul of Heaven laid to the heart of a burdened sinner.”—1897, Sermon #2507
“Everywhere, lukewarmness in religion is to be loathed and abandoned, for it is
a gross and glaring inconsistency!”—1902, Sermon #2802 “There is nothing that is
so soul-strengthening as taking another look at the bronze serpent, or having
another plunge in the fountain filled with blood, or feeding, once again, on the
inexhaustible provision that is stored up for us in the Person of our
Lord!”—1899, Sermon #2638

“If, as I have often declared to you, it is the command of God that we believe
on Jesus Christ whom He has sent, you are guilty of sin every moment that you
live without faith in Christ! It is commanded of you, therefore you can clearly
say you have a right to it, for any man has a right to obey a Divine
command!”—1901, Sermon #2763

“Salvation is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs but it is God that
shows mercy! It is not the man who preaches, who accomplishes the work, but God
working through the man. He could dispense with the man altogether if He
pleased.”—1900, Sermon #2700 “Christ will go from you if you want Him to go. He
forces Himself upon no man—the Grace of God does not violate the will of man—it
acts in accordance with man’s nature and achieves the Divine purpose without
disturbing the individuality of the man.”—1897, Sermon #2507

“The day will come, dear Friend, when your cheeks, all befouled with weeping,
shall be washed and made fair to look upon. Your eyes may be weary with waiting
and watching, and red with weeping, but that weeping shall endure only for a
night. ‘Joy comes in the morning,’ as surely as the morning comes after the
night! Bear your sorrows bravely, for they are appointed of your Heavenly Father
in supreme wisdom. Bear them joyfully, for they will bring forth to you the
peaceable fruits of righteousness.”—1897, Sermon #2508 “…he who is meek is meek
without trying!”—1897, Sermon #2508

“The Lord beautifies the meek, I think, in this way—he puts into them a peace of
mindwhich fiery spirits never have—and which quick spirits do not know. They are
not easily ruffled or disturbed. They have, as others have, much to annoy them,
but they are so put into Christ that they cannot be put out. They are rendered
so deeply calm, so solidly patient by the indwelling of the Spirit of God, that
they bear without seeming to bear, and that which would crush another seems to
have no weight with them. The deep peace of mind of a truly meek Christian is, I
think, a very beautiful thing.”—1897, Sermon #2508

“We ought to be ashamed of being ashamed of Jesus! We ought to be afraid of
being afraid to acknowledge Him! We ought to tremble at trembling to confess Him
and to resolve that we will take all suitable opportunities that we can find of
saying, first to relatives, and then to all others with whom we come into
contact, ‘We serve the Lord Christ.’”—1900, Sermon #2680 “The Church of Rome can
never again be put in the ranks of Christian Churches!”—1899, Sermon #2639

“Souls convinced of sin have no time or inclination to quarrel! When a man feels
that he must ‘flee from the wrath to come,’ he does not notice that someone else
is not respectful to him. No, he thinks of himself as a lost sinner—and lost
sinners must not be so foolish as to stand upon their dignity, nor even to
insist upon their rights and privileges!”—1901, Sermon #2764 “There cannot be
any Grace at all except as we know Christ!”—1900, Sermon #2700

“ISAIAH 44:21, 22. Remember these, O Jacob and Israel; for you are Myservant: I
have formed you, you are Myservant: O Israel, you shall not be forgotten of Me.
I have blotted out, asa thick cloud, your transgressions, and,asa cloud, your
sins: return unto Me; for I have redeemed you. Out of all the world, God had a
chosen people, His own Israel, to whom He revealed Himself—but they also turned
aside to idols, yet here He bids them return to Him. Even to this day they
bravely bear their protest against idols. I would to God that they also knew the
Christ of God and worshipped Him. All Believers are the true Israel after the
spirit and are to maintain forever the Glory of the one only living and true
God.”— 1903, Sermon #2847

“Go through the world, Beloved, blindfolded to all but Christ, and you shall do
well!” —1903, Sermon #2825 “There is no bondage connected with endeavoring to be
like Christ! In fact, there is no joy that ever sparkles in the eyes like the
joy of a reconciled soul.”—1897, Sermon #2509

“The common sin of husbands and wives should be confessed unitedly, and there is
nothing more natural, more beautiful, and more edifying than for husbands and
wives to pray together, to confess sin together, and to offer thanksgiving
together. In all these they may be most fittingly one. Yet there is and there
must be some sin which the man shall bring before God and before God alone,
feeling that even his dearest one would be an intruder in that act of personal
mourning for sin. And when the Spirit of God is in the woman’s heart, she feels
that, though she has no earthly secret from her husband, yet there is something
between God and her soul into which even her husband cannot enter. Her mourning
for her sin, when she first seeks the Savior, would be hindered by her husband’s
interposition, so she gets alone. And his mourning for sin, when he first seeks
the Savior, or when afterwards he is conscious of some backsliding and longs to
return to his Lord, must be apart and alone.”—1897, Sermon #2510

“I would not have you go with a lukewarm heart, even to distribute tracts! I
would not have you dare to visit the sick unless your heart is filled with love
to Christ! Either do such work well, or do not do it at all. Either put your
heart into the work, or let someone else do it.”—1902, Sermon #2802

“The tried and troubled ones who can still cry, “Blessed be the name of the
Lord,” are not driven to despair, for despair shuts the mouth and makes a man
sit in sullen silence, or else it opens his lips in bitter complaints and in
multiplied murmurings. But, when a man can truly say,“Blessed be God,” then
despair has not mastered him—he still holds his own and he has on his side far
greater force than the devil and the most trying circumstances can bring to bear
upon him to vanquish him. O Friends, if you are afraid of being overcome, take
to praising God! If you are in trouble and do not know how to bear it, divert
your thoughts by praising God! Get away from the present trial by blessing and
magnifying His holy name!”—1899, Sermon #2640

“When a Christian man so lives that others see something about him which they do
not perceive in themselves, that is one way in which they are often attracted
towards the Christian life.”—1900, Sermon #2680

“As there are words in Heaven so high that it were not lawful for a man to utter
them, so are there words down here in the deep corruption of our fallen spirits
that it were not lawful for a man to utter save in the ear of the Most High!
Therefore, each individual must mourn apart.”—1897, Sermon #2510 “When the two
seas meet—the sea of the saved one’s gladness and the sea of the Savior’s
joy—what blessed floods they make!”—1900, Sermon #2701

“ISAIAH 44:18, 19. They have not known nor understood: for Hehas shut their
eyes, that they cannot see; and theirhearts, that they cannot understand. And
none considers inhis heart, neither is there knowledge nor understandingto say,
I have burned part of it in the fire; yes, also I have baked bread upon the
coals thereof; I have roasted flesh, and eaten it: and shall I make the residue
thereof an abomination? ShallI fall down to the stock of a tree?Shall I, an
intelligent being, worship gold, silver, wood, or brass, however excellent may
be the workmanship of it? Shall I, an immortal being, cast myself down before a
piece of bread and worship that, as some do who first worship, and then eat
their god? Oh, what strange infatuation!”—1903, Sermon #2847 ““The idea we get
of others is close upon the heels of the idea we ought to have of ourselves,
except when it is a good notion—and then the less we indulge the thought as
being a picture of ourselves, the better!”1902, Sermon #2766

“I take it to be an awful violation of the natural delicacy of the human mind
when any person is invited to make oral confession to a priest. I can myself
scarcely conceive of anything that could be more degrading to the heart and more
injurious to the conscience than the infernal brazenness of heart that permits
anybody to attempt such a thing! As the inspired Prophet would have said, they
must have “a whore’s forehead” before they can dare to unmask their hearts
before their fellow men. No, no, Brothers and Sisters, such a thing must not be
so much as namedamong us! What shame remains in us ought to prevent such a
shameful or shameless thing as that. Hence, our mourning must be apart.”—1897,
Sermon #2510

“When a man blesses God for the bitter, the Lord often sends him the sweet. If
he can praise God in the night, the daylight is not far off. There never was a
heart yet that waited and wanted to praise God but the Lord soon gave it
opportunities of lifting up Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs unto
Him.”—1899, Sermon #2640

“If you can only pray in public, you do not pray at all! If you can only join in
the general confession, you have uttered a public lie! You are only right before
God when it is your own sin, felt in your own heart, confessed by yourself
before your own God, unknown to anybody else and altogether known to Him.”—1897,
Sermon #2510

“I do not know that the faith of Abraham, as a saint, when he offered up his
son, was greater than the faith of David, as a sinner, when he believed that God
could make even him whiter than snow!”—1897, Sermon #2510

“Our common talk should be much more spiritual than it often is. There is no
fear of degrading sacred subjects by the frequent use of them—the fear lies much
the other way—lest by a disuse of them we come to forget them. This blessed
Book, the Holy Word of God, is a fit companion for your leisure as well as for
your labor, for the time of your sleeping and the time of your waking. It will
bless you in your private meditations and equally cheer the social hearth and
comfort you when, in mutual friendship, you speak the one with the other. Those
who truly love God greatly love His holy Word.”—1897, Sermon #2511

“Beware, I pray you, of being like many nominal Christians who know not Christ!
Beware of that Christianity from which Christ has been eliminated! You must
first receive the Master, or else it is idle to be associated with His servants.
You may say that you belong to His Church, but if you are not joined to the
Head, what will it avail you to claim to be in the body? If you are not vitally
united to the Lord so as to become one spirit with Him, of what service will it
be to you that you are reckoned among His followers and that your names are
written on an earthly church roll?”—1900, Sermon #2701

“Stagnation in a church is the devil’s delight.”—1902, Sermon #2802 “Never be
ashamed to speak up for your Lord, Beloved. Never blush to acknowledge that you
belong to Him. No, if you blush at all, blush with shame that you do not love
Him more and serve Him better.” —1903, Sermon #2825

“I look upon a murmuring spirit as the forewarning of stormy weather in a
rebellious soul—and I regard a praiseful spirit as the forecast of a happy time
to come to the loyal joyous soul. God has prepared the heart to receive the joy
which, otherwise, it, might not have been fit to accept at his hands. Be
comforted, then, dear Friends, if you find in your hearts the desire to praise
God, and belief that the Lord will find in His heart the willingness to speedily
bless you!”—1899, Sermon #2640

“What a blessed kind of hearing that is when a man hears with longing, wishing,
hungering all the way through the sermon! When the fish are hungry, then is the
time for fishing, and when souls hunger and thirst after righteousness, thenis
the time for preaching!”—1897, Sermon #2512 “I do not know a stronger force in
all the world than utter helplessness—for that is the end of all care. Many and
many a time I have tried till my head has ached, to work out a problem in Church
government, but have not discovered the solution—I could not see any way out of
it. So I have just done as a schoolboy would who shuts up the two parts of his
slate and puts it on the shelf. I have said to myself, ‘I will never have
anything more to do with the matter, but will leave it for the Lord to solve.’
And I have found that the proposition has been worked out for me in due
time.”—1903, Sermon #2848

It is God’s usual way to save men by their using the means of Grace, by their
constantly, attentively, intensely, earnestly hearing the Word of God!”—1897,
Sermon #2512

“‘Without faith it is impossible to please God.’ This is not popular teaching,
but we never wish to teach a popular theology. It is not one that will commend
itself to the natural mind of men—we never thought it would—we would have been
thunderstruck if our preaching had been admired by such persons! And we would
have gone home and felt that we were not sent of God to preach at all. But,
nevertheless, this is true, ‘without faith it is impossible to please
God.’”—1897, Sermon #2513

“God cannot reward them that seek Him on the ground of their merit, for they
have none. It must, therefore, be upon the ground of Grace. This introduces into
our faith, as a point of necessary belief, that we believe in Jesus Christ by
whose merit we are accepted—that diligently seeking God, we find Him in
Christ—and this brings to us the great Gospel reward. God bestows upon us His
favor, His Grace and the blessings of His Covenant as a gracious reward, not
because of ourmerit, but because of the merit of His Son, Jesus Christ! This we
must believe, or we have not really come to God aright. That is the doctrine
asserted in our text, ,without faith it is impossible to please God.’”—1897,
Sermon #2513

“There are no good works except those that spring from a living, loving, lasting
faith in God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”—1897, Sermon #2513

“Some of you pray when you are, as it were, at Calvary, but not at Gethsemane. I
mean you pray when the trouble comes upon you, but not when it is on the road.
Yet your Master here teaches you that to conquer at your Calvary, you must
commence by wrestling at your Gethsemane. When as yet it is but the shadow of
your coming trial that spreads its black wings over you, cry unto God for
help.”1902, Sermon #2767

“Men are eager enough to get temporal things, but when you come to spiritual
things, there are thousands of people who seem only anxious to prove that they
can never be saved!”—1900, Sermon #2701

“Oh, dear Friends, if you can share the lot of Christians when they are in
trouble. If you can take God andaffliction. If you can accept Christ and a
cross—then your decision to be His follower is true and real! It has been tested
by the afflictions and the trials which you know belong to the people of God,
yet you are content to suffer with them in taking their God to be your God,
too.”—1900, Sermon #2680

“No creature can be a success unless it pleases its Creator. No man can be a
success unless he has treasure laid up for immortality, a mansion in Heaven, a
place to abide in the islands of the blessed in the land of the hereafter.
Without God , he is a complete failure in life.”—1898, Sermon #2559

“If there is anything in the world that can make sin to be more than ordinarily
sinful, it is when sin is persisted in, notwithstanding the manifest warnings of
God.”—1902, Sermon #2802

“One might have supposed that if men once believed the Bible to be God’s Word,
and Jesus Christ to be God’s atoning Sacrifice, they would be eager to have
Christ as their Savior. But it is not so. And often, as I preach, I am driven
back to this conclusion at which I arrived long ago—It is not your power, Sir
Preacher, that can save men. You may preach and argue, and reason as best you
can, but until the arm of the Lord is revealed, and the Power of the Holy Spirit
sends home the argument, that which is a mere matter of argument would be
irresistible to a rationalman, yet, as a spiritual force, fails to have any
influence over the carnal mind. It is not by might, nor by power, but by the
Spirit of the Lord that the work of salvation is accomplished! O Spirit of the
living God, send home the Truth of God by Your own almighty Power, for Jesus’
sake!”—1897, Sermon #2513

“No man is so free, no man is so happy as he who loyally bows before the King of
kings—to serve God is to reign! He who has God for his King, is himself a
king!”—1903, Sermon #2848

“Long before a man knows that his transgressions are pardoned, God may have
pardoned and blotted them out. I do not say that a man receives actual pardon in
his own soul, or a sense of justification without knowing it. I cannot believe,
with some, that a man may be born again without being aware of it. I know there
never was a natural birth without pangs and pains—and I am equally sure that
there never will be a spiritual birthwithout some suffering and some agonies. A
man is not to be born again when he is asleep—he is to know it and know it, he
will, at some time or other in his life! Not constantly, it may be, but
nevertheless he will know, even if it is only for an hour, that he is a child of
God! I think he who never had one minute of assurance, never had faith. He who
never knew himself to be a child of God, who never could say, “I believe in
Jesus,” never could see his sins blotted out—I think such an one does not know
what faith is. It may endure for ever so short a time, but if it is real
assurance, it springs from true faith and the man is saved.”—1898, Sermon #2563

“The wonder of extraordinary love is that God should make it such an ordinary
thing, that He should give to us ‘marvelous loving kindness,’ and yet should
give it so often that it becomes a daily blessing, and yet still remains
marvelous!”—1900, Sermon #2702


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  CHAPTER 4: VOL. 2 CONTD
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“We are all born great the first time—it is only when we are born the second
time, born from above—that we come to be little. When we were born the first
time, we were so great that we were really nothing—but when we are born a second
time, we are so little that we are everything in Christ!”—1897, Sermon #2514

“We need not wonder if those who have no knowledge of God, no Savior, no Father
in Heaven, should try to get all they can out of this world, for they have no
other! Well may they make gold their god, for they have no God who can give them
any pleasure or delight. But it should not be so with you who are the
twice-born, the immortal, the God-descended. You who have eternal life within
you, you in whose bodies the Holy Spirit is dwelling as in a temple—and it is so
with you unless you are hypocrites and are making a pretense to that which is
not true—you should not be fretting and stewing about what you shall eat, or
what you shall drink and how you shall be clothed! Endowed with such a noble
nature, called to higher things than the heathen have ever dreamed of, descend
not to the trifles which content them, but let your spirit rise above these
earthly things!”—1897, Sermon #2515

“Remember what David said, long ago—“Cast your burden upon the Lord and He shall
sustain you: He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.” But if you cast
your burden upon the Lord, do not go looking after it when I have pronounced the
benediction—leave it altogether! The fault with many of us is that when we have
cast our burden upon the Lord, we beg Him to let us have it back! And if He
grants our foolish request, it comes back twice as heavy as it was before. Oh,
that we were wise enough to leave our troubles with our Father who is in Heaven
as little children leave things with their father! Then we shall find that He
comforts us in all our tribulation.”—1899, Sermon #2640

“The least mercy from God is a miracle.”—1900, Sermon #2702 “Whenever there is
the shadow of a coming trouble looming before you, let there also be the
substance of more intense communion with God!”1902, Sermon #2767 “Our blessed
Savior is honestly intolerant! He says, ‘He that believes and is baptized shall
be saved, but He that believes not shall be damned.’Because He loves the souls
of men, He will not bolster up the fiction of universal charity.” —1903, Sermon
#2826

“Whatever the other Bethlehem people might be, there was among them one notable
being, and it was worthwhile to join the nation for the sake of union with him.
Ruth found it all out by degrees. There was a near kinsman among those people
and his name was Boaz. She went to glean in his field and, by-and-by, she was
married to him. Ah, that was the reason why I cast in my lot with the people of
God, for I said to myself, ‘There is One among them who, whatever faults theymay
have, is so fair and lovely that He more than makes up for all their
imperfections! My Lord Jesus Christ, in the midst of His people, makes them all
fair in His fairness and makes me feel that to be poor with the poorest and most
illiterate of the Church of Christ, meeting in a village barn, is an unspeakable
honor since He is among them!”—1900, Sermon #2680

“Being in the Kingdom of God, and enjoying its privileges, then seek to extend
that Kingdom. Go forth every morning, conquering and to conquer! With the
weapons of love and kindness, seek to win men to Christ. Enlisted in this holy
army, carry on a constant crusade for Christ. From your earliest waking
thoughts, till you fall asleep at night, be intent, first and foremost, to win
other hearts to Christ. Let all your care go in this direction—to serve God, to
live for God, to glorify God! Seek this as earnestly as the merchant seeks more
trade, as the miser seeks more gold, as the sick man seeks a return of health:
‘Seek you first the Kingdom of God.’”—1897, Sermon #2515

“I cannot understand the indifference of some people to the crime that flows in
black torrents down our streets. It seems to me that if I am a Christian, I am
to seek to promote the kingdom of righteousness everywhere! And that the side I
ought to take in social life, politics and everything else, is the side of
righteousness.”—1897, Sermon #2515

“O Brothers and Sisters, in proportion as you are holy, the absence of the Light
of God’s Countenance will be grief to you! And as Jesus was perfectly holy, it
was the utmost anguish to Him to have to cry to His Father, ‘Why have You
forsaken Me!’”—1902, Sermon #2803

“David said, ‘I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the
righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.’ If you will care only to seek
your bread, yourself. If you will make your gain your great objective in life,
then you may provide for yourself. But if you will serve God. If you will mind
His business, He will mind your business! And as surely as He lives, He will
provide for His own.”—1897, Sermon #2518“Always expect the unexpected when you
are dealing with God! Look to see, in God, and from God, what you never saw
before, for the very things which will seem to unbelief—to be utterly
impossible—will be those which are most likely to happen when you are dealing
with Him whose arm is Omnipotent, and whose heart is faithful and true.”—1900,
Sermon #2702

“Why does God lay trouble upon His people and comfort them in it? It is that He
may make them comforters of others—“that we may be able to comfort them which
are in any trouble.” A man who has never had any trouble is very awkward when he
tries to comfort troubled hearts. Hence, the minister of Christ, if he is to be
of much use in God’s service, must have great trouble. ‘Prayer, meditation, and
affliction,’ says Melanchthon,‘are the three things that make the minister of
God.’ There must be prayer. There must be meditation and there must be
affliction. You cannot pronounce the promise correctly in the ears of the
afflicted unless you, yourself, have known its preciousness in your own hour of
trial. It is God’s will that the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, should often work
by men according to that ancient word of His, ‘Comfort you, comfort you My
people, says your God. Speak you comfortably to Jerusalem.’ These comforting men
are to be made—they are not born so—and they have to be made by passing through
the furnace themselves. They cannot comfort others unless they have had trouble
and have been comforted in it.”—1899, Sermon #2640

“ And as they went to tell His disciples, behold, Jesusmet them—Happy are the
ministers who meet their Lord when they are going up the pulpit stairs! Blessed
are the teachers who meet Jesus when they are going to the class! They will be
sure to preach and teach well when that is the case. ‘As they went to tell His
disciples, behold, Jesus met them.’”—1897, Sermon #2518

“There are many ways of praising God. We should do it with the lips and grateful
is the voice of song in the ears of the Lord God of Sabaoth. We should do it by
our daily conversation—let our acts be acts of praise, as well as our words be
words of praise. We should do it even by the very look of our eyes and by the
appearance of our countenance. Let not your face be sad, let your countenance be
joyous! Sing wherever you go, yes, when you are laden with trouble, let no man
see it.”—1900, Sermon #2681

“You may cut the evil weed, self-righteousness, up, but when you think you have
got to the last root of it, it will be shooting up again before you can sharpen
your knife to cut it up once more! This evil thing is bred in man’s nature. When
you preach against it, see how men will roar at you—they cannot bear that
teaching.”—1898, Sermon #2594

“Oh, to have a cheerful spirit, not the levity of the thoughtless, nor the
gaiety of the foolish, nor even the mirth of the healthy—there is a cheerful
spirit which is the gift of Grace—that can and does rejoice evermore. Then, when
troubles come we bear them cheerfully! Let fortune smile, we receive it with
equanimity. Or let losses befall us, we endure them with resignation, being
willing, so long as God is glorified, to accept anything at His hands.”—1903,
Sermon #2850

“Men are frightened into Hell, but not into Heaven. Men are sometimes driven to
Sinai by powerful preaching. Far be it from us to condemn the use of the Law of
God, for, “the Law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ,” but if you
want to get a man to Christ , the best way is to bring Christ to the man!”—1898,
Sermon #2563

“I can hardly realize how terrible will be the doom of those who, after making a
profession of religion, have prostituted their knowledge of the inner working of
the Church of God and made it the material for novels in which Christ’s Gospel
is held up to scorn!”1902, Sermon #2767

“Now, look at the text [Luke 18:1] again, and lay stress upon the first word of
it—‘ Menought always to pray.’ I feel so grateful to the Holy Spirit that this
text does not say, ‘ Saintsought always to pray,’ because then I might ask
myself, ‘Am I a saint?’ and, perhaps, I might have to answer, ‘No, I am far from
it.’ But the text does not say, ‘saints,’ and it does not even say,
‘Tender-hearted, penitent persons who are in a very gracious state ought always
to pray.’ No, there is no description of character given in the text, for which
I am deeply grateful.”—1897, Sermon #2519

“Do not give way to little sins and you will not give way to big ones… Beware of
little sins and you will not commit great ones.”—1900, Sermon #2703

“All the adulteries, murders, unnatural vices and accursed blasphemies that had
ever defiled the race of mankind have not so certainly proved it to be a
desperately fallen thing as the murder of the Son of God, the Savior and the
Friend of men! This appalling crime of Deicide stands out without a parallel in
the history of the universe! There was no guilt in the Lord Jesus for which He
deserved to die, yet, with wicked hands, they crucified and slew Him.” —1903,
Sermon #2826

“Let all the infidels in the world assuredly know that the Gospel will win its
way, whatever they may do. Poor creatures! Their efforts to oppose it are not
worthy of our notice and we need not fear that they can stop the Truth of God!
As well might a gnat think to quench the sun! Go, tiny insect, and do it, if you
can! You will only burn your wings and die. As well might a fly think it could
drink the ocean dry. Drink the ocean, if you can—more likely you will sink in it
and so it will drink you!”—1898, Sermon #2594 “The man who knows that his
eternal future is secured by the unfailing Grace of God may forever praise the
Lord who has given him life!”—1900, Sermon #2682

“Christ’s testimony concerning His own ministry was, ‘The poor have the Gospel
preached to them,’ so if you bring me a Gospel which can only be understood by
gentlemen who have passed through Oxford or Cambridge University, I know that it
cannot be the Gospel of Christ!”—1902, Sermon #2803

“I can well believe that when the holy angels heard that the Son of God was to
be Incarnate, and when it oozed out that in human flesh He was to die, even they
could scarcely believe that such a thing was possible!”—1899, Sermon #2641

“The Jews prayed three times a day. There have been some holy men who have
prayed at least seven times a day, but I take it that the man who lives near to
God could not tell how many times a day he prays, for, whether he has three or
seven times of special and notable prayer in word, he will have 70 times seven
times in a day in which his heart speaks with God about everything that occurs.
I think that it is well before every action to breathe a prayer, and during
every action to breathe a prayer, and after every action to breathe a
prayer.”—1897, Sermon #2519“If your religion is to be worth anything, it must
have a heart—there must be heart-work—the work of the Holy Spirit upon your
hearts and the drawing near of your souls unto God. Otherwise, all your outward
performances, however excellent they may appear to be, will land you short of
Heaven.”—1903, Sermon #2851

“Ah, a religion that does not begin with secret prayer is not worth the label
you put on it! A religion that is not sustained by secret prayer is a lie! A
religion that does not grow through secret prayer may be puffed up, but it is
not truly builtupby the hand of God. No, no, if you seek to join a Church, to be
baptized, to come to the Communion Table and, all the while, you do not pray,
your religion is but the baseless fabric of a vision and will disappear! You
must either pray or you will faint!”—1897, Sermon #2519

“The most effective sermons are those which make opposers of the Gospel bite
their lips and gnash their teeth.”—1898, Sermon #2594

“There is no going to Heaven by following the road to Hell! There is no finding
pardon while continuing in sin. Depend upon it, Mr. Drunkard, you will not be
forgiven for your drunkenness if you still go on with your drinking. Let not the
man who is unchaste imagine that he can go on with his sin and yet be forgiven.
Let not the thief dream that there is any pardon for him unless he quits his
evil course and tries to make such restitution as he can to those whom he has
wronged.”—1900, Sermon #2704

“You shall never so fully and so truly find yourself as when you have lost
yourself in God.”—1899, Sermon #2641 “Life without God’s love is death. But put
God’s love with it and then what a song we ought to send up to His Throne if we
feel that He has given us both spiritual life and infinite love.”—1900, Sermon
#2682

“I would rather be the means of saving a soul from death than be the greatest
orator on earth. I would rather bring the poorest woman in the world to the feet
of Jesus than I would be made Archbishop of Canterbury. There is no honor and no
dignity under Heaven that can content us unless souls are won for Christ! And if
souls are won, we shall care little how the great work was done instrumentally,
for God will have the whole of the glory of it.”—1897, Sermon #2520

“Ah, poor Sinner, I daresay your first prayer is full of blunders, but that does
not matter as long as your heart is in it. The Lord knows how to put our prayers
together and take all the contradictions out of them—He understands the meaning
of our sighs and our groans!”—1897, Sermon #2520

“Often times a sinner will become more adept in guilt and more inclined to evil
the further he advances in years. Certain sins may decline through the weakening
of the flesh, but the sins of the heart do not. The power to sin may grow less,
but the will to sin continues to increase as the sinner grows older.”1902,
Sermon #2768

“I have heard preachers ignorantly talk about ‘natural’ love to the Gospel—there
cannot be such a thing! I heard someone say that there was a ‘natural’ love to
Christ—it is all rubbish! Nature cannot beget a love to Christ, nor love to any
good thing—that must come of God, for all love is from Him.”—1898, Sermon #2594

“In reference to this matter of predestination and free will, I have often heard
men ask, ‘How do you make them agree?’ I think there is another question just as
difficult to solve, ‘How can you make them differ?’ The two may be as easily
made to concur as to clash.”—1903, Sermon #2828

“And oh, poor troubled Sinner, if you cannot pray, but can only get alone and
moan, that is good praying!”—1897, Sermon #2520“Railway men do not build bridges
over rivers without an intention of sending engines and trains across them—and
God does not give faith without an intention of letting it be tried. And He
wants you to know, when He does try you, or permit others to try you, that He
still loves you. When He leaves you for a little while in the dark, He loves you
just as much as when you were in the light.”—1900, Sermon #2682

“You will be as surely damned by your righteousness, if you trust in it, as you
will by your unrighteousness! Christ, alone, the Gift of the free Grace of
God—this is the gate of Heaven—but all self-satisfaction, all boasting, all
exaltation of yourself above your fellow men is mischievous and ruinous, and
will surely be deadly to your spirit forever.”—1900, Sermon #2704

“Think it not a strange thing that you are subject to this eclipse—others have
been eclipsed, too—and all those who have found the Sun of Righteousness have
had to run through the dark to get at Him! There must be a dark tunnel before we
can get at Christ and we must grope through worse than an Egyptian night before
we behold the face of God with joy.”—1899, Sermon #2642

“If, dear Friend, you are self-condemned and can see no reason why the Lord
should have mercy upon you, yet He spies a reason in the very fact of your being
unable to see any! He finds, in that very brokenness, misery and helplessness of
yours, a reason why His own sweet love and mercy should come and deal with you,
even with you.”—1898, Sermon #2564

“I do not know how to put Christ’s love more plainly, or give the invitation
more simply. I wonder that souls do not come and yet I know that you will not
come unless my Master draws you!”—1897, Sermon #2520

“If you think that your prayers help in any degree to put away sin, you make an
antichrist of your prayers! Christ’s blood and righteousness form the onlyground
of your acceptance before God. If you reckon your prayers as a ground, or
medium, or even helpto your acceptance with God, you push the Cross of Christ
into the background and put your prayers into the place of the only Substitute
for sinners—and the more you pile them up, the more you multiply your
sin!”—1903, Sermon #2851

“Now, Beloved, possibly you will say to me, ‘How is it that the Gospel—God’s
glad tidings to guilty man, the Gospel which is full of Grace, which is, indeed,
all of Grace from top to bottom—comes in the shape of a command? Does it not
tend to make your preaching legal?” My answer to that question is that if it did
have that effect, I could not help it. I am bound to preach what I find in God’s
Word. Whatever may be the consequences, I must not alter the form of my Master’s
message!”—1902, Sermon #2803

“Dear Friends, you know as well as I do that there are many sorts of Christians.
I am sorry to say that there are some nominal Christians who are no credit to
Christianity—they bear the name of Christians and though I will not say that
they are dead—yet certainly they are very sickly and seem ready to die. They
stand among the people of God and their names are put down in the Church Book,
but if they are spiritually alive, theirs is a very feeble form of life. Their
heart is not in God’s ways. They are active and energetic when they get into the
shop, but they are half asleep when they are in the sanctuary. They leave
“footprints on the sands of time” when they are devoting their attention to
politics, but when they come to the things of God, they tread so lightly that we
cannot tell that they have passed that way!”—1897, Sermon #2521

“And, mark you, that mistakes concerning the Gospel are never little things—they
are always dangerous, they are always painful. Sinners have more griefs than
they need have because they have less knowledge than they should have.”—1899,
Sermon #2642

“It is good evidence that Grace has been given to any man when he looks upon
Christ, obeying the great command—‘Look unto Me, and be you saved, all the ends
of the earth.’ This is the first sign and token of Believers and it is to be our
continual distinguishing mark, for we are always to be ‘looking unto Jesus, the
Author and Finisher of our faith.’”—1900, Sermon #2683

“Dear Friends, look not towards any sin, for looking breeds longing, and longing
begets lusting, and lusting brings sinning! Keep your eyes right and you may
keep your heart right. If that first woman had not looked upon the forbidden
tree and seen “that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the
eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise,” she would not have plucked and
eaten of the fruit—and we would not have been the children of sorrow.”—1897,
Sermon #2521

“I used to think that if I once told this wondrous story of “Free Grace and
dying love,” everybody would believe it. But I have long since learned that so
hard is the heart of man, that he will sooner be damned than be saved by
Christ!”—1900, Sermon #2704 “Among the wise concealments of God is that which
hides from open view the depravity of our heart and the corruption of our
nature.”—1903, Sermon #2828

“Old John Newton used to say, ‘You who are called Calvinists—though you are not
merely Calvinists, but the old, legitimate successors of Christ—you ought, above
all men, to be very gentle with your opponents, for, remember, according to your
own principles, they cannot learn Truth of God unless they are taught of God.
And if you have been taught of God, you ought to bless His name—and if they have
not, you should not be angry with them, but pray to God to give them a better
education.’ Do not let us make any extra “offense of the Cross” by our own ill
humor, but let us show our love to the Cross by loving and trying bless those
who have been offended with it.”—1898, Sermon #2594

“O Friends, if we begin to look upon iniquity, we shall almost certainly fall!
There are some sins that we poor, frail creatures cannot endure to look at. We
are as moths near a burning candle—the only safety for us is to get out of the
room and fly into the open air. But if we stop near the light, we shall
certainly burn our wings and, perhaps, even destroy ourselves. So we must take
care that we do not get used to sin. I believe that even the common reading in
the newspapers of accounts of evil things is defiling to us and if we habitually
read such things, we shall come, at last, to think less and less of the coarser
forms of vice than we ought to do.”—1897, Sermon #2521 “Sin will ruin any man.
If it is not forsaken, it will eternally ruin him.”—1898, Sermon #2565

“What a dreadful lie it is when men stand up as sponsors for a child and promise
and vow various things, none of which are within their power to perform! As to
anything that anybody ever promised with regard to your soul, what can another
person do for you in such a matter as that? The most earnest faith in your
parents can never bring you to Heaven unless you, also, have faith in
Jesus!”1902, Sermon #2770

“Beloved Brothers and Sisters, pray that God will bless the message I am trying
to deliver, in deep solemnity of soul, to poor sinners. Ask Him to send it home
to their hearts by the effectual working of His Holy Spirit.”—1902, Sermon #2803

“Nothing can keep us away from the fangs of error like falling into the embraces
of Christ. Looking unto Jesus is the great remedy against looking unto sin! Turn
away my eyes from vanity, my Lord, by filling them full with a vision of
Yourself and holding me spellbound with that grandest spectacle that eyes of
men, or angels, or even of God, Himself did ever see—the spectacle of God
Incarnate bearing our sin in His own body on the Cross! Keep your eyes fixed
there and all will be well.”—1897, Sermon #2521

“It will never do for any man to hope to be saved by putting prayer into the
place of genuine repentance and immediate forsaking of sin.”—1903, Sermon #2851

“There is a poor soul in this place now—I have talked with her many times. I
know her sad condition and I have often shaped my discourse so as to meet her
case. Many times I have thought that the Lord has given me some sweet word that
would break the gates of brass and set the imprisoned one at liberty, It has
taken a little of the pride out of me and shown me how impossible it is for man,
when he labors the hardest, to bring a soul out of bondage before the Lord’s
promised hour of redemption comes.”—1899, Sermon #2642

“I invite each one of you personally to offer this prayer, “Turn away my eyes
from beholding vanity; and quicken me in Your way.” It is the preacher’s prayer.
Let each of us who preach the Gospel ask God to keep the dust out of our eyes
and make us full of spiritual life, for, if we are not filled with heavenly
life, we shall be a curse to our people instead of a blessing.”—1897, Sermon
#2521

“They say when a man is sick, that it is a good thing to take him to his native
place. And when a true Believer’s soul gets faint and unbelieving, let him
breathe the air of Calvary over again!”—1900, Sermon #2705

“It is quite true that of all sights in the world, the sight of Christ crucified
is the sweetest. People say, ‘See Naples and die.’ But it would be worthwhile to
see Christ, by faith, even if that sight were necessarily followed by death. Of
all that can be seen in the world, there is nothing so delightful as a believing
sight of Jesus Christ!”—1900, Sermon #2683

“You cannot be a blessing to others unless God has first blessed you. We do not
encourage selfishness in anything, but we do say that you must fill your own
pitcher before another man can drink out of it. You must have bread in your own
hands before you can break it for the multitudes. It is no use for you to
attempt to sow out of an empty basket, for that would be sowing nothing but
wind. First of all, then, you must get the blessing yourself, for until it can
be said to you, ‘I will bless you,’ it cannot be said, ‘You shall be a
blessing.”—1897, Sermon #2523 “I do not know how they get on who have the
communion only once a quarter or once a year. Paul said, ‘As often as you eat
this bread, and drink this cup.’ He should have said, ‘as seldom as you drink
it,’ according to the habit of some! There is no law about the frequency of its
observance, except the sweet Law of Love which seems to say, ‘If this is a
window where Christ looks out, then let me often approach it. If this is a door
through which He comes to my heart, then let me stand often at this door.’
‘Often’—frequently—I think that at least once in the week it is well for us to
come to the Table of our Lord.”—1898, Sermon #2595

“A sinner’s sight of Christ must breed sorrow for sin—it is unavoidable—and the
more clear that sight shall become, and the more it is mixed with faith, and the
more sure we are of pardon, the more bitterness will there be in it. When we
know that our sins are forgiven, it is then that we, most of all, realize their
guilt and abhor and hate them.”—1900, Sermon #2683

“‘The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar,’ so the Light of
God’s Countenance rises upon poor sinners when they come to

Jesus!”—1899, Sermon #2642 “And if you, dear Friends, have a faith that never
works for Christ, I beg you to get rid of it at once, for it will turn out to be
a bastard faith! The faith that never kisses His feet is a faith that He will
tread under His feet! The faith that never anoints Him is a faith that will have
no fragrance in His esteem and He will not accept it. We are not saved by works
and faith combined, much less by works alone, but, nevertheless, the faith which
saves is not a barren faith—it produces the good fruit of love and service for
Christ.”1902, Sermon #2770

“There are no men who are in such danger as the men who think they are not in
any danger! There are none so likely to sin as those who say they cannot
sin!”—1903, Sermon #2828 “Well may we forget our enmities against men when we
begin to repent of our enmities against God! It is time for a man to forgive his
brother his trespasses when he, himself, prays to the Lord, ‘Forgive me my
trespasses.’”—1898, Sermon #2566

“That heart is full of Heaven that is full of God. That man is blessed to all
the intents of bliss who dwells in God and in whom God dwells! And that is the
privilege of all who truly believe in Jesus, all who come out from the world and
live a life of faith as Abraham did.”—1897, Sermon #2523

“Oh, who can describe the raptures of the dying saint, the glories of that
moment when God is pleased to cut the fetters that bind us to our clay and give
us leave to soar into His Presence?”—1899, Sermon #2642 “You are not to make
faith in God an excuse for idleness. It would be equally wrong to make your
industry a pretext for trusting to yourselves, instead of confiding only in
God.”—1902, Sermon #2805

“Beloved, if you and I are to be made a blessing to others, it must be by our
bringing the Lord Jesus Christ to those whom we meet from day to day. Do not
talk to a friend without speaking of your Savior. Do not be long in a house
without introducing that dear name—there is so much of savor, of sweetness, of
comfort, of healing, of life in that precious name of Jesus, that you cannot too
often speak of it, or too frequently introduce it into all sorts of
companies!”—1897, Sermon #2523

“I know men talk of the laws of nature, but the laws of nature have no force in
themselves—the whole force that carries out a law of nature is a Divine force.
So, your difficulties are of God’s sending, trials of God’s making and they are
all still in the hands of the All-Powerful One to restrain, or mitigate, or
increase, or direct according to His own will.”—1903, Sermon #2852

“Have you come to a great difficulty, my dear Friend? Cannot you get over it?
Are you in trouble about it? Now, if this is a difficulty that ought to be
removed, the shortest way to have it removed is to go to God about it! If it is
one that ought not to be removed, then you also have done rightly in going to
God, for He who willnotremove it will at least give you Grace to glorify Him in
some other way! The best thing we can do, in all times of trouble and trial, is
to lay the matter before the Lord.”—1898, Sermon #2596

“A minister, then, is one who should be diligent in his Master’s business,
fervent in spirit, serving the Lord by endeavoring to warn men of the terrible
nature and consequences of sin.”—1900, Sermon #2684

“Oh, how sadly true it is that, sometimes, true saints as well as mere
professors slumber and sleep! Even those who have the oil of Grace are not
always wide awake to serve their Master and to proclaim the Gospel as they
should. There are, alas, sleeping Believers and sleeping hypocrites side by
side!”—1899, Sermon #2642

“Puritan divines are at a great discount today, but I believe that some of us
will live to see them prized more than they ever were! The Doctrines of Grace
are, for a while, trod in the mire, but after infidelity has emptied the
chapels, and the churches have lost the true missionary spirit, they will come
back again to the grand old Truths of the Gospel, and we who are spared shall
see a revival of them such as our hearts have longed for!”—1897, Sermon #2524
[preached in 1885.]

“There is a difference between seeking Christ and seeking Christ’s people that
should always be noticed—you are not to seek Christ’s people so as to join with
them until you have, first of all, found Christ! No man, no woman, no child, has
any right to Gospel ordinances till first of all he has trusted Christ.”—1898,
Sermon #2566

“All who have heard the Gospel preached have been called to some extent. The
Word of God calls every sinner to repent and trust the Savior, but that call
brings nobody to Christ unless it is accompanied by the special effectual call
of the Holy Spirit.”—1897, Sermon #2526

“It is a great honor to do anything for your Master’s children which will be for
their good. In the Kingdom of God, the way to go up is to go down—and the way to
grow great is to grow little. Look at little Paul—that man short of stature and
with many infirmities. Why, he is the biggest of all the Apostles! And what is
“great Paul”? Oh, he is only sounding brass and the less we hear of him, the
better. Get to be like little Paul, Brother, and your sound shall go out to the
very ends of the earth! Whereas if you are ever a big Paul, you will only give
out a brazen note which will be heard for a very little way. If the Lord Jesus
Christ has made us to be His servants, let us count it our highest honor to be a
servant of the least of His servantsso that we may bless them and glorify
Him!”—1899, Sermon #2643

“A man with intellect and mind to bow himself down before a carved image is most
degrading. That he should worship that which is made of wood, or stone, or metal
is practically to make himself inferior to the dead thing which he
worships!”—1900, Sermon #2684

“You and I are going about after this and after that till we compass sea and
land, and miss the blessing! Straightforward makes the best running. Let us go
straight to God in prayer, with simple confidence in Him, and we shall not have
long to ask, “Where is Jehovah, the God of Elijah?”for we shall prove that He
still answers prayer even as He did in the Prophet’s day.”—1898, Sermon #2596

“Let every unconverted person be sure that whatever spirits there may be in the
unseen world—and there are good angels and bad ones—they will, none of them,
work for the good of the ungodly! The evil angels may tempt and mislead, and
help to destroy, but they can do no good, even if they wished to do so, to the
ungodly. And as for the pure and holy spirits that behold the Father’s face in
Glory, I think that their flaming swords must often be ready to start from their
scabbards as they hear God’s holy name profaned and see how mortal men, puny
creatures as they are, dare to provoke the majesty of Heaven! If angels are
capable of experiencing horror, I think they must often be horrified into
burning indignation at the transgressions which they behold among the sons and
daughters of men!”1902, Sermon #2773

“Now, dear Friends, sermons, good books and even the Bible, itself, may be made
into idols if you look to them for salvation and expect that by hearing and by
reading—and going no further—you will be saved!”—1902, Sermon #2805

“The Levite of old had no business to do in the world but the business of
God—and the true Christian is in the same condition for, though he keeps a shop,
or plows the fields—he keeps shop for Jesus and plows the fields for Jesus. He
is not his own master, but he is the servant of Another, even the Lord Jesus
Christ, and it is his joy to labor faithfully as a steward and a servant on
behalf of his Master!”—1903, Sermon #2829

“I am afraid that there are some persons who do not want to be instructed in the
things of God. They are afraid of knowing too much. I know some good Christian
people—good in their way—who cautiously avoid portions of Scripture that are
contrary to their creed. And I know a good many more who, when they get hold of
a text, stretch it a little, or squeeze it a little, to make it fit in with what
they, byprejudice, conceive oughtto be the Truth of God! But that should not be
your method or mine. Let us say, ‘Speak, Lord, and say to me what You will.
Whatever You have to say to me, Master, say on.’ The Lord Jesus may perhaps
reply to us, ‘I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.’
Howbeit, it is for us to ask Him to lead us into all Truths of God. If there is
a Truth that quarrels with you, depend upon it there is something in you to
quarrel with! You cannot alter the Truth of God—the simplest thing is to alter
yourself! It is not for us to shorten the measure, but to endeavor to come up to
it. Let us lay our hearts before God and pray Him to write His Truth upon them.
Let us yield our understanding and every faculty that we have to the supreme
sway of Jesus and, like Mary, sit down at His feet and receive His gracious
Words. ‘Speak, Lord, to instruct me. Tell me all about this and that Truth which
it is necessary for me to know.’”—1897, Sermon #2526

“Did not Jesus Christ come into the world to save sinners? Is there any sin
which He is not able to forgive? It is true that there is a sin which is unto
death, but you have not committed that sin, or else you would be in a state of
death—and would have no desire to be saved. But if you have any spiritual life,
so that you long to be saved, you have not committed that unpardonable sin—and
all other sin and blasphemy can be forgiven unto men if they repent of it and
trust the Lord Jesus Christ.”—1903, Sermon #2852

“I wish that some Christian men of my acquaintance would leave out the Lord’s
name a little in their prayers, for we may take the name of the Lord in vain
even in our supplications! When the heathen are addressing their gods, they are
accustomed to repeat their names over and over again. ‘O Baal, hear us! O Baal,
hear us!’ Or, as the Hindu say when they cry, ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!’ repeating
the name of their god. But as for us, when we think of the infinitely-glorious
One, we dare not needlessly repeat His name.”—1897, Sermon #2526

“Be content with none but Christ! Have no Gospel but Jesus Christ and Him
Crucified. May God so satisfy the souls of His saints that they shall be able
either to serve well or to suffer well! We are only strong either in patience or
in zeal as the Lord God of Elijah feeds us with the Bread which came down from
Heaven, the Bread of Life, Christ Jesus, himself. ‘Lord, evermore give us this
Bread!’”—1898, Sermon #2596

“He who worships the little round images of the Queen is as gross an idolater as
the man who bows down before Juggernaut or Baal! The sin of idolatry is still
abundant everywhere and it is always, in its nature and essence, a degrading
thing to man and an insult to God and, therefore, He continues to say to all
idolaters, ‘Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!’”—1900, Sermon #2684

“It is a blessed thing when faith rises as tribulations increase. A little faith
may do for a skirmish with the enemy, but you need the full assurance of faith
for a pitched battle. When the waters are up to the ankles, a little faith may
enable you to stand. But when you get to “waters to swim in,” then you need, in
childlike confidence, to cast yourself entirely upon the stream of Divine Love,
or else, assuredly, you will sink. May God be pleased to increase the faith of
all of us who believe in Jesus!”—1897, Sermon #2527 “Without faith, it is
impossible to please God. Is it not strange that the eternal God can ever be
‘pleased’ with us? It is a wonderful thing, certainly, that we poor creatures
should, by any means, be able to give pleasure to the infinitely-happy God—yet
so we do when we trust Him.”—1901, Sermon #2721

“He is also our lifelong Master. No, that is a mistake, for there was, alas, a
time when we lived, yet we lived not unto Him. Some of us were but boys when we
first began to serve Him. I always feel glad to think that I wore a boy’s jacket
when I was baptized into His name. I had not assumed the garb of a man, but my
whole soul was His and I was buried with Him. I wish it had been still earlier!
O dear young people, there is no such joy as that of knowing Christ in your
early youth! We hear, sometimes, of life-long teetotalers, but I could wish that
I had been a life-long abstainer from self-righteousness, a life-long drinker of
the river of the Water of Life! But, as all of us have failed to serve the Lord
at the beginning of our life, let us try, with all our hearts, to serve Him
right to the end! Oh, to have Him for our lifelong Master—with no little
intervals of running away, no furloughs, no holidays!”—1899, Sermon #2643

“There are two kinds of tears and I think that they who truly seek the Lord shed
both of them—the one is a tear of sorrow because of sin, the other is a tear of
joy because of pardon.”—1898, Sermon #2566 “Oh, if the children of God would
sometimes be silent instead of speaking, they would be wise! But if, on the
other hand, they would sometimes speak instead of remaining silent, they might
be equally wise!”—1897, Sermon #2527

“If a man is oppressed, if he is slandered, if he is evil spoken of, let him
just say to himself, ‘God will see to this. He is the Judge of all the earth and
shall not He do right? Do not meddle with the case yourself. Leave it in the
Lord’s hands. Our proverb says, ‘If you want a thing done well, do it yourself,’
but, if it is anything which has to do with your own character, let me tell you
that this is the worst proverb that ever was invented! If you want a blot that
you have made, or that somebody else has made, multiplied into two, try and rub
it out with your finger while it is wet. But if you are wise, you will leave it
alone. All the dirt that ever comes on a man’s coat will brush off when it is
dry. I do believe that, sometimes, holy characters shine all the brighter
because they have been tarnished for a while by the filth cast upon them by
ungodly men. If men cast mud at you, leave it alone.”—1897, Sermon #2527

“What do I mean by will-worship? I mean any kind of worship which is not
prescribed in God’s own Word. It has sometimes been pleaded, as an excuse for
the observance of some rite or ceremony which is not commanded in the
Scriptures, that it is very instructive, or very impressive. That is no excuse
or justification for disobedience.”—1903, Sermon #2855

“We always learn much more by our griefs and woes than by anything else. God has
often produced in us much richer and sweeter fruit by pruning than by any other
process of His Divine husbandry.”—1903, Sermon #2829

“If there is anything recorded as having been done by Christ, a believing child
can judge whether it is authentic or not. Those miserable false gospels that
were brought out did very little if any mischief, because nobody with any true
spiritual discernment was ever duped into believing them to be genuine!”—1899,
Sermon #2644

“No one rebels against Christ because he believes in Him, but, because we
believe in Him, He becomes our Lord and we learn to obey Him.”—1902, Sermon
#2806

“There are people, nowadays, who make a difficulty about Moses praying for
Israel, ‘If You will forgive their sin—and if not, blot me, I pray You, out of
Your Book which You have written.’ And they raise questions about Paul being
willing to be separated from Christ for his brethren, his kinsmen according to
the flesh. Oh, but there is no difficulty in the matter if you once get to feel
such an intense love for the souls of men that you would, as it were, pawn your
own salvation and count it little if you might but bring the people to the
Savior’s feet!”—1898, Sermon #2596

“Long before He was born into this world, His delights were with the sons of men
and He looked forward with joy to the time of His appearing.‘Lo I come,’ said
He, ‘in the volume of the Book it is written of Me, I delight to do Your will, O
My God.’ In the fullness of time He came, leaping over the mountains, skipping
over the hills, that He might save His people! It is no unwilling Savior who has
come to save you and me, Beloved. Feed on that sweet Truth of God. Think of the
love that did lie at the back of it all, the love He had to His Church and
people, which moved Him to lay aside all His Glory and take upon Himself all our
shame—to surrender the ineffable splendor of His Throne—to be nailed up to the
shameful Cross! O Brothers and Sisters, there is a great feast for the soul in
the love of Christ! This is ‘butter in a lordly dish .’ There was never such
wine, even at a king’s marriage, as that which Christ Himself made, and we can
truly say to Him, ‘You have kept the best wine until now.”—1897, Sermon #2528

“It is all in vain that you have a Bible, or read your Bible, unless you do
really ‘take the water of life’ of which it speaks. It is worse than vain, for
if it is not a savor of life unto life to you, it shall be a savor of death unto
death!”—1900, Sermon #2685 “Do not imagine that any amount of prayer will have
the effect of staving off all trouble, for surely never did anyone else pray
like our Lord Jesus Christ did!... His agony in Gethsemane was a time of the
mightiest prayer that was ever heard in Heaven, yet it was followed very closely
by His death upon the Cross. You may abound in prayer, in thanksgiving, in
patience and yet, for all that, all God’s waves and billows may roll over you
and you may be brought into the depths of soul-trouble.”—1901, Sermon #2722

“He who has never sorrowed for sin has never rejoiced in a Savior! And the more
you rejoice in Christ, the more you will sorrow for sin.”—1898, Sermon #2566 “If
you mean to be a Christian, you must remember there remains but one source of
true delight to you—but that one Source of delight contains more than all other
springs of joy put together!”—1902, Sermon #2774

“It is idle to merely let the eyes glance over the Words, [of the Bible] or to
remember the poetical expressions, or the historic facts—but it is blessed to
eat into the very soul of the Bible until, at last, you come to talk in
Scriptural language and your very style is fashioned upon Scripture models—and,
what is still better, your spirit is flavored with the words of the Lord!”—1899,
Sermon #2644

“I believe the Eternal might sooner forgive the sin of ascribing the creation of
the heavens and the earth to an idol, than that of ascribing the works of Grace
to the efforts of the flesh, or to anyone but Himself.”—1898, Sermon #2598

“I solemnly declare, as the result of thorough and, I trust, impartial
observation, that the conversation of Christians, while it cannot be condemned
on the score of morality, must often be condemned on the score of Christianity!
We talk too little about our Lord and Master!”—1898, Sermon #2598

“Being priests, we are, first of all, to offer ourselves. What says the Apostle?
‘I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present
your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your
reasonable service.’ Now, you will never do this unless you feed upon Christ! I
shall never be a sacrifice to God unless my soul is nourished upon the true and
living Sacrifice, Christ Jesus my Lord! To attempt sanctification apart from
justification is to attempt an impossibility! And to endeavor to lead a holy
life apart from the work of Christ is an idle dream! You priests who offer
yourselves unto God must take care that it is all done through Christ who is in
you.”—1897, Sermon #2528

“And, in dying, His [Jesus] expiring heart was buoyed up and comforted with the
thought that God was His Father. It was because He said that God was His Father
that they put Him to death, yet He still stood to it even in His dying hour and
said, “Father, into Your hands I commend My spirit”!”—1899, Sermon #2644

“There is a great deal of fuss made nowadays about ‘ordaining’ a minister. I was
never “ordained” by mortal men, for I did not believe in having their empty
hands laid on my head. If they had any of them had any spiritual gift to impart
to me, I would have been glad to receive it, but, as they had nothing to give
me, I could not accept it. I believe that every true Christian is ordained of
God to his particular work and, in the strength of that Divine ordination, let
him not bother his head about merely human forms and ceremonies, but just keep
to his proper work and shoulder his own burden.”—1903, Sermon #2829

“I pray that there may come to all sections of the Church of Christ—Methodist,
Presbyterian, Baptist, Episcopalian—this one resolve, ‘We will get back to Holy
Scripture and to the sole Headship of Christ, cost whatever it may.’ If all of
us should ever get to that point, we should get closer to one another than we
now are, for we should be all one in Christ Jesus our Lord.”—1902, Sermon #2806

“There is, perhaps, nothing more amazing in this century than the ignorance of
men about the things of God. It is certain that a knowledge of Scripture does
not keep pace with the growth of knowledge of other things and that the
understanding with regard to eternal realities is not so instructed as it is
with regard to politics, to science and to other matters which are of temporary
importance for this present life.”—1897, Sermon #2529

“A man might spend a century under the best ministry, or in the best school that
ever existed on earth and yet, at the end of one hundred years, he might not
know the things of God, for these Truths must come as a revelation to each man
and God, the Holy Spirit, must teach them to each one, or they will never be
learned. This is the standing miracle in the Church of God—and unless we see it
continually worked, we have not the clearest evidence that our religion is
supernatural and Divine!”—1897, Sermon #2529

“Ah, we, many of us, need reviving, but few of us feel that we need it. It is a
blessed sign of life within when we know how to groan over our departure from
the living God. It is easy to find hundreds who have thus departed, but you must
count by ones and twos those who know how to groan over their departure! The
true Believer, however, when he discovers that he needs revival, will not be
happy. He will begin at once that incessant and continuous strain of cries and
groans which will, at last, prevail with God and bring the blessing of revival
down!”—1898, Sermon #2598 “Whoever you may be, you will have to come down to
God’s terms if you wish to be saved! There is only one door to Heaven and but
one way for the worst and for the best. You must bow down and accept Jesus as
the sinners’ Savior, or else you cannot have Him at all! God’s terms are,
‘Come... take.’ So, do not try any other plan. Do not say, ‘Well, I will bring
something.’ Do not bring anything! It is not what you bringto Christ, but what
you take ofChrist that will save you! Therefore hear and heed the message of the
text. God make you to hear it in your very soul! It is the true Gospel
message—‘Come... take.’”—1900, Sermon #2685

“Good Mr. Whitefield used to cry, ‘Oh, the wrath to come! The wrath to come!’
And, verily, I know not what he could have said about it except to utter the
exclamation—and there to leave it—for that wrath to come must surpass all human
language or imagination!”—1903, Sermon #2856

“Some of us can bear witness to His faithfulness—not for so many years as others
of you have seen—but some of us can talk of 30 years’ experience of a faithful
God. And though we have forgotten Him and grieved Him, He has never once broken
any promise that He has made! Oh, the deliverances we have had, the merciful
interpositions of His gracious hand on our behalf! He is a good God, a blessed
God! His praises we can never fully sing. The service of God is happiness below
as it is eternal bliss above. If I knew that I would die like a dog. If it could
be proven to me that my faith would all turn out to be a delusion, I would like,
somehow, never to be free from the delusion! It is so blessed a thing to serve
God, even in this life! He gives us such joy and peace that though many are the
afflictions of the righteous, yet His service is perfect freedom—and to honor
Him is our supreme delight. Blessed be His holy name!”—1901, Sermon #2723

“David said to the Lord, ‘Into Your hands I commit my spirit.’ But let me beg
you to add that word which our Lord inserted—“ Father.” David is often a good
guide for us, but David’s Lord is far better. And if we follow Him, we shall
improve upon David. So, let us each say, ‘ Father, Father, into Your hands I
commit my spirit.’ That is a sweet way of living every day—committing everything
to our Heavenly Father’s hands, for those hands can do His child no unkindness.
‘Father, I might not be able to trust Your angels, but I can trust You.’”—1899,
Sermon #2644

“I remember one who was, afterwards, an eminent saint, who first went to hear
Mr. Whitefield because he was a great mimic. He wanted to hear him so he could
later mimic him in a club which they called the ‘Hell Fire Club.’ ‘Now, my
mates,’ he said, ‘I am going to give you a sermon that I heard Mr. Whitefield
preach yesterday.’ And the man repeated the sermon, but he, himself, was
converted while he preached it—and so were several of his mates who had met for
blasphemy! So, come even if you come for such an evil purpose as that! Still, it
is a sorrowful business that there should be men who ask the way to Zion and
turn their faces in the opposite direction. Turn them, O God, and they shall be
turned!”—1898, Sermon #2566

“No man can long know anything of himself without discovering that he has a
biastoward evil—that if let alone, quite alone, his thoughts go the wrong way!
He finds that he needs to school himself to be right, kind and loving, but that
he needs no effort to be proud, domineering, and revengeful! He finds that sin
is indigenous to the soil of his heart, while everything that is good needs
cultivation, watching and tender care. He finds, in fact, that his heart is
‘deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.’”—1897, Sermon #2529

“There is no prayer that is purer, more spiritual, more heavenly than the prayer
which comes out of a heart full of praise! How often have I said that prayer is
the breathing in of the air of Heaven and praise is the breathing of it out
again? Prayer and praise make up the best life of the Christian and he is not
yet thoroughly in spiritual health who is all for prayer and not at all for
praise—but he is the really healthy Christian who has these two things rightly
balanced.”—1898, Sermon #2599

“When we are in love, we need no one to urge us to give tokens and pledges of
love—it is a joy to us to do anything that will give pleasure to our beloved. It
is no misery to the tree to produce its luscious fruit and it is no severe task
to a Christian to perform deeds of love to Christ! So I will not urge you to it,
but leave the matter with you, and with the Well-Beloved of your souls.”—1902,
Sermon #2774

“I sometimes bless God that He does not give to some comers such a sight of sin
as they get afterwards. A full sight of sin, my Brothers and Sisters, without a
sight of the precious blood of Christ, would drive any man or woman among us
mad!”—1897, Sermon #2529

“Suppose I become like Solomon, so that I have all which the eyes, or the ears,
or the passions can delight in? Should I, after all, be tired? Yes! Solomon
tried it, and said, ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ Why? Because there were
other cravings in Solomon which all these things did not satisfy. His mind was
hungering after knowledge and when Solomon satisfied that, for he spoke of all
things, from the hyssop on the wall up to the cedar of Lebanon, there was one
thing that was still not satisfied—that was His soul. His immortal spirit was
longing for communion with his God! There was a hunger and thirst after
something higher than mere mental food. His mind could not be content with wine
to drink and meat to eat, for it needed knowledge. And his spirit could not be
satisfied with mere knowledge, for it needed something higher than that—the
ethereal and celestial ambrosia of the glorified! His spirit was panting for
communion with God and, therefore, Solomon felt that all here was vanity because
it could not satisfy that craving. ”—1901, Sermon #2724 “If you have not
believed in Christ, you may well be afraid even to rest on the seat where you
are sitting! I wonder that the earth itself does not say, “O God, I will not
hold this wretched Sinner up any longer! Let me open my mouth and swallow him!”
All nature must hate the man who hates God! Surely, all things must loathe to
minister to the life of a man who does not live unto God. Oh that you would seek
the Lord and trust Christ, and find eternal life! If you have done so, do not be
afraid to go forth to live, or to die, just as God pleases.”—1899, Sermon #2644

“As no living man should complain, so no living man should despair—and
especially no child of God!”—1903, Sermon #2830

“Isaiah 1 is a chapter which, I think, teaches an important lesson to those of
us who desire the salvation of men, for it shows us how God sets about that
work. He begins by exhibiting the sinner’s sin to him before He proclaims mercy
to him—and if we want to be the means of doing good to men, it will not be by
merely crying to them, ‘Believe, believe, believe’—there must be a laying of the
axe at the root of the tree of selfrighteousness and a cutting away of all trust
in self. A man must realize his danger before he will desire to escape from it
and it is a mistaken kindness which refuses to set before him the peril in which
he is. God, who is infinitely tender and inconceivably merciful, shows us, in
this chapter, how to go to work with sinners.”—1900, Sermon #2685

“Whenever there is a cross to be carried by any of Christ’s followers, He always
bears the heavy end on His own shoulders.”—1903, Sermon #2856 “Alas, I suppose
that no one is more orthodox than the devil, yet no one is more surely lost than
he is!”—1898, Sermon #2566

“Possibly you have sometimes had a dread of death. So had your Lord—not a sinful
fear of it, but that natural and perfectly innocent, yet very terrible dread
which comes to a greater or less extent upon every living creature when in
expectation of death. Jesus also comes very near to us because He was
notliterally heard and answered. He said, ‘If it is possible, let this cup pass
from Me.’ But the cup did notpass from Him! The better part of His prayer won
the victory, and that was, ‘Nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.’ You
will be heard, too, if that is always the principal clause in your prayers. But
you may not be heard by being delivered from the trouble. Even the prayer of
faith is not always literally heard! God, sometimes, instead of taking away the
sickness or the death, gives us Grace that we may profit by the sickness, or
that we may triumph in the hour of death. That is better than being literally
heard, but even the most believing prayer may not meet with a literal answer. He
‘was heard in that He feared.’ Yet He died and you and I, in praying for
ourselves, and praying for our friends, may pray an acceptable prayer and be
heard—yet they may die, or we may die.”—1897, Sermon #2529

“You can scarcely have a better gift than this, ‘the Spirit of wisdom and
revelation in the knowledge of Him.’ The knowledge of Christ Crucified is the
most excellent of all the sciences! It is better to be well acquainted with
Christ than to be a very Solomon concerning all other things, yet not to know
Him.”—1902, Sermon #2807

“I grieve, sometimes, when I see how God’s people manage to live a great way off
from Him and yet appear to be quite comfortable, and to have all that they could
wish. But I am glad when any one of them is thrust right out of all harmful
associations and so is drawn nearer to God, for when God says,” Come you out
from among them, and be you separate,” if we do not at once obey His command, He
has many ways of makingus come out and it may be that we have to come out in a
fashion that is exceedingly painful. Yet, however trying it is, it matters
little if we but get nearer to Him.”—1899, Sermon #2645

“Some people make out faith to be a marvelously easy thing—and so it is in
theory—but it is the hardest thing in the world in practice.”—1901, Sermon #2728

“You remember that it is said of Mr. Rowland Hill that he was met, somewhere
about the New Cut, by a drunken man who reeled up to him and said, ‘Well, Mr.
Hill, I am glad to see you, Sir. I am one of your converts.’ ‘Yes,’ replied the
good minister, ‘you certainly may be one of my converts. If you had been one of
the Lord’s converts, you would not be drunk.’”—1898, Sermon #2599 “He only knows
the music of mercy who knows the misery of sin!”—1900, Sermon #2685

“There is nothing that does a man so much good as to worship the Lord in the
beauty of holiness. A little heavenly excitement is a blessed refreshment and
revival for the entire manhood and—turning again to the other side of the
subject—to walk uprightly towards our fellow men, to forgive those who injure us
and to bless with our beneficence all those who need anything at our hands is a
kind of exercise that is eminently suitable to our renewed manhood!”—1902,
Sermon #2775

“To trust God while you are alive is good, but to say, with Job. ‘Though He slay
me, yet will I trust in Him,’ that is the very cream of faith! ‘He knows’—with
approving knowledge—‘all them that trust in Him.’”—1898, Sermon #2555 “They who
are born twice have a life which cannot be comprehended by those who are only
born once! Those who have received the Spirit of God have a new spirit within
them which is so amazing that the carnal mind cannot perceive what it is!
Spiritual things must be spiritually discerned.”—1897, Sermon #2530

“The great goodness of God to rebellious sinners is proof positive that He is
willing to bestow His forgiving mercy upon them as soon as they repent of their
sin. And so it should be a great inducement to them to turn unto Him and
live.”—1903, Sermon #2857

“No lonely watcher on the tower did ever sigh for the dawn as they do who love
the Savior and have lost His company—and never were hands so heartily clapped
with exultation at the light of the sun reappearing in the far North as we clap
ours, in a spiritual sense, when Christ manifests Himself to us, for He is,
indeed, ‘the consolation of Israel.’”—1901, Sermon #2729

“There are many who will criticize some of the sentences of Ralph Erskine in his
Believer’s Riddle, and say that these things are contradictory. Just so, but
faith has to credit contradictions. If you do not know that the spiritual life
is a profound paradox, you do not know anything at all. The way of a serpent on
the rock, or of a ship in the sea, is a mere trifle compared with the way of
spiritual life in the soul of man. To understand yourself, you must understand
the mystery of the two natures and of the daily inward conflict between them—the
carnal mind that never can be reconciled to God and that heavenly mind that
cannot sin because it is born of God—both of which co-exist in the
Believer.”—1897, Sermon #2531

“Why did the Romanists not burn Luther? I never could make that out. If I had
been the Pope, I think I would have got rid of him someway or other. Yet nobody
could touch Luther! They made short work of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, but,
even when the princes and prelates had Luther before them at the Diet of Worms,
they did not destroy him! It could not be, for God meant that Luther should die
in his bed, notwithstanding all the rage of the enemy!”—1899, Sermon #2645

“Now, I believe that a temporary salvation is a trumpery salvation and that it
is neither worth preaching nor receiving. but God’s salvation is both worth
preaching and receiving because it is everlasting salvation.”—1898, Sermon #2599

“If God gives you your health and you are grateful for it, you shall have true
sanity, for your soul shall be in health even as your body is. Restoration from
sickness should always be ascribed to God. Whatever part the physician may
play—and he often plays a very important part—yet to God, who gives the
physician wisdom and skill, must the gracious result be ascribed.”—1897, Sermon
#2531

“Ah, my dear Friends, he whose great trouble lies in his own heart cannot run
away from it, for he bears it about with him wherever he goes! The old man of
the mountain who sits upon your shoulder and clings so tightly to you, if he is
yourself, is not to be shaken off by your running away!”—1903, Sermon #2830

“Prayer is a vital evidence of Christianity, but prophecy is not. A thousand
sermons would not prove a man to be a Christian, but one genuine prayer would.
It is easy enough to speak to men, but quite another thing, from our inmost
soul, to speak to God.”—1902, Sermon #2808

“There is but one true religion and there is only one way of receiving that
religion. There are many false religions and there are many wrong ways of
professing the true religion. There are a thousand paths that lead to Hell, but
only one that leads to Heaven. In the many broad roads that lead to destruction,
there is room for innumerable winding alleys, but the way that leads to Heaven
is a strait and narrow one—there is no room for any divergence there. We must
have the same religion and have it in the same way, or else we shall not arrive
at that hoped-for end, towards which, by our profession, we pretend to be
pressing.”—1900, Sermon #2686

“How many roads are there to Heaven? This Book declares that there is only one!
It says , ‘Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus
Christ.’ And Jesus Himself says, ‘I am the way.’ Not, “I am one of the ways,”
but, “I amTHE way.” I quoted to you, just now, one of His last sayings—‘He that
believes and is baptized shall be saved.’ Well, suppose that he does not
believe, what then? ‘He that believes not shall be damned.’ Thus, you see, the
teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ is intolerant of all compromise! It will not
admit that there may be other ways to Heaven and other methods of
salvation.”—1898, Sermon #2566

“Because He first loved us and that love of His has been shed abroad in our
hearts, we have loved Him in return as a matter of course—we cannot help doing
so. The mighty deeps of His immeasurable love, high up on the eternal hills,
flow down into the inmost recesses of our empty hearts and when, afterwards, a
fountain of love is seen springing up out of them, the secret of its action is
to be traced to that great reservoir away up on the everlasting hills!”—1901,
Sermon #2730

“‘Let me never be ashamed: deliver me in Your righteousness. Bow down Your ear
to me; deliver me speedily: be You my strong rock for an house of defense to
save me. For You are my rock and my fortress; therefore for Your name’s sake
lead me, and guide me.’ [Psalm 31:1-3] See how logical David is with his, ‘for,’
and, ‘therefore’? It is the very essence of prayer to be able to urge pleas with
God and to say to Him, ‘Do it for this reason,’ or, ‘Therefore, do it for such
another reason.’ I would that we, all of us, studied more fully this blessed art
of pleading with God—bringing forth sound arguments as we approach Him.”—1899,
Sermon #2645

“Those things which you can see are merely the garments of some great thought of
God. The sea, the land, the sky—these are, as it were, the words in which some
thought of the Eternal is couched—in part concealed, in part revealed.”—1897,
Sermon #2531

“There is, at the back of it all, the reason that the Lord gave to Moses, ‘I
will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I
will have compassion.’ I find such a stuttering and stammering about this great
Truth of God in these days that I mean to be all the more emphatic in preaching
it, for I believe that this doctrine largely helps in producing that state of
spirit into which God would have sinners brought so as to make them feel that
they have no claim upon Him—no right to His mercy and that, if He gives it, He
gives it simply because He chooses to give it!”—1898, Sermon #2600

“You and I have nothing at all to do with consequences! Be it ours to hearken to
the voice of the Lord and obey His high behests. When God prompts our conscience
to a course of action, the slightest demur will recoil with a sense of
intolerable guilt. Though the heavens should fall, through our doing right, we
are not to sin in order to keep them up.”—1903, Sermon #2859

“One of the greatest rewards that we ever receive for serving God is the
permission to do still more for Him.”—1902, Sermon #2775

“There are millions of the human race who have never heard the Good News—and
millions, I fear, will yet die without having even heard the nameof Jesus! Even
in our own country and under the semblance of religious teaching, what masses of
people we have who never hear the Gos pel—they hear about forms and ceremonies,
and they are deceived by the falsehoods of priest-craft, but the Truth of God,
as it is in Jesus, is an untold tale to them. So, if you have heard the Gospel,
and heard it often, there has been, in that privilege, a wonderful manifestation
of the love of God to you!”—1897, Sermon #2532

“The Apostle [2 Peter 3:17] has told us that there will come, in the last days,
scoffers. We, therefore, know this is to be the case, for we have been informed
concerning it. Forewarned is forearmed and now that we see the scoffers, and
cannot help seeing them, we perceive another proof of the truth of Scripture.
Every time a blasphemer opens his mouth to deny the truth of Revelation, he will
help to confirm us in our conviction of the very Truth of God which he denies!
The Holy Spirit told us, by the pen of Peter, that it would be so, and now we
see how truly he wrote.”—1897, Sermon #2533

“I believe that the very soul of Christianity lies in the sanctifying of what is
called secular—the bringing of all things under the cognizance of our God by
intense, constant, importunate, believing prayer.”—1903, Sermon #2830

“‘ I have hated them that regard lying vanities: but I trust in the LORD.’
[Psalm 31:6] ‘In Jehovah.’ David had no patience with those who trusted in gods
of wood and stone. He knew very little, indeed, of that spurious charity which
leads some men to speak respectfully even of idolatry. David was ‘a good hater’
and there is something gracious about that when the thing hated is really
hateful and something which ought to be hated!”—1899, Sermon #2645

“No man is so ready to suck in any delusion as the one who professes to abhor
superstition. You will never find anyone so ready to be led astray as the man
who says that he cannot be led astray. He who despises the miracles of our Lord
and all that is recorded in the Word of God is the most gullible creature
alive—and we know that however high his opinion of himself may be—he is a
deceived man and feeds upon ashes.”—1900, Sermon #2686

“Service rendered in unbelief is like a vessel marred on the potter’s wheel, but
as long as faith can turn it round upon the wheel and fashion it, it will come
to something that the Master can use. You must believe, for so will you be able
to serve. ‘Trust in the Lord and do good,’ but be sure to do the first thing.
The trustingmust come before the doing—and be mingled with all the doing—or else
it will be a very poor piece of doing, indeed!”—1902, Sermon #2809

“You may not be able to be always thinking about Divine subjects, but if your
heart is right, your love to your Lord is there all the while.”—1901, Sermon
#2730

“If Jesus trod the winepress, and trod it alone, you shall never have to tread
it. What mistakes Christians often make in this matter! You will hear one say
that such-and-such a good man was punished for his transgressions, and I have
known Believers think that their afflictions were punishments sent from God on
account of their sins. The thing is impossible! God has punished us, who are His
people, once and for all in Christ and He will never punish us again! He cannot
do it, seeing He is a just God. Afflictions are chastisements from a Father’s
hand, but they are not judicial punishments!”—1898, Sermon #2567 “ Singpraises
unto His name; for it is pleasant. That is, singing God’s praises is pleasant—it
is a pleasant duty and the Lord’s name is pleasant, or lovely. The very thought
of God brings the sweetest emotions to every renewed heart. There is no pleasure
in the world that exceeds that of devotion. As we sing praises unto the Lord, we
shake off the cares of the world, we rise above its smoke and mists and we get,
then, the clearer atmosphere of communion with Him.”—1898, Sermon #2600

“Have you a religion that did not begin with rigorous self-denial. Then, get rid
of it! If you have a religion that suits your constitutional fondness for
ceremonies, your aesthetic taste for culture, your habitual passion for music,
beware of it! The root of all real religion is simple faith in the Lord Jesus
Christ. Away with every counterfeit. That faith which lives only on Jesus, rests
solely on Jesus, builds wholly on Jesus and shows itself in earnest prayer, will
give you a consistency and decision of character that will make you like Daniel
all your days!”—1903, Sermon #2859

“There must be, on the part of a minister of Christ, a deep and intense
affection towards all those whom he believes to belong to Christ.”—1897, Sermon
#2533

“Perhaps some of you, from your childhood, always said a form of prayer and if
you ever went to bed without saying it, you dared not go to sleep. Yet how much
of that formality was but a mockery of God! I will not speak too harshly about
the child’s form of prayer, for sometimes that form has been made use of by God
to lead on to true spiritual supplication. Still, it would be idle for us to
imagine that the mere repetition of certain words was prayer—we know, now, that
it was notprayer.”—1898, Sermon #2555

“I wish that all of us, when we go forth as Christ’s heralds, crying, “Behold
the Lamb of God”—and that is our main business here below—would take care that
we were never so grand in our style of thought or language that when the Master,
Himself, came in all His wondrous simplicity, men would begin to despise Him
because they remembered the fine tones of his pretended herald! No, let us be
simple and plain whenever we have to speak of Christ and when our King, Himself,
comes, let us step back and get out of sight, that He alone may be seen, and
that all the people’s hearts may be won to Him.”—1899, Sermon #2646

“You know, a silver sixpence is as really silver as a half-crown. And the
Queen’s image on the one is as genuine as on the other. They are current coin of
the realm and I am sure you will not treat with scorn the little pieces of
money. Then why should we despise the small coins in Christ’s treasury? When our
dear young Brothers and Sisters are made of the same metal and stamped with the
same image as we are, why should we despise them, though we happen to be, or
thinkwe are, of somewhat more weight and value in the Church of God than they
are?”—1898, Sermon #2601

“Blessed are they who never exalt themselves over the weak and afflicted among
the children of God!”—1903, Sermon #2831 “Our love is a force. If you truly love
God, you feel it to be so. It is a force that comforts and emboldens us. Out of
love to God, we feel that we can even dare the devil to do his worst against us.
When love fills us to the full, it makes us courageous.”—1901, Sermon #2730

“The Roman Catholic will tell you, when he converses with you, that he is quite
content with his religion, but I cannot believe it. There may be times when he
is so imposed upon as to believe that, in his church, there is infallible
salvation and that, by attention to ceremonies as absurd and wicked as those of
idolaters, he shall obtain the favor of the Lord his God. But there are hours
when Romanists, especially in this country, must tremble for the stability of
their religion! There are times when they must be a little shaken! Surely there
is enough of moral dignity and conscience in most men to teach them that a
rotten rag cannot have any saving virtue about it! Surely the man who has kissed
the toe of the Pope must feel everything within him that is noble recoil from
the act! There ought to be enough humanity in man to rise above that groveling
system which has sought to bring human nature lower than the dregs of the brute
creation! I cannot suppose that a man who has a soul—a soul whose high
aspirations are among the best proofs of its immortality—can be content with
that poor piece of outside show which we call Popery! No, in that case, also,
man “feeds on ashes.” He is not satisfied with his religion, although he may
pretend to be.”—1900, Sermon #2686

“The highest reward that God ever gives His servants on earth is when He permits
them to make such a sacrifice as actually to die in His service as
martyrs.”—1902, Sermon #2775

“I know some who have said, ‘Really, it does not matter what we believe so long
as we are right on the main point.’ But it doesmatter, for they who neglect any
of Christ’s Words shall fall by little and little. Every Truth of God is a
diamond of untold value! I do not know whether there is such a thing as an
unimportant Truth of God. Somewhere or other, near to it, there may lie certain
consequences that we know not of and, the Truth of God being neglected, an error
may fill its place—and that error may become pregnant with mischief from
generation to generation!”—1897, Sermon #2533

“ Some saintshavemore faith thanothers have—and very much in proportion to their
faith will be their condition of heart and mind! Such saints, having more faith
than others have, will also have more zeal for God, more conscientious
observance of His commands, more complete devotion to His will, more
self-denying consecration to His service—and where there is much of all these
things, there will be more joy than there can be in any other condition of heart
and life!”—1903, Sermon #2860 “I do not care what clothes you come in [to
worship]—the only clothes that are unfit to wear are those that you have not
paid for!”—1898, Sermon #2568

“Let not any of us go and talk to our Sunday school class, or preach from the
pulpit, or write a letter about our Lord until we have had a fresh glimpse of
Him. It is wonderful how nimbly the pen or the tongue moves when the eye has
just feasted itself upon Christ!”—1899, Sermon #2646

“For a man to take his creed blindly from a pope or a priest is to degrade
himself because he receives that teaching from his fellow man—but for him to lay
his whole mind down at the feet of Jesus Christ is no degradation since Christ
is the Wisdom of God, and all wisdom is Infallibly gathered up in Him. I do not
expect fully to understand my Lord’s will, I only ask to be informed what that
will is. I do not suppose that I can comprehend it, but I say, ‘What is Your
will, my Master? If You will reveal it to me, I will believe it.’”—1902, Sermon
#2810

“Errors of doctrine are almost always attended with errors of practice and,
certainly, they legitimately lead that way. Those who scoff according to the
lusts of their intellect are very likely to live according to the lusts of their
flesh! The two things are congruous. They are born from the same cause, they
flourish for the same reasons, and they tend to the same ends!”—1897, Sermon
#2533

“Further, if God were to justify those who are like this Pharisee was, He would
be either making two ways to Heaven or else shutting sinners out. You see, dear
Friends, God must shut the sinners out if the door into Heaven is only for the
good, or else He must make a special entrance for the gentlefolk, a little
private door where qualified people can go in by presenting tickets describing
their own merits.”—1900, Sermon #2687

“If we pray for anything, God expects us to use the proper means of obtaining
it—and if we neglect the means, we have no right to expect Him to believe in the
sincerity of our prayer. If a father and mother pray fortheir children, but
never pray withthem, or speak to them personally about the welfare of their
souls, they must not wonder if they are not brought to Christ.”—1901, Sermon
#2731

“I have often quoted to you the words of Jerome when he said that he loved
Christ in Augustine and he loved Augustine in Christ. So ought we to love the
weakest Believers—to love Christ in them, and to love them in Christ. May the
Holy Spirit teach us to be like our Master in this respect as well as in all
others!”—1898, Sermon #2601

“A glorified Christ makes men run to Him! When Christ is glorified in your
hearts, dear Friends, you will run to Him!”—1897, Sermon #2533 “Let it be
reported of you in your biography, if it is ever written, ‘This was one of his
sayings. He often said, ‘Lord, be merciful unto me.’”—1897, Sermon #2535

“Sinners’ prayers suit depressed saints! The prayer of the publican is, after
all, my everyday prayer. I have what I may call a Sunday prayer, a prayer for
high days and holiday, but my everyday prayer, the one that I can use all
through the week, the one that I can pick up when I cannot pick up anything
else, is the publican’s prayer, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’”—1897,
Sermon #2535

“There is such a thing as Divine Sovereignty with regard to the choice of
persons who are to be saved. If one man is saved and not another, God has made
the difference and God has the rightto make the difference. If my brother shall
enter Heaven and I shall be sent to Hell, God has a right to save my brother and
He would be righteous in my damnation, for I deserve it. And if my brother does
not deserve to be saved—as he does not—yet God has a right to give salvation to
him and to withhold it from me, if so it pleases Him. My soul falls down in
abject submission at His feet! I have no rights when I come before the Almighty.
I have no claims on Him. I have so sinned and so erred that if He had sent my
soul to Hell, I should have richly deserved it. God has a right to do as He
wills with His creatures and He exhibits this right in His choice of those whom
He calls to work in His vineyard.”—1898, Sermon #2602 “Good works are not the
root of faith, but they are its fruit.”—1902, Sermon #2778

“Blessed is that man who is saved beyond all fear and who, for the love he bears
his Lord, lives wholly and only to prove the power of the Grace of God that has
been bestowed upon him—and earnestly seeks to be the means of saving the souls
of others. The doctrines of Grace do this for us, by delivering us from all fear
with regard to the future and fixing us firmly upon the Rock of Ages. They turn
our thoughts away from self to the service and the glory of our God.”—1903,
Sermon #2831

“It was a beautiful trait in the character of John the Baptist that he was so
ready to pass on to Christ his own disciples—he did not want to keep them merely
to swell the number of his own followers, but only kept them with him until he
could point them to his Master. When we try to win souls, if we find that people
have confidence in us and affection for us, let us use that influence not to
attach them to ourselves except with the earnest desire to pass them on to
Christ—that they may become disciples of the Savior for themselves and grow up
from being babes who have to be nursed to become strong men in Christ
Jesus.”—1899, Sermon #2646

“Sinners may rest content in their sin, for as yet they know no better, but you
[backsliders] are disqualified even for that!”—1898, Sermon #2569

“When you thank God for the good things He has done for you, thank Him not only
for keeping you out of sin, but also thank Him for enabling you to do His will.
No man has any right to take credit to Himself for His own integrity, for, if he
is a Christian, that integrity is the gift of God’s Grace and the work of God’s
Spirit within him.”—1902, Sermon #2810

“The loss of God’s Presence is also inexpressibly painful to aBeliever. If you
can live without God, I am afraid you will die without God. But if you cannot
live without God, that proves that you are His, and you will bear me out in the
assertion that this is the heaviest of mortal griefs—to feel that God has
forsaken you and does not hear your prayer—no, does not even seem to help you to
pray, so that you can only groan, “Oh that I knew where I might find Him! . . .
Behold, I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive
Him.””—1901, Sermon #2732

“…Satan betrays his cunning by the weapons which he will often use against us.
Sometimes he will attack the child of God with the remembrance of a ribald song,
or a licentious joke which he may have heard in the days of his carnal state.
But far more frequently he will attack him with texts of Scripture! It is
strange that it should be so, but it often is the case that when he shoots his
arrow against a Christian, he wings it with God’s own Word!”—1900, Sermon #2707

“If you are a true Believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, yet are slack in serving
God, you shall get to Heaven but you shall have very little Heaven on the way
there.”—1903, Sermon #2860

“One of the surest proofs to any man of the existence of a God consists in his
dealings with that man in turning him front darkness to light, and from the
power of sin and Satan, unto God. All the arguments that ever were written by
Butler, or Paley, or any of the defenders of religion, will never convince a man
like coming into personal dealings with God. And when those dealings assume this
form—that we have passed from death unto life—they become indisputable proofs of
the Godhead and of the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ!”—1898, Sermon #2555

“I know that I am addressing some who are not yet saved, but I wish that this
prayer might get into each one of their hearts—‘Lord, be merciful unto me.’ Keep
on praying it until you obtain the mercy! Every five minutes in the day,
wherever you are, let your heart go beating—beat, beat, beat, beat—to this tune,
‘Lord, be merciful unto me. Be merciful unto me. Be merciful unto me.’ You
cannot have a prayer that will better fit your lips.”—1897, Sermon #2535

“I feel that working side by side with Christ is the only style of working at
which a man can keep on year after year.”—1902, Sermon #2779 “There is no novel
that ever was written that can equal in interest the true life of a believing
man. His path is strewn with wonders and thick with marvelous displays of his
Lord’s love.”—1900, Sermon #2688 “When a man sins outwardly, it is because he
has sin inwardly. If there were no sin in us, no sin would come out of
us.”—1897, Sermon #2535

“I am old enough to remember the times when we used to strike with a flint upon
the steel in order to get a light in the morning, and I recollect that I always
left off trying to produce a spark when I found that there was no tinder in the
box. I believe that the devil is no fool and that if there is a man who has no
tinder in the box—that is, no corruption in his nature—depend upon it, Satan
will not long continue to tempt him!”—1899, Sermon #2603

“I reckon that there is no man who loves the means of Grace like the man who at
one time felt them to be dry and barren. When the Lord fills the dry beds of the
rivers with the torrents of His love, then we come and drink abundantly and we
rejoice exceedingly. When, for a while, all outward means have seemed to become
a wilderness to us, oh, how glad we are when, once again, the Lord appears, and
puts life, and power, and efficacy into them, so that our soul rejoices in
them!”—1898, Sermon #2569

“When God’s will and our will are contrary to one another, we may be sure that
there is something amiss with us. We are never right till God’s will becomes our
will and we can honestly say, ‘The will of the Lord be done.’”—1901, Sermon
#2739 “You have never truly found Jesus if you do not tell others about
Him!”—1899, Sermon #2646

“You cannot get to Heaven by your mother’s godliness, or by your father’s
graciousness—there must be a work of Grace in your own souls. No man can be a
sponsor for another in spiritual things. There is no more gigantic lie than that
one person should promise that another shall do this and that, which he cannot
even do himself! No, “every man shall bear his own burden.” Everyone must come,
with his own sin, to his own Savior and, by his own act of faith, must find
peace through the blood of Jesus Christ. Do not trust to any national religion,
for it is utterly worthless. It is only personalreligion that can save you. If
the blood of saints is flowing in your veins, it brings you nothing except
greater responsibility, for salvation is not of blood, nor of the will of man,
nor of the will of the flesh, but of God, and of God alone.”—1903, Sermon #2831

“And this I know, that life would not be worth living if it did not continually
touch the hem of Jehovah’s garments! The very virtue of life streams into our
life through our being in contact with Him. Where the little circle of our
existence impinges upon the unutterably vast circumference of His power and
Glory is where we get the blessings that we need!”—1900, Sermon #2688

“Satan, I tell you to your face, you are the greatest fool that ever breathed,
and I will prove it to you in the day when you and I shall stand as
enemies—sworn enemies, as we are this day—at the great bar of God! And so,
Christian, may you say to him whenever he attacks you! Hear him not, but resist
him steadfast in the faith and you shall prevail.”—1900, Sermon #2707

“The way to Heaven is not by explaining riddles, but by believing Revelations.
The way to Heaven is not through the cleverness that can spell out an enigma,
but through the simplicity that believes in God who cannot lie. It is true that
God’s eternal purpose is fixed, do not doubt that—but it is equally true that
the Lord listens to the voice of a man and that whatever we ask in prayer,
believing, we shall receive.”—1897, Sermon #2537

“Some people will always look on what they call “the black side” of things, but
to faith’s eye, there is no black side, for even the dark side of God’s
Providential dealings with us glows with light when faith looks at it!”—1903,
Sermon #2860

“The Presence of God is absolutely essential for the edification, instruction,
growth and perfecting of Believers! If we have not this, the means of Grace are
empty, vain and void. Clouds without rain that mock the thirsty land. Wells
without water that tantalize the perishing caravan, but yield no moisture to
burning lips—a mere mirage in the desert, looking like pools of water and
fruit-bearing palm trees—but only mocking the wayfarer’s gaze. We must have the
Presence of God for His people’s sake, for without Him they can do
nothing.”—1902, Sermon #2811

“There are some things about which a man must not be undecided—you must not be
undecided about being chaste, about speaking the truth—and you cannot be
undecided about serving God without being guilty, in that very indecision, of
manifest treason against the majesty of Heaven!”—1897, Sermon #2537

“Christ reckons that the man who is not with Him is against Him! He who does not
serve Christ is opposing Him. There are no ‘betweenites’—none can dwell on the
fence. You are either in Immanuel’s land, or else you are in the dominions of
Satan—you can be sure of that! If not right, you are wrong! If not a friend of
Christ, you are His enemy!”—1897, Sermon #2537

“Again, before coming to the Communion, it behooves you to consider the great
distance there is between you and God. Even though you now have very blessed and
hallowed fellowship with the Lord Jesus, remember that in this Supper, there is
a memorial of yourguilt. It is true that you see here how your sins were taken
away by the broken body and the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, but let the
very bath in which you were cleansed remind you of your sinfulness!”—1899,
Sermon #2647

“I know of nothing that can lift you up so much above the evil influences of an
ungodly world as constantly abiding in close fellowship with Christ and telling
Him all that you feel in your heart of hearts.”—1902, Sermon #2779

“Any man who is selfish is an unsaved man, for the chief point in salvation is
to save us from ourselves. As long as you live simply within your own ribs, you
live in a dungeon. You will never come into the palace where the many mansions
are—the liberty of our great Father’s House—until you can say, ‘I love others
more than I love myself. Above all, I love the great Burden-Bearer who took my
burden of sin upon His shoulders and carried it up in the Cross and away from
the Cross and now, through love to Him, the love of self is gone and I will live
to glorify His name forever and forever.’”—1903, Sermon #2831

“‘Come unto Me,’ says Christ, ‘and I will give you rest.’ Here I ask you to
admire the wonderful Grace and mercy of this arrangement. According to Christ’s
words, you are to obtain rest of heart, not by coming to a ceremony, or to an
ordinance, but to Christ, Himself! ‘Come unto Me.’ He does not even say, ‘Come
to My teaching, to My example, to My Sacrifice,’ but, ‘Come unto Me.’ It is to a
Person you are to come—to that very Person who, being God, and equal with the
Father, laid aside His glories and took upon Himself our human flesh.”—1901,
Sermon #2708

“I am sure that in looking back upon all the way that the Lord has led you,
those of you who are His children will be bound to say that goodness and mercy
have followed you all the days of your life! There has not been a single mistake
or one unkind act on God’s part. He has sometimes cut you with the very sharpest
knife He had and it was necessary for Him to cut deeply with it so as to get out
the very roots of the cancer that was destroying you. You would have been lost
if it had not been that you lost your all—but that loss was your greatest
gain!”—1900, Sermon #2688 “The strength to overcome temptation comes from God,
alone, and the conquering name is the name of Jesus Christ! Therefore, go
forward in that strength and in that name against all your temptations. Up and
at them, for they have been routed long before, and you shall rout them
again!”—1899, Sermon #2603

“Fools say that time is long, but only fools talk like that. They say that “time
is made for slaves.” He alone is a free man who knows how to use his time
properly—and he is a slave, indeed, who finds it slavery to pursue his calling
with a good conscience and serve his God with diligence, fidelity, and
zeal.”—1903, Sermon #2861

“There is many a sinner who cannot find the door of hope because he is holding
on to some evil thing. There is, for instance, the man who is clinging to strong
drink—he never can have peace with God when, perhaps, only once in six months
can he walk home in an upright fashion. He cannot drink of the cup of the Lord
and the cup of devils! There is another man who is practicing some secret sin. I
dare not say what it is, but he knows. Yet he says that he is trying to find
peace with God. Ah, Sir, you will never obtain it while you cling to that
iniquity! You must cut off the evil thing, even if it is your right arm! You
must pluck it out, even if it is your right eye! Here is a person who does
something in business that he ought not to do—and here is another man who omits
to do what he knows that he ought to do. They think that God will make peace
with them on theirterms, but He makes no terms with sinners unless they will
part with their sins and trust in Christ alone! God will not save you and let
you save your pet sin—that cannot be!”—1898, Sermon #2569

“If religion does not salt your tongue and keep it sweet, it has done nothing
for you. If the doctor wants to know the state of your health, he says, ‘Let me
see your tongue.’ And there is no better test of the health of the mind than to
see what is on the tongue! When it gets furred up with unkind words. When it
turns black with blasphemy. When it is spotted with lasciviousness, there is
something very bad inside the heart, you may be quite sure of that!”—1897,
Sermon #2537

“Christian experience is the richest product of Grace and it ought to be laid at
the feet of the Well-Beloved from whom it comes, and to whom it belongs. What
God has done for one of His people is an indication of what He will do for
others of His chosen. The Lord’s Providences are promises and His benedictions
are predictions. To be silent concerning the loving kindness of the Lord is a
robbery of the worst kind—it is taking from our God the glory due unto His holy
name.”—1897, Sermon #2538

“Jesus Christ says to all who labor and are heavy laden, ‘Come unto Me, and I
will give you rest.’ This invitationimplies a movement—a movement from something
to something. You are bid to come away from whatever else you have been trusting
in and to move towards Christ and trust to Him. And when you do so, He will give
you rest.”—1901, Sermon #2708

“To serve God is to reign!”—1900, Sermon #2688 “It is worthwhile to be like
Christ in the worst of times because that is an assurance that we shall be like
He in the best of times.”—1902, Sermon #2780

“There is no need of fear to the man who relies upon his God, but there is every
reason for fear to the man who begins to rely upon himself.”—1902, Sermon #2811
“By the brevity of time, then, and by the rapidity of its flight, I admonish you
to refrain from all abuses of the tongue. Invest each hour in some profitable
manner that, when past, it may not be lost. Let your lips be a fountain from
which all streams that flow shall savor of Grace and goodness.”—1903, Sermon
#2861

“Let us abase ourselves in the Presence of God. Let us humble ourselves before
Him and, while we feed, by faith, on our Master’s body, let us feel as if our
own proud flesh were cut away and humbled by the very communion we hold with
Christ, our Redeemer.”—1899, Sermon #2647

“If the Holy Spirit takes possession of a man, or a woman, what can they not
say? What can they not do? The Lord can take up the poorest worm among us and
make him thresh the mountains till they become like chaff! Let us, therefore,
sing this charming sonnet with all our hearts, ‘The Lord is my strength.’ I will
rely in no degree upon oratorical power, or human learning, or natural gifts, or
acquired aptitude, or on anything that I have, but I will rest in the Lord
alone!”—1897, Sermon #2538

“Child of God, are you vexed and embittered in soul? Then bravely accept the
trial as coming from your Father and say, ‘The cup which my Father has given me,
shall I not drink it?’ ‘Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we
not receive evil?’ Press on through the cloud which now lowers directly in your
pathway—it may be with you as it was with the disciples on the Mount of
Transfiguration, ‘they feared as they entered the cloud,’ yet in that cloud they
saw their Master’s Glory and they found it good to be there.”—1898, Sermon #2557

“We do not come to Christ by the exertion of our own power to come, but by the
cessation of the will to stay away!”—1901, Sermon #2708“Oh, I never imagined how
strong Christ was till I saw His love hold back His Deity!”—1898, Sermon #2570

“Whenever I grow very dull through pain, or heavy through lack of sleep, I say
to myself, ‘I will note down what I owe to God of praise, which I cannot just
now pay to Him, that I may do so when I get a little better.’ And then my
conscience chides me, saying, ‘Praise Him NOW! Bless God for aching bones! Bless
God for a weary head! Bless God for troubles and trials, for he who can so
praise the Lord is singing a truer and more acceptable song than youth, health
and happiness can present!’ A seraph never praised God with an aching head.
Cherubs never blessed the Lord upon a sick bed—so you will excel even the angels
if you magnify the Lord in sickness! Why should you not, since you also can say,
‘The Lord is my strength and song’?”—1897, Sermon #2538

“Remember that you can never be really whole till you are holy, for holiness is
spiritual sanity—it is the caring of the mind and heart from the disease which
sin brought upon them.”—1899, Sermon #2649

“It is so blessed to think that there is a Gospel that will suit the man who
cannot read—and that will suit the man who cannot put two consecutive thoughts
together—and that will suit the man whose brain has almost failed him in the
hour of death—a Gospel that suited the thief dying upon the cross—a Gospel so
simple that if there is but Grace to receive it, there needs no great mental
power to understand it! Blessed be my Master for giving us a Gospel so simple
and so plain as this!”—1901, Sermon #2708

“It were not worth while living if we could not die! It is the very joy of this
earthly life to think that it will come to an end! What would a sailor say who
was on a voyage that would never bring him to a port? What would a traveler say
if he was toiling along a road which would never bring him home? Blessed be God,
we shall come to the pearly gates, by-and-by! Let us not be alarmed about that,
for the Lord has become our salvation.”—1897, Sermon #2538

“The yoke of sin—the yoke of selfishness, the yoke of greediness, the yoke of
drunkenness, the yoke of unbelief—is the heaviest yoke of all! The crux of
infidelity is heavier than the Cross of Christ. You may depend upon it, that
Christ’s yoke, compared with any other, or with all others, is truly easy and
light!”—1903, Sermon #2832

“There are some people who talk about presenting the perpetual sacrifice of the
“mass.” There is perhaps, no grosser blasphemy under Heaven than the idea that
we can offer up the body and blood of Christ again.”—1900, Sermon #2689

“We ought to be happy to be where we can make others happy. It should be our
will to do the Lord’s will by being useful to our fellow men. We must not value
our position according to the ease it brings to us, or the respectability with
which it surrounds us, but by the opportunities which it affords for overcoming
evil and promoting good.”—1897, Sermon #2539

“How happy ought to be your ears that hear the Gospel’s joyful sound, yet, as
you hear it not in your hearts, you cry to the Lord, ‘In what way have You loved
us?’”—1902, Sermon #2782

“Yes, the chief joy in the tabernacles of the righteous is a spiritual one! A
joy of the father because he is saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation.
A joy of the mother because she, too, has had her heart opened, like Lydia, to
hear and to receive the Word. A joy of the dear children as they offer their
little prayers and as they talk of Jesus, whom their soul loves. I do not know
that I ever have a greater joy than when, sometimes, I have to receive a whole
family into the Church! Five came to see me at one time, from one house—quite a
company of boys and girls. It is delightful to see our beloved offspring early
in life giving their hearts to the Lord! Happy mothers, happy fathers, happy
brothers, happy sisters where the Lord works so graciously! May you long
continue to praise and bless His name for this singular blessing, if you are
partakers in it! I know none of my father’s family, or of my own, who are
unsaved and, therefore, I can lead you in the song!”—1897, Sermon #2539

“You, dear Friends, cannot love the right if you do not hate the wrong. I would
not give a penny for your love to the Truth of God if it is not accompanied with
a hearty hatred of error.”—1899, Sermon #2604 “Blessed is he who can expound the
mysteries. I have no doubt about his blessedness, but I am perfectly satisfied
with another blessedness, namely, if I can bring sinners to Jesus and teach the
saints some practical Truths which may guide them in daily life.”—1903, Sermon
#2861

“My deacons know well enough how, when I first preached in Exeter Hall, there
was scarcely an occasion in which they left me alone for ten minutes before the
service, but they would find me in a most fearful state of sickness produced by
that tremendous thought of my solemn responsibility. And, even now, if I ever
sit down and begin to turn that thought over, and forget that Christ has all
power in Heaven and in earth, I am always affected in the same way. I scarcely
dare to look that thought in the face and I am compelled to put my
responsibilities where I put my sins—on the back of the Lord Jesus Christ,
hoping, trusting, believing, knowing, that He is able to keep that which I have
committed unto Him against that Last Great Day.”—1902, Sermon #2811 “Perhaps in
the case of some of you Christ is wearied with your religion. Wearied with our
religion?” asks one. When you get home, will you read the first chapter of the
Book of the Prophet Isaiah and you will see there how God declares Himself to be
tired of the empty formalism of the people? “Bring no more vain oblations;
incense is an abomination unto Me. The new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of
assemblies, I cannot endure. It is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new
moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates: they are a trouble unto Me; I am
weary to bear them.” It was a weariness unto Him and, if you pray, but do not
pray sincerely, my Lord will be tired of hearing your mockery of prayer! If you
go to sacraments, or come to public worship and think that this will save you,
my Lord will be weary of you, for it is all a sham! There is a shell, but there
is no kernel. You mock Him with the solemn sound upon a thoughtless tongue. You
sit as His people sit and your minds are far away on the mountains of vanity.
You hear, you join in the hymn and listen to the prayer, but there is no true
worship, praise, or supplication. I tell you, sirs, my Lord is getting weary of
you—getting sick and tired of your religion! What a picture! Christ wearied with
sin and wearied with dead religion!—1898, Sermon #2570

“This is the greatest thing we can do for God—to be emptied, so that His
fullness may flow into us. That is what I want to do when I go down to the
Communion Table—I want to just sit there and not try to think of anything that I
can offer to my Master—but to open my soul and to take in all that He is willing
to give me!”—1901, Sermon #2708

“I have heard of one who was said to love his wife too much, but I did not
believe it, because the model for a husband’s love is, “even as Christ also
loved the church,” and who could go beyondtha?”—1899, Sermon #2650

“I would ask any of you young people who are newly-married and just starting in
life, how can you expect happiness unless you seek it in God? You have given
your hearts to one another—oh, that you had given your hearts to Christ as
well—for then you would be joined in One from whom you can never be separated!
If you are one in Christ, you will have surer grounds of union than natural
affection can afford. There will be a brief separation of the body when one of
you is taken Home, but you will meet again and dwell forever in the same Heaven.
Unions in the Lord are unions which have the blessing of the Lord. See to it
that you begin as you mean to go on, namely, with that blessing which makes rich
and brings no sorrow with it. If your home is to be happy, if the children that
God may give you are to be your comfort and your delight, first let your own
souls be right with God. If the Lord is the God of the parents, he will be the
God of their seed. The God of Abraham will be the God of Isaac and He will be
the God of Jacob, and He will be the God of Joseph, for He keeps His
faithfulness from generation to generation of them that love Him. He does not
cast off His people, nor their children, either. If you are an Ishmael, what
will your children be? If you are far from God, how can you hope that your
posterity will be near to Him?”—1897, Sermon #2539

“Be not startled if I say that it is very much in proportion to our thought that
we really worship and, without thought, there is no true worship.”—1902, Sermon
#2783

“I am not one of those who think that the result of Christ’s death ever hung in
jeopardy for a single moment. I believe that all He intended to do by His death
will be done and that there is not one soul, for whom He stood as Substitute,
that shall ever be lost. He has paid the debt for all His elect and they shall
never be charged with their debts again—they are gone, and gone forever. If the
Son of God has actually laid down His life to achieve a certain purpose, I
cannot suppose that He will be prevented from achieving it. I can imagine myself
living and dying for a certain end and yet being foiled, for I am but a man. But
I am not capable of such blasphemy as would be involved in believing that the
Son of God could ever be born and live for a certain set purpose—and die to
carry out that purpose and yet not accomplish it! ‘He shall see of the travail
of His soul, and shall be satisfied.’ He ‘was dead’ and He has, therefore, put
forth all His strength for the accomplishment of the end He had in view—and that
end will certainly be achieved!”—1900, Sermon #2689

“Where there is no family prayer, we cannot expect the children to grow up in
the fear of the Lord—neither can the household look for happiness.”—1897, Sermon
#2539

“The gentlemen of the modern-thought school, who have been to Germany for their
theology, do not like that glorious Doctrine of Substitution! They think that
the Atonement is a something or other, that in some way or other, somehow or
other, has something or other to do with the salvation of men—but I tell them
that their cloudy Gospel might have surrounded me till my hair grew gray, but I
would never have been any the better for it!”—1901, Sermon #2709

“The Prayer Meeting is the gauge of the Church’s spiritual condition. You may
always test our prosperity by the multitudes who assemble to pray.”—1902, Sermon
#2811 “There is more joy in being unknown than in being known and there is less
care in having no wealth than in having much of it.”—1903, Sermon #2832

“If a man is poor, let him rejoice that everybody is not as poor as he is. If he
is troubled about his worldly circumstances and he meets with a Brother who has
no cause for such sorrow, let him say, ‘I am glad he is better off than I am. I
do not want him to have anything to worry him as my troubles perplex me. I
praise God for his prosperity, I bless the Lord for his happiness.’”—1899,
Sermon #2650 “What new worlds may yet be created, what revolts there may be
among fresh orders of creatures, how many orders of creatures there may yet be
in the universe and how great and comprehensive the vast dominions of Jehovah
may be, we do not, at present, know—but we shall know all that we need to know
in due time! It is enough for us now to know that our Bible is true, that Jesus
Christ is our Savior and that we shall be with Him where He is and behold His
Glory forever and ever.”—1903, Sermon #2862

“Oftentimes, in seeking to bless people, the kindest way is not to build them
up, but to pull them down—not to begin to encourage their hopes—but to let them
see how hopeless their case is apart from sovereign Grace.—1898, Sermon #2570

“Do you think that the Lord saved you that you might just be happy, keeping your
joy within your own heart, ever feeding and fattening it? I do not think the
Lord had such a narrow purpose as that in His mind when He saved you. Depend
upon it, if God has given you a jewel to wear, it is that other eyes may be
gladdened by the sight of it.”—1897, Sermon #2540

“My dear Brother, you cantalk to those few poor people in that hamlet where you
live. You have been afraid to try to speak to them and so you have let them
remain uninstructed. But you will not be able to be silent if you think upon
God’s loving kindness to you!”—1902, Sermon #2783 “I am afraid that there are
many people who think all others evil except themselves, yet if they could but
look within, they would discover that the evil person not only lives in their
house, but that his head is under their hat!”—1897, Sermon #2541

“The very genius of the Christian religion is enthusiasm, but the enthusiasm is
created by contact with Christ. As we come near to our great Captain, every
soldier in the ranks of the King’s army feels that he must be a hero. We look at
His scars and wounds, and see what He did and suffered, and then we feel that it
would be mean and contemptible on our part to be otherwise than altogether in
earnest for so great and good a Lord, and for so grand a cause!”—1901, Sermon
#2709

“It is not the placewhich makes the true worship—it is the heart. It is not even
the day—it is the state of a man’s mind. It is not that the place is said to be
holy and, therefore, prayer is accepted—every place is equally holy where holy
men worship God. All distinctions of buildings are heathenish or, at the best,
Jewish—they are done away with by Christ.—1898, Sermon #2570

“The Revelation of God in Nature is not unique. If He has made one world, He can
make another. If He has made one universe, He can make 50 universes! But after
having given us one complete Revelation of His will, He will never give another,
that one stands alone.”—1899, Sermon #2604

“Some dear souls are afraid to trust Jesus. If they better understood the
matter, they would be afraidnot to trust Him. He commands us to trust Him and He
has declared very plainly what are the consequences of disobedience to this
command—‘He that believes not shall be damned’—so that faith must be a duty, and
unbelief a terrible offense in the sight of God.”—1897, Sermon #2541

“Remember that the greatest force in the world is love—it is invincible. You can
love a man to Christ, but you cannot bully him into salvation. I never heard of
a soul that was scolded to the Savior, but I have known many drawn to Him by
love. So love them, dear Friends, keep on loving them more and more, until they
shall be brought to feel that the love of God shed abroad in your heart has also
reached their hearts.”—1901, Sermon #2710

“When God looks upon Christ’s shed and sprinkled blood, it is then that He looks
on you with pity and compassion! Look where God looks and then your eyes will
meet His! If you look to Christ, and God looks to Christ, then you shall see eye
to eye, and you shall find joy and peace in believing.”—1898, Sermon #2577

“…the pilgrim path to Heaven is by Weeping Cross—the road to joy and peace is by
the way of a sense of sin and a sense of the Lord’s anger!”—1898, Sermon #2557
“God had one Son without sin, but He never had a son without suffering. We may
escape the rod if we are not of the family of God, but the trueborn child must
not—and would not if he could—avoid that chastisement of which all such are
partakers.”—1900, Sermon #2689 “‘Glory be to God,’ should always be the
preacher’s motto.”—1902, Sermon #2784 “A grainof Divine Grace is worth more than
a ton of knowledge! If you have but a spark of true faith in Jesus Christ, it is
better than a whole volcano full of worldly wisdom!”—1903, Sermon #2862

“Brothers and Sisters, we must be willing to be nothing—we shall never be
anything till we are willing to be nothing. If any man will be perfectly content
to be nobody, he shall be somebody. But he who must be somebody shall be
nobody.”—1902, Sermon #2811“The yoke of Christ is His word, His precepts, His
commands, the following of His example, the bearing of suffering which He
appoints, the persecution which comes to us for His sake. This is His yoke, and
His burden, quite as much as we need desire to carry. So, let us be content that
we are not our own masters, but that we are our Lord’s servants and that we have
not even a pennyworth of our own to carry, but only mean to be carriers for Him.
We have hired ourselves out to carry the vessels of the sanctuary—and we will
carry no other burden than that.”—1903, Sermon #2832

“ Hear, O LORD, when I cry with my voice—have mercy also upon me and answer me.
One moment he praises and the next moment he prays. That is quite right. I have
often said to you that we live by breathing in and breathing out. We breathe in
the atmosphere of Heaven by prayer and we breathe it out again by praise. Prayer
and praise make up the essentials of the Christian’s life. Oh, for more of
them—not prayer without praise, nor praise without prayer! Prayer and praise,
like the two horses in Pharaoh’s chariot, make our Christian life to run
smoothly and swiftly to God’s honor and glory.”—1897, Sermon #2541

“Another method of fruit-bearing is by a holy character. O Beloved, I implore
you to be holy men and women! Seek after close conformity to the likeness of
Christ. Nothing does more good for a Church than for its members to live the
Gospel in all their concerns at home and abroad.”—1899, Sermon #2650

“Man is not so dead that he sins without guilt, or lives without responsibility.
No man who remains out of Christ is without guilt on that account. He who
continues an unbeliever may not say that he cannot help it—it is his fault and
his sin that he does not believe.”—1899, Sermon #2605

“The way to become like Christ is to think about Christ. Some people think so
much about their own sanctification that they miss sanctification altogether.
They are looking at their own image and admiring it until they are gradually
being more and more conformed to their own image! But he who looks away from
himself, entirely to Christ, shall go from glory unto glory and be transformed
into the image of his Master.”—1898, Sermon #2559

“Some people believe that children of God can fall from Grace. If that were
true, the members of Christ’s mystical body would be severed from Him and He
would be no longer a perfect Christ! I believe no such teaching as that! If I am
one with Christ, I defy the devil, himself, to tear me away from Him.”—1897,
Sermon #2542

“Do not refuse to be comforted, for if you do, you will be spiritually a
suicide! The man who will not eat and so dies of starvation, is as much a
suicide as he that puts the pistol to his head and blows out his brains. He that
rejects Christ, damns himself as surely as he that gives himself body and soul
to the devil. He that refuses what God has provided and will not have pardon
through the precious blood, dashes himself upon the bosses of Jehovah’s buckler
and fixes himself upon the point of the javelin of Divine Justice.”—1898, Sermon
#2578

“However gracious our genealogy may be, unless our family tree begins in Christ
and we, ourselves, are personally grafted into Him, we shall die in our sins and
perish forever. God help us, who have been so highly privileged as to be born of
godly parents, to lay that Truth of God to heart and to seek the Lord now, that
we also may be numbered among those who are saved!”—1899, Sermon #2652

“Rest assured, dear Friends, that where your pleasure is, there your heart is.
If you find your pleasure in the world, your heart is in the world and you are
to be reckoned among the worldly. But if Christ is your joy, your pleasure, your
delight, your very Heaven—then there is a difference between you and
worldlings.”—1901, Sermon #2710

“You say you do not wish to die? Well, perhaps you never may, but why should you
fear death? Why should you dread the grave? Our Lord Jesus left His grave
clothes behind for our use, and He carefully laid the napkin apart for our
friends to wipe their eyes with. We go not to a bare, unfurnished chamber when
we go to our last sleep on this earth— “‘Tis no mere morgue to fence The ruins
oflost innocence, A place of sorrow and decay—The imprisoningstone is rolled
away!”—1897, Sermon #2542

“Brethren, what a grand expression that is, ‘eternal salvation!’ You know that
there are some who preach a temporary salvation. They say that you may be in
Christ today and out of Christ tomorrow, that you may be saved by Grace at one
hour, but damned by sin the next. Ah, but the Bible says no such thing! This may
be the Gospel according to Arminius, but it is not the Gospel according to John,
nor according to Paul, nor according to our Lord Jesus Christ.”—1900, Sermon
#2689

“Flimsy views of human depravity lead to very indistinct ideas of the Grace of
God. There is nothing but deep sub-soil plowing that ever makes a man sound in
the Doctrines of Grace—and I will defy any man who has had a deep experience of
his own odious depravity to believe any other doctrines but the Doctrines of
Grace which are commonly called Calvinism.”—1903, Sermon #2833 “The Lord is such
a great God that if we rejoice in Him at all, we ought greatlyto rejoice in Him.
Little sources of blessing may well produce little joy, but when we think of the
great goodness of the great God to such great sinners as we have been, each one
of us who has been greatly pardoned through the great Sacrifice of Jesus may
well say, ‘I will greatly rejoice in the Lord.’”—1897, Sermon #2543 “It is
congenial to God’s Nature to make His creatures happy.”—1898, Sermon #2557

“It is a sign of something radically rotten within when a man can apparently be
just as holy and as earnest without prayer as he is with it. You cannot really
know the power of the life of God if you are able to live without prayer, for,
just as a man who is unable to breathe, soon faints, so must a person
spiritually faint if he does not pray.”—1903, Sermon #2812

“There is always a set of grumblers about who think they could preach better and
manage Sunday schools better than anybody else. They are the people who
generally do nothing at all.”—1902, Sermon #2785

“Joy in the creature must necessarily be limited, for the creature is limited.
Joy in the creature may be harmful, for the creature may beguile you and allure
you away from the Creator. Joy in yourself is a fiction—there can be no true
satisfaction in it. Joy even in the work of God in your soul may sometimes be
questionable, for you may not be sure that it is God’s work in which you are
rejoicing. But when you can say, “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul
shall be joyful in my God,” you have a subject for joy and an object of joy
higher than I can ever describe!”—1897, Sermon #2543

“Brothers and Sisters, there is no seeing unless there is believing! I have
heard that seeing is believing, but it is not—it is the very opposite! Seeing
and believing do not run this way—to see first and then to believe. They run the
other way—believe and then see! And that is just what Abraham did. He believed
God and then he saw Christ’s day afar off and was glad. See as much as you like
after you have believed, but remember our Lord’s words to Thomas, “Blessed are
they that have not seen, and yet have believed”—that is, those who did not need
to see first, but believed first, and then their eyes were so opened that they
saw the salvation of God.”—1899, Sermon #2652

“…whenever a man doubts the mercy of God, the best thing that I can say of him
is that he is a fool.”—1898, Sermon #2578

“Perhaps, God allows wicked men to come in our way to make us see the evil of
sin, that we may turn from it, pass by it, abhor it andnot indulge in it. I have
no doubt that the wickedness of men may be employed under the Divine wisdom and
the overruling hand of God for the sanctifica tion of His own people.”—1901,
Sermon #2711

“As far as spiritual things are concerned, man’s understanding is dead. He can
comprehend the highest and most wonderful of sciences, but he cannot—or, what is
tantamount to it, he willnot—understand the things of God.”—1899, Sermon #2605

“If you want to see Christ, dear Friends, borrow the telescope of promise. Faith
is very fond of that optic glass, and it is wonderful what she can see when she
puts it to her eye. Ten thousand blessings, not seen by our natural vision,
become visible to the eye of faith when we look at them through the medium of
the promises of God.”—1899, Sermon #2652

“No matter what sorrow falls to your lot, if you can pray, you will rise out of
it.”—1898, Sermon #2578

“I think there is nothing that I detest more than the idea of priest-craft and I
hope that you do the same. Who is any poor mortal man that he should interpose
himself between a sinner and his Savior? Take care to go straight away to
Christ. But, in the true Scriptural sense, there is a priesthood which belongs
to all Christians and I want you to understand, poor Believer, notwithstanding
all your infirmities and imperfections, that the Lord has so covered you with
the righteousness of Christ that you are clad in a priest’s holy vestments! You
have, all over you, the pure white linen which is the righteousness of saints,
and you are wearing that royal miter which permits you to exercise the
priesthood, for He, ‘has made us kings and priests unto God.’ We are ‘a chosen
generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people.’”—1897,
Sermon #2543

“Meditation and prayer are twin sisters and both of them appear to me equally
necessary to Christian life. I think meditation mustexist where there is prayer,
and prayer is sure to exist where there is meditation.”—1900, Sermon #2690 “The
man who habitually lives in sin is not a free man, for he is still a slave to
sin. If he finds pleasure and delight in disobeying God, he has no right to talk
about being a free man. His chains are rattling on his wrists—what can he know
about freedom?”—1899, Sermon #2652

“Oh, what myriads of men there are in the world! When I traverse this city of
five million souls, it appalls me! It can scarcely be called a city—it is a
province, it is a nation! There are two or three nations which, if put together,
would not make up as many inhabitants as the population of this wonderful city!
Yet, over all this vast population the taint of sin has spread. But what is
London compared with all the nations of the globe, the almost innumerable hosts
that people this round world? Yet there is not one who bears the countenance of
a man upon whom the shadow of the curse has not fallen. Each man must toil for
his bread with the sweat upon his brow and, in due time, it must be said to each
one of us, ‘dust you are, and unto dust shall you return.’ What has caused all
this? It is the one offensewhich has brought judgment unto condemnation upon
all!”—1897, Sermon #2544

“O dear Friends, search out one of the exceeding great and precious promises of
the Word—feed upon it, get it right into your soul and then you may feel that
your soul can no more be troubled, for you believe in God and you believe in
Christ and, therefore, you are full of gladness! ‘Let your soul delight itself
in fatness.’ There is this joy as one of the benefits of obedience to the
exhortation of the text.”—1902, Sermon #2786

“Yes, Christian, God has put you in the very midst of sin to make His Grace the
more conspicuous.”—1901, Sermon #2711

“Good John Newton used to say that for a Calvinist to be proud was the most
inconsistent thing in the world, because, by his own profession, there were
Truths of God which no man could receive or understand of himself—so, why should
he boast of his own attainments and why should he blame others for not doing
what he knows they cannot do of themselves?”—1903, Sermon #2833

“The Father does not draw us to Christ by a force which is contrary to our
nature and will—we are not sticks and stones—and He does not treat us as if we
were. We are rational, responsible, free agents and He deals with us as such,
never snapping even the finest strings in the instrument of human nature, so far
as it is human nature. So, when He draws men, He draws them by teaching
them!”—1899, Sermon #2606

“There is no preaching like that which Gods bids us. The preaching that comes
out of our own heads will never go into other men’s hearts. If we will keep to
the preaching that the Lord bids us, we shall not fail in our ministry.”—1897,
Sermon #2544 “Any man who is born of God must love Jesus Christ.”—1899, Sermon
#2652 “The way to make us love God is for the love of God to be shed abroad in
our hearts by the Holy Spirit!”—1897, Sermon #2544

“You may dive as far as you like into the sea, but you will not find any fire
there. You may rake as long as you please in the burning fiery furnace, but you
will never reach any cooling blocks of ice. You may hunt, for many a day, in the
human heart’s natural death, but you will not there discover any signs of life.
And, within the morgue of man’s corruption, you shall never be able to discern
any remedy for a sin-sick soul.”—1900, Sermon #2691

“I would rather find God beneath a shed with half-a-dozen poor working men, than
I would go and see the gorgeous ceremonies in a cathedral where God is not
present! It is not the place, it is not the form, it is not the garb, it is not
the sweet tone of song or music—it is getting near to God that is the
all-important matter! Whatever else we do—whether our service is plain as a
Quaker’s, or gorgeous as a Romanist’s, if we do not seek God, it is all
nothing—a bottle of smoke—and it shall come to nothing. The outward
ceremonialist has no understanding, for he does not seek after God.”—1897,
Sermon #2545

“If a man is truly converted, the influence of his conversion will spread to
others—it is an act of mercy from God to him with a view also to his children,
his friends, his neighbors, his dependents.”—1897, Sermon #2546

“I have heard some people say that they will have such sweet and satisfying
fellowship with Christ that they will not want to have any with His people, but
that is both absurd and impossible because you cannot have fellowship with the
Head without having fellowship with the members at the same time! Christ will
never wish you to look upon Him in Heaven as divided from His people—they shall
be so completely one with Him that in fellowship with His people, you shall in
no degree be diminishing your fellowship with Christ, but rather be enjoying it
in the form in which He, Himself, rejoices, for His delights will still be with
the sons of men and if, on earth, they were the excellent in whom was all your
delight, He would have you take the same delight in them when you meet them
before His Throne in Glory.”—1903, Sermon #2813

“God can lift up your head, poor mourner, sorrowing under sin and a fear of
wrath. I tell you, God can at once forgive your sin, turn away all His wrath and
give you a sense of perfect pardon—and with it a sense of his undying
love.”—1898, Sermon #2557 “Not a step heavenward, not in the least likeness to
God, not to the smallest degree of holiness can you proceed apart from Jesus
Christ your Head! Never forget this fact, simple though it is.”—1899, Sermon
#2653

“When you have abundant provision in your house, it is your duty to send
portions to those for whom nothing is prepared. Mind that you attend to this
matter lest your Lord should put you on short commons, too, and make you feel a
little more as you ought to towards the afflicted.”—1897, Sermon #2546 “If any
man preaches that which does not lead you to Christ, do not listen to it, for
evidently he has not been taught of God. And, if you find in any book, teaching
which makes you think less of Christ than you did before, burn the book! It will
do you no good—and it may do you a great deal of mischief.”—1899, Sermon #2606

“Are there not in it [the Gospel] great Truths of God that cannot be cut down to
fit any system that the human mind can make? And ought we not to be thoroughly
glad that it is so? For, surely, it is better that the Gospel should be
according to God’s mind than that it should be according to the mind of Toplady,
or the mind of Wesley, or the mind of Calvin, or the mind of Arminius! The mind
of God is greater than all the minds of men, so let all men leave the Gospel
just as God has delivered it unto us.”—1903, Sermon #2834

“Young Brothers in the College, you must eat your way into the ministry! You
will never be able to say to others, “Eat what is good,” unless you have feasted
upon those things yourselves! Unless you have an inward appreciation of their
sweetness and have sucked them into your very being, you will never be able to
talk with power to others concerning them. Paul wrote to Timothy, “The
husbandman that labors, must first be partaker of the fruits,” so Christian
ministers, Sunday school teachers, and all workers for Christ must eat that
which is good if they are to be used in feeding others with spiritual
food!”—1902, Sermon #2786

“Whitefield said, in one of his sermons, ‘O my God, when I think how this wicked
city is perishing, and how many are dying for lack of knowledge, I feel as if I
could stand on the top of every hackney coach in the streets of London to preach
the Gospel.’ Why did he say that? Why was his zeal so burning? Because he had
seen the sinfulness of men and marked their follies. We shall never be
thoroughly in earnest till we are thoroughly aware of the evil that is before
us.”—1901, Sermon #2711

“It will never do for men to be led to think that they are healed before they
know that they are sick unto death, or to imagine that they are clothed before
they see themselves to be naked, or to be taught to trust Christ before they are
aware that they have anything for which they have need to trust Him. It would be
a happy circumstance if, in our preaching, we could have a blending of these two
elements so that we could have somewhat of our forefathers’ deep experimental
teaching and, with it, and growing out of it a plain, unfettered delivery of the
Gospel declaration, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be
saved.’”—1900, Sermon #2691

“I notice that when converts do not begin to speak a little for Christ very
early in their Christian career, they become tongue-tied—that is how we get so
many dumb members of the Church who seem as if they could not offer up a prayer
to save their lives. And what is worse, they cannot talk to their personal
friends about the things of God.”—1897, Sermon #2546

“Shall I ever get to be so holy that I can stand before God without my Mediator?
Shall I ever have a spiritual beauty of my own which shall render the imputed
righteousness of Christ unnecessary for me? Never! For, even in our highest
estate in Heaven, we shall still need to have our vital union with Christ
perpetually maintained. He is the Head of the Church triumphant as well as of
the Church militant! He will be forever the Head of the Church made perfect as
surely as He is the Head of His poor, weak, feeble, but ever-growing Church on
earth.”—1899, Sermon #2653

“We have lately lost some of our dearest and best friends from the Tabernacle.
Some of our most earnest helpers have passed away, but, oh, they have died
gloriously! It has been a pleasure and a privilege to see them rejoicing while
everybody else was weeping—to hear them triumphant when all around them were
sorrowful—to behold them casting gleams of sunlight from their eyes even when
those eyes were being glazed in death! Give me a religion by which I can live,
for that is the religion on which I can die! Give me that faith which will
change me into the image of Christ, for then I need not be afraid to bear the
image of death! God grant that you and I, dear Friends, may know, as a matter of
personal experience, that there is a solid truth in our religion, that it is,
indeed, our life! ”—1898, Sermon #2575

“When that great saint and preacher, Augustine, lay dying—and I venture to say
of Augustine that among all who were born of women, there has hardly ever been a
greater than he—his mind was equal to any philosophy for its depth, its length
and its breadth. And as an instructor in theology he still remains, under
Christ, next to the Apostle Paul, the master-teacher of the churches—yet, as he
lay dying, he asked to have certain texts of Scripture printed in large
capitals. Which do you suppose he chose? You may think that he selected some
deep and mysterious passage about the high doctrine which he so greatly loved,
but he did nothing of the kind. He chose those texts of Scripture which we
commonly quote to sinking sinners—such as these—‘He that believes on the Son has
everlasting life.’ ‘Whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be
saved.’ And that great saint feasted his dying eyes on the texts which we
usually give to babes in Christ’s faith, or those who are seeking the Savior,
for they suited him just then!”—1897, Sermon #2546

“There is not, in unrenewed human nature, a place where you could put the point
of a pin where it is not defiled with sin! It is in our entire system—we have
been lying in it until we are steeped through and through with it. Sin, in human
nature, is like those colors that are ingrained—the more you wash the material,
the more clearly are they discovered! You can never wash them out—only the
precious blood of Jesus can wash out man’s sin.”—1903, Sermon #2835 “A day is
coming when every minister of Christ shall speak with unction, when all the
servants of God shall preach with power, and when colossal systems of heathenism
shall tumble from their pedestals and mighty, gigantic delusions shall be
scattered to the winds! The shout shall be heard,‘Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord
God Omnipotent reigns.’”—1898, Sermon #2558

“People seem to jump into faith very quickly nowadays. I do not disapprove of
that happy leap, but still, I hope my old friend, Repentance, is not dead! I am
desperately in love with repentance—it seems to me to be the twin sister to
faith. I do not, myself, understand much about dry-eyed faith—I know that I came
to Christ by the way of Weeping-Cross. I did not come to shelter beneath His
blood immediately when I heard of it, as I now wish that I had done, but when I
did come to Calvary, by faith, it was with great weeping and supplication,
confessing my transgressions and desiring to find salvation in Jesus, and in
Jesus only.”—1900, Sermon #2691

“It could not be that a body in which dwelt the fullness of the Godhead could be
held by thin bonds of death—He who slept in Joseph’s tomb was the Son of
God!”—1901, Sermon #2712 “The Lord will not let even the suburbs of the New
Jerusalem be conquered by the foe! He will preserve the holy city, His own
Church, until the day when His Son shall come to reign in her forever.”—1899,
Sermon #2654

“A million millions, what must that be? The human mind cannot grasp the meaning
of such vast numbers, yet, when millions of millions of millions of millions of
years have passed over the heads of Christ’s saints in Glory, this text will not
be exhausted! No, more—not one jot or tittle of it will be exhausted—and
throughout eternity it will still be, “pleasures forevermore.” Ah, my Brothers
and Sisters, this prize is worth winning! Eternal life is worth having! And it
shall be the portion of everyone who truly trusts in our Lord Jesus
Christ.”—1903, Sermon #2813

“The longer you stay away from God, the more deeply you will sin. If you keep on
in the wrong path, not only will you have sinned the more, but that sin will
have taken a more terrible hold upon you. Habits begin like cobwebs, but they
end like chains of iron. A man might more readily have swept away the temptation
when it was new to him than he will be able to do when, having yielded to it
many a time, the devil has learned the way to master him. May God help you to
flee from sin as soon as you perceive it, lest you be caught in its net of steel
and be held in it to your eternal destruction!”—1897, Sermon #2547

“So, Beloved, feed on the Word of God—especially feed on the Incarnate Word,
Christ Himself—otherwise, you cannot possibly enter into true spiritual
fellowship with God.”—1902, Sermon #2786

“Sorrow for sin is a perpetual rain—a sweet, soft shower which, to a truly
gracious man, lasts all his life! He is always sorrowful that he has sinned. He
is continually grieved that there should still be any sin remaining in him and
he will never leave off grieving till all that sin has gone.”—1900, Sermon #2691

“He who is idle has as good reason to be penitent before God as David had when
he was an adulterer. Indeed, David’s adultery probably resulted from his
idleness. It is an abominable thing to let the grass grow up to your knees and
do nothing towards making it into hay. God never sent a man into the world to be
idle—but there are some who make a profession of being Christians who do nothing
to serve the Lord from one year’s end to the other.”—1899, Sermon #2607

“I have preached the Gospel, now, these 30 years and more, and some of you will
scarcely believe it, but in my vestry behind that door, before I come to address
the congregation in this Tabernacle, I tremble like an aspen leaf. And often, in
coming down to this pulpit, have I felt my knees knock together—not that I am
afraid of any one of my hearers—but I am thinking of that account which I must
render to God, whether I speak His Word faithfully or not. On this service may
hang the eternal destinies of many. O God, grant that we may all realize that
this is a matter of the most solemn concern! May we all come to God by Christ
Jesus, that everything may be right with us, now, and right for eternity! God
grant that it may be!”—1898, Sermon #2575

“Some fellows will get up, and, under the pretense that they are going to
glorify God, will tell of all manner of filthiness and vice which cannot do any
good to anybody. Stand up and cry, Brother, that is the best thing you can do.
Or else, sit down, and cover your face, and say, ‘Concerning those things of
which I am now ashamed, I only pray God, as He has blotted them out of His
memory, to put them out of my own, also.’”—1897, Sermon #2549

“The disease of sin is everywhere in the realm of manhood and it is all the more
certainly proved to be everywhere because so many people cannot see it! This is
why you cannot see sin in yourselves—it has made all the various faculties of
your soul to mortify so that you cannot feel the pains which this mortal disease
would otherwise have caused you. Thus your heart has lost any tenderness that it
may have had, naturally, and your conscience is seared as with a hot iron so
that it cannot warn you of the mischief within, but prophesies smooth things,
while all is in a state of ruin, destruction and dismay—and will be so forever
unless God, by His Grace, shall work a miraculous change.”—1903, Sermon
#2835“Singing is the best thing to purge ourselves of evil thoughts. Keep your
mouth full of songs and you will often keep your heart full of praises—keep on
singing as long as you can—you will find it a good method of driving away your
fears.”—1898, Sermon #2558

“It is a sweet thing to be sorrowful for sin, to be sorrowful for impurity, to
be sorrowful for anything that made Jesus sorrow—it is not a thing that happens
once, and then is done with—the godly sorrow of a Believer lasts throughout his
life.”—1900, Sermon #2691 “… true religionis alwaysa matter of desire. If you do
not desire to fear God, you do not fear Him. If you do not feel any desire after
that which is right in God’s sight, you have not anything at all right in your
heart.”—1901, Sermon #2714 “None but the God of Infinite patience could bear
with such a family as He has. Any one of us might exhaust the patience of a
hundred Jobs rolled into one—yet, shout it out and let even the angels hear
it—we have not exhausted the patience of God!”—1899, Sermon #2654

“Go where you may, my dear Brother, you need not puzzle your head about the sort
of Gospel you are bound to preach. To the jailor at Philippi, to the Areopagites
on Mars’ Hill, to the Sanhedrim at Jerusalem, to Nero at Rome, to barbarian,
Scythian, bond, or free—to the very chief of sinners, to the greatest or the
least of mankind, you have to deliver but one message—‘God has set forth His
Son, Jesus Christ, to be the propitiation for sin, that whoever believes in Him
should not perish, but should have everlasting life.” There is the essence of
the one message we have to deliver to all men! ‘There is no difference.’”—1899,
Sermon #2608

“Restoration from sickness should always be ascribed to God. Whatever part the
physician may play—and he often plays a very important part—yet to God, who
gives the physician wisdom and skill, must the gracious result be
ascribed.”—1897, Sermon #2531

“When people come to the House of God and they expectto be saved, and weexpect
it, too, it is tolerably certain that they will beconverted before long! We may
rejoice and bless God if you live in an atmosphere of holy expectancy! Where the
great door stands wide open for the prodigal son to come back, where all in the
house are on the watch for his return, where they keep on sending letters to him
to ask him to come home, is there not a good hope that such a wanderer will,
indeed, return, and that the great Father will be made glad?”—1900, Sermon #2692

“Brothers and Sisters, we know that God loves us. I never dare to try to speak
about this great Truth of God—it is a thing to think over rather than to talk
of. I like to get away quietly in a corner and just try to roll this sweet
morsel under my tongue, to suck on it till I draw the very essence out of it—God
loves me.”—1903, Sermon #2814

“That first Grace which works in the heart—is not that just like the rain which
comes when nobody is looking for it? The man has never prayed for Grace or, even
if he has prayed for it, there is no true prayer ever offered until first of all
Grace has come to produce that prayer. The sinner is never beforehand with God.
If you begin to pray at this moment, it is because God’s Grace has begun to work
upon your heart so that you canpray. He is always first! That is one of the
blessings of Heaven, then—that first movement of the Eternal Spirit upon the
dead, chaotic heart—producing light and order. That is surely from Heaven and
God has given it to His people.”—1897, Sermon #2531

“There may be more prosperity in a place where but six of Christ’s true people
meet together than where thousands congregate to worship God in a way which they
think to be right, but which is not in accordance with His sacred Word.”—1898,
Sermon #2576

“I believe that all schemes for comprehending all the saints in one visible
church must fail. Adam never saw Eve until God had perfectly fashioned her—and
you will never see the Church, the Bride of Christ, till she is perfect and
complete! And when she is, you will clap your hands with joy at the sight of the
exquisite beauty which God shall have given to her before she is presented to
her Heavenly Bridegroom. The process of perfecting her is going on now, and
Christ’s Bride is being “curiously worked” out of material taken from Christ’s
own side.”—1902, Sermon #2788

“There are those whose fear of God arises entirely from dread. They dare not go
to bed at night without offering some sort of prayer—not because they have any
real desire to pray, or to commune with God, but through fear as to what might
happen if they omitted their usual form! They would not allow a Sunday to pass
without attending the means of Grace at least once—not because they have any
desire to go, or any delight in the services of God’s House—but because they are
afraid notto go. Yet we must always remember that the religion of dread is not
the religion of Christ. That which you do because you are afraid to act
otherwise is no evidence of a renewed heart—it is, rather, the proof that you
are a slave, living in dread of the lash, and that you would act far otherwise
if you dared!”—1901, Sermon #2714

“We may do, or say, or give anything we like, but nothing will please God except
our turning from our sin and trusting in the atoning Sacrifice of His dear Son.
We may pray till our knees grow hard as iron and weep our eyes away till their
sockets are empty, but we shall never obtain the great blessing of salvation
while we link our arm with sin and go on delighting in iniquity.”—1899, Sermon
#2655

“None but the poor will value the charity of men and none but the guilty will
value the charity of God!”—1897, Sermon #2535“First, I have to tell you that ‘
all thingsare of God.’ That is the first sentence [2 Cor 5:18] of the verse from
which our text is taken. If, therefore, you are willing to be at peace with God,
there is nothing whatever needed from you. God has prepared all things that are
needed for this present and perpetual reconciliation. To make the friendship
between God and man firm and lasting, all that is needed has been already
supplied!”—1903, Sermon #2837

“The text says, ‘Set your house in order.’ This shows that we are not to destroy
it, nor even to injure it. Our body should be the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Nothing should be done by us that may injure our body, for, in the case of the
Believer, it is a precious thing, ordained to rise, again, at the Last Day,
since Chris Jesus has bought it, as well as the soul which it contains, with His
own blood! Nor are we to waste our substance, for this is the accusation which,
of old, was brought against the unjust steward, that he had wasted his master’s
goods.”—1897, Sermon #3021

“Whether sin is open or covert, whether it is less or more than that of other
men, it needs the atoning Sacrifice of Christ to remove it!”—1899, Sermon #2608

“And you, dear Brother, must not go home to your church in the country and say,
‘I cannot stir the people. The work does not flourish as I wish it would.’ Of
course it does not! My work does not prosper as I wish it might. You and I can
never go at the pace we would like to go, but can we not be willing to be driven
by our Lord and to go at HIS pace? It is quite right to work as if the salvation
of all the souls in the world depended upon you, yet, as it does not, you had
better throw that burden back upon your Lord and Master! Feel the weight of
men’s souls till it crushes you down to Christ’s feet, but do not let it crush
you any lower than that—you are not the Savior, you are not to have the Glory of
their salvation.”—1898, Sermon #2559

“There is no possibility of converting anybody by persuasion, by logic, by
rhetoric, or anything of the sort. It is the work of God, and the work of God,
alone! And though He uses instrumentality in almost every case, yet He will not
use that instrumentality which thinks itself sufficient for the work. He will
make us know that we are nothing—and then He will make everything of us. He does
not mind how much He makes of His servants when all that He does for them brings
the more glory to His own name, and they do not, even with their little finger,
touch the honor of it, or wish to do so.”—1900, Sermon #2692

“I verily believe that some people think more of their fingernails than they do
of their souls, and there is many a man who spends more on the blackening of his
boots than he does on the cleansing of his soul from sin.”—1899, Sermon #2655

“It is a blessed thing, sometimes, to soar aloft, as on the wings of eagles, and
to seem to play with the young lightning that is at home with the sun! It is a
grand thing to live evenherein the very Presence of God and feel that earth has
grown into a little Heaven! But I find that such an ecstatic state as that is
frequently followed by deep depression. Elijah runs before Ahab’s chariot, but
the next morning he runs away from a woman and asks that he may die. Our great
‘ups’ are not far off equally great ‘downs.’”—1898, Sermon #2550

“There is many a pretty face that has been admired because of its appearance,
but when its owner’s not very pretty tongue has begun to chatter, love has been
almost driven to its wits’ end to find any cause for admiration!”—1898, Sermon
#2577

“That blessed Book of Solomon’s Song is misunderstood by many Believers because
they never knew the joy of conjugal love with Christ and the sweetness of His
heart when He lays it bare to His Beloved people. ‘The secret of the Lord is
with them that fear Him’ and I can assure you, Beloved, that, if you do but
become reconciled to God, it will be the best day that you ever spent.”—1903,
Sermon #2837

“It often happens that there is very little power in those prayers that leap out
of our lips without premeditation—born in a minute, like gnats, and dying just
as soon. But the prayer that lies in the soul, like eggs in a nest, and that has
to be sat upon, as it were, and hatched, and brought forth—there is life in such
supplication as that and that is the kind of prayer which prevails with God!
Such was the prayer of Daniel.”—1902, Sermon #2788

“A man may have other rewards if he is content with God as his reward. But he
who has any sinister or even secondary aim in what he does in the cause of God,
spoils it all. This is the fly in the precious ointment! We must get rid of
everything of this sort and be just as satisfied to serve God in obloquy and
reproach as we are to serve Him amid the acclamations of the multitude!”—1903,
Sermon #2814

“Desire must be at the back of every religious act, or else there is nothing at
all in it. It is so in the case of almsgiving. Always take heed that you do not
give to the poor, or to any charity, or to the funds of the Church simply
because you are asked to do so, for, unless you really desire to give what you
appear to present, you have not, in God’s sight, given it at all! If, in your
heart of hearts you feel, ‘I wish I had dodged round the pillar, or gone down
the other aisle, and so escaped having to give,’ you have not truly offered
anything to God.”—1901, Sermon #2714

“There is a secret sweetness in the gall and wormwood of our daily trials—a sort
of ineffable, unutterable, indescribable—but plainly experienced joy in sorrow
and bliss in woe! O Friends, I think that the happiest moments I have ever known
have been just after the sharpest pains I have ever felt! As the blue gentian
flower grows just upon the edge of the Alpine glacier, so, too, extraordinary
joys, azure-tinted with the light of Heaven, grow hard by the severest of our
troubles—the very sweetest and best of our delights.”—1898, Sermon #2550

“Men may put cruel pressure upon you till your fear of them drives you away from
God, but it would be well if your fear of them could be slain by a greater fear,
for it is infinitely better to dread the wrath of God than to fear the anger of
man!”—1899, Sermon #2655

“Once more, there is no difference as to the efficacy of the plan of salvation.
This man believed in Jesus Christ and was saved. So shall that other man be if
he believes in Jesus Christ. All who believe in Christ are justified from all
things. All who trust in Christ have eternal life and shall never perish. The
blood of Jesus was never yet applied to a conscience without giving it peace. A
persecutor is washed and his crimson stains are gone. A thief believes and he
is, that day, with Christ in Paradise! Mary Magdalene believes and seven devils
are cast out of her. A rough Philippian jailor believes and that night he is
baptized, rejoicing in God with all his house. Never sinner yet did try this
blessed remedy and find it fail! And none ever shall, for “there is no
difference.””—1899, Sermon #2608

“A true prayer is the Revelation of the Spirit of God to our heart, making us
desire what God has appointed to give us. Hence the success of prayer is no
difficulty to the man who believes in predestination. Some foolishly say, ‘If
God has ordained everything, what is the use of praying?’If God had notordained
everything, there would be no use in praying, but prayer is the shadow of the
coming mercy which falls across the spirit—and we become, in prayer, in some
degree, gifted like the seers of old. The spirit of prophecy is upon the man who
knows how to pray! The Spirit of God has moved him to ask for what God is about
to give!”—1898, Sermon #2550

“The Roman Catholic Church teaches us that we must do penance if our sin is to
be forgiven. There must be so many lashes for the bare back, or so long
abstention from food—and purgatorial pains to be inflicted after death and I
know not what besides! Yes, but this is the glory ofGod—that He can cover all
this sin now, upon the spot, without any price being paid by the sinner, or any
suffering being endured by him! He has but to come and confess his sin and
accept the Divine covering, namely, the blood and righteousness of Jesus
Christ—and the whole of it shall be covered once and for all!”—1903, Sermon
#2838

“The Apostle Paul, writing to the Thessalonians, was inspired to pass a very
sharp sentence upon them—‘This we commanded you, that if any would not work,
neither should he eat’—a sentence which would exterminate a great number of
persons who at the present time seem to flourish! If in business I am not
diligent, I cannot expect to prosper. If I wish to be a man of learning, I
cannot get it simply by praying for it—I must study , even to the weariness of
the flesh. If a man is sick, he may trust in God as much as he wills—that should
be his first thing—but let him also use such remedies as God has given if he can
discover them, or learn of them from others.”—1898, Sermon #2559

“If you would find out the cause of most of your sorrows, dig at the root of
your self-will, for that is where it lies. When your heart is wholly sanctified
unto God and your will is entirely subdued to Him, the bitter becomes sweet,
pain is changed to pleasure and suffering is turned into joy. It is not possible
for that man’s mind to be disturbed whose will is wholly resigned to the will of
God.”—1901, Sermon #2715

“God speaks to men by men. He has made them to be the choice and chosen
instruments of His wondrous works of Grace upon earth. Oh, what a solemn thing
it is to be a preacher of the everlasting Gospel! It is an office so high that
an angel might covet it, but one that is so responsible that even an angel might
tremble to undertake it! Brothers and Sisters, pray for us who preach, not
merely to a few, but to many of our fellow creatures, that we may be the means,
in the hand of God, of blessing to our hearers.”—1899, Sermon #2655

“The Lord has aneternal knowledge ofour sins. He will never forget them. If they
are not washed away by the blood of Christ, He can never forget or cease to be
angry because of them!”—1898, Sermon #2551 “A sense of satisfaction with
yourself will be the death of your progress and it will prevent your
sanctification.”—1898, Sermon #2551

“I have heard of a king of Sweden who, when he lay dying, had a bishop to pray
with him. And when the bishop had finished his prayer, the king said, ‘Somehow I
have derived no comfort from that prayer. I remember once hearing a shepherd
pray in a hut when I had lost my way—will you send for him?’ They did so, and
when the shepherd poured out his heart in his own simple language, then the king
saw the Light of God and died rejoicing! ‘There is no difference’—the king and
the shepherd need the same Savior—and must go to Heaven by the same royal
road.”—1899, Sermon #2608

“We are bound to love our enemies, but we are not bound to love God’s enemies.
We are to wish them, as enemies, a complete overthrow, but to wish them, as men,
a gracious conversion, that they may obtain God’s pardon and become his friends,
followers and servants.”—1898, Sermon #2551

“Oh that God the Holy Spirit would teach you that first 1esson, my Brothers and
Sisters—the boundless wickedness of sin—for Christ had to lay down His life
before your sin could be wiped away!”—1900, Sermon #2656 “It is all very well
for a man to pray, but the value of his prayer very much depends upon its
sincerity, and that sincerity will be proved by his doing something that will
help to answer his own prayer.”—1902, Sermon #2788

“You may go to Hell heedlessly, but you cannot so go to Heaven. Many stumble
into the bottomless Pit with their eyes shut, but no man ever yet entered into
Heaven by a leap in the dark.”—1898, Sermon #2552

“They are ‘the enemies of the Cross of Christ,’ who try to belittle this great
Atonement and to make it out to be a very small affair, next to nothing in
importance. As I have often said of some preachers, they teach that Jesus Christ
did something or other, which in some way or other, is in some measure or other
connected with our salvation. We do not teach any such hazy ideas as that! We
say that He laid down His life for the sheep and that for those sheep He has
made a perfect, complete and effectual Redemption by which He has delivered them
from the wrath to come. Blessed is he who rejoices in that doctrine of the Cross
of Christ!”—1898, Sermon #2553

“I do verily believe that the great sweetness of giving to God begins when we
feel the pinch, when we have to deny ourselves in order that we may give. Then
it is that there is the true spirit of Christian liberality!”—1901, Sermon #2716

“You will never understand the agony of Christ’s soul if you despise the agony
of His body, for, while the sufferings of His soul were the soul of His
sufferings, yet the sufferings of His body were the body of His sufferings and
he who does not think much of the body of the sufferings is not likely to know
much about the soul of them.”—1900, Sermon #2693

“Think not, dear Friend, that your ignorance can push you out of the family of
God! Little children cannot read Greek and Latin, but they can say, “Abba,
Father,” and that is all they need to say. If you cannot read books of deep
theological lore, yet, if Jesus Christ is yours—if you are trusting in Him—even
the imperfect knowledge that you have of Him proves that you are His!”—1903,
Sermon #2815

“See to what Paul is looking forward—resurrection—and therefore he lets this
life go as of secondary importance. He is willing to suffer as Christ suffered
and to die as Christ died. You and I may never be called to make that great
sacrifice, but if we are true followers of Christ, we shall be prepared for it.
If ever it should happen that Christ and our life shall be put in competition,
we must not deliberate for a moment, for Christ is All, and we must be ready to
give up all for Christ.”—1898, Sermon #2553

“As long as you have God, you have the essence of all good—and as long as God
lives, whoever else dies, the goodness on which your soul is to feed has an
independent existence.”—1898, Sermon #2555

“In the last dread hour of death, when conscience looks at sin as it really is
and no longer is blinded, nothing can bring it peace but the blood of the Lamb!
Nothing can give the soul repose when it is about to meet its God, except the
knowledge that Christ was made a curse for us that we might be blessed in
Him.”—1903, Sermon #2839

“If you are not just now being assailed by any temptation, it is because God is
delivering you from it.”—1901, Sermon #2718

“Faith and hope and love are plants that only live in the sunlight of God. And
if the great Father of Lights withdrew, all these would die. ‘Without Me you can
do nothing,’ is as certainly true of us who are His people, as of those who are
far from Him by wicked worlds.”—1899, Sermon #2609

“Let me say to you mourners and sufferers that your praises of God when you have
no trouble are not worth half as much as they may be now. If you can sing His
praises on the bed of sickness and extol Him in the fire of a sore bereavement,
that will be grand! The praises of the angels, as they bow in perfect happiness,
and say, “God is good,” must be very blessed. And the praises of men of God on
earth, who are prospering in business and who have health and strength, and who
say, “God is good,” are very precious. But you take me to one who is poor and
needy, one who scarcely knows where his daily bread will come from—and when he
says, ‘But God is good,; I think the Lord finds a sweeter note in that praise
than He does even in the music of the angelic choirs!”—1898, Sermon #2555

“There is nothing in the world that God approves of more than faith. To trust
God is the greatest of all works. ‘What shall we do,’ said the Jews to our Lord,
‘that we might work the works of God?’ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘This is
the work of God, that you believe on Him whom He has sent.’ To erect a row of
almshouses, or to build a cathedral—is not that a big work? No, not compared
with believingonJesusChrist whom Godhassent.”—1898, Sermon #2555

“Praying is the end of preaching! Preaching has its right use, and must never be
neglected, but real heart devotion is worth more than anything else. Prayer is
the power which brings God’s blessing down upon all our work. I beg you, day by
day, as you walk the streets, to have this petition in your hearts and in your
mouths, ‘Cause Your face to shine upon Your sanctuary.’ ‘O God, bless Your
Church all over the world—in Europe, in America, in Asia, in Africa, in
Australia! Everywhere prosper Your work among the heathen, and in our own
highly-favored land, too, cause Your face to shine upon Your sanctuary.’ And do
not cease to present that prayer until, to the fullest possible extent, it shall
be answered. And when will that be? When He comes, for whose coming we look with
joyful expectation! The Lord blesses you for Christ’s sake! Amen.”—1902, Sermon
#2788

“If you were to get quite alone, as our Savior was in the wilderness, with
nothing but the wild beasts round about you, you could not shut out the devil
even then! Forty days He had for meditation, prayer and fasting, yet there was
the devil waiting to assail Him again and again! So I repeat that not even
solitude, if the lonely hours were spent in prayer, fasting and watching, could
secure us immunity from temptation—it must and will attack us.”—1900, Sermon
#2694

“If God works in me to will and to do of His good pleasure, then the natural
result is that I must work out what He has worked in.”—1898, Sermon #2559

“How graciously God is preserving many of us from the tongue of slander! It is a
wonderful thing for any man to live much in public without being accused of some
vile crime. And the woman who lives in the most retired position, the housewife
who does nothing but look after her own children, will find somebody or other
slandering her. You cannot always escape from the envenomed tongue of slander,
be you what you will and where you will—and for God to keep the reputation of
any Christian man unstained year after year is a subject for the greatest
thankfulness.”—1901, Sermon #2715

“Jacob had gone below the surface and spied out the hidden meaning—and if you
should ever be able to see more in a promise than is in it, it is in it! I seem
to contradict myself by that paradox, yet it is true. If the Word of the Lord
should, in its literal construction, not actually contain all that your faith
can see in it, yet over every promise there is this Law of God written,
‘According to your faith, be it unto you.’ And you may rest assured that your
faith will never outrun the promise of God! He will keep His promise, not only
to the letter, but to the fullest possible meaning that you can impart to
it!”—1903, Sermon #2817

“Flowers are not more frail, moths more fragile, bubbles more unsubstantial, or
meteors more fleeting than man’s life! What transient things we are! I said, We
are, but I mistake myself— we are not. We but begin to be and before we are, we
are not! It is God alone who can say, ‘I AM.’None of the human race should dare
to pronounce those words!”—1897, Sermon #3021 “God can bring men to Himself, so
let us never despair of any!”—1896, Sermon #2453

“Revelation is a constant source of thanksgiving to those who understand it
through the teaching of the Spirit who inspired it. God might never have spoken
to us, or we might not have lived in a world wherein God had deigned to reveal
His will. But that is not the case—‘He made known His ways unto Moses, His acts
unto the children of Israel.’ [Psalm 103]”—1903, Sermon #2839

“A soul must get alone if it is really born again—it cannot live without private
prayer.”—1896, Sermon #2480 “Yes, the Church of God has often been preserved by
persecution—she was never purer, she was never holier, she was never truer and
she never lived nearer to God and more like her Savior than when she was
persecuted!”—1898, Sermon #2574

“I wish I could speak right to the very soul of some of you who do not know my
Master—how I wish you did know Him! I cannot imagine what some of you have to
comfort you which you can, for even a moment, compare with the bliss of knowing
my Lord! I have seen your joys. I know something of what mirth can do and what
relief laughter may be able to bring, but I also know that these things are of
little use in the time of sickness, or when one is near death. It is just at
such times that true joy in Christ becomes more deep, more sweet than ever! The
less there is of the creature, the more room is there for the Creator. The more
of suffering and sorrow we have to endure, the more of content and bliss can we
enjoy. And oftentimes, when the body is weak and the head is aching, and the
soul is faint, there is, as it were, a sweet swoon of Divine delight which comes
over the spirit, which has more strength in it than strength, more joy in it
than joy, and almost as much of Heaven in it as there is in Heaven! May you know
this, for the sake of Him who has loved us and given Himself for us! God bless
you all! Amen.”—1899, Sermon #2610

“It was pronounced as a curse upon one of old that he should die childless. Oh,
I think that though the Christian is always blessed, it is half a curse to die
spiritually childless. There are some of you who are childless tonight. You
never were the means of the conversion of a soul in all your lives. You hardly
remember having tried to win anyone for the Savior. You are good religious
people so far as your outward conduct is concerned. You go to the House of God,
but you never concern yourselves about winning souls for Jesus!”—1900, Sermon
#2695

“Men who are to stand pre-eminent as God’s ministers must make up their minds,
when they commence their ministry, that they will probably be accused of every
crime in the calendar! I should not be greatly surprised if you were to be told
that I had committed the grossest iniquity that ever was perpetrated and, my
Brethren, should you hear such a thing, it will not so much distress my spirit
as it might have done in years gone by, now that I know that the world’s tongue
is always ready to speak the worst word it can against the man who does it the
most harm. If I am to fight the Lord’s battles, I may leave Him to fight mine!
If I defend His Character, He will defend mine! I shall not defend my own, that
I know. It is always a bad thing for a man to be his own defender!”—1902, Sermon
#2789 “Do you notice that there is not a single petition in the whole of this
Psalm? [103] It is all praise! And herein it is like Heaven, where they cease to
pray, but where they praise God without ceasing! We cannot rise to that height
here, but let us both praise and pray when we can.”—1903, Sermon #2839


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  CHAPTER 5: VOL. 3
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NOTABLE QUOTES OF CHARLES H. SPURGEON ~ PART 3 ~ December 20, 2008 Dear Reader,
This is the third compilation of Brother Spurgeon’s quotes from my work of
modernizing his sermons. All of these quotes are found in volumes 50-53 of his
work. Thus I identify them by the year and sermon number. You may note that the
first 15 pages or so represent one quote from each sermon in numerical order.
After that they are mixed. If you want to read or download the sermon from which
a quote comes, simply go to our site and look in The Metropolitan Tabernacle
Pulpitlinks on the front page—each link identifies the sermon numbers in that
link. Nothing on our site is copyrighted—feel free to copy anything—but please
use it only for the honor and glory of our Master, Jesus Christ. My prayer for
you and yours is Paul’s to the Ephesians 3:17-19.

Emmett O’Donnell _________________________________

“Indeed, Brothers and Sisters in Christ, in one sense allyour prayers—that is,
your prayers that ought to be answered—are already answered, for whatever there
may be that you may rightly ask of God, you really have it, since in giving us
Christ, He has already given us all things!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2864

“Others come to the Communion as a piece of sheer superstition, really
believing, poor deluded souls, that when they take the wafer into their mouths,
they actually eat the flesh of Christ. Such a monstrous doctrine as that is only
fit for cannibals—it is not a Doctrine of Christianity! What a profanation of
the ordinance it is to come to it with such a notion as that! If any of us have
the slightest idea that to partake of what is called “the sacrament”—though
there is no such name as that for it anywhere in Scripture—confers Divine Grace,
let all such thoughts be banished from our minds at once!”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2865

“That wise resolve within your heart which says, ‘I will arise and go to my
Father,’ should be at once carried into effect, for your Father has prepared the
way by which you may come back to Him and, to encourage you, He has sprinkled it
with the blood of His dear Son—the surest sign and token of His love to sinners
that even God, Himself, could give. Here, then, is good news from a far country.
Your Father thinks of you, poor prodigal, and He has paved the way for you to
come back to His own house and heart!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2866

“Accustom yourself to look towards God in Christ Jesus in your thoughts and
contemplations. By the blessing of the Holy Spirit, this will breed faith in
you. Set your face that way—look at God as He has revealed Himself in the Person
of the great Propitiation, Jesus Christ, His Son.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2867

“You do not know, poor Soul, how glad God is when He forgives a soul. The angels
sang when God made the world, but we do not read that He sang then. Yet, in the
last chapter of the prophecy of Zephaniah, we read, ‘The Lord your God in the
midst of you is mighty; He will save, He will rejoice over you with joy; He will
rest in His love, He will joy over you with singing.’ Only think of it—the
Triune God singing!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2868

“The strong desire to magnify God is acceptable to Him and is an indication of
spiritual health. It is certain, in the long run, to bring blessing to our own
souls and I have frequently noticed that when we earnestly desire to do
something special for the Lord, He generally does something for us very much of
the same kind.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2869 “When the Spirit of God goes with the
Word, then the Word becomes the instrument of the conversion of the souls of
men.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2870

“Many persons think a great deal about the adorning of the body, but do not
think anything about the ornaments of the soul. The feeding of the physical
frame engrosses much care, but the supply of spiritual food is often
neglected.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2871 “The proof that Christ came into the world
should be that His followers are holy! Let their character be blameless and
harmless, their conduct so devoted and so full of self-sacrifice that it shall
be a constant memorial of that Redeemer whose name they profess.”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2872

“There is the same door of entrance for us as that which was opened to the very
chief of sinners, for there is no difference between one sinner and another in
the sight of God, as far as the plan of salvation is concerned. There may be
many differences in other matters but, in the matter of salvation, there is
nothing which places one man in a different position from another, or which
allows him to be saved in any other way than the one way which God has laid down
for a sinner’s salvation.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2873

“If you simply take the name of Christ upon you and call yourself His servant,
yet do not obey Him, but follow your own whim, or your own hereditary prejudice,
or the custom of some erroneous church—you are no servant of Christ. If you
really are a servant of Christ, your first duty is to obey Him.”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2874

“Let us never judge men by their talents—but by the use which they make of their
powers, by the end to which they devote their talents, by the interest which
they bring to those pounds which their Master has entrusted to them.”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2875

“There will be no jarring note in Heaven, no whisper of human merit, no claim of
a reward for good intentions—but every crown shall be cast at Jesus’ feet and
every voice shall join in the ascription, ‘Not unto us, not unto us, but unto
Your name be all the glory of the salvation which You have worked out for us
from first to last.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2876

“Yes, Beloved, we who believe in Jesus are on the winning side—we are on the
side which has God with it and Christ with it, and eternity with it—and the
appointed day shall reveal that this is the conquering side!”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2877 “You know right well that the value of a [Scripture] text to any soul
depends upon the condition of that soul.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2878

“The true teacher should not seek to soar on the gaudy wings of brilliant
oratory, pouring forth sonorous polished sentences in rhythmic harmony, but
should endeavor to speak pointed Truths of God—things that will strike and
stick—thoughts that will be remembered and recalled, again and again, when the
hearer is far away from the place of worship where he listened to the preacher’s
words.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2879

“It is in our most desperate straits that we often have our most joyous
revelations. John must go to “the isle that is called Patmos” before he could
have the wondrous Revelation that was there given to him.”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2880 “Until a man receives faith, he may think that he has it—but when he has
real faith in Jesus Christ, then he shudders as he thinks how long he has lived
in unbelief—and realizes how much of unbelief is still mixed with his
belief.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2881

“If any of you doubt whether there is forgiveness with God, I pray you to stand
on Calvary, in imagination, and to look into the wounds of Jesus. Gaze upon His
nail-pierced hands and feet, His thorn-crowned brow, and look right into His
heart where the soldier’s spear was thrust—and blood and water flowed out for
the double cleansing of all who trust Him.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2882

“Although blindness in part has happened unto Israel, yet, in due time, we know
from the Word of God that the seed of Abraham will recognize our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ as the long-promised Messiah. When that happy day comes, the Lord
will give to the whole world times of amazing blessing.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2883

“Between the will of the flesh and the will of God, there is no possible
question as to which is ‘the Lord’s side.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2884

“God’s power is never given to a man to be stored up unused. The heavenly food
that is sent to strengthen us, like the manna given to the Israelites in the
wilderness, is intended for immediate use. If the Lord sends you much, you shall
have nothing beyond what you can use for Him though, blessed be His holy name,
if you have but little, you shall have no need!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2885

“If you, young man, give yourself up to what is erroneously called the pursuit
of pleasure, it is quite certain that you will not find rest for your soul in
that direction! You have taken a dose of poison that will make your blood hot
and feverish and that will cause true rest to flee from your pillow.”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2886 “You cannot heal men who are not sick, or wounded. It matters not
how matchless the medicine is—even though it is the substitutionary suffering of
the Son of God, Himself—if it is to heal, it must heal some malady or other and,
Brothers and Sisters, it is quite true that there is a dreadful disease which
has attacked the whole human race! You scarcely need that I should tell you that
it is the disease of sin.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2887

“The unity at Babel would have been far worse than the confusion has ever been,
just as the spiritual union of Babylon, that is, Rome, the Papal system, has
been infinitely more mischievous to the Church and to the world, than the
division of Christians into various sects and parties could ever have
been.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2888

“The Christ whose Gospel we preach is no unapproachable philosopher! The Glory
of His Person reflects even a brighter luster than the dignity of His office. He
appeared among men not as one who had been lifted up from the ranks to obtain a
position for Himself, but as one who bowed Himself down from the Heaven of
heavens that He might bring blessings to the sons of men—yet the ignorant and
the illiterate may find in Him their best Friend.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2889

“Beloved Friends, let us never look upon our own unbelief as an excusable
infirmity, but let us always regard it as a sin—and as a great sin, too.”—Volume
50, Sermon #2890

“Fine sermons never win souls—you may blaze away, young man, at a terrific rate
with your brilliant oratory and your fine pieces of poetry and quotations from
eminent authors! And your length sermon may be like the set piece at a display
of fireworks, or the final burst of brightness with which it all ends—but all
that will not save souls! What does save souls, then? Why, the Word of the Lord,
the Truth of God as it is in Jesus!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2891

“How long I was, myself, dictating to God instead of trusting Him! I thought I
must have a certain amount of conviction of sin before I could be saved. I
really had it all the while, though I did not know that I had it. I thought I
must feel a certain weight of guilt. I wasfeeling it and, for that very reason,
I thought I was not. I might have been spared much needless suffering if I had
only believed what the Lord had taught me in His Word—that I had nothing to do
with feeling burdens or anything else by way of preparation for coming to
Christ, but that I had to come to Him just as I was… So, poor blind ones, come
to my Master, blind as you are—but do not lay down any rules or regulations as
to how He is to save you, for He will do it in His own way, which is, after all,
the best possible way”—Volume 50, Sermon #2892

“What Jeremiah knew was this—that the affairs of this world are not under the
control of men, however much they may imagine that they are. There is a Supreme
Authority to theirs and a power which rules, overrules and works according to
its own beneficent will—whatever men may desire or determine to do.”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2893

“Even if you reject the Word of God, you must believe that God is just. If there
is a God, He must punish men for sinning against Him. How can any moral
government exist if sin goes unpunished, if virtue and vice lead to the same
end? Conscience, fallen though it is, and no longer like God’s candle in the
soul, still has sufficient light to assure men that God must punish sin!”—Volume
50, Sermon #2894

“O Brothers and Sisters, it is a blessed proof that Divine Grace has been
largely given to us when even the smallest word uttered by Jesus Christ is more
precious to us than all the diamonds in the world and we feel that we only want
to know what He has said and to love whatever He has spoken!”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2895

“Flowers, what are they? They are but the thoughts of God solidified—God’s
beautiful thoughts put into shape. Storms, what are they? They are God’s
terrible thoughts written out that we may read them. Thunders, what are they?
They are God’s powerful emotions just opened out that men may hear them. The
world is the materializing of God’s thoughts, for the world is a thought in
God’s eyes. He made it first from a thought that came from His own mighty mind
and everything in the majestic temple that He has made has a meaning!”—Volume
50, Sermon #2896

“Poor Soul, groping in the dark and trying to believe in Jesus, ought not this
to enable you to believe in Him? Christ has lived, loved, bled, died and now
there is a reward due to Him which can only be met by the salvation of all for
whom He died! See, then, how He has the Living Water and come and trust Him to
give it to you freely.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2897

“Those who hold a sound creed may be destitute of precious faith and those who
are able to defend the Divinity of Christ with admirable scholarship may,
nevertheless, be without God in the world. To believe in Christ includes much
more than a religious profession. It is so to believe the Gospel as to forsake
all other beliefs for the possession of its blessed hope! It is to imbibe the
spirit of the Word of God while you accept the letter of its pure teaching! Or,
in other words, it is to come to Jesus and to prove, in your own souls, His
power to save.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2898

“I like to think about how many people are going to be saved every time the
Gospel is faithfully preached. It is not preached in vain—we deliver a message
from God that never misses the mark at which He aimed it!”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2899 “Remember this, Sinner, however far you may get away from God, you will
have to come close to Him one of these days! You may go and pluck the fruit that
He forbids you to touch and then you may go and hide yourself among the thick
trees in the forest and think that you have concealed yourself—but you will have
to come face to face with your Maker at some time or other!”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2900

“There was never any real godly sorrow which worked repentance acceptable to God
except that which was the result of the Holy Spirit’s own work within the
soul.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2901 “Now, if our text [Heb. 12:4] said that without
perfection of holines, no one could have any communion with Christ, it would
shut every one of us out, for no one who knows his own heart ever pretends to be
perfectly conformed to God’s will!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902 “The material
universe is but scaffolding for the Church of Christ. It is but the temporary
structure upon which the amazing mystery of redeeming love is being carried on
to perfection.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2903 “That faith which is not accompanied by
repentance will have to be repented of!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2904

“All that John [the Apostle] saw, he was prepared to speak of according to his
ability, that others might have fellowship with him and, dear Friends, remember
that if you ever learn anything of Christ—if you have any enjoyment of His
Presence at any time—it is not for you, alone, but for others to share with
you!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2905

“I suppose if any man looks long into the Doctrine of the Trinity, he will be
like one who gazes upon the sun and will be apt, first, to be dazzled and then
to be blinded by the excessive light. If a man asks that he may understand this
great mystery, and refuses to believe until he does, then he will most assuredly
be blinded! How can you, O man, hold the sea in the hollow of your hand? And how
can you see God’s face and yet live?”—Volume 50, Sermon #2906

“Does the Holy Spirit deal with science? What is science? Another name for the
ignorance of men. Does the Holy Spirit deal with politics? What are politics?
Another name for every man getting as much as he can out of the nation. Does the
Holy Spirit deal with these things? No, my Brothers, ‘He will receive of Mine.’
O my Brother, the Holy Spirit will leave you if you go gadding about after these
insignificant trifles! He will leave you if you aim at magnifying yourself, your
wisdom and your plans, for the Holy Spirit is taken up with the things of
Christ!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2907

“The ship of Christ’s Church never sails so well as when she is rocked from side
to side by the winds of persecution and when, at every lurch, she is well-near
overwhelmed! Nothing has helped God’s Church so much as persecution—she has been
increased and strengthened by it.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2908

“Christ’s kinship with His people is to be thought of with great comfort because
it is voluntary.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2909

“The best of men are, all too often, trodden down as the very mire of the
street, while the worst are sitting proudly in the high places of the earth! If
there is a God at all—and we know that there is—there must be a time and a way
of rectifying all this in another state! And so there is, as David says, ‘Verily
there is a reward for the righteous: verily He is a God that judges in the
earth.’ And, therefore, verily there must be a time of judgment for the
ungodly—even common reason seems to teach us that!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2910

“Dear Friends, all the distress that is felt by the mind when under conviction
of sin is not the work of the Spirit of God, though some of it is. I cannot draw
the line and say exactly how far it is the Spirit’s work but, certainly, there
is a portion of this horror and distress which doesnot come from God. Therefore,
learn this lesson—that it is not necessary for you to traverse the whole ground
of every other sinner’s experience in passing from the kingdom of darkness into
the Kingdom of God’s dear Son!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2911

“And I will venture to go even further and say that if you watch those in whom
sin is said to be dead, you will find that if it is dead, it is not buried—and
that it smells remarkably like other dead things which ought to be
buried!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2912 “The Cross that was meant to be the death of
the Savior was the death of sin! The Crucifixion of Jesus, which was supposed to
be the victory of Satan, was the consummation of His victory over Satan!”—Volume
50, Sermon #2913

“There are many points and particulars in which the Gospel is offensive to human
nature and revolting to the pride of the creature. It was not intended to please
man. How can we attribute such a purpose to God? Why should He devise a goal to
suit the whims of our poor fallen human nature? He intended to save men, but He
never intended to gratify their depraved tastes.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2914 “I
have preached the Gospel to you, my Brothers and Sisters, because I have
believed it—and if what I have preached to you is not true I am a lost man. For
me there is no joy in life and no hope in death except in that Gospel which I
have continually expounded here.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2916

“There is never a moment, I suppose, at any time when the fall of feet may not
be heard by listening ears that are hard by the gates of death-shade. The dead
have always been coming since Abel led the way—one perpetual stream, never
ceasing day nor night.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2917 “Away with superstition! Kill it
by counting every place to be holy, every day to be holy and every action that
you perform to be a part of the high priesthood to which the Lord Jesus Christ
has called every soul that He has washed in His precious blood.”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2918

“We say that we belong to Christ and we are not our own, but bought with a
price. Do we live as if it were true? Come, let us take up the position now of
being altogether Christ’s own sheep. If the sheep could speak it would say,
‘There is not a fragment of wool on my back that belongs to me: there is no part
of me that is my own. I belong to my shepherd, and I am glad to have it so.’ You
belong to Christ as absolutely as that.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2919

“‘But some Truths of God ought to be kept back from the people,’ you will say,
‘lest they should make an ill use of them.’ That is Popish doctrine! It was upon
that very theory that the priests kept back the Bible from the people—they did
not give it to them lest they should misuse it.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2920

“It is insulting to a man to call him a fool, but I question whether any man is
saved unless he has called himselfa fool!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921

“There is to come a day when Christ shall be known and loved of every land!...
You will hear no more of the name of Pope, or Patriarch, or a great religious
leader receiving the chief honor. No great name set in the front of a section of
the Church shall be shouted in that day—the Lord alone shall be exalted!”—Volume
51, Sermon #2922

“If we begin by doubting, our prayer will limp. Faith is the tendon of Achilles
and if that is cut, it is not possible for us to wrestle with God.”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2923

“There have been times with some of us in our younger days before we knew
Christ, when the temptation was very strong, but the opportunity was not near.
And at other times the opportunity has been before our eyes, but there was no
temptation. God help the man that has the temptation and the opportunity at the
same time.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2924 “A pious fraud is a most impious
blasphemy.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2925

“God delights in the thought of the fervent love we gave Him when we knew first
Him, our thoughtful and practical kindness towards His name, our steadfast
resolve to follow Him at all lengths, our faith which took His least Word as a
warrant for action and our holiness which shrank even from the approach of sin.
Happy are we if these things still abide with us. But if we have lost them, the
Lord, like some fond mother recalling the infant days of her children, remembers
them and beckons us back to our first love and our first works. ”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2926

“I am afraid that even those who are busy in the Master’s work and are not
occupied much with lower things, yet overlook the necessity for love to be at
leisure. Now tonight, at any rate, you that work longest and toil most and have
to think the hardest can ask the Lord to make this a leisure time between you
and Jesus. You are not called upon to help Martha to prepare the banquet. Just
sit still—sit still and rest at Jesus’ feet and let nothing else occupy the next
hour but sitting still and loving and being loved by Him.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2927

“The preacher ought to preach so that it shall be almost an impossibility for
his hearer to be altogether careless. You Christian people should set such an
example in your households that it shall be next door to an impossibility for
son or daughter or servant to remain at peace while they remain out of God and
out of Christ in a state of sin!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2928

“In these busy times, when men have so much to do in order to live, it may be of
much service to them to think how certainly they must die.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2929

“Let your admiration both of David and of the Lord Jesus Christ be
practical—there is far too much of that kind of religion which consists in
merely admiring other people, or in seeing what we, ourselves, ought to be, or
in regretting that we are not what we should be—true godliness is manifested as
we bring forth the fruit of the Spirit by being and doing that which we feel we
ought to be and to do.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2930 “Whatever anyone else may think
or say, I know that I must be saved by the Grace of God or else that I shall
never be saved at all! I have not done a single good work in which I cannot see
any faults—not one solitary thing which I cannot perceive to be marred and
stained and, like a vessel spoiled even while it is on the potter’s wheel, not
fit to be presented before God at all!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2932

“There are no suppositions and imaginations in the Gospel—it tells of positive
sin, positive punishment, positive substitution and positive forgiveness, for
God would not have His people reckon upon anything which is not absolutely
true.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2933

“Here, surely, is A WONDER OF GRACE—‘There are last that shall be first.’ Here
is Divine Sovereignty—choosing the last to make them first. Here is Sovereign
Grace—forgiving the greatest sin to make the brightest saint. Here is almighty
power changing the most degraded, turning the current of the most strong-minded
sinner and making his soul ‘willing in the day of God’s power.’”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2934

“A Christian has never fully realized what Christ came to make him until he has
grasped the joy of the Lord. Christ wishes His people to be happy. When they are
perfect, as He will make them in due time, they shall also be perfectly
happy.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2935

“It is a very blessed thing when we are able to love one another because the
Divine Grace that is in any one of us sees the Grace that is in another and
discerns in that other, not the flesh and blood of the Savior, but such a
resemblance to Christ that it must love that other one for His sake!”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2936

“Everything that has to do with Christ’s work is of real, practical, vital
consequence to Believers. He is to be the food for our souls. Faith is to
receive Him. Love is to embrace Him. Hope is to rejoice in Him! ”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2937

“The Hindu meets the Muslim and he says, ‘No doubt you are sincere as well as we
are, and you and we shall at last meet in the right place.’ They would salute
the Christian, too, and say the same to him, but it is a necessity, if our
religion is true, that it should denounce every other and that it should say
unto those who know not Christ, ‘Other foundation can no man lay than that is
laid, which is Jesus Christ.’ Yes, it goes still further and pronounces its
anathema upon those who pretend to any other way! ‘Though we or an angel from
Heaven preach any other Gospel than that which you have received, let him be
accursed.’ I simply mention certain other ways to assure you, in God’s name,
that they are roads which lead to Hell and that none of them can bring you to
Heaven—for there is only one way by which the soul can came to God and find
eternal life—and that way is Christ.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2938

“You sometimes wonder that the Gospel does not spread more rapidly in the earth.
But are disobedient servants likely to do their Master’s work well? If there are
commands of Jesus which we persistently ignore—if there are precepts of the
Savior which, year after year, we forget—if there are Doctrines and other parts
of His teaching to which we turn a deaf ear, can we expect Him to bless
us?”—Volume 51, Sermon #2939

“O Brothers, when you preach and no man gives heed to your message—when you
teach, but the children yield not their hearts to your Lord—when you sojourn in
Mesech and dwell in the tents of Kedar and meet with hard and cold hearts in
every place, that thaw not even beneath the sunbeams of the love of Jesus, you
are very apt to say that it does not appear that, ‘He must reign.’”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2940

“The music of joy and the music of Heaven should often be upon our lips in the
form of Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2941 “This
Supper sets forth to all who choose to see it, the painfulness of Christ’s
death…That is the teaching of this Supper, that Christ’s death was a painful
death, and a death on behalf of others.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2942

“Prayerless souls are Christless souls, Christless souls are Graceless souls and
Graceless souls shall soon be damned souls. See your peril, you that neglect
altogether the blessed privilege of prayer! You are in the bonds of iniquity,
you are in the gall of bitterness. God deliver you, for His name’s sake!”—Volume
51, Sermon #2943

“Yes, dear Friend, we cannot wonder if some reject our message when so many
rejected the teaching of the Master, Himself! But we must so deliver it that, at
any rate, if they do refuse it, the blame shall lie entirely at their own
door.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2944 “But see fair days have foul eventides and the
Christ manifested during the day may become a Christ hidden during the night.
Close on the heels of the intense excitement of great success comes the relapse
into darkness of spirit and absence of joy.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2945

“It is very hard for young people, especially in ungodly families, to dare to
call themselves followers of the Crucified! Nor is it easy for a working man, in
the workshop, to bear that perpetual ‘chaffing,’ as his companions call it,
which they delight to inflict on those who are better than themselves.”—Volume
51, Sermon #2946 “Happy day, happy day, when Jesus comes into the heart! Save
the day when we shall be with Him where He is, I suppose there is no day that is
comparable to the first one when we behold Christ and see Him as our Savior and
our King!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2947

“It is very difficult to estimate the amount of darkness that may come over the
human conscience and to imagine how blind a man may become, or how fully he may
put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter—but certain it is that an unrenewed
heart may become as darkened that, while we are going posthaste to Hell, we may
imagine that we are making good headway towards Heaven!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2948

“Think over the time and the place of our Lord’s Ascension and you will have
some subjects worthy of your deepest meditation.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2949

“In another sense it is true that ‘God hears not sinners,’ that is to say, He
will hear none of us—no sinner among us, (and who among us is not a sinner?) in
and ofourselves. If heard, it must be through the interposition of the Mediator
between God and men, the Man, Christ Jesus, for up to the immediate Presence of
the thrice-holy God the guilty sinner cannot come by himself.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2950

“There is not one among us who can afford to live in sin, or who can afford to
die in sin. We may find a temporary pleasure in it, but it must end in eternal
loss to us unless there comes a time when God’s Grace saves us from it—we cannot
be truly happy while we are out of gear with God.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2951

“When a man has no self remaining, but has given himself up as a living
sacrifice for Christ, that which would be a terror to another man becomes a
comfort to him.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2952

“I feel that much evil comes of a mode of address which is adopted by some of my
ministerial brothers in which they speak to the entire congregation as though
all who were present were Christians. That is a false theory to go upon because
it is not at all likely that any congregation ever gathered together will
consist wholly of Christians.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2953

“If we would come to Christ, we must come away from sin. Repentance must make us
turn from sin, and faith must make us turn to Christ—and we must also come away
from self-righteousness if we are to come to Christ. It is very difficult for
some people to part with their selfrighteousness. They have looked in the mirror
till they are in love with themselves and they cannot bear to be separated from
their beloved self. They feel so good, so proper, so respectable, so excellent,
so amiable, so lovely and so dear to themselves that they would gladly hang
about the neck of their self-righteousness and embrace it as long as they
can!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2954

“If the Gospel of God is true, it can stand any quantity of questioning. I am
more afraid of the deadness and lethargy of the public mind about religion than
any sort of enquiry or controversy about it. As silver tried in the furnace is
purified seven times, so is the Word of God—and the more it is put into the
furnace, the more it will be purified—and the more beauteously the pure ore of
Revelation will glitter in the sight of the faithful.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2955

“He who would be wise, in dealing with the daughters of grief, must let them
tell their own story and, almost without a single sentence from you, their own
story will be blessed by God to the relieving of their grief.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2956

“It is a very bad thing to live upon the past—to say, ‘I believe I am a child of
God because I had certain spiritual enjoyments and experiences 10 or 12 years
ago.’ Ah, such stale fare as this will not feed hungry souls. They need present
enjoyment, or, at least, present confidence in the everliving God. Yet, Brothers
and Sisters, we may sometimes gather fuel for today from the ashes of
yesterday’s fire. Remembering the mercies of God in the past, we may rest
assured concerning the present and the future.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2957

“If your pathway has been smooth of late—if temporal mercies have abounded—if
spiritual comforts have been continued to you, then, O you happy saints, love
the Lord!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2958 “What a blessing it was to us that when we
woke up in this world, we looked up into a face that smiled upon us and to lips
that, by-and-by, spoke to us of Jesus Christ! The first example that we had was
one that, to this day, we wish to follow.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2959 “Cold prayers
court refusal. Heaven is not to be obtained by lukewarm supplications. Heat your
prayers red-hot, Brothers and Sisters! Plead the blood of Jesus! Plead like one
who means to prevail—and then you shall prevail!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2960 “THIS
chapter—the 8th of Romans—is, like the Garden of Eden, full of all manner of
delights. Here you have all necessary doctrines to feed upon and luxurious
Truths of God with which to satisfy your soul.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2961

“THERE are some people in the world who, the moment we begin to speak of a type,
try to disparage that style of speech by calling it ‘spiritualizing’ They seem
to be far too wise to be able to learn anything by that mode of teaching. Yet
the Holy Spirit has given us, in the Old and New Testaments, abundant instances
of spiritualizing and, though He could have used new metaphors and fresh phrases
in His Infinite Wisdom, He preferred to use the old historical allusions and the
old historical types for the instruction of God’s people.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2962

“…the stream of Divine Grace, from where does it spring? In what mountain does
it take its rise? Arminian theology, like all the ancient travelers, has failed
to make the discovery. But the Gospel, as it is revealed in Scripture, plainly
tells us that everything in salvation is according to the good pleasure of the
Divine will.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2963

“IF we are inclined to grieve because everything around us changes, our
consolation will be found in turning to our unchanging God. If we lament the
ills of mortality, it will be wise for us to turn to Him “who only has
immortality.” If our earthly joys fade and die, it is a blessed thing for us to
be able to go to the fountain of undying joy and there to drink deep draughts of
bliss, which shall cause us to forget our misery.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2964

“[Backslider] if you ask, ‘What shall we do in order to get ready to meet Him?’
I answer—Cast out the idols from your hearts! Let them all go! Love no one else
and nothing else as you love Him, but give Him your whole body, soul and
spirit!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2965

“Those persons who stumble at the election of some men rather than others ought
equally to stumble at the fact that Christ did not redeem the fallen angels, but
only fallen men—for why God chose to save men and not to save angels, who among
us can tell? The only answer I know to that question is this, ‘Even so, Father,
for so it seemed good in Your sight.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2966

“I question whether any man ever attained to the eminence in piety that he once
marked out for himself and whether we have not all had occasion to eat our
words.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2967 “O Believer, whatever life of a spiritual kind
you have in you, today, was given to you by God! It was not yours by
nature.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2968 “When you are so foolish as to say, ‘Now I am
out of the reach of temptation,’ you are in the very midst of temptation! And
when you think you are not being tempted at all, you are being tempted the most
by the very fancy that you are not being tempted!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2969

“Our God sets great value upon those whom He calls His jewels, as we may gather
not only from their costly redemption, but from the fact that all Providence is
but a wheel upon which to polish and perfect them. Those stupendous wheels,
which Ezekiel saw, were but a part of the machinery of the great Lapidary by
which He cuts the facets of His true brilliants and makes His diamonds ready for
His crown, for is it not written that ‘all things work together for good to them
that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose?’”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2970

“There are many persons who have so little faith in God that they fear that the
trials which will sooner or later overtake them, will also overthrow
them.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2971

“It could not be possible that God would woo sinners to return to Him and yet
not intend to forgive them! I cannot believe a theory so monstrous as that God
would send His ministers and send His own Book, and earnestly and affectionately
invite sinners to turn from their evil ways and repent of their sins and yet
intend, even if they did repent, to punish them on account of their iniquity! It
cannot be.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2972

“If ever you want to know what Christ means by His teaching, look at His life.
You may rest assured that He never gave us a command which He was not, Himself,
prepared to obey.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“LET no Christian imagine that he will ever have immunity from trouble while he
continues in the body… Do not expect, dear Brothers and Sisters, that because
you have been strengthened in the faith, you will therefore be loosened from the
burden of the flesh—neither because you may have been the means of strengthening
others, that, therefore, trouble will be light to you. Even into your ship the
deep waters may come.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2974

“There are hundreds of men who might be compared—as Rowland Hill did once
compare them—to hogs under an oak. ‘They eat the acorns,’ he said, ‘but they
never look up and thank the oak.’ They live in this world and feed upon the
bounties which God has provided for them, yet they have no thought of Him! It is
His air that they breathe and it is by His power that they exhale the air—they
could not exist for a single moment if it were not for Him—yet He is not in any
of their thoughts!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2975

“Brothers and Sisters, the events of our history march on as rightly as a
victorious legion under a skillful Leader. Do not let us arraign the wisdom of
that which happens to us, or fancy that we could order our affairs in better
style. Our good and ill, our joy and grief, all keep their places. ‘Neither
shall one thrust another; they shall walk everyone in his path.’”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2976 “The man whose arm is not long enough to grasp that which lies in
the land beyond the stars will have to live and die without attaining to perfect
satisfaction. Man, it is not here below that God has placed that which you need.
The bread for your souls must come from Heaven! That which can satisfy your
immortal spirit must be Divine, like the Creator who made you!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2977

“I know certain individuals who say that they will never believe what they
cannot understand. If they adhere to that determination, they will never believe
in their own existence, for they certainly cannot understand that!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2978 “Christ, my Brothers and Sisters, is the point of union for all the
soldiers of the Cross ”—Volume 52, Sermon #2979

“I hope that there are many in this congregation whom Jesus Christ means to
bless, but they are, at present, in a state of utter prostration. They are so
despondent that their spirits sink almost to the point of despair. They cannot
believe that there is mercy for them—they have relinquished all hope of that.
They did, at one time, have some measure of hope, but it is all gone. They are
in the prostrate condition of Peter’s mother-in-law and they need Christ to do
for them the two things which He did for her. First, He came into contact with
herand, secondly, He gently lifted her up and completely restored her. May He do
the same for you!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2980

“I have read that a spider will extract poison from the flower from which the
bee extracts honey so, surely, from that very Truth of God from which a renewed
heart extracts reasons for holiness, unregenerate men have been known to extract
excuses for sin! If they do so, I can only say that they are ‘without
excuse.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2981

“Because, then, it was the settled custom of Israel to recite or sing these
Psalms, [at the Passover] our Lord Jesus Christ did the same, for He would leave
nothing unfinished. Just as when He went down into the waters of Baptism, He
said, “Thus it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness,” so He seemed to say,
when sitting at the table, “Thus it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness.
Therefore let us sing unto the Lord, as God’s people in past ages have done.”
Beloved, let us view with holy wonder the strictness of the Savior’s obedience
to His Father’s will! And let us endeavor to follow in His steps in all things,
seeking to be obedient to the Lord’s Word in the little matters as well as in
the great ones.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2982

“I cannot imagine a better promise for the wheat than that it shall be
threshed—and that is the promise that is made to us if we are the Lord’s
wheat—and not the enemy’s tares, ‘You shall have the threshing which shall fit
you for the heavenly garner.’ You need not mourn, Beloved, that it is to be so.
If you do, it will make no difference, for your Lord has declared that ‘in the
world you shall have tribulation.’ Rest quite sure of that.”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2983

“O Lord, the great Searcher of hearts, do search us lest we should have applied
to us saintly names and pass the saintly reputation and character, and hold
saintly offices—and after all be cast away with the rubbish over the wall and
left to be consumed forever and ever!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2984

“Brothers and Sisters, faith is an exotic in any heart where it is made to
flourish—it does not grow there by nature—it must be planted by Grace.”—Volume
52, Sermon #2985

“This Doctrine of Redemption tallies with the types of the old Jewish
dispensation and corresponds with the prophetic descriptions of the promised
Messiah, especially those wonderful chapters in Isaiah and Ezekiel in which His
Character is so accurately foretold. This view of Christ dying as the great
substitutionary Sacrifice for sinners cannot be dispensed with for a single
moment—it seems to us to be the very essence of the Gospel.”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2986

“There never did live and there never could live, a man whose entire nature
could be satisfied with his worldly possessions. You know that we call the man
who delights in hoarding up riches, a miser. Why do we call him by that name
unless it is because he is truly miserable?”—Volume 52, Sermon #2987

“This very day, have there not been more sins than moments, more transgressions
than heartbeats, more offenses than pulses? God only knows the total of the sins
of man! Only His Infinite mind can reckon the iniquity that crops forth from the
polluted soil and wells up from the deep spring of depravity that is hidden in
the very core of our corrupt nature! Count your sins if you can, O you children
of God, and then fall on your knees, bow your heads, cover your faces and say,
‘Our iniquity is indeed great.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2988

“Do not be self-confident, nor rely too much upon your own judgment, but let
your mind lie open to conviction. Above all, let it be open to the heavenly
Light of God! And if you do, I shall have hope concerning you, notwithstanding a
thousand mistakes that you may make. An honest seeker after the Truth of God
will not be long before Truth finds him and he finds Truth!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2989“It is most for your profit that you should receive the Spirit of Truth,
not through the golden vessel of Christ in His actual Presence here, but through
the poor earthen vessels of humble servants of God like ourselves. At any rate,
whether we speak, or an angel from Heaven, the speaker matters not—it is the
Spirit of God, alone, that is the power of the Word and makes that Word become
vital and quickening to you.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2990

“It would be far better to have half a dozen souls really brought to Jesus
Christ and enduring to the end, than to have half a dozen thousand blazing away
with a false profession for a time—and then returning like the dog to his vomit,
or like the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire. Our Lord’s own
declaration is, ‘He that endures to the end shall be saved.’ It is that
endurance, that holding out to the end, which is the point to which we would
direct all our endeavors on behalf of our hearers and our converts—and the point
about which we would most earnestly pray to our God.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2991

“Even the seed of Israel, circumcised and blessed with covenants and
promises—and having the immediate Presence of God in their sanctuary could not
keep the Law—a clear lesson to us that ‘by the deeds of the Law there shall no
flesh be justified.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2992

“It is possible to endure afflictions on earth and afterwards to endure eternal
damnation in Hell. Sinners may go from beds of languishing to beds of flame,
from toil and poverty here to torment and all despair hereafter. There is
nothing at all in sorrow that can burn out sin—there is no power in human
suffering to remove the wrath of God.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2993

“The best-taught man, apart from Divine Guidance, is capable of becoming the
greatest fool possible! There is a strange weakness which sometimes comes over
noble spirits and which makes them infatuated with an erroneous novelty, though
they fancy they have discovered some great Truth of God.”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2994

“The wisdom which contemplates only this life fails even in its own sphere. Its
tricks are too shallow, its devices too temporary and the whole comes down with
a crash when least expected to fall!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2995 “We lose a great
blessing and incur no small guilt if, professing to be the sons and daughters of
our Father who is in Heaven, we never ask Him to direct our way!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2996 “What we are taught to seek or shun in prayer we should equally
pursue or avoid in action.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“The weary sentinel who has stood upon the watchtower all night, keeping guard
in the pitiless tempest, longs to see the first streak of daylight—and he will
not readily forget the moment when, in the East, he first perceived the glow
which betokened the rising of the sun! He may forget that, but weshall never
forget the hour when, in our deepest sorrows, we caught the first glimpse of a
Savior and of His wondrous plan of salvation!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2998

“But, if ordinary life is precious, much more is the life of the soul and,
therefore, it is our Christian duty never to do that which imperils either our
own or other men’s souls. To us there is an imperative call from the great
Master that we care for the eternal interests of others and that we, as far as
we can, prevent their exposure to temptations which might lead to their fatal
falling into sin.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2999

“The message, ‘Him that comes to me I will in no wise cast out,’ must be true,
for it fell from the lips of Jesus! And, next, it is eminently consistent with
His Character. You cannot conceive of Him as casting out a soul that came to
Him. The scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman taken in the very act of
adultery, yet He did not condemn her, but said to her, ‘Go, and sin no
more.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3000

“We say it sincerely, for we know how sadly true it is—the natural heart of man
never does and never can produce so much as one single grain that God can
receive as being to His honor and glory.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3001 “If we wish to
share the lot of the righteous, we must be as they are and, among other things,
this text [Psa. 37:31] must be realized in our experience as it is in theirs.
The Law of our God must be in our heart that our steps may not slide.”—Volume
52, Sermon #3002

“Even in His hours of keenest conflict, Christ knew that His chosen followers
would leave Him alone—all would forsake Him and flee. It is true that even then,
He could say, ‘Yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me,’ but apart
from His Father’s Presence, His whole life may be compressed into those two
sentences—‘I have trodden the winepress alone. And of the people there was none
with me.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3003

“Flesh and blood, as they are, cannot inherit the Kingdom of God and cannot even
guess what that Kingdom is like. This is not the place where the Christian is to
be seen. This is the place of his veiling—Heaven is the place of his
manifestation. This is the place of his night. Yonder is the place of his day.
Our portion is on the other side of the river—our days of feasting are not
yet!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3004“No man ever comes to God unless he is drawn. There
is no better proof that man is totally depraved than that he needs to be
effectually called. Man is so utterly ‘dead in trespasses and sins’ that the
same Divine Power which provided a Savior must make him willing to accept a
Savior, or else he will never be saved.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3005

“There is far more of the hand of God in our life than there is of our own
hand—if our life is what it ought to be.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3006

“Beloved, we strain no metaphor when we say that there exists, between the soul
of every Believer and Jesus Christ, a relationship admirably imaged in the
conjugal tie. We are married to Christ. He has betrothed our souls unto Himself.
He paid our dowry on the Cross. He espoused Himself unto us in righteousness, in
the Covenant of Grace. We have accepted Him as our Lord and Husband. We have
given ourselves up to Him and under the sweet Law of His Love we ought to dwell
evermore in His house. He is the Bridegroom of our souls, and He has arrayed us
in the wedding dress of His own righteousness.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3007

“It is too much the custom for ministers to address the whole assembly as
“Brothers and Sisters” and to speak to a mixed multitude of men and women as if
they all had a part and lot in spiritual things. It seems that if anywhere,
certainly in the pulpit, there should be a wise and constant use of
discrimination. The preacher should make his hearers clearly understand that
there are some who fear God and some who fear him not—some who are still dead in
trespasses and sins—and others who are alive unto God through the quickening
power of the Holy Spirit.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3008

“The Apostle Paul has put him among the worthies in the 11th Chapter of the
Epistle to the Hebrews and Paul wrote by Inspiration—therefore there can be no
mistake about the fact that Samson was saved.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3009

“Brothers and Sisters, let us learn from Jacob’s experience to expect troubles,
especially if we have so acted as to bring trouble upon ourselves—but let us
also learn from Jacob’s action that while planning is right enough when kept
within its proper bounds, prayer is much more important.”—Volume 52, Sermon
#3010

“IN speaking of this important matter—confessing with the mouth what we have
believed with the heart, I call your attention, first of all, to the order of
the two things. Believing with the heart must come first. Confession with the
mouth must and should come afterwards. To confess with the mouth what I do not
believe with the heart would be hypocrisy instead of being an acceptable
sacrifice. It would be an abomination in the sight of God.”—Volume 52, Sermon
#3011

“First, then, it is clear, from the very wording of our text, that THE LORD HAS
A PEOPLE. Isaiah does not say, in general terms that the Lord has comforted the
children of men as a whole, but he says, ‘the Lord has comforted His
people.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3012

“Your communion may be transient, but your corruption is perpetual. To be with
Christ is but a thing of a moment with you, but to be with your corruption is a
thing of every hour in the day! I pray you, keep this in mind and whenever you
are in your best frame, then be doubly careful, lest you should lose your
Beloved and have to cry once again, ‘I sleep, but my heart wakes!’”—Volume 52,
Sermon #3013

“I may gravely question whether I am growing in Grace and under such a doubt I
may search my heart to see whether I love my Lord better, or whether I have more
fully conquered my sins. But one thing I do not question, namely, that being a
Believer in Him, Jesus Christ is unutterably precious to my soul! If you doubt
your faith, you may doubt whether Christ is precious to you, but if your faith
is certain, the preciousness of Christ to your heart is quite as
certain.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014

“When I see some of our young people inclining to be drunkards, I am very sorry
and I blame them. But can I wonder at their conduct when I see how many parents
train up their children as if they really intended to make drunkards of
them—tempting them to drink and giving them their first taste of that which
becomes a cause of stumbling to them?”—Volume 52, Sermon #3015

“A man infected with a deadly disease is never at ease. Whatever garments he may
put on, or at whatever tables he may feast, he is still unhappy because he has
the arrows of death sticking in him! Such is a man conscious of sin. Nothing can
please him. Nothing can ease him till his sin is removed. But when sin is
gone—when he knows that he is pardoned, he is as a bird set free from its
cage!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3016

“May God grant that all of us may not only come to Christ, but may we also
exercise a simple, childlike faith which takes God’s Word as it stands in this
blessed Book, believes it, receives it, lives upon it, asks no questions
concerning it and will allow none to be asked by others!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#3017

“Sometimes, among our Primitive Methodist friends, we hear the same kind of
thing—they get so carried away by the power of the Truth of God which has just
been stated that they cannot refrain from crying out, ‘Glory!’ or, ‘Hallelujah!’
Throughout all Wales, this custom, which I am far from condemning, prevails
through the whole sermon, often very much to the comfort of the speaker,
enlivening him and cheering him on—and making him rise to greater flights than
otherwise he might have taken.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3018 “If a man’s prayer is of
such a character that only sovereign Grace, real pardon and true salvation will
content his soul, then he shall not be put off with anything else, but he shall
have that for which his soul craves.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3019

“It is one of the most unwise things under Heaven to comfort people who do not
require it. When we are dealing with enquirers, our love may bring them loss if
we offer them words of cheer when they need admonition or rebuke. Any comfort
which keeps a soul short of Christ is dangerous.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“Never, even in the sharpest trial, can the heir of Heaven accuse God of being
unfaithful to what He has promised. He told His disciples that they would have
to endure tribulation—and when it came, they proved the truth of His
prophecy—and everything that God does to us, whether little or great, whether
sharp or kind, will prove to have been done in accordance with His faithful
Word.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3022

“The Gospel of Mark is the most impulsive of all the Gospels. You are aware and
I have frequently mentioned it to you, that the word eutheos, translated,
‘straightway,’ ‘forthwith,’ ‘immediately,’ is used a very great number of times
by this evangelist in his Book. He is a man who does everything straightway—he
is full of impulse, dash, fire, flash—the thing must be done and done at
once.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3023

“Surely we make too little of our Redeemer’s death. I fear that even we, who
preach most concerning it, dwell too little upon it. That we who pray, plead it
too little. That we who sing, praise our Lord too little for His wondrous death
and that we who live upon His Grace, yet think too little of the channel by
which it flows to us!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024

“Some of the rarest pearls have been found in the deepest waters and some of the
choicest utterances of Believers have come from them when God’s waves and
billows have been made to roll over them. The fire consumes nothing but the
dross and leaves the gold all the purer.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025

“Unless we follow Christ, and make God the great Object of our life, we only
differ from the most frivolous in degree—and possibly the degree may not be so
great as we suppose.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3026 “If God’s promises cannot comfort
you, rest assured that no speech from the lips of man can do it. If your God
shall not yield you the consolation that you need, you will go in vain to the
giddy world and its pleasures and follies in the hope of finding it.”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3027

“We have, moreover, in the Church of Christ, a considerable proportion of those
who are always behind. Some of those are here tonight. You feel yourselves to
belong to the rear because you are so weak in faith. It is a blessed thing to
enjoy full assurance of faith and yet, no doubt, there are thousands in the fold
of Jesus who never reach this attainment. It is a great pity that they should
not reach it, for they miss much happiness and much usefulness.”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3028

“I rejoice to be able to say that all that a sinner can need between here and
Heaven is provided in the Gospel of Christ—all for pardon, all for the new
nature, all for preservation, all for perfecting and all for glorifying is
treasured up in Christ Jesus, in whom it pleased the Father that all fullness
should dwell!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3029

“The preacher cannot tell you what it is to receive Christ. Human language is
not adapted to convoy to the mind this deep enigma, this matchless secret. We
know what it is, for ‘truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son,
Jesus Christ.’ We can describe it in such a measure that our friends who have
also received Christ, will know that we understand the mystery—but to the carnal
mind it will ever remain a puzzle how Christ can be ‘in us the hope of
glory’—how we can eat His flesh and drink His blood. They run away to some
carnal interpretation and suppose that the bread is turned into flesh at the
Eucharist or that the wine is transformed into blood. That iscarnaltalk and this
they talk because they know not what is the mystery of this receiving Christ and
this walking in Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3030

“Whenever conscience oppresses you and reminds you of your guilt, depend upon it
that Christ has not lost His power to quiet conscience and to calm your
fears.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3031

“I know that there are those who would like to see a new Bible, or a revised
version of it. I mean a revised version of the original Scriptures to suit their
depraved taste! They would gladly have what they call ‘new developments’ and
‘fresh light’ worthy of this ‘advanced’ generation! But, beloved Friends, there
is nothing new in theology but that which is false—only the old is true—for the
Truth of God must be old, as old as God Himself!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3032

“I must honestly confess that before I knew the Lord, or was seriously seeking
Him, although I found the historical parts of the Bible interesting, a great
portion of the Scriptures appeared to me to be dull and meaningless.”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3033 “Bread and wine, which are but created and common things, even when
placed on the table to assist us in Communion, are made into deities by the
blind idolaters of this age! Could Egypt or Assyria do worse? Bread used at the
ordinance is but bread and nothing other than ordinary bread. Its emblematic use
imparts to it no measure or degree of sanctity, much less of Divinity! It is
idolatry—flat, groveling idolatry—and nothing less, which on all sides is
spreading its mantle of darkness over this land under the pretense of profoundly
reverent piety!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3034

“Many of you may know but little of astronomy, but still, you see every day that
God is working everywhere around us and that Heaven and earth, and land and sea
are teeming with the products of His marvelous skill. The revolutions of day and
night and the formation and fall of rain are indisputable proofs of the Presence
of eternal power and Godhead! Let us, therefore, seek the Lord.”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3034

“You remember that Zion of old was the place, above all others, where God
manifested Himself. To ask the way to Zion means, therefore, to seek after God,
to desire to be reconciled to God, to long to be pardoned and accepted by
God.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3035 “When we are in trial and trouble, we believe the
devil when he says God will forsake us. The devil, who has been a liar from the
beginning, we credit—but if our God promises anything, we say, ‘Surely this is
too good to be true.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3036

“For that Almighty Love which has manifested itself in restraining Grace, let us
render grateful songs of thanksgiving as we look back upon our past lives, for
we can scarcely tell how often we should have dishonored our character and our
profession if it had not been that God came to our rescue and kept back His
servants from presumptuous sins.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3037

“Need I do more than suggest to you the infinite number of ways in which the air
becomes valuable, not merely as an accessory to our comfort, but as a necessity
of our life? Yet, how infinitely more precious is the blood of Jesus Christ
which in every way and in every place becomes efficacious to the everlasting
salvation of all Believers!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3038

“Another of the Truths connected with Christ’s Gospel that is like a sharp arrow
is this— the utter impossibility of self-justification.This is one of the Truths
of the Gospel that we must never fail to proclaim—‘By the deeds of the Law there
shall no flesh be justified in His sight.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3039

“The poor in pocket may be blessed, or may not be blessed, as the case may be,
but the poor in spiritare always blessed and we have Christ’s authority for so
saying! Theirs is a poverty which is better than wealth! In fact, it is a
poverty which indicates the possession of the truest of all riches.”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3040

“As the sparrows were permitted to find their house under the eaves of God’s
ancient Tabernacle, we, insignificant and worthless as we are, may come and
build under the shelter of God’s great House of Mercy. There we may find a safe
refuge from every danger, a perfect security for all time, and even for all
eternity.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“Would you be saved, rich man? There is no way but that whereby the
poverty-stricken pauper is also to be saved! Would you be delivered, man of
intelligence? You shall be saved in the same way as the most ignorant! ‘There is
none other name under Heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved,’ but
Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3042

“There is a fullness of the iniquity of every individualsinnerin these days,
just as there was a fullness of the iniquity of the Amorites in ancient
times.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3043

“But remember, however much you have persecuted God’s saints, however harshly
you may have dealt with the followers of Christ, the Lord is able to transform
you into one of them… You think that it is only your child, or your wife, or
your mother. But, in persecuting the members of the body of Christ, you
persecute the Head!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3044

“If God says that He will make us a blessing, surely it is implied that once we
were not so. Let us look back to the days of our unregeneracy. It may be that
some of us were great curses to our families and to the neighborhood in which we
dwelt. If so, we must look back with deep sorrow upon the past, for, albeit that
God has blotted out the guilt of our iniquity, yet the consequencesof the sin
still continue.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045

“Not to the idlers in Herod’s court did Jesus reveal Himself, but to hard
working fishermen by the lake of Galilee. If Satan is never far away from the
idle, it is pretty plain that it is no disadvantage to be busy!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3046

“When Omnipotence and Omniscience unite to sift the chaff from the wheat, you
may depend upon it that the sifting wall be thoroughly done!”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3047 “The Spirit was first poured upon Christ and from Him descends to all
those who are in union with His adorable Person. Let us bless the name of Christ
if we are united to Him—and let us look up to our Covenant Head, expecting that
from Him will flow down the heavenly unction which shall anoint our
souls!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3048

“A deep sense of sin is often a blessedly impelling power to drive us to the
Savior. I desire never, in this world, to be free from a deep sense of the
bitterness and guiltiness of sin. Even though freed from the guilt of sin by the
precious blood of Jesus, I still desire to feel what an abominable thing sin is,
that I may go, eagerly and passionately, to my dear Lord’s wounds, and get the
one only effectual remedy for all my soul diseases.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3049

“Do not I recollect the time when I would have given my eyes for a tear and
would have been willing to suffer anything if I could have but bent my knees and
uttered one groan? But my heart would not yield a sigh or my eyes a tear! I
turned to the Book of God but that did not move me. I listened to the preacher
without emotion. It seemed as if even a dying Savior’s groans could never move a
heart so base as mine—and yet I bear witness that Christ came to save such, for
I do myself rejoice in His salvation! You who are lost to all feeling may well
catch at this text, ‘The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was
lost.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3050

“When a man has kept his promise once, it does not stand good any longer—but
God’s promises may be fulfilled a hundred times over and yet remain just as
valid as when He first gave them. So what God did for His Church at Pentecost He
is prepared to do today—and He will do it on a yet larger scale in those happy
times that are yet to come, the latter days for which we look and long with
joyful expectation!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3051

“David lamented the villainy of Ahithophel, but the Savior, inasmuch as He was
of a more tender spirit than the son of Jesse, even more keenly felt the
treachery of Judas”—Volume 53, Sermon #3052

“There never was anyone else so kind in heart as He was, yet He clearly taught
the dreadful Truth of God that sinners shall be punished in Hell forever! There
never can be any question about the Savior’s view of sin as being a very evil
thing and of the punishment of sin as being a very terrible thing.”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3053

“Nothing that man can present to God by way of sacrifice can ever purchase the
blessing of forgiveness.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3054

“Have you never felt, when you have seen the faults of your own children, that
you ought to lay the rod on your own back because, in some way or other, you
were an accomplice in your children’s sins? How much of the ruin of many
children’s souls lies at their parents’ door!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3055

“Sometimes it has been asked by unconverted men, ‘Why do you talk so much about
atonement? Why could not God be generous and forgive sin outright? Why should He
require the shedding of blood and the endurance of great suffering?’ Sinner, if
you had a right sense of sin you would never ask such a question!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3056

“I can truly say to every one of you that the main thing you have to do, in this
world, is first to follow Christ until you find him as your Savior or, in other
words, the first thing for you to do is to look to Him, to trust in Him. We live
in vain if we do not live unto God and if we do not live by faith in Jesus
Christ, the one and only Savior.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“And there comes even a brighter day than has ever dawned upon this poor misty
earth—the day of the coming of the Son of Man, when the Sun of Righteousness
shall arise, when Christ shall thrust in His golden sickle and shall reap the
harvest of this world! And then shall the righteous rejoice before Him with a
greater joy than ten thousand harvest years have ever known!”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3058

“GOD is the poor man’s Friend. The poor man, in his helplessness and despair,
leaves his case in the hands of God and God undertakes to care for him.”—Volume
53, Sermon #3059 “He who is convinced that he knows nothing as he ought to know,
gives up steering his ship and lets God put His hand on the rudder. He lays
aside his own wisdom and cries, ‘O God, my little wisdom is cast at Your feet.
Such as it is, I surrender it to You.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3060

“I learn from…that it is not the preacher’s business to seek to please his
congregation. If he labors for that end, he will in all probability not attain
it. But if he should succeed in gaining it, what a miserable success it would
be! He must lose the favor of his Master if he should once aim at securing the
favor of his fellow men. We therefore ought to preach many Truths of God which
will irritate our hearers!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3061

“At the commencement of spiritual life we believe that we are nothing. As we
advance, we find that we are less than nothing. May the Holy Spirit so work in
you! Some of you are, perhaps, depending and thinking that you are not children
of God, or else you would not be so cast down as you are. I pray you to
understand this matter aright. Instead of having any reason for despondency, you
will find a subject for joy, for I am sure that the Spirit is honoring Christ
when He is lowering you in your own estimation.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3062

“They are the strongest who are the weakest in themselves. They are the richest
who know how poor they are apart from God. They have the most Grace who know how
utterly empty they would be of Grace if the Lord should ever withdraw His hand
from giving it to them.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3063

“Since the time when you believed in Jesus, you have had many needs, both
spiritual and temporal, but He has promised no good thing will He withhold from
them that walk uprightly. What say you, Brothers and Sisters? Your needs have
come—have the supplies come also? I am sure you will say, ‘it wasso’—strangely
so—but always so!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3064

“No man ever becomes truly meek, in the Christian sense of that word, until he
first knows himself and then begins to mourn and lament that he is so far short
of what he ought to be. Self-righteousness is never meek. The man who is proud
of himself will be quite sure to be hard-hearted in his dealings with others. To
reach this rung of the ladder of the Light of God he must first set his feet
upon the other two. There must be poverty of spirit and mourning of heart before
there will come that gracious meekness of which our text speaks.”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3065

“Whenever a thing is a sin, we need not appeal to Christ to know whether we
shall commit it, for we are taught to avoid even the appearance of evil! If we
consider that a thing is wrong, we have no right to do it, even though it might
tend to our advantage in worldly affairs. We must not do evil that good may
come, for if we were to do so, then indeed our damnation would be just!”—Volume
53, Sermon #3066

“The best man here will, at times, have painful memories of the past and to look
at the past, except through the glass made red by our Savior’s precious blood,
is to look upon despair—for our past transgressions would drag us down to Hell
were it not for the Atoning Sacrifice of Jesus Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3067

“Brothers and Sisters, the sayings of Christ upon the Cross have a deeper
meaning than that which appears upon the surface. They were texts of which His
eternal life should be the sermon—they were no common words. As no word of
Scripture is of private interpretation, no word of the Savior upon the Cross
loses its force and significance in later times.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3068

“Depend upon it, no mutilation and no disease of man’s body was ever so
sickening to the most delicate taste as sin is sickening to God!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3069

“It is not easy for a man who has constantly enjoyed good health and prosperity,
to sympathize with the poor and the suffering. Even our great High Priest, who
is full of compassion, learned it by carrying our sorrows in His own Person. To
see the sufferings of the afflicted, in many cases, would be enough to move a
stone. And if we visit a hospital and come back with a more tender heart, we
shall have found it a sanatorium to ourselves.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3070

“The Christian Church is the home of Christian love. When it is what it should
always be, it is a family—it is ‘the household of faith,’ of which God Himself
is the Father, the Lord Jesus is the Elder Brother, and all the members are
Brothers and Sisters—all equal, all one in Christ Jesus, all seeking to serve
the rest, laying themselves out to be servants to the whole band of Brothers and
Sisters in Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3071

“Oh, infinitely better is the end of a spiritual life than the beginning!
Contrast the Slough of Despond with the Celestial City and human intellect
cannot fail to see how much better, how infinitely better, the end is than the
beginning!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3072
____________________________________________________

“There are two sorts of sorrow—the sorrow that rushes like a mighty torrent, and
the sorrow which is, perhaps, the worse of the two, which goes drip, drip, drip,
drip, drip, drip—like the constant dripping which wears away stones—and which
makes even the boldest heart to feel the attrition.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2969

“I would not give twopence for your religion if you are a tradesman—but not fair
in your dealings! I do not care if you can sing like David, or preach like
Paul—if you cannot measure a yard of material with the proper number of inches,
or if your scales do not weigh rightly, or your general mode of business is not
straight and true—you had better make no profession of religion!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2994

“But many of you who have heard the Gospel, have not believed it…This is your
greatest sin—that you have not believed on Jesus Christ, whom God has sent! Oh,
that God the “My soul begs and beseeches of you to renew your prayers for me,
that I may preach with greater vigor. What if my ministry should become as dull
and stupid as the ministry of one-half of my Brothers Holy Spirit would convince
you of the sin of unbelief and enable you to repent of it and to lay hold on
Jesus Christ by a act of childlike faith, that you might live through
Him!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2951

“I had sooner die than live to be such a being as many who stand up in the
pulpit wholly to waste people’s time and not to win souls!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#3013 “It is not said in Heaven, ‘Moral, moral, moral are You, O God!’ But,
‘Holy, holy, holy are You, O Lord!’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902 “Whatever there may
be in the sealed scroll that records God’s purposes in predestination, there
cannot be anything there to contradict what is written on the open scroll of
Divine Revelation.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2864 “It is an unspeakable blessing to
have sin forgiven.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3037 “If you could ask those Believers
who are now in Heaven, they would tell you that they came through great
tribulation—many of them not only washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb,
but they sealed their faithfulness to Him with their own blood!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2983 “If you lament your loneliness, cure it by seeking heavenly
company. If you have no companions below who are holy, seek all the more to
commune with those who are in Heaven where Christ sits at the right hand of
God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3052

“I have sometimes heard of ministers that have been quite exhausted by the
preparation of a single Sunday sermon. I am told, indeed, that one sermon on a
Sunday is as much as any man can possibly prepare! It is such laborious work to
elaborate a sermon! And then I say to myself, “Did my Lord and Master require
His servants to preach such sermons as that?” Is it not probable that they would
do a great deal more good if they never tried to do any such fine things, but
just talked out of their hearts of the simplest Truths of His blessed
Gospel!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2927

“There is no necessity for saints being on earth that I know of, except for the
good of their fellow men. Sanctification might be completed in a moment. As for
all the rest, it is already done. God ‘has made us meet to be partakers of the
inheritance of the saints in light.’ Why do we stay here, then, at all, but that
we may be salt in the midst of putrefaction—light in the midst of darkness—life
in the midst of death? The Church is the world’s hope!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2952

“The separation at what, is called, “religious,” from the, “secular,” is one of
the greatest possible mistakes. There is no such thing as a religion of Sundays,
and of chapels and churches. At least though there is such a thing, it is not
worth having. The religion of Christ is a religion for seven days in the week—a
religion for every place and for every act! And it teaches men, whether they
eat, or drink, or whatever they do, to do all in the name of the Lord Jesus
Christ and to the glory of God! I pray that you may be kept from falling away
from thatreligion, and that you may be kept up to the mark in serving the Lord
in all things, and attending diligently to the little commonplace matters of
daily life.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2994

“Do not imagine that you can live for twenty, thirty, or forty years in sin and
yet be just as likely to be converted as anybody else is! I know that God can,
if He pleases to do so, call you at the 11th hour as easily as at the first,
but, as far as you are concerned, if you harden your neck, you have no right to
expect that He will do so, but rather to expect that you shall suddenly be
destroyed, and that without remedy.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3037

“If we can but believe in God, He will never desert us! If we can dare, God will
do! If we can trust, God will never allow us to be confounded, world without
end! It is sweet beyond expression to climb where only God can lead and plant
the standard on the highest towers of the foe!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3052

“Just in proportion as you enter into your royal heritage and live in it, and
believe in it—in this proportion Jesus Christ will be precious to you.”—Volume
52, Sermon #3014

“Beloved, nothing so delights God, next to the Person of His own dear Son, as
the sight of one of those whom He has made like unto the Lord Jesus! Know you
not that Christ’s delights are with the sons of men and that the holiness, the
patience, the devotion, the zeal, the love and the faith of His people are
precious to Him?”—Volume 52, Sermon #2970

“What arrow will ever pierce the heart of sin unless it is dipped in the blood
of Jesus? When I see sin punished on Christ, I see the evil of it. When I see
Christ dying for my sin, I see the great motive for my dying for my sin. When I
behold His griefs and pangs on my behalf, I see a reason why I should make
abundant sacrifices in order that I may glorify Him. Beloved, the death of
Christ is the great sin-killer and he who truly knows it and understands it,
will feel its sanctifying power!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2942 “I recommend some of
you, instead of praying, “Lord, give me a sense of pardoned sin. Give me a new
heart. Give me to feel that You love me”—pray those prayers, by-and-by, but for
the present, pray like this, “Lord, help me to believe. Lord, give me faith.
Lord, drive away my unbelief.”Direct your prayers to that one point—for that is
the matter in which you are lacking. Unbelief is the great stone lying at the
door of your heart and preventing that door from being opened!”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2881

“Do you not see that the greater your value of Christ, the greater your strength
against temptation? Although the devil may tempt you with this and that, yet
Jesus Christ, being more precious than all else, you say, ‘Get you behind me,
Satan. You cannot tempt me while Christ is dear to my spirit.’ Oh, may you set a
very high value upon Christ, that thus you may be kept firm in the day of
temptation!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014

“If anyone should proclaim a religion without a sacrifice, you would soon see
how quickly this building would be emptied, or any other place of worship. There
are always more spiders than people where the Atonement is left out. Men must
have a sacrifice—in their inmost hearts they know their absolute need of it when
they seek to approach the Lord.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2951

“Christ never meant Christians to be stoics. There is a wide and grave
distinction between a gracious acquiescence in the Divine will and a callous
steeling of your heart to bear anything that happens without any feeling
whatever. ‘You shall be sorrowful,’ says our Lord to His disciples, and ‘you
shall weep and lament.’ It is through the weeping and the lamenting, oftentimes,
that the very kernel of the blessing comes to us!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983

“Give me great sinners to make great saints! They are glorious raw material for
Grace to work upon and when you do get them saved, they will shake the very
gates of Hell!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2934

“The best sermon Paul preached was when he took bread and gave thanks. He did
not do that for show. It was just in the daily course of his habitual godliness
that the man of God came forth boldly before their eyes. Do not conceal your
godliness from those around you! Though at first they may laugh at you and
despise you, who can tell but that, like Paul, you may gain influence till they
will do anything you tell them? And like Paul, by means of that influence, you
may save all that are in the house and so the text may come true of you, ‘God
has given you all them that sail with you.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2952

“Hark to the shriek that goes up from the midst of the Red Sea, when the waters
that stood upright as a heap, suddenly descend and lock in their death-wooing
arms the multitudes of Egyptian chivalry! Do you not see here the Justice of
God? You do, but you do not see it so completely, because a multitude of
sinners, in front, have escaped by this very destruction…for had Divine Justice
slaughtered all sinners on that occasion, Israel would have been drowned as well
as Egypt! ”—Volume 53, Sermon #3038

“No one man is tempted in all points exactly like another man and each man has
certain trials in which he must stand alone amid the rage of war, with not even
a book to help him, or a biography to assist him—no man ever having gone that
way before except that one Man whose trail reveals His nail-pierced feet. He
alone knows all the devious paths of sorrow. Yet, even in such by-ways, the
Father is with us, helping, sustaining and giving us Grace to conquer at the
close.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3052

“They [God’s people] are not all alike and they never will be! All attempts at
uniformity must fail and it is very proper that they should. We need not wish to
be one in the sense of uniformity, but only in the sense of unity not all one
jewel, but many set in one crown. It little matters whether we shine with the
sapphire’s blue, or the emerald’s green, or the ruby’s red, or the diamond’s
white, so long as we are the Lord’s in the day when He makes up His
jewels!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2970

“If we open our mouth wide, India may be evangelized—and China—and the new world
of America and the far-distant world of Australia will feel the power of the
Gospel that we take there in the name of the Lord! Let us pray, as David did
long ago, that the whole earth may be filled with God’s Glory! What is the whole
earth, after all, compared with the greatness of God, and with the Infinite
Sacrifice that Christ has offered? Well may the Lord say to each one of us,
‘Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2879

“I like, and the world likes, a religion that will wash—a religion that will
stand many showers and much rough usage. Some Christians’ joy disappears in the
wear and tear of life—it cannot endure the world’s rough handling. Let it not be
so with us, Beloved, but let us praise, bless and magnify the name of the Lord
as long as we have any being!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2994

“I would recommend you to choose the church of which you would be a member and
the pastor whom you would hear by this one thing—by how much of Christ there is
in that church and how much of the savor of Christ there is in that
ministry!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014

“We may also be ‘partakers of other men’s sins’ by joining a church that holds
unscriptural doctrines, or that does not act according to Apostolic precedent.
Some people say, ‘We belong to such-and-such a church, but we don’t approve of
its teaching or its practice.’ What? You belong to it and yet you do not approve
of its principles? Out of your own mouth you are condemned!”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3055“When we reach the highest point in our devotions, we still need a Savior.
I do not at all like the boastful talk about ‘the higher life’ in which some
people seem to revel. We cannot have too high a life, but, ‘God be merciful to
me a sinner,’ is about as big a prayer as I can manage at present. And often
does my soul pray with such earnestness the dying thief’s prayer that his
petition is forced to my lips, ‘Lord, remember me when You come into Your
Kingdom.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2941

“I solemnly believe that there are those who have not the shadow of an idea of
the meaning of the words which they hear every Sabbath in a form of prayer! They
repeat those prayers without any appreciation of the sense of them. They would
probably not notice if the words were put in any other way. Doubtless they would
get as much good out of them if they were thrown together in wild disorder, as
they do out of the beautiful and magnificent array in which they are marshaled!
”—Volume 52, Sermon #2984

“The death of Christ gloriously set forth Divine Justice, because it taught
manifestlythis Truth ofGod, that sin can never go without punish- ment.”—Volume
53, Sermon #3038

“Now, my Hearer, let me speak to you about your own conversion. If you have
skipped the first page of the book, namely, repentance, go back and begin again,
for that faith which has a dry eye and never wept for sin is not the faith of
God’s elect! There must be repentance! It is an essential Grace—no man is truly
saved who has not a hatred of the sin he loved before and who has not made a
confession of it before God with an earnest prayer for pardon.”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2928

“I will not discuss that question just now, whether the practice of teaching
children a form of prayer is proper or not. I would not do it. Children should
be instructed in the meaningof prayer, and their little minds should be taught
to pray, but it should be rather the matter of prayer than the words of prayer
that could be suggested. And I think they should be taught to use their own
words and to speak to God in such phrases and terms as their own childlike
capacities, assisted by a mother’s love, may be able to suggest.”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2943

“But supposing you have joined a church whose doctrines are Scriptural, you may
be ‘partakers of other men’s sins’ if the discipline of the church is not
carried out as it should be. If we know that members are living in gross sin and
do not deal with them either by way of censure or excommunication in accordance
with the teaching of Christ and His Apostles, we become accomplices in their
sin. I often tremble about this matter, for it is no easy task where we count
our members by the thousands. But may we never wink at sin, either in ourselves
or in others! May you all, Beloved, exercise a jealous oversight over one
another and so help to keep one another right!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3055

“When a man imagines that all his corruptions are gone, that is no proof that he
is rid of them, but only that he does not really know his true condition, for,
if God were but to lift the veil that covers his eyes and let him see the great
deeps of sin that are in his nature, he would soon discover that he has grave
cause for fear—and he would be driven to cry out to God, ‘Oh, keep me, I beseech
You, or else I shall commit spiritual suicide! I must and shall become like the
vilest of apostates unless Your Sovereign Grace shall hold me on my
way.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2971

“It is better to count Christ precious than it is to count orthodoxy precious.
It is not loving a creed, but it is loving Jesus that proves you a Christian.
You may become such a bigot that it may be only the laws of the land which keep
you from burning those who differ from you, and yet you may have none of the
Grace of God in your heart!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014

“Never was shame more shameful than in the experience of our Lord. Here God
seemed to declare, once and for all, how shameful in His sight sin was. When sin
lay but by imputation upon His own dear Son, His Son must be an object of scorn
to the universe!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3038

“If there is a poor sinner here who sees the lifeboat of faith come close up to
him and he is afraid to step in, if it is any comfort to you, Sinner, let me
tell you that if you step into that lifeboat and are lost, I must be lost, too,
for I do not know of any other way of escape!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2951

“I remember my mother saying to me, ‘I prayed that you might be a Christian, but
I never prayed that you might be a Baptist.’ But, nevertheless, I became a
Baptist, for, as I reminded her, the Lord was able to do for her exceedingly
above what she asked or thought—and He did! She expected, of course, that I
should be an Independent. Well, as long as your children are saved, you need not
put any conditions as to the mode. Sooner see your son and daughter go to the
Established Church, saved, than see them go to your own place of worship and be
lost.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2952

“I press it on you—it seems to me to be the greatest of all inconsistencies that
a man should think himself able to guide a nation and yet should lose his own
soul! That he should have schemes by which to turn this world into a Paradise
and yet lose Paradise for himself! That he should declaim violently against war
and all sorts of evils and yet, himself should be at war with God! Himself a
slave to sin! Shall he talk of freedom while he is manacled by his lusts and
appetites? Shall he be enslaved by drink and yet be the champion of
liberty?”—Volume 52, Sermon #2995 “The judge who winks at sin, is the abettor of
sin. If the supreme Ruler does not punish sin, He becomes Himself the patron of
all guilt and sin may take its rest beneath the shadow of His wings! But it is
not so and, Sinner, God would have you know, and have angels know, and have
devils know that however lightly any of His creatures may think of sin—and
however foolishly simple man may toy with it—He knows what a vile thing it is
and He will have no patience with it. ‘He will by no means spare the
guilty.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“We have plenty of Baptist churches educating cowards by the score! They never
come out before the whole church—that would be too trying for their nerves! They
are never expected to come out boldly on the Lord’s side. Too often, Baptism is
administered somewhere in a corner, when as few as possible are present and, in
that way, where we ought to have lion-like men, we breed those who hide their
principles and are ready to amalgamate with any sect of people so long as they
can but bear the name of Christians!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2984

“To think that my case is so bad that God cannot blot out my sin is to doubt His
Omnipotence and to do Him grievous dishonor. For me to despair of receiving the
mercy of Christ is to do despite to that generous and self-sacrificing Savior
who bled to death on Calvary’s Cross! To think that He is either unable or
unwilling to forgive us is to add to our former offenses—and that which is, in
itself, sinful cannot be a help to salvation!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2911

“It is a blessed temptation to find one of God’s precious promises, for you feel
then as if you were tempted to pray, so as to plead it!1904, Sermon #2869

“Each Christian is a manifestation and display of some attribute or other of
God—a different part may belong to each of us, but when the whole shall be
combined, when all the rays of evidence shall be brought, as it were, into one
great sun, and shine forth with meridian splendor—we shall see in Christian
experience a beautiful Revelation of our God. ”—Volume 53, Sermon #3036

“Is there a harlot here? O poor fallen woman, I pray that Christ may so forgive
you that then you will wash His feet with your tears and wipe them with the
hairs of your head! Is there a thief here? Men say that you will never be
reclaimed, but I pray the same Eternal Mercy which saved the dying thief to save
the living thief! Have I any here who have cursed God to His face a thousand
times? Return unto your God, for He comes to meet you! Say to Him, “Father, I
have sinned.” Bury your head in His bosom! Receive His kiss of forgiveness, for
God delights to pardon and to blot out transgression. Now that He has smitten
Christ, He will not smite any sinner who comes to Him through Christ. His wrath
is gone and He can now say, “Fury is not in Me.” Here, then, is a great
wonder—that Christ’s precious blood can cleanse the vilest of the vile and you
may now pray the prayer of the text, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be
clean.””—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“I love Protestantism, but if there is anything in this world that I have a
horror of, it is that politicalProtestantism which does nothing but sneer and
snarl at its fellow citizens—but which is as ignorant as a cow about what
Protestantism truly is.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014 “Oftentimes the Good Shepherd,
in caring for the sheep, ‘ makes us lie down,’ but He is glad when we come of
our own accord that we may rest and listen to His Word.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2927

“Do not grieve the Spirit of God by unworthy doubts and mistrusts—these things
will be like fiery arrows in your own soul and drink up the very life of your
strength. However hard the struggle and difficult the trial, if you seek the
Lord, seek Him in the confidence He deserves.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2923

“It is hard to keep to the narrow way when the broad road runs so near to it
that sometimes they seem to be one! The time was when the broad road was so
distinct from the narrow one that we could easily discern who was travelling to
Heaven and who was going to Hell. But now the devil has engineered the broad
road so very close up to the side of the narrow way that there are many people
who manage to walk on both of them—they were never so pleased as when they could
first take a little turn on the narrow road and then, afterwards, take another
turn on the broad one.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2971

“God had one Son without sin, but He never had a son without temptation. The
natural man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward—and the Christian is
born to temptation just as certainly and necessarily.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“The pains of the damned in Hell are no atonement for sin! They suffer in
consequenceof sin, but no atonement has been made by them, for all they have
suffered has not lessened what they have to suffer. And when ten thousand times
ten thousand years shall have rolled over their poor accursed heads, they will
be just as far off having satisfied Divine Justice as they are now, for sin is
such a dreadful thing that even Tophet cannot burn it up, though ‘the pile
thereof is fire and much wood,’ and though ‘the breath of the Lord, like a
stream of brimstone, does kindle it.’ Sin is cast into its flames and men suffer
there—but all the burnings of Gehenna never did consume a single sin, and never
could. Think of that! Earth, Heaven and Hell could never take away a single sin
from a single soul!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“‘Tis greatly wise to talk about our last hours. The shroud, the grave, the
shovel may teach us more of true wisdom than all the learned heads that ever
pondered vain philosophy, or all the lips that ever uttered earth-born
science!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929 “It is true that nothing could add to His
Glory as God, but seeing that He assumed our Nature and became Man as well as
God, He added to His Glory by all the shame He bore. There is not a reproach
that pierced His heart which did not make Him more beautiful! There is not a
line of sorrow that furrowed His face which did not make Him more lovely—that
marred Countenance is more to be admired by us than all the comeliness of
earthly beauty! He was always superlatively beautiful. His beauty was such as
might well hold the angels spellbound as they looked upon Him!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2983

“I do not care to what church you belong, or what creed you are ready to die
for, you do not know the Truth of God unless the Person of Christ is dear to
you!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3014

“In these days, we know right well that there are unconverted persons in the
audience and it is proper, therefore, to have one message to the saints and
another message to the sinners—and to let it be seen, all through the sermon,
that the preacher is aware that the Lord has made a distinction between Israel
and Egypt—between them that fear Him and them that fear Him not.”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2953

“The reporter has not got a sign in all his stenography, I think, by which he
can record a cry. A cry is the heart’s own language with which the tongue cannot
interfere. Is there anybody here that does pray and yet cannot pray—who groans
before God, ‘Oh, that I might be saved’—whose only words are tears—whose only
language is the anguish of his silent spirit? Ah, you are the person—the person
that can cry! Cry then unto the Lord with all your might. It is said of such,
‘He sent His word and healed them.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921

“If our sins had been punished upon ourselves with the utmost rigor of the
Divine law, that Law would not have been as honored throughout the entire
universe of intelligent beings as it now must be when they hear that God,
Himself, would sooner pay the penalty of sin than allow His Law to be broken
with impunity!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2905

“Martin Luther would never have been the Martin Luther he was if it had not been
for the devil. The devil was, as it were, the proof-house for Martin Luther. He
must be tried and tempted by Satan and so he became fit for the Master’s
use.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997 “No sinner, when converted, although God has
forgiven him, can ever forgive himself—and no child of God, although God has
blotted out his sin, can ever blot it out of his own memory as long as he is
here on earth.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3037

“If I were to tell you that I was commissioned by God to say that if you walked
from here to John o’Groat’s House in the cold and wet, barefooted and ate
nothing on the way but dry bread and drank nothing but water, you would inherit
eternal life, you would all be on the road tomorrow morning, if not tonight! But
when I say just this, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be
saved,” what do you do, then? Are you such a fool as to be damned because the
way to be saved is too simple? My anger waxes hot against you, that you should
play the fool with your own soul and be damned because it is too easy.”—Volume
53, Sermon #3056

“I consider the form of prayer to be no more worthy of being called prayer than
a coach may be called a horse. The horse will be better without the coach,
travel much more rapidly and find himself much more at ease. He may drag the
coach, it is true, and still travel well. Without the heart of prayer, the form
is no prayer—it will not stir or move—it is simply a vehicle that may have
wheels that might move, but it has no inner force or power within itself to
propel it.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2943

“A little while, Sinner, and you will never have another invitation to come to
Christ. A little while and there will be no outstretched arms of Him who died
upon the Cross, ‘the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to
God.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2953

“The man who dares not have his ship examined is the man who knows that some of
the timbers are rotten! And if you do not like being examined, you are the very
men who ought to put yourself through that process without a moment’s delay,
obeying the injunctions of the Apostle, ‘Examine yourselves, whether you are in
the faith; prove yourselves. Know you not yourselves, how that Jesus Christ is
in you, except you be reprobates?’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2971

“I call that real happiness which I can enjoy by the hour together in my room
alone, calmly looking into things and feeling content. I call that real joy
which I feel when I wake up at night and, though full of pain, can lie still and
bless God for His goodness.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3016

“I believe that if we could brighten the faces of all the saints and anoint them
with the oil of gladness, we would do more than anything else could do to spread
Christianity. I mean if we could make the children of the King rejoice, we
should cause worldlings to ask, ‘Where does this joy come from?’ And as they
asked this question, we would give them the answer and so the Gospel would be
sure to spread.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2941 “Regeneration is an absolute necessity
before any soul can enter Heaven—and you must not be satisfied with anything
short of that! Yet you may be grateful if, like Timothy, from a child you have
known the Scriptures, or if, like Samuel, you have been brought up in the house
of the Lord from your very early years.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3037

“God is so inflexibly just that He has never forgiven and will never forgive the
sinner without having exacted the punishment for his sin! He is so strictly true
to His threats and so inexorably severe in His justice, that His holy Law never
relaxes its hold upon the sinner till the penalty is paid to the utmost
farthing.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3054

“It is a fine word, that word, “ silly.” Hardly do I know another that is so
eminently descriptive. There may be some sort of dignity in being a fool—but to
be silly—to attract no attention except ridicule—is so utterly contemptible that
I do not know how a more sarcastic epithet could be applied!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2984

“And we know some who when they go on the Continent, for instance, say, ‘Well,
we need not be quite so exact there.’ And therefore the Sabbath is utterly
disregarded and the sanctities of daily life are neglected, so reckless are they
in their recreations. Well, Sirs, if your religion is not warranted to keep in
any climate, it is good for nothing!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902

“No faith brings greater glory to God than the faith of the audaciously guilty
when they dare to believe that God can forgive them!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2934
“If all the Believers who have ever lived, or who ever shall live, could be
gathered together, we might maintain that there is not, in the whole universe, a
single sin that can be laid to the charge of any soul that believes in
Jesus.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2998

“Such, my Brothers and Sisters, is the true philosophy of a Christian’s life.
You are to do good works as zealously as if you were to be saved by your good
works—and you are to trust in the merits of Christ as though you had done
nothing at all! So, too, in the service of God, though you are to work for God
as if the fulfillment of your mission rested with yourselves, you must clearly
understand and steadfastly believe that, after all, the whole matter, from first
to last, rests with God! Without Him, all you have ever planned or performed is
unavailing.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2913

“There are many very sweet conditional promises—one of them helped to save my
soul at rest, it was this, ‘Look unto Me, and be you saved, all the ends of the
earth.’ The condition there is, ‘Look unto Me.’ But you cannot prove it unless
you look unto Christ! Here is another, ‘Whoever shall call on the name of the
Lord shall be saved.’ What a blessed promise that is! But then you cannot prove
the promise unless you call on the name of the Lord. So that, whenever we see
the promise to which a condition is attached, if we wish to prove it in our own
experience, we must ask of God to give us Grace to fulfill the
condition!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3036

“Brothers and Sisters, the Virgin Mary was a sinner, saved by Grace, as you and
I are! That Savior whom she brought forth, was a Savior to her as much as to us.
She had to be washed from sin, both original and contracted, in the precious
blood of her own Child, ‘the Son of the Highest.’Neither could she have entered
Heaven unless He had pronounced her absolution and she had been, as we are,
‘accepted in the Beloved’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3018

“It is powerful pleading when you have Christ praying by your side and know that
you have Him there—and when you feel that your prayer is not the petition of a
suppliant who is pleading alone, but the utterance of one who is covered up and
lost sight of in the Person of the greater Pleader—the Lord Jesus Christ. This
is, indeed, seeing Christ. ‘You see Me,’ said Christ to His disciples, and we do
see Him when we realize His power with us in the hour of prayer!”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2953

“ But even the Man Christ Jesus, inassociation withthe Godhead, could not have
taken away your sins unless He had died. I never read in Scripture that all that
He did in His life could take away sin. The Savior’s life is the robe of
righteousness with which His people are covered, but that is not the bath in
which they are washed.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“Every Divine promise, if it is rightly viewed by faith, will make the heart
leap for joy.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2864

“Dear Brothers and sisters, may you, by God’s Grace, be preserved from sin, but
if sin should come upon you unawares, may your bones be broken by it and may you
feel that your very heart is wounded because you have wounded your God! To
repent of sin is one of the hallmarks of a Christian, but to have a hardened,
untrembling heart is one of the sure marks of the reprobate who is far off from
God!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2971

“And are you practically keeping Christ’s words as to the precepts of the
Gospel? Have you believed on Him? Believing on Him, have you been baptized
according to His command? Being baptized, do you come to His Table according to
His bidding, “This do in remembrance of Me”? Or do you turn on your heels and
say that these are nonessential things?”—Volume 50, Sermon #2895 “A religion
without the blood of Christ in it is a lifeless religion. A religion without the
Atonement and reconciliation by the blood of the Covenant has missed the most
essential part of true godliness!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2928

“Do, I beseech you, put the Lord in mind of His own promises and He will most
assuredly fulfill them! Here is a challenge to all the redeemed, ‘Prove Me
now.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3036

“What can be our reason for calling God our Lord if we refuse to consult Him? Do
not even the heathen always conclude that a god is to be consulted? Though their
lying oracles have deluded them, yet have they always been right in the idea
that the very thought of godhead implied guidance! And shall we turn away from
Jehovah who really can guide us? While the heathen look to stocks of wood and
stone, shall we confide in human oracles and neglect to consult God who knows
all things?”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996

“Even if any of you are looking forward to a dreaded sickness, or to a painful
operation, or to business losses which may sink you from your present
comfortable position to one of great trial and poverty—think of this blessed
Truth of God—‘God is faithful.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2912

“I remember the story of a felon, in those days when they used to hang people
for very little indeed. A poor man, who had committed some offense, was
condemned to die. While he lay waiting for the sentence, the Lord sent a choice
minister of the Gospel to him and his heart was enlightened so that he found
Christ. As he was on the way to the gallows, what, do you think, was this man’s
cry? He was overwhelmed with joy and, lifting up his hands, he said many times,
“Oh, He is a great Forgiver! He is a great Forgiver!” Death was no terror now
that he had found forgiveness through Jesus Christ!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3016

“Remember what we said the other night—there is all the difference in the world
between the religion that is made up of, ‘Do, do,’ and that other religion that
is spelt ‘D-o-n-e, done.’ He who has the religion of, ‘It is all done,’ loves
God out of gratitudeand serves Him because he is saved. But he who has the
religion of ‘Do’ is always a slave, never gets salvation, but perishes in his
doings—as they deserve to do who will look to themselves instead of looking to
Christ!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“All the life that any Believer ever had on the face of the earth, he must have
derived from the Lord Jesus Christ for he had none of his own. And when the Holy
Spirit had given him this life from Jesus Christ, he could not keep it alive by
his own power. He had to remain in union with Jesus if he was to continue to
live, as Christ reminded His disciples, ‘Without Me, (severed from Me), you can
do nothing.’ Let us recognize this fact, Beloved, that we who have seen Christ
have a new life within us which we did not create and which we could not nourish
and sustain, but which Jesus keeps, feeds and preserves through the gracious
ministry of the Holy Spirit. And thus we live as the world does not live—it is
dead in sin, but we are alive unto God by Jesus Christ!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2953

“The very thought of sin, the word of sin, the very garments spotted with the
flesh should be hated by the Christian. The Lord give us to feel more and more
of this! We shall only get it, however, by living more where the groans of
Calvary can meet our ears and the sight of the Savior’s wounds can melt our
hearts!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3038

“Blessed Savior, we rejoice that You have gained by all Your sorrows, for
therefore has God highly exalted You, and given You a name which is above every
name!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983 “Blessed is the man who, in his holy things,
fears always—the man who is afraid when he is alone on his knees, lest he should
not pray rightly—the man who is afraid lest, either in public or in private, he
should act the hypocrite before his God!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2971 “Never do men
give so freely to the cause of God as when they are rejoicing over pardoned sin!
Keep a deep sense of your indebtedness to God alive in your soul and you will
feel that you can never do enough for Him who has forgiven you so much!”—Volume
53, Sermon #3056

“Somebody or other always seemed to object to Mary! If Martha does not do it,
Judas will. To be found guilty of excess of love to Christ is such a blessed
criminality that I wish we might be executed for it! It were sweet to be put to
death for such a crime! It was that that Christ died of—He was found guilty of
excess of love. (John 12:3-7)”—Volume 51, Sermon #2927

“We would pray better than we do if we meditated more, before prayer, upon the
God whom we address in our supplications.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2943 “Beware, dear
Friends, of the devil! Beware of him most when you think you have least need to
beware of him!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“There are those who love the high places of the earth where they can exalt
themselves. But he who is wise will choose to be numbered among the hungry whom
the Lord fills with good things and not among the rich whom He sends away empty.
He will delight to be reckoned among those that are of low degree, whom God
exalts, even the humble and the meek—and he will not wish to be gathered with
the proud, against whom the Lord has registered His solemn declaration that He
will stain the pride of their glory.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2878

“Not even the unfallen seraphim can render to God purer homage than when you, a
defiled and condemned sinner, dare to believe in the mercy of God in Christ
Jesus and so believe as to say, with David, ‘Wash me, and I shall be whiter than
snow.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2934

“Sanctification is a lifelong work, continuously effected by the Holy Spirit,
but justification is done in an instant! It is as complete the moment a sinner
believes as when he stands before the Eternal! Is it not a marvelous thing that
one moment should make you clean?”—Volume 53, Sermon #3054

“And while it is cause for congratulation that you may not have wandered so far
into sin as others, it is also cause for trembling, for verily I say unto you,
publicans and harlots often enter the Kingdom of Heaven before Pharisees! Some
who were the vilest of the vile have come to Christ—have penitently accepted His
righteousness while others robed in their own righteousness have gone down to
Hell and perished with a double destruction with the rags of their righteousness
about them!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2924

“Never dream that you can be pardoned and then be allowed to live as you did
before—the very wish to do so would show that you were still under
condemnation.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3016

“The wrath of the Lamb is the worst thing a sinner can ever feel. “The wrath of
the Lamb!” Think of that! When love turns to anger, it is cruel as the grave. To
despise Incarnate Love is to entail upon yourself infinite misery! They who
perish without the knowledge of Christ, perish happily compared with you! It
shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the Day of Judgment than for
you if you have despised Christ!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3038

“When you are ill, bless God for the health you will enjoy when you get well!
When you are down-hearted, bless God for the joy that you will have when He
shall again lift up the light of His Countenance upon you! When you go to the
grave of a Christian friend, bless God because you will meet that friend
again!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2864

“The Doctrine of Final Perseverance, or the Eternal Preservation of Believers,
seems to me to be written as with a beam of sunlight throughout the whole of
Scripture! If that is not true, there is nothing at all in the Bible that is
true, for that Truth of God is there if anything is! It is impossible to
understand the Bible at all if it is not so. But it is so, glory be to
God!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2953

“I know that on a certain day I shall stand before the judgment bar of
Christ—but that Judgment Day is mine! I fear it not, I dread it not. I know that
soon I must die, but the River of Death is mine! It is mine to wash me, that I
may leave the dust of earth behind. It is a glorious river though its waters may
be tinged with blackness, for it takes its rise in the mountains of love, hard
by the Throne of God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3054

“I cannot see a bleeding Savior without understanding that there must be pardon!
Gethsemane, Gabbatha, Golgotha—three sacred words, three irresistible arguments
by which it is proved beyond controversy that there is forgiveness even for the
chief of sinners!

“It is said that the bow of William the Conqueror was so strong that no man in
England, except himself, could bend it. And the great bow of King Jesus is such
as none of us can bend! It has the power of the Holy Spirit in it—it is the Holy
Spirit, Himself, who gives force and power to the Word so that it pierces
through all the sinner’s armor, the most vital part of his being and smites him
even in the heart. ”—Volume 53, Sermon #3039

“When Satan tempts us, he strikes sparks on tinder. But, in Christ’s case, when
the devil tempted Him, it was like striking sparks on water, yet he kept on
striking. Now, if the devil goes on striking where there is no better result
than that, how much more will he do it when he knows what inflammable stuff our
hearts are made of? Expect it, then. Though you become ever so sanctified by the
Holy Spirit and destroy sin after sin and lust after lust, you will have this
great dog of Hell still barking at you!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“I cannot see a bleeding Savior without understanding that there must be pardon!
Gethsemane, Gabbatha, Golgotha—three sacred words, three irresistible arguments
by which it is proved beyond controversy that there is forgiveness even for the
chief of sinners!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2972

“If all the mighty orators who have moved the Christian Church at once to tears
and to joy, could stand here, I would defy them to weigh this burden of the
Lord, or estimate its tremendous meaning, ‘Christ was made a curse for us.’
Christ a curse! Jehovah-Tsidkenu a curse! Jesus, the darling of the Father, made
a curse! He, who ‘counted it not robbery to be equal with God,’ a curse! O
angels, you may well marvel at this mystery, for its astounding depths you
cannot fathom! Yet so it is. ‘He has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin;
that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056
“The Church of God may well rejoice as she thinks of the noble army of martyrs
who praise the Lord on high for, among the sweetest notes that ascend even in
Heaven, are the songs that come from the white-robed throng who shed their blood
rather than deny their Lord!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983

“If you have labored by other means to procure mercy, you have not found it, for
no one else can give it but the one appointed Mediator. Can your “priest” grant
you pardon? Did you offend the priest? Then the priest can forgive you for
offending him, but he cannot forgive you for offending God. None but God in
Christ Jesus can blot out sin and you must go to Him—and if you do not, you are
not forgiven, whatever you may dream.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3016

“Our first parents were utter bankrupts. They left us nothing but a heritage of
old debts and a propensity to accumulate yet more personal obligations. Well may
we be poor who come into this world heirs of wrath with a decayed estate and
tainted blood!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3040

“A doctor does not come to heal those that are healthy—he naturally looks after
the sick—and a Savior does not come to save those who need no saving! He comes
to save sinners, so that your sinnership, instead of being a disqualification,
is, to speak broadly, a qualification! Just as filth is a qualification for
being washed—just as poverty is a qualification for receiving alms—just as
sickness is a qualification for medicine, so your very sin and vileness are
qualifications for Christ’s work of Grace in you! I am using expressions that
some will think strange, yet I am speaking, nevertheless, what is the absolute
Truth of God. Does it not help to remove your unbelief to hear that Jesus is
‘mighty to save’?”—Volume 50, Sermon #2881

“There is nothing about your case that Christ cannot reach! There is in Jesus
Christ something exactly adapted to the peculiarly disastrous nature of your
position. He can, He will save even you, even you, if you do but trust Him
now.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921 “Prayer is a living thing—you cannot find a living
prayer in a dead heart. Why seek you the living among the dead, or search the
sepulcher to find the signs and tokens of life? No, Sir, if you have not been
made alive by the Grace of God, you cannot pray!1904, Sermon #2869

“We often fail in prayer because we come without an errand, not having thought
of what our necessities are… See yourself as an abject bankrupt, weak, sick,
dying—and this will make you plead. See your necessities to be deep as the
ocean, broad as the expanse of Heaven—and this will make you cry. There will be
no restraining of prayer, Beloved, when we have got a due sense of our soul’s
poverty. But because we think we are rich, increased in goods and have need of
nothing, therefore it is that we restrain prayer before God.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2943

“When sin is pardoned and the eternal safety of the soul is ensured, the next
thing is to seek the purity of the soul and to secure a character that shall be
worth having throughout eternity. There is no character which is worth having
which is not fashioned according to the Character of Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3057

“I learn, each day more and more, my utter inability to do good to my fellow men
apart from the Spirit of God. There come to me, sometimes, cases that completely
stagger me. I try, for instance, to comfort a broken heart. I seek, but in vain,
all sorts of metaphors to make the Truth of God clear. I quote the promises, bow
the knee in prayer and yet, after all, the poor troubled spirit has to go away
still unbelieving, for only God can give it faith!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3044

“Honestly looking back upon the private life of my father and mother, I cannot
recall anything in their example which it would have been unsafe for me to
imitate. Well then, if I have sinned, I have sinned against a parental example
which I ought to have followed and, therefore, there must be more guilt in my
fifty-pence sin than in the five-hundred-pence sin of others who have not had
such an example as I had!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3015

“A Christian knows that he should not go to such places of amusement as
worldlings frequent—they may go without any very great mischief, but he may not.
He could not feed on the fare that is provided there, for it is not to his taste
and, moreover, he would not go there because he could not expect to have
communion with Christ there. And he could not ask God’s blessing upon his going
there.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996

“Our life has an outlook towards the Infinite—there are windows in our life that
look towards God. Look out of them, O Christian! With your windows open towards
God, live in the light of His Countenance and seek in all things to please and
honor Him! It is your life-work to honor God, to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ,
to be the instrument by which God shall illustrate His almighty power—the black
foil from which He shall display the brightness of His Grace. You are to be the
means of spreading abroad in this world the savor of Christ’s name—but you
cannot do this unless you follow Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“Death has no sting to a Believer. Once death was the penalty of sin—sin being
forgiven, the penalty ceases and Christians do not die, now, as a punishment for
their sin, but they die that they may be prepared to live!”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2929 “What has the Gospel of Christ to do with education? You do not need a
degree from a university—you do not need to be a master of arts, or bachelor of
arts, in order to find Christ!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2954

“It is in being singularly qualified for the duties of our holy Christian
warfare, in being singularly courageous and singularly ready with the
martyr-spirit, to imperil ourselves for His service, that we may bring glory to
God! God says, ‘Prove Me now.’ Saint, will you rob Him of His honor? Will you
not do that which shall crown Him, in the estimation of the world, with many
more crowns? Oh, prove Him, for by so doing you will glorify His name!”—Volume
53, Sermon #3036

“Oh, how great your sin has been, my Hearers! But Jesus Christ is greater still!
You have gone deeply into sin, but the arm of Mercy can reach you! You have
wandered far, but the eyes of Love can see you and the voice of Love calls to
you now, ‘Come, come, come and welcome, come and welcome!’ Come just as you are
and you will not be cast away, but be accepted in the Beloved! ‘There is
forgiveness with You, that You may be feared,’ and none fear, and love, and
bless, and praise God as much as those who know that there is forgiveness with
Him!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2972

“I think I may congratulate you, my Brothers and Sisters in Christ, on the
ingathering of converts into the Church. There is a time for rebuke and there is
a time for expressing our mutual comfort in one another. Let us congratulate one
another that the Spirit of God is with us as a people and with us in no mean
measure.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3058

“You worship not God at all if you do not worship God alone! There must be an
image-breaking in the soul if the conversion is really true.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2928

“If you have not found Christ, my dear Hearer, it is because you have not sought
Him, for He said, ‘He that seeks, finds, and to him that knocks it shall be
opened.’ I grant you that the blessing may be delayed for awhile—you may be some
time in finding peace, perhaps through your ignorance, or through some cherished
sin that you have not given up—but if you truly come to the Throne of Grace and
cry in real earnest for mercy, as surely as God is in Christ Jesus, He will
stretch out His silver scepter toward you and you shall touch it and find Grace
in His sight.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“The promise of harvest gives joy to the earth. Rob not your Lord of the sheaves
which He deserves to gather from your heart and life, but believe His Word, rest
upon it and rejoice in it, realizing that His Words of promise are meant to
bring you great joy!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2935

“Next, we ought to come to the Communion with a sense of self-abasement.
Brothers and Sisters, we ought to think little of ourselves everywhere, but when
we come to the Table of our Lord, we ought to shrink to nothing—yes, to less
than nothing! In the wilderness, man did eat angels’ food, but angels never ate
such food as this! Yet we are permitted to come and partake of it. So, let us
sink, and sink, and sink, and sink, and sink, and sink, and sink till we are
lost in wonder, love and praise that we should ever be permitted to come to this
sacred feast!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2865

“It is easy to get black by sin, but remember that it is so hard to get clean
that only God’s Omnipotence, in the Person of Christ, could provide a Cleanser
for your sins.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3056

“Christ keeps nothing back from His chosen. Between the heart of a true saint
and Christ there are no secrets! We pour our hearts into His heart and He pours
back His heart into ours. Does He not, this day, manifest Himself unto us as He
does not unto the world? You know that He does! And therefore you will not
ignorantly cry out, as this woman did, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore You,’ but
you will intelligently bless God that, having heard the Word, and kept it, you
have, first of all, as true a communion with the Savior as the Virgin had, and
you have, in the second place, as true an acquaintance with the secrets of His
heart as she can be supposed to have obtained!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3018

“Now, we may find Christ, in a sense, so as to know much about Him, to read
about Him, to hear about Him and even to understand much about Him, yet not
truly find Him. The root of the matter is to get Christ for yourself! In this
respect, you must be selfish and you can thus be selfish without being sinful.
You must personally lay hold of Christ if you would be saved!”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3041

“Rutherford says, in one of his letters, ‘When Christ’s dear child is carrying a
burden, it often happens that Christ says, ‘Halves, My love,’ and carries half
of it for him.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983 “You cannot say that Jesus Christ ever
troubled His head about what He should eat, or what He should drink—His meat and
His drink consisted in doing His Father’s will!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“Oh, what wonders God can do! He loves us to state the difficulty we are in, so
that when He gets us out of it, we may remember that we were in such a
condition! It was a real disaster and a time of real trial—and yet the Lord
redeemed us from it.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2923 “God has been pleased to add to
us, year by year, pretty nearly after the rate of four hundred members in a year
till our numbers have been swollen beyond our most sanguine hopes. Oh, how
greatly has He multiplied the people and increased our joy! Surely the Spirit of
God is with us!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3058

“We are told by Luke that Jesus Christ was full of the Holy Spirit. He was full
of the Holy Spirit, yet He was tempted! Why? Because the Holy Spirit is never
given in vain and, if given to us, it is as a preparation for conflict in order
that we may have strength proportioned to our need.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“If a man keeps the Lord’s commandments, He will have power with God in prayer.
But when a man lives habitually in sin, or even occasionally falls into sin, he
cannot pray so as to prevail, he cannot win the ear of God as he used to do. You
know right well that if you have offended the Lord in any way, you cannot enjoy
the Gospel as you did before you so sinned. The Bible, instead of smiling upon
you, seems to threaten you in every text and every line—it seems to rise up, as
in letters of fire, and burn its way into your conscience!”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2895

“He that believes in Jesus is safe forever!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041 “Cold
prayers court a denial. God hears by fire and the God that answers by fire let
Him be God!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2943

“Yes, and let a man really have the fear of Hell before his eyes and a sincere
desire for reconciliation with God—let his soul be really hungering after peace
with God through Jesus Christ—and he will be at mercy’s door both night and day!
He will hammer away at the knocker and give God no rest until He puts forth His
hand and gives the Bread of Life to that poor starving suppliant. Yes, it is
holy importunity that wins the day—and the spiritually hungry man gets the
blessing because his importunity gives success to his pleading with God!”—Volume
52, Sermon #3019

“Some of the worst men were once, apparently, meek-hearted hearers of the Word,
but they sat under the preaching of the Gospel till they grew ripe enough to
deny God and curse Him. The unsanctified hearing of the Gospel has sometimes
produced more gigantic specimens of sin than the deaf ear of the adder. Beware,
my Hearer!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2984

“It is not the strength of your faith that saves you, but the strength of Him
upon whom you rely! Christ is able to save you if you come to Him—be your faith
weak or be it strong.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2954

“If you would obey Christ and so serve Him, be like He, for the sum and
substance of His teaching is, “Follow Me.” Watch, then, His every footstep, and
ask for Grace to put your foot down where He put His. Whatever you see to be His
temper under any circumstances, cultivate that temper when you are in similar
circumstances. If you want to know what you should do at any special time, think
what He would have done if He had been in your place, for what He would have
done is what you should do.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2874

“ Out of those who are added to the Church, there are always some who are not
saved. Let us judge carefully and watch earnestly. Some come like Judas with a
lie in their right hand, and put on Christ by profession who are not followers
of Christ in spirit and in truth. Search yourselves, Brothers and Sisters, and
if you are not Christ’s, do not dishonor His name by venturing to be called by
it!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3058

“Heaven on earth can only be known by those who are saved and who know that they
are saved. May that be your case and mine, beloved! Christ’s own words are, ‘He
that believes and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believes not shall be
damned.’ May God bless us all with the true belief which is eternal life to all
who possess it, for Jesus’ sake! Amen.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2898

“Having done all that we can do by honest labor and earnest prayer, let us leave
the rest with God, for He would not have His children cumbered with much
serving, nor have them vexed with earthly cares.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“Cultivate more and more your love for the assemblies of the saints! We have no
reverence for bricks and mortar, stones and wood, glass and iron—we do not
believe in the sanctity of any one place above others—but we have a reverence
for the living Temple of God, built up of living men and living women whose
hearts are sanctified by the Holy Spirit!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“If we are, indeed, Christians, we have broken a great many idols, we have still
some more to break and we must keep the hammer going till they are all
broken!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2928

“He that gave you breath may take it back, but you may not give it up yourself!
To die by your own hand is not to escape from suffering, but to plunge yourself
into it forever, for we know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.
Therefore he that murders himself, if he knows what he is doing, gives sure
evidence that eternal life is not in him.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2917 “At this very
day we have serfs in England who, with sternest toil, cannot earn enough to keep
body and soul together and to maintain their families as they ought to be
maintained. And where masters are thus refusing to their laborers a fair
remuneration for their work, let them know that whoever may excuse them and
whatever may be said of the laws of political economy, God does not judge the
world by political economy!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059

“It has been often said that there are but two steps to Heaven—and that those
two are but one— out ofselfand into Christ.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2954

“With some professors, presumption is a very common sin. They will go into
worldly amusements and all sorts of frivolities and say, ‘Oh, we can be
Christians, and yet go there!’ Can you? It may be that you can be hypocrites and
go there—that is far easier than going there as Christians!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2997

“As it is in the pulpit, so is it in the Sunday school, and so is it with all
classes of Christians—there is a difference. Some seem to be all heart and
others seem to have no heart at all. There are some who serve the Lord with
their whole soul and others who give Him just the odds and ends of their time
and strength. I pray God to raise up among us many Brothers and Sisters who
shall be eminent for their Grace and consecration to Christ!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#3015

“As it was with God’s ancient people in the days of Sennacherib, so is it with
us. This principle holds good all along—the faith that relies upon God will
bring to us both salvation and strength.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985 “Every
Christian should think that what is good for himself is good for his children!
He who does not labor and pray for the salvation of his own offspring has good
reason to doubt whether he knows the Grace of God, himself.”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3041

“When the people of Judah came to their foes they found there were no foes.
There they all lay dead! None of the men of might could raise their hands
against those whom God had favored. After this fashion will God deliver you,
Brothers and Sisters—in answer to prayer He will be your defense! Therefore,
sing unto His name. ”—Volume 51, Sermon #2923

“Christ came to bring healing to those who are spiritually sick—you say that you
are perfectly well, so you must go your own way and Christ will go in another
direction—towards sinners.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059

“The joy of Jesus is, first, the joyofabiding in HisFather’s love. He knows that
His Father loves Him—that He never did anything else but love Him—that He loved
Him before the earth was—that He loved Him when He was in the manger and that He
loved Him when He was on the cross. Now that is the joy which Christ gives to
you—the joy of knowing that your Father loves you!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2935

“I charge you, Christian people, if you want your piety to be increased, never
to blunt your sensibility of sin. Do not begin to look at sin in any light which
takes away any of it blackness. The devil himself is not as bad as sin is, for
it is sin that made the devil.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2873

“There is a certain denomination which is constantly engaged in stealing the
sheep that are in other flocks—it would be much better if such people would ask
the Lord, by His almighty Grace to turn lions into lambs and sheep so that they
might gather their own flocks! That is the proper spirit in which all Christians
should act.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2944

“O Christ of God, it could not be that You should die and yet that sinners
cannot be forgiven! It would be a monstrous thing that You should have bled to
death and yet that no sinner should be saved by that death! It cannot be—there
must be forgiveness—there is forgiveness since Jesus died, ‘the Just for the
unjust, that He might bring us to God.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2882

“The noblest of the peers of Heaven were here below daily pensioners upon God’s
love—they were fed, and clothed, and housed by the charity of the Lord—and they
delighted to have it so.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3040

“The wear and tear of life comes not out of the Providential trials which we
have to endure, but out of the unbelieving cares and burdens which we make for
ourselves. You can carry easily enough the load that God appoints for you, my
Brothers and Sisters, but if you let the devil sit on the top of it in the form
of your own anxieties, doubts and fears, then the burden will crush you to the
earth! Imitate your blessed Lord and Master, and never despair, but hope on,
hope always and even if God, Himself, should seem to forsake you, yet cry, ‘My
God, my God,’ even as Jesus did when God had forsaken Him!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2973

“If Christ has taken your sins upon Himself—and He has done so if you have truly
trusted Him—your sins have ceased to be! They are blotted out forever! Christ
nailed to His Cross the record of everything that was against us and now, every
poor sinner who is indebted to God’s Law and who trusts in Christ, may know that
his debt is cancelled and that he is clear of all liability for it
forever!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059 “As Christ is mine and Christ is All, I have
in Christ all that I can ever desire! It is a blessed fullness, a Divine
satiety, a heavenly satisfaction which the Lord gives to us when He makes our
youth to be renewed like the eagles by filling our mouth with good
things!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3019

“I pray you, members of this Church, and members of Christ’s body everywhere,
touch nothing upon which you cannot ask God’s blessing! The moment you perceive
that God cannot be consulted about a thing, turn your back upon it and say, ‘Let
those who mean to damn their souls do the devil’s work! But a Christian must not
and will not touch it.’ I am aware that in my saying these things, I may strike
some persons who are engaged in trades which they conduct lawfully. My censure
is not intended for those persons who, though in a trade which I might not
choose, yet do their best to conduct it honorably. Still, I would make the
censure as sweeping as it ought to be, for there are far too many men merely for
gain following that which they know is damnable—and must in the end ruin their
own souls!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996

“People tell us that in the pulpit, the minister should always say, ‘We,’ as
editors do in writing. We would lose all our power if we did. The minister of
God is to use the first person singular and constantly to say, ‘I bear
eyewitness for God that, in my case, such-and-such a thing has been true.’ I
will not blush nor stammer to say, ‘I bear my personal witness to the truth of
Christ’s Gospel in my own case.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2955

“How much trouble Christians would save themselves if when they have committed
their case into the hands of Jesus, they would leave it there and not attempt to
deal with it on their own account! I say to the devil, when he comes to tempt me
to doubt and fear, ‘I have committed my soul to Jesus Christ and He will keep it
in safety. You must bring your accusations to Him, not to me. I am His client
and He is my Counselor. Why should I have such an Advocate as He is, and then
plead for myself?’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059 “Our motto must be, ‘Anywhere with
Jesus, nowhere without Jesus.’ Anywhere with Jesus! Yes, even in
Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace! When we have the Son of God with us, the glowing coals
cannot hurt us, they become a bed of roses to us when He is there! Where Jesus
is, our sorrow is turned into joy.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2983

“So needy are we that even in lying down to die, we need our last bed to be made
for us by Mercy and our last hour to be cheered by Grace. So needy are we that
if Jesus had not prepared a mansion for us in eternity, we would have no place
to dwell! We are as full of needs as the sea is full of water!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3040

“Full often the Truth of God shines out the more brightly from the very fact
that an error has beclouded the world with its dense shadows. Go on, then!
Strive with coolness and courage! Be not daunted by the comely face, the
princely figure, or the battle array of your antagonist! Let not his vaunting
words deter you. Call on the name of Jehovah, the Lord of Hosts, and use, even
in God’s battles, those weapons which you have tested and proved. But take care
to go through with God’s work—do it thoroughly, looking unto Jesus, the Author
and Finisher of your faith—and so, Beloved, you may expect to go from strength
to strength and bring glory to God!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2913

“When Noah offered a sacrifice to God, Jehovah smelled a sweet savor of rest—not
in Noah’s sacrifice, but in what Noah’s sacrifice typified and symbolized—that
is, in the Sacrifice of Christ.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2905

“Some glib professors talk of having got outof the 7th of Romans—I hope they
will grow in Grace until they get intothe 7th of Romans! It seems to me as if
they were in the 1st of Romans, so they have a long way to travel before they
will get into the 7th of Romans.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2873

“…while it is, in some senses, a high privilege to have wealth, yet it involves
such solemn responsibilities that a man should never have it without enquiring
of God how he can rightly use it.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996 “Self-satisfaction is
the death of progress. Contentment with worldly goods is a blessing, but
contentment in spiritual things is a curse and a sin.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3019

“Observe that the Christian does not find comfort inhimself. ‘I am poor and
needy.’ That is the top and bottom of my case. I have searched myself through
and through and have found in my flesh no good thing. Notwithstanding the Grace
which the Believer possesses and the hope which he cherishes, he still sees a
sentence of death written upon the creature and he cries, ‘I am poor and needy.’
His joy is found in Another! He looks away from self to the consolations which
the eternal purpose has prepared for him.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3040

“I might thus multiply figures and illustrations of how we commit ourselves to
Christ. We do it very much in the way in which our blind friends, sitting under
the pulpit, got here this evening— theycame by committing themselves to the care
of guides. Some of them can walk a good long way without a guide, but others
could not have found their way here tonight without some friend upon whose arm
they could lean. That is the way to get to Heaven, by leaning upon
Jesus.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059 “The argument which our holy religion needs at
the present moment is a new appeal to the senses of men. You will ask me, ‘What
is that?’ The holy living of Christians! The change which the Gospel works in
men must be the Gospel’s best argument against all opposers!”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2955

“There were great preachers before Luther and Calvin, before Wickliffe and Huss
and Jerome—they went about preaching and preaching to great crowds, too, but
they did not save souls! That was not because they could not speak and were not
attractive, but because they had not this story to tell—the story that is in
this Book—the story of Him who did hang upon the Cross.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921

“ To get and to holdseems to be the great end-all and be-all of some men’s
being—but it can never be so with a true Christian. He, by Divine Grace, is like
His Master, who, “though He was rich, yet for our sakes became poor.” His riches
consisted in giving and, therefore, He was the richest man who ever lived, for
He gave more than anyone else when He gave Himself that He might redeem His
people!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“Why is it that we sometimes find that faith is difficult? It is because we are
too proud to believe in Jesus. If we did but see ourselves as we really are, we
would be willing enough to trust the Savior—but we do not like going to Heaven
like blind people who need a guide, or like debtors who cannot pay a farthing in
the pound. We want to have a finger in the pie. We want to do something towards
our own salvation. We want to have some of the praise and glory of it. God save
us from this evil spirit!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059

“If your heart begins to suck in the sweets of another man’s sin, it is unsound
in the sight of God! If you can even wink at another man’s lust, depend upon it
that you will soon shut your eyes on your own, for we are always more severe
with other men than we are with ourselves! There must be an absence of the vital
principle of godliness when we can become partakers of other men’s sins by
applauding or joining with them in the approval of them! Let us examine
ourselves scrupulously, then, whether we are among those who have no evidences
of that holiness without which no one can see God!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902

“The blood of all the bullocks, and rams, and lambs offered in sacrifice, had
possessed no real efficacy in putting away sin. They had no virtue except as
types, symbols and prophecies of the one great Sacrifice that was to
come!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3040

“I would have the hearts of Christians insatiable as death and the grave, for
how can we stand that men should be forever lost? How can we be quiet while Hell
is being filled and souls are perishing day and night? How can we be at ease
while God is blasphemed, while Christ is unknown in a great part of the world,
and where He is known, He is not loved?”—Volume 52, Sermon #3019

“What is there for a Christian to fear in death? It is not dying—it is
living—about which we ought to be anxious, if anxious at all! But you say, ‘It
is the thought of the pains of death that trouble me.’ But pains belong to life,
so do not lay them upon poor death’s back! Death is the physician that eases
pain! He does but lay his skeleton hand upon the patient and, straightway, the
fever has departed and the sufferer is where the inhabitant shall no more say,
‘I am sick.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2998

“The salvation which Jesus gives is salvation from unbelief, salvation from a
seared conscience, salvation from pride, from lust, from malice, from envy, from
evil of every kind!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985 “Come close to your Lord, Beloved!
I delight to come very near to Him. To touch the hem of His garment is enough
for sinners, but it is not enough for saints. We need to sit at His feet with
Mary and to lay our heads upon His bosom as John did.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2935
“You cannot count God’s thoughts of you. If He were only to think of us once, in
tender mercy, that one thought would run on throughout eternity, for He does not
retract either a thought that He thinks or a word that He utters!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3040

“While it is a very simple thing for the spiritually poor to commit themselves
to Christ, let me also say that it is an act which greatly glorifies God. Christ
is honored when any soul trusts in Him—it is a joy to His heart to be trusted.
When the feeble cling to Him, He feels such joy as mothers feel when their
little ones cling to them. Christ is glad when poor sin-sick souls come and
trust Him. It was for this very purpose that He came into the world—to meet the
needs of guilty sinners.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059

“Occasionally, I hear or read remarks about the great excitement caused by our
Brothers, Moody and Sankey in their evangelistic services, but I must confess
that I have failed to see the excitement, although I have been to several of
their meetings. We Londoners do not know anything about real religious
excitement—we have not begun to be excited yet, though I pray God that we soon
may. I would like to see such a stir all over the metropolis, that the press
would rave and rage about our fanaticism—and I shall not believe that God has
done very much among us until we are accused of something like that!”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2944 “I know some people who earn their living in employments which are
very hazardous to their immortal souls. They are in the midst of evil, yet they
tell me that God can keep them in safety there. I know that He can, but I also
know that we have no right to go, voluntarily, where we are surrounded by
temptation!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2997

“We are not saved by faith itself as a meritorious work. There is no merit in
believing in God and even if there were, it could not save us, since salvation
by merit has been once and for all solemnly excluded.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2898

“Christ has vanquished death by dying! He has disrobed the grave of its
triumphal garments by wearing its cerements Himself! He consecrated the
sepulcher by slumbering in its dark recess! Death is now no more the destroying
angel, the tomb no more a morgue!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929

“The best preparation that you young people can have for the highest honor and
service in your future life is to bathe frequently in the Word of God and to
perfume your whole life by a familiar and accurate acquaintance with Scripture
Truths. Nothing else can make you so pure, or so prepared for all service which
God may yet have for you to perform.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3019

“It is a bad sign concerning any man’s ministry when the children do not
understand him! I always look upon it as being one of the highest compliments I
ever receive when I see some little boy’s or girl’s bright eyes, that are all
too apt to wander here and there, fixed upon me, while they seem to be drinking
in what I have to say. There is a great lack in the preachers of the present
day, in this respect, and we need to have the Master’s words to Peter, ‘Feed My
lambs,’ as well as the command, ‘Feed My sheep,’ more and more impressed upon
our hearts. May you, Beloved, find a place of prayer for your children where it
shall be their delight to go with you and to join intelligently in the worship
of God.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“If I had anything of which I could say, ‘God has not given me this,’ I hope, by
Divine Grace, I would turn it out of doors. Food, raiment, health, breath,
strength—everything, comes from Him and we are constantly dependent upon
Him!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3060

“While Christ was here on earth, He was the great Light-Giver—and He is still
the great Light-Giver! And now that His visible Presence has been withdrawn from
the world, His people are to be ‘the light of the world’ by reflecting the light
they have received from Him! In such works as you will be unable to perform
after death, you are now to give light to the sons of men.”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3032

“…this is all we ask of you—we only ask you, if you wish to join the church, to
be able to confess that you are a changed character, that you are a new man,
that you are willing to be obedient to Christ and to His ordinances. And then we
are only too glad to receive you into our midst. Come out, come out, I pray you,
you, that are hiding among the trees of the forest, come forth! Whoever is on
the Lord’s side, let him come forth! It is a day of blasphemy and rebuke. He
that is not with Christ is against Him, and he that gathers not with Him
scatters abroad.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2955

“Those who have stood foot to foot with Apollyon and fought with him, and
overcome him in the hour of temptation, will never doubt that there is a great
fallen spirit who strives to lead men into sin! Satan and his myriads of
followers still lie in wait for the ungodly, or openly drive them into fierce
lusts and evil passions so that they sin again and again.”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2886

“Do you know, in your own soul, that God has ever heard your prayers? Then bless
Him and love Him all your days.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2879 “The objective of
parents, preachers and teachers should be that children should be saved while
they are children!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“You need to know whether you shall move to such-and-such a town. Well, is there
a good Evangelical minister there? Can you hear the Word to profit in that town?
If not, unless there are some very strong reasons why you should go there, you
ought to remain where your soul can be best profited. A man would often be
better off with less earnings where he could hear a faithful minister than with
more money in a place where the Gospel is not preached. Ask the question, too,
‘Can I serve God there?’ If you cannot, what right have you to go there?”—Volume
52, Sermon #2996

“It happens to many and many a heart that after it has obtained the blessing of
salvation and has been healed of the disease of sin, a time of fear occurs.
After it has made its confession of faith, a season of trembling follows
occurring, perhaps, as a reaction from the joy of salvation, a rebound of the
spirit from excessive delight.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“God is a Sovereign and may therefore save whom He wills. And He may also save
them howHe wills. Yet when He is about to save a man, He does not depart from
His usual method of working, but saves him according to the way in which He is
accustomed to save.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3061 “Returning to God includes turning
from sin. Do you think that the prodigal, when he came back to his father,
brought his dice in one hand and some other implement of sin in the other? He
may come foul with the filth of the wine. He may come wretched through hunger
and famine. But he must leave his riotous living, his wine-cup, his debauchery
in the far country—these cannot be tolerated in his father’s house!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2985

“O beloved Brothers and Sisters who are bought with the blood of Christ, we
cannot, any of us, say this about our own lives! Yet we ought to be able to say
it and we ought now to pray God’s blessed Spirit to enable us to concentrate all
our thoughts, powers and energies upon this one objective—that we might, in all
things, glorify God!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“The praise of gratitude for the past is sweet, but that praise is sweeter which
adores God for the future in full confidence that it shall be well. Therefore,
take down your harps from the willows, O you people, and praise you the name of
the Lord, though the fig tree still does not blossom and the cattle still die in
the stall and the sheep still perish from the folds—though there should be to
you no income to meet your needs and you should be brought almost to necessity’s
door—still bless the Lord whose mighty Providence cannot fail and shall not fail
as long as there is one of His children to be provided for!”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2923

“I have heard of an idiot who was, one day scouring a brass plate to get the
name out, but, the more he scoured, the more clearly it shone! And when the
devil tries to erase the impressions made upon my mind and heart by my mother’s
tears and my father’s prayers, he is as much like an idiot as he possibly could
be, for, let him scour as he may, those impressions will never be removed, but
will continue to shine yet more brightly.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“In conclusion, I pray every spiritually poor heart to commit itself to God. I
like to do this every morning. Satan often comes and says, ‘You are no
Christian! All your supposed Christian experience is false.’ Very well, suppose
it has been false? Then I will start afresh—saint or no saint! I will begin over
again by trusting Christ to be my Savior. When you, dear Friend, wake tomorrow
morning, let this be the first thing that you do—commit yourself to Jesus Christ
for the whole of the day. Say, ‘My Lord, here is my heart which I commit to You.
While I am away from home, may my heart be full of fragrance of Your blessed
Presence. And when I return at night, may I still find my heart in Your kind
keeping!’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3059

“The Last Great Day will call me to account for every word I utter in delivering
my Master’s message—and it will also call each one of you to account for the
reception or rejection of that message! You young men and young women, and you
graybeards will have to answer in that day for the way you deal with the message
now!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2899

“I fear that some Christians need quickening for God’s service because they have
so much to do for themselves. The shop shutters are down so long that there is
little time for anything but business, and the ledger is such a big book that it
quite hides the Bible!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2944

“Blessed be God, where Jesus rules, even the thought of death is not a cloud! If
you are not under the rule of Jesus Christ, you will have many clouds, but if
you are under His rule, if you have faith in Him, and live upon Him, and are a
subject of His Kingdom, you will find that He is to you as ‘a morning without
clouds.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2998

“If we have believed in Jesus, we need not weep, even though the dread archer
may have lodged the fatal shaft quite near our heart. What is there to weep
about? When a Christian has received an intimation that he is soon to be with
his Savior in Glory, we may congratulate him that he is the sooner to be out of
the strife and the sin—and to wear the crown of victory and glory forever! So we
will not weep about that.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2956

“I have known certain timid ones who have wished to unite with the Church on the
sly and to make no open confession either by word of mouth or by Baptism. I have
refused to be a party to the breeding of cowards, and they have lived to thank
me for what seemed a harsh demand.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“I advise you to study Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—and to preach the crucified
Savior of which the Gospels and Epistles will tell you! And when you get to the
Revelation, keep it in its proper place and ask the Holy Spirit to teach you the
meaning of its mysteries. May God save this generation from the follies of some
of the generations that have preceded it—and may we be most of all concerned
about being born-again, about faith in Jesus, about preaching His Gospel and
following Him all the days of our life!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“It is not a transient faith. It is not saying, ‘I was converted so many years
ago.’ But it is a livingfaith, an abiding faith, a constant vital union with
Christ that marks the true heir of Heaven.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2935 “How many
hundreds of times have I said from the pulpit that if you cannot come to Christ
with a broken heart, come to Himfora broken heart! If you cannot come as you
should, come anyway that you can, in order that you may be taught to come as you
ought! It is quite true that your condition is bad, but then Christ ‘came not to
call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985

“That man is like Christ who lives, not for himself, but for others. It has been
all too truly said that there are some people whose first care is for
themselves, and whose second care is for themselves, and whose third care is for
themselves, and whose fourth care is for themselves, and so on as many times as
you like to repeat it.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“We must mind, when we are preaching experience, that we do not so put the
experience of the strong as to make it the standard for the weak. That is almost
as wrong as to make the experience of the weak to be the standard of the strong,
as some have done. The fact is, there is no experience that is a real standard
of the Christian life except the experience of a change of heart and of simple
faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2878

“It matters not who you may be—unless you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ you
cannot have eternal life. Do not suppose, dear Hearers, that there is some
secret decree of God that will override this—there is no such decree! The Truth
of God with which you have to do is this, “He that believes and is baptized
shall be saved; but he that believes not shall be damned.” If you do not believe
in Jesus, there is no hope for you!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3061

“Oh, it is hard work to deal with sinners! It needs a sharper tool than man can
keep in his toolbox. Only God Himself can break hearts—and when they are
broken—only the same hand that broke them can bind them up.”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3044 “If you think of the condescension of the Holy Spirit in taking of the
things of Christ and showing them to us, you will not talk any more about coming
down to the level of children when you talk to them.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2907

“The teachings of Christ and of His Apostles concerning sinners being saved
through faith in Him are blessedly clear. The Gospels and Epistles tell us that
a perfectly holy and Divine Substitute for sinners was required—and that Jesus
was that Substitute and stood in the place of all His chosen people—and bore the
punishment which was due for all their sins.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3053

“‘Without Me, you can do nothing,’ said Christ to His disciples—and the fruit of
the Christian is practically Christ, for if the Christian brings forth the fruit
of holiness, it is the glory of Christ reflected in him! If he is bright with
hope, it is Christ within him who is the hope of Glory. If there are any graces
in us, they are the virtues which Christ has given to us! Our green grass is
Christ, Himself, appearing in us. Our verdure, our beauty, our fruit, our
everythingis Christ manifest in us!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2998

“If you, dear Friend, have just come out from the world and have newly said, ‘I
am on the Lord’s side,’ do not be surprised if what you have just done should,
upon calm consideration, look almost like presumption. A sense of fear is
natural when you see to what a service your dedication vows have bound you. At
such a time, Jesus will give you the comfort of the text, ‘Be of good cheer;
your faith has made you whole.’ (Luke 8:48)”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“Do you ask, ‘What shall I do to be saved?’ ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and you shall be saved.’ That was Paul’s answer to the question and I cannot
give you a better one. Believing does not take a week, or even a minute. Your
heart rests and relies on Christ and Christ saves your heart. See me leaning
here, with all my weight, upon this platform rail? Lean so upon Christ, with all
your weight! Have done with everything but Jesus—and when you have believed on
Him, then obey Him by being baptized in His name, for He put belief and Baptism
together when He said, ‘He that believes and is baptized shall be
saved.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2899

“Let us not only submit to the will of the Lord, but let us ask Him to grant us
Grace to acquiesce in it, for in quietness and in confidence shall be our
strength.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985 “It is the work of His Spirit to change you.
You are not to work a miracle and then come to show the miracle to Christ, but
you are to come to Chris to have the miracle worked.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3044

“I charge all of you, men and women, in these evil days to keep close to Jesus!
Follow Him with the utmost care, reverence and love. Follow Him with intense
ardor and with all your heart, soul and strength—and make that the one thing for
which you live! Do not let anything divert you from the straight path of
obedience to your Lord, for to that you are called above everything else! If men
come to you talking about mental culture and modern thought, stand firm to this,
that you will follow Christ wherever He leads you!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“Brothers and Sisters, I repeat it, that Christ did not institute a memorial of
His life because He would have yoube the living memorials of Himself. He has not
left us any ordinance in which His acts, His words, His thoughts can be set
forth before the eyes of men in visible signs—He has done better than that for
He has made you to be His signs and ordinances! “You are My witnesses,” says the
Lord.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2872

“When your heart is brought to rest upon what Christ has done. When, laying
aside all confidence in your own works, knowledge, prayers, doing, or believing,
you come to rest upon what Christ has done in its simplicity—then is Jesus
Christ exalted in your heart and it must have been the work of the Spirit of
Divine Grace.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3062

“Do not imagine that restoration to communion with Christ need occupy a longer
time than conversion—and remember, conversion is often worked
instantaneously!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2956

“Behold, as Samson carried the gates of Gaza to the top of Hebron—doors, posts,
bars and all—so has Christ carried the gates of Death to the top of Heaven’s
hill—posts, bars and all—and all the legions of Hell cannot bring back the
trophies which our Samson has torn away!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929

“There was a young man who was impressed with the idea that he ought to preach
for me one Lord’s-Day. But as I was not impressed to let him do so, he lost out
and probably will continue to lose out for some little time! He had no gifts of
speech, but he thought his impression was quite sufficient. When I receive a
similar impression, the Revelation will be a proper one and you will have the
pleasure of listening to his voice, but certainly not before that!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2996

“After a seeker has found the Lord and has experienced salvation, he is
sometimes tempted to question whether he is really a Believer in Jesus. He
reasons within himself thus—‘My faith is so mixed with unbelief that I am
ashamed of it. Why did I come to Jesus in such a way as I did? It was well to
come, but oh that I had come in a more childlike spirit and that I had done Him
the justice to have a greater confidence in Him!’ Do you, dear Friend, know this
experience? If so, to you and to all others who are thus exercised, the comfort
of our text is addressed! (Luke 8:48).”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“It is the eternal purpose of God that we shall be saved through faith in Jesus
Christ and if there is no faith in Jesus Christ, that is a proof that there is
no Divine Purpose to heal that soul! But where there is the Divine Purpose to
heal, it is evidenced, sooner or later, by a submissive yielding to the ordained
way of salvation and simple trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3061

“The things that concern your soul’s salvation are plain enough for a child to
comprehend! If you are lost, it will not be a mystery that damns you—and if you
are ever to be saved, it is the simplicity of the Gospel that will save you! The
Truths of God that relate to your ruin through sin—and the only remedy for that
ruin—through the Grace of God, are ‘as plain as a pikestaff,’ as our common
proverb puts it.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3053

“Was that prophetic when the woman broke the alabaster box and filled the house
with the perfume? Was that prophetic of what every repentant sinner does when
his broken heart fills Heaven and earth with the sweet perfume of joy because he
is saved? And when she washed the Savior’s feet and wiped them with the hair of
her head, was that also prophetic? Did that show how Jesus gets His greatest
honor, His purest love, His fairest worship and His sweetest solace from sinners
saved by blood?”—Volume 53, Sermon #3044

“It is not poetical work to be a Royal Humane Society’s officer, seeking to pull
drowning people out of the river—and there is not much poetry about our work in
trying to be the means of saving your souls!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2944

“Paul says, “He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all,
how shall He not, with Him, also freely give us all things?” What? Will He deny
you bread for your body after He has given you Christ, the Bread of Heaven, for
your soul? Will He deny you clothes for your body after He has clothed your soul
with the robe of Christ’s perfect righteousness? Will He deny you a sufficient
store of earthly goods that you may get through this world when He has already
given you a mansion in the skies and a crown of life that fades not away? If we
should forget our cares anywhere—surely we should do so at the Communion
Table!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2973

“Beloved, you that have been healed, do you not ascribe your healing to the
secret mysterious power of the Holy Spirit? You know you give Him the glory.
Hence when you wish to bring men to Christ, always honor the Holy Spirit. Do not
forget to adore Him, to lean entirely upon Him for all the power with which the
healing of a soul is to be accomplished. There is no faith in the world that
will save except the faith which is of the operation of the Spirit of God! There
is no true glance of the eye toward Christ on the Cross but such as the Spirit
of God has given!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921

“There is much talk about an operation, wisely performed by an eminent surgeon
upon the poor body which must soon become food for worms. Yet little or nothing
is said about the soul which is so vastly more precious. The soul of an emperor
or the soul of a beggar is of the same value in God’s sight. ‘Where does it take
its flight when its earthly cage is broken?’ Is that a question which is never
asked by some of you? If so, what arrant fools you must be! O blessed Spirit of
God, teach us the solemnity of the Gospel which concerns the soul which must
live forever in raptures or in woe!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3053

“I would, young people, that you would so value the Christian experience of
others that you would trust Christ for yourselves! He has been a good Master to
me. I have served Him now for 25 years and, blessed be His name, He has never
once done me or mine an ill turn! His work is good, His wages are good and He,
Himself, is best of all! Oh, that you all would trust, and love, and serve Him!
[1875.]”—Volume 52, Sermon #2998

“After we are saved, we may do something in the way of almsgiving and other
things to show our gratitude to God, but they are worse than useless if we begin
to boast of them as a reason for our salvation.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3061 “If
there is anything about the Lord’s will that you do not like, my dear Brothers
and Sisters, that is a point in which you are wrong!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2906

“Quiet majesty is the characteristic of the man of faith, just as unquiet
weakness is the characteristic of the unbeliever. May God make you strong,
Brothers and Sisters in Christ, by taking from you the fret and the worry in
which you have too long indulged—and by giving to you the quietness and
confidence which shall be your strength for the future!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985

“The results of good or evil deeds will abide forever and ever, so let us beware
what we do since it can never be undone.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045 “We talk of
“Providences” when we have hairbreadth escapes—but are they not quite as much
Providences when we are preserved from danger?”—Volume 53, Sermon #3022

“You must not expect at this time to have Grace to die with, when, perhaps, God
intends you to live another 50 years. What would you do with such Grace? Where
would you put it? You shall have it when you come to die. Only trust in Christ,
today, and do His bidding—when the dying time shall come—the Dying Grace shall
be afforded you.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2917

“Where faith is genuine, through the Holy Spirit’s power, it works a cleansing
from sin, a hatred of evil, an anxious desire after holiness and it leads the
soul to aspire after the image of God. Faith and holiness are
inseparable.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2999 “It was God who took Jacob into Egypt and,
therefore, though it took 400 years to bring Israel out of Egypt, God brought
them out at last. He kills and He makes alive. He wounds and He heals. Rest in
this Truth of God as a matter of absolute certainty!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3061
“Take care, Christian workers, that in this day of activity, when there is so
much to do, you do not neglect the personal act of faith which unites your soul
to Christ. See to this vital and all-important matter.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2898

“The very best of men have had to smart under the wounds caused by that cruel,
accursed thing, slander! No quality of purity, no degree of piety can screen a
man from the tongue of slander. In fact, as the birds peck most at the ripest
fruit, it is often the best of men who are most slandered.”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3059

“There was a boy once, a very sinful child, who hearkened not to the counsel of
his parents. But his mother prayed for him and now he stands to preach to this
congregation every Sabbath. And when his mother thinks of her first-born
preaching the Gospel, she reaps a glorious harvest that makes her a glad
woman!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2896

“If you have many infirmities which make you weak, there is a way of glorying in
infirmities because the power of Christ rests upon you! Suppose that you are not
only weak, but that you are weakness itself—that you are nothing and nobody?
When you have reached that point, the cause of your weeping will have vanished
because, where you end, there God begins!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2956

“The Lord will chasten those whom He loves and His children shall suffer—you can
be sure of that. It is as sure as any other thing in the world,‘You shallhave
tribulation.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2974 “There is no poverty in the world so dire
as the poverty of those who have been rich—and there are none who can know the
value of the Savior, in His absence, but those who have enjoyed His preciousness
by dwelling in His Presence.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2945

“Trust in God, Beloved, for faith in Him will keep your vision clear and your
judgment sound. Trust in God and then, in the day of stern conflict, there shall
be no man’s arms that shall be as strong as yours. ‘In quietness and in
confidence shall be your strength.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985 “Every good thought
you have ever had, every right word you have ever spoken, every holy action you
have ever done has been a mercy from God to you! He gave these blessings to you,
or else you would never have had them—and I challenge you to try to count this
great budget of mercies!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3022

“Good works are to be insisted on, for they have their necessary uses. James
never contradicts Paul—it is because we do not understand him that we fancy he
does so. Both the doctrinal Paul and the practical James spoke as they were
moved by the Holy Spirit. Paul builds the tower and James puts the railing
around it—Paul conducts us to the summit of God’s House and bids us rejoice in
what we see there. And then James points us to the railing that is built up to
keep us from overleaping the truth to our own destruction.”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2999

“I believe that God will yet bring back into the fold every one of His own sheep
and they shall all be saved. It is something to feel our wanderings, for if we
feel ourselves to be lost, we shall certainly be saved! If we feel ourselves to
have wandered, we shall certainly be brought back.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3060

“When I hear a Christian man finding fault with his minister, I always wish that
the devil had found somebody else to do his dirty work.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2936

“Flatter not yourself, Sinner, with the false and foolish notion that your sin
is forgotten. You may possibly forget it, but God never forgets. You may keep no
record of your transgressions, but God’s recording angel does not fail to write
in His Book of Remembrance, and to engrave them as‘with an iron pen and lead in
the rock forever,’ as Job said concerning the preservation of his own
words.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3043

“A promise in the Bible is often a promise to a deaf ear—but the promise,
applied by the Spirit of God, goes right through the outer organ and penetrates
to the ear of the soul! I am sure, dear Friends, that you can never be backward
in prayer when God opens your ear, and puts a promise into it.1904, Sermon #2869

“No man ever knows the Spirit of God so as consciously to be aware that the
Spirit is at work with him until he knows Jesus Christ. As no man comes to the
Father but through the Son, so no man comes to realize and to be aware of the
work of the Spirit on his soul till he knows Jesus Christ.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2921

“Above all, let me admonish you young people not to be ‘unequally yoked
together.’ Marriage without the fear of God is a fearful mistake. Those
ill-assorted unions between Believers and unbelievers rob our churches of more
members than any other popular delinquency that I know of! Seldom—I might almost
say never—do I meet with a woman professing godliness who becomes joined in
wedlock to a man of the world but what she goes away. She ceases to follow Jesus
and we hear no more of her.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2914

“Whenever any of you have anything to do which you know is right, do it! After
you have enquired of God, do not stop to consult friends, but go and do it! Take
your sling and your stone and, in God’s name, sling the stone into the giant’s
forehead and, like David, come back victorious, for that shall be your last
answer to those who would persuade you not to do it!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2996

“Sin is an everlasting thing—unless it is put away by God, Himself, for the Lord
Jesus Christ’s sake—no grave in the world can hide it.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3043
“I think it is well, dear Friends, to remember the Lord’s past goodness, but we
must not live on that— we must go and get fresh supplies from Heaven.”—Volume
52, Sermon #2974

“God has all sorts of stones in His Temple and some of them are of such a
strange shape that I am glad the placing of them is not left to me, for I could
not do it! I am thankful that God never sent me into the world to make people
perfect, but to use them as I find them. And I believe that He also uses them as
He finds them and gradually prepares them for higher uses and for the place
which He means them to occupy in His Temple above. So do not say, ‘I am
wondering what this man will do and what that man will do, and what others
around me will do’—but do what you can for Christ and, as for others—leave them
to the Master.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“It is very sweet when the Holy Spirit shows us theloveof Christ—how intensely
He loves men! How He loved them of old, for His delights were with the sons of
men—not because He had redeemed them, but He redeemed them because He loved them
and delighted in them!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2907

“Apart from the Atoning Sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ, there is not one
sinner living in the whole world who could stand before God! It is not justice,
but boundless compassion and infinite pity which put a measure to man’s iniquity
and allows him to live on until he has reached that point, for sin is worthy of
death in every case, and in any degree—so says the Word of the Lord.”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3043 “The work of God in the soul is a lasting and an everlasting work!
If you are once healed by Christ, He has worked in you an effectual cure which
will hold good throughout time and throughout eternity!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“We can never understand how Father, Son and Holy Spirit can be Three and yet
One. For my part, I have long ago given up any desire to understand this great
mystery, for I am perfectly satisfied that if I couldunderstand it, it would not
be true, because God, from the very nature of things, must be
incomprehensible!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2958

“I wish that we all had more of that spirit—calm, quiet, self-possessed or,
rather, God-possessed. I believe that is the best spirit for preachers to have.
We can do most by way of moving others when we ourselves are firmly fixed upon a
solid base. You need not fluster yourself, young man, in the way that you often
do. You will not save souls by stamping your foot, thumping your Bible and
shouting at the top of your voice. From the very bottom of your heart, in an
earnest Spirit, tell your hearers something that is worth their hearing and pray
God to put His blessing upon it!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985

“People talk about free-will Christians and tell us of persons being saved and
coming to God of their own free will. It is a very curious thing, but though I
have heard a great nanny free-will sermons, I never heard any free-will prayers.
I have heard Arminianism in preaching and talking, but I have never heard any
Arminian praying.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3060

“God never honors His servants with success without effectually preventing their
grasping the honor of their work. If we are tempted to boast, He soon lays us
low. He always whips behind the door at home those whom He most honors in
public.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2999

“Turn not back from labor or from scorn—‘in the sweat of your face you shall eat
bread’ on earth, but that bread which you eat in Heaven, so gloriously won by
the Grace of God, shall be all the sweeter for the sweat that was lavished upon
it! ‘Always abounding in the work of the Lord.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929

“I feel that sometimes when we are preaching, we seem to look after the scum and
the riffraff and we forget many others. I would not forget one of you, my dear
Hearers, who hear me Sabbath after Sabbath. God is my witness, if I thought I
had missed any one of you I would be too glad to preach a sermon for that one
person only, if I might but win his soul. What did I say? Preach a sermon? I
would preach 50 sermons! I would preach my whole life to win one of you and
think myself well paid with such a blessed reward for such easy toil. But
whether you are great sinners or little sinners outwardly, remember you are all
vile in the inner nature—and the same Grace is presented to you all. ‘Whoever
will, let him take of the waster of life freely.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2924

“If you want to be damned out of hand, become a persecutor of the saints, for
that is the quickest way to Hell! When holy Wishart was chained to the stake, he
pointed to the cardinal who was gloating over the spectacle and told him that
God’s wrath would shortly fall upon him—and so it came to pass, for God avenges
His own elect—and sometimes does it very speedily.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3043

“It is annoying to hear persons talk flippantly of their sins before conversion
as though they were proud of them. They seem to glory in them as a Greenwich
pensioner might boast of his battles and his broken bones. Such things are to be
mentioned with blushes and tears. Say as little as you can about those things of
which you are now ashamed, and let what you say be spoken in lowliest penitence
. Still, there are times when you are bound to tell out your case to the praise
of the Glory of the Grace which so abounded where your sin abounded! And then
you need not be afraid to tell your story, for Grace has made it end so well.
Let the world know that though foully defiled, you came into contact with the
Savior by simply, humbly believing in Him-and that by this simple means you are
saved.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020

“I have heard of a minister who, wishing to bring the Truth of God home to the
hearts and consciences of his people, said that he should like to pass a Reform
Act—that everybody should reform one person and then all would be reformed. He
meant that they should all reform themselvesbut one man said, ‘The minister is
quite right! Everybody is to reform one and I am going home to reform our
Mary.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“Whatever God keeps away from His servants, I do not think He ever keeps away
the rod from them! He had one Son without sin, but He never had one son without
chastisement. If there are many of God’s children who have not yet had any
trials, I would not recommend them to pray for it—that would be very wrong. The
Lord’s children need not ask to be whipped, but I would advise them to reckon
that somewhere between here and Heaven, they will have to realize the truth of
that saying of the Apostle, ‘If you endure chastening, God deals with you as
with sons; for what son is he whom the father chastens not?’”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2945

“Christ, too, is exalted by the Spirit in His prophetic as well as in His
priestly office. Shall I call any man master so as to take him for my teacher?
All teaching which lifts up Wesley, or Calvin, or any man, living or dead, in
the place of the authorized Teacher and which says that their teachings are to
be taken as though they were the Infallible Revelations of Christ is not of the
Spirit, of God! But that teaching which says , ‘One is your Master, even
Christ., and all you are brethren ,’ and which tells us of the holy equality of
all saints and that the true Teacher and the only Teacher who can speak with
authority is Jesus Christ, the Son of God—such teaching you may accept as coming
from God the Holy Spirit.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3062

“When I hear my Master say, ‘One of you shall betray Me,’ I may have a shrewd
suspicion that He refers to Judas, but it will be wiser for me to say, ‘Lord, is
it I?’ rather than to ask, ‘Lord, is it Judas?’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2936

“Scarcely ever is there a profound calm on the soul’s sea, but a storm is
brewing! The sweet day so calm, so bright, shall have its fall and the dew of
the succeeding night shall weep over its departure. The high hill must have its
following valley and the flood-tide must retreat at ebb. Lest the soul should be
beguiled to live upon itself and feed on its frames and feelings—and by neglect
of watchfulness fall into presumptuous sins—railings are set around all hallowed
joys, for which in eternity we shall bless the name of the Lord.”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2999

“Some of us are often obliged to bring forth arguments in favor of what we
believe to be the Truth of God—and there is one thing at which I always aim when
I take part in a discussion—and that is to never let my opponent cause me to
lose my temper. I know that in proportion as I get excited and angry, I am
losing strength. I must seek to overcome my adversary by the power of the Truth
of God, but, let him say what he will, I must not let him make me feel annoyed.
For if he does, then to that extent he has conquered me.”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2985

“Our Lord Jesus Christ did not come into the world to tell us how sin was
brought here, but He came to show us the only way in which sin can be got out of
the world—and that is by the door which He opened in His own side. It is by His
death that sin is to be expelled from the earth!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“Conflicts bring experience and experience brings that growth in Grace which is
not to be attained by any other means!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2974 “To be one of
the Lord’s saved ones is joy enough to bear up the heart under every
affliction!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3020 “Man, you must die in your sins if you
continue to live in them! You cannot escape from the consequence of sin if you
keep following in the pursuit of sin. Work and you shall have your wages—and
‘the wages of sin is death.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3043

“And then, O you saints, I must not forget to dwell upon the thought that you
must love God the HolySpirit!Never let us forget Him, or speak of Him, as some
do, as, ‘it,’ for the Holy Spirit is not, ‘it,’ or talk of Him as though He were
a mere influence, for the Holy Spirit is Divine and is to be reverenced and
loved equally with the Father and the Son! It was that blessed Spirit who
quickened us when we were dead in trespasses and sins! It was He who illuminated
us and removed our darkness and, since that time, it has been He who has taken
of the things of Christ and revealed them to us.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2958

“I believe that before the foundation of the world, God chose in Christ all
those whom He will eternally save. And I equally believe that whoever believes
in the Lord Jesus Christ shall be eternally saved, that salvation is all of
Grace and damnation is all of man’s sin—that God will have the glory of every
soul that is saved, and that every lost soul will be responsible for its own
ruin.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3057

“Little as you may think I know of the joys of the world, yet so far as I can
form a judgment, I can say that I would not take all the joys that earth can
ever afford in a hundred years for one half-hour of what my soul has known in
fellowship with Christ! We who believe in Him have our sorrows, but, blessed be
God, we have our joys and they are such joys—oh, such joys with such substance
in them and such reality and certainty—that we could not and would not exchange
them for anything except Heaven in its fruition!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902

“Until you have humbled yourself before God and sought and found mercy, God is
at war with you and you are at war with Him. There can be no peace where there
is no purity. God has no peace with sin, and never can have.”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2886

“I may not dictate to you whether you should sing, or read, or pray—or whether
you should do this every morning or evening, or how many times a day. I shall
leave this to the free Spirit that is in you, but do maintain family prayer and
never let the fire on the altar of God burn low in your habitation.”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2999

“Only holy Christians are useful Christians—and the preaching of Christ’s Truth
must be backed up by the consistent living of Christ’s followers if it is to
have its due effect upon the hearts and lives of the ungodly.”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3045 “If we were once to have a church fully awakened and zealous for Christ
and His Truth, we should soon have the persecuting times back again.”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2884

“‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.’ Our
forefathers used to read this verse, ‘There is therefore now no damnation.’ One
of the martyrs, being brought before a Popish bishop, heard the bishop say to
him, ‘Dying in your heresy, you will be damned.’ ‘That I never shall be,’
answered the good man, ‘for there is therefore now no damnation to them which
are in Christ Jesus.’ He had sought the very spirit of the text, for there is
nothing that can condemn the man who is in Christ Jesus!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2974

“The mercies of God are uncountable—the ingratitude of man is unaccountable! We,
Christian men and women, cannot tell how it is that we can be so stolidly
indifferent when we ought to be so devoutly thankful to God for all His goodness
to us.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3022

“Any man who says that he has had more revealed to him, than is in the Holy
Scriptures, incurs the curse of the last chapter of Revelation! He must take
care lest, since he adds to the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, ‘God shall add
unto him the plagues that are written in this Book.’ ‘It is finished,’ must be
said concerning this Book as we close it. Not a single verse or revelation shall
henceforth come of the Spirit. Until Christ comes, this Book is sealed, so far
as any addition to it is concerned!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3062

“Joseph ruled Egypt for the good of Israel and, in like manner does Christ rule
the whole world for the good of His people. All the arrangements of Providence
are under His control. Nothing is done in the entire universe without His
command or His permission. Does that statement startle you? It is, nevertheless,
true!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2876

“In due season we shall die unless our Lord shall first return. The appointed
hour for each of us is drawing near—what shall we do then? Why, then, Beloved,
trusting in Jesus, quietness and confidence will still be our strength! We shall
not send our friends running to fetch a ‘priest’ to perform some mysterious
ceremony over us. Christ is all we need and as we have Him, we can die any day
with perfect serenity!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2985

“If our Gospel were hard, it would be easy, but because it is easy it is hard!
It needs a strong hand to bring us down to this and I am praying while I am
preaching to you that the Lord Jesus Christ would now send forth the
ever-blessed Spirit—His own Word of Power—to bring you to Himself. Look and
live!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2921

“‘Be you holy,’ for so shall you serve God and serve the Church of Christ and,
in the highest sense, serve your generation and serve the world!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3045

“Many come here, Sabbath after Sabbath, to hear the Gospel. The immense number
and the constancy of it surprise me. I do not know why the multitudes come and
crowd these aisles. When I preached yesterday in Worcestershire and saw the
thronging crowds in every road, I could not help wondering to see them—and the
more so because they listened as though I had some novel discovery to make—they
listened with all their ears, eyes and mouths! I could but marvel and thank God.
Ah, but it is a dreadful thing to remember that so many people hear the Gospel
and yet perish under the sound of it! Alas, the Gospel becomes to them a savor
of death unto death—and there is no lot so terrible as perishing under a pulpit
from which the Gospel is preached!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2999

“Oh, how you will glorify Christ if you have faith enough to take in this Divine
mystery! Stagger not at electing love—it is one of the highest notes of heavenly
music! Be not afraid of such a verse as this—‘I have loved you with an
everlasting love; therefore with loving kindness have I drawn you.’ Here is
marrow and fatness such as saints fed upon in days long since gone!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3062

“I wonder whether there are any here who once declared and probably believed
that he was a Christian, but who has now given up even the name of Christian? If
so, my Friend, one of two things is true concerning you—either you never were
converted at all, and so have been a mere professor, or else, if you ever were
truly converted, you will have to come back.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2975

“If you should experience a double trouble and if neither sun nor moon should
give you cheer, yet you need not suspend, but may rather deepen your fellowship
with the Man of Sorrows!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3046

“I have heard many strange things in the course of my life, but I have never
heard one of the Lord’s servants, when he came to die, regret that he had taken
Him for a Master. Nor have I ever heard one of them rail at Him because of even
the heaviest blows of His hand, but, like Job, they have said, ‘The Lord gave,
and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ Yes, as much
blessed when He takes away as when He gives!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2958

“We are very bad judges of our own spiritual experiences. We often undervalue
who God esteems and set great store by that which God does not prize. So it may
be that Christ is really with you, dear Friend, although you are writing such
bitter things against yourself and mourning His absence.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2945

“The mischief is, dear Friends, that we often stop somewhere short of God when
we are seeking salvation. A Romanist, for instance, erects a crucifix and bows
down before it. The original intention of the crucifix, no doubt, was to help
the person who used it to remember the death of Christ…But why do I talk about
this to you Protestants? Why, because many of you do just the same in other
respects! You say, ‘Now, if I am to be converted, I ought to read the Bible.’
Yes, that is quite right. Read the Bible, but, if you stop at the Bible, you
will no more get to God than if you stop at the crucifix!”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2867

“Growing Christians think nothing of themselves, but full-grown Christians know
themselves to be less than nothing.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3063

“…I know, my God, that when I shall have received my last mercy on earth, I
shall receive my first enjoyment in Heaven! When I shall have had the last
blessing of this mortal life, I shall have the first blessing of the life
everlasting! When the goodness and the mercy that have followed me to the brink
of Jordan shall cease, I shall have angels there to escort me up to the
celestial hills, and to admit me to my Savior’s Presence where there are
pleasures forevermore!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3022

“Brothers and Sisters, if we had more sense of our need, prayer would be more of
an instinct with us—we would pray because we could not help praying!”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2879

“The difficulty which many feel is this— perhaps they are not elect—and if they
are not, then, even though they come to Jesus, He must cast them out. Now, that
is supposing what never did occur, because no non-elect soul ever came to Jesus!
But I need not go into that matter, for my text suffices without any
explanation. Read the first part of the verse—‘All that the Father gives Me
shall come to Me’ [John 6:36].”—Volume 52, Sermon #3000

“Many are the hills and dales between this Jericho and the city of the Great
King! Let who will, be without trials, Christians will have their full share of
them! But there shall come no difficulty of any kind, between here and Paradise,
which shall necessitate the soul’s going anywhere but to her gracious Lord for
guidance, for consolation, for strength, or for anything besides! Little know we
of the walls to be leaped or the troops to be overcome—but we know full well
that we never need part from the Captain of our salvation, or call in other
helpers.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3046

“Whenever we want to have converts—and I hope that is always—the best thing for
us to do is to ‘preach the Word.’ There is nothing better! There can be nothing
more—there must be nothing less!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2870 “Never judge men by
the clothes they wear, but by what they are in themselves! It is a man’s heart
and, above all, it is the Grace of God that dwells within the man’s heart that
you and I are to prize and love—may God help us to do so!”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2936

“The one who really loves the Lord, when tempted to sin, cries with Joseph, ‘How
can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?’ Every act of sin arises out
of the absence or the decline of the love of God, but perfect love to God leads
to the perfect life with God.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2958

“Your Lord does not pray the Father to take you out of the world, but He does
pray that he will keep you from the evil that is in the world. And in accordance
with His prayer, it ought to be the great aim of your life that you may so live
as not to be dragged down to the low level of ungodly men—yes, and not even down
to the level of common Christianity—for the level of ordinary Christianity, at
this day, far too closely resembles that of the church in Laodicea which was so
nauseous to the Lord.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3063

“Indeed, blindness would follow upon a vision of absolute Deity—if such a vision
were even possible. To dwell long upon the Doctrine of the Trinity, and to vex
your mind with the various theories of that mysterious subject which men have
imagined, is the sure road to Socinianism or some other heresy! But, to see God
veiled in human flesh and especially to see Him revealed in the Person of the
dying Mediator, is to see God in the only way in which He can to seen by mortal
men. We do, not, therefore, for a moment forget that Christ’s death was the
greatest possible display of God’s love to men.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2986

“In the world you shall have tribulation, but in Christ you shall have peace!
Value the Holy Spirit above all things. Realize your entire dependence upon Him.
Pray for fresh Grace. Venture not into the world without a fresh store of His
hallowed influence. Live in the Divine Love. Seek to be filled with that blessed
Spirit and then, my Brothers and Sisters, even if the strong man armed shall lay
hold of you, you will not flee away—shame shall not overtake you, dismay shall
not frighten your souls—and you shall stand in unblemished integrity to the end
as the true servants of Jesus Christ!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3023

“There are those in Heaven who have found as hard hand-to-hand fighting in the
spiritual life as we do—yet they were not vanquished, nor need we be—for the
same strength which was given to them is also available for us!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3046

“This is how God saves men—by leading them to trust in Him in Jesus
Christ.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2867“I sometimes pass persons who used to sit in
these pews, and who were, I thought, ardent Christians. Even now some of them
have respect for me, but I fear that they have none for my Master. If I get
anywhere near them, they slink away, for fear I should speak to them. I wish
they had as much anxiety about the grief they have caused my Lord as they have
about any grief they may have caused me.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2975

“Man is unwilling to give up sin—he loves it too much—he is unwilling to be made
holy for he has no time for spiritual things. God, then, must come to man, for
how can man, being naturally dead, and naturally unwilling, ever come to
God?”—Volume 52, Sermon #3001

“O Sinner, the day may come when God will say of you, ‘Let him have his own
way.’ If He should give you up, then your doom will be sealed forever and your
fate more desperate than words can describe! God help you and keep you from
yourself, or else you will soon destroy yourself and go posthaste to
destruction!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2924

“Having the same God and the same promises, we may expect to always see the same
results. As for the future, a large part of Scripture is as yet unfulfilled.
Many persons try to interpret it, but the man is not born who can explain the
Revelation. Yet, whatever God has there declared will be explained by the
working out of His Providence.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3064

“This Psalm [the 23rd]is, among the other Psalms, what the lark is among the
other birds—it soars and sings till it is lost in the heights to which it
ascends!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2886

“Trial is absolutely necessary in order to reveal to us some of the attributes
of our gracious God! We cannot, ordinarily, see the stars in the daytime, but if
we go down a mine or a well, we can. And often in the deep mines or wells of
trouble, as we go down, down, down, we see the brightness of our Lord Jesus
Christ as we never saw it before!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2945

“Crown Him, O you daughters of Jerusalem, as the King of Sufferers, most mighty
to suffer and to save! With His garments all red from the winepress, adore Him
as having alone sustained the fury of His adversaries!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024
“A beggar with the Truth of God is mightier than priests and princes with a
lie.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3032

“In the very best of men, there is an infernal and well-near infinite depth of
depravity! Some Christians never seem to find this out. I almost wish that they
might not do so, for it is a painful discovery for anyone to make—but it has the
beneficial effect of making us cease from trusting in ourselves and causing us
to glory only in the Lord.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2986

“‘Where sin abounded, Grace did much more abound.’ There is no unconquerable
sin! There is no Dagon that shall not be broken in the presence of the Ark of
God! There is no temple of the Philistines which shall not fall beneath the
might of our greater Samson! We need not, as the result of temperament, or
because of any sin that does so easily beset us, depart from Jesus, for Grace is
equal to all emergencies.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3046

“No man knows how far God’s mercy goes, but if that mercy is given to faith, I
cannot see how it can be extended to some dying men. Delirium, a wandering mind,
an aching head—oh, these will give you quite enough to do in dying without
having to seek your peace with God!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2917

“Although we are to scatter the seed everywhere, upon the wayside as well as
upon the good ground, God never does. Common calling is addressed to every man,
but effectual callingcomes only to prepared men, to those whom God makes
‘willing in the day of His power.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3001

“God will honor His Church when she has faith enough to believe in His
promises.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3064

“If we give our life for others, we do not really give our life—we but pay the
debt of Nature a little while before it is due. But it was altogether different
in the Lord Jesus Christ’s case… It was a purely voluntary act for Christ to die
at all—not merely to die on the Cross but everto die, was a voluntary act on His
part and, consequently, a most singular proof of His love to us.”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2959

“I tell you that one backsliding Christian does more harm to the Church of God
than one minister can ever undo! And the dear children who are living near to
God are often exposed to scorn through those of you that are settled upon your
lees.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2926

“In our courts of law, we do not require men to answer questions which would
incriminate them, but God does. And at the Last Great Day, the ungodly will be
condemned on their own confession of guilt!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2900 “Brothers,
if we want to have fruit in our ministry—if we want to see sinners converted—we
must preach up Christ’s death! As the blacksmith strikes the hot iron upon the
anvil, we must keep the hammer of the Gospel at work upon this great foundation
truth, ‘Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.’”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3024

“Christ said ‘ finis’to the canon of Revelation and it was closed forever! No
one can add a single word to it and no one can take a word from it. We
Dissenters are sometimes charged with inventing a new Gospel. We deny it. We say
that our Owen, Howe, Henry, Charnock, Bunyan, Baxter, or Janeway and all that
galaxy of stars of the pulpit did not pretend to say anything new—they only
revived the things that Christ said—they only professed to be confirmers of the
Witness, Christ Jesus”—Volume 50, Sermon #2875

“Our mothers returned thanks on their own behalf and ours, but as we look back,
we are bound to return thanks, too, for that kindly care of God in our most
extreme weakness—when the little candle of life was scarcely lighted and might
have been so easily blown out. Then, as God took care of us in our first
infancy, do You not think that He will take care of us when we get into our
second childhood? We are never likely to be quite as weak as we were then, but,
as the Lord guarded us at that time, will He not guard us in those dark days
which are already looming before some of us? Of course He will! Therefore, be of
good courage, for He shall strengthen your heart and your praise shall be
continually of Him.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3022

“If we are really God’s people, it is a great consolation for us to know
that—notwithstanding our many infirmities and iniquities, our many anxieties and
doubts and fears as to whether, after all, we have been self-deceived or
devil-deceived—God will never forsake us!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3047

“You will be wise, you young Christian professors, if you cultivate Christian
companionship! Try to live with those who live with God and sit at the feet of
these who sit at the feet of Christ. God may speak through them to your soul, so
give heed to what they say—it may be that in giving heed to them, you will be
listening to the voice of God Himself!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3063

“God save you from being able to delight yourselves in anything but your God!
May He put so much bitterness into every other cup that you will be compelled to
take the cup of salvation and, calling upon the name of the Lord, to drink only
of that! You will be dreadful and eternal losers, whatever else you gain, if you
lose the Lord!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2975

“Christians, you also are to love one another, not because of the gain which you
get from one another, but rather because of the good you can do to one
another.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2936

“If I ever try to secure a quiet half-hour’s meditation upon His love to me,
somebody is pretty sure to come and knock at the door. But if I can keep the
door-knocker still, and get alone with my Lord and only think about His love to
me—not trying to elaborate any theories, or to understand any doctrines, but
just sitting down with the view of loving Him who gave Himself for me—I tell
you, Sirs, that this thought is positively inebriating to the soul!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2986

“When a soul sees itself, it then has the eyes with which to see Jesus. He that
can see his own deformities, shall not be long before he sees the Lord’s
unspeakable perfections! In that day of self-humbling, cutting away and casting
down, I know the Lord alone will be exalted in your soul.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2922

“The coming of Christ into any soul, or into any church, is the death of sin and
the birth of holiness!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3047

Antinomians, that is, those who are ‘against the Law,’ we are not to be numbered
among them, for we can say with Paul, “The Law is holy and the Commandments holy
and just and good.” And though we are carnal, and often feel ourselves ‘sold
under sin,’ yet we cannot find any fault with the Law of God. If eternal life
could have come by any law, it would have come by that Law—and even though that
Law can now do nothing for us but condemn us, yet, as we hear its terrible
sentence, we feel that the Law ‘is holy, and just, and good.’”—Volume 52, Sermon
#3002

“In persecuting times, the Christian has often had to literally give himself up
to die, but, instead of the cause of Christ being injured by his death, he has,
in that way, brought forth the “much fruit.” There have been no other such
fruitful preachers of the Gospel as those who suffered at the stakes of
Smithfield or died upon the rack. If you would be the means of saving others,
you must make no reserve for yourself, but imitate your Master, of whom His
enemies tauntingly but truly said, ‘He saved others; Himself He cannot
save.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024

“Do not be afraid to argue for the Truth of God. Do not think that infidels are
wise men, or that Arminians are so exceedingly learned. Stand up for the
Truth—and there is so much solid learning and real Truth to be found in the
Doctrines that we uphold [Doctrines of Grace] that none of you need be ashamed
of them! They are mighty and must prevail! The mighty God of Jacob, by the
demonstration of the Holy Spirit, make them triumphant!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2908
“O Son of God, how could You stoop so low as to take upon Yourself our nature
and in that nature to bleed and die, when between us and You there was a
distance infinitely greater than that between an ant and a cherub, or a moth and
an archangel? Yet with no claims upon You, of Your own free will, You did yield
Yourself to die because of Your amazing love to us!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2959

“God said He, alone, should be the Christian’s Master—and the rule of his
conduct should be the will of the Lord as revealed in the teaching of this
blessed Book. Happy will Christians be, and strong in the Lord will they become,
when they get as far as that!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3063

“I pray you, as soon as you know Christ, speak out for Him and come out and show
your colors. But I also beseech you never profess to follow Christ merely
through the persuasion of friends!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3023 “Light thoughts of
sin breed light thoughts of the Savior.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3049

“Great success is one of the worst perils of mankind. Many a man has been
elevated until his brain has grown dizzy and he has fallen to his destruction.
He who is to be made to stand securely on a high place has need to be put
through sharp affliction. More men are destroyed by prosperity and success then
by affliction and apparent failure.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2945

“Do you not see that if the richer you get and the more often you go to the
Cross, it will be safe for you to be trusted with wealth? Take care to sanctify
everything that God gives you by giving Him His proper portion and do not use
your own portion till you have given Him His.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2975

“You would be cut off from Christ, you would be more depraved than you were
before your conversion, you would be more corrupt than you were previous to your
being regenerated—‘twice dead, plucked up by the roots’—if God the Holy Spirit
were to withdraw from you! You must live in His life, trust in His power to
sustain you and seek of Him fresh supplies when the tide of your spiritual life
is running low.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3048

“The early Christian Church was very enthusiastic—they went everywhere preaching
the Word. Somebody says, “Ah, they lived in the days of persecution.” But it was
not the persecution which made them enthusiastic—it was their enthusiasm that
brought upon them persecution for Christ’s sake!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2884

“You who have mighty founts of love welling up in your soul may come and let
them flow most freely here, for here is One who is worthy of them all! And when
you have loved Christ as much as you can, you have not loved Him half as much as
He deserves to be loved.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3002

“The proud-hearted may, if they will, arraign their Maker. And the thing formed
may say to Him who formed it, ‘Why have You made me thus?’But these men of Grace
will not do so. It is enough for them if God wills anything! If He wills it, so
let it be—Solomon’s throne or Job’s dunghill—they desire to be equally happy
wherever the Lord may place them, or however He may deal with them!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3065

“Do you want to know where to find Christ? He is dwelling in His people and
especially in His poor people, in His suffering people, in His tried people! So,
when your heart is full of love to your Lord, let some of the light of it shine
upon them…The moon cannot shine as brightly as the sun does, and you cannot love
as much as Christ does—but you can be like the moon and shine with borrowed
light—you can reflect upon others the light of the love which Christ has shed
upon your own soul.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2986

“I ask you, Brothers and Sisters in Christ, to resolve, by God’s strength, that
there is nothing you will not do and nothing you will not give for Him who loved
you so well that He gave all He had to save you! Seek, by every means that you
can use, to win souls for Christ! The man who must have conversions or he will
die, will have them! The woman who feels that she must bring her class to Christ
and will never rest till she does, will bring them to Christ! The Lord help us
so to preach Christ and so to live for Christ and, if necessary, so to die for
Christ, that we may bring forth fruit unto God—‘some a hundredfold, some
sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024

“What can the ministers of the Gospel do if their people cease to pray for them?
Even if their own prayers are heard, as they will be, and a measure of blessing
be given, yet it will be but a scant measure compared with what it would be if
all the saints united in their intercessions!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929

“Alas! Alas! If we had to deal with sane men, our preaching would be easy—but
sin is a madness—such a madness that when men are bitten by it, they cannot be
persuaded even though one should rise from the dead. ‘Without holiness, no man
shall see the Lord.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902 “The meek in spirit are like a
photographer’s sensitive plates—as the Word of God passes before them, they
desire to have its image imprinted upon their hearts. Their hearts are the
fleshy tablets on which the mind of God is recorded . God is the Writer and they
become living Epistles, written not with ink, but with the finger of the living
God.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3065

“The Holy Spirit is the chariot wheel of prayer. Prayer may be the chariot, the
desire may draw it forth, but the Spirit is the very wheel whereby it moves. He
propels the desire and causes the chariot to roll swiftly on and to bear to
Heaven the supplication of the saints when the desire of the heart is ‘according
to the will of God.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3048

“In many churches there are so few making profession of religion that there is
not much danger of this evil—but here, where we receive so many every week,
there is need for wise discrimination! I do beseech you never to sit down with a
religion that comes to you merely through your being talked to by your
acquaintances.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3023

“There are some who read the Bible and try to systematize it according to rigid
logical creeds, but I dare not follow their method and I feel content to let
people say, ‘How inconsistent he is with himself!’ The only thing that would
grieve me would be inconsistency with the Word of God! As far as I know this
Book, I have endeavored, in my ministry, to preach to you not a part of the
Truth of God, but the whole counsel of God—but I cannot harmonize it, nor am I
anxious to do so. I am sure all Truth is harmonious and to my ear the harmony is
clear enough—but I cannot give you a complete score of the music, or mark the
harmonies on the gamut—I must leave the Chief Musician to do that.”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2976

“Do not expect, Beloved, to hear voices, to see visions and to dream dreams, but
rather look at Providence—see how God’s wonder-working wheels turn round and, as
the wheels turn, so do you! Whichever way His hand points, go there and thus God
shall guide you, for your Counselor has not yet perished!”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3066

“Its [the Bible] every page is a sheet of gold! No, rather let me say that
Heaven’s banknotes are here, to be cashed by them who have faith enough to bring
them to the God that issued them, that He may make their souls rich to all the
intents of bliss!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3002 “Practical godliness is absolutely
necessary to a true Christian character—and a man is not righteous unless he
does that which is righteous.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2959

“Never did water leap from the crystal fountain with half such freeness and
generous liberality as Grace flows from the heart of God! He gives forth love,
joy, peace and pardon—and He gives them as a king gives to a king! You cannot
empty His treasury, for it is inexhaustible. He is not enriched by withholding,
nor is He impoverished by bestowing!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2867

“A religion that cannot stand a little laughter must be a very rotten
one.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3023 “It is a great help in prayer, when you are
yourself unable to pray, to get someone whom you know to be a Christian, and who
has sympathy with you, to come and pray with you.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024

“It is an easy thing to shut the mouths of ordinary lions, but it is a great
deal more difficult to shut the mouth of the roaring lion of Hell who goes about
seeking whom he may devour. It is a very simple matter for the Omnipotent God to
make a world—He speaks and it is done! But to remake an innumerable company of
His creatures who have become debased and spiritually dead—this is, indeed, a
work only comparable to that which He accomplished when He “brought again from
the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of
the Everlasting Covenant.””—Volume 50, Sermon #2880

“If ever you are asked which comes first, repentance or faith, you may answer,
by another question, ‘Which spoke of a wheel moves first when the wheel begins
to revolve?’ You know that they are all set in motion at the same time. So, when
the hand of God sets our soul ‘going’ in the right road, it also sets our soul
and often our eyes ‘weeping.’ And I believe that when our soul is really ‘going’
towards God, it is with a deepened repentance over the past and a sincere
‘weeping’ over the imperfections which it still has to lament.”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3049

“We must endeavor, as much as possible, to exercise our thoughts upon all the
subjects which God has given us to think upon in His Word and has applied to our
hearts by the workings of the Holy Spirit. Where this is done, we shall avoid
one thought thrusting another, and each will go in its own path (Joel
2:8).”—Volume 52, Sermon #2976

“Oh, what wondrous love was that which impelled the Savior onward to
Gethsemane—the olive press where He was to be pressed and crushed between the
millstones of Jehovah’s wrath in order that He might suffer the penalty due to
our transgressions!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3003

“Personal preaching is the best kind of preaching. We are not going to avoid
personalities! We are striving to reach individual cases as much as possible,
that every man may hear the Word of God in his own tongue—and hear it speaking
to his own heart.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3066“If it were required, as once it was,
that you should be dragged into the amphitheatre to be slain by wild beasts, you
must be willing to do as the Christians did then—to die such a death, if
necessary, for Christ. My Lord and Master will not be content with the shell of
a man—He must have his heart and soul, his entire being—and he who will not thus
give himself up to Christ cannot be His disciple.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2946

“Nothing tends so greatly to oil the wheels of life as a little loving
sympathy—let us always be ready with a good supply of it wherever it is
needed.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2936

“If a man could eat gold, drink gold, sleep with gold, walk with gold and be
robed in gold, yet, still, what is there in that metal which could satisfy the
cravings of the highest part of man’s nature—that mysterious spiritual thing
which is called the soul? No, there is no solid satisfaction for the soul in all
the wealth in the world!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2987

“My Master knows that I would cheerfully resign, that another voice might speak
to you, if that would keep alive your zeal and enthusiasm. If it is, however,
not my fault, even a changed ministry would not suffice. When churches grow to a
great size, people think they must always continue so, and that God will always
bless them as He has done. Why, Sirs, as our first blessings came in answer to
prayers—all future blessings must come in the same way!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3013

“But there is such a thing as being angry and yet not sinning—and the meek man
turns his anger wholly upon the evil and away from the person who did the
wrong—and is as ready to do him a kindness as if he had never transgressed at
all!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3065 “A sight of Your Cross, O Jesus, makes the priests
topple down like Dagon before the ark—and the sacraments that once were trusted
in to be despised if placed side by side with You!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2922

“What you learn from man, you can unlearn—but what you learn of the Spirit is
fixed indelibly in your heart and conscience—and not even Satan himself can
steal it from you. Go, you ignorant ones, who often stagger at the Truths of
Revelation—go and ask the Spirit, for He is the Guide of benighted
souls!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3048

“Gratitude is a very rare thing. If any of you try to do good for the sake of
getting gratitude, you will find it one of the most profitless trades in the
world. If you can do good, expecting to be abusedfor it, you will get your
reward, but if you do good with an expectation of gratitude in return, you will
be bitterly disappointed.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2960

“The best service you can render to Christ is to imitate Him. If you want to do
what will please Him—do as He did!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3024 “No matter how far
off a man may be from God, if there is a hearty and earnest seeking after Him
through Jesus Christ, he will find Him.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2925

“Though it is evident enough that the early Christians were an uneducated
company of men, yet those that were great and noble, learned and polished, did
not disdain to join with them, nor will they ever in any age if the Light of
Heaven shines and the love of God burns in their hearts!”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2914

“Now, Christian…Do you wonder if your integrity is questioned and your most
manifest virtue is misrepresented? And if the Grace which really is within you
is laughed at and despised? How could the world know you when the Savior,
Himself, was not discovered? As the bright gleams of His Divine Glory were
almost wholly concealed, surely the weaker gleams of your earthly and human
glory must be altogether hidden! That, perhaps, is the first reason why ‘it does
not yet appear what we shall be.’” [1 John 3:2]—Volume 52, Sermon #3004

“Some people seem to have a notion that although sin is a very evil thing, yet
if repentance is sincere and deep, it will suffice to wash out the sin. But Paul
[Romans 8:34] does not say, ‘Who is he who condemns?—for I have felt the plague
of sin and hated it, and wept over it and turned from it. He makes no mention
whatever of his repentance as a ground of his confidence! He had truly repented,
yet he never dreamed of relying upon his repentance as a reason for his
justification in the sight of God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3067

“While we sometimes find the purse-proud man looking down on the poor, it quite
as often happens that the poor man takes umbrage where there is no need for it
and is much more wicked in his jealousies than the other in his purse-pride. Let
it never be so among Christians, but lest the Brother of high degree rejoice
that he is exalted and the poor that he is brought low!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2976

“If I hear blasphemy and am able to condemn it, yet do not, my silence makes me
a sharer in the sin. I am always afraid lest, when I hear God’s name blasphemed,
my guilty silence should make me an accomplice of the blasphemer. A rebuke need
not be and should not be discourteous or disrespectful. And it should not be
unduly severe, but I am afraid that nowadays we are not so likely to err by our
harshness, as by failing to be faithful to our conscience and our God.”—Volume
53, Sermon #3045

“According to our Lord’s testimony, [Luke 7:22-23] the preaching of the Gospel
to the poor is as great a proof of His Messiahship as the raising of the dead!
Then how highly it ought to be prized by them and how glad should they be who
have the Gospel now preached freely in their hearing!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2876

“When a man plays the fool, let him do it for something that is worth
having.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2987

“The meek-spirited man may be naturally very hot and fiery, but he has had Grace
given to him to keep his temper in subjection. He does not say,“That is my
constitution and I cannot help it,” as so many do. God will never excuse us
because of our constitution—His Grace is given to us to cure our evil
constitutions and to kill our corruptions! We are not to spare any Amalekites
because they are called constitutional sins, but we are to bring them all
out—even Agog who goes delicately—and slay them before the Lord who can make us
more than conquerors over every sin, whether constitutional or
otherwise!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3065

“In a spiritualsense, so far as anything in the nature of good works is
concerned, sin has paralyzed man altogether. Indeed, it has taken his very life
away from him so that he is truly said to be ‘dead in trespasses and
sins.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2887

“All the water in the sea will not hurt your vessel as long as you keep it
outside—the danger begins when it gets inside the ship. So it matters little
what is outside you, if all is right within. Have that little bird in your bosom
that sings sweetly of the love of God! Wear the flower called heart’s-ease in
your buttonhole and you may go merrily through a perfect wilderness of trouble
and a desert of care!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2871

“Good old Rowland Hill, when he found himself getting very feeble, said, ‘I hope
they have not forgotten poor old Rowley up there.’ But he knew that he was not
forgotten, nor will you be, Beloved.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2900 “No food is so
palatable as that which has hunger for its sauce! To know what it is to be poor
will make us more grateful if God ever gives us abundance.”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3025 “Self-satisfaction is the end of progress, so we are constantly to cry,
“Higher, and yet still higher! Onward and upward”—and still to ask to be filled
yet more completely with all the fullness of God!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2961 “Be
charitable, notwithstanding all the mischief that unworthy applicants may make
of your charity, remembering the command of our Savior to His disciples, ‘Give
to him that asks you.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045

“There will come to every man, whoever or whatever he may be, sudden assaults of
temptation—but if the Law of his God is in his heart, he will be forewarned and
forearmed against them! There will also come the long sieges of temptation and
many a man has fallen by little and little. But if the Law of his God is in his
heart, he will be safe against even them.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3002

“Very likely if we prayed more for ministers, they would be more blessed to us.
There is many a man who cannot ‘hear’ his minister and the reason may be that
God never hears him pray for his minister.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2929 “It is an
ill sign when anyone refuses to forgive another. I have heard of a father saying
that his child should never darken his door again. Does that father know that he
can never enter Heaven while he cherishes such a spirit as that?”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3065 “As the planet needs the sun, so man needs his God. As the eye is
nothing without light, so your spirit is nothing without God. You must have
God!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2987

“Self-righteousness is a great cheat. The man who gets most comfort out of it
simply gets that comfort because he is ignorant! If he knew himself and knew
God’s Law, and knew the demands of inflexible Justice, he would fling upon the
nearest dunghill that self-righteousness of his which looks like fair white
linen, but which really is, in God’s sight, nothing but filthy rags!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2977

“We all know what our own cross is. And if our Heavenly Father has appointed it
for us, we must take it up and follow Christ!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2946

“Oh, privileged beyond compare is that man who has a partner in life who, with
himself, rejoices in Christ and who sees all his children following in his
steps, equally rejoicing in the Lord Jesus Christ! And happier still is he if
all his servants are in the same blessed condition. How is it with you, Brothers
and Sisters? Have you this blessing? I know that some of you have. Your house
ought to be a little Heaven, for you have a church in your house! Keep the bells
always ringing, ‘Holiness unto the Lord,’ and let your hearts be so many harps
from which there shall constantly pour forth floods of music to the praise of
Him who has so highly favored you!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2937

“You who know not where you will have a lodging tonight, if you can truly say,
‘my Redeemer,’ you need not envy the very angels of God, for in this respect,
you are ahead even of them, for they can call Him, ‘Lord,’ but not
‘Redeemer’!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2909

“I am afraid we would have to present a very poor record if we gave a true
account of the time we spend in prayer—yet we have no excuse to offer for being
lax in this holy duty. It is not a bondage, a slavery—it is the highest
privilege of the Believer’s soul to be engaged in prayer to our Heavenly
Father—yet we often prefer the disastrous ease of wasting our time instead of
drawing near to God in prayer!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3003

“O my Brothers in the ministry, if we are not a blessing, we are a double curse!
Every so-called “place of worship” in which the true Gospel is not preached is a
curse, for it is like a sepulcher full of rottenness doing nothing but harm!
Worldlings more often judge Christianity by fruitless trees than by
fruit-bearing trees. O preacher, be a blessing, or never enter the pulpit
again!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045

“We have been born into a world where there is much sin and much sorrow, where
no man can have all that he wishes—and it is a grand thing when our wishes get
changed, our desires get altered and we become altogether different from what we
used to be! This is the path that leads to satisfaction!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2987

“We are, all of us, remarkably good-tempered while we have our own way. But the
true meekness which is a work of Grace will stand the fire of persecution and
will endure the test of enmity, cruelty and wrong—even as the meekness of Christ
did upon the Cross of Calvary.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3065

“That man is truly happy who can say of all his substances, be it little or be
it much, ‘The Lord gave it to me.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025

“I would like, Brothers and Sisters in Christ, that you and I would so live that
our very lives would preach for Jesus Christ—that people would only have to
listen to our ordinary conversation, or to see the cheerfulness of our
countenance, or to perceive the hopefulness of our spirit under trouble, our
justness and integrity, our readiness to forgive, our zeal for God! It is good
to preach with your tongue if God has called you to do so. But never forget that
the best preaching in the world is done by other members of the body. So, preach
with your feet—by your walk and conversation! Let your whole being be a living,
powerful, irresistible illustration of the power of Jesus Christ to bless and
save!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2891

“Thousands of hearers of the Gospel are constantly saying, ‘We will believe in
Jesus when we feel our sins more—when we feel more repentance—when we have done
this and told that, and experienced the other.’ Ah, Sirs, this plan of bringing
Christ in at the end of the work—after you have accomplished the first part of
it yourselves—is a most foolish mistake, and a fatal one, too!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2977

“O Sirs, if you remain what you are by nature, you may strive to do what you
please, but when you have dressed out the child of nature in its finest
garments, it is still only the child of nature finely dressed, but not the child
of God You must be, by a supernatural birth, allied to the living God, for, if
not, all the works that you may perform will not entitle you to the possession
of the inheritance of the Most High.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2961

“Brother, if ever the Lord should rebuff you and seem to refuse that which you
desire to offer to Him, do not sulk—do not get into a bad spirit, as some have
done in similar circumstances—but know that the very essence of Christian
service is to be willing notto serve in that particular way if, by not serving,
God would be the more glorified!1904, Sermon #2869

“It is only as you yourselves are, in the fullest sense,saved—saved from falling
into sin, saved from inward corruption, saved from error—it is only as you are
conformed to the image of Christ that you can expect to be a blessing to
others.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045

“It has been my lot to stand by many death beds and I can honestly say that if I
wanted to enjoy the most intense pleasure that is possible on earth, I would
seek out some dying saint that I might witness his rapturous joy and hear his
gladsome and cheering testimony to his Lord and Savior!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2987

“The meek-spirited man is glad to know that other people are happy—and their
happiness is his happiness! He will have a great number of heavens, for
everybody else’s Heaven will be a Heaven to him! It will be a Heaven to him to
know that so many other people are in Heaven, and for each one whom he sees
there, he will praise the Lord. Meekness gives us the enjoyment of what is other
people’s, yet they have none the less because of our enjoyment of it!”—Volume
53, Sermon #3065 “When a church feels it mustget a blessing—I hope we are
feeling it now—in proportion as that desire grows into an agony, the Lord alone
will be exalted in that day!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2922

“I do not think that we shall long plead for our sons and daughters without
seeing a prayer-hearing God stretching out His hand to save them. Or if we do,
we must look upon the delay as a further trial of our faith and we must
intensify our prayer until it becomes an agony—and in that agony we lay hold
upon the Covenant Angel and cry, ‘I will not let You go unless You bless me and
my seed also.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2937

“You cannot direct your own steps for you are a cripple and cannot take even one
step except as strength is given you from on high! You are like a ship upon the
sea—you can make no progress except as the breath of the Divine Spirit fills the
sails of your boat. How can you direct your own way when you have no power to go
in it and are dependent upon God for everything?”—Volume 50, Sermon #2893

“My young Brother, you are about to become the pastor of a large church and you
tremble lest you should make some great mistake and bring dishonor upon God. But
if His Law is in your heart, none of your steps shall slide. You need not mind
about the slipperiness of the way if the Law of your God is in your heart! Many
slip when the road is not slippery, and many a man, by God’s Grace, stands fast
where it seems a miracle that he stands at all.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3002

“When a man says to us, ‘I am a child of God,’ we have the right to expect that
there shall be at least some trace of the Character of God visible in his walk
and conversation. Come, dear Friend, with all your imperfections, are you
seeking to be an imitator of God, as one of His dear children?...Do you feel
that because you are a child of God, it becomes you to walk even as His
first-born Son walked while He was here below? Remember that without holiness no
man shall see the Lord, because without holiness no man has the evidence that he
is, indeed, a child of God!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2961

“Do not, therefore, fear persecution, but rather thank God for it, and say, ‘I
have to endure this that I may be a blessing to those who revile and abuse
me.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3045 “Plowing does not harden rocks—but preaching does
harden sinners if the Gospel does not reach their hearts and, of all hardhearted
men, the hardest are those who have been hardened in the fire of the
Gospel.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2977

“I know that some of you seekers after salvation fancy that those good Christian
people whom you very much admire must get a great deal of comfort out of the
good lives that they lead. But I can assure you that this is not the case with
any of them. They will all tell you that they have not the least confidence in
themselves, or in their own works, but that their confidence is found in quite
another direction!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3067

“I do not think that all the cherubim and seraphim in Heaven ever praised God as
they have done who have died in prison for Jesus’ sake, or at the stake have
poured forth their blood rather than deny Him. Be glad that you may prove your
love by suffering for Christ. The ruby crown of martyrdom is not within your
reach today, but be thankful if some jewels of suffering may be yours. And count
it all joy when you can endure this cross for the name of Jesus Christ.”—Volume
51, Sermon #2946

“Oh, the delight of pleading with God when the heart casts forth mighty jets of
supplication like a geyser in full action! How mighty is supplication when the
whole soul becomes one living, hungering, expecting desire!1904, Sermon #2869

“When we come to God and are saved by Him, then ordinances take their proper
place. You cannot teach a man how to live until he is born and you cannot teach
him what his spiritual life is to be until he is born-again. all religious rites
and ceremonies which precede the new birth go for nothing. First there must be
the inward life—the broken heart, the contrite spirit—and then everything else
drops into proper order.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2903

“If you want to find a heart that is as hard as steel, you must look for one
that has passed through the furnace of Divine Love and has been made aware of
the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, but has rejected the Truths of God that
has been made known to it.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2977

“As Christ thus made known the will of God the Father to His people, so the Holy
Spirit makes known to us the words of Christ. I could almost affirm that
Christ’s words would be of no use to us unless they were applied to us by the
Holy Spirit! Beloved, we need the application to assure our hearts that they are
our own, that they are intended for us and that we have an interest in their
blessedness!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3048

“Every moment that Christ is at the right hand of God, every Believer is safe.
For Christ to be in Heaven and for the people for whom He died to be in Hell is
utterly impossible! For Christ to be there as our Representative and yet for
those whom He represents to be cast. out from the favor of God would be a
monstrosity, a blasphemy which cannot be imagined for a single instant!”—Volume
53, Sermon #3067“A certain amount of sleep is necessary for the body; but prayer
is just as necessary for the soul. The bed will give rest to the tired limbs,
but the Mercy Seat will give refreshment to the powers and passions of the
spirit. Let us get strength for service, power for endurance and might for
conflict by going to the Mount of Olives with the Savior and watching and
praying with Him.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3003

“Iniquity is indeed great when it is committed against experience! Men
deliberately run upon the pikes of damnation—they destroy their own souls by a
sort of spiritual suicide!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2988

“ You believe the Gospel istrue, butyou doubt whether it is for you. Well, no,
it is not for you if you are not a sinner. If you can say, “I am not guilty,”
then farewell to all hope, for Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners!
If you are a sinner, surely He came to save such as you are!”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2925

“Time has to do with time, but time has not to do with eternity, so, whether
you, my Brother, were born to God 50 years ago and I, 25 years ago—and our young
friend over there 25 daysago—it makes no difference. ‘If children, then heirs,’
because the date of birth cannot come into our reckoning when we have to do with
eternal things.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2961

“If those who hate righteousness, hated Christians more heartily than they now
do, it might be a token that God was more manifestly at work in us, making us
more “out-and-out” for Him than we are at present.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2884
“After faith comes repentance,or, rather, repentance is faith’s twin brother and
is born at the same time.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2882

“When a man is poor, unless he has brought his poverty upon himself by
extravagance, or idleness, or his own wrongdoing, the man is a man for all that,
and none the worse man for being poor! Indeed, some of the best of men have been
as poor as their Lord was.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025

“When I talk of the glories of the love of Christ, I feel at home. When I speak
of the matchless Grace of the Everlasting Covenant, my heart is well at ease.
But to prove man’s sin heavy is a task too hard for me! Not that it is hard in
itself. The evidence is clear, but to procure a conviction is the difficulty.
The jury is not impartial. Your conscience is like an unjust judge. Oh, how hard
it is to make any man believe himself to be so bad as the Word of God says he
is!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2988

“Though all sinners are fools, yet there are fools of all sorts. Some are
learned fools. Unconverted men, whatever they know, are only educated fools.
Between the ignorant man who cannot read a letter and the learned man who is apt
in all knowledge, there is small difference if they are both ignorant of
Christ!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3070

“It was said of Harry the Eighth that if all the histories of all the tyrants
who ever lived had been lost, you might have composed them all with the material
from the life of that execrable monster! And I will venture to say that if all
the biographies of all the good men and holy angels that have ever existed could
be blotted out of existence or memory, they might all be written again with the
material from the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, for in Him dwells all
excellence and all goodness.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3004

“Truly, Brothers and Sisters, to rule over other men is a great thing. To have
moral power over men is no mean matter. But to get men to so love you that they
would willingly die for you—to get them to so love you that they would sooner
cease to live than cease to love you—this is to occupy a glorious high throne!
And such is the throne upon which Christ sits in the hearts of all His people!
Such is the dominion which He wields over all the hosts that He has purchased
with His precious blood!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2876

“How certain, then, is the salvation of every elect soul! It does not depend on
the will of man—he is “made willing” in the day of God’s power. He shall be
called at the set time and his heart shall be effectually changed, that he may
become a trophy of the Redeemer’s power. That he was unwilling before is no
hindrance, for God gives him the will, so that he is then of a willing mind.
Thus, every heir of Heaven must be saved because the Spirit is put within him
and thereby his disposition and affections are molded according to the will of
God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3048

“Doctors judge their patients’ health by looking at their tongues—and we might
judge of our moral and spiritual health in a similar way. Oh, what tongues some
people would have if their words could blister their tongues as they ought to
do! How common it is to hear scandalous words and slanderous words—and how many
hearts are made to bleed, full often, by the cruel things that are said!”—Volume
51, Sermon #2932

“If Jesus pleads for me, can His Father reject me? If so, He must also reject
His Son! He must refuse the authoritative requests of His onlybegotten and
well-beloved Son! He must deny to Jesus that which He well deserves—and that He
can never do.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3067

“Now, if you pray in one way with your lips and in another way with your lives,
your lives will win the day and your children will rather be like what you are
than what you ask for them to be.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2937 “If anybody could
teach me how to preach better, I would gladly go to school, again, and learn how
to get at some of your hearts. If they would teach me how to speak in such a
vulgar style that I would lose my reputation, but be blessed to the saving of
your souls, I would willingly fling my reputation to the winds! Or if I could
learn the art of oratory, I would go and sit at the feet of Cicero or
Demosthenes, if I could but get at your superfine hearts that need such fine
words before they will be touched! But I fear that it is the oxen’s fate to go
on plowing, and plowing, and plowing—and to get weary with the labor, and yet to
see no result of it all.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2977

“A thousand good things come to us by the way of suffering and reproach. I think
the sweetest letters which God ever sends to His children are done up in
black-edged envelopes. You will find in many of those bright envelopes of His,
some choice silver mercies, but if you want a great banknote of Grace, it must
came to you in the mourning envelope. It is when the Lord covers the Heavens
with clouds that He sends the showers of blessing upon the earth. Be glad of the
clouds for the sake of the rain.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2946

“Weeping is a wondrous help to those who would find their way to the heart of
God! So, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, pour out your hearts before
Him—pour them out like water before the Lord and when your heart is breaking for
the longing that it has, even if you shed no outward tears, you have learned the
sacred art of praying and you shall receive what you have asked in so far as it
is according to the will of God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3049

“Think, dear Brothers and Sisters, how can there be any wrath treasured up
against God’s people when it was all poured out upon the Lord Jesus Christ,
their Surety and Substitute?”—Volume 51, Sermon #2962

“He that believes on the Lord Jesus Christ shall be made clean. He shall be
cleansed from all the foulness of the past—God will wipe it right out. He shall
be cleansed as to his heart and his nature. To him God repeats that ancient
promise, ‘A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within
you.’ ‘How is this to be had?’ By trusting to the Divine method of cleansing the
filthy, for the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanses from all sin everyone
who believes in Him.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3069

“…some of our very doctrinal friends, to whom orthodoxy seems to be both the
first thing and the last thing, though, as you very well know, what they call
orthodoxy is simply their own doxy!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2989

“Oh, that amazing sight, that unique sight of Jesus as He is! It would be
worthwhile to die a thousand painful deaths in order to get one brief glimpse of
Him as He is. I do not think that Rutherford exaggerated when he talked of
swimming through seven Hells to get at Christ if he could not get at Him any
other way.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3004

“You may even learn something from what these busybodies say about you. It is
not true, of course. But, Brother, if they had known you better, they might have
said something worse that was true! They picked a fault where there was none.
Well, but you know there aresome faults that they do not know and had not you
better amend them lest they should pick those next time?”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2918

“Brothers and Sisters, if God has saved us, let us live as in the light of the
coming Day of Judgment! And may the Lord have mercy upon us in that day and
honor us because first, by His Grace, He enabled us tohonor Him!”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2906

“God is visiting a soul and healing it when it has enough faith in God to cast
itself, with a cry, upon His mercy. I cannot hope that there is a work of Grace
in you until I know that you pray. Ananias would not have believed that Paul was
converted had it not been said, ‘Behold he prays!’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3070

“When the Lord has taken us away from trusting in ordinances, then He shows us
what great blessings come from the ordinances when they are rightly observed.
When we trust to the preacher, or the preaching, we get nothing—but when we
trust in Christ alone, then He makes the preacher, the preaching and other means
of Grace to be the channels of blessing to our souls!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2892

“How can we so degrade ourselves as to worship that which God has given to us?
Yet you know that many make idols of their gold, their lands, their husbands,
their wives, their children, or their friends!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025 “If it
is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom, “Fear not, little flock,
be of good comfort,” the Kingdom of God you must and shall have!”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2963 “They who have no heart cannot display real indignation—but where
there beats a true heart of love, there must be righteous wrath against that
which is unloving—holy anger against that which is unjust and true.”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2910

“If God does anything, that is enough for us! If God says anything, that is
enough for us! Instead of arguing and reasoning, ‘It is written,’ or‘God has
said it,’ is sufficient to settle any question that concerns a
Christian!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2978 “The man who thinks he has only a few sins
may bring his little bill—and you who know that you have many sins may bring
your big bill—but Christ’s receipt avails for one as much as the other! Even if
the roll of your guilt should be many miles long, it makes no difference to the
efficacy of the blood of Jesus! If the list of your sins should be long enough
to go right around the world—and just one drop of the blood of Jesus should be
put upon it—all that is written there would at once disappear and be gone
forever! And the sinner would be saved in the Lord with an everlasting
salvation.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3069

“Brothers and Sisters, I pray you to suspect that it is presumption and not the
full assurance of faith if you are always ‘going,’ but never ‘weeping.’ I have
already explained that this ‘weeping’ does not put aside the rejoicing, for a
Christian may ‘rejoice in the Lord’ all the more while he mourns before God on
account of his own shortcomings, waywardness and faultiness.”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3049

“Do you now desire to live unselfishly, to live for others, to live for God? Are
you prayerful? Do you come to God in prayer as Jesus did? Are you careful of
your words and of your acts as Christ was? I do not ask you if you are perfect,
but I do ask whether you follow the Perfect One? We are to be followers of
Christ, if not with equal steps, still with steps that would be equal if they
could!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2920

“Now, dear Friend, if you have been enabled to break through your former
attachment to mere external ceremonies—if you have fully comprehended that true
religion is not a matter of mere externals—you are “not far from the Kingdom of
God.” You are one of those who are learning that ‘God is a Spirit and they that
worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeks such
to worship Him.’ I hope He is seeking you and that, before long, you will not
only be nearthe Kingdom, but actuallyinit!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2989

“My testimony is that if I had to die like a dog. If this life were all and
there were no hereafter, I would prefer to be a Christian for the joy and peace
which, in this present life, godliness will afford.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3005

“It is no unusual thing for a little child to be the god of the family—and
wherever that is the case, there is a rod laid up in store in that house. You
cannot make idols of your children without finding out, sooner or later, that
God makes them into rods with which He will punish you for your
idolatry!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025

“The advent of Christ brings to the heart celestial beauty! Faith in Him decks
us with ornaments and clothes us as with royal apparel! Better garments than
Dives had, though he wore scarlet and fine linen, does Christ give to His people
when He comes to them! And better fare than Dives had, though he fared
sumptuously every day, does Jesus bestow upon His saints when he shines into
their hearts! Oh, the glory of the sunrise of the Savior on the darkness of the
human soul!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2947

“‘With God all things are possible,’ which means not only that God can do all
things, but that we also can do all things when God is with us!”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2963

“I have seen and often is my spirit melted at the sight of one whose sufferings
seldom abate, yet whose desire to serve God never abates, but rather increases
and who would give anything if activity might take the place of patience.
Blessed be those weak ones whom the Lord elects to suffer, yet who still seek to
serve Him! And blessed are those who actively serve Him, yet sit humbly at His
feet and feel that they are less than nothing and who weep tears of joy to think
that God should so honor such poor worms as they are as to permit them to do
anything for His dear name’s sake!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3049

“I am always pleased to see our dear Brothers and Sisters diligent in the
service of Christ. I am glad to miss many of you on the Lord’s-Day evening when
I know how well you are engaged. I could spare a few more of you if you were
intent upon teaching the young, or exhorting those who are out of the way. But I
earnestly admonish you never to be negligent of your own souls while you are
vigilant for the souls of others! If you do not get nourished with the Bread of
Life yourselves, you cannot grow in Grace.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2914

“O Sirs, mere words strung together, whether they are in Hebrew, or Greek, or
Latin, or English, are of no avail before God! It is the utterance of the
heartthat He hears, and you must never imagine that there is any excellence in a
certain arrangement of letters and sounds, or that certain men, by the use of
these words, can bring down blessings from above!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2978

“There is a so-called ‘regeneration’ by a priestly ceremony which leaves the man
or the child as unregenerate as he was before the ceremony had been performed!
But the regeneration by the Holy Spirit entirely changes the nature of the
pea-son concerned and bestows upon him or her a new heart and a right spirit. To
have this high privilege is to have one of the choicest gifts of Heaven—indeed,
it is that which is essential to the enjoyment of all other blessings!”—Volume
53, Sermon #3071

“There have been many remedies recommended by various quacks—some have come with
their so-called ‘sacraments.’ Some with their ceremonies, some with their
philosophies—but they are all quacks and their medicines have no healing power!
The only cure for the wounds of sin is to be found in the stripes of
Jesus.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2887 “Some people are much too big to go through
Heaven’s gate. They are so wise, in their own estimation, that they are not
willing to be taught even by Infinite Wisdom. Their judgment is so accurate,
their intelligence is so clear, that they will not submit to be instructed by
Him who is the very Wisdom of God. They think that they have within themselves
the power to draw an Infallible distinction between right and wrong, between the
Truth of God and error—and they will not allow even the Almighty to dictate to
them, and to be the Arbiter of their lives. Ah, Brothers and Sisters, this is a
sad state for anyone to be in! But it is a hopeful sign when we are teachable.
If you are so, you are ‘not far from the Kingdom of God.’”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2989

“Do you remember a touching story, told some years ago, of a poor mother with
her two little fatherless children? On a cold winter’s night they discovered an
empty house, into which they went for shelter. There was an old door standing by
itself, and the mother took it, placed it across a corner of the room, and told
the children to creep behind it so as to get a little protection from the cold
wind. One of the children said, ‘Oh Mother, what will those poor children do
that haven’t got any door to set up to keep out the wind?’”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3025

“The Son of Man, none other than He who said, “I am meek and lowly of heart,”
has come to seek and to save the lost.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3050

“Perhaps you remember Mr. Whitfield’s speech to his brother who had long been in
distress of mind, who said at last, across the table, ‘George, I am lost.’
George said, ‘I am glad to hear it,’ and answering his brother’s startled
expression, he continued, ‘because the Son of Man is come to seek and to save
that which was lost.’ That brief utterance of the Gospel lifted his brother out
of despair into a clear and abiding hope in Jesus Christ!”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2925

“You know that in countries where leprosy prevails, they shut up the lepers in a
place by themselves, lest the terrible disease should pollute the whole
district. And Hell is God’s leper colony where sinners must be confined forever
when they are incurable and past hope!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3069

“Many professing Christians come to God’s House to sleep and then go home to
sleep. They walk about sleeping, sleeping with their eyes open, spiritually
sleeping while they are wide awake about mere secular matters. But it is as
comfort to know that, while professors sleep and lambs sleep, Jesus still goes,
spiritually, to the Mount of Olives. The only hope for the slumbering Church is
the wakeful Savior!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3003

“Some people seem to be afraid lest we should be the means of saving some of the
non-elect—but that is a fear which never troubles either my head or my heart,
for I know that with all the effort and preaching in the world, we shall never
bring more to Christ than Christ has had given to Him by His Father!”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2937

“It is an astounding thing and a great proof of human depravity that men do not
themselves seek salvation. They even deny the necessity of it and would sooner
run away than be partakers of it!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3050


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  CHAPTER 6: VOL. 3 CONTD
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“‘By their fruits shall you know them,’ is an Infallible test of doctrines as
well as of disciples! And if any of you have embraced any form of doctrine which
hinders you from being watchful, prayerful, careful and anxious to avoid sin,
you have embraced error and not the Truth of God, for all God’s building tends
towards holiness, towards carefulness, towards a gracious walk to the praise and
Glory of God!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2904

“None but the Spirit of God can make a man call himself a sinner and mean it.
Nothing but the Irresistible influence of the Holy Spirit can ever bring a man
as low as the Word of God would have him lie. If you can feel, in your soul,
tonight, that your iniquity is great, that it deserves God’s wrath, displeasure
and punishment—if you can pray from your very heart, ‘O Lord, pardon You my
iniquity, for it is great’—I shall have hope of you that the first sparks of the
Divine Light have fallen into your soul, never to be quenched, but to blaze out
in the brightness of salvation forever!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2988

“To preach to sinners a salvation which they cannot obtain would be to tantalize
them. We do not so, but to every person in this Tabernacle tonight and to
everyone anywhere else whom this message may reach, we have to say this, ‘If you
will confess your sins to God and then put your trust in Jesus Christ, His Son,
you shall be saved—even you, whoever you are, and whatever sins you may have
committed!’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3069

“O you who profess to serve the Lord, mind that you serve Him faithfully, for it
is ‘the living God’ whom you serve, the God who is not to be mocked with
hypocritical service! O you who know that you are not reconciled to Him,
remember that it is to ‘the living God’ that you are not reconciled! And
recollect that solemn and true declaration, ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into
the hands of the living God.’ And that other, ‘Our God is a consuming
fire.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2964 “Some say, ‘If the people want to hear the
Gospel, let them go to church or chapel—they can always hear the Gospel when
they like.’ That is not Christ’s way! We are to go and seek them! Open-air
preaching is a blessed institution and though you may block up a thoroughfare
sometimes, it is better to do that than that the thoroughfare to Hell should be
crowded!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3050

“O dear Friends, all this is contrary to the spirit of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ! There is far more power with God in the humble acknowledgment of
sinfulness than in a boastful claim of cleanliness—much more power in pleading
that Grace will forgive than in asking that Justice should reward—when we plead
our emptiness and sin, we plead the truth—but when we talk about our goodness
and meritorious doings, we plead a lie! And lies can never have any power in the
Presence of the God of Truth.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2978 “There is a wide
difference between physical force and spiritual force. God does not save an
unwilling man, but He makes him willing in the day of His power.”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2880

“The aim, end, and objective of God in salvation is to glorify His own
character! Therefore, if His choice may be said to be guided by any principles
which we can at all understand, that choice would be guided to select those who
would the most magnify His Grace and glorify His own name. Well now, if God
would do that great work of pardoning sin in such a way as to glorify His own
name, the most fitting persons to be saved are the biggest sinners!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2988

“You can be sure of this, though the devil may come out against you and assail
you in fashion which shall utterly stagger you, God has not forgotten you! Jesus
has gone up on high and He is pleading for you that in this, your time of utmost
weakness and need, the Grace of God shall be sufficient for you and make a way
of escape for you out of all your troubles and temptations!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#3003

“The idolatrous church of Rome calls itself the only true church, outside which
none can find salvation, but although the church in Rome was once a bright and
glorious church, God forsook it and for many a day it has been the very center
of apostasy and abomination!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3051

“Some of you have been to everybody else for salvation except to the Lord Jesus
Christ. You have been to Rome and you have been to Oxford, and you have been to
self and I hardly know where you have not been! Yet, notwithstanding that, you
may come to Christ even now! He will not refuse you even now! Going to
Canterbury has not saved you, but going to Calvary can. You have found no help
in the city on the seven hills, but you may find immediate help on the little
hill outside Jerusalem’s gate—the little mound called Calvary, where the Savior
shed His precious blood for all who will put their trust in Him!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3069

“A church in agony for souls wants only to see men converted—she does not care
how or by whom the work is done as long as the people are brought to Christ!
Then is the Lord alone exalted.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2922

“If Christ did ask anything of you or me, if He did but ask repentance of us,
unless He gave us that repentance, His salvation would be of no use to us! But
He asks nothing. All He bids us do is to take Him as everything—and be nothing
ourselves. So, to the empty-handed sinner, He is such a full Christ that we may
well say, ‘He is like a morning without clouds.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2947

“There is not a true minister of Christ but would willingly lay himself down to
die if he could thereby see multitudes saved from eternal wrath! We live for
this. If we miss this, our life is a failure. What is the use of a minister
unless he brings souls to God? For this we would yearn over you and draw near
unto God in secret, that He would be pleased in mercy to deliver you!”—Volume
53, Sermon #3070

“Remember, Sinner, that there will never be a tear of acceptable repentance in
your eyes till you have first looked to Jesus Christ!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2901
“Praising God is one of the best ways of keeping away murmuring!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3025

“There are some of you who are in trouble and probably your chief trouble arises
from the fact that you will not absolutely submit to the Lord’s will. I pray
that the Holy Spirit may enable you to do so, for trouble loses all its sting
when the troubled one yields to God!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2893

“There is room in Christ’s heart for all who come to Him, so let many come
now.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3051 “Almost saved is altogether lost! There are many
in Hell who once were almost saved, but who are now altogether damned. Think of
that, you who are not far from the Kingdom. It is being in the Kingdom that
saves the soul, not being nearthe Kingdom.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2989

“Christians, being born-again—born from above—become as little children,
otherwise they could not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. They were very great
people once, but they are very little now. They thought, at one time, that they
were really growing as they grew bigger in their own estimation, but now they
understand that they are growing in the best fashion when they are growing
smaller!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3071“The seal of an American Missionary Society is
an ax standing between an altar and a plow, with the motto, ‘Ready for
either’—ready to work in God’s field yoked to the plow, or ready to fall beneath
God’s sacrificial axe and to smoke upon God’s altar—ready, with Paul, to be
offered up when the time of our departure is at hand! We have not a true idea of
the rights of God over us, or even of our own condition before Him unless we
feel that we are the sheep of His pasture and that He may do with us exactly as
He wills.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3006

“We go down to our graves, as Esther went to her bath of spices, to be prepared
for the embrace of the great King! And, in the morning of the Resurrection, this
poor body of ours, all fair and lustrous, shall be reunited with our glorified
spirit and we shall behold the face of the King in His beauty and be with Him
forever and ever! ‘God is not the God of the dead’ and, therefore, those of whom
He is the God will never die!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2964

“I tell you, though you are poor and ignorant, and perhaps can scarcely read a
word in the Bible—for all that, you may be better instructed in the things of
God than doctors of divinity if you go to the Holy Spirit and are taught of
Him!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2990 “Oh, you can sing, even by the rivers of Babylon,
if you have but faith! You may lie on your sick bed and feel great pain, yet
your spirit shall not smart, but shall dance away your pain if your heart is but
looking in simple confidence to Christ.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2890

“Brothers and Sisters, praise is God’s due when He takes as well as when He
gives, for there is as much love in His taking as in His giving! The kindness of
God is quite as great when He smites us with His rod as when He kisses us with
the kisses of His mouth. If we could see everything as He sees it, we would
often perceive that the kindest possible thing He can do to us is that which
appears to us to be unkind.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3025

“The Gospel teaches, indeed, that when a man believes in Christ, the sin of the
past is all blotted out and Christ’s righteousness is given to him so the man is
not saved by what he is, nor damned for who he was, but he is ‘saved through
Jesus Christ and through Jesus Christ alone.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2938

“The way of sense is to get everythingnow—the way of faith is to get everything
in God’s time. The worldly man lives on the present—the Christian lives on the
future.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3072 “If anyone asks, ‘How can a man have power with
God?’ The answer is, ‘Not because the power is in him, but he can have power
with God by reason of something that is in God.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2978 “It is
the Word of God that will restore you, Backslider. I hope it will do so this
very hour and that, soon, you will come to us, and say, ‘Take me into the Church
again, for the Lord has restored me to fellowship with Him through His blessed
Word.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2870 “I have heard it said that a sinner sucks in
happiness, such as it is, with the mouth of an insect, but that a Believer
drinks in bliss with the mouth of an angel—and it is so.”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2879

“There are countries where there is found salt from which the pungency has
completely gone. It is an altogether useless article and if there are men who
ever did possess the Grace of God , and who were truly God’s people, if the
Divine life could go out of them, they would be in an utterly hopeless case.
Perhaps there are no powers of evil in the world greater than apostate
churches—who can calculate the influence for evil that the Church of Rome
exercises in the world today?”—Volume 53, Sermon #3069

“Beloved, we must not confuse the Persons of the Godhead. The Holy Spirit is not
the Son of God. Jesus, the Son of God, is not the Holy Spirit. They are two
distinct Persons of the one Godhead. But there is such a wonderful unity and the
blessed Spirit acts so marvelously as the Vicar of Christ, that it is quite
correct to say that when the Spirit comes, Jesus comes, too.”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2990

“Midnight services, hunting after the poor sinners in the streets at midnight,
the opening of Ragged Schools and Reformatories—all these things are the
fulfilling of the word, ‘The Son of Man is come to seek that which was
lost.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3050

“We must be looking for Christ to reveal the exceeding riches of His Grace and
Glory—not after vanities to display the pleasure of this present evil world—or
else our souls will soon lose the force and strength of piety and we shall have
good reason to cry, ‘Quicken me in Your way.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3026

“Oh, that God would teach us, by His Grace, to estimate the true value of our
actions, not by their outward appearance, but by the desire of our heart that
prompts us to them. For if we are kept back from sin merely by motives of
respectability, or because our fellows are looking upon us, we are as guilty
before God as if we had actually committed the sin because our heart still goes
after its filthy idols!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3006 “There is no sleep in Hell. Oh,
what a blessing sleep would be if it could enter the habitation of the
damned!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3072

“Self-righteousness often lies concealed far down in the heart of man—but
whenever he ventures to speak it out, the very way in which he talks of it
condemns him.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2932 “‘Behold,’ says the risen and glorified
Jesus, ‘I stand at the door and knock.’ It is at the door of Laodicea, the door
of that Church which was lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, and it is at your door,
O lukewarm Christian, that Christ is now knocking!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2965 “I
think there is scarcely such a day on earth to be had in Christian experience as
that first day when we came to Christ and knew Him as our Savior!”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2947 “How glad I am when I can receive husband and wife into the Church
at the same time! And I am still more glad when there is a little train of their
sons and daughters behind them all coming together to confess their faith in
Christ!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3051

“I wish that Darwin’s theory might be carried out in us as Christians until, as
he talks of an oyster developing into an Archbishop of Canterbury, we who at our
conversion were little better than the oyster, should go on developing,
developing and developing in spiritual things until we should know what John
meant, who said, ‘It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when
He appears we shall be like He, for we shall see Him as He is.’”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2926

“What does a beggar ask for? The poorest beggar that I ever met never asked me,
so far as I remember, for anything less than a drink of water and a bite of
bread—but here is a man who does not ask God for anything so little as that—he
asks for life itself! ‘Quicken me.’ The beggar has life—he only asks me for
means to sustain it. But here is a poor beggar, knocking at Mercy’s door, who
has to ask for life itself! And that beggar represents me—represents
you—represents, I am sure, every Christian who knows himself. You may well ask,
every day, for spiritual existence! It is not, ‘Enlarge me, Lord. Enrich me in
heavenly things,’ but, ‘Oh, do keep me alive! Quicken me, O Lord!’”[Psalms
119:37.]—Volume 53, Sermon #3026

“The preacher’s work is only half done when he has exhorted his hearers to stand
fast—he must then fall upon his knees and pray for them. And you who teach
others in the Sunday school and elsewhere, must remember that whatever you
exhort your scholars to do, you should always pray to God to lead them to do
it.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2991

“Do but know that God gave His Son for you, dear Friend—know that Jesus Christ
is yours and the logic of your prayer is clear enough, and forcible enough, when
you say, ‘What can You deny me, O my Father? You have given me Your Son, so, by
His blood and wounds, by His life and death, and resurrection Glory, give my
spirit the Grace it needs, since You have given me Jesus Christ.’”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2978

“The greatest freedom of thought is to think only God’s thoughts—and the highest
freedom of living is to live according to the rule of holiness in the ways of
the Most High.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3072 “I venture to prophesy that within 10
years from this date, the whole of this country will be permeated by Popery.
[These words spoken by Brother Spurgeon on October 16, 1866.] The advance that
Romanism has made during the last 10 years is so terrible that if it continues
to increase at only half that rate, my prophecy will prove to be a true one. The
very name of Protestantism will die out unless God sends us a revival of
Evangelical religion, for the fashion of the age is so set towards that which is
gaudy, sensuous and sensational—and the whole trend of ecclesiasticism is so
directly towards ceremonialism, that if we who love the old faith, do not bestir
ourselves, we and our fellow countrymen will plunge into the Stygian bog of
Popish superstition!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3006

“You might as well hope to be saved by the mumblings of a witch as by the doings
of a priest! You might as well hope to enter Heaven by blasphemies as by a
priest mumbling over certain words which he thinks to have virtue in them! God,
even our God, has denounced again and again those who delight in these errors
and who keep back the blood of Jesus and the power and merit of His
righteousness. Do not, I pray you, any of you think that this is the way to
Heaven, for it is not. ‘Jesus said unto him, I am the way.’”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2938

“If Christ can draw one soul to Himself, why can he not draw twenty? And if He
can draw twenty, why not twenty thousand, and why not thousands of millions? Why
should not we live to see many millions of souls converted to God? Let us pray
to the Holy Spirit to present the irresistible attractions of Christ to the
hundreds of millions in the whole human race!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3051

“Revelation 8:14—‘ And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen,
is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of
the wrath of her fornication.’ That is spiritual fornication, as we understand
it in the Old Testament—man’s idolatry—the setting up of visi ble objects of
worship instead of the invisible God. And what is there, in all the world, that
is so idolatrous as the so-called ‘religion’ of Rome? She multiplies her idol
gods to great excess—her crosses and her crucifixes, her saints and her
“sacraments” and her relic—her ‘old cast clouts’and her ‘old rotten rags.’ The
Papacy is the most pagan of all the paganisms that have ever existed on the face
of the earth—but it is to come to an end, for the mouth of the Lord has said
so.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2910

“Growing Christians reckon themselves to be nothing, but full-grown Christians
count themselves less than nothing! And when we feel ourselves to be ‘less than
the least of all saints,’ then we are indeed making good progress in the Divine
Life. To grow less and less in your own esteem is the right kind of growth.
Naturally, we grow up from childhood to manhood but, spiritually, we grow down
from manhood to childhood—yet it is not really growing down, but growing up as
we increase in humility.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3071

“I heard of a converted wife who despaired of her husband’s salvation, but she
used to be always very kind to him. She said, ‘I am afraid he will never be
converted.’ But whatever he wished for, she always got for him, and she would do
anything for him, ‘for,’ she said, ‘I fear that this is the only world in which
he will be happy and, therefore, I have made up my mind to make him as happy as
I can in it.’ But you, Christians, must seek your delights in a higher sphere
because you cannot be happy in the insipid frivolities of the world, or in the
sinful enjoyments of it!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3026

“Remember, Believer, that the Lord loved you long before the foundation of the
world. You are so insignificant in the scale of being that if He had quite
forgotten you, you might not have wondered. And yet, before the mountains were
created, or He had kindled the morning star, in the glass of His decrees He
beheld you and even then He loved you… Dwell on that wondrous Truth of God, that
God has loved you with an everlasting love. Suck the honey of consolation out of
that glorious fact! Surely if your faith is at all in exercise, you will find
much sacred sweetness there.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2991

“Be it remembered that even the work of the Holy Spirit, if it is depended upon
as a ground of acceptance with God, become as much an antichrist as though it
were not the work of the Holy Spirit at all! Dare we so blaspheme the Holy
Spirit as to make His work in us a rival to the Savior’s work for us? Shame on
us that we should thus doubly sin!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3007

“The great and mighty angels were passed by and we, who are but worms of the
dust, were looked upon with eyes of favor and love! And Satan, knowing this, and
being jealous of the love which lights upon men, cannot endure the Presence of
Christ.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2966

“Dear Soul, if you have begun to find out that even in the Christian Church
there are many opinions concerning many things, do not trouble yourself about
those things. This is enough for you—Your faith has saved you; go in peace.
There may be some who are galled to contend for this or that point of the faith
but, as for you, poor child, if, with your broken heart, you have found the
Savior, and if you love Him with an inward, warm and hearty love, do not spoil
that love by getting into a controversial spirit—‘Your faith has saved you; go
in peace.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2876

“The Bible is not the light of the world, it is the light of the Church. But the
world does not read the Bible, the world reads Christians! ‘You are the light of
the world.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3069

“Man, how dare you say that there is no hope for you? If the iron gates of Hell
were shut upon you and God had hurled the key of the Pit into the infinite
abyss, thenyou might say that there was no hope for you. But as long as there
trembles in the air that blessed invitation of Christ, ‘Come unto Me, all you
that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,’ it is only a lying
voice that tells you that there is no hope for you!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3027

“Has He [God] given you a promise and shall He not fulfill it? Yes, and fulfill
it again, and again, and again, as long as you shall need to have it fulfilled,
for His promises are inexhaustible and full of manifold riches of blessedness to
the believing soul!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2991 “It is possible for even a good man
to fail one who trusts him, but it is quite impossible for God to fail the soul
that has relied upon Him.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2978 “I am persuaded that the man
who loves Christ best is just the man who is most discontented with his own
love. When a man lives wholly for Christ, he is the very man who still looks for
something yet beyond and desires to serve Christ still more.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2919

“God forbid that I should say anything in praise of ignorance! Yet I think that
I might, in spiritual things, give it greater praise than I could give to
‘philosophy’ or ‘science’ falsely so-called. Happy and wise were the shepherds
to whom the angels came and sang and spoke concerning the birth of Jesus, for in
their simplicity, they went straight away to Bethlehem and found the newborn
King! But the wise men (happy, too, for a star came to guide them), in their
very wisdom seemed to make mistakes, for they went to Jerusalem and enquired,
‘Where is He that is born King of the Jews?’ and so, for a time, they lost their
way—and caused Herod to seek the life of the Holy Child Jesus!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3071“Yes, the name of Jesus has wondrous power over all the hosts of
Hell! So, Brothers and Sisters, let us not be discomfited nor dismayed by all
the armies of Satan, but let us with holy courage contend against all the powers
of evil, for we shall be more than conquerors over them through Jesus Christ our
Lord and Savior!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2966 “There is no cure for the love of sin
like the blood of Christ!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2887

“It spoils a man for satisfaction with this world to have had heart-ravishing
dealings with the world to come. I mean not that it spoils him for practical
activity in it, for the heavenly life is the truest life even for earth, but it
spoils him for the sinful pleasures of this world—it prevents his feeding his
soul upon anything but the Lord Jesus Christ’s sweet love.”—Volume 52, Sermon
#3007 “I pray God that those professors who do nothing for Him may be miserable!
‘That is a very unkind prayer,’ say some of you. No, it is not, for it is meant
for your good. See, if you get to be happy in your idleness, you will stay in
that sinful state. But if you are unhappy while you are doing nothing for the
Master, I think you will be the more likely to say to Him, ‘Lord, what will You
have me to do?’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3027

“If you are not on the side of Christ you are on the side of His enemies, for
this is a fight which admits of no neutrality. And if you cannot feel that you
would, like Stephen, defend the cause of Christ, then I fear you only lack the
opportunity and the circumstances, if not to stone Stephen, yet, at least, to
let those who do the dreadful deed lay their clothes at your feet!”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2948

“Even when the Believer sins, the Holy Spirit does not utterly depart from him,
but is still in him to make him smart for the sin into which he has fallen. The
Believer’s prayers prove that the Holy Spirit is still within him. ‘Take not
your Holy Spirit from me,’ was the prayer of a saint who had fallen very foully,
but in whom the Spirit of God still kept His residence, notwithstanding all the
foulness of David’s guilt and sin.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2990

“I pity the poor creatures who believe in popish miracles, but I have now
learned to think that those who can believe in such frauds are not half such
idiots as the men who try to teach us that inanimate matter has fashioned itself
into those marvelously beautiful shapes in which we see it all over this
wondrous world which God created ‘in the beginning.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3071

“You say that you have done nothing wrong and that you are right. But suppose
that tomorrow you were to be called to stand at God’s Judgment Bar—would you
feel comfortable at the prospect? ‘Oh, no!’ you say. I felt sure that must be
your answer. Indeed, all the religions in the world that teach the doctrine of
salvation by worksare at least honest enough not to pretend to ensure for any
man present salvation!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2932

“Brothers and Sisters, often, to will is present with us, but how to perform
that which we would, we find not! The understanding is convinced and that leads
the van. Firm affections are awakened and they follow after. But there is a
weaker passion which would, if it dared, consent to sin—and that is this flesh
of ours in which there dwells no good thing! It is this dangerous rear, this
weakest part of our nature, which we have most cause to dread.”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3028

“I was preaching in Bedford, and I prayed that God would bless the sermon and
give me at least some few souls that afternoon. When I had done, there was an
old Wesleyan brother there who gave me a good scolding, which I richly deserved.
He said to me, ‘I did not say, ‘Amen,’ when you were asking for a few souls to
be converted, for I thought you were limiting the Holy One of Israel! Why did
you not pray with all your heart for all of them to be saved. ‘I did,’ he added,
‘and that was why I did not say, ‘Amen,’ to your narrow prayer.’”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2978

“I look upon Samson’s case as a great wonder, put in Scripture for the
encouragement of great sinners. If such a man as Samson, nevertheless, prevails
by faith to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, so shall you and I!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#3009

“David further says, concerning his iniquities, ‘They are more than the hairs of
my head: therefore my heart fails me.’ Well, when our heart fails us, let us
recollect the mercy which has helped us so long—and let us cast ourselves again
upon that mercy for all that lies before us.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2916

“It is really scandalous when nurses and others tell little children idle tales
and foolish stories which the children believe to be true. We should be very
careful and jealous concerning the faith which a little child has in its elders
and never do or say anything to weaken their belief.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3071

“I am glad to hear that crowds are going to listen to the Gospel preached and
sung by our two American Brothers, Moody and Sankey. God grant that in their
services, there may not be merely the excitement of multitudes gathering
together, but the power of the Spirit of God working upon the hearts and
consciences of the hearers, for where that is felt, there is sure to be a stir
in the city!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2939 “Christ came into the world to preach the
Gospel, but He came on a greater errand than that, namely, to provide a Gospel
that could be preached—and He knew that the time was approaching when He must
provide that Gospel by dying upon the Cross.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2874

“I see before me many, very many veterans. Your gray hairs tell of your nearness
to Heaven. I trust your locks are whitened with the sunlight of Glory! Oh, be
not afraid! You shall find it a blessed thing to sleep in Jesus—and even as you
go to that last bed, you shall not tremble, for He shall be so manifestly with
you that you shall not be afraid!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3028

“Do you not see, dear Friends, that there is not only all you can need, but all
you think you can need wrapped up in a sentence, ‘I will come to you’? ‘It
pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell,’ so that when Christ
comes, in Him ‘all fullness’ comes! ‘In Him dwells all the fullness of the
Godhead bodily,’ so that when Jesus comes, the very Godhead comes to the
Believer!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2990

“I wish I could depict…between unconverted persons and Christians, for there is
a contrast between them, a contrast which will come to this one day—there will
be a great gulf fixed between them, across which there will be no passage. At
the Last Great Day, the righteous shall be upon the right hand of the Judge and
the wicked on His left hand and Christ, Himself, shall stand between them, so
that the division shall last as long as Christ Himself shall live!”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2948

“We die, but it is not any longer as a punishment. It is the fruit of sin, but
it is not the curseof sin that makes the Believer die. To other men, death is a
curse—to the Believer, I may almost put it among his Covenant blessings, for to
sleep in Jesus Christ is one of the greatest mercies that the Lord can give to
His believing people!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3009

“‘Know you not that we shall judge angels?’ And then the devil shall receive his
final sentence and be forever banished to Hell! There he will be bound, no more
to wander… no more to dress out his antichrists and to work with his puppets,
the Pope of Rome and the false prophet, Mohammed—no longer able to beguile the
multitude and lead them astray—no longer able to go through Christ’s fields by
night and to sow his tares in the midst of the good wheat—but kept in prison,
forever bound in chains, to continue as an eternal and awful evidence of the
wrath of God against transgression!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2966

“In the crusade against the powers of darkness, with the salvation of sinners
for my one undivided aim, little care I for anything but the lifting up of my
Master’s Gospel and the proclamation of the Word of mercy through His flowing
blood!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2979

“A hope that is founded upon a lie is a vain hope, but a hope that is founded
upon a promise of God is a good hope. It is a good hope because it is a hope of
good things—so good, my dear Friend, that you cannot find anything to match them
in the whole world. It may well be called a good hope, for it is the hope of
perfection, the hope of being transformed into the image of Christ, the hope of
everlasting delight.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2991

“Looking at the history of the whole Church, it is cheering to us to see that
God has never sustained a defeat. And when His army seems to have been repulsed
for a time, it has only been drawn back to take a more wondrous leap to a yet
greater victory!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3028

“Do you not know that the higher you rise, even in the Church of Christ, the
more responsibility you have and the heavier burdens you have to carry? Do you
not also know that the way to be really great is to be little—and that he who is
greatest of all is the one who has learned to be least of all? He who is chief
in the Church of Christ is he who serves the Church most and who is willing to
go lowest for Christ’s sake! Cultivate that kind of greatness as much as you
like, but put aside the other, and be not of ambitious mind even in your Lord’s
service!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2871

“Beware of a mere ancestral religion which may be of no more value than the
ancestral religion of the Chinese! Do not suppose that you are personally right
in the sight of God because you have had a godly mother and father, or godly
grandparents? Christ’s message to all who have not been regenerated by the Holy
Spirit is, ‘You must be born-again.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3008

“Christ not only comes to those who seek Him, but, in the splendor of His Grace,
He is often found of them that sought Him not! Yes, those who cried, ‘Let us
alone,’ are not let alone, for Grace brings them beneath her blessed
sway.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2892

“When Christ is preached, there is a defiance given to the enemies of the Lord.
Every time a sermon is preached in the power of the Spirit, it is as though the
shrill clarion woke up the fiends of Hell for such a sermon to say to them,
“Christ is come forth again to deliver His lawful captives out of your power!
The King of kings has come to take away your dominions, to wrest from you your
stolen treasures, and to proclaim Himself your Master.””—Volume 52, Sermon #2979

“Brothers and Sisters, the way to maintain fellowship with Christ is very
simple. If you desire to retain in your mouth all day the flavor of the“wines on
the lees well refined,” take care that you drink deeply of them by morning
devotion.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3046 “No Christian is ever safe when his soul is
so slothful or drowsy that it needs quickening. Of course you do not understand
me to mean that his soul is in danger of being lost. Every Christian is always
safe as to the great matter of his standing in Christ, but he is not safe as
regards to his standing and happiness in this life. Satan does not often attack
a Christian who is living near to God—at least, I think not. It is when the
Christian gets away from God and gets half-starved and begins to feed on
vanities, that the devil says, ‘Now I will have him!’—Volume 53, Sermon #3026

“If the mind of Christ is in His people, it will make them so far superior to
other men that it must be inferred that some superior energy is in them and that
superior energy is none other than the love of Christ.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2872

“It is one of the characteristics of the Doctrines of the Gospel that the older
a man gets, the more he loves them. I always find that the older saints become
more Calvinistic as they ripen in age—that is to say, they get to believe more
and more that salvation is all of Grace. And whereas at first they might have
had some rather loose idea concerning free will and the power of the creature,
the lapse of years and fuller experiences gradually blow all that kind of chaff
away.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2991

“…remember that all those who have continued in a state of nature have, without
exception, perished. Not one, however high in station, however excellent in
morality, however profound in learning, however lofty in fame has ever been able
to pass the threshold of Heaven except through the blood and merit of the Lord
Jesus Christ!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2894

“In this present age idol temples are being set up almost everywhere by our
Ritualistic clergy! And a form of idolatry that is on a par with the fetishism
of ignorant Africans has come back to this land, for they make a god out of a
bit of bread. And after worshipping their idol, eat it up—a process which can
only be fitly described in such sarcasm as Elijah would have poured upon it if
he could have stood in the midst of these modem priests of Baal as he stood
among their prototype of old!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3071

“Some of us sat, this morning, at the close of the public service, around our
Master’s Communion Table, where we broke bread in His name, as is our custom on
the first day of the week, [1867] but, my fellow communicant, ‘Do you believe in
the Son of God?’”—Volume 52, Sermon #3008

“As the poor widow’s two mites drop into the treasury of the Lord, He receives
her gift with as sweet a smile as that which He accorded to the lavish gifts of
David and Solomon. In His Church, Christ teaches us that if we have more than
others, we simply hold it in trust for those who have less than we have—and I
believe that some of the Lord’s children are poor in order that there may be an
opportunity for their fellow Christians to minister to them out of their
abundance.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2888

“That true man of God, Dr. Hawker—I am told by a friend of mine who visited him
one morning—was asked to go and see a military review that was then taking place
at Plymouth. The doctor said, ‘No.’ My friend pressed him and said, I know you
are a loyal subject and you like to see your country’s fleets—it is a noble
spectacle.’ The doctor said, no, he could not go and, being pressed until he was
ashamed, he made this remarkable answer, ‘There are times when I could go and
enjoy it, but my eyes have seen the King in His beauty this morning, and I have
had so sweet a sense of fellowship with the Lord Jesus that I dare not go to
look upon any spectacle lest I should lose the present enjoyment which now
engrosses my soul.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3026

“I sometimes hear people say, as an excuse for professors going to doubtful
places of amusement, ‘You know, they must have some recreation.’ Yes, I know,
but the re-creation which the Christian experienced when he was born-again has
so completely made all things new to him, that the vile rubbish called
recreation by the world is so dull to him that he might as well try to fill
himself with fog as to satisfy his soul with such utter vanity! No, the
Christian finds happiness in Christ Jesus—and when he needs pleasure, he does
not depart from Jesus.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3046

“I have known some people who have wished for trouble—it is a great pity that
anybody should be so foolish as that. I remember one who used to think that he
was not a child of God because he had not had much trouble. He used to fret all
day long because he had nothing really to make him fret!”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2912

“Make no idol of your child, or your wife, or your husband, for by putting them
into Christ’s place, you really provoke Him to take them from you! Love them as
much as you please—I would that some loved their children, their husbands, or
their wives more than they do—but always love them in such a fashion that Christ
shall have the first place in your hearts.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3071

“If you want to defy the devil, don’t go about preaching philosophy! Don’t sit
down and write out fine sermons with long sentences, three quarters of a mile in
length! Don’t try and cull fine, smooth phrases that will sound sweetly in
people’s ears. The devil doesn’t care a bit for this! But talk about Christ!
Preach about the suffering of the Savior! Tell sinners that there is life in a
look at Him and straightway the devil takes great offense.”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2979 “We have a proverb which reminds us that, ‘Rome was not built in a day,’
and we cannot always expect the new Jerusalem to be built in men’s hearts in a
single hour!. There are some who are struck down at once, as Saul was
afterwards, but there are others, against whose strong fortress the battering
ram of the Truth of God must come with all its might year after year—and it is
only when God strikes the effectual blow of Divine Grace that, at last, they
yield, subdued by Almighty Love!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2948

“A man may be and I think sometimes will be in doubt as to whether he really
believes in Jesus, but chronic doubt is a sin that is not to be tolerated.
Constant questioning as to whether you are saved, or not, is an unhealthy state
for any of you to be in. You cantell and you oughtto tell whether you believe in
Christ, or whether you do not believe in Him.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3008

“Some of you ought to thank God that He does not let you have a very easy or
merry time. He does not let you settle on your lees, but keeps on emptying you
from vessel to vessel. The reason for this is that He has designs of love for
you and He means that you never should rest till you rest in Him.”—Volume 51,
Sermon #2966

“What does the Gospel ask of us? It certainly asks nothing of us but what it
gives to us. It never asks of any man a sum of money in order that he may redeem
his soul with gold. The poorest are as heartily welcomed by Christ as the
richest! And the beggar who could count all his money on his fingers is as
gladly received as the millionaire who has his stocks and his shares, his lands
and his ships! Poor men are bid to come to Jesus ‘without money and without
price.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3029

“I have some sort of respect for a downright honest infidel, like Voltaire or
Tom Paine, but I have none for the man who goes to college to be trained for the
Christian ministry and then claims to be free to doubt the Deity of Christ, the
need of conversion, the punishment of the wicked and other Truths of God that
seem to me to be essential to a full proclamation of the Gospel of
Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3071

“Old saints get what is called ‘a sweet tooth.’ They love the sweet things of
the Covenant. They like their meat to have a rich savor. I am not old yet, but I
confess that I get more and more fond of the sweet things of the Gospel of Grace
and cannot endure the novelties that are so current and so exceedingly popular
nowadays. Oh, no! Tell me of my Father’s eternal love, tell me of my Savior’s
precious blood, tell me of the Spirit’s sacred indwelling and my heart is glad!
But tell me anything short of this and my soul is not fed.”—Volume 52, Sermon
#2991

“The message we have to deliver to you is not this—‘ere is Christ and you may
have Him or leave Him, as you please—and it is left to your own choice which you
will do.’ No! But it is this—‘In the name of God we command you to believe on
the Lord Jesus Christ and it will be at your peril that you will reject Him, for
He is soon to came to be your Judge. And if you reject Him as your Savior, He
will certainly destroy you in that day.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2939

“We, as Baptists, have no objection to your bringing everything that is taught
to the test of the Bible, for we know that we would be the gainers if you were
to do that. But instead of using the plumb line of the Bible, many people have a
newly-invented test—the Book of Common Prayer, or Minutes of the Conference, or
something else equally valueless! Now, whatever respect I have for books of that
sort, I prize my Bible infinitely above them all and above all the volumes of
decrees of popes, councils and conferences put together!”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2904

“Possibly you have not succeeded with God because you have not sunk low enough
before Him. You unconverted ones, especially, if you put your mouths in the very
dust, that will be the best attitude for you to assume. If you still have some
relics of strength, you will not receive Divine Strength. If there are some
remnants of the pristine idea of human merit tolerated in your heart, the robe
of Christ’s righteousness will not be wrapped around you!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#3010

“The Believer has received Christ into his trust, and this he did at his
spiritual birth. He received Christ into the arms of his faith. He took Jesus
Christ to be, henceforth, the unbuttressed pillar of his confidence, the one
Rock of his salvation, his strong castle and high tower. And, in this sense,
every soul that is saved has ‘received Christ Jesus the Lord.’”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3030

“Many of us are about to gather around the Communion Table to celebrate the
death of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This ordinance should help us to keep
ourselves from idols, for if there is any place where idols disappear, it is at
the foot of the Cross!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3071

“Believers ought not to be solitary stones, lying by themselves—they should be
built up into “a holy temple in the Lord, built together for a habitation of God
through the Spirit.” So, dear Friends, if you are on “the Lords side,” admit it
and join with those who also are on that side.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2884

“You cannot see God till your heart is changed, till your nature is renewed,
till your actions, in the tenor of them, shall become such as God would have
them to be.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902

“Fear is often the mother of courage. To fear God makes a man brave. To fear man
is cowardly, I grant, but to fear God with humble awe and holy reverence is such
a noble passion that I would we were more and more full thereof, blending, as it
were, the fear of Isaac with the faith of Abraham! To fear God will make the
weakest of us play the man, and the most cowardly of us become heroes for the
Lord our God!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2979

“The heart’s belief is to be so potent and energetic a thing that it constrains
us to confess openly what we have received inwardly—no confession is worth
anything unless it is the outcome of the Grace by which we have received the
Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3011

“Sometimes an attack of this kind is made upon us—‘It is no use trying to teach
the Gospel to children. We cannot suppose that they can understand its deep
mysteries.’ I heard that said only the other day. Well, I can say that we have
tried it and we have found that whether you choose to call them great mysteries
or not, children do understand the Gospel and seem, sometimes, to comprehend it
better than their fathers do just because they are so childlike! This
qualification for entering the Kingdom of Heaven is not fully-developed manhood,
but rather that we should become as little children. And unless we do become
childlike, we cannot enter the Kingdom.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2991

“Faith is the accepting of what God gives. Faith is the believing what God says.
Faith is the trusting to what Jesus has done. Only do this and you are saved, as
surely as you are alive!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2932 “Beloved, here is a test for
us—is our religion a receiving religion, or is it a working and an earning
religion? An earning religion sends souls to Hell. It is only a
receivingreligion that will take you to Heaven.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3030

“I am not a believer in that Apostolic succession which is supposed to come by
the laying of human hands upon human heads, but I believe that there has always
been, in the Church of God, a succession of faithful men so that, when one has
died, another has been called to take his place. And I believe that it will
always be so until Christ Himself shall come.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2948

“Many people seem to think that it is a very sorrowful thing to be a Christian,
that believers in Christ are a miserable, unhappy lot of folk who never enjoy
themselves. Well, I must admit that I do know some little communities of people
who reckon themselves the very pick of Christians and who meet together on a
Sunday to have a comfortable groan together, but I do not think that the bulk of
us, who worship in this place, could be truthfully charged with anything like
that! We serve a happy God and we believe in a joyous Gospel, and the love of
Christ in our hearts has made us anticipate many of the joys of Heaven even
while we are here on earth!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2966

“Faith is, in one sense, the gift of God, but, in another sense, it is a mental
act for which we are responsible. God gives us faith, but He does not believe
for us. He does not give us faith as we give our children bread, but He, by the
gracious operation of His Holy Spirit, makes us willing in the day of His
power—and then we will to believe in Jesus and we do believe in Him.”—Volume 52,
Sermon #3008

“No matter how excellent your reasoning may seem to be, and how clear it may be
to the eyes of the flesh, it is always pride to doubt God! And to believe God,
though, to the carnal mind which can never understand the bravery of faith, it
may look like presumption, is always a badge of the truest and most reverent
humility.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3030

“It is also the good news of pardon that inclines the heart to prayer. You would
never have heard of a man praying for mercy if there had been no mercy to be
obtained! If Jesus had never died and the Gospel had never been sent into the
world—if there had been no proclamation of pardon, it would never have been said
of Saul of Tarsus, “Behold, he prays.” No, prayer arises in the soul as a result
of the telling of the glad tidings that pardon is to be had. And prayer, like
faith and repentance, is a large part of “the fear of the Lord.” The man who
truly prays is certainly one who fears God.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2882

“You need not bring anything with you when you come to Christ, only come and
trust Him, and all your needs shall be supplied. Whatever your souls can need to
bear them safely through the troubles of earth—and bring them to the bliss of
Heaven—you shall have it freely given to you if you do but come flying with the
wings of faith to find a house and a home in Jesus Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3041

“It is a blessed thing to be such a fool that you do not know anyone to trust in
except your God. It is a sweet thing to be so weaned from your wisdom that you
fall into the arms of God.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2979 “Obedience to God is a
flower that never grew on nature’s dunghill! It grows only where the Spirit of
God has tilled the soil and planted the root from which it springs.”—Volume 52,
Sermon #3008

“You have most effectually cut the throat of all your hopes of ever being saved
by the Law of God! O Man, why do you try to do this when Christ has kept the Law
for all who trust Him? Do you think that Christ would have come all the way from
Heaven to keep the Law for you if you could keep it for yourself? If you could
be your own Savior, what need was there for Him to be stretched upon the Cross
and to bleed, and agonize, and die?”—Volume 52, Sermon #2992 “There is one who
asks, ‘Who is this?’ who is really seeking the Savior, but cannot find Him. You
say that you have been praying a long time, but have not yet found peace? Do you
not know that this is not the way to find peace? The way to obtain peace with
God is not by praying, but by believing.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2939

“Do you know a man who keeps his wheat year after year and never puts it through
the mill? Let me tell you that my God puts all His wheat through the mill—and
you must all go between the big stones and you must have your crushing! You will
never come out fit to be offered unto the Lord unless you have been between the
stones—there must be ‘the trial of your faith.’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2967

“The Gospel invitation rings through this building every Sabbath day— ‘Come and
welcome, come to Jesus, Sinner, come!’ We not only invite you, but we earnestly
press you, in Christ’s name, to come and put your trust in His great Sacrifice,
assuring you that, if you do, you shall find an everlasting and blessed home for
your souls.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3041

“The most powerful enemy of the Church can do nothing without God’s
permission!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2893

“There is, by nature, nothing in man to win the heart of Christ. What form, what
comeliness is there in human nature in His sight? Shall blackness win the heart
of Him who is without blemish and without spot? Shall loathsome leprosy be
attractive to the Divine Being? Shall deformity so charm the eyes of Jehovah
that He shall love it? It cannot be! The onlyreason for God’s love to us is that
He will love us. From that fountain of His own dateless love springs our
effectual calling and everything else that comes to us!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2880

“Neither does the Lord ask of us any severe penances and punishments in order to
make us acceptable to Him. He does not require you to put your bodies to
torture, or to pass through a long series of outward and visible mortification
of the flesh. You may trust Christ while you are sitting in your pew—and if you
do so, you shall be at once forgiven and accepted!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3029

“Some men wear their religion as men wear their hats—where it can be snatched by
a thief, or be blown away by the winds of temptation, or be laid aside to suit
their own convenience when they get into the devil’s drawing room. But the true
Christian carries his religion in his heart. And as his heart is always safe in
the very center of his being, so is his religion.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2992

“The nearer you get to perfection, the more horrified you feel because of the
sin that still remains in you! And the more horror you feel at your sin, the
more intense will be your gratitude to the bleeding Savior who has put that sin
away. And, in consequence, the more intense will be your love to Him.”—Volume
50, Sermon #2873 “The result of faith and confession is salvation.”—Volume 52,
Sermon #3011

“The most profound astronomer admires the Sun of Righteousness! The best-taught
geologist has no quarrel with the Rock of Ages! The greatest mathematician
marvels at Him who is the sum total of the universe! He who knows the most of
the physical, if he knows aright, loves the spiritual and reverences God in
Christ Jesus! To imagine that to be wise one needs forsake the Incarnate Wisdom
is insanity! No, to reach the highest degree of attainment in true learning,
there is no reason for departing from Christ.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3046

“The grandeur of the Atonement of Christ is a proof that its objective was the
removal of sin, however great that sin may be! The Son of God is Himself the
Savior of sinners! There must, therefore, be a colossal greatness about sin to
need the Son of Godto remove it, and to need that the Son of God shoulddiebefore
the more than Herculean labor of putting sin away could be performed. But,
having put away sin by the Sacrifice of Himself, He is now able to save even the
greatest of sinners.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2980

“I always court the trials if they are sent by a Brother in friendliness of
spirit. It is only the bitterness with which they come that sometimes makes my
blood boil about it. But I must look to the God that sends it and not to the man
who may happen to be the second cause! Whether as individuals, or as a Church,
or as a denomination, we shall have to say at last, ‘O Lord, Youhave, tested us.
Blessed be Your name that You have!’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2967

“The saints in Jerusalem did not know where Stephen’s successor was, but God saw
him among Stephen’s enemies and He brought him out and Saul was a mightier
Apostle than Stephen could ever have been! The Church lost Stephen, but she
gained Saul—and that was a very good exchange for, though nothing may be said
that would be derogatory to such a high-souled man as Stephen was, yet the
Church of Christ has never had a servant who, taking him for all in all, has
been so useful to her as the famous Apostle Paul who was once that young man
named Saul!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2948

“Do not delude yourself with the idea that there is a great deal for you to
doand to feelin order to fit yourself for coming to Christ. All such fitness is
nothing but unfitness! All that you can do to make yourself ready for Christ to
save you is to make yourself more unready! The fitness for washing is to be
filthy—the fitness for being relieved is to be poor and needy. The fitness for
being healed is to be sick and the fitness for being pardoned is to be a sinner!
If you are a sinner—and I guarantee you that you are—here is the Inspired
Apostolic declaration, ‘This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all
acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3029

“A great many people go to the Bible to find texts in it to endorse a system of
divinity which they have already embraced. That is not honoring God. The right
course is to get your system of divinity out of the Bible under the unerring
teaching of the Holy Spirit.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2906

“When you go home tonight, eat your supper and go to bed to the glory of God.
And when you get up in the morning, do not think about what you are going to do
at night. Do what comes to you when you begin the day’s work and keep right
straight on. If you can see a step at a time, that is about as far as you need
to see. Do not begin prying into the future, but just go straight on from day to
day, depending on God for the mercy and Grace and strength of the day. That is
the way to live and I am persuaded that is the way to die!”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2916

“God knows that I would sooner break stones on the road than be a minister if it
were not for the hope of winning souls! I know of no life that has more trouble
in it. I know of no occupation that brings more awful despondency of spirit upon
a man’s mind than my ministry brings upon me. So, if God does not enable me to
win souls by it, I pray Him to deliver me from it!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2894

“There are no slaves like those who serve their enemies and those are the
greatest slaves who are slaves to their own soul-destroying lusts.”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2992 “There is nothing standing between you and the pardon of your sins
but your unbelief—and if you will but shake that off, you shall march
triumphantly through the gate of Glory.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3009

“If a thing is not right—if it is not right all round, it is sin, you can be
sure of that. I heard the other day of a man who was said to be a splendid
Christian God-wards, but a wretched creature man-wards. But there cannot be such
a monstrosity as that. Such a man as that was not a Christian at all. Our
righteousness, if it is real and true, must be an all-round righteousness
towards men as well as towards God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3071

“I believe there are many Truths in Scripture that are just like two pictures on
a stereoscopic slide—they are really one—only you and I have not the
stereoscope! When we get to Heaven, we shall get a stereoscope and then they
will appear to be one. And we shall see that conflicting Truths of God, such as
free-agency and Divine Sovereignty, were only different views, after all, of the
same Truth taken from a little different angle. And we shall see how God gave us
both the Truths and how foolish we were to go against them.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2967

“Hear this Gospel, Sinner! You have no good works and you will never have any
until you repent of sin and trust the Lord Jesus Christ! If you try to have any,
they will all break down because the motive at the back of those supposed good
works will be this—you will do them in the hope of thereby saving yourself. What
is that but sheer selfishness—dead selfishness, which cannot be acceptable with
God?”—Volume 52, Sermon #2980

“I see an old gentleman, over there in Rome, with a triple crown on his head. We
do not want him, for “Christ is All.” He says that he is the vicegerent of God.
That is not true, but if it were, it would not matter, for “Christ is All,” so
we can do without the Pope!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2888

“There is not one Heaven for the great sinners and another for the little
ones—but there is the same Heaven for those who have been the greatest sinners,
but who have repented and trusted in Jesus, as there is for those who have been
kept from running into the same excess of riot. Let us admire the wondrous
tenderness of Divine Grace in its dealings with the very chief of
sinners!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3029

“All the flowers in God’s spiritual garden bloom double. There never was any
mercy of His which had not many other mercies wrapped up in it. Every one of
them contains far more blessing than we thought it did.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2883

“Do I speak to any Ritualist who finds himself awkwardly situated here? Do I
speak to any Romanist who has entered into a place where not the works of the
law, but the righteousness of Christ is preached? Let me remind you again, very
solemnly, my Hearer, that those fine hopes of yours built upon the maneuvers of
the priests and upon your own performances shall utterly fail you in that day
when most you shall need them! Your soul shall then stand in shivering nakedness
when you most need to be well equipped before the eyes of God. These men know
not true holiness!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902

“It is ours to do what Jesus bids us, just as He bids us and because He bids us,
for His command is our authority!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2939 “Surely we may praise
and bless the Lord whenever we see His Law written upon a human heart because it
is God’s Law, because it is God who wrote it and because it is the Spirit of God
who is the Agent, through the Word, by whom that writing is put there! Let us
join in hearty thanksgiving to Father, Son and Spirit, the Covenant-keeping God
who writes His Law in our hearts.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2992

“As the volcano is but the index of a mighty seething ocean of devouring flame
within the heart of the earth, so any one sin is only a token of far greater
sinfulness that seethes and boils within the cauldron of our nature! ‘Behold, I
was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.’”—Volume 52,
Sermon #3009

“Another blessed sharpener of our sense of sin is a consciousness of sin’s
tendency—knowing what sin really is and what it would do if it could have its
way without those blessed checks which Omnipotence put upon it. What would sin
do if it could? What didit do when God gave it liberty? It took God Himself and
accused Him, brought Him before its bar and there the sinner dared to sit and
judge his God—yes, and to condemn his God and even to slay his God!”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2873

“Would those in my congregation be saved? They must all be saved by one way! Do
they object to Christ as the plan of salvation? Then they must be damned, for
there is no other hope for them! Do they think this too hard? Do they think the
revealed plan of salvation too humbling? Then they must sink, even as the sons
of Adam sank beneath the mighty flood and all flesh was utterly consumed by the
overwhelming billows. There is but one way!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3042

“Most people like those things in which there are plenty of great armies. But
there arechosen men who always stand where there is nothing to rest upon but the
bare arm of God. This seems to be the test of the Christian when he can dare to
say, ‘This is the field of usefulness which God has put in my way. Though my
strength is not sufficient, I have faith. Here I am, and I will do it.’”—Volume
51, Sermon #2967

“The true way for a Christian to live is to live entirely upon Christ…Christians
have experiences and they have feelings, but, if they are wise, they never feed
upon these things, but upon Christ, Himself.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3030

“Sirs, if you will only trust the Lord Jesus Christ, you shall receive the
immediate pardon of your sin and with that pardon will come heartfelt gratitude
to Him who gives you the pardon! And with that gratitude will come intense
hatred of everything that He hates, and fervent love of everything that He
loves. And then you will do good work! But from what motive? Why, out of
gratitude to Him—and not being the result of selfishness, they will really be
good works, for they will be done with the view of pleasing God—not as a means
of getting something for yourself.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2980

“I know this, if the Lord had not first loved me, I never would have loved Him.
And if there is any good thing in men whatever, it must have been implanted
there by the Holy Spirit. If salvation is of works, then I can never have it—and
if it is the reward of natural goodness, then I shall never have it. I feel that
it must be of Grace, and of Grace alone.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2948

“Sin in a Christian is quite as much sin as it is in anybody else! Indeed, it is
a great deal more sinful, for never does a black stain seem so black as when it
falls on spotlessly white linen—and never is sin as sinful as when it is
committed by one who is greatly loved by the Lord and is the subject of peculiar
favor.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2933

“You would not teach your children, I suppose, to say their prayers backwards
and begin at, “Amen.” And you are beginning at the wrong end when you want,
first of all, to know your election instead of commencing with repentance
towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2920”

“Never let us doubt the universal benevolence of God. Let us hold it as a
fundamental Doctrine that ‘the Lord is good to all; and His tender mercies are
over all His works.’ And let us firmly believe that if any man shall be
consigned to carnal misery, it will be because it is just that he should so
suffer and he has brought his terrible doom upon his own head, for, as the
Apostle Peter tells us, God is ‘not willing that any should perish, but that all
should come to repentance.’ Yet, we must never forget that inside this universal
love there is a private, secret, distinguishing, discriminating love which is
set only upon those whom God chose, before the foundation of the world, to be
His own peculiar people.—Volume 52, Sermon #3012

“If God were now to give to any man all the blessings that He means to bestow
upon him in a few years’ time, it would ruin him!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2879

“Do not think, Beloved, because we preach election, that we preach the election
of a few? I find that this is a common mistake. Someone will say to me, ‘I don’t
like your Calvinism, Sir, because it says that there are a few elected and that
nobody else will be saved.’”—Volume 53, Sermon #3042 “The Law of God is perfect!
Let us say nothing against it. But it is not so glorious as the Law which Christ
has brought in and which He exhibited in His own Person. The glory of the Law
was great, but the glory of Christ’s Gospel is far greater! Remember, Christian,
that there is to be written on your heart the whole of God’s Law, but it is the
spiritof that Law—not the letter of it—which is to be written there. And what
that spirit is, you know, for our great Teacher epitomized it in one word, and
that one word is ‘LOVE.’ Love that furnishes the impulse while it prescribes the
duty.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2992

“If you really desire to have Christ’s love shed abroad in your heart, that is a
proof that Christ has already fixed His love upon you! If your head is now
beaten upon by the fierce sunlight of God’s wrath, you may come and find a
shelter in the great rock of Christ’s atoning Sacrifice!”—Volume 53, Sermon
#3031

“I do not think that a Christian knows much of doing business on the great
waters if he does not feel, sometimes, as if he would give all he has to have as
good a hope as the meanest lamb in Jesus’ fold has.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2967

“Secularism teaches us that we ought to look to this world. Christianity teaches
us that the best way to prepare for this world is to be fully prepared for the
next. Why it elevates and glorifies the secular duties which otherwise would
trail in the mire if our conversation, our citizenship is in Heaven, even while
we are on the earth!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2916

“Faith in the storm is true faith! Faith in a calm may be, or may not be,
genuine faith.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2893

“Come, heavenly Wind, and breathe upon these dry bones! Quicken them into life
and activity so that where there was nothing but death, there may be a living
army to serve the living Lord! And, blessed be His holy name, He will do it for,
wherever there is a true, heart-felt prayer for His Presence, He is already
present, dictating that prayer!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2980

“If some of the prayers I have heard at Prayer Meetings—though I must say that
the fault is less in this place than in most others with which I have become
acquainted—if some of the prayers at certain Prayer Meetings were less
doctrinal, less experimental and more argumentative with God, they would be more
like true prayer should be, for true prayer is just pleading with the Most High,
spreading our case before Him, and then pressing our suit with all the arguments
we can muster!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3010

“The richest blessing that you ever get from Christ is no new thing—it is just a
continuation of His old habits and practices and if He were, at this moment, to
lift His hands and give us some special blessing—as I pray that He may—it would
only be another link in a long chain of which every link is more precious than
the most valuable diamond in the world!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2949

“I think it would have been less painful to have been burned alive at the stake
than to have passed through those horrors and depressions of spirit which some
of us passed through while we were seeking pardon, but seeking it in the wrong
way.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3031

“Whenever we repair to the Lord’s Table, which represents to us the Passover, we
ought not to come to it as to a funeral. Let us select solemn hymns, but not
dirges. Let us sing softly, but none the less joyfully. This is no burial feast!
These are not funeral cakes which lie upon this table, and yonder fair white
linen cloth is no winding sheet. “This is My body,” said Jesus, but the body so
represented was no corpse!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2982

“When Christ came and redeemed us, there was, on His part, no display of
physical or mere brute power. There was a display of power, but it was the power
of goodness, the power to suffer, the power to be patient, the power to love. As
if God said to men, ‘Sinners and rebels as you are, I love you more than you
hate Me. And great as your badness is, My goodness shall overwhelm your badness,
My pardoning mercy shall overpower your power to transgress.’”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2876

“O beloved Brothers and Sisters in Christ, love without beginning is indeed
sweet, but there is a still more luscious sweetness in love without end!”—Volume
50, Sermon #2880

“The same Truth of God is taught in the memorable sentence which I quoted to you
just now—‘He that believes and is baptized shall be saved.’There is no saving
efficacy in Baptism, yet belief and baptism are joined together by our Lord
Jesus Christ and again I say, ‘What, therefore, God has joined together, let not
man put asunder.’ I would not like to attend to one duty and neglect another
when I found my Master laying both upon me. The path of obedience is always the
path of happiness and if any God-given command should ever seem to your
imperfect apprehension to be less important than another, remember the wise
words of the mother of Jesus to the servants at the wedding in Cana of Galilee,
‘Whatever HE says unto you, do it’—and do it conscientiously, gladly, promptly,
because He commanded it, even though you cannot see any other reason for doing
it.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3011 “You will find it recorded in Scripture that ‘it
repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His
heart,’ but you never read that He repented of redemption! Nowhere in Scripture
is there such a passage as this, ‘It grieved the Lord at His heart that He had
given His Son to die for such unworthy ones.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2968

“Who is so honored as the venerable Christian who has his sons and his grandsons
around him? He is a king, every inch of him, though, perhaps, he never earned
more than a day-laborer’s wages. As he lays his hands upon the heads of his
children’s children and implores his God to be their God, also, I seem to see a
Patriarch stand before me in a grandeur which an emperor might envy! God will
honor you in your family if you honor Him there.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2906

“Nor is Christ’s Kingdom limited to the Church in Heaven and the Church on
earth, for He reigns today over all things. ‘All power,’ said He, ‘is given unto
Me in Heaven and in earth.’ Providence is at the disposal of the
Nazarene!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2940

“We hold a happy festival when we break bread on the first day of the week. We
come not here trembling like bondsmen, cringing before the Lord as wretched
condemned serfs! They eat on their knees—we approach as freemen to our Lord’s
banquet, like His Apostles, to recline at length or sit at ease—not merely to
eat bread which may belong to the most sorrowful, but to drink wine which
belongs to men whose souls are glad. Let us recognize the rightness, yes, the
dutyof cheerfulness at this commemorative supper and, therefore, let us sing a
hymn!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2982

“Self-esteem naturally keeps Jesus out of the heart. And the more our
self-esteem increases, the more firmly do we fasten the door against Christ.
Love of self prevents love of the Savior!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3033 “The Lord,
then, has a people whom He regards with a special love which is not shed abroad
in the hearts of others. These people He set apart for Himself from
eternity.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3012

“Unless your heart is in your prayer, it is a wicked one, and God will not
answer it! He must hear it, but it will be only in indignation and He will say
to you, ‘What have I done that you should thus provoke Me to My face and bring
to Me mere empty shells when the kernel of the heart is altogether
absent?’”—Volume 51, Sermon #2950

“Jesus Christ lifted up upon the Cross has such mighty power that if a man had
all the sins of mankind resting upon him, yet, if he did but look to Christ by
faith, his sins would be all gone in a moment!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2980

“You may rest perfectly sure that falling back on the Doctrine of Election in
order to exonerate you from what God commands you to perform is but a pitiful
pretense! You are commandedto believe and what God commands no Doctrine may
teach that it is unfit for you to do! May God help you to believe, for this
Doctrine comes not to excuse you. The Gospel commandsyou and Election through
the Holy Spirit enablesyou.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2920

“I can perfectly understand God’s pitying me. I can perfectly understand God’s
having compassion on me. But I cannot comprehend God’s loving me—nor can
you.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2968

“I was told once, ‘When you sow seeds in your garden, put them in a little water
overnight—they will grow all the better for it.’ So, if you have been sowing
your seed, put it into tears and it will make your seed germinate better. ‘They
that sow in tears shall reap in joy. Steep your seed in tears and then put it
into the ground—and you shall reap in joy. No bird can devour that seed! No bird
can hold it in its mouth! No worm can eat it, for worms never eat seeds that are
sown in tears.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2896

“Self and the Savior can never live in one heart. He will have all, or none. So,
where self is on the throne, it cannot be expected that Christ should meekly
come and sit upon the footstool.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3033

“Many churches, nowadays, have given up the old-fashioned custom which once
prevailed in Baptist churches, of candidates coming before the Church and making
a public avowal of their faith before their fellow Believers and, through the
abandonment of that Scriptural method, they have bred a race of cowardly
good-for-nothings who hardly dare to say that their souls are their own, who
never know what their religious convictions are, but are turned this way and
that with every wind that blows, like so many weather-cocks!”—Volume 52, Sermon
#3011

“Ah, my Brothers and Sisters, when you think of unbelief as aiming her darts at
Jesus Christ, the Well-Beloved of our soul, surely you will say that it is a
shameful sin and a disgraceful crime against Infinite Love!”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2890

“There are two sides to all the moral questions in the world. There is holiness,
for instance. You all know on whose side that is. And there is unholiness—and
you have no difficulty in deciding on whose side that is.”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2884 “Sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal must be more musical in the ears
than the mere chattering of formalists, or the pretended prayers of those who
hope to gain thereby. He hears not prayers in which men sin as they pray and
insult Him when they appear to be devout.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2950

“Where, Beloved, can we find richer instruction than at the Table of our Lord?
He who understands the mystery of Incarnation and of Substitution, is a master
in Scriptural theology. There is more teaching in the Savior’s body and in the
Savior’s blood than in all the world! O you who wish to learn the way to comfort
and how to tread the royal road to heavenly wisdom, come to the Cross and see
the Savior suffer, and pour out His heart’s blood for human sin!”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2982

“I utterly abhor that so-called, ‘piety,’ which belongs only to places and to
dates! Your ‘holy’ places, and your ‘holy’ dates, and your ‘holy’ water, and so
on are all alike anti-Christian and Popish! To the Christian, every day is alike
holy, every place alike holy and everything alike holy. He is a sanctified man
and all things that are around him are sanctified to God’s service and to his
fellow creatures’ good and, to that end, he confesses Christ with his mouth at
all times.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3011

“God knows, to an ounce, just what His children and His servants can carry and
He never overloads them. It is true that He sometimes sends them more trouble
than they could have carried by themselves, but then, as He increases the weight
of their burden, He also increases the strength of the back upon which He places
it!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2912

“Though you are ready to lie down in despair. Though you suppose that Hell yawns
for you and will soon receive your guilty soul—He can turn this shadow of death
into the morning of peace and joy!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3034

“Jesus Christ, the Seed of the woman, sets His foot upon the monster, Sin, and
breaks its head. And if you believe in Jesus, that pierced foot of His shall
crush the life out of your sin and you shall be delivered from its power. Oh,
that you might have Grace to trust in Jesus for instantaneous pardon,
instantaneous regeneration, instantaneous deliverance from nature’s darkness
into God’s most marvelous light! If you are as prostrate as Peter’s wife’s
mother was, you ought not to lie still any longer when Christ is ready to give
you such a lift as that!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2980

“Sweet above all other things is love—a mother’s love, a father’s love, a
husband’s love, a wife’s love—but all these are only faint images of the love of
God!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2968

“Be not surprised, young converts, if you find sin to be terribly fierce within
you and if, sometimes, it seems even to be stronger than Divine Grace! It is not
really so, but it may sometimesappearto you to be so. And rest assured of
this—that sin in you is so strong that unless God the Holy Spirit shall help
you, it will get the victory over you. It will fail to get the victory over you
because God will help you, but if He did not, the smallest soldier in the army
of sin would be too strong for you, however powerful you may think yourself to
be!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2933

“Love is the Law of the Gospel! ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength; and your neighbor as
yourself.’ This is the Law of the Christian, and this is the Law which is
written on his heart! This is the sum and substance, the distilled essence of
all the Ten Commandants. You may forget those Ten Commandments, O Believer, if
you will but remember this new Law which is written on your heart, ‘Love, love,
love!’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2992

“Depend upon it, our sins will come home to us sooner or later! Jacob must have
bitterly regretted that he had ever wronged Esau. There was a long interval
between Jacob going away and his coming back, but his sin came home to him! And
if you are a child of God and you do wrong, it is more certain to come home to
you, in this life, than if you were one of the ungodly! As for them, they are
often left to be punished in another world, but if you are a child of God, you
will be chastened here for your iniquity.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3010

“Brothers and Sisters, if you never doubt your Lord till you have just cause to
do so, you will never doubt Him at all! And if you never have any mistrust of
His goodness till He betrays your confidence in Him, you will never mistrust
Him!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2877“To the unbeliever, it will prove a terrible thing
that Jesus ever came into the world! He is a precious cornerstone to those who
build upon Him, but those who stumble upon Him shall be broken—and if this Stone
shall fall upon any man, it shall grind him to powder!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3034

“I would that the men who can so well write popular songs and give to the people
attractive words and tunes to sing in the street or in the home, would
consecrate their talents to a better purpose by writing hymns and spiritual
songs to the praise and glory of God. We would then be the richer in our
Psalmody, as, indeed, we always are when God sends us a true revival of
religion, for revivals of religion always bring with them new hymns and
spiritual songs.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2941

“If the resurrection of Christ is not credible, there remains nothing credible
in history! I go further than that, and say that the news of yesterday, which
you read in this morning’s paper, you had no right to believe if you do not
believe in Christ’s resurrection, for the evidence in its favor is not half as
strong as the evidence concerning the resurrection of Christ from the
dead.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2950 “Holiness excludes immorality, but morality does
not amount to holiness, for morality may be but the cleaning of the outside of
the cup and the platter, while the heart may be full of wickedness. Holiness
deals with the thoughts and intents, the purposes, the aims, the objectives, the
motives of men. Morality does but skim the surface, holiness goes into the very
caverns of the great deep—holiness requires that the heart shall be set on God
and that it shall beat with love to Him.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2902

“How often that is still the cry of sinners, ‘Let us alone. Why do you not hold
your own views and let us alone?’ Yes the devils, and those whom they control,
still say, ‘Let us alone.’ But it is a part of the Gospel to attack that which
is not the Gospel—and it is as much the duty of the minister of the Gospel to
denounce error as to proclaim the Truth of God. If we do so, the old cry will
still be heard, ‘Let us alone. Let us alone.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2980

“Since you who so constantly hear the Gospel must have it made to you either a
savor of death unto death or of life unto life, I pray that the Eternal Spirit
may show you the wisdom of seeking God by Jesus Christ—and of seeking Him
now!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3034

“We should openly acknowledge Jesus Christ, my Brothers and Sisters, if only for
ourown sakes, for really, it does a Christian great good to say openly, ‘I love
the Lord.’ It gives happiness, comfort, satisfaction, rest of heart and lasting
joy to confess Christ before men!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3011

“It is a grand thing to be able to bury in eternal forgetfulness every unkind
word or act that has ever caused us pain. If any of you have any thought of
anger in your heart against anyone—if you have any feeling of resentment—if you
have any recollection of injuries. If there is anythingthat vexes and grieves
you, come and bury it all in the grave of Jesus—for if He loved you when you
were dead in sins—it cannot be half so wonderful for you to love your poor
fellow sinner whatever ill treatment you may have received at his hands!”—Volume
52, Sermon #2968

“A Christian silent when others are praising His Master? No! He must join in the
song. Satan tries to make God’s people dumb, but he cannot, for the Lord has not
a tongue-tied child in all His family! They can all speak and they can all cry,
even if they cannot all sing—but I think there are times when they can all
sing—yes, they must, for you know the promise, “Then shall the tongue of the
dumb sing.” Surely, when Jesus leads the tune, if there should be any silent
ones in the Lord’s family, they must begin to praise the name of the
Lord!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2982

“Our converts are worth nothing. If they are converted by man they can be
unconverted by man! If some charm or power of one preacher can bring them to
Christ, some charm or power of another preacher can take them from Christ. True
conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit and of the Holy Spirit alone!”—Volume
51, Sermon #2920

“Jesus never forgets the price He paid for the redemption of even one soul! I
think I hear Him say, my Brothers and Sisters, ‘By My agony and bloody sweat, by
My Cross and passion, by My death and burial, I will have him as My own, for I
cannot have suffered all these things in vain.’”—Volume 50, Sermon #2889

“Some men go to God and ask only for temporal favors and, possibly, they do not
obtain them. He who would be content with this world will probably never get
it—but he who craves spiritual good may ask with the absolute certainty of
receiving it!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2879

“Providential care extends not only to the righteous, but also to the
wicked—yes, and not only to the wicked among men, but to the very beasts of the
field. You know what I said to you, the other Sabbath morning, about the God who
makes the grass to grow for the cattle. [See Sermon No. 767, Volume 13—IN THE
HAY FIELD—Read/download the entire sermon, free of charge at
http://www.spurgeongems.org.] It is the same great Provider who feeds the young
ravens when they cry, and the hungry lions when they roar for their food. God’s
Providence not only extends to mankind in general, and to the beasts of the
field, and the birds of the air, and the innumerable fish in the sea, but also
to every atom of matter in the universe.”— Volume 52, Sermon #3012

“Christ’s ministers may all go home, for their office is useless, if there is no
forgiveness of sins!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2882 “He who is his own guide is guided
by a fool. He that trusts to his own understanding proves that he has no
understanding.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2893 “You, also, must often have heard of the
death of friends—and some day people will tell the survivors that you, too, are
gone. With unremitted sin upon you, you know where you will go, do you not? I
need not tell you where they are driven whose sin has never been forgiven— and
whose sin never will be forgiven—as they have passed out of this world unwashed
in the precious blood of Jesus!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2951

“I believe, Brothers and Sisters, that it is the duty of all converts to test
the various sections of the professing church by the Word of God and then to
cast in their lot with that part which holds the Truth of God most fully and
clearly. And, having conscientiously done that, to rally with the hosts of God
in the great battle against wrong.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2884 “To ask the way to
Zion, then, means to seek to come to Christianfellowship,to desire to be united
in Christian bonds with Brothers and Sisters who love each other because they
love one common Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, their blessed Savior!”—Volume 53,
Sermon #3035

“Trouble, like a sharp spade, digs up the earth that is about our roots and then
we bring forth more fruit. Were it not for the thorns in our nest, we would be
so content with its soft lining that we would sit in it till we died. But the
sharp thorns prick our breasts and then we turn our eyes aloft and learn to try
our wings, ready for the time when they shall have fully grown and we shall
mount to joys above! ”—Volume 52, Sermon #2993

“You who have the most familiarity with Christ and enjoy the most holy
fellowship with Him may soon become the very leaders of the hosts of Satan if
your Lord withdraws His Grace!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3013 “The more work we have
to do with men for God, the longer we ought to be at work with God for men. If
you plead with men, you cannot hope to prevail unless you first plead with
God.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2980

“Look at that great crowd gathered in Smithfield! Who is that poor wretch
standing in the middle? Many of those around him look upon him with the utmost
scorn and derision. They have chained him up to a stake, and they are bringing
dry firewood, for they are going to burn him to death! Who is that man? People
in the crowd cry out that he is a dreadful heretic who deserves to die! But if
you turn to Foxe’s Book of Martyrsyou will find his name recorded there among
the noble army who died as heroes of the Cross. Because he suffered for Christ,
God has honored him and, at this present day, who among us would not rather be
the martyr who was burned than the cardinal who was the means of getting him
burned? Who would not rather have been numbered among the faithful multitudes in
the valleys of Piedmont whose names are all unknown, than have been the Duke of
Savoy, or the King of France, or the Pope of Rome who conspired together to put
them to death?”—Volume 50, Sermon #2906

“You have never had half as many trials from God as you have manufactured for
yourself. Death, which you so much dread, is nothing compared with the thousand
deaths that you have died through the fear of death.”—Volume 50, Sermon #2890

“And though I like some of the new tunes very much and am glad that they are so
popular, yet, for my own part, I like a good old Psalm tune much better. It
seems to me like going away from the snows of Lebanon to seek after the stale
cisterns of earth when we leave the old music, and the old hymns, and the old
Psalms for any of your modern melodies. Still, if you can praise God better with
the new songs, do so, but let it always be done reverently.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2941

“Those who ask the way to Zion also thereby confess that they are not yetsaved.
It is a great work, a Divine work, to bring His people to confess that they are
not yet saved, for the most of mankind have the notion that, somehow or other,
all is well with them in the sight of God.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3035

“We should openly acknowledge Jesus Christ, my Brothers and Sisters, if only for
ourown sakes, for really, it does a Christian great good to say openly, ‘I love
the Lord.’ It gives happiness, comfort, satisfaction, rest of heart and lasting
joy to confess Christ before men! I have not the time to tell you of all the
blessings that I personally received through publicly acknowledging that Christ
was my Savior. One thing I may say, however, I believe that up to that time I
was one of the most timid persons in the world! I never spoke to anybody and
never ventured to give an opinion upon anything without tears coming into my
eyes. But, from that happy day when I walked into the water, at Isleham Ferry,
to be baptized into the name of Christ, I have never been afraid of any man in
the world, nor of the devil, either, while engaged in the pursuit of the things
of God! My Baptism was a sort of crossing of the Rubicon for me. I had burnt my
boats, drawn my sword and thrown away the scabbard—so there was no possibility
of going back—and I never wished to do so. And I believe that others, who are
always timorous, trembling and afraid, would derive perpetual benefit from once
and for all boldly openly acknowledging themselves to be on the Lord’s
side!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3011

“There is a sin which is unto death, but those who commit it never ask for
mercy, or desire it. They are dead even while they live, their conscience is
seared as with a hot iron, and they rush to Hell willingly.”—Volume 51, Sermon
#2951

“Afflictions also are often to the benefit of Believers in leading themto search
for sin. Our trials should be search warrants, sent to us from God that we may
search and find out the secret evil that is within us—the offense that we have
hidden, the lie that is in our right hand.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2993

“If Thomas will not believe that Christ is risen until he has put his finger
into the print of the nails in His hands and thrust his hand into his Savior’s
wounded side, that is bad enough—but it is worse if you who do believe that He
is risen and who do not doubt any one of the doctrines that He has taught you,
still have unbelief mingled with the faith which you possess! Whether that
supposed faith is all true, or not, is more than I can say, but, with so much
faith as you profess to have, how can you still continue to doubt?”—Volume 50,
Sermon #2890“If you are not yet saved, I pray that you may be made to know that
you are not. It is only God’s gracious Spirit who can convict a man who thought
all was well with him, that he is lost. Only the Holy Spirit can prove to him
that he is not a Christian, though he thinks he is one! And when he is made to
realize this, he will probably soon be transformed into that which he now
fancies that he is—a true child of the living God!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3035

“He [David] was a grand man, one in whom the Grace of God shone very
conspicuously, but he was a man of like passions with ourselves and we have
reason to thank God that he was—because his experience becomes all the more
instructive to us from the fact that while it teaches us that God can and will
forgive us if we repent of our great and gross sins, yet it also teaches us that
sin is an evil and a bitter thing, and that, though the guilt of it may be
removed, the evil consequences of it will cling to us and be a subject of sorrow
to us till God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2981

“Keep to a cause that is despised if you believe it is a right one and love it
all the more because it is despised!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2969

“I charge you, sons and daughters of Adam, to remember that since your father,
Adam, even in his state of innocence, could not direct his own way aright, but
lost Paradise for us all, there is no hope that, in your fallen state, you can
find your way back to Paradise! No, but you will keep on wandering further and
further and further from the way of peace and holiness, for, ‘it is not in man
who walks to direct his steps’[Jeremiah 10:23.]”—Volume 50, Sermon #2893

“I used to think that believing in Christ was some mysterious thing and I could
not make out what it was—but when I heard that it was just this—‘Look unto Me,
and be you saved,’ I found that the only reason why it was so hard was that it
was so easy!”—Volume 50, Sermon #2898 “I have known such a clatter of
worldliness or pride, or some other noise in the soul of man, that the still
small voice of the Holy Spirit has been drowned to the serious detriment of the
disciple.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2927

“Shall others fight to win the prize and shall you, as a coward, abide by the
stuff? God forbid! Instead thereof, the Lord help you to confess Christ in the
day of His rejection that you may be honored with Him in the day of His
exaltation! God help you to take His part in the midst of the sinners of the
world, that you may be with Him when the acclamations of cherubim and seraphim,
and the innumerable host redeemed by His blood, shall make all Heaven ring and
ring again with the music of His matchless name!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3011

“Brothers and Sisters, there is no teaching, no ministry, even of the
best-taught servant of God, that can do you such good as sanctified experience
will! You must learn for yourselves—under that blessed schoolmaster, Mr.
Affliction—you must study the sacred science of Divinity! It is good to go to
his school, for the lessons to be learned there are so beneficial. One of his
scholars wrote, ‘Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept Your
Word.’”—Volume 52, Sermon #2993

“Morality is a sweet, fair corpse—well washed, robed and even embalmed with
spices—but holiness is the living man, as fair and as lovely as the other, but
having life! Morality lies there, of the earth, earthy, soon to be food for
corruption and worms—holiness waits and pants with heavenly aspirations,
prepared to mount and dwell in immortality beyond the stars!”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2902

“It is usually a sure sign that we are in love with the Master when we are in
love with His servants and when we find delight in the company of His people. It
is surely because there is a secret drawing of our hearts towards Him.”—Volume
53, Sermon #3035 “If God were to give you all earthly good and yet took His
Presence from you—which He will do if sin is within you, and unrepented of—the
loss of His Presence would be a greater loss than the loss of the whole world,
or even of Heaven itself!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2981 “A way is none the less right
because it is rough. Indeed, often it is all the more sure to be the right way
because it is so displeasing to flesh and blood.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2969
“‘There is no devil,’ said one, ‘like having no devil.’ That is to say, there is
no temptation like the temptation of not being tempted!”—Volume 52, Sermon #3013

“You tried Believers must not imagine that God does not love you as much as He
did in the days of your spiritual youth when He did not test you as He does now.
He loves you quite as much as He did then and He trusts you even more than He
did then because He has made you stronger than you used to be! He gives you the
honor and privilege of marching with the vanguard of His army, or leading the
forlorn hope, or standing foot to foot with old Apollyon.”—Volume 50, Sermon
#2912

“We fell, federally, in Adam, and we fell, actually, by our own sin. But Christ
has put us back where Adam was in his state of innocence. No, He has done more
than that for us, for man was but man before he fell, but now man is linked to
the Eternal in the Person of the God-Man, Christ Jesus, so we are nearer to God
than Adam was before he fell!”—Volume 51, Sermon #2951 “Christ is superlatively
sweet to us and the next sweetest thing in all the world is Christ’s dear Cross.
He is, Himself, most precious, but next to the kisses of His lips are the
blows—the love pats—of His pierced hands.”—Volume 52, Sermon #2993

“One’s eyes might weep tears of blood when we think how unhappily some children
are placed in the very first moment of their advent into society. Glory be to
God, however, there are some of these that shall be first. God will find His
jewels in the dens, alleys and slums of London—and take up to His Eternal Throne
those that were the sons of harlots and the children of the thief—that they may
sing forever of His amazing Grace.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2934

“Remember this—there never was a saint who repented as much as he should have,
for repentance should be perfect and no Christian has ever attained to that
height.”—Volume 53, Sermon #3035

“O dear Friends, let us never be satisfied with any kind of worship which does
not take up the whole of our inner and higher nature! It is what you are within
that you really are before the living God! And it is quite a secondary matter
how loud the chant may be, or how sweet the tune of your hymn, or how
delightfully you join in it unless your spirit, your soul, truly praises the
Lord! You can sometimes do this in ‘songs without words’—and he that has no
voice for singing can, after this fashion, magnify the Lord with his soul and
spirit.”—Volume 51, Sermon #2941

“A man never talks rightly of God’s works till he knows God’s ways. And it is
idle to talk of them if there is no doingat the back of the talking.”—Volume 52,
Sermon #2969

“A man clad in armor may go walking through the woods and may never feel the
thorns, but another man who has had his armor taken off, will be scratched and
torn to pieces! Sinners clad in the armor of sin feel not the thorn of Christ’s
desertion—but saints who have thrown this armor aside and are tender of heart,
feel even His slightest frown.”—Volume 52, Sermon #3013

“Oh, that we felt more the weight of our ministry! It is, perhaps, the great
fault of this age that so many who do preach, yet preach with so little
earnestness and are not sufficiently alive to the value of immortal souls! Oh,
that the Holy Spirit would make our ministry to be ‘the burden of the Lord’ upon
us!”—Volume 52, Sermon #2993

“Though your faith is no bigger than a mustard seed, so that you can hardly see
it, it will bring salvation to you! Even if you cannot see it, God can. If you
do but touch the hem of Christ’s garment, virtue will flow out of Him to the
saving of your soul!”—Volume 53, Sermon #3035 PRAY THE HOLY SPIRIT WILL USE
THESE QUOTES TO BRING MANY TO A SAVING KNOWLEDGE OF JESUS CHRIST.


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  CHAPTER 7: VOL. 4
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NOTABLE QUOTES OF CHARLES H. SPURGEON ~ PART 4 ~ October 14, 2009 Dear Reader,
This is the fourth compilation of Brother Spurgeon’s quotes from my work of
modernizing his sermons. All of these quotes are found in volumes 54-58 of his
work. Thus I identify them by the year and sermon number. You may note that the
first few pages represent one quote from each sermon in numerical order. After
that they are mixed.

If you want to read or download the sermon from which a quote comes, simply go
to our site and look in the Spurgeon Sermons link on the front page. Nothing on
our site is copyrighted—feel free to copy anything—but please use it only for
the honor and glory of our Master, Jesus Christ. My prayer for you and yours is
Paul’s to the Ephesians 3:17-19.

Emmett O’Donnell ________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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  CHAPTER 8: VOL. 4 CONTD
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“We shall all have contributed our quota to the reform of the Church when we
are, ourselves, reformed. There can be no better way of promoting general
holiness than by increasing in personal holiness. ‘Let us cleanse
ourselves.’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3245

“O God, You have bid me open my mouth wide and you will fill it, but I do not
open my mouth! You are ready to bestow great things upon me, but I am not ready
to receive great things! I am straitened, but it is not in You—I am straitened
in my own desires!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3083

“As workers, we are to be hidden away in the hand of God, or to quote the other
figure, “in His quiver has He hid me”—we are to be unseen till He uses us! It is
possible for us not to be known somewhat if the Lord uses us, but we may not aim
at being noticed—on the contrary, if we are as much used as the very chief of
the Apostles, we must truthfully add, “though I am nothing.” Our desire should
be that Christ should be glorified, and that self should be concealed.”—Volume
57, Sermon #3267

“Perhaps some of us have been too severe upon certain people. We have said that
they come to our place of worship out of mere curiosity. What if they do? It is
well that they come at all, so let us not cut even the spider’s web that links a
man in any sense with Christ—hat web may grow into a thread, that thread into a
cord, that cord into a cable and there may yet be an unbreakable union between
that man and Christ.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3192

“Victory must come to the Lamb that was slain! He shall come from Edom, with
dyed garments from Bozrah. His apparel shall be red, like the garments of him
that treads in the wine vat, for all His enemies shall be trodden down in His
wrath! And Rome, the harlot church, the chief of all His foes, shall be hurled
down like a millstone into the flood and sink to rise no more.”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3180

“Now if in our blackest parts of sorrow there is brightness, there must be
brightness elsewhere and, indeed, if we were half as inquisitive to find out
that which will cheer us, as to discover that of which we may complain, we
should soon have reasons of gratitude in the lowest and worst condition!”—Volume
55, Sermon #3164

“Faith is the uniting bond which binds together the Christ in whom we believe
and those who believe in Him. If you are truly trusting in Christ, God looks
upon you as a part of Christ’s Mystical Body and He is well-pleased with you for
Christ’s sake.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3298

“Indeed, it strikes me that the wise man is rather delighted that things are as
well as they are, than displeased that they are not any better, for he knows
that the best of men are but men at the best. He knows from his own experience
that men are very likely to go fast in the way of error and to travel very
slowly in the way of right—and so when he does see a cause prosper, or a holy
deed done, he is grateful to God for it!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3163

“If we had no idols in children, friends, wealth, ourselves, we would not need
half the trials we have! Foolish loves make rods for foolish backs!”—Volume 57,
Sermon #3272 “Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, always do what is right!
Whatever may come of it, be out-and-out for Christ. Verily I say unto you—there
is no man who shall be a loser by Christ at the last! Great shall be his gain
who, for Christ’s sake, can give up even all that he has!”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3078

“I thank God, also, that we are not mourning as those do who fiendishly regret
that accidentally they have done a good thing. You remember how angry Pharaoh
was with himself because he had let Israel go—I have known men who have never
been penitent till they have, by mistake, done something good, or given too much
away!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3325

“The special Truth of God which distinguishes us as a denomination is regarded
by many with supreme contempt! Not long ago a professedly Christian minister
said that he did not care a penny about Baptism! If he belongs to Christ, he
will have to answer to his Master for that saying! But I could not utter such
sentence as that without putting my very soul in peril! He who really loves His
Lord will not trifle with the least jot or tittle of His Lord’s will.”—Volume
56, Sermon #3228

“I hope none of you are under the impression that, at the close of the present
service, I am going to administer the Lord’s Supper. God forbid that I should
ever venture to do such a thing as that! No, it is you, or we, who come to the
Lord’s Table, to break bread and to drink of the cup—and we come together, not
as a Church holding certain views, but we come simply as Christians to, “do this
in remembrance” of the Savior who died for us!...“This do you as often as you
drink it,” is no command addressed to an ecclesiastical organization concerning
an ordinance to be administered by men who have the impertinence or impudence to
call themselves priests, but a command to all Christians everywhere, on any day
of the week, and in any place…to break a piece of bread in memory of their
Lord’s broken body, and to drink of the cup in mutual loving memory of His
precious blood poured out for them!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3099

“God and mammon cannot abide in the same house! Remember that you serve a
jealous God and be very careful not to provoke Him to jealousy. Every idol must
be cast down, or His comfortable Presence cannot be enjoyed.”—Volume 57, Sermon
#3242

“My dear Friend, if you are determined to be damned, leave religion alone
altogether—but do not pretend to be a child of God and yet live in sin. To
profess to be an heir of Heaven and then to live as an heir of Hell is such
detestable hypocrisy that I pray God that all of you may be preserved from ever
falling into it! Where the Spirit of God dwells, there is sure to be
purity!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3298

“Those who are really chosen of God hear and heed the voice of Christ but those
who are not Christ’s chosen ones will not heed His discourse, but will listen to
the many voices which attract the ears and the hearts of sinful men. The elect
of God are known by this mark, that they hear the voice of Christ! Just as you
can find out in a heap of ashes, whether there are any pieces of steel there by
simply thrusting in a magnet, so can you find out God’s chosen people by the
mighty magnet of Christ’s voice! ”—Volume 56, Sermon #3190

“There is nothing so terrible to look upon as injured love. Fiercer than a lion
leaping upon its prey is love when once it is incensed. Oil flows smoothly, but
it burns furiously—and when the love of Jesus has been finally rejected—then the
sight of Him whose head was once crowned with thorns will be more terrifying
than anything else to the eyes of those who have rejected Him.”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3198

“There are some persons who seem to have been reared on vinegar—who wherever
they go, see some defeat—and where this cannot be discovered will insinuate,
‘Ah, well, but we do not know what they do in secret.’ Or, ‘we do not know their
motives.’ But those who love one another can see much to rejoice in
everywhere.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3272

“Do not forget what you have been told about study and culture, but remember at
the same time that the heart has more power in pastoral work than the head. In
this ministry, a humble, godly, ill-educated man with a great, warm, heart will
be blessed far more than the large-headed man whose heart is a little diamond of
rock-ice which could not be discovered without a microscope even if he were
dissected!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3211

“Love is one of the most jealous things in the universe. ‘God is a jealous God,’
because ‘God is Love.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3228

“Oh, for more consecration! We are, most of us, up to our ankles in our
religion—very few of us are up to our knees. But oh, for the man that swims in
it, who has got off the earth altogether and now swims in consecration, living
wholly unto Him who loved him and gave Himself for him!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3185

“I believe that the religion of Jesus Christ is so certain a truth to that man
who has believed it, that it is so verified to his inner consciousness, and so
interweaves itself with his entire being that no proposition of Euclid could
ever be more demonstrable, or more absolutely conclusive.”—Volume 58, Sermon
#3299 “If you have to mourn an absent God, seek to know the reason why He has
withdrawn Himself from you—and repent of the sin that has separated you from
Him.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3242

“I have always found that the meaning of a text can be better learned by prayer
than in any other way. Of course we must consult lexicons and commentaries to
see the literal meaning of the words and their relation to one another—but when
we have done all that, we shall still find that our greatest help will come from
prayer!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3178

“Many Christians appear to hold their religion as a pious fiction—regarding the
promises of God as pretty things for sentimentalism to play with—and His
Providence as a poetical idea. We must get out of that evil fashion and make God
to be the greatest factor in our daily calculations—the chief force and fact of
our lives! We must each one boldly act on the conviction that ‘it shall be even
as He has told me.’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3145

“If in the winter you complain of the cold, get to the plow and you will soon
glow with warmth! But sit down to moan and complain and blow on your blue
fingers, you shall feel the cold more and more! Holy activity is the mother of
holy joy!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3272

“I have been in a foreign land where there was no congregation to meet for
public worship, but the two or three Believers who were there have always broken
bread together each Sunday, and it has been to us quite a full service, most
strengthening to the soul, when we have gathered around the Table of our Lord to
do “this” in remembrance of Him!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3130

“Till we see Christ’s face in Glory and are perfect through His perfections, the
Law will be far above us and will continue to condemn us for our shortcomings.
But the great reason why men do not comprehend the high spirituality of the Law,
its exceeding breadth and wondrous severity, is because they are blind.”—Volume
54, Sermon #3117

“ Adoptiongives us the privilegesof the children of God. Regenerationgives us
the Nature of the children of God. Adoption admits us into the Divine family.
Regeneration makes us akin to the Divine Father—it creates us anew in Christ
Jesus and puts into us a spark from the eternal Spirit, Himself, so that we
become spiritual beings. Before regeneration, we are only body and soul—but when
we are born-again, born from above—we become body, soul and spirit. Being born
of the Spirit, we understand spiritual things and have spiritual perceptions
which we never possessed before.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3198

“Awakened souls mourn for Jesus as one that is in bitterness for his first-born.
You can never stand at the altar and see Jesus bleed without your own heart
bleeding if, indeed, the life of God is in you! Can any but a heart of me stone
unmoved at the sight of Calvary? Blessed are they who amidst their joy for
pardoned guilt wash the pierced feet of Jesus with tears of love and
grief!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3325

“But let me tell you, if you believe in Christ you are one of His elect! And it
is because He elected you that you come to believe in Him—it is because He chose
you that you are led to desire Him and made to accept Him! Let not that Doctrine
ever terrify you, or provoke your distrust, for if you rightly understand the
Revelation, it is rather a finger beckoning to Christ than a specter that should
intimidate you, or drive you away from Him!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3299

“When the Lord descends from Heaven, it will be time enough for us to talk of
what He will then do—but till He comes, let us continue to gather the souls He
gives us. We are not in such great need of conferences about how to win souls as
of men who will do it. I vote for less talk and more work! We cannot have too
much prayer, but we certainly need more effort.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3149

“There are three classes of blind people—the physically blind, the mentally
blind and the spiritually blind. In illustration, I would take you to the London
Road and there you will find these three orders of blind people. There is the
school for the blind, where you will find the physically blind. Just before you
is the Roman Catholic Cathedral—there you will find the spiritually blind. And
further on is the Bethlehem Hospital, commonly called Bedlam, where you will
find the mentally blind. These are, then, the three divisions—the naturally, or
physically blind; the mentally blind and the spiritually blind.”—Volume 55,
Sermon #3139

“There would be no hope of our ever getting to Heaven if we had to depend upon
our own efforts, or our own merits, or anything of our own—our comfort arises
from the fact that the Covenant is made on our behalf by our great
Representative and Redeemer, who will Himself see that all that is guaranteed to
us in the Covenant is fulfilled in due season!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3242

“We, too, meet with many who can talk glibly enough of their miseries, but who
are silent concerning their mercies! I daresay some of you know old Mrs.
Complaint. If you ever go to see her, the moment you sit down she beams to tell
you how she has been tormented all the week with rheumatism and then she says
troubles never come alone, for that son of hers gives her constant anxiety, and
her neighbors are continually slandering her—and so on, and so on.”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3214 “If it is written on all your hearts by the Holy Spirit, you will
not need any other sermon than this Divine text—‘Verily, verily, I say unto you,
He that believes on Me has everlasting life.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3192

“Is a Christian to be afraid of man and conceal his principles for fear he
should be ridiculed? God forbid! Leave shame for those who have no religion, or
have a religion which is of no value! Let us be true witnesses for Christ in
life and death, worthy of the ancestors that went before us and mindful of the
eyes which rest upon us.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3165

“For your own sake, and for the sake of those whom you would bless, you must see
to it that sitting at the Savior’s feet is not neglected, even though it is
under the specious pretext of waiting upon Him. The first thing for our soul’s
health, the first thing for His Glory and the first thing for our own usefulness
is to keep ourselves in perpetual communion with the Lord Jesus—and to see that
the vital spirituality of our religion is maintained over and above everything
else in the world!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3163

“It is said that there is a lack of love in certain churches that profess to be
Christian. Well, perhaps there is. I am not going to be an accuser of the
brethren in that respect, but I believe there is a great deal more love existing
among Christians than many persons imagine. Possibly, those who say there is a
lack of love in our midst judge by the state of their own hearts, while those
who really love the saints find that the saints also love them.”—Volume 58,
Sermon #3300

“The builder uses many poles that are not part of the permanent building, but as
soon as the house is up, down goes the scaffolding. So God may permit us to be
scaffolding for His Church, and when that Church is completed, He may take us
down and we may be consumed in the fire of Hell. Oh, may the Lord grant that
this may never be so with any one of us! Deacons and Elders of churches, the
same may be said of you! If bearing the vessels of the Lord you are not clean,
have not been washed in the great laver of the Savior’s Atonement, remember that
this bearing this Lord’s vessels will not save you! Just as the carrying of
bread and meat by the ravens did not put them in the list of clean birds, but
left them still unclean.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3264

“Our duty is not to judge whether such-and-such a course will be profitable or
beneficial, but to consider whether such-and-such a course is in accordance with
the Word of the Lord!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3228 “People are not made to grow in
Grace as plants grow, of which it is said, ‘They grow you know not how.’ The
Christian is developed by actively seeking growth, by earnestly striving after
holiness and resolutely endeavoring to obtain it.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3245 “That
man is worthy of being called a man who dares to do right whatever others may do
or say.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3090

“I think it is conclusively proven that Jesus died of a broken heart. The most
careful investigation of the symptoms preceding His death appears to lead to
that conclusion. He could say, with an emphasis that was not possible even with
David, “Reproach has broken My heart and I am full of heaviness.” The
broken-hearted Savior is the Healer of broken-hearted sinners!”—Volume 54,
Sermon #3104

“There is a day coming when all Christ’s sheep shall pass again under the hand
of Him that counts them—and in that day, not one of the whole redeemed flock
shall be missing! As the long roll of God’s ransomed family is called, it shall
be asked, ‘Is Little-Faith here?’ And he will answer to his name not at all in
the trembling way in which he used to speak when he was upon earth. When it is
asked, ‘Is Miss Much-Afraid here?’ she will reply, in jubilant tones, ‘Glory be
to God, I am here!’ No matter how weak and feeble you may be, if you are a child
of God, you shall certainly be there and the inheritance shall assuredly be
yours!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3198

“We cannot help feeling that blindness has seized the church of Rome when she
boasts of the commission to feed Christ’s sheep having been given to the Apostle
Peter, when, with half an eye anyone can see that our Lord addressed these words
to Peter because at that time he was the least of the twelve! He had denied his
Master, The others had not and, therefore, he was the one concerning whose
Apostleship distrust was most likely to arise!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3211

“Oh, Friends, if the frost of sin rules in a Church, every tender flower is
injured and nothing flourishes! Love is a sensitive plant and if it is touched
by the finger of sin, it will show it. The lilies of Love’s Paradise cannot
bloom amid the smoke and dust of unholiness! ”—Volume 58, Sermon #3301

“Certain personsdream that God is their salvation! Go to bed and dream again,
and dream fifty times, and when you have dreamed the same thing fifty times,
there can and will be nothing but dreaming in it after all! You who build on
dreams had better mind what you are doing!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3137

“Dear Friends, that sword was so keen and piercing that it cut Him to the very
soul. I talk of these great Truths of God very simply, for I do not think there
is any occasion here for using flowers of speech. But if we were as we ought to
be, we should be very deeply affected at the thought that the Son of Man most
perfect, and the Son of God most glorious, should have the sword of Divine
Vengeance against sin plucked out of its scabbard that it might be used upon
Him!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3088

“Perhaps our faith has got to be very low. ‘O Lord, will You destroy my little
faith? I know there is sin in it. To be so unbelieving as I am is no little
crime, but Lord, I thank You that I have anyfaith. It is weak and trembling, but
it is faith of Your own giving! Oh, break not the poor leaf that is driven to
and fro!’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3269

“Scripture promises have, all of them, a message to all Believers—and if you
believe in Jesus Christ—what God has said to other Believers of old He says this
day to you!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3150

“Oh, if the Lord would but convert some of the cardinals and priests of the
Church of Rome—and some of the great infidel philosophers of the present day,
and some of the licentious ‘nobility,’ as they are called—what high honor would
be brought to the name of Jesus Christ!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3111

“Albeit sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit, yet it is equally true
and this we must always bear in mind, that the Holy Spirit makes us active
agents in our own sanctification!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3245

“If today you have indulged an unholy temper, if you have given way to
covetousness, if you have in any way transgressed against the Lord, you will not
feel that warmth of love towards Jesus Christ which you felt yesterday! Your
life will have lost much of its beauty and its sweetness. Cry to God that He
would give it back to you! Do not rest satisfied until it is perfectly
restored.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3301

“Comfort God’s people and labor at the same time to win sinners to Jesus—and the
love of your heart shall bring untold blessings into your own bosom! Happiness
is contagious and the cheerfulness of your piety will be so attractive that the
careless and indifferent will be allured to the ways of piety. Do not run about
with ill news, but make your communications joyous by mixing up the glad tidings
of salvation with your cheerful daily talk!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3145

“In the Presence of the Royal Intercessor who pleads for us day and night, one
would think there would be some interest excited! But no, the multitude warm
their hands and think nothing of Him. In His Presence, they forget His redeeming
love, neglect His great salvation and remain without God and without Christ.
This is terrible! As I see the worldling merely caring for his personal comfort
while Christ is in Glory, I marvel, first, at the insolence of the sinner and,
secondly, at the Infinite Patience of the Savior!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3181

“Let us not forget that our souls need to be fedand this I say to some of you
who do but little for the Lord Jesus, and may be said neither to work nor to
eat. Look at the mass of our Christian people, what do they do? Monday morning
early at business and on till Saturday evening late at business! What is their
reading? The daily paper! I condemn it not, but of what use is this to their
souls? ”—Volume 56, Sermon #3199

“We speak with bated breath when we say that to some men, a painful break-down
has been the making of them. They became from that time, free from their former
self-esteem and were as cleansed and emptied vessels, fit for the Master’s use!
A deep sense of our weakness and a humbling consciousness of unworthiness form a
considerable part of our qualification for dealing with Christ’s sheep. Because
you are a sinner, you will deal lovingly with sinners. Because you know what
backsliding means, you will be very gentle and forbearing with
backsliders.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3211

“A man who is really saved by Grace does not need to be told that He is under
solemn obligations to serve Christ—the new life within him tells him that.
Instead of regarding it as a burden, he gladly surrenders himself—body, soul and
spirit, to the Lord who has redeemed him, reckoning this to be his reasonable
service.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3229

“Do you not feel, beloved Brothers and Sisters in Christ, whenever you meet a
Believer in Jesus, and begin to talk of the things that belong to His Kingdom,
you have fellowship with him in heart and spirit even though you had never seen
him before? When we talk of Jesus, our love to one another soon begins to flow!
The true basis of our communion with one another is that we are there in Christ
Jesus—and that union manifests itself in love to all who are, as our text puts
it, ‘brethren beloved of the Lord.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3300

“If you are over a 100 years old, yet, as you are a creature, I have to preach
the Gospel to you and the Gospel is, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you
shall be saved!’ So, if you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, however great your
age may be, or however many times you may have refused to believe on Him, there
is no doubt about God’s willingness and power to still receive, pardon and
accept you!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3262

“Brothers and Sisters, it is so sweet to know that our best things are ahead. O
Sinner, you are leaving your best things behind and you are going to your worst
things! But the Christian is going to his best things. His turn is coming. He
will have the best of it before long, for the shadows will flee away! No longer
shall he be vexed, and grieved, and troubled, but he shall be eternally in the
light, for the shadowsshall flee away!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3185 “There is one
consideration which has done me a deal of good and it is this—that the Lord
Jesus got on very well before we were born, and it is very likely that He will
get on exceedinglywell when we are dead.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3163

“O Christian, you may very well doubt your right to that name unless all sin is
obnoxious to you! You have no right to say, ‘I will give up pride and vanity,’
if you excuse yourself for being covetous. If covetousness is the leak in your
vessel, it will sink it quite as surely as pride!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3245

“When I hear Brothers and Sisters say how amazing it is that God has heard
prayer, I think it far more amazing that they should talk so, for surely it is
not surprising that God should keep His Word! No, these are the commonplace of
genuine Christianity—a prayer-giving God working in the heart—and a
prayer-answering God working both in Providence and in Grace. Brothers and
Sisters, never be slow to bear your testimony to a prayer-hearing God.”—Volume
55, Sermon #3165

“I will let no man or woman in this congregation take a place before me in
obligation to the Most High! Brothers and Sisters, we are all debtors, but I
count myself most of all a debtor! I boast that I have nothing to boast of! I
would desire to lie the lowest and to take the meanest place, for I owe most of
all to the Grace of God!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3131

“We hear a great deal about the universal fatherhood of God, but it is all
nonsense! There is no Scripture for it whatever. Those only are the children of
God who are ‘the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.’”—Volume 56, Sermon
#3194

“Providence may be seen as the finger of God, not merely in those events which
shake nations and are duly emblazoned on the page of history, but in little
incidents of common life—yes, in the motion of a grain of dust, the trembling of
a dew-drop, the flight of a swallow or the leaping of a fish!”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3075

“There is a straight line from my heart to the heart of God—and so there is from
your heart, my Brother or my Sister in Christ—so our Father’s heart is our
common meeting place.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3300

“The Doctrine of Election is not one about which you need trouble yourself just
now. Begin to read your Bible and the Gospel according to Matthew, and see there
how you are bid to repent and invited to come to Christ. When you have done
that, you can go on to the Epistles and read about election and all the other
Doctrines of Grace, but your first business is to repent of sin and to believe
on the Lord Jesus Christ!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3262

“I would like—oh, that I might realize it—to ‘follow the Lamb wherever He goes.’
Not to say, ‘This is not essential, and that might be dispensed with,’ but, like
the Master, Himself, to say, ‘Thus it becomes us to fulfill all
righteousness.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3102

“Through His Sovereign Grace, He loves many of the poor, darkened sons of men.
Blind men are not chosen for soldiers except in the army of God, but in that
army He enlists many blind warriors and makes them the best of His soldiers!
Yes, blind saints, God loves you and will not exclude you from Heaven!”—Volume
55, Sermon #3139

“When will God’s people perceive that it is not enough to be born-again, but
that the life then received must be nourished daily with the Bread of Heaven. It
is not enough to be spiritually alive—our life, to be vigorous—must be familiar
with its Source. Every Christian should know that he needs times for supplying
his soul with the meat which endures unto life eternal. As the body needs its
mealtimes, so must you sit down to your heavenly Father’s table until He has
satisfied your mouth with good things and renewed your strength like the
eagle’s. The more intensely earnest we are in feeding upon the Word of God, the
better!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3199

“We may lead blind men to Jesus, but we cannot open their eyes. We can, in a
measure, indicate to them what spiritual sight is and we may explain to them
what their own sad condition is—but we cannot open their eyes! Neither can
anyone but God alone open their eyes.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3117

“God has so linked you with His Son that He has made you also to have a life
which is eternal and which can never die. Let all things else perish and the
pillars of the universe crumble and decay, and the whole visible creation fall
with thunderous crash, yet you, the Beloved of the Lord, shall dwell safely with
Him!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3246

“There are certain sacred passwords that are common to all the saints and I will
defy the hypocrite or the worldling to pronounce them aright—but if he should be
able to utter them with his lips—he can never really know their meaning in his
heart.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3300 “If you wish to save yourselves, do it, but God
will have no share in the work under such conditions. If He is to save you, He
must be Alpha and

Omega—He must have all the praise because He gives all the power.”—Volume 57,
Sermon #3262 “I believe that the Peter of the Epistles grew out of the Peter of
the Sea of Tiberias and the Peter of the denial, by means of the Grace given
him, while feeding the flock of God. Peter was a bigoted, narrow-minded Jew—he
could not readily believe that any others beyond the chosen nation were to be
saved! But when he mixed with mankind and was sent to the house of Cornelius,
his heart grew larger, although it was not as large as it should have been till
Paul boldly withstood him to his face because he was to be blamed! “Feed My
sheep” is, therefore, Beloved, a commission intended for your own good as well
as theirs.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3211

“It is not remarkable that a minister gets skeptical if he never sees
conversions. The proof of the Gospel lies in what it does. If it does not save
men from sinning, if it does not lift up the fallen, if it does not give light
and joy to the despairing, then surely it lacks the evidences of its Divine
mission—for even Jesus Christ, Himself, gave to His own mission this as the
proof—‘The deaf hear, the blind see, the lepers are cleansed, the poor have the
Gospel preached to them.’ If these things are not true now, we may doubt whether
the Gospel which we preach is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But we can bear
witness and, oh, how joyfully we do it—that the Gospel has not lost its
power!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3165

“Let a man once know what sin really is and he needs nothing else to make him
thoroughly unhappy.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3229 “Oh, that every Christian
enterprise were commenced with prayer, continued with prayer and crowned with
prayer! Then might we, also, expect to see it crowned with God’s
blessing!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3178

“So, if our fretting over God’s work would improve it, Brothers and Sisters, let
us fret! Let us fret together in harmony! But if it really will not, and if
after having done all we can in prayer and holy work, the thing does not go on
quite as well as we could wish it, then let us say, ‘My Master, let it be
according to Your will, and if it is according to Your mind, it is sure to be
according to my mind, or if not, Lord, give me a better mind.’”—Volume 55,
Sermon #3163

“And, higher still, there is a Divine nourishment in Communion when the soul
ascends to Jesus Christ and feeds on the Lord, Himself, when the Incarnate God
becomes the soul’s Bread and the bleeding Savior in His substitutionary
Sacrifice, becomes the heart’s wine. Feed on Him, O Beloved, you who have lately
come to Him! Eat, yes, drink abundantly, O Beloved! May the Lord give you a
mighty hunger after His Word, after Himself and then lead you by the still
waters, and make you to lie down in green pastures!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3199

“If we could go through the wards of Bethlehem Hospital, not far away from us,
and see the many forms of madness represented, I think each one of us would be
moved to say, ‘My God, I thank You that, however poor or sick I am, You have
preserved me from such mental affliction as many have to bear.’”—Volume 57,
Sermon #3244

“If my sermons kept people from reading the Bible for themselves, I would like
to see the whole stock in a blaze and burned to ashes! But if they serve as
finger-posts, pointing to the Scriptures and saying, ‘Read this, and this, and
this,’ then I am thankful to have printed them. But if they keep you from your
Bibles, burn them, burn them, burn them! Do not let them overlay the Scriptures,
but lie beneath them, for that is their proper place. Keep you first to God’s
revealed Word.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3272

“One unrepented sin. One sin indulged in and delighted in will as effectually
stop the gates of Heaven against your soul as if you were living in fornication,
adultery, or murder! Your heart must hate all sin and your heart must love all
holiness.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3073 “Nobody has ever had his hunger satisfied by
hearing a discourse about bread! It is bread itself that is needed to feed the
hungry, so keep on, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, giving the Bread of
Life to starving souls!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3127

“You cannot understand your Lord till you have wept over your congregations! You
will understand Him then, as you see Him weeping over Jerusalem. If you feel
towards your hearers that you could die to save their souls, you will then have
fellowship with the death of your Lord. In grief over backsliders and joy over
penitents you will commune with the Redeemer in the most practical
manner.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3211

“In former days our fathers counted it a small thing to go to prison for a
Doctrine, or to be burnt to death for a testimony! Look at the multitudes in
Holland who were drowned, or who were tied to ladders and roasted to death for
nothing but their conviction that Believers should be baptized!”—Volume 58,
Sermon #3301

“Every time we stay from a labor because we covet ease, every time we are
impatient at the suffering which the Cross involves, every time we “make
provision for the flesh, to obey the lusts thereof,” every time we seek ease
where He toiled, honor where He was put to shame and luxury where He endured an
ignominious death, we are like Peter among the ribald throng, warming our hands
at the fire while our Lord is buffeted and shamefully entreated!”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3181 “The answer to some prayers would be a dire calamity! Some pray for
riches, and they get it—but they also get leanness in their soul. Some ask for
earthly honors and success, and get them, but with them they also get leanness
in their soul. And if a man is lean in his soul, it is not much good being fat
anywhere else.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3193

“Oh, if you are sick of the world, come to my Master! May God the Holy Spirit
sanctify this sickness and bring you to Jesus because you have nowhere else to
go. Jesus will not spurn even the devil’s castaways! The sweepings of humanity
who have gone so far that their friends reject them, Jesus Christ will accept
and bless!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3272

“Beloved, he who receives Christ both as Prince and Savior has the blessed and
happy experience of resigning his own will and subjecting all the passions of
his soul to the sacred control of his glorious Prince and, at the same time he
daily realizes in his soul the cleansing power of the precious blood of Jesus
and so, as Mary sang, his spirit rejoices in God his Savior.”—Volume 56, Sermon
#3229

“Perhaps I am addressing members of a bereaved Church. You have lost a man of
God who went in and out among you as Moses did among the children of Israel in
the wilderness—and you are asking, ‘Where is his successor to come from?’
Perhaps there is a Joshua within sight, but you are half afraid as to whether he
will have the power needed to carry on the great work. Trust that the God who
was with Moses will also be with Joshua and take this promise home to your own
heart—and say to each of your fellow members in the sorrowing Church that the
Lord has said, ‘I will not fail you, nor forsake you.’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3150

“We do not pray as if we believed. Believing prayer is a grasping and a
wrestling, but ours is a mere puffing and blowing, a little breathing—not much
more. God is true and we pray to Him as if He were false. He means what He says,
and we treat His Word as if it were spoken in jest. The master-fault of our
prayer is lack of faith.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3083

“Dear and blessed was the woman who bore us, nursed us and cared for us as no
one else could have done! Yet this mortal life of ours would have been a curse
to us if Jesus had not come to redeem us from eternal death and shown us a
greater love even than our mother’s!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3092

“There are certain experiences that cannot be learned without the teaching of
the Holy Spirit. There is a certain way of speaking about Christ that can never
be acquired as a parrot learns to talk. There is a certain ring which God gives
to His gold which is never bestowed upon baser metal—and there is a certain
something about a true child of God which enables him to recognize others of the
same family and which also enables them to recognize him so that, when they come
together, their hearts leap up at the thought that they are ‘brethren beloved of
the Lord.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3300

“Oh, may we always be kept at peace! I bless God for the love that has reigned
among us. May it continue and may it deepen! Beloved Friends, when we fall out
with one another, we shall find that the Spirit of God has fallen out with us!
We cannot expect to see young converts among us at all, much less can we hope to
see them advance in Divine Grace, if we indulge a party spirit, or a
controversial spirit within the fold. All Believers should endeavor to maintain
a sacred quiet within the Church for the sake of the little ones.”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3199

“Paul was Inspired when he wrote to the Philippians, ‘Rejoice in the Lord
always, and again I say, Rejoice.’ And I believe it is the cheerful Christian,
and especially the Christian who can be happy in sickness, patient under
adversity and joyous even in the hour of death, who will win fresh adherents for
the Lord Jesus Christ!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3214

“How thankful we all ought to be that we are not in prison! Does it seem
improbable that such good people as we are could ever be numbered among the
law-breakers of the land? You know how Hazael said to Elisha, ‘Is your servant a
dog, that he should do this great thing?’ Yet he did all that the Prophet
foretold—and but for the restraining Grace of God, you and I, dear Friends,
might have been suffering the agony and remorse that many are tonight enduring
in the prisons of this and other lands!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3244

“If such a thing were possible, I cannot conceive of a more lamentable condition
than for a man to have the happiness of salvation without the holiness of it!
Happily, it is not possible. If you could be saved from the consequences of sin,
but not from the sin itself, and its power and pollution, it would be no
blessing to you. But the salvation to which God has from the beginning chosen
you is inseparably linked with the cleansing and sanctifying work of the Holy
Spirit, who operates within you through the instrumentality of faith.”—Volume
58, Sermon #3300

“The world looks on a man under scoffing and ridicule to observe how he behaves.
And if he conducts himself like a Christian, it feels his power and respects his
consistency. Give way a little, and you will have to give way more—and be
despised! But adherence to principle commands respect. Put your foot down! Stand
firmly where God would have you stand, and your testimony will gather value from
the very ridicule which is poured upon it.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3165 “Verily,
verily, I say unto you, if you have not something more than what Nature gave
you, you will perish! If you are not something higher than the best morality,
the most exact discipline and the most consistent moral behavior can make you,
you will never enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. ‘You must be
born-again!’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3275

“I think that one of the grandest passages in the whole Word of God is Psalm
147:3, 4—‘He heals the broken in heart, and binds up their wounds. He counts the
number of the stars; He calls them all by their names.’ Does it not seem to be a
great stoop from marshalling the stars to bending down over poor broken hearts
and closing up their wounds?”—Volume 54, Sermon #3104

“Christ Crucified is the foundation of all our hopes, for Christ could not have
risen from the dead if He had not first died. Of what use would His plea be if
He had not His blood to offer? Do not be led astray even by ideas about the
Second Advent if they depreciate the death of Christ! Rejoice in Christ’s Second
Coming and look and long for it, but remember that the basis of our hope lies in
Christ Crucified. ‘We preach Christ Crucified’ and as we have preached so have
you believed, so let none turn you away from your confidence in Christ Jesus
suffering in the sinner’s place.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3099

“I believe that we make more real advance in the Divine Life in an hour of
prayer than we do in a month of hearing sermons. I do not mean that we are to
neglect the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is, but I am
sure that without the praying, the hearing is of little worth!”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3178

“If we ever get upon the mountain summit and bask our foreheads in the sunlight
of fellowship with God, we stand there only by faith! It is because our faith is
strong and in active exercise that we realize the things not seen as yet, and
behold the God whom mortal eyes cannot gaze upon!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3265

“It is easy to have a faith that acts backwards, but a faith that will act
forwards—a faith for the present and for the future is the true faith—and the
faith that you need now.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3215

“The way to assurance is through the door ofsimplefaith. The Gospel is, ‘He that
believes and is baptized shall be saved.’ To believe is to trust Christ. Now, if
I know that I trust Christ and that I have, in obedience to His command, been
baptized, then God says I shall be saved and is not that enough for me? Ought it
not to be, at any rate? If God says it, it must be true!”—Volume 55, Sermon
#3137

“I know that however many may preach the Gospel better than I do, there is no
one who can preach a better Gospel than the one I preach, for it is that Gospel
which ‘is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believes.’ ‘Our
Gospel’ is the best of gospels, the richest of gospels, it cannot be excelled,
it cannot be equaled! In fact, it is the only Gospel that is worthy of the
name!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3300

“As for any affliction that you ever can have to endure on earth, it is not
merely light, it is absolutely unworthy of mention in comparison with the
eternal woe that is the portion of the lost! Be thankful that, up to the present
moment, this has not been your portion—and lest it should be—flee at once for
refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before you in the Gospel!”—Volume 57,
Sermon #3244

“There are preachers who preach mere morality. I trust their number is smaller
than it used to be, but there are still too many professedly Christian ministers
who are like that notable man who said that he preached morality till there was
no morality left in the place. Yet afterwards, when he imitated Paul and
preached Christ crucified, he soon found that vice hid her dishonored head and
that all the Graces and virtues flourished under the shadow of the Cross! So
have we found it and, therefore, whoever may preach anything else, we shall
still stick to the old-fashioned theme that Paul preached—that old, old story
which the seeker after novelties condemns as stale, but which, to the man who
needs eternal life and longs for something that will satisfy his conscience and
satiate his heart—has a freshness and charm which the lapse of years only
intensifies, but does not remove!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3229

“We are accustomed to sing to Him as pleading before the Eternal Throne, but we
must forever banish from our minds all idea of His needing to plead because God
is unwilling to hear! No, what the Son desires, the Father desires—that which He
seeks at the Divine Throne is flowing from that Throne—but His intercession it
not the cause of it, but the channel through which it comes to us!”—Volume 58,
Sermon #3329

“John Bunyan says if you send a servant off for the doctor and you tell him to
go on horseback as fast as ever he can—and there is but a very sorry nag in the
stable, so the man uses the spur and the whip, and tugs at the bridle, but
cannot make the horse go—you see that the man would go if he could, and so you
do not blame him. So, he says, our poor flesh is that sorry nag, but the spirit
is willing, and Jesus Christ looks on us and says—‘Truly the flesh is weak, he
would go if he could.’ And so He takes the will for the deed and does not blame
us, but covers our faults in the mantle of His love.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3163
“There are people about who seem to be cut on the cross and the only use they
are in this world seems to be to raise irritating questions. They and the
mosquitoes were created by Infinite Wisdom, but I have never been able to
discover the particular blessing which either of them confer upon us!”—Volume
56, Sermon #3199

“The world is against the true faith. The faith of God’s elect is not a flower
that men delight to admire and praise—it is a thing which, wherever they see it,
they count as a speckled bird and they are sure to be against it! If you have
faith in God, remember that this is not the world of faith, but the world of
unbelief—and the darkness that is in the world will try to quench your
Light!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3265

“Oh, hearts that are to glow forever with delight in the Presence of the
Reigning One, who once was crucified, what ails you if you grow cold when you
most need His love and are receiving most from Him? I cannot bear it that we
should love Jesus so little! It seems to me horrible! Not to have your heart all
on fire for Christ Jesus is immoral! Let us love Him to the utmost! Let us ask
Him to give us larger hearts and to fire them with the same love that is in His
own, that we may love Him to the utmost possibilities of affection!”—Volume 58,
Sermon #3301

“It is a very familiar thing for us who are sitting here to hear the Gospel, but
will you just carry your minds back some two or three thousand years to the
period when this Psalm was written? What was then known concerning salvation was
known almost exclusively by the Jews. Here and there, a proselyte was led into
the bonds of the Covenant, but for the most part, the whole world lay in heathen
darkness. Where there was the seal of circumcision, there were the oracles of
God—but as for the sinners of the Gentiles, they knew nothing whatever
concerning the Truth of God.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3086

“An aged Christian who has little or nothing to say for his Master is a sad
drawback to young beginners. I very greatly deprecate the example of some who
have long been professors, but who still remain babes in Christ, if they are in
Christ at all. It is a great pity to see the head white with the sunlight of
Heaven, and yet so little of Heaven in the daily conversation. Rise up, you
grave and reverend sires, and declare the faithfulness of our God!”—Volume 55,
Sermon #3165

“I think this must have been a sort of proverb or common saying among the early
Christians, ‘The Lord has said, I will never leave you, nor forsake you,’ and
that it was one of the things that they constantly said, the one to the other. I
wish that we had more such holy proverbs current among us nowadays—that our
common sayings were more worth saying than they often are, and that our
proverbial philosophy were more truly Christian philosophy!”—Volume 55, Sermon
#3150

“We may well say that no affliction weighs more than a gnat resting upon an
elephant when the Lord’s upholding Grace is sweetly manifested to our soul in
times of perplexity, anxiety and pain. It is just then that Jesus often so
graciously reveals Himself to us that we even come to love the cross that brings
Him specially near to us.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3244

“I am always afraid of a dry-eyed repentance and, mark you, if forgiveness
should be granted to those who were not sorry for their sin, such forgiveness
would tend to aid and abet sin—and would be no better than the Romish heresy
that when you have sinned, all you have to do is to confess it to a priest, pay
a certain sum of money according to the regular Roman tariff and start over
again on your career of evil. God forbid that we should ever fall into that
snare of the devil!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3229

“In the Infallible Truth of God, which has been revealed by the Holy Spirit,
there is no possibility of progress or advance! He has been pleased to reveal
the whole Truth, so there is nothing more to be revealed! We can continually
search further and deeper into the Truth that has been revealed, and so may be
enabled, by the help of the Spirit of God, to speak better concerning it, but
better Truth we never shall have and “another Gospel” we never will declare! We
should certainly be “accursed” if we did, for there is but one Gospel—and to
that Gospel we shall remain steadfast, God helping us—even to the end.”—Volume
55, Sermon #3127

“In our peace of soul, if God has given it to us by lot and by inheritance, some
thorns and thistles must and will spring up in this present world.”—Volume 57,
Sermon #3265

“I have preached in places whose spiritual temperature was that of an icehouse
and, preach as hard as I could, nothing could possibly come of it, for my words
fell to the ground like lumps of ice! Colder and colder Churches become till, at
last, the great God who breaks up icebergs in due season, destroys a Church and
its place knows it no more.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3301

“I charge you, Brothers and Sisters, remember that if you cannot be admitted
into ‘society’ without concealing your principles, you are far better off
without society! Has not our Lord called us to go outside the camp? Are we not
warned against being conformed to this world? Deny yourselves the warm place
around society’s charcoal brazier, for its sulfurous vapor will do you more harm
than the cold!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3181 “Wonderful is the capacity of faith, but
a hundred times more wonderful is the capacity of unbelief. The most credulous
persons in the world are unbelievers. He who refuses to swallow the gnat of
Scriptural difficulty, usually swallows camels in large quantities of other
difficulties of all sorts!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3112

“Let your brightest thoughts, Beloved, always be those that concern your Lord!
And above all the joys of earth let this joy rise to the very zenith—that your
heavenly Father thinks of you!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3246

“The medicine not received may be very potent, but the man cannot know its
value—and the promise of God may be very sweet and precious, but it cannot
comfort you unless it is applied. Do ask, then, for Grace that you may believe
while you are still under the cloud, black as it looks, that it will empty
itself in blessed rain upon you.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3215

“Happy, happy child, whose earliest work is work for God, whose earliest hearing
is hearing the voice of God, whose earliest breath is spent in the praise of
God! God grant, of His infinite mercy, that our children may be such children,
and He shall have the praise!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3082

“When I hear of one minister after another giving up the old-fashioned Gospel,
[1866] do you know what I say to myself? I resolve that I will stick the closer
to it! If the many cannot bear Calvinistic Doctrine, I will be more Calvinistic
than ever! The more men do not like the Truths of God, the more they shall have
it! Let this be our line of action. If men become more worldly, we will become
more Puritanical. If professing Christians do not exhibit the spirit of Christ,
we will ask our Lord to give us sevenfold of His spirit, that we may maintain
His Truths!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3301

“He [God] taught us to desire when we neither willed nor ran, and so fulfilled
the text, ‘it is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs, but of God that
shows mercy.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3329

“That word, ‘blood,’ is one of the most solemn and most important in the whole
of Scripture! ‘The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin,’ is
one of the most weighty of all the Truths of Revelation—and he that speaks that
Doctrine stammeringly, or who holds it without confidence, had better go to his
bed—but never to his pulpit, for he cannot win souls! Let him repent of his
iniquity, but never pretend to be a minister of Christ!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3275

“Now if you, dear Brother and Sister, want to shine before God and be among the
illustrious elect who the Lord makes as stars in the Church’s history, pray for
patience towards men and patience towards God. Pray for bright eyes to find out
the light even in the darkness. Pray to always lean wholly upon God and keep
yourself upon Him. You will glorify God in that way and you will be the means of
bringing others to God. Distrustful preachers do not win souls. Moaning and
repining Sunday school teachers will not bring children to Christ. ‘The joy of
the Lord is our strength.’ The patience which makes us possess our souls gives
us the fullness of the blessing of the Lord!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3164

“I am glad our friends do not universally call out in the Tabernacle,
‘Hallelujah,’ and, ‘Hosannah,’ and the like. But, for my part, when I am
preaching in the open air in the country and our Methodist friends do so, it
seems to stir my blood and I am glad of it. It is much better than having a
sleepy congregation!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3199

“We are all somewhat blind. We have all, we must confess, an imperfect
vision—except the “Pope” who claims to be infallible and, therefore, proves that
He is more blind than the rest of us! There are some of us who feel our
fallibility in point of judgment and who are obliged to acknowledge our
ignorance and lack of clear mental perception.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3139

“True Bible readers and Bible searchers never find it wearisome. They like it
least who know it least and they love it most who read it most.”—Volume 57,
Sermon #3246 “We believe the Holy Spirit to be no mere influence, no inferior or
secondary power of moral suasion, but to be absolutely Divine —a Divine Being
exerting irresistible force upon the mental powers of man!”—Volume 56, Sermon
#3215 “The rich should give that they may be rich and the poor that they may
become rich—for those who give shall usually find that God returns it into their
bosoms abundantly.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3275

“Trust in Jesus, for this is the vital sign by which we discern those who are
chosen of the Father, regenerated by the Holy Spirit and redeemed by the
precious blood of Jesus! If you truly believe in Jesus, you are born of God—you
need not fear that you shall ever perish, but you may even now rejoice with joy
unspeakable and full of Glory!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3302 “Some whom I have known
have ventured very far upon very dangerous ground to win the affection of a
chosen object. There is no wiser precept in Holy Scripture than that which
commands Christians to marry “only in the Lord.” It never can conduce to take
comfort of any Christian man or woman to be unequally yoked together with an
unbeliever—you had far better remain in the cold of your bachelor or spinster
life than warm your hands at the fire of unhallowed marriage.”—Volume 56, Sermon
#3181

“It is a blessed thing to be driven to despair as to any ability of our own to
do any good, for we never rely wholly on God’s power as long as we have any
confidence in our own. While the preacher imagines that he can do something, he
will do nothing. While teachers or parents entertain the belief that there is
some innate power in themselves with which they can do God’s work, they are not
on the right track, for God will not work through those who believe in their own
self-sufficiency.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3117

“If ever a man ought to concentrate all his faculties and pray to be in the best
mental order, it should be when he comes to study the Word of God upon matters
which concern his noblest being.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3303 “If the Lord of Hosts
is with us, what grounds can there be for fear? I know of no supposable dangers,
no imaginable troubles, no conceivable difficulties through which, and out of
which, and beyond which this text will not carry us, if by faith we grasp it,
‘He has said, I will never leave you, nor forsake you.’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3150

“It is an admirable plan to fix your thoughts upon some text of Scripture before
you leave your bedroom in the morning—it will sweeten your meditation all the
day.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3090

“So let us be thankful if God sends us a glowing and zealous minister, for even
those who count it an affliction to have a minister, would be more afflicted if
they had not a good one! But how evil it is when men get itching ears, when they
need someone to be perpetually tickling them, giving them some pretty things,
some fine pretentious intellectualism! In all congregations there is good to be
done, except in a congregation having itching ears. From this may God deliver
us!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3331

“If we want to bring up a godly family who shall be a seed to serve God when our
heads are under the clods of the valley, let us seek to train them up in the
fear of God by meeting together as a family for worship.”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3103

“We hear a great deal, nowadays, about the liberty of ministers to preach what
they like, but what about the liberty of the people? Are they not to be
considered? Are churches made for ministers, or ministers made for churches?
After the people have elected a man to be their pastor, and he changes his
views, it is only common honesty that he should say so and no longer pretend to
preach what he does not believe, or to belong to a church with which he is not
sincerely in sympathy.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3200

“As we look back over our past experience, we see how precious our trials have
been to us. Someone said, ‘Give me back my bed of languishing. Give me back the
aches and pains that I suffered in that long trying illness if I may but have
such enjoyment of my Master’s Presence as I had then.’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3246

“Suppose I do now hate some sin that I once loved or that I hate all sin? No
credit is due to me, for that abhorrence of sin is what I ought always to have
had! God had the right to claim from me the hatred of sin of every sort, but
that hatred does not discharge the debt which I owe to God. I will go further
than that and say that no one ever repents of sin so thoroughly as he does when
he knows that it is forgiven.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3229

“An ordinary Christianity is not worth the picking up, but the true Christianity
that wraps a man up and envelopes him as the bush was enveloped in the fire and
was not consumed—that will make you happy—that will make the eyes to flash and
the soul to beat high with a more than earth-born joy!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3275

“It is a bad thing for a man not to know a little of all sciences, but a man may
go to Heaven well enough if he knows only the science of Christ Crucified. Not
to know Jesus will shut you out of Heaven though you had all the degrees of all
the universities in the world appended to your name! Ignorance of Him who is the
Savior of sinners is ignorance of the remedy for your soul’s disease, ignorance
of the key which unlocks Heaven’s gate, ignorance of Him who can kindle the lamp
of life in the sepulchers of death! Oh, I pray you, if you have been hitherto
ignorant of the Savior, be not satisfied till you know Him!”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3085

“The God of Israel had given rules for the preservation of the Scriptures, but
they had evidently fallen into disuse. It is expressly laid down in the Book of
Deuteronomy that each king was to copy out the Book of the Law for himself. We
have no evidence that any one of them did so.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3303

“We were told, the other day, that Calvinism is almost obsolete, but we do not
mind what men say about it—we believe that it will yet see everything else
obsolete! When modern culture has been blown away, like the thistledown from the
side of the hill, the Gospel I have preached will stand like the eternal hills
themselves, outliving every opposition, for God Himself has piled this Truth
like a mighty mountain and it shall stand fast till Christ Himself shall come!
Not a jot or tittle of it shall ever pass away.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3127

“When you have read the Bible through a score of times, you may have only walked
over the surface then, or plowed, at most, the upper soil. If you take one
passage and dig deep for the treasure that couches beneath, you will find it
inexhaustible! This Book has in it a matchless fullness. It were as possible to
measure space, or to grasp the infinite in the hollow of your hands, as to take
the entire compass of Holy Scripture.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3215

“As I meditated upon this sad scene[the crucifixion]—while my eyes were
streaming with tears on the Savior’s account, it seemed to me that the ribald
crowd was unconsciously honoring Him, after all, because contempt from such
people was true honor for Jesus. If they had applauded Him, He might have
blushed at the disgrace of being praised by such miscreants! But when they
despised and rejected Him, it brought Him true honor! Thus virtue received the
homage of vice and the beauty of holiness was the more plainly manifested in
contrast with the ugliness of sin!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3276

“He who hopes that what he says will be accepted by those who hear it, opens his
ears to hear what God says to him. There will be no acceptance of what you say
to others unless you accept what God says to you!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3246

“Nowadays, we do not so much need Bibles as Bible-readers. Are any of you in
that condition—that you would not be without a Bible in your house—and yet you
never read it? Do you treat this Book as a fetish? Do you reverence words which
you do not care to read? Is there some kind of witchcraft about paper and
binding in a certain form? Do you think it a very pious thing to put a big Bible
under your arm and march to a place of worship with it, and yet never read
it?”—Volume 58, Sermon #3303

“Oh, a great change would come over religious opinion in England if people were
not led by that absurd idea that they ought to be just what their parents were!
If we once could grow a race of men and women that would read the Scriptures for
themselves, and judge of Doctrines for themselves, we would have grand times
again!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3166

“It was because the Lord had made Ezekiel a watchman unto the house of Israel
that he proclaimed his Master’s message with such power and unction—and it must
be in a similar way that a minister must be to his people as the mouth of
God!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3200

“He who simply believes in Jesus Christ must have some degree of assurance, for
the simple act of reclining, recumbently resting upon Christ, if it is done
truly and sincerely is, in its measure, assuring to the heart. At any rate, it
is the milk that brings the cream. Faith is the milk and assurance is the cream!
You must get your assurance from your faith—and if it is a simple faith which
relies entirely upon Jesus Christ, it will, if not directly, yet very speedily,
bring you some degree of assurance of your interest in Christ.”—Volume 55,
Sermon #3137

“The faith that saves is a trusting faith, a reliant faith, a sacred recumbency,
confidence and leaning upon the Lord Jesus Christ!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3112

“Some persons allege that the children of God may act on different principles,
may believe different doctrines, may be the recipients of different kinds of
Divine Grace and that their apprehensions of God and of Christ may be thoroughly
diverse—we hold no such opinion! If there is not the vital principle in a man’s
heart, teaching him the Truth of God as it is in Jesus, he does not belong to
the one ‘Church of the living God.’ Thus, there is but one Church, however
divided it may be.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3093

It is of no use to be acquainted with the Scriptures if you are not acquainted
with God. You may read the Scriptures till you perish unless you see God in the
glass of Scripture, for it is to Him that you must come. A personal Christ must
have personal dealings with a personal sinner, or else there will be no personal
salvation.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3303 “True love proves itself when it comes to
something like self-denial, but how few of God’s servants ever reach to
self-denial for Jesus? They could not remember, if they sat down, that they ever
denied themselves a penny’s worth of anything to eat or drink, or denied
themselves a pound’s worth of finery, or a comfort in their homes, or anything
else for the sake of Christ! We should do better if we could get to feel that we
love Christ so much that we could not give too much to Him.”—Volume 55, Sermon
#3166

“Brothers and Sisters, I cannot do without you! If I want to celebrate the
Lord’s death, I cannot go into my chamber and take the piece of bread and the
cup and celebrate the ordinance alone—I must have you with me! I cannot do
without you! And you, the most spiritually-minded of you, if you shut yourselves
up in a cell and try to play the monk and the super-excellent, cannot keep this
ordinance! You must have fellowship with other Believers! You must come down
among the saints, for our Savior has given us this memorial which cannot be
celebrated except jointly, by the whole of us together!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3151
“I have often said, ‘There is no true coming which can be wrong’ ‘No man can
come unto Me, except the Father which has sent Me draw him.’ So if God draws, He
cannot draw the wrong way. Looking for the mercy of Christ, trusting the merits
of His sacrificial death, then you have come and come aright to the door of
mercy! And yet you may for a time not have a word to comfort you.”—Volume 57,
Sermon #3268

“If a man trusts in God and his friends, he has no secure trust. He is like one
that has one foot upon the rock and another on the quicksand.”—Volume 57, Sermon
#3247

“When Jesus grants the Divine Grace of forgiveness, at the same moment He gives
the tender heart that mourns that it should have needed forgiveness. I believe
that if this Truth of God were thoroughly understood, it would help many more to
receive the Calvinistic system of theology which now puzzles them. I know that
when I first realized that my repentance was the gift of God, the whole Doctrine
of Salvation by Grace fell into my soul as by a lightning flash!”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3229

“Beloved, often deny yourselves what you might have—what might lawfully be
yours. Put away every alluring bait if in any wise you would injure your
usefulness or mar your character by taking it. The Lord help you to do this by
His good Spirit! ”—Volume 56, Sermon #3208

“The work of the Law upon the enlightened conscience is a very healthy
operation—it is like a sharp needle that goes through the soul, but it draws the
golden thread of Mercy after it—or like the sharp plow which breaks up the
ground and prepares it for the seed which in due time shall bring forth the
harvest to God’s praise and Glory! Whenever the entrance of the Law makes the
offense to abound, may God grant us Grace to receive the Gospel so that Grace
shall much more abound!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3304

“When we are asking for anything about which we are somewhat doubtful as to
whether it will glorify God or not, we may well speak with hesitation, but as we
are sure that it is for God’s Glory that men should see Jesus and rejoice in
Him, let us crave this gift for them with great importunity and much holy
boldness—and we shall certainly have our heart’s desire.”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3117

“We may receive new light upon what is in the Word, but the new light will not
make that false which was true before the new light came! We hope, when the time
comes for us to die, that we shall be able to say, ‘As we commenced our
ministry, so we finish it. Our first sermon was on the same lines as our last.
Of course there was a growth in our power of receiving and expounding the Truth
of God, but it was the same Truth that we received and that we preached at the
first and at the last.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3200

“When God’s Infinite Justice was wide awake and in sternest action, you may
guess in a measure, but you cannot fully conceive what our Lord must have
endured!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3088 “Your own righteousness is such an abominable
thing that it will as surely damn you as the greatest profanity! The best thing
for you to do with it is to bury it, and run away from it.”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3084 “Our dear Lord has many things to say to us, but we cannot bear them yet
because we are so unbelieving. But if we had more faith and rested like little
children upon Him, He would tell us more and show us more!”—Volume 57, Sermon
#3247

“Ignorance of the Bible often troubles men’s hearts and consciences—and prevents
them from finding that peace of God which a little more knowledge of it would be
sure to give them. And I am certain that ignorance or forgetfulness of many of
the exceedingly great and precious promises of God and of the marvelous things
He has engaged to do for His people, often causes our eyes to flow with tears
and our hearts to be overwhelmed with suffering. The more a Christian knows of
his religion, the better for his peace and for his happiness!”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3077

“A deep sense of need often reveals to us Christ’s All-Sufficiency.”—Volume 57,
Sermon #3268 “If I am now addressing any backslider, let me remind him or her
that the Lord Jesus has been sent “to bind up the brokenhearted.” Return to your
first love, poor Backslider, for it was better with you then than it is
now!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3104 “Oh, how guilty we much be that we will not
believe that what God says it true, that we will not believe though millions of
witnesses before the Throne of God attest the Truth of God that ‘where sin
abounded, Grace did much more abound.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3304 “Your proper
note on joining the Church is not one of congratulation, as though the victory
were won, but one of preparation—for now the trumpet sounds and the fight
begins! ”—Volume 55, Sermon #3167

“No doubt the excitement of having slain the Philistines would naturally be
followed by depression of spirits in Samson. When David had mounted the throne
of Judah, there came a reaction and he said, ‘I am this day weak, though
anointed king.’ You must expect to feel weakest just when you are enjoying your
greatest triumph!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3131 “I think that certain forms of
Arminianism are injurious to the faith of the Christian—those forms, for
instance, which deny the election of God, the effectual calling of the Holy
Spirit and the final perseverance of the saints. These denials seem to me to cut
from under a man’s foot everything he has to stand upon! And I do not wonder
that the man who believes them has no assurance. If I believe that God’s
children may fall away and perish, it seems to me that full assurance, at any
rate, becomes an impossibility, for if they may fall, why may not I?”—Volume 55,
Sermon #3137

“You think about saving—God only thinks about giving. You take a delight in
getting—He takes a delight in bestowing. Go to Him! Go to Him! You would not
need anybody to be long praying you to accept a gift, so do not think that God
needs much beseeching in order to give, for it is as easy for Him to give as it
is for you to accept! And as accepting seems congenial to our nature, so does
bestowing seem congenial to His! Go to Him and He will empty out His Grace upon
you!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3215

“If, indeed, you have been redeemed by His precious blood. If His Spirit has,
indeed, regenerated you. And if His Grace is working in your hearts and lives,
surely you cannot be so cowardly as to try to conceal yourselves as secret
disciples of Christ!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3200

“I must not fail to remind you that as a memorialofChrist, while it is very
solemn, it is singularly happy. Christ has ordained, as a memorial of His death,
what? Why, a feast! Not a funeral, not a meeting together to sing dirges over
His mangled body, or to go to a grave to weep! That might have been a memorial,
but we have a better one—we have a happy one!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3151

“The Lord’s Prayer is quite as good said backwards as forwards if you do not say
it from the heart. There is quite as much likelihood of a benediction in a
number of words thrown out pell-mell, without any kind of connection, as there
would be in the best-arranged sermon, if there is not an attentive ear and an
understanding heart.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3305

“And so, wearisome nights may have been appointed for you, strong crying and
tears—but keep on, for if God has given you genuine faith, He must give you
eternal salvation unless He breaks His promises—which He can never do! He must
save them who come unto Him through Jesus Christ! Your business is with His
command and when you have obeyed, and believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, then,
even if you weep in the dark, your tears will be for your spiritual
strengthening!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3268

“Of how many places might it not be said, ‘He could not do many mighty works
there because of their unbelief?’ Unbelief seems to hamper Omnipotence, to tie
the hands of the Almighty! We do not know what losers we have been by our
unbelief.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3247

“I hope none of you are under the impression that, at the close of the present
service, I am going to administer the Lord’s Supper. God forbid that I should
ever venture to do such a thing as that! No, it is you, or we, who come to the
Lord’s Table, to break bread and to drink of the cup—and we come together, not
as a Church holding certain views, but we come simply as Christians to, “do this
in remembrance” of the Savior who died for us!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3099

“Divide yourselves upon this question as to how far you are Believers, for we
cannot assert that Christ is precious to you if you are not Believers. We know
He will not be your heart’s Monarch if you have no faith. He will be the very
reverse! But if you are Believers in and upon Him, He will be precious to you
beyond all comparison!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3112

“Brothers and Sisters, if we could see what God sees, we would feel that the
heaviest trouble we have ever had was the thing that we would choose above all
other things! You probably sometimes think that the course of Divine Providence
is very mysterious, but were you as well informed concerning all the
circumstances as the Lord is, you would say, ‘That is the course I, myself,
would have chosen.’—Volume 54, Sermon #3076

“Shame on the man or woman who can live in the midst of worldlings and never let
them know that they belong to Christ!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3200

“Why, even a solitary Divine precept is so precious that if all the saints in
the world were burnt at one stake for the defense of it—it would be well worth
the holocaust! If the whole of us went to prison and to death for the
preservation of a single sentence of Scripture, we would be fully justified in
making such a sacrifice.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3248

“Let it never be supposed that the office of teaching in the Christian Church
can exclusively belong to one man, or to one class of men! It belongs to every
Christian man, and to every Christian woman, too! You cannot teach beyond what
you have been taught of God, and it is in proportion as you are taught of God
that your teaching takes a wider sphere. But you must teach what you
know!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3305

“To get the goodness out of the Scriptures, you must meditate upon them and so
digest them, just as you have seen the cattle lie down to chew the cud after
eating. To get the nourishment out of a text, turn it over and over in your
mind, ruminate upon it, pull it to pieces word by word.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3090

“Coming to Christ means, first, turning away from all confidence in ourselves or
inothers andtrusting alone in Jesus.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3230

“If old age could keep men out of Heaven, there are many now before the Throne
of God who would never have been there! If you are seventy, or eighty, or even
90 years of age, it is a sad and solemn thing that you should have lived so long
without Christ—but this is no reason why you should die and be damned! God’s
message to you is still this, “Turn you, turn you from your evil ways; for why
will you die?””—Volume 57, Sermon #3262

“When a man once gets into the habit of giving to the cause of God, it becomes
as much a delight to contribute of his substance as to pray for God’s bounty or
to drink in the promises! How could I dare to exist if I fill not do something
for Christ? Not do something for Jesus? Where it not to rob me of the highest
privilege which can be accorded a man this side the grave?”—Volume 56, Sermon
#3215

“I remember my dear old grandfather looking about his study to find his
spectacles while he had them on! He was looking through the spectacles to find
the spectacles and there are many who act just as inconsistently as that with
regard to salvation!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3117

‘‘Dread the Greeks, even when they bring you gifts,’ said the tradition of
old—and let the Christian dread the world most when it puts on its softest
speeches! Stand, then, upon your guard, you warriors of the Cross, when least
you fear, the cringing foe will come behind you and stab you under the pretense
of friendship! Your Master was betrayed with a kiss, and so will you be unless
you watch unto prayer.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3167

“The Word of God is to us an Infallible Revelation of the Eternal Truth of God
and that part of it which has already been proved to be true to us is the seal
and pledge that the whole of it is true and precious!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3248
“If a man needs an excuse for clinging to his sin, he can always find one, and
any lie will satisfy the soul that is resolved not to be saved!”—Volume 58,
Sermon #3306

“There is powder enough in all our hearts to blow our character to pieces if God
does not keep the devil’s sparks away, or quench them in a mighty stream of
Grace before they can do us mischief! Utter weakness are you, O Man, and many
and mighty foes are seeking your destruction! You need an infinite Friend to
keep you in safety against all the machinations of your adversaries!”—Volume 54,
Sermon #3074

“If we never doubt God till we have cause to do so, distrust will be banished
from our hearts forever! Of men, we speak as we find them—let us do the same
with God.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3131 “Many who are ordained unto eternal life, are
yet held back, as John Bunyan was, for many a day and even years in doubt and
perplexity and trouble! ”—Volume 57, Sermon #3268 “I would like to make those
four words ring again and again in your ears, ‘God knows all things.’ Then He
knows the sins that you have forgotten, or that you wish you could forget!
”—Volume 55, Sermon #3152

“If the snowy peaks of Piedmont, if the lowlands of Holland, if the prisons of
Spain could speak, they would tell of Infinite Mercy experienced by the saints
under terrible oppression—of hearts that were leaping to Heaven while the bodies
were bruised or burning on earth! God has been gracious to His people when they
have been driven out.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3201

“There will be people in Heaven who never read a word in their lives. I know not
how low the Grace of God can go. Some poor creatures who know nothing of the
things of earth, even these may understand the Gospel, it is so plain! We do not
need a giant intellect in order to grasp its Doctrines. Its element and
substance is, ‘He that believes and is baptized shall be saved.’ Believer,
ignorant though you may be, you can comprehend this grand scheme of man’s
redemption, so do not say that because you are poor and ignorant, you will not
enter Heaven!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3139

“No honey is so sweet as that which drops freely from the comb, and no service
is so sweet to the Lord Jesus as that which a Believer spontaneously renders to
Him.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3092

“Our Lord turns His face from His people though He never turns His heart from
His people. He may even close His eyes in sleep when the vessel is tossed by the
tempest, but His heart is awake all the while.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3307 “‘He
that is not with Me is against Me,’ is still one of the infallible tests by
which He [Jesus Chris] tries the sons of men! And if you are not with Him, you
are against Him! If you are not out-and-out for Him, you are mocking Him in your
way even as the Jews did in theirs [at the Cross]!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3276

“‘With all our imperfections, we feel that we do love God’s people and we do
love our fellow men.We desire to relieve their distresses as far as we can. And
as much as lies in us, we desire to promote the happiness and comfort of
others.’ If a man cannot say this, he cannot claim to be a Christian because any
man who lives for himself is no more a Christian than the devil is!”—Volume 55,
Sermon #3152

“When I pray, I ask for something for myself or other people. When I praise, it
is but little I can render. But oh, to think that, I, a poor creature of God’s
own making, should be able to give to Him! It puts the creature in the highest
conceivable light. It lifts him well above angels. There are works which
laborious, disinterested, self-sacrificing Christians can do for Christ. Let the
wealthy empty themselves upon the earth and this shall be the way to fill
themselves!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3215

“There are scattering times, no doubt, but we should always pray that we may
live in gathering times, that we may be gathered together in unity, in essential
oneness around the Cross, in united action for our glorious Master, and that
sinners who are far away may be gathered in, too, and backsliders who have
wandered may be restored! Pray for gathering times, Brothers and Sisters, and
may the day come when the Lord will assemble the lame and will gather the
outcast and afflicted.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3201

“If a man can stand commendation, he can stand anything. The severest trial
which a Christian has to bear is probably the trial which comes from his kind
but inconsiderate friends who would puff him up, if they could, by telling him
what a fine fellow he is.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3167

“Everything short of personal godliness falls short of eternal life. Remember
that nobody can be born-again for you. You yourselves must be regenerated.
Nobody can renounce “the pomp and vanities of the world” for you. Sponsorship in
religion is the most transparent of frauds. Nobody can love Christ for you—your
own heart must beat high with affection towards His dear name! It must be a
personal religion if it is to be of any value to you.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3112

“‘Give me Christ, or else I die,’ is the cry of every spirit that has lost the
dear Companionship of Jesus. We do not part with such heavenly delights without
many a pang. It is not with us a matter of ‘maybe He will return, and we hope He
will,’ but it must be, or we faint and die!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3307

“He [Jesus Christ] is a Savior—do not believe that fact and yet remain unsaved.
As far as Christ is known to you, so far make use of Him! Is not this sound
common sense?”—Volume 57, Sermon #3249

“Happy day! Happy day when I shall sit down at the feet of Jesus Christ and hear
Him preach! O Beloved, what we shall then think of our poor preaching, I cannot
tell! It is a mercy that Jesus Christ does not preach here now, for, after
hearing Him, none of us would preach again, so ashamed would we be of
ourselves.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3081

“But, dear Friends, if you want to get full assurance, I can recommend to you
another thing and it is this, work for Christ. We are not saved by works, but
working for God brings us many blessings. Rest assured that if you spend and are
spent for Christ, you shall never be out of spendingmoney! If you lay out your
strength for Him, He will lay in for you fresh stores of strength. He does not
give us faith that we may bury it as the man buried his talent, but if we have
five talents of faith and use them, He will give us five talents more—and so we
shall have assurance if we use our faith well.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3137

“It will not suffice for you to come to Christ’s Doctrine—you must, of course,
believe what He taught—but believing His teaching will not save you unless you
come to HIM.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3230

“We have heard persons talk about their natural inability to perform gracious
acts and we have not answered them because it will be time enough to talk of
what they cannot do when they have done what they can do. There are some things
which we are sure they can do, and these they have neglected—it is mere
hypocrisy, therefore, for them to be pleading lack of power when they do not use
the strength they have.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3277

“In the sacred emblems now upon this Supper Table Jesus is already among us.
Faith cries, ‘He has come!’ Like John the Baptist she gazes intently on Him and
cries, ‘Behold the Lamb of God!’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3307

“It is a terrible thought to me that although God’s Word says, ‘Owe no man
anything,’ yet that the Church should be more awfully in debt than any
corporation in England! I do not think that the debts of all the people put
together would equal the debts of professing Christians—debts which they have
entered into often on account of religion.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3100 “That man
only is rich towards God who begins to know his emptiness and feels that he is
less than nothing, and vanity.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3201

“The joys of fellowship with God are written in marble. ‘Engraved as in eternal
brass’ are memories of communion with Christ Jesus.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3249

“When a man will not believe the Truth of God, he is sure, before long, to be a
greedy believer of lies! No persons are so credulous as skeptics. There is no
absurdity so gross but what an unbeliever will very soon be brought to receive
it, though he rejects the Truth of God.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3331

“A Primitive Methodist Brother said at one of the meetings, lately, that the
reason why the Primitive Methodists got on so was that other Christians were
waiting for something to turn up, but that the Primitive Methodists turned it
up, themselves! It was an odd thing to say, but there is a great truth in it.
Some Christian people are always waiting for something to turn up. They want an
opportunity of doing good and they mean to do it—oh, so well—when they get the
opportunity.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3215

“I pray the Lord to open your eyes and mine to see what it is to be a lost soul,
that we may sigh and cry over souls that are being lost by millions! May He open
our eyes to see the true character of sin and the desperate condition of those
who are steeped in it—to see the terrors of the wrath to come, that final
judgment of God which shall overwhelm the wicked! Then may he open our eyes to
see the reality of His eternal love, the cleansing power of the precious blood
of Jesus and the almighty efficacy of the ever blessed Spirit. And may He open
our eyes in such a way that, seeing these things, we may be startled into
earnestness, amazed in devotion, constrained unto consecration and may give
ourselves up, from this time forth—spirit, soul and body—to serve the
Lord!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3117

“The more you give up self, the more you dare and do for Christ, the more fully
Jesus sits on the throne of your heart and the more Divinely blessed will this
life become to you! But the farther you keep from Christ and the more content
you are with a half-hearted religion, the more will you find it to be a
weariness, a mere burden to be borne, a custom to be endured—not a banquet to be
enjoyed, nor a thing Divine to be loved and to be grasped with all your mind and
heart!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3275

“I have always taught you that the Omnipotence of God over the human heart is
never exercised in such a way as to violate the free will of man. It would be a
clumsy kind of Omnipotence that would do as it pleased with men whether they
were willing or not! But it is Divine Omnipotencethat molds the will, enlightens
the judgment and fashions the heart and mind and character of man according to
the Lord’s eternal purpose.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3308

“I have heard of men who mark a hundred as a hundred and twenty, and who mark
goods as of certain lengths when they know they are not of such lengths. And
they say, ‘It is the custom of the trade.’ Well, if it is the custom of your
trade to lie, remember that it is God’s custom to send all liars to Hell! A
Christian man has no right to lie even if all the world should concur in the
lies! He should say, ‘No, I serve the God of Truth and, come what may, no lie
shall defile my tongue, for Christ has cleansed it and made it His own.’”—Volume
55, Sermon #3152

“A man cannot have spiritual life in him and yet be unconscious of it.”—Volume
54, Sermon #3079 “Who among us has not doubted his own interest in Christ? Happy
are you who are free from such trouble! But there are seasons with some of us
when we turn our title deeds over and we are sometimes afraid lest they should
not be genuine.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3167 “I never met with anybody who ever
thought that he deserved to be chosen unto salvation—the very fact of the choice
proves that it must have been all of Grace.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3248

“The Gospel is to be preached to every creature in order that Christ’s chosen
ones may be gathered unto Him. We cast the net into the sea, for we do not know
where the fish are, but God knows and He guides into the net those He means us
to catch for Him. You know that a magnet will attract steel to itself—well, the
Gospel attracts souls that have an affinity to itself—and thus Christ draws His
chosen ones unto Himself with the cords of a man, and bands of love!”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3216

“It is not any rite and it is not the neglect of any rite which can produce
righteousness. It is as easy to trust in your non-observance of a ceremony as to
trust in the ceremony, itself, and it will be quite as delusive. It is faith in
Christ that brings righteousness—the ‘faith which works by love.’”—Volume 57,
Sermon #3249

“You cannot praise another man’s God. Possession is not only nine points of the
law, but it is all the points of the Gospel!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3275 “There
were also others [God’s chosen] in the far-away islands of the south—cannibals
given up to the wildest passions—but Christ had bought them with His precious
blood and a sacred instinct compelled John Williams and many another martyrs and
missionaries to go forth to the Apostolic task of turning savages into
saints!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3308

“Many come into this place of worship as skeptics and go out sincere Believers
in the Lord Jesus Christ. Some have I known who have come here only to laugh and
scoff, but they have remained to pray. No thought was further from their mind
than that they should ever become the followers of the Lamb—but the Divine
power, which was not necessarily connected with the preacher—carried the Word
into their hearts, arrested them on the spot, changed their natures, made them
new creatures in Christ Jesus and sent them on their way rejoicing in their
newly-found Savior!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3202

“Those silly butterflies of fashion who spend all their time in flitting about
from flower to flower are so heartless and thoughtless that I can, to some
extent, comprehend how they can do without God. With empty heads and silly
hearts, men and women can make gods of anything! Their own pretty persons can be
quite a sufficient object for their idiotic worship. But a man who stands right
straight up, a sensible thinking man—a working-man, if you will—I do not mind
whether he works with the dry heat of his brain or with the damp sweat of his
face—I cannot understand how a man like this, with organs of thought and a
reasoning soul, can go on without God!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3131

“The discussion between Catholics and Protestants has been far from what it
ought to have been. We seem bent upon forcing them to submit at once to our
views, but this is wrong of us. We may condemn wrong principles, but let us
always speak gently of the men who hold them. They are spiritually blind, so we
should deal kindly with them, avoiding that bitterness of spirit which is so
often manifested. Sick men will not take your medicine if you give them vinegar
with it—give them something sweet with it and they will take it. So be kind and
loving to the spiritually blind and they will be likely to give heed to
you.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3139

“I am quite certain that God has an elect people, for He tells me so in His
Word. And I am equally certain that everyone who comes to Christ shall be saved,
for that also is His own declaration in the Scriptures! When people ask me how I
reconcile these two Truths of God, I usually say that there is no need to
reconcile them, for they have never yet quarreled with one another! Both are
true and both relate to the same persons, for those who come to Christ are those
who were from eternity given to Christ by His Father!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3230

“It would be a mistake in language, a contradiction in thought even to
suggestthat there was some measure of deserving about any of those sinners for
whom Christ died!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3248

“If your faith is as feeble, now, as it was 20 years ago. If you have not made
any spiritual advance during the last 10 years, you ought very gravely to
question whether you have any spiritual life at all! You may not be able to see
the growth, but there must be growth if there is life.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3250

“One vessel may leak at the bow and another may leak at the stern, but it does
not much matter where the leak is—in either case the vessel will sink.”—Volume
56, Sermon #3202

“If you are, indeed, ‘bought with a price,’ Christ will surely gather you with
the rest of His redeemed! By might and main He will make a conquest of you, for,
when the Lord determines to bring His people to Himself, neither material
distance nor moral distance can prevent Him from doing so!”—Volume 58, Sermon
#3308

“It is the duty of every Christian to forsake every known sin, whatever it may
be, and, in doing so, he is not to consult with flesh and blood. ”—Volume 54,
Sermon #3078

“The sufferings of the Man who was the Fellow of the Lord of Hosts, in place of
us poor worms of the earth, were more than we can comprehend! God grant us
Grace, if startled as we hear about them, to rally again to Him and, each one of
us to say, with Thomas, ‘My Lord, and my God,’ and then to cling to Him through
life and in death, come what may!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3088

“Some even complain of Christian importunity and are weary of it, not liking to
be spoken to about their souls. ‘Intrusion,’ it has been called by some
cavilers, but indeed it is a blessed intrusion upon a sinner, slumbering in his
sin over the brink of Hell, to disturb his slumber and awaken him to flee for
his life!...I reckon that a breach of courtesy is often a most courteous thing
when the desire is the benefit of an immortal soul! If I say a very personal
thing and it arouses anyone to seek and find salvation, I know that he will
never blame me on that score!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3277

“Those who are pushed about by many as though they were not fit to live are the
very ones for whom I would gladly make a way and bring them to the softest place
and say, ‘Be of good comfort, for it is for you and such as you that God has
sent His Son and His Spirit into the world.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3113 “I thank
God every time I remember the scores of young men we have here whose mouths have
been opened to speak for Christ. Go, on, my brave sons, bearing your testimony
for the Master! Even if the police should sometimes move you off, be content to
be moved and go and blow the Gospel trumpet somewhere else! But take care to
proclaim the good tidings of salvation, for you have your Lord’s commission to
do so! When a man receives a commission from the Queen, he is not a little proud
of it. But you have a commission from the King of kings empowering you to gather
together unto Him all who are included in the Covenant of His Grace!”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3216

“O you great sinners, Jesus Christ knows how to pardon you! He knows how to lay
home to your hearts such texts as these—‘All manner of sin and blasphemy shall
be forgiven unto men.’—‘Come now, and let us reason together, says the Lord:
though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are
red like crimson, they shall be as wool.’—‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and
you shall be saved,’ even you, O you greatest of sinners!”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3104

“May God the Holy Spirit teach us to weep at the remembrance of our sin, to weep
at the foot of the Cross as we look upon Him whom our sins have pierced, and
mourn for Him as one mourns for his only son and be in bitterness for Him as one
that is in bitterness for his first-born!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3308

“Sin indulged will prevent the full assurance of faith—and even a little sin
will do this. Have you ever had a small stone in your boot? If so, and you have
tried to walk, you have found it very uncomfortable travelling. If you have a
tiny splinter of wood beneath your nail, you know how painful it is—you get it
extracted as soon as you can lest you should lose your finger, or even your
hand. Beware of little sins, Beloved, for they will keep all comfort out of your
life and effectually hinder the growth of your faith.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3250

“Do not any of you imagine because your children can get good books, that you
are exonerated from speaking to them personally about their souls! Mother, you
are the best instructor that your child can have. Father, your loving, gracious
talk with your boy will have more effect upon him than any book you can give
him.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3248

“Once you get to know Christ personally and that He loved you and gave Himself
for you—and then rejoice that you are forgiven and justified through Him—the
world will count you stupid and obstinate, but you will stand firm and be able
to resist all its sarcasm and its ridicule. He who has made a refuge of Jesus
Christ may stand safe, whatever errors may invade the land!”—Volume 55, Sermon
#3167

“You say that your enemies are doing all that they can to destroy you, but can
they destroy the Divine promises? The Lord has promised to give unto His sheep
eternal life—can they take that promise from you, or make it of no value? They
may frown at you, but can they keep you out of Heaven? They may threaten you,
but can they make the Covenant of Grace to be of no effect? While eternal things
are safe, we may well be content to let other things come or go just as God
wills!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3098

“There may be some here who are now truly converted, who have sinned as deeply
as even Saul of Tarsus did. Then let them acknowledge, as he did, that their
conversion was due to the undeserved favor of God!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3202

“We, as Calvinists, believe that men cannot see the Truth of God unless it is
revealed to them by God. We should, therefore, be the last to condemn the
ignorant, but should do our utmost to instruct them and to open their eyes. It
is of no use to attempt to force a man to believe.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3139

“Hearing true Gospel sermons is one of the most solemn occupations in which
intelligent beings can be employed. Hearing ears are by no means common
things—happy are you who have them.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3082

“The last tear will be dropped in Jordan’s flowing stream, for we shall sorrow
no more and repent no more when we stand before the Eternal Throne of God! And
the last prayer—at any rate, the last prayer that has any sense of sin in
it—shall be breathed just on the bank of the river which we cross to enter into
Glory!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3308

“‘The Lord stood by him.’ This shall be said of each one who diligently serves
God. Dear Friend, if you are a worker for the Lord Jesus, depend upon it He will
not desert you. If, in the course of your endeavors, you are brought into
sadness and depression, you shall then find it sweetly true that the Lord stands
by you.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3153

“We find a very large number of invitations, both in the Old and New Testament,
addressed to persons in certain conditions and positions. And when we meet with
a person whose case is thus anticipated, we are bound to bid him be of good
cheer because the Lord is plainly calling him.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3277

“This is the foundation of our faith—that this Book is Divinely Inspired! Allow
nobody to make you doubt concerning this matter, for you must give up
Christianity, itself, if you give up the Inspiration of this Book!”—Volume 57,
Sermon #3248 “The Lord says, ‘Gather My saints together unto Me.’ [Psalm 50:5.]
We are not told to gather them into the Baptist denomination, or into the
Presbyterian kirk, or into the Episcopal establishment, or into any particular
church! Our Lord’s command is, ‘Gather My saints together unto Me.’ I have never
been ashamed of being called a Baptist since I became one. And if I did not
believe that the Lord Jesus Christ ordained the immersion of Believers on
profession of their faith, I would not preach and practice it. But, dear as
Christ’s own ordinances ought always to be to all Christians, our main business
is not to bring men and women to Baptism, but to bring them to Christ!”—Volume
56, Sermon #3216

“This is the best test I can give you, Beloved—the most accurate thermometer by
which you can ascertain the rise or fall of your spiritual temperature—Is Christ
Jesus more precious to you than He ever was before? If so, then I am bound to
thank God always for you, Brothers and Sisters, because your faith grows
exceedingly!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3250

“The path to Heaven is not at all difficult to find. It would be very difficult
to find the way to Heaven by the rites and ceremonies about which some are so
particular, but to those who trust in Jesus the way of salvation is a very
simple one, so simple that the wayfaring man, though a fool in other things,
need not err therein!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3308

“The false doctrine of general redemption—that Christ died for the damned in
Hell and suffered the torment of those who afterwards are tormented
forever—seems to me to be detestable, subversive of the whole Gospel and
destructive of the only pillar upon which our hopes can be built! Christ stood
in the place of His elect—for them He made a full Atonement—for them He so
suffered that not a sin of theirs shall ever be laid at their door. As the
Father’s love embraced them, so the death of His Son reconciled them.”—Volume
54, Sermon #3085

“It is a very good sign that a man has been really awakened when he goes
uninvited to a Prayer Meeting. I love to see a stranger come stealing in and sit
in a corner where God’s people are met for supplication. Any hypocrite may come
to worship on a Sunday, but it is not every hypocrite who will come to the
meeting for prayer!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3118

“Dread, mysterious and profound as the Doctrine of Divine Sovereignty is, yet it
certainly must be acknowledged that He who is God has an absolute and inherent
right to do as He wills with all those whom He has, Himself, created.”—Volume
56, Sermon #3202

“The true helmet of hope must come from the heavenly arsenal! You must go to the
Divine Storehouse, for unto God belongs salvation and the hope of salvation must
be given to you by His free Grace. A hope of salvation is not purchasable. Our
great King does not sell his armor, but gives it freely to all who enlist. They
take the shilling and accept faith. They trust Christ and they are enlisted—and
then the armor is given them gratis. From head to foot they are arrayed by
Grace!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3167

“Bartimaeus followed a despised and crucified Christ! Friend, will you do the
same? Will you fare as He fares, and endure reproach for His sake? Brave men are
needed for these evil times—we have too many of those thin-skinned professors
who faint if society gives them the cold shoulder! Power to walk with the
crucified Lord into the very jaws of the lion is a glorious gift of the Holy
Spirit! May it rest on you, dear Friend, to a full degree! May the Spirit of God
help you!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3277

“The people were quick to express their admiration [Matthew 9:33] yet we see
very little trace of their believing in our Lord’s mission. It is a small thing
to marvel, but a great thing to believe! O Lord, give the people around us to
see such revivals and conversions as they have never known before!”—Volume 55,
Sermon #3139

“Are you trusting in God, dear Friends? Are you living a life of faith? Then the
walk of faith will be followed, in due time, by the triumph of faith! Blessed
are all they that put their trust in the Lord, and blessed forever shall they
be.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3131

“There were many ways by which men might die, but there was only one death which
God pronounced to be accursed. He did not say, ‘Cursed is he that dies by
stoning, or by the sword, or by a millstone being fastened about his neck, or by
being eaten of worms.’ But it waswritten, ‘Cursed is everyone that hangs on a
tree.’ By no other death than that one, which God did single out as the death of
the accursed, could Jesus Christ die!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3251

“When you see a Christian in the furnace, you cannot expect that he will get out
by asking, ‘When will this flame abate?’ But the fire will soon be over when a
man, in such circumstances, can say, ‘The Lord’s will be done.’ It is a sign
that the metal has been properly fused and that the dross has gone when you can
see the image of the Refiner in it—when the heart reflects the face of God and
says, ‘Not as I will, but as You will.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3073

“If we have nothing, we should be humble because of our poverty—and if we have
much, we ought to be humble because we are so much in debt to God!”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3202 “A text of Scripture is often like an apple tree with abundance of
ripe fruit on it and we are underneath the tree. Give it a shake, Brothers and
Sisters—shake it till the ripe fruit drops down!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3090

“I do not know whether there are any degrees in Glory and I do not trouble about
whether there are or are not—but this I do know, that all the saints shall be
gathered together unto Christ—and that degree is high enough for any of
them!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3216 “‘The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that
which was lost,’ is a sentence as majestic as Prophet ever penned when in
fullest Inspiration he extolled the Prince of Peace!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3309

“I have always found that as my trust in self went up, my trust in Christ went
down—and as my trust in self went down—my trust in Christ went up. So I urge you
to take an honest view of your own blackness of heart and life, for that will
cause you to pray with David, ‘Wash me, and I shall be whiter than
snow.’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3278

“Jesus can stand side by side with us, for He has been afflicted in all our
afflictions.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3153 “Why should there not be money to send
forth missionaries abroad? It is just this—there is not enough of the love of
Christ in the Church and there is not enough of preaching Christ—otherwise there
would be more of Christian giving!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3100

“Do we sufficiently reverence the Holy Spirit and love Him as we should for all
that He has done? The Incarnation of the Son of God is no greater mystery than
the indwelling of the Spirit of God in the hearts of men. It is truly marvelous
that the ever-blessed Spirit, who is equally God with the Father and the Son,
should come and reside in these bodies of ours and make them His temple.”—Volume
54, Sermon #3086

“The Atonement of Christ gives such an exhibition of the guilt of sin as is not
to be seen anywhere else—no, not even in the flames of Hell! ”—Volume 57, Sermon
#3252

“One thing in which we all betray our littleness is the readiness with which we
fall intothe gross sin ofidolatry. We are, none of us, likely to bow down before
blocks of wood and stone as the heathen do. Nor are we likely to worship the god
made of bread which is the god of so many in this country—yet we are all too
prone to make unto ourselves gods that are really idols! At one time it is
favorite child who is thus worshipped.‘There never was a fairer child than mine.
She is more like an angel than a human being,’ says the fond and foolish mother
whose heart is wrapped up in her little one! Then comes God’s great hammer that
breaks all idols—and the dead child is carried to the silent tomb. After such a
painful experience as that, will the mother ever make an idol of another child?
Yes, there are some who have done that, to their own confusion, time after
time!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3140

“Oh that blessed word, HOPE! You know what the New Zealanders call hope? They
call it in their language, ‘the swimming thought,’ because it always swims. You
cannot drown it—it always keeps its head above the wave! When you think you have
drowned the Christian’s hope, up it comes, all dripping from the brine, and
cries again, ‘Hope you in God, for I shall yet praise Him!’”—Volume 55, Sermon
#3167

“Men have tried to overcome sin by the reasoning of philosophy, or by arguments
fetched from common sense—but those blunt wooden swords have been powerless to
destroy it! It is only the sharp two-edged sword of the Spirit—the grand
doctrine of the love and Grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that can
pierce our sin to the heart and lay it in the dust!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3252

“I do not know that I would pray for sudden death, though sudden death is, to a
Believer in Christ, sudden Glory, but I certainly would not pray that I might
not be called home suddenly. So far as I am personally concerned, I would like
to have a similar experience to that of good Dr. Beaumont who was preaching the
Word on earth, and just as he finished uttering a sentence of his sermon, was
singing the praises of God in Heaven!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3216

“It was but yesterday that I saw it alleged against Christianity that it
discourages virtue and patronizes the guilty. They say that we ministers lift
the sinful into the most prominent place and give them the preference above the
moral and excellent in our preaching. This is a soft impeachment to which, in a
better sense than is intended by those who bring it, we are glad to plead
guilty!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3309

“I heard one say of a certain preacher, ‘I greatly admired him, for he commenced
his sermon by saying, ‘Permit a young man to address you.’’ I said, ‘That is not
the way God’s servants ought to talk. If God has given them anything to say for
Him, they have not to ask anybody’s permission to say it, nor should they
apologize to anybody for saying it as God enables them to say it.’”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3202

“We hold most firmly the Doctrine of Particular Redemption, that Christ loved
His Church and gave Himself for it. But we do not hold the doctrine of the
limited value of His precious blood! There can be no limit to Deity—there must
be infinite value in the Atonement which was offered by Him who is Divine. The
only limit of the Atonement is in its design, and that design was that Christ
should give eternal life to as many as the Father has given Him—but in itself
the Atonement is sufficient for the salvation of the whole world—and if the
entire race of mankind could be brought to believe in Jesus, there is enough
efficacy in His precious blood to cleanse everyone born of woman from every sin
that all of them have ever committed!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3278

“Numbers of persons are kept from peace of mind through mistaken ideas of God.
They think that He is like themselves and so they do not receive the
Gospel.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3119 “No Church will long continue in the enjoyment
of the blessing of unity unless it continues in nearness to Christ. Communion
with Christ means the communion of Christians with one another—we can only get
true union and true communion in that way.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3104

“If any of us should fall into straitened circumstances, it will be a comfort to
be able to say, ‘When I was rich, I freely used my wealth for my Lord.’ If we
are ill, it will be a satisfaction to remember that when we were in health, we
used our strength for Jesus. These are reflections which give light in the shade
and make music at midnight. It is not out of our own reflections that the joy
arises, but out of the witness of the Holy Spirit that the Lord is not
unrighteous to forget our work of faith and labor of love.”—Volume 55, Sermon
#3153

“It is a thrice-blessed fact that Christ came to save the lost, for such are we
all—and had He not made lost ones the object of His searching and saving, there
would have been no hope for us!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3309

“Very often, some of those who really do believe in Jesus neglect to avow their
faith in the Lord’s appointed way. Nothing is more plainly taught in the New
Testament than that it is the duty of every Believer in Christ to be baptized.
It is the duty of every Christian, having first given himself to Christ,
afterwards to give himself to Christ’s Church, according to the will of God.
Now, my dear Friend, do your Master’s will and consult not with flesh and
blood.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3078

“Alas, alas, our thoughts, if left to themselves, are as a cage of unclean birds
or a den of wild beasts! And as Hercules needed to turn a stream of water to
clean the Augean stable, our Lord Jesus Christ needed to pour rivers of water
out of His own heart to cleanse the foul stable of our corrupt thoughts!”—Volume
57, Sermon #3252

“Brothers and Sisters, we must get back this old enthusiasm if ever our land is
to be swept clear of Popery! If ever Europe is to become free with God’s
freedom, if ever Africa is to have the light of the Truth of God driving away
her dense darkness, if ever Asia, America and Australia are to be won for the
Lord Jesus Christ, they whom God has called to the conflict must fight because
it pleases God!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3202

“The world can neither give nor take away the hope of a Christian! It comes from
God and He will never withdraw it, for His gifts and calling are without
repentance. Once let this helmet be put on and He will never remove it, but we
shall hope on and hope always until we shall see His face at the last.”—Volume
55, Sermon #3167

“Always read Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy with this view—‘This is
the story of the Church of God in the wilderness—I would see how God dealt with
them and how they dealt with Him, and from this learn lessons that may be useful
to me in my own pilgrimage to the eternal rest.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3217

“We [ministers] were sent by God to be personal and to deliver personal
messages, as Nathan did to David when he said to him, ‘You are the man.’ I wish
it were possible for us, in a wise and prudent manner, to be more closely
personal than we have ever been—and so to imitate our Savior’s example of wise
personal enquiry when He said to this man, ‘Do you believe on the Son of
God?’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3132

“Justification is not a work of degrees—it does not progress from one stage to
another—but it is the work of a moment and it is instantly complete. God’s great
gift of Eternal Life is bestowed in a moment and you may not be able to discern
the exact moment when it is bestowed.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3278

“It is worthwhile to feel the sentence of death in one’s soul in order to know,
by the testimony of Inspiration, that God is looking upon one out of Heaven in
this special and peculiar sense! He can never forget His children anywhere, but
if there is one place where He remembers them more specially than anywhere else,
it is in the place of their sorrow!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3113

“I would like to die talking of this blessed Doctrine of Substitution and I
intend, by Divine Grace, to live proclaiming it, for it is the keystone of the
Gospel! Jesus Christ did literally take upon Himself the transgression and
iniquity of His people and was made a curse for them, seeing that they had
fallen under the wrath of God! And now every soul that believes in Jesus is
saved because Jesus has taken away the penalty and the curse due to sin. In this
let us rejoice!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3309

“I long to get to this Table again, though I have not been away from it any
Sabbath for many a long day, for it has been my constant habit, wherever I have
been, to get a few Christian friends together to break bread in remembrance of
Christ. ”—Volume 54, Sermon #3099 “Do not ever say of anybody, ‘That person is
too bad for me to do anything with him.’ It is the genius of Christianity to
select the worst, first, and we should never regard any man as utterly hopeless
until he is dead. As long as the breath is in his body, no matter though all the
devils from Hell were also in him, there is enough power in the Lord Jesus
Christ to make the whole troop of them flee—and it is for us to attack those
devils in His name! Jesus Christ, having saved us, the salvation of other
sinners mustbe possible.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3092

“God forgive us for the sins of the tongue! If we had nothing else for which to
praise Christ, we ought to bless Him to all eternity that He came‘by water’ to
cleanse that tongue which is naturally so foul!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3252

“This day, in the proclamation of the Gospel, the demand is made of faith in
God. And if there is no faith, no matter how rich the Gospel, how full its
provisions and how precious the portion which God has prepared, none of us can
ever enter into the enjoyment of them!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3217

“He that is a surety shall smart for it—and Jesus found that proverb true. When
Justice came to smite the sinner, it found Him in the sinner’s place and smote
Him without relenting, laying to the full the whole weight upon Him which had
otherwise crushed all mankind forever into the lowermost Hell! Let us love Jesus
as we think that He endured all this.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3203

“True Believers, though they are a very feeble folk in themselves, are very
strong when God is with them!...The strength of the true Christian is so great
that nothing can overcome him and he is more than a conqueror in every
engagement into which he enters!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3140 “Great errors have
come into the Christian Church by the alteration of simple points in God’s
commands and, therefore, since a little thing in the sign may involve a great
thing in the substance, it becomes us to cultivate exact obedience!”—Volume 55,
Sermon #3168

“No man is really saved unless he is, in his heart, obedient to Christ. I do not
say that you will be perfect, but you will desire to be so. I do not say that
you will not be tempted to sin until you die, but there will be no sin that you
will love, there will be no sin from which you will not long to be
delivered.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3310

“Now, if you were to set the dish with the whole roast on it down on the floor,
your dog would probably be afraid to touch it lest he should get a cut of the
whip! He would know that a dog does not deserve such a dinner as that—and that
is just your difficulty, poor Sinner! You know that you do not deserve such
Grace as God delights to give. But the fact that it is of Grace shuts out the
question of merit altogether! ‘By Grace are you saved through faith, and that
not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3278

“If I were to say, ‘Hands up, everyone who has a Bible,’ everybody’s hands here
would go up. I suppose that nobody here is without a Bible. But if I were to
ask, ‘How many here, constantly, as a habit and a delight, meditate upon the
Scriptures?’—I wonder what answers I would receive? Well, I will not ask you
that question, but let everybody ask it for himself and judge himself concerning
it in the sight of God.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3090

“As the Apostle John says, ‘All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and
the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the
world.’ All these evils continually beset us and powerful, indeed, must be that
stream which can counteract and overcome them! Yet Jesus Christ does this
through coming ‘by water’ as well as by blood!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3252

“If men become negligent of hearing and our audience dwindles down to a handful,
it will be a great distress to us if we have to remember that when the many were
anxious to hear, we were not diligent to preach to them. He who will not reap
when the fields are white unto the harvest, will have only himself to blame if
in other seasons he is unable to fill his arms with sheaves!”—Volume 55, Sermon
#3155

“The greatness of the Divine promises, instead of staggering our faith, ought to
be the evidence of their truthfulness! Is it reasonable to suppose that God
would promise to do only little things for those who trust Him? Oh, judge not
so! He ‘does great things past finding out; yes, and wonders without number.’
His mercies are high as Heaven, and wide as the East is from the West!”—Volume
54, Sermon #3119

“Oh, that the Lord Jesus would now send fire into all your souls and make you
love Him, for surely, if you have but the sense of what He has done and how He
did it, and what it cost Him to do it, and who He is that has done it—and who
you were for whom He has done it—you will surely say, ‘Oh, for a thousand hearts
that I may love You as I should, and a thousand tongues that I may praise You as
I should!’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3203

“The best thing we ever do needs to be washed in the fountain filled with blood,
or God can only look upon it as a sin.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3083 “If any of you
have thought that trusting Christ does not involve obeying Him, you have made a
great mistake. They do very wrong who cry up believing in Christ and yet
depreciate obedience to Him, for obeying is believing in another form and
springs out of believing. Neither may anyone say, ‘I will obey one command of
Christ, but I will not obey another.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3310

“The Inquisition, in its dreary vaults, almost rivaled Hell in its pains and
torments, but it was not able to quench the noble spirit of God’s faithful
servants. The persecutors may do what they will, but only give us a band of men
and women who have God’s Spirit in them—and even though their foe may tear them
limb from limb—they shall not conquer them! It is impossible that God’s true
saints should be overcome, for they have a glory of strength that nothing can
destroy!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3140

“Generally there is no greater coward in this world than the man who never will
acknowledge that he is afraid.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3253 “There is no eye that is
quicker to see the mercy of God than an eye that is washed with the tears of
repentance!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3278

“Morality is excellent as far as it goes, but without holiness no man shall see
the Lord—and holiness far exceeds mere morality. Holiness can only be produced
by a real change of heart and that real change of heart can only come through
the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit which manifests itself through faith
in Jesus Christ.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3132

“You must be Believers, or the blood of Jesus Christ itself shall never be
sprinkled upon you to your cleansing. However great your sins may have been, all
manner of sin and iniquity shall be forgiven you if you believe. The greatness
of your sin shall not shut you out of Heaven—only unbelief will stop the
way.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3217

“Your sins are not put away through your repentance. That repentance becomes to
you the token of the pardon of sin, but the true cleansing is found, not in the
eyes of the penitent, but in the wounds of Jesus! Your sins were virtually
discharged upon the accursed Cross. You stand this day accepted, not for
anything you are, or can be, or shall be, but entirely and wholly through the
blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3203

“When death is called a sleep, it is not because the soul sleeps—that, we are
told by Holy Scripture—rises at once to Heaven. The soul of the saint is found
at once before the Throne of God. It is the bodywhich is said to sleep. The soul
sleeps not! Absent from the body, it is present with the Lord. It stretches its
wings and flies away up to yonder realm of joy! And there, reveling in delight,
bathing itself in bliss, it finds a rest from the turmoil of earth infinitely
better than any rest in sleep. It is the body, then, that sleeps, and the body
only.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3077

“Unless we give abundant attention to the Word of God, we shall fall into
mistakes beyond number! Errors are unavoidable if we do not study our perfect
Chart, even as it is certain that a man will lose his way if he never enquires
about it. At any rate, we need not rush into mistakes by omitting to use our
judgment, and to inform our understanding.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3168

“Genuine evangelical repentance runs in double harness with faith and they
should never be separated. To suppose that we are to go through a sort of
quarantine before we can be admitted into the harbor of salvation is a very
serious mistake. Our text flatly [Psalm 18:44] contradicts this idea, for it
says, ‘As soon as they hear of Me, they shall obey Me.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3310

“The best way to preach of the faithful Promiser is to tell you some of His
promises. I will not tell you what treasures there are in Christ’s cabinet—I
will break the door open and let you look at some more of the treasures for
yourselves!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3081

“If God has sent us to preach His Word, you may depend upon it that He will
resent it if you do not hear the message that He sends to you through us. It
will not merely be a rejection of the ambassador of Christ, but a rejection of
the King who sent him to you! Therefore, I pray that God may give to each one of
you a hearing ear.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3082

“If a man’s skepticism includes a doubt of the existence of God, or the truth of
Scripture, we will talk to him another time. But with most of you there are no
such questions, and the Lord Jesus might well demand of you, “If I tell you the
truth, why do you not believe Me?” If before the Judgment Seat of Christ a man
shall be forced to confess, ‘I believe the Bible to be God’s Word,’ I cannot
imagine the apology which he can frame in his heart for not having believed in
Jesus Christ! To you, then, there is no lack of evidence—and if you are shut out
of Heaven, your own willful unbelief must bear the blame!”—Volume 56, Sermon
#3217

“If you are never afraid about the condition of your souls, I am afraid for
you!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3253

“The Beatitudes before us, which relate to character, are seven. The eighth is a
benediction upon the persons described in the seven Beatitudes when their
excellence has provoked the hostility of the wicked and, therefore, it may be
regarded as a confirming and summing up of the seven blessings which precede it…
The whole seven describe a perfect character and make upa perfect benediction.
Each blessing is separately precious, yes, more precious than much fine gold.
But we do well to regard them as a whole, for as a whole they were spoken, and
from that point of view they are a wonderfully perfect chain of seven priceless
links put together with such consummate art as only our heavenly Bezaleel, the
Lord Jesus, ever possessed!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3155

“God, the Everlasting Father, has staked His honor and His Glory upon the
success of Christ. I make bold to say that if Christ wins not the world, and if
He is not crowned King of kings and Lord of lords, it is not Jesus that is
dishonored so much as the Great Father by whom He was ordained, sent and
anointed!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3279

“‘Do you believe on the Son of God?’ is the most important question that a man
can ever have to answer! This is vitally and overwhelmingly important.”—Volume
55, Sermon #3132

“We need not say, as many do, that ‘He is a prayer-hearing and prayer-answering
God,’ for prayer-hearing involves prayer-answering! O mourners, still mourn
before your God, but mourn with this mixture of hope—that God will not suffer
the groaning that arises from your heart, in the name of Jesus, to be like the
mere whisperings of the wind! He will hear them before long!”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3113

“It is not faith to trust God as a saint when you feel you are a saint. Faith is
to trust Christ as a sinner—while you are conscious that you are a sinner. To
come to Jesus and to think yourselves pure, is a sorry coming to Him—but to come
with all your impurity—this is true coming.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3203

“For the most part there is such a thing as terror in prospect of death—the fear
is often greater in prospect than in reality! In fact, it is always so in the
case of the Christian. But yet, when we give ourselves up to fear for a time, we
are grievously afraid.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3253

“It was one of the worst days that ever dawned upon the Church of Christ when it
began to cultivate the art of oratory and turned aside to ‘enticing words of
man’s wisdom.’ But when men speak out of an overflowing soul of what God has
done for them, that is the power which the Spirit of God gives to them and the
power which He will bless to their hearers! They do not then try to use
out-of-the-way words and nicely rounded sentences, nor to pile up
perorations—for that is magnifying the preacher and dishonoring the Word that
has come out of the mouth of God!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3140

“We are never so near to the condition of the glorified saints above as when we
are, with heart, and soul, and voice, glorifying God! ”—Volume 54, Sermon #3105

“There is life for a look at the Crucified One.”—There is life for a look—even
though the heart should be as hard as the nether millstone! There is life for a
look—even though as yet the character has undergone no change! There is life for
a look—even though you cannot see any signs of Grace—“There is life for a look
at the Crucified One.”

“No man that I know of saw the blood upon the lintel and the two side posts, at
the dead of night, in the land of Egypt, for there were none abroad to look upon
it—but God saw it, and it is written—“When I see the blood, I will pass over
you.” When God sees our simple confidence in His dear Son and perceives us
resting upon His Word without the admixture of human reason and opinion, then,
Beloved, He will accept us in the Beloved and our house shall stand when others
fall!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3168

“There is one word that every true servant of Christ must be able to speak very
distinctly—that word is Substitution. I believe that substitution is the keyword
to all true theology—Christ standing in the place of sinners and numbered with
the transgressors because of their transgressions, not His own—Christ paying our
debts and discharging all our liabilities. This truth involves, of course, our
taking Christ’s place as He took ours, so that all Believers are Beloved,
accepted, made heirs of God, and in due time shall be glorified with Christ
forever.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3218

“There is no grief which the Holy Spirit cannot relieve! That Divine Comforter
knows so well how to get at the secret springs of our sorrow and to put the
comfort right into the spring, itself, that there can never be a grief which can
elude Him, or which can baffle His skill.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3260

“What the Lord does requires no time. We need weeks, months, years, to do what
we have so do, but when Christ had even to raise the dead, He did it in a
moment! He simply said, ‘Lazarus, come forth,’ and there was Lazarus! He touched
the bier on which the dead young man lay—and the young man at once sat up and
began to speak! He said to the little maiden, ‘Talitha cumi,”’ and she opened
her eyes at once and rose from her bed ready to eat the refreshment which the
Savior commanded her parents to bring her! O poor Sinners, I pray you do not
doubt that the great mercy, the free mercy of Jesus Christ is to be given even
now, if your hand is but stretched out to receive it!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3119
“If one should spend one’s whole life for God and win only one soul by the most
earnest and devoted effort, it would be a rich reward to see that one star
shining forever in the firmament of Heaven, to see that one gem glistening
forever in the diadem of Christ, to see that one sheep feeding forever in the
pastures of Eternal Life!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3310

“When your souls are at the blackest, seek for nothing but the blood! When your
soul are at the darkest, seek no light anywhere but in the Cross! Do not cling
to preparations, to humbling, to repentings. All these things are good in their
way, but they cannot be a balsam to a wounded conscience! Christ and Christ
crucified is what you need.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3203

“That is true faith which, when it cannot stand by itself, which sees death
written upon all its own power, which sees almost all its hopes withered and
blasted with the East wind, yet cries, ‘My God, it is enough! My soul waits only
upon You. My expectation is from You.’ This is, indeed, the way to honor
God!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3253

“The depravity of mankind is a miracle of sin. It is as great a miracle from one
point of view, as the Grace of God is from another. Jesus Christ neglected!
Eternal Love slighted! Infinite Mercy disregarded!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3086

“Ah Sin, what a shameful thing you must be! Blush, Christian, that you should be
guilty of it. Blush again, that you do not blush more often! Be ashamed that you
are not ashamed of sin, and be offended that your heart should be so stolid over
a thing so detestable. ”—Volume 58, Sermon #3311

“Give us a Bible reading, Bible loving people, and all the ‘priests’ in the
world, with all their finery, will never make any headway! An open Bible is
death to their follies and lies if there are but people with open eyes to read
it! The worst of it is that although we have the open Bible, we have not as many
Bible readers and Bible lovers as we wish to see. May the Lord graciously
increase the number the wide world over!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3090

“When Rutherford was talking of the beauties of the Christ whom he loved so
dearly, one of his hearers was compelled to cry out, “Now, mon, you are on the
right string, keep to that!” And, indeed, this is a theme that might stir the
stammerer to speak with power and make the very dumb to be eloquent for Christ!
Oh, how glorious is our blessed Lord!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3218

“Till we are emptied of self we cannot be filled with God. Stripping must be
worked upon us before we can be clothed with the righteousness which is from
Heaven. Christ is never precious till we are poor in spirit—we must see our own
needs before we can perceive His wealth. Pride blinds the eyes and sincere
humility must open them or the beauties of Jesus will be forever hidden from us.
”—Volume 55, Sermon #3156

“Where Christ is exalted, there will be a willing, generous people. I do not
believe it is so much the fault of Christians that they have not given more to
the cause of God, as it has been the fault of ministers that they have not more
fully preached Jesus Christ.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3100

“One of the most powerful preachers who ever lived was the Prophet Jonah. And I
believe that Jonah learned to preach by going, in the whale’s belly, to the
bottom of the Mediterranean. That voyage was better than a university education
for him and he became a good sound Calvinist before he was cast up again upon
the land. He said, ‘Salvation is of the Lord,’ before the Lord told the fish to
give him up and I have no doubt that he often preached that doctrine
afterwards!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3113

“It is no part of the business of Christ’s ministers to modify the Truth of God
which He has entrusted to them, or to put new meanings into it which God never
meant, draining away the very life-blood of the Gospel and leaving it dead and
useless! But it isboth our duty and our privilege to state it just as we find it
and to proclaim it in as plain a language as possible so that everybody may
understand what the teaching of God really is.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3203

“Yes, the Master is pleased, in the assembly of His saints, when we break the
Bread of Life, to feed the multitude to the fullest and they go away
refreshed!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3260

“Now, dear Friends, let us say that there is no blood and no water that can wash
away sin anywhere but in Christ. All the blood of bulls could not take away sin,
though offered by Aaron, himself, the father of the Levitical priesthood! And
all the water in the world, though consecrated by bishops, cardinals and popes,
cannot take away a single spot of iniquity! The only blood that can cleanse us
from God’s wrath is the blood of Jesus Christ, Himself, and the only water that
can wash out of us the damning stain of sin is the water which came from Jesus
Christ’s heart!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3311

“Beloved, there is no difference in the affection of God towards His children!
There is an elect out of the elect, I will acknowledge, as to gifts and standing
and as to the labor they may accomplish in this world—but there is no election
out of the elect as for a deeper extent of love! They are all loved alike! They
are all written in the same book of eternal love and life. They were all
purchased with the same precious blood of the Savior…They are all saved by the
same Grace, loved by the same love, heirs of the same inheritance—and Jesus
Christ puts them all together when He says, ‘Neither pray I for these alone, but
for them, also, which shall believe on Me through their word.’”—Volume 55,
Sermon #3133

“Ah, my Hearers, had humbling is this truth to our pride—that the curse of God
is upon everyone who is of the seed of Adam, that every child born into this
world is born under the curse since it is born under the Law. ”—Volume 57,
Sermon #3254

“Coming here, the other afternoon, and walking down one of the back streets, I
amused myself by observing how many houses were insured. I noticed the marks of
the different Insurance Companies. There was the sun on one, with his bright
face looking down upon us, as much as to say,‘There shall be no loss here.’ The
globe, the star, the Phoenix—all were there as seals of safety. Now there was
only one house in Jericho that was insured—and that had for its symbol and mark
of insurance a scarlet line tied in the window! What a mercy it is when houses
are insured by the Grace of God and dedicated to the Lord—the very houses and,
much more—the inhabitants of those houses!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3168

“We must be very clear in telling the sinner that there is no hope for him
anywhere else but in Christ. Nine out of ten of the arrows in a minister’s
quiver ought to be shot at the sinner’s good works, for these are his worst
enemies. That “deadly doing” that needs to be cast “down at Jesus’ feet”—that
trying to beor to feel somethingin order that they may save themselves—this is
the curse of many!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3218

“No lie was ever more extraordinary than the lie that baptismal water can
regenerate the soul. I marvel more and more that I should find myself living in
an age of such idiots and have almost come to think that Carlyle was right when
he spoke of our nation as, ‘Consisting of twenty million people, mostly
fools.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3311

“I do implore you never to be satisfied with any religion which does not affect
your heart, and with no religious exercise which is not true heartwork. You
might as well be sitting in your own homes as be here without your
hearts.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3094

“The best way to repay God, and the way He loves best, is to take encouragement
from past answers to prayer and ask Him ten times as much each time! Nothing
pleases God as much as when a sinner comes again very soon with twice as large a
petition, saying, ‘Lord, You did hear me last time, and now I have come
again.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3120

“I wish that all the saints would meet for Communion on every ‘first day of the
week.’ I cannot conceive it to be possible for them to meet thus too often. As
for myself, unless sickness keeps me away, I find it most helpful to come to the
Lord’s Table every Lord’s-Day, for although we believe neither in,
transubstantiation nor in consubstantiation, yet there is a very real sense in
which we do spiritually eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man and
so become ‘strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.’”—Volume 57, Sermon
#3260

“Are you concerned about how you are to get food and clothing? How can God deny
you such trifles as these when He has given you His Son? Perseverance in
Grace—is that what you ask? Even that is but a crumb under the Master’s table
compared with His Son! You need certain virtues, you need help in trouble, you
need sustenance under stern difficulties—I know not what you need, but this I
know—all the needs of all of us put together could only make one little drop in
comparison with the tremendous ocean of benevolence which flowed out of God’s
heart when He spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for us all!”—Volume
56, Sermon #3204

“Give the Gospel a fair consideration and very especially and impartially weigh
in the scales of sound judgment the Doctrine of the Atoning Sacrifice of Christ.
Sit down at the foot of the Cross and study the wounds of Jesus—and do not pour
contempt and scorn upon Him until you have found good reason to do so—and that I
am sure you never will do. Shake off all prejudice, again I entreat you, for it
is a deadly disease which may prove eternally fatal to you.”—Volume 58, Sermon
#3312

“If every convert were brought in through the usual means of Grace, we would
come to regard conversion as a necessary result from certain fixed causes—and
attribute some mystic virtue to the outward means. But when God is pleased to
distribute the blessing entirely apart from these, then He shows that He can do
without means as well as with means—that nothing is too mighty a work for Him,
that His arm is not shortened at all so that He needs to use an instrument to
make up the length of it—neither has He lost any strength so as to be forced to
appeal to us to make up the deficiency!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3075

“If our prayers were forcible according to their expression, then rhetoric would
be more valuable than Grace and a scholastic education would be better than
sanctification—but it is not so. Some of us may be able to express ourselves
very fluently from the force of natural gifts, but it should always be to us an
anxious question whether our prayer is a prayer which God will receive, for we
ought to know and must know by this time, that we often pray best when we
stammer and stutter—and we pray worst when words come rolling like a torrent,
one after another! God is not moved by words—they are but a noise to Him. He is
only moved by the deep thought and the heaving emotion which dwell in the
innermost spirit.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3083 “Eternity alone can reveal the value
of Christ! By the miseries of the Hell from which He saves us, let us measure
Him! By the bliss of the Heaven to which He lifts us, let us estimate His worth!
By the depths of ignominy and shame into which He dived, let us conceive of Him!
By the glories He relinquished and by the agonies He bore, let us attempt to
form some faint idea of His value!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3204

“It were enough to make our knees knock together, to chill our blood and to
cause every hair of our head to stand on end if we did but know what it is to be
under the curse of God!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3254

“The learned have collected 288 different opinions of the ancients with regard
to happiness—and there is not one which hits the mark! But our Lord has, in a
few telling sentences, [the Beatitudes] told us all about it without using a
solitary redundant word, or allowing the slightest omission! The seven golden
sentences are perfect as a whole and each one occupies its appropriate place.
Together they are a ladder of light—and each one is a step of purest
sunshine.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3155

“There is no lack which a Christian ever has which Christ cannot fully supply
and there is nothing in Christ which is not useful to a Christian.”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3218

“I long to see my Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven, but I think I would almost as
gladly have seen Him in the carpenter’s shop. I delight in the thought that I
shall see Him on the Throne of God, but I sometimes wish that I could have seen
Him on the Cross, for it was there that His love reached its climax as He bore
our sins in His own body on the tree!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3312

“Beloved Believer, remember that you are not partlysaved, but you are wholly
saved! The robe you wear today does not reach part of the way to cover you, but
covers you from head to foot! The washing which the Savior has given you has not
washed away a part of your spots, but you are clean every whit! And looking upon
the work of your salvation as you receive it from the hands of Jesus, you may
rest as God rested and keep a long and blessed Sabbath just as God has kept it!
He rested because His creative work was finished—and you may rest because the
work of your salvation is also finished! ”—Volume 55, Sermon #3169

“For a man to bend his knees and utter the hypocritical language of affection
before God which he never feels in his heart is little short of blaspheming God.
We must have very light thoughts of God when we try to deceive Him with such
prayers as these.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3133

“What we do for God, God’s Grace has first bestowed upon us! If there is any
virtue, if there is any zeal, if there is any faith, if there is any love, it is
the result of the Grace of God bestowed upon us! Always look upon things in that
light, for then you will not grow proud. Give what you may, and do what you
may—you may regard it as the effect of the Grace of God bestowed upon
you.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3092

“In the olden days, ‘they that feared the Lord spoke often, one to another.’ Let
this good practice be revived, for thereby, depend upon it, many will be
strengthened in the Lord!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3260

“O Brothers and Sisters in Christ, we have need to pray for God the Holy Spirit
to work mightily among us! We have the Holy Spirit still with us, so we have no
need to pray that He would come down from Heaven. He came down at Pentecost and
He never went back to Heaven, so He is still here. He is in all His people! He
is in this assembly right now. He dwells among us, though we are apt to forget
that He does. We reckon that the glory of our strength lies in our ministers, or
in our organizations, or in our creeds. We forget that the glory of our strength
is spiritualand lies in the Holy Spirit, Himself, who is in us and who shall be
forever in us if we are truly the Lord’s!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3140

“It is a sweet thought to me that even Satan himself can never rob me of my
pardon. I may lose my copy of it, and lose my comfort from it, but the original
pardon is filed in Heaven!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3254 “Those who follow the
despised Christ will not be rejected by the reigning Christ!”—Volume 58, Sermon
#3312

“When a man becomes nothing in his own estimation, then Jesus Christ becomes
everything to him, but not till then. Self is an effectual darkener of the
windows of the soul. How can men see the Gospel while they see so much of
themselves? With such a noble righteousness of their own to deck themselves
with, is it likely that they will buy of Christ the fine white linen which is
the righteousness of saints?”—Volume 56, Sermon #3205

“Virtues in unregenerate men are nothing but whitewashed sins! The best
performance of an unchanged character is worthless in God’s sight. It lacks the
stamp of Grace upon it and that which has not the stamp of Grace is false coin.
Be it ever so beautiful in model and finish, it is not what it should be. ‘So
then they that are in the flesh cannot praise God.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3105

“When a certain clergyman asked the Duke of Wellington, ‘Does Your Grace think
it is any use preaching the Gospel to the Hindus?’ He simply replied, ‘What are
your marching orders?’ As a soldier, he believed in obeying orders. And when the
clergyman answered that the orders were, ‘Preach the Gospel to every creature,’
the Duke said, ‘Then your duty is quite clear. Obey your Master’s orders and
don’t you trouble, about anybody else’s opinions.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3218

“If some preachers whom I know, instead of having lessons in elocution, were
sent for a little while down into the depths of soul-despair. If they were
tried, plagued, vexed and chastened every morning, they would learn a way of
speaking which would reach the people’s hearts far better than any that can be
learned by human teaching!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3113

“Beloved, to make a true Sabbath, there must be a sanctifying of the day—it must
be a holy day if it is to be a restful day. It is no use for men to say that
they can get a rest by spending the Sabbath in amusement—they never will. There
is no perfect rest to our entire manhood except in holiness and holy exercises,
alone, can give complete rest to our whole being.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3169

“The clearer view we have of Christ, the firmer confidence we have in His
faithfulness and His power to save, the stronger will our spiritual nature grow
and the more like our Lord shall we become! They who live near to Christ must
derive strength from Him.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3260

“Let me tell you that you virtually pray for Christ, Beloved, whenever you pray
for one of His people. And whenever we do a kindness to one of them, we do it
unto Him. Whenever we pray for one of His servants, we pray for Christ! You
prayed for that poor miserable looking penitent who was afraid to call himself a
Christian, though he was so in deed and in truth. Do you know that you then
prayed for Christ? You interceded for that simple-minded woman who did not know
the way to Heaven and who asked you to put up a prayer to God that she might be
taught. Do you know that you then prayed for Christ, for she was part of His
flesh and blood and was afterwards brought into His family.”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3100

“Now, am I addressing one man who feels that he is saved by faith, and yet he is
sinning as he used to do? Give up that belief, Sir, or it will ruin you! I pray
you do not indulge in it, for it is a delusion of Satan! Do I address one man
who has a hope that perhaps he can so trust Christ as to be saved, and yet
continue to live in his own wicked way? If anyone has told you that, he has told
you a lie! Rest assured that you are mistaken! Christ never came to be the
minister of sin. He came to save us, not inour sins, butfromour sins.”—Volume
58, Sermon #3311

“Observe well that the patience of Job was the patience of a man like ourselves,
imperfect and full of infirmity, for as one has well remarked, we have heard of
the impatience of Job as well as of his patience! ”—Volume 57, Sermon #3255

“And how many there are in this city of London, in what we call this
‘enlightened’ 19th Century, who know a great deal about a thousand things, but
nothing about the one thing necessary! They have never troubled to study Christ
and so, for lack of knowledge, they grope about as the blind!”—Volume 56, Sermon
#3205

“There is not one step in the whole Divine experience of the Believer—not one
link in the wonderful chain of Divine Grace—in which there is a withdrawal of
the Divine smile or an absence of real happiness! Blessed is the first moment of
the Christian life on earth—and blessed is the last!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3155

“We preach Christ to the harlots in the street and oh, how joyfully have many of
them received Him and how gladly have they found cleansing from their foul
stains in Jesus’ precious blood! We preach Christ to the drunk, for we believe
that nothing but the Grace of God can rescue him from his degradation and
sin—and many such sinners haves we seen reclaimed by the Gospel!”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3218

“Do you not know that God is an eternal, self-existent Being, that to say He
loves now, is, in fact, to say He always did love, since with God there is no
past and can be no future? What we call past, present and future, He wraps up in
one eternal NOW. And if you say that He loves you nowyou thereby say that He
loved you yesterday, He loved you in the past eternity and He will love you
forever—for nowwith God is past, present and future!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3133

“Christ is your Savior from beginning to end, so always regard Him in that
light. And as your Savior, let it be very comforting to you to reflect that He
is Divine—“The only wiseGodour Savior.” He who has undertaken to save you is no
mere man and no angel—He is nothing less than the Omnipotent, Omnipresent and
Omniscient God!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3074

“Working for the Lord necessitates prayer and this is a great blessing to us. If
a man gives himself wholly to soul-winning, he must be much in prayer, for he
will be all at sea without help from Heaven! If he tries to comfort the downcast
penitent, how readily will he be baffled! How soon will he cry to the Holy
Spirit, the Comforter, to do the work effectually!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3313

“Our Doctrine may be as high as the Scripture warrants us in teaching, but we
shall never find there any ground for the infamous deduction that because God
works in us, we are to lie inert as if we were logs or stones. Oh, no! That is
not His will concerning us, for the Apostolic injunction is, “Work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which works in you, both to
will and to do of His good pleasure.””—Volume 57, Sermon #3260

“Many judge what the Gospel ought to be, but do not actually enquire as to what
it is. They do not come to the Bible to obtain their views of religion, but they
open that Book to find texts to suit the opinions which they bring to it. They
are not open to the honest force of the Truth of God and, therefore, are not
saved by it!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3205

“Dead fish float down the stream, but live fish swim against it. Do you swim
against the stream? Have you learned to go against the current? Do you strive to
get up, up towards the great Source of everything that is good and true or do
you float along the stream of pleasure with the mases of the world? Then you may
readily know to which side you belong.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3079

“The Dog of Hell is allowed to snap and snarl, but his chain is not removed and
the collar of Omnipotent restraint is on him. Come, dear Friends, you that are
in trouble, remember that God is in your sorrow, ruling it to its desired end
and checking it that it should go no further than according to His will! And you
neither have suffered, nor in the future will suffer, any more than He in
Infinite Love permits!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3255

“The man who believes in Jesus knows that he is saved, so he has no need to try
to save himself. That work is done and done forever! And now we work from life,
not for life! Now we work because we are saved, not in order to be saved!Now we
feel that we have not to win any merit by anything that we do, but that the
Infinite Merit of Christ has already procured for us full acceptance with God.
And what we have to do now is to prove our gratitude to God for the Divine work
that is already completed. What a blessed thing it is to rest both from the
sinful service of Satan and from the servile service of the Law!”—Volume 55,
Sermon #3169

“God wants nothing of us except our needs and these furnish Him with room to
display His bounty when He freely supplies them! It is from the worse and not
from the better side of fallen man that the Lord wins glory for Himself. Not
what I have, but what I have not, is the first point of contact between my soul
and God.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3156

“Does anybody know how precious the Gospel is till he has seen it light up the
eyes that were dim with despondency? Does any man know how the joyful sound of
the name of Jesus can charm a heart till he has seen the smile of newborn faith?
I do not see how our coming memories can minister to our eternal happiness
unless we earnestly labor to being sinners to the Savior!”—Volume 58, Sermon
#3313

“We know that there is a Book of Life before the Throne of God and that no more
names can be written there—they were all recorded before the foundation of the
world when the Father gave to Christ those who are to be eternally His. We
cannot mount up to Heaven to read the names that are written there, but we
believe the list contains millions upon millions of names of those who have not
yet trusted in Christ, so we mean to keep on preaching Christ to sinners of
every age, of every rank, of every sort, of every degree of blackness and
vileness! And we believe that ‘there is yet room,’ there is yet mercy for the
miserable, there is yet forgiveness for the guilty who will come and trust in
Jesus Christ and Him crucified!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3218

“Daughters of godly parents, children of those who have gone before to eternal
Glory, I entreat you, look to Jesus! Go and present your suit to Him now. It
shall surely prosper. If the question was once doubtful, it has now become ‘a
statute of judgment.’ The Lord has commanded it! May God bless these counsels
and exhortations to you, for Christ’s sake! Amen.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3141

“Some of you, too, whom I have been addressing for years, are Believers in the
head, but unbelievers in the heart, not really putting your trust in Jesus! Who
can see if he refuses the Light of God? Who shall find salvation if he will not
trust the Savior for it? Unbelief is as sure to destroy those who are guilty of
it as faith is sure to save Believers!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3205

“Fussy work that is done for Christ without communion with Christ comes to
nothing because it is not worked in the strength of God. O my Brothers and
Sisters, nothing can come out of us if it is not first worked in us by the Holy
Spirit! It is essential that a Christian worker should himself be the
workmanship of God. If we would heal, we must be healthy. If we get out of
fellowship with Jesus, it will lead to innumerable evils… You must walk in the
light as God is in the light if you are to enlighten a dark world and glorify
your Lord!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3313

“O my God, if You should make all Your goodness pass before me, all Your
goodness to the children of man, I must sit me down on an adamantine rock
forever and look through eternity! I should wear these eyes out and must have
eyes of fire, or else I should never be able to see all Your goodness towards
the sons of men!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3120

“A life of Christian activity down here is a fitting prelude to a life of
heavenly activity up there! The best Christians are those who serve God the
most.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3260 “It is well to have a little singing as well as
weeping at a funeral. It well becomes the burial of the saints. Angels never
weep when saints die—they sing. You never heard a saint say, when he was dying,
‘There are angels in the room. Listen! You can hear them sobbing because I am
dying.’ No, but we have often heard a saint say, ‘There are angels in the room
and I can hear them singing.’ That is because angels are wiser than we are. We
judge by the sight of our eyes and the hearing of our ears—but angels judge
after another fashion. They ‘see and hear and know’ the joys of the blessed and
therefore they have no tears—but they have songs for them and they sing loudly
when the Christian is carried Home like a shock of corn fully ripe.”—Volume 54,
Sermon #3077

“Never will a man became rich in faith until first he has learned that he is
penniless so far as his own merit is concerned. You must be emptied, you must be
drained dry, you must be made to feel and to confess that in your flesh there
dwells no good thing, or else the Sovereign Mercy of God and the riches of His
loving kindness shall never be your heritage.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3256

“The more faith grows, the more rest grows. But when our faith begins to forget
the Lord and we commence to worry and to fret, then our rest goes at once. It is
glorious to live exempt from care by the blessed power of prayer—to be able to
take every trouble to God and leave it with Him.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3169

“There might as well be found water in Hell as true comfort for a soul that
realizes its guilt and fears the thunders of the wrath of God, yet is not
reconciled to God by the death of His Son. Apart from that Living Water which
Jesus came to bring, such a soul is truly in ‘the pit wherein is no
water.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3106

“Talking about the Bible is well enough, but searching the Scriptures is better!
Feed on the Word yourselves, or else your teaching will be thin and
watery.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3313

“A true servant of Christ must never try to let the people see how well he can
preach. He must never go out of his way to drag a pretty piece of poetry in his
sermon, nor to introduce some fine quotations from the classics. He must employ
a simple, homely style, or such a style as God has given him. And he must preach
Christ so plainly that his hearers can not only understand him, but that they
cannotmisunderstandhim even if they try to do so.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3218

“Beloved, you must have a personal experience of the things of God, or you
cannot help newborn souls. If you do not know what it is to pass from death to
life, and do not know the marks of regeneration, you are useless.”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3205 “It is better for each one of us to be rendering our homage to God
than picking holes in the coats of others, so let each one of us ask, ‘What
shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits toward me?’”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3086

“But when the roll was read just now, where was that man who used to teach in
the Sunday school ten years ago? He has given up, he says, to let the young
people have a turn. Yes, but he would not like the Lord to leave off blessing
him and to give the young people all His Presence and Grace!”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3082

“An Omnipotent hand created us out of nothing and the same Omnipotence is needed
to bring us to feel that we are nothing! We can never be saved unless we are
made alive by Infinite Power, nor can we be made alive at all unless that same
Power shall first slay us. It is amazing how much is needed to strip a man and
lay him in his true place!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3156

“The length and breadth and depth and height of Scripture all surpass the
comprehension of mortal men! And though we do unfeignedly believe and devoutly
rejoice in them, it is not within the range of our powers to fully comprehend
them.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3314

“I remember an old countryman saying to me, long ago, ‘Depend upon it, my
Brother, if you or I get one inch above the ground, we get just that inch too
high.’ And I believe it is so. Flat on our faces before the Cross of Christ is
the place for us—realizing that we are nothing and that Jesus Christ is
everything!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3169

“There are some of you between whom and myself there are ties which death cannot
snap. I will find you in Heaven if I can and I know you will desire to meet me.
The Lord gave you to me as my spiritual children and if it should come to pass
that earthly fathers should not see their children in Heaven, yet the spiritual
father will see his children there praising and blessing the Lord! One of the
next joys to knowing Christ, yourself, must surely be that of leading others to
know Him. Seek after this bliss!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3205

“‘Light be.’ ‘Light was.’ God had but to speak the word and the great wonder was
accomplished! How there was light before there was any sun—for the sun was not
created until the fourth day of the week—it is not for us to say. But God is not
dependent upon His own creation. He can make light without a sun! He can spread
the Gospel without the aid of ministers, He can convert souls without any human
or angelic method, for He does as He wills in the heavens above and on the earth
beneath.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3141 “I know that if there is much to dispirit me
in my ministry and I see but little of its effects, yet He shall keep all whom
the Father has given to Him—and this makes me preach. I come into this Chapel
tonight with the assurance that God has some child of His in this place—not yet
called—and I feel confident that He will call someone by the use of the
ministry, so why not by me?”—Volume 55, Sermon #3133

“Ask the gardener which is the best apple tree in the garden and he will tell
you that it is not the one which has the best shape, but the one which yields
the most fruit! And he is not the best Christian who occupies the highest
position, or who talks the most about Divine things, but it is he whose life is
most fruitful in good works to the Glory of God!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3260

“Have you come to the end of yourself? Well, then, now you have come to the
beginning of God! It is when the last penny of creature merit is gone that God
comes to us with the boundless treasures of His Grace! If you have one moldy
crust of your own homemade bread left, you shall not have the Bread of Heaven!
But when you are starved. When you have no goodness in you, nor any hope of
goodness, no merit, nor hope of merit, no reliance, nor shadow of reliance upon
anything that you are, or ever can be—then is the time to cast yourself upon the
all-sufficient mercy of God in Christ Jesus!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3113

“It is brightness that discovers dimness, holiness that reveals unholiness and
the purity of God that shows the impurity of man.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3256

“We must hold firmly whatever we have learned of the Truth of God, but we must
always be prepared to learn more. To say of my Bible that I have attained to
every height that it reveals, is as foolish as to say that I have reached the
highest degree of spiritual life that is possible.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3314

“It were well if we were to have some seasons set apart for seeking communion
with Christ, for at such times He would bless us.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3073

“There is never a child of God brought into the Church by man’s contrivance or
man’s persuasions—each precious stone is brought there by God, and by God alone!
No child of God is sanctified by man—he is sanctified by the living God. No heir
of Heaven is fitted into the Church by man—God alone puts him into his proper
position.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3093

“If there is not enough prayer in us to stir our own hearts, how can we expect
that God should be moved by our entreaties? It was not so with Jacob—“He blessed
him there.” There he prevailed, and if you want a blessing, you must get it in
that way. When you get to the state that you will take no denial—that you would
sooner die than not be blessed—you shall get it.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3219

“Human weakness is a small obstacle to salvation compared with human
strength—there lies the work and the difficulty! Hence it is a sign of Grace to
know one’s need of Grace. He has some Light of God in his soul who knows and
feels that he is in darkness.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3156

“Wherever the Bible goes, it appears not as an exotic, but as a homegrown
flower. And whenever the Gospel is preached, it comes, not as a Revelation from
the East, or the West, or the North, or the South, but as God’s message to all
mankind in the whole world!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3314

“I rejoice that so many whom I am now addressing are occupied in various forms
of Christian activity—and I hope that each one of us who loves the Lord will
continue thus to walk up and down in His name until He calls us to serve Him in
the upper sanctuary!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3260

“Then, again, it is true that noman, even asa saint,can see God’s faceand
live—not because of moral disability, but because of physical inability. The
body is not strong enough to bear the sight or vision of God. I cannot tell
whether even the saints in Heaven see God. God dwells among them, but I do not
know whether they ever behold Him. That is a speculation. We can leave that till
we get there—we will decide it when we get to Heaven.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3120

“If that which men see of you is foul, how foul must you be where only God can
see you? We are none of us better than we seem, but we are all of us far worse
than we think. May God tear away every veil which hides us from ourselves, that
we may see ourselves even as we are in His sight! ”—Volume 56, Sermon #3206

“Show your love to Jesus by trying to find some of His lost sheep for Him.
Awaken yourselves, my Brothers and Sisters who have entered into rest, and prove
to mankind that the grand old Calvinistic Doctrine of a finished salvation does
not breed sluggishness! Rise, I pray you, and show that the children of the
freewoman are not slothful, but that the motive of gratitude to God is a higher
and more potent one than the selfish motive of seeking to save yourselves! Let
those who want to save themselves go and work for themselves, but as for you who
are saved, go and work for Jesus!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3169

“I tell you, Sinners, if you are lost, it will not be for lack of mercy! If your
sins destroy you, it will not be because the blood of the Covenant has not power
to wash away your sins. If you perish, it will not be because Jesus Christ is
not able to save you. Why will it be, then? It will be because you have not
believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, for ‘he that believes not is condemned
already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of
God.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3106

“Now, our manna does not come to us every morning, but it comes once a year and
is preparing all the time. Behind the baker’s cart with its daily call is the
miller. Behind the miller is the farmer and behind the farmer is God who makes
the earth to yield her fruits and to multiply them for the sustaining of the
whole race of men! ”—Volume 58, Sermon #3315

“Desponding soul, if Jesus speaks to you today you will not be desponding any
longer! There is such potency in the word, ‘Jesus,’ that I think it ought to be
sung in all hospitals to charm away diseases! Wherever there are diseased hearts
and troubled spirits, I would always go and sing,‘Jesus!’ When He draws near to
comfort His people, midnight becomes noon and the thickest darkness becomes a
blaze of meridian splendor, for Grace is poured into His lips!”—Volume 54,
Sermon #3081

“That He does choose them [to salvation] is clear enough from Scripture, so
clear that even such an unbeliever as Bolingbroke said to Mr. Whitefield one
day, ‘[If we] let it be taken for granted that the Bible is true, then no other
Doctrine but Calvinism can be true, for the Bible teaches it from beginning to
end.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3206

“No, Sinner, apart from God, you have not one friend who can help you! You have
no merit with which to help yourself, no power to win any merit, no friend to
get any merit for you and no character to be a recommendation to you. You are a
beggar, indeed.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3256

“We should do well to always make little things as well as great things the
objects of prayer.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3142

“God elected His people without ministers. He did not need any ministers to help
Him in that. He redeemed His people without ministers. What great Divine could
have helped Christ to redeem His people? Yes, more, He can, if He pleases, call
His people without ministers, for we know how some have become the subjects of
Grace by the reading of the Word, without the assistance of the ministry! And
some in the Sunday school have received the words of eternal life. This should
make our pride subside at once.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3133

“When I think of it, I can see how my Lord divides the spoil with the strong
(Isaiah 53:12). Death comes and he says, “That is mine.” He has taken the poor
wrinkled body! And Christ smiles, and lets him have it, for He takes for His
share, the soul, the life! And as He bears him off, He takes the best part of
the spoil! He has left Death the husk, but He has, Himself, secured the kernel!
Yes, the day will come when He will take the body, too, out of the custody of
Death, for not a wreck or a rag of all His saints shall remain in the domains of
Death. There is a resurrection of dead bodies as well as an immortality of
spirits! Glory be to Christ! In this way, here and hereafter, He divides the
spoil with the strong! Strong is Death, but still stronger the Omnipotent Son of
God!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3279

“It will be our Heaven here to be out of Heaven for a season if we can but
thereby bring others to know the Savior and so add fresh jewels to our
Redeemer’s crown!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3315

“Brothers and Sisters, we miss a thousand blessings because we are too busy to
commune with God! We are here, there, and everywhere, except where we ought to
be. We are running to this and to that instead of sitting with Mary at the
Master’s feet. He blessed Mary as she sat there, and there, too, will He be sure
to bless us.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3219

“The sweet apples of self-esteem are deadly poison—who would wish to be
destroyed by them? The bitter fruits of self-knowledge are always healthful,
especially if washed down with the waters of repentance and sweetened with a
draught from the wells of salvation! He who loves his own soul will not despise
them.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3156

“If we are born only once, we must die twice—but if we are born twice, we die
but once—and after that one death which is not really death, we enter into
eternal life!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3206

“‘But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency ofthe power
may be of God, and not of us’ (2 COR4:7). The original might very fairly be
rendered, “We have this treasure in oyster shells,” for, just as pearls are
found in the shells of oysters, so God gives to those who preach the Word, the
treasure of the Gospel, yet they are themselves nothing but the oyster shells,
nothing but the earthen vessel in which God pleases to place His priceless
treasures. If you have done anything in the service of God, my Brother, remember
that you are nothing but the oyster shell, it is God’s Truth that is the pearl
in you!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3169 “The natural man discerns not the things that
are of God, for they are spiritual and can only be spiritually seen and known.
But oh, the bliss of knowing that Christ is yours and of entering into nearness
of communion with Him! To thrust your hands into His side and your finger into
the print of the nails—these are not everyday joys!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3315

“There is one talisman that will open every vault in the treasury of God—the
blood of the Covenant! You cannot be denied if you plead the atoning Sacrifice
of Jesus Christ! Knock at Heaven’s gate with the crimson token in your hand and
as surely as God loves Jesus Christ—and He loves Him more than all of us put
together love Him—He will honor His Son’s great Sacrifice and He will say to
you, ‘According to your desire and your faith, so be it unto you.’”—Volume 54,
Sermon #3106

“O my Soul, what is the cleft of the rock where youmust stand if you would ever
see God’s face and live? Oh, it is the ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me,’ where I
must hide! Oh, what a cleaving that was when Jesus died! O my Soul, enter into
the hole in Jesus’ side! That is the cleft of the Rock where you must abide to
see God!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3120

“If you have to pray in sore agony of spirit fearing that God has forsaken you,
remember that Christ has gone further even than that into the depths of anguish
in prayer, for He cried in Gethsemane, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken
Me?’”—Volume 57, Sermon #3280

“The next thing that Saul would see would be a Savior in Christ, for Ananias
said to him, ‘The Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto you in the way as you
came, has sent me, that you might receive your sight.’ Now Saul would see what
an opener of the eyes Jesus is, what a mighty Savior for sinners! And, oh, this
is a blessed sight—to see Christ as a Savior, as my Savior, opening myeyes, so
that I can say, ‘One thing I know, whereas I was blind, now I see.’ This is a
heavenly sight. May you help many to gaze upon it!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3205

“How impossible it is to fully describe our Lord in human language! He is going
away, yet He is, Himself, the way! And He is, Himself, the beginning and the
end—He is everything to His people—‘the way, the truth, and the life.’ We are
obliged to have mixed metaphors when we talk of Christ, for He is the mixture of
everything that is delightful and precious. All over glorious is our Lord—there
is no way of setting Him forth to the full in our poor halting speech.”—Volume
54, Sermon #3078

“Ah, no sinner prizes salvation like the sinner who knows he is lost! May our
God give you to know that you are!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3316 “The Divine
interposition of God in the midst of His Church is her great bulwark, her hope,
her shield, her stay.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3087

“I cannot make out what some of you do with your comfortless Gospel—believing
that God loves you today and hates you tomorrow. That you are a child of God one
day. and a child of the devil the next. I could not believe a Gospel like that.
If I were a heathen, I could believe it at once because I could manufacture a
god of mud that I could alter with my fingers, and change to any fashion. But if
I once believe in the God who “Was and Is, and is to come,” I know that He
cannot change and I feel a constancy of faith and a firmness of hope, which the
cares and trials of this mortal life cannot destroy. He will not cast off His
people whom He has chosen.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3114

“The greatest unfitness for Christ is our own imaginary fitness! When we are
utterly undone, we are near to being enriched with the riches of Divine Grace.
Out of ourselves is next door to being in Christ. Where we end, mercy begins, or
rather, mercy has begun and mercy has already done much for us when we are at
the end of our merit, our power, our wisdom and our hope!”—Volume 55, Sermon
#3156

“Regeneration makes us actually the children of God, just as adoption makes us
virtually the children of God. By regeneration, we become really and truly heirs
of God and joint heirs with Christ—and our right to Heaven, to all the blessings
of the Covenant of Grace, and to the promises of God—arises from this new and
heavenly birth!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3206

“Sin is an offense to the nostrils of the thrice-holy Jehovah even more than a
dunghill can ever be to the most delicately active man or woman! And when we
realize our true condition as sinners, we feel that a dunghill is a fitting
place for such a mass of defilement and corruption.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3256

“The glory of the Scriptures is like the glory of the heavens—‘in them has He
set a tabernacle for the sun’—and in the Word of God there is a tabernacle for
the Sun ofRighteousness. It is within the Truths of Divine Revelation that Jesus
Christ abides as the sun does in its proper sphere. What would the heavens be
without the sun? And what would the Scriptures be without the Sun of
Righteousness?”—Volume 58, Sermon #3314

“True Christians live for God and work for God—and everyone of us who claims to
be a Christian is either working for God or else an impostor. I repeat my
declaration that the man who calls himself a Christian and yet does nothing for
Christ, is an impostor!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3142 “Praying without a promise is
like going to war without a weapon. God is so gracious that He may yield to our
entreaties even when He has not given a definite promise concerning what we are
asking at His hands. But going to Him with one of His own promises is like going
to a bank with a check—He must honor His own promise. We speak reverently, yet
very confidently upon this point. To be consistent with His own Character, He
must fulfill His own Word which He has spoken! So, when you approach the Throne
of Grace, search out the promise that applies to your case and plead it with
your heavenly Father, and then expect that He will do as He has said.”—Volume
57, Sermon #3280

“But every morning also brings a new mercy because every morning ushers in
another day. That is a new reason for praise, for we have no right to an hour,
or even a minute, much less to a day. To the sinner, especially, it is a great
mercy to have another day of Grace, another opportunity for repentance, a new
reprieve from death, a little more space in which to escape from Hell and fly to
Heaven.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3170

“Is it not one of the greatest blessings that can occur to us to be made to
think little of ourselves? May not God be enriching us most when He is emptying
us and preparing us for the largest possible benediction when He is making us to
see how destitute in all things we are?”—Volume 56, Sermon #3219

“Many professors say, ‘This course is wrong, judging by the Scriptural standard.
But then, society has long tolerated it. No, it has even decreed it to be
right.’ But will society judge you at the Last Great Day? If you are cast into
Hell as a deceitful professor, will society fetch you out of the bottomless pit?
If you are found at last outside the gates of Heaven, will society recompense
you for your eternal loss? What have you, O man of God, to do with society?
Christians are to come out from among the ungodly to daily take up their cross
and follow Christ—to go outside the camp, bearing His reproach. The friend of
the world is the enemy of Christ! What have you to do with doing as the world
does?”—Volume 54, Sermon #3078

“On the fact of your being born-again, or not being born-again, must hang your
everlasting destiny!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3206

“There may be more prayer in a groan than in an entire liturgy. There may be
more acceptable devotion in a tear that dampens the floor of yonder pew than in
all the hymns we have sung, or in all the supplications which we have uttered!
It is not the outward, it is the inward! It is not the lips, it is the heart
which the Lord regards! If you can only breathe, your prayer is still accepted
by the Most High!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3083

“A girl who had been converted was asked what was the difference between her
prayers now and before she was converted. She answered, ‘Sir, first I prayed as
my mother taught me, but now I pray as God prompts and teaches me.’ That is a
blessed and vital difference!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3316

“There is nothing in this world that is more real than hunger and thirst—and the
truly blessed man has such a real passion, desire and craving after
righteousness that it can only be likened to hunger and thirst. He must have his
sins pardoned, he must be clothed in the righteousness of Christ, hemustbe
sanctified! And he feels that it will break his heart if he cannot get rid of
sin. He pleas, he longs, he prays to be made holy! He cannot be satisfied
without this righteousness—and his hungering and thirsting for it is a very real
thing.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3157

“Only the Spirit of the living God, who first opens our eyes to see our state as
beggars can lead us to look to Jesus Christ and find in Him everlasting riches
and eternal salvation!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3256 “I love to find those who have
not got anything good at all about them. Some like to find something good in men
before they preach to them, but I like to find men who think there is nothing
good in them—and then to preach God’s Sovereign Mercy to them.”—Volume 55,
Sermon #3133 “I do not see how there can be a Church without worship—and I do
not see how there can be a Church in a house unless there is constant worship in
the family. ”—Volume 54, Sermon #3103

“Oh, if there is under Heaven an ordinance that is Christ’s mirror. If there is
under Heaven a hand that can withdraw the blind and pull up the lattices and let
us see the King in His beauty, it is the Lord’s Supper! He has often blessed us
there! Let those who despise the Table of the Lord stay away—but those who have
got the blessing will wish to be there often and come again and again, saying,
‘Sirs, we would see Jesus.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3219

“When a martyr has to lay down his life for the Truth of God, his faith is
sustained by the comforting Presence of God—he believes in the God who is
smiling upon him even while he is in the midst of the fire. But Christ on the
Cross trusted in the God who had forsaken Him! ”—Volume 57, Sermon #3280

“Nothing is absolutely wonderful except God—all other things are dwarfed and
diminished in wondrousness as compared with Him. The Seven

Wonders of the World are trifles compared with the seven-million wonders of
God!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3317 “The beggar in the street says to you, ‘Help me
this time, and I will never ask you to help me again.’ Talk not like that, O you
who beg at God’s door of Mercy, but—‘Open your mouth wide and I will fill it’ is
the Lord’s gracious exhortation and promise! Spread your wings and soar away to
the very Throne of God and then expect that He will still exceed your faith and
do for you exceeding abundantly above all that you ask or even think!”—Volume
55, Sermon #3170

“The day comes when they that have been ashamed of His Cross will find
themselves losing His crown. ‘No Cross, no crown.’ This is what Christ, Himself,
says ‘Whoever shall be ashamed of Me and of My Words, of him shall the Son of
Man be ashamed when He shall come in His own Glory, and in His Father’s, and of
the holy angels.’ If you dare not follow Him because you fear shame, shame shall
be your perpetual inheritance!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3207

“This coin of Heaven will not have lost its image or its superscription when
time shall be no more—it is of God’s minting and will outlast the world—‘Christ
Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3089

“If you teach the Truth and die—and that Truth appears to be forgotten, you have
not lived in vain, for that Truth will spring up again in God’s good time! They
burnt Jerome of Prague. They took John Huss and when they fastened him to the
fatal stake, he said, ‘You may burn the goose, today, but there shall come a
swan that you cannot burn’—and that prophecy was fulfilled in Luther, whose
crest was a swan.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3142

“O Sinners, quarrel not with Christ for warning you of a Hell from which He
would gladly preserve you! Be angry with yourselves, rather, for choosing the
path to destruction! Be vexed and wrathful with your own sins for dragging you
down to ruin! But oh, be not angry with the loving Savior for telling you, once
and for all, that you cannot escape if you neglect this great salvation!”—Volume
57, Sermon #3258“My dear Brothers and Sisters, are you all consciously Christ’s
servants? If so, though the service may at times seem heavy because your faith
is weak, yet be very thankful that you are servants at all, for it is better to
serve God than to reign over all the kingdoms of this world!”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3107

“As little children have their own confections that need no vigorous
mastication, but will melt in the mouth, so some passages of Scriptures are
prepared as choice morsels for the Lord’s children—they have only to receive
them by transparent faith and unaffected love—and their enjoyment is
great.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3330

“You may be slow to embrace Him, but He is not slow to embrace you! You may not
be saying, with the Psalmist, ‘My heart and my flesh cries out for the living
God,’ but He wants to see your face, He longs to hear your voice, for with Him
it is now, as it has always been, a time to love.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3220

“Had certain theologians of the present time been present at the Red Sea, they
would have cried in sentimental sympathy over the Egyptians! But instead of
that, Miriam took a timbrel and said, ‘Sing unto the Lord, for He has triumphed
gloriously.’ The fates of sinful men are of small moment as compared with the
Glory of God! Jehovah fills all things and when the heart is fully taken up with
the Glory of God, it learns to sing even this stern refrain—‘To Him that smote
Egypt in their first-born: for His mercy endures forever.’”—Volume 58, Sermon
#3317

“God has so made man’s heart that nothing can ever fill it but God, Himself.
There is such a hungering and thirsting put into the quickened man that he
discerns his necessity and he knows that only Christ can supply that necessity.
When a man is saved, he has obtained all that he needs. When he gets Christ, he
is satisfied.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3157

“Do not pray, ‘Preserve me, O God,’ as though you felt that you were a very
precious person. It is true that God regards you as one of His jewels if you are
a Believer in Jesus, but you are not to regard yourself as a jewel. Think of
yourself as a brand plucked from the burning and then you will pray with due
humility.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3280

“It is the duty of every Christian to be witnessing for Christ. Jesus still is
on trial every day. He stands before the world, as it were, at this very hour,
and the question is—Is He the Son of God or not? Witnesses are being examined
every day for Him and against Him. “What do you think of Christ?” is a question
which is stirring all this city and all lands, more or less!”—Volume 56, Sermon
#3207

“Oh, that thought—it staggers thought! It is an idea that overwhelms me—that God
is working in all that happens! The sins of man, the wickedness of our race, the
crimes of nations, the iniquities of kings, the cruelties of wars, the terrific
scourge of pestilence—all these things are, in some mysterious way, working the
will of God! I cannot explain this. I cannot tell you where human will and free
agency unite with God’s Sovereignty and with His unfailing decrees.”—Volume 54,
Sermon #3114

“There is no worker for Christ like the young worker! I bless God that I was
preaching the Gospel at sixteen years of age! I could never have found such
pleasure and ease in doing my Master’s work if I had not begun to do it
early.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3082“At the worst pinch, God will always be there—you
may reckon it as certain that He has never forgotten His people! When the clock
strikes and the bell tolls the hour, God will arise for their defense and show
Himself to be strong on behalf of all those who put their trust in Him.”—Volume
55, Sermon #3170

“I bless God that the Gospel we have to preach is the Gospel for the illiterate,
the Gospel for the poor—and that we can still say, as our Master did—‘The poor
have the Gospel preached to them.’ And that many of them have, through that
Gospel, become ‘rich in faith, and heirs of the Kingdom which God has promised
to them that love Him.’ Do not quarrel with my Master because of the simplicity
of the Gospel, lest your pride should hang you on a gallows as high as
Haman’s.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3258

“Beloved, have you never felt yourself strangely supported under the direst
afflictions, so that they seemed not afflictions at all? And yet when pressure
has been removed you have been ready to faint like Samson after he had slain the
Philistines! Fear is a strange contradiction, a grim inconsistency, for it is
apt to be greatest when the reason for it is least and smallest.”—Volume 58,
Sermon #3330

“If you would learn all that you can concerning Jesus Christ, you must
diligently study the Word which reveals Him to us.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3314

“While the Golden Rule is more admired than practiced by ordinary men, the
Christian should always do unto others as he would that they should do unto him.
He should be one whose word is his bond and who, having once pledged his word,
swears to his own hurt, but changes not.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3281

“Young converts, make the best use you can of your earliest consecrated
hours—let the love of your espousals be inexpressibly sweet. There will be many
other times of love, but none of them will ever have quite the same sweetness as
you enjoyed when first you realized that Christ had loved you with an
everlasting love and, therefore, with loving kindness had drawn you unto
Himself.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3220

“How often have we seen the eyes brighten up with an almost supernatural
brilliance just before they were closed on all beneath the skies! How often have
we seen the hand raised with the parting expression of triumph, and then laid
motionless by the side! How often has the Presence of the Beloved sustained the
frail tenement of the expiring Christian till he has defied death ‘to quench his
immortality, or shake his trust in God!’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3077

“There are some of us who find it sweet to witness for Him—that He is the very
Christ of God—and we do not take any honor to ourselves for so doing, for flesh
and blood have not revealed it unto us.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3207

“Water will naturally rise as high as its own source, but without extraneous
pressure, it will never rise any higher. And humanity may rise as high as
humanity can rise, but it can never get any higher until the Spirit of God
imparts a supernatural force to it. ‘Except a man be born-again (born from
above), he cannot see the Kingdom of God.’ The very first act in the great work
of the new creation is that the Spirit of God moves upon the soul as he moved
upon the face of the waters.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3134

“Beloved, if you believe in your God, you know that He will bring you through
your present trouble and all future trials as well. If you truly love Him, you
know that all things are working together for your good. Therefore, let not your
heart be troubled! No, it cannot be, for your faith will drive out your
fear—your confidence in God will keep your heart from being troubled.—Volume 54,
Sermon #3076

“If ever a man is really dead, buried and risen with Christ, there is no fear of
his ever undergoing such a backward process as being dead with Christ and then
alive again to the world! There are some principles which are only powerful for
a time, but the principle of Grace, which produces the fear of the Lord, exerts
a permanent influence upon everyone in whom the Holy Spirit works it—and there
is no possibility of the love of the world or the fear of man casting it out!
May that gracious Spirit work this holy fear in each one of us!”—Volume 58,
Sermon #3314

“To do good for the sake of the good done, and not because of the character of
the person benefited, is a noble imitation of God. If the Lord only sent the
fertilizing shower upon the land of the saintly, drought would deprive whole
leagues of land of all hope of a harvest. We also must do good to the evil, or
we shall have a narrow sphere—our hearts will grow contracted and our sonship
towards the good God will be rendered doubtful.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3157

“And, today, when Christ says concerning the bread at the communion, ‘Take, eat,
this is My body,’ the carnally-minded say that the bread is turned into flesh,
not having the spiritual discernment to be able to comprehend even the simplest
metaphors which the Lord Jesus Christ is pleased to use! Spiritual things must
be spiritually discerned and, therefore, the carnal mind cannot discern
them!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3121 “There ought to be an essential difference
between the Christian and the best moralist, by reason of the higher standard
which the Gospel inculcates and the Savior has exemplified. Certainly the
highest point to which the best unconverted man can go might well be looked upon
as a level below which the converted man will never venture to descend!”—Volume
57, Sermon #3281

“Oh, that all of you whom I am addressing knew at least somethingof the
experiences of God’s people! You who only live the life of sense and have no
faith in Jesus, little know what I mean, for though I have talked largely of the
sorrows of God’s people, yet the joys of faith are unspeakable! One drop of
God’s love would sweeten a sea of gall. Yes, I was almost about to say that even
the pangs of Hell would lose their bitterness if a drop of the love of Christ
could once flow there and be tasted by those who are lost!”—Volume 55, Sermon
#3170

“What could be better than the Divine plan of Substitution? God must punish
sin—He could not be God unless He did—it is a necessity of His nature that He
should hate sin with an infinite hatred and He must punish it! Yet, as He had
loved His people with an everlasting love, how could He better show His love to
them and His hatred of sin than by giving up His well-beloved Son to die instead
of them—making Him who knew no sin to be sin for them, that they might be made
the righteousness of God in Him? This seems to me to be the most beautiful thing
I ever heard of and it delights my soul to preach it!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3258

“The guilt of one soul might sink a world—the accumulated guilt of all the
millions whom Christ redeemed will stand forever as a proof that God delights in
mercy!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3317

“Redeemed and glorified spirits can join in the everlasting hallelujahs of the
skies, but they can no longer climb up creaking staircases in the haunts of
poverty and minister to the sick and dying who lie languishing there. They can
still praise their Lord, but they cannot preach Him! They can talk to one
another of His love, but they cannot make it known to lost and helpless sinners
as you and I can. So let this, Beloved, be our ‘time to love.’”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3220

“If you also are one of His disciples, bear your witness for Him, even if it is
but one who can hear it! If that one is all the congregation that God sends you,
you have done your part. I am not accountable for the people that hear me, but
only for the witness that I bear! And you shall not be accountable for the
largeness or smallness of your sphere, but for the faithfulness of your
testimony for Christ.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3207

“If you are a Christian, be a Christian! If you follow Christ, go outside the
camp! But if there is no difference between you and your fellow man, what will
you say to the King in the day when He comes and finds that you have on no
wedding garment by which you can be distinguished from the rest of
mankind?”—Volume 57, Sermon #3281

“Christ saves sinners, but He does not save them in their sins, but fromtheir
sins! And when Christ once gets His hand upon a man, He casts out the devils
that once dwelt in him and makes him a new creature in Christ Jesus, being
henceforth bound to do God’s will and to walk according to God’s Word!”—Volume
54, Sermon #3079

“Suspicion is the death of fellowship! The moment one Christian imagines that
another thinks badly of him, though there may not be the slightest truth in that
thought, yet straightway the root of bitterness is planted! Let us believe in
one another’s sincerity, for we may rest assured that each of our Brothers and
Sisters deserves to be trusted more than we do.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3107

“Any common sort of man will love those who love him. Even tax gatherers and the
scum of the earth can rise to this poor, starveling virtue. Saints cannot be
content with such a groveling style of things. ‘Love for love is manlike,’ but
‘love for hate’ is Christlike. Shall we not desire to act up to our high
calling?”—Volume 55, Sermon #3157

“To my mind, the most glorious work that God ever performed was when God
Incarnate died that sinners might live! You surely cannot object to that
Doctrine of Substitution! If you do and if you persist in that objection, let me
tell you that you will perish—for he who rejects the Savior who died upon the
Cross brings eternal ruin to his soul.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3258

“The Gospel which God has revealed is so essentially THE Truth there is nothing
false, as there is nothing trifling in it. It is Truth unalloyed. It is Truth
which ought to be undoubted. It is a vile sin to imagine that there can be any
fallacy in the utterances of an Infallible God! Let everything else we credit be
a lie. Let all that man has asserted and proved be swept away—God’s Words are
the Truth, substantially and really so!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3093

“Tell all with whom you come in contact that He is your Savior, a precious
Savior, a true Promiser, a Promise-Keeper, a faithful Friend, a Helper in life
and in death! And I say again, you know not what may be the value of your
testimony, for if it is borne but to a child, that child may grow up to bear
testimony to tens of thousands!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3207 “The cry of Rachel,
‘Give me children, or I die,’ is the cry of your minister this day—and the
longing of thousands more besides! As that desire grows in intensity, a revival
is surely approaching! We must have spiritual children born to Christ, or our
hearts will break for the longing that we have for their salvation! Oh, for more
of these longings, yearnings, cravings, travailing! If we plead till the harvest
of revival comes, we shall partake in the joy of it!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3315

“There is no doubt about the hardness of your heart and the badness of your
nature—you are probably much worse than you think are—but it is impossible that
your depravity should exceed the potency of the Holy Spirit’s influence to renew
your nature and change your whole life!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3262

“If the days of persecution were to come back, how many of us would be willing
to go to the stake and be burned alive rather than give up our love to Christ?
Yet think of all that He endured for us! He gave His back to the smiters and His
cheeks to them that plucked out His hair, and He hid not His face from shame and
spitting! My gracious Master, You have given Your flesh and Your blood to be the
spiritual food of my soul—give me the Grace to consecrate my flesh and blood and
all the powers of my body, soul, and spirit to You and to Your blessed
service!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3220

“I am glad to be associated with all of you in your various works of faith and
labors of love—but I have often learned more about Christ from the poor than
from the rich. Besides, if Jesus Christ was willing to be reckoned among the
poor, there is no man who needs to be ashamed of his poverty unless it is
brought on by his own sin!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3258

“There are persons whose names will never be known to fame—some of the very
poorest on the earth who, nevertheless, are speaking softly with their voices
for Jesus and who are also speaking very powerfully by their lives for Jesus—as
servants in the household, as toilers in the workshop, as poor humble bed-ridden
sufferers who patiently endure great pain and privation because the Lord gives
them the Grace to bear it for His sake!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3171

“I do not think our prayers would ever be heard in Heaven if it were not for
Jesus Christ. He is the great Mediator by whom our prayers must be
presented.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3081

“If I am never to preach the Gospel to a sinner till I see something in him that
will help the Holy Spirit to save him, I shall never be able to preach the
Gospel at all! And if Jesus Christ never saves a man till He sees something in
that man that cries to Christ to save Him, then no man will ever be
saved!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3134

“What? Should Sodom go unpunished? Shall the bestial vice of which Sodom was
guilty never be checked? Why, if this should spread among the sons of men, it
would bring in its infernal train ten thousand times more damage than the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3317

“Brothers and Sisters, Beloved in the Lord, you may depend upon it that nothing
worse can happen to a Church than to be conformed unto this world! Write
“Ichabod” upon her walls, then, for the sentence of destruction has gone out
against her.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3281 “It is wealth enough to a Believer to
possess his God, honor enough to please his God, happiness enough to enjoy his
God. My heart’s best treasure lies here—‘This God is our God forever and ever:
He will be our guide even unto death.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3330

“I could ask for some men whom I know no greater mercy than that they might be
blessed with spiritual poverty—that they might be made to feel how poor they
are—for they will never know Christ and they will never rise to be practically
merciful till first they have seen their own true condition and have obtained
mercy enough to lie down at the foot of the Cross—and there, with a broken
heart, to confess that they are empty and poor!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3158

“The Scriptures have taught us that whoever dares to administer that ordinance
[Believers’ Baptism] to any but those who believe with their heart and profess
with their mouth, dares to touch with sacrilegious hands, God’s own institution,
and is guilty of breaking down the hedges of the Church and throwing open to the
world that which was never intended but for the Lord’s own family!”—Volume 54,
Sermon #3100

“Repentance and faith are distasteful to the unregenerate—they would sooner
repeat a thousand formal prayers than shod a solitary tear of true repentance!
They would sooner work their way to Heaven even if they had to pass through Hell
itself to get there, than come and simply receive salvation for nothing as the
gift of God by Jesus Christ. Brothers and Sisters we must be born-again because
the Truth of the Gospel cannot be understood and the commands of the Gospel
cannot be obeyed except where the Spirit of God works regeneration in the
heart!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3121 “A person does not become a member of Christ’s
Church by Baptism, nor by birthright, nor by profession, nor by morality. Christ
is the Door into the sheepfold! Everyone who believes in Jesus Christ is a
member of the true Church. Being a member of Christ, he is a member,
consequently, of the body of Christ which is the Church.”—Volume 57, Sermon
#3281

“‘Whoever believes in the Lord Jesus Christ shall never perish, but have
everlasting life.’ There is an alternative. It is, ‘He that believes not, shall
be condemned.’”—Volume 58, Sermon #3317

“I rejoice that we are a praying Church, but I am always jealous lest we should
lose the spirit of prayer which the Lord has so graciously poured out upon us.
Some of us recollect times when we have gripped the Angel of the Covenant and we
would not let Him go until He blessed us. Many of you were given to us in answer
to these effectual fervent prayers—and this makes me the more urgent in pleading
with you to pray for others.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3258

“This is the world of the dying! You seem to be passing before me in a
procession and I, too, am part of the procession, myself! Oh, make sure work for
eternity! Run no risk concerning your souls—not even this night’s risk, for this
night, at midnight, without a knock at your door there may come the messenger
saying, ‘Prepare to meet your God.’ And then— and then, it will matter if you
are Christ’s disciple, or not! It will not matter, then, whether you have been
rich or not, educated or not—but it will matter for all eternity whether you are
His or not, for remember the division—‘These shall go away into everlasting
punishment; but the righteous into life eternal.’ God grant that you then may be
with the company of the disciples of Jesus for Jesus Christ’s sake!
Amen.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3207

“You may sometimes write much in a very few words and here you have an epitome
of the whole Gospel of God in these few syllables—‘Behold the Lamb of God, which
takes away the sin of the world.’”—Volume 56, Sermon #3222

“Be cheered, you humble penitents, the Lord’s heart is too large to permit Him
to send you away empty! Be encouraged, at this moment, to breathe the silent
prayer, “O God, the Lord and Giver of Grace, give Your Grace to us who seek it
now!” Why, dear Heart, you have Grace already, or you would not seek it, for
Grace must first come to you to make you seek Grace! Be thankful, for salvation
has come to your house! Dead men do not long for life. In the marble limbs of
the corpse there is no struggling after life, no pangs of desire for health. God
has looked on you in love—look you to Jesus and live!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3075

“It is your Master’s new command that you love one another—will you disregard
it? He has given this as the badge of Christians—‘By this shall all men know
that you are My disciples’— not if you wear a gold cross, but—‘if you have love
one to another.’ That is the Christian’s badge of his being, in very truth, a
disciple of Jesus Christ!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3107

“We are dependent upon God for everything! And sometimes He makes use of the
ordinary laws of Nature to be a chastisement to those who forget Him. If we will
not be reminded of Him by His mercies, we shall be reminded by His judgments!
And if, as stewards, we do not make a proper use of that which He entrusts to
us, He can easily take it all away.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3073

“I recollect when, at one time, I was a little afraid to preach the Gospel to
sinners as sinners, and yet I wanted to do so, so I used to say, “If you have
but a millionth part of a desire, come to Christ.” I dare say more than that
now, but, at the same time, I will say that at once—if you have a millionth part
of a desire, if you have only a little breathing—if you desire to be reconciled,
if you desire to be pardoned, if you would be forgiven, if there is only half a
good thought formed in your soul, do not check it, do not stifle it and do not
think that God will reject it!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3083

“No Scripture is of private interpretation—you may take out the name of Abram
[Genesis 15:1] and put your own name into the promise if you are of Abram’s
spiritual seed, and do not stagger at the promise by reason of unbelief. ‘If
children, then heirs’ applies to all the spiritual family and to the pledging of
all the promises to them!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3330

“When you really draw near to God and other saints draw near [in prayer] to Him,
you also draw near to them. No, more, since Jesus Christ, Himself, prays when
you pray, you have fellowship with Him! And as the Holy Spirit inspires your
prayers if they were according to the mind of God, you also have fellowship with
the Spirit and through Him with the Father! Thus prayer becomes a glorious bond
which binds God and all His people together in one sacred bundle of life! And to
be without prayer is to be outside that blessed bundle.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3282

“I plead with you, Christians—and I wish I had more power to do it
effectually—for the sake of sinners, to stir yourselves up to pray for them and
to labor for them that through the mighty working of the Spirit of God, they may
no longer stumble at the Word, but may yield themselves to Christ and be
saved!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3258

“The point I want to emphasize is this, that the reliance of the Church, under
God, must not be upon the voices that ring out, far and wide, like a peal of
bells, nor upon the tongues that give forth the sweet music that pleases the
ear! We must rely upon the Gospel, itself—upon the Gospel simply stated, upon
the Gospel taught in the Sunday school, the Gospel explained at the family
altar, the Gospel lived and loved by holy men and women! It is that which will
do the work of God effectually and accomplish His glorious purposes of
Grace.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3171

“Temptations frequently come in the form of very pleasing baits. Satan gilds the
pill that he offers us. He very seldom presents to any of us a bare hook, though
that may be done with those who become habituated in sin. It is almost a bare,
unbaited hook when persons continue in drunkenness after they have ruined their
health and brought themselves to beggar’s rags. Satan hardly has to tempt them
at all, for they go willingly after their idols and dote upon them. But with
God’s own people, Satan generally takes care to bait his hook and cover it so
that it is scarcely seen.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3208

“It may not appear to some that the quarter of an hour in the morning spent in
looking into the face of God with ecstatic joy can fill us with strength, but we
know from blessed experience that there is no strength like it! If the Eternal
overshadows us, then Omnipotence comes streaming into us!”—Volume 58, Sermon
#3330

“No, where God has given a man a new heart and a right spirit, there is great
tenderness to all the poor—and especially great love to the poor saints—for,
while every saint is an image of Christ, the poor saint is a picture of Christ
set in the same frame in which Christ’s picture must always be set—the frame of
humble poverty.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3158

“Why should the Spirit of God ever have come into our hearts? What was there in
us to induce the Spirit of God to begin a work of Grace in us? We admire the
condescension of Jesus in leaving Heaven to dwell upon earth, but do we not
equally admire the condescension of the Holy Spirit in coming to dwell in such
poor hearts as ours? Jesus dwelt with sinners, but the Holy Spirit dwells in
u.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3134

“I thank God for any revival that produces any genuine results but, just because
I rejoice in revivals of the right kind, I tremble as I think of many of the
supposed converts who are only converted to self-conceit and other delusions—and
not to real faith in Jesus Christ. I charge you, by the living God, everyone of
you, not to trust to mere excitement, or fancy as a ground of salvation. You
must be made new creatures in Christ Jesus—your very nature must be changed—the
whole bent, current and tenor of your life must be altered and that not by human
arguments and persuasions, but by the Holy Spirit’s power, or else into God’s
Kingdom you cannot come!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3121

“It is true that meekness of heart produces rest. And yet it is a still deeper
Truth of God that rest produces meekness of heart!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3330

“Do not think that what the Lord worked in the early saints cannot be worked in
you. It is because you think so that you do not pray for it—and because you do
not pray for it, you do not attain it! The Grace of God sustained the
Apostles—that Grace is not less today than it was then! The Lord’s arm is not
shortened! His power is not straitened. If we can but believe and be as earnest
as those first saints were, we shall yet subdue kingdoms and the day shall come
when the gods of Hinduism and the lies of Mohammed, and the lies of Rome shall
as certainly be overthrown as were the ancient philosophies and the classic
idolatries of Greece and Rome by the teaching of the first ministers of
Christ!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3107

“To be a true Christian is something higher and nobler than simply sitting in
our pews twice on Sunday, or even teaching in a Sunday school or giving away
tracts. It is the laying of one’s whole self upon the altar—offering your body,
soul and spirit as a living sacrifice unto God, which is our reasonable service,
so that, whether we live or whether we die, we shall be the Lord’s, and live or
die for Him!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3258

“So, my Brother, your prayer may never edify your Brothers and Sisters. It may
not be suitable to be presented in public, but if your soul is in it, if your
heart goes out towards God through your poor feeble prayer, it will be so
precious in His sight that He will not have it thrown away!”—Volume 57, Sermon
#3282

“The poor will never cease out of the land and the poor will never cease out of
the Church of Christ. They are Christ’s legacy to us! It is quite certain that
the Good Samaritan got more out of the poor man whom he found between Jerusalem
and Jericho than the poor man got out of him! He had a little oil and wine, and
twopence, the expenses at the inn—but the Samaritan got his name in the Bible
and there it has been handed down to posterity—a wonderfully cheap investment!
And in everything that we give, the blessing comes to those who give it, for you
know the Words of the Lord Jesus, how He said, ‘It is more blessed to give than
to receive.’ Blessed are they who are merciful to the poor.”—Volume 55, Sermon
#3158

“Riches procured by impoverishing the soul are always a curse! To increase your
business so that you cannot attend week-night services is to become really
poorer—to give up heavenly pleasure—and receive earthly cares in exchange, is a
sorry sort of barter.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3208

“Saints in Heaven sparkle like the sun when they put on this glorious array. Not
Christ, Himself, on Tabor’s mountain shone more lustrously than will poor
sinners shine when they are covered with the righteousness of Jesus
Christ!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3122 “If it were possible for the condescension of
the Incarnation to be outdone, it would be in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit
in the hearts of men!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3134

“I wish the whole Church of Christ would realize that her greatest victories
have usually been accomplished by those who did not seem, from a human
standpoint, competent for the task and that she may still expect to see the
grandest results coming to her by the use of ordinary means, by ordinary persons
devoutly exercising, in the name of God, their ordinary functions in an ordinary
way—the workers being, however, under the gracious influence of the Divine
Spirit from whom all true power must come!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3171

“Now Paul did not merely write ‘it is a saying,’ but, ‘ itisa faithful saying,’
a saying worthy of faith, a saying full of the Truth of God, a saying about
which no doubts may be entertained, a sure and certain saying, ‘that Christ
Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3089

“I am persuaded that often, when we think we have prayed as we ought, we have
only been feeding our own vanity—and that at other times, when we have found
that we could not pray, that we could hardly express a single desire, but could
only sigh and groan before the Lord—then we have really prayed and God has heard
our prayer!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3282

“Of course, an oppressor cannot or will not see the evil of oppression. If you
put before him a case of injustice which is as plain as the nose on his face, he
cannot see it because he has always been under the delusion that he was sent
into the world with a whip in his hand to drive other people about, for he is
the one great somebody and other people are poor nobodies, only fit to creep
under his huge legs and humbly ask his leave to live.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3159

“I charge you people of God who are here present to try how near you can get to
complete consecration to the Lord Jesus Christ! Never say, ‘I am as good as my
minister.’ You had need be much better than I am! Never say, ‘I am as good as
such-and-such a Christian.’ O Sirs, if you compare yourselves among yourselves,
you are not wise! The only model for Christians is Christ Himself.”—Volume 54,
Sermon #3078

“You must have faith or you will perish. “He that believes and is baptized shall
be saved, but he that believes not shall be damned,” is the declaration of Jesus
Christ the Savior, Himself!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3259 “You may judge of it [the
Truth of God] by three things—by God, by Christ and by man. That is, the truth
which honors God, the truth which glorifies Christ, and the truth which humbles
man.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3093

“O Believers, be on the watch! Take heed unto yourselves lest you enter into
unholy alliances, or put yourselves into positions out of which you may be
unable to escape, but may have to mourn to your dying day that you ever entered
into that evil confederacy! You must say, ‘Our Master bids us come out from the
world, and be separate from sinners. He bids Christians walk with Him and be
choice in their company, and not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers,
for that would be dishonoring to God and ruinous to their souls!’”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3208

“You will make a fatal mistake if you suppose that you are saved simply because
you have been driven almost to despair. There can be no more insecure foundation
for a hope of Heaven than to think that you are saved because you have realized
that you were lost. It would be a very absurd idea for a man to conclude that he
was in health because he had felt that he was ill, or for another to fancy that
he was rich because he had felt that he was poor. There is a remorse which is
near akin to repentance, but it is not the fruit of the Grace of God.”—Volume
55, Sermon #3171

“I daresay some of you remember Dr. Hamilton’s story of poor Betty who said,
‘The Lord said to me, Betty, look after your husband and your house, and I did
it. And then He said, Betty, go and talk to your neighbors about Jesus, and I
did that. And then He said, Betty, go and lie on the bed and cough, and I am
doing it, blessed be His holy name!” Ah, but it needs a great deal of Grace to
lie and cough to God’s Glory! Yet it is being done—and the groans of sick, yet
submissive saints are as musical to God’s ear as the hallelujahs of
archangels!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3082

“If you are conscious of the Lord’s Presence, you will do the best thing
possible by being very calm, deliberate and quiet in His service. ‘He that
believes,’ in that sense, ‘shall not make haste, but he shall go about the
business in a restful spirit.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3330 “It is not the merit of
our prayers that secures the gracious answers to them, but the power of Christ’s
prevailing intercession!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3282

“Sinner, if you will be saved, you must give yourself up to Jesus Christ to be
His servant and to do all that He bids you! You must rely alone, upon Him! Trust
not in fiction, but in reality—not by mere profession, but with your whole
heart—and you must continue to lean, rest and lie upon Him, trusting alone in
Him! This is what saving faith is.”—Volume 57, Sermon #3259 “Dear Brother, you
may be preaching to those who are dead in sin, but preach the Gospel to them all
the same! It is your business to preach the Gospel to dead sinners, for it is
the Gospel that makes the dead to live! If we had to look for some natural
goodness in the sinner before we preached the Gospel to him, we would never
preach to him at all! But we have to go to him where he is, with darkness over
his soul and ruin and confusion all around—and while we preach the Word, the
Spirit of God accompanies it with saving power and the man is made to live—and
he is fashioned in the image of God!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3134

“When you hear some people talk about there being no God and no spiritual
things, and so on, you need not be at all concerned at what they say, for they
are not in a position to warrant them in speaking about the matter! For
instance, an ungodly man says, ‘I do not believe there is a God, for I never saw
Him.’ I do not doubt the truth of what you say, but when I tell you that I have
seen Him, you have no more right to doubt my word than I have to doubt
yours!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3159

“Now, there are a thousand things which may be right in worldlings which are
wrong in Christians. There is a very high law for all men and I will not
depreciate the true standard of common morality, but set it as high as it can be
set! But over and above that there is a law of consecration—there is a rule, not
merely of morality, but of something more—of holiness.”—Volume 56, Sermon #3208

“If you could pray a prayer that seemed to you a thousand times better than
those you now present, I am not sure that it would not really be any better. If
you said to yourself, ‘There, that prayer will do, it will find its way to God
all by itself,’ I am certain that it would never reach the Throne of God! But
if, when we have prayed, we feel that we must have Christ’s intercession to make
our prayers acceptable, He will add the‘much incense’ to our poor petitions and
so they shall prevail with God!”—Volume 57, Sermon #3282

“It is very difficult for man to have much money running through his hands
without some of it sticking. It is very sticky stuff—and when it once sticks to
the hands, they are not clean in the sight off the Lord! Unless a man is able to
use money without abusing it, accepting it as a talent lent to him and not as a
treasure given to him—it will very soon happen that the more money he has, the
more troubles he will have.—Volume 54, Sermon #3076

“Let your lowliness of heart, your sense of utter nothingness, instead of
disqualifying you, be a sweet medium for leading you to receive more of Christ.
The more empty I am, the more room is there for my Master. The more I lack, the
more He will give me. The more I feel my sickness, the more shall I adore and
bless Him when He makes me whole.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3124

“If we would get faith, we must take care how we hear, as well as what we hear.
The hearing is, itself, almost as important as the preaching. Faith does not
come by every sort of hearing. There have been persons who have heard the Gospel
for many years, but they have really heard nothing, for it has gone in one ear
and out at the other. Faith does not come by such hearing!”—Volume 57, Sermon
#3259

“Many of us could testify, if this were the time to do so, that there is such a
thing as fellowship with God even here on earth, but men can enjoy it only in
proportion as they give up their love of sin. They cannot talk with God after
they have been talking filthiness. They cannot speak with God as a man speaks
with his friend if they are accustomed to meet companions in the alehouse and
delight to mingle with the ungodly who gather there. The pure in heart may see
God and do see Him—not with the natural eyes, and far from us be such a carnal
idea as that—but with their inner spiritual eyes they see the great God who is
Spirit!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3159

“There is a secret of prevailing in prayer which you may know to your heart’s
comfort if you will learn the lesson of our text, (Revelation 8:3, 4) and then,
as your prayer is presented by Christ to His Father, the answer will come down
in blessings which many others will be glad to share with you.”—Volume 57,
Sermon #3282

“I think the moments we are nearest to Heaven are those we spend at the Lord’s
Table. I have sometimes looked at your faces, my Brothers and Sisters, at the
Lord’s Table, and if anyone wanted to see men’s faces when they looked as if
angels themselves were smiling in their eyes, such have your faces been when I
have broken the bread and the wine has been passed to you!”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3100

“Some sinners seem to think that they are to get comfort and light for
themselves—but it is not so—Christ must bring it all to you. You are not to
bring anything to Jesus, but to come to His fullness to receive
everything!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3172

“I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move
an atom more or less than God wishes—that every particle of spray that dashes
against the steamboat has its orbit as well as the sun in the heavens—that the
chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as surely as the stars in their
courses—that the chirping of an aphid over a rosebud is as much fixed as the
march of the devastating pestilence, and the fall of sere leaves from the poplar
is as fully ordained as the tumbling of an avalanche. He who believes in God
must believe this Truth of His. There is no standing point between this and
atheism. There is no half way between an almighty God who works all things
according to the good pleasure of His own will and no god at all. A god who
cannot do as He pleases—a god whose will is frustrated is not a God and cannot
be a God! I could not believe in such a god as that.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3114
“The work of Creation did not end with the first day, but went on till it was
finished on the sixth day. God did not say, ‘I have made the light and now I
will leave the earth as it is.’ And when He had begun to divide the waters and
to separate the land from the sea, He did not say, ‘Now I will have no more to
do with the work.’ He did not take the newly-fashioned earth in His hands and
fling it back into chaos, but He went on with His work until, on the seventh
day, when it was completed, He rested from all His work and, glory be to God, He
will not leave unfinished the work which He has commenced in our souls!”—Volume
55, Sermon #3134

“One of the loveliest sights in the world is an aged Believer waiting for the
summons to depart… they ought to be in Heaven, but in mercy to us they tarry
here to let us see what the glorified are like!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3283

“I know many whose consciences are truly awakened and who see themselves as
sinners in the sight of God, but instead of beholding the Lamb of God, they are
continually beholding themselves! I do not think that they have any confidence
in their own righteousness, but they are afraid that they do not feel their
guilt as much as they ought. They think that they are not yet sufficiently
awakened, sufficiently humbled, sufficiently penitent and so on, and thus they
fix their eyes upon themselves in the hope of getting peace with God!”—Volume
56, Sermon #3222

“That Truth of God which of old was mighty through God to the pulling down of
strongholds, is still mighty, and we will maintain it to the death! The Church
needs the Doctrines of Grace today as much as when Paul, or Augustine, or Calvin
preached them! The Church needs justification by faith, the substitutionary
Atonement, regeneration and Divine Sovereignty to be preached from her pulpits
as much as in days of yore! And by God’s Grace she shall have them, too!”—Volume
54, Sermon #3107

“When the Holy Spirit has become to you the Spirit of Adoption, you will go
forth to Christian ordinances without fear!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3172

“I was sprinkled when I was a child, but I know that I was not thereby made a
member of Christ, a child of God and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven! I
know that nothing of the kind took place in me, but that, as soon as I could, I
went into sin and continued in it. I was not bornagain, I am sure, till I was
about 15 years of age, when the Lord brought salvation so my soul through the
regenerating work of the Holy Spirit and so I was enabled so trust in Jesus as
my Savior.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3121

“Some tell us that in baptism, by which they mean baby sprinkling as a rule,
they regenerate and make members of Christ, children of God and inheritors of
the Kingdom of Heaven! But those who are sprinkled are no better than other
people. They grow up in just the same way as others. The whole ceremony is
useless and worse than that, for it is clean contrary to the example and
teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ! No aqueous applications, no outward
ceremonies can ever affect the heart!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3159

“For a man to trust himself in the beginning of his Christian career is very
unwise, for Scripture warns him against it! But for him to trust himself after
he has been 20 or 30 years a Christian is surely insanity, itself—a sin against
common sense!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3283

“Always be afraid of not being afraid—and be always in fear when you feel that
you are perfectly safe. When you realize your danger and fly to the Lord to
guard you, then you are safe. But when you begin to think, ‘All is right with
me, nothing will make me fall now,’ you are not very far off a bad fall in which
you may suffer serious hurt. May God keep you, my dear Brothers and Sisters. May
He preserve each one of us till we see His face in Glory at the last!”—Volume
54, Sermon #3074

“O my Hearer, do not be lost through a mock humility which is really abominable
pride! You are not too great a sinner to be saved. I will venture to say that
you will dishonor Christ if you ever think such a thing! So let not that sinful
thought destroy you!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3222 “No race of men has ever been
discovered that has been sunk too low for the Spirit of God to work upon them
and to save them! Let us never despair of any, or think that they are beyond the
Spirit’s power.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3134 “I would rather lie sick upon a bed of
pain from now till my Master’s appearance than be employed in the preaching of
God’s Word if I cannot have my Master’s Presence with me!”—Volume 54, Sermon
#3122

“Jesus Christ says, ‘Whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.’ Do you
Believe this? Will you put your trust in Him? Will you drop into His arms and
let Him carry you? Will you fall flat upon the Rock of Ages and let that sustain
you? If you do it now, this moment, you shall become in this happy moment a
changed man! You shall be no longer an heir of wrath, but a child of Grace! And
your salvation shall become as inevitably secure as if you were even now among
the glorified!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3081

“Whenever a Christian has to say, ‘My leanness, my leanness, woe is unto me,’ it
cannot be because suitable food has not been supplied—it must be because he has
not fed upon it—for if we have fed upon Christ Jesus, how can we help growing in
faith, knowledge, holiness and every spiritual gift?”—Volume 55, Sermon #3172
“Oh, what a glorious Truth of God is this, that although a poor tried child of
God may feel the force of his inbred sin and have to continually struggle with
it—and though he may, from day to day, be conscious of his many imperfections,
yet before those Eyes that see everything, there is no spot to be seen upon the
Believer in Christ—I mean no spot in this respect—that he can never be condemned
or punished for his sin. His sin is finally and forever pardoned!”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3223

“Does not our Savior tell us that the well of water in us is to become rivers of
water streaming out from us? As we receive, we should give! The more we learn,
the more we should teach—and if God teaches us, it is because He expects us to
instruct others.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3283

“The fact is, baptismal regeneration [See Sermon #573, Volume 10—BAPTISMAL
REGENERATION—the Sermon which has had the largest circulation of any in the
whole of Mr. Spurgeon’s discourses!—Read/download the entire sermon, free of
charge, at http://www.spurgeongems.org.] is a lie, a wicked invention of Popery,
without the slightest warrant in the Word of God! Not one has ever been
born-again in baptism, nor ever can be! Regeneration, in the Scriptures, is
always put side by side with faith, as anybody can see who will read the
Scripture without prejudice, seeking to know the Truth of God that is there
revealed. There is nothing in so called sacraments upon which a soul can rest
for salvation. If you have been baptized and even if you have been immersed,
which is the only true Baptism, unless the Spirit of God has regenerated you,
‘You must be born-again, born from above.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3121

“Have you in your heart the intention to serve God when you have amassed so much
wealth? What? Shall God be second? Shall mammon take the first place and Jehovah
be put in the background? No! Let your gold come in second or not at all. Let
your God come in now!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3160

“Holy occupation is one of the most important things for our spiritual
health…Very largely will you find that in proportion as you serve Christ, Christ
will serve you—therefore seek you to feed His lambs—and He will feed
you.”—Volume 58, Sermon #3283

“I do not believe in the faith that is unaccompanied by repentance. Some have
spoken in disparagement of repentance by saying ‘that the original word means
nothing more than a change of mind.’ And you might imagine that it was a very
unimportant change of mind. But their knowledge of Greek is not very deep and
their experimental knowledge of true religion would seem to be still more
shallow.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3094

“Breathe the prayer, ‘Lord, give me the faith of Your elect and save me with a
great salvation!’ Though it is only breathing, yet, as the old Puritan says,
when God feels the breath of His child upon His face, He smiles. And He will
feel your breath and smile on you, and bless you. May He do so, for His name’s
sake! Amen.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3083

“Several of the first followers of Christ were plain, blunt fishermen, honest
after their fashion, yet they had to be born-again—it does not matter how good a
man may be, or how earnest he may be in seeking to find the Truth of God—he
cannot escape from the necessity which applies to the entire human race! ‘You
must be horn again.’”—Volume 54, Sermon #3121

“He who has faith is better than the stoic. The stoical philosopher bore trial
because he believed it must be. The Christian bears it because he believes it is
working for his good.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3114

“When people sometimes say when they know their duty, “We will make it a matter
of prayer,” they generally mean that they will try to find some excuse for not
doing it. You need not pray about any matter when you know what you ought to
do—go and do it!”—Volume 58, Sermon #3283

“I am hopeful, therefore, for our young members, that God will take care of them
and that they will surprise us by the advance which they will make. I only hope
that they will surpass all who have ever gone before them. Ah, dear young
Friends, never take us as an example in stopping short of the Christian ideal!
Follow us as far as we follow Christ! But go beyond the very best of us where
you see that we come short of what we ought to be. I hope you will be more
earnest, more prayerful, more conscientious, more diligent than any of us have
been!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3172

“The salvation of sinners is the will of God, the work of Christ and the joy of
Christ! Is not this good news?”—Volume 55, Sermon #3135 “Oh, pity those poor
souls who live in darkness and do not know our sweet Lord Jesus! ‘You are the
light of the world.’ Defer not the lightgiving lest the night come to them
wherein you cannot help them!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3160

“Oh, let me rest! Come, night, and let me slumber! Come, my last hour! Let me
bow myself upon the bed! Come, Death, oh, come lightly to my couch! Yes, strike
if you will, but your stroke is the loving touch that makes my body slumber!
Happy, happy, they who die in the Lord!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3077 “Does God
accept your heartless sacrifices, your meaningless words and empty phrases? No!
He is not to be mocked by mere outward religious forms and ceremonies.”—Volume
54, Sermon #3109

“Rowland Hill used to say that the only thing that he should be sorry to leave
when he went to Heaven was that sweet, lovely, sorrowful Grace of repentance—he
supposed he could not repent in Heaven, but it was such a sweet experience to
keep on repenting that he would wish to repent forever if such a thing might
be.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3094

“I fear that some Brothers and Sisters think that a quick temper can never be
overcome. But it must be overcome! The reason why so many professors so often
fall into that sin is that they do not believe that it is conquerable and,
therefore, they do not pray it down! ”—Volume 56, Sermon #3223

“I am afraid there are some sinners that never come to Christ because they do
not get an invitation. I know that is not the case with any sinner who is in the
habit of coming to thishouse. I believe Christian ministers would do well, or,
at any rate not ill, if they never preached anything but invitation!”—Volume 55,
Sermon #3160

“‘Ah,’ somebody says, ‘I fear that this kind of preaching will be very
discouraging to a great many people.’ Well, how will it discourage them? ‘It
will discourage them from trying to save themselves.’ That is the very thing
that I want to do! I would like not only to discourage them from attempting that
impossible task, but to cast them into despair concerning it! When a man utterly
despairs of being able to save himself, it is thenthat he cries to God to save
him—so I believe that we cannot do a man a better turn than to discourage him
from ever resting upon anything that he can do towards saving himself.”—Volume
54, Sermon #3121

“Are we to praise the Lord now for keeping us to the end? Will it not do if we
praise Him when the end comes and we have been kept to the end? Will it not do
if we praise Him when we are presented faultless before the presence of His
glory with exceeding joy? But can you not believe God’s promise that He will
keep you to the end—and bless His name for it even NOW?”—Volume 54, Sermon #3074

“Sowing to the Spirit lifts our sowing altogether above the idea of human merit.
He who sows to the Spirit is led and guided by the Spirit of God—led to repent
of sin, led to believe in Jesus, led to a new life, led to holiness, led to
sanctification and, therefore, he does not take any credit to himself for
anything in him that is good, for he knows that it was all implanted there by
the Holy Spirit!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3109

“Everything of salvation that a Believer receives, comes to him out of the one
storehouse wherein all fullness abides—that is in Christ Jesus!”—Volume 56,
Sermon #3223 “The crest and the motto of the American Baptist Missionary Union
should be ours. The crest is an ox standing between a plow and an altar, and the
motto is, ‘Ready for either.’ May we be ready to be offered up in death or to
serve God in life!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3172

“A Christian should be like a steamer that goes straight away to the port it is
intended to reach. But many professors are like sailing vessels, the motive
power that controls them is outside of them, so they have to tack a good
deal—and though they may ultimately get to their destination—there is a good
deal of strange sailing to the right and to the left, and their voyage takes a
very long while.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3080

“You are a nation of priests! Instead of having some one man selected who
becomes a priest and so maintains the old priestcraft in the Christian Church,
Jesus our Lord and Head has abolished that monopoly forever! He remains the one
great Apostle and High Priest of our profession and we in Him are made, through
His Grace, kings and priests unto God. You are, each of you, as Believers, sent
into this world with a distinct commission—and that commission is very like the
commission given to your Master! In your measure, the Spirit of the Lord is upon
you and He has sent you to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the
captives and to preach the acceptable year of the Lord!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3135

“The faith by which you received Christ was as much the gift of God to you as
was the Christ upon whom your faith was fixed. You know that it is so and,
therefore, you also know that boasting is forever excluded from the fact that
you are saved.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3173 “I would not live here always. I have a
strong appetite for Heaven and I think many of God’s saints, as they grow in
age, find it so. They care less and less for this world because they recognize
that there is nothing here worth caring for!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3122

“Very often God will not hear us because we will not hear Him. If He speaks and
we are deaf to His voice, we must not wonder if we find Him deaf when we speak
to Him! Our success in prayer will often depend upon our obedience to the
precept—you cannot have the promise torn away from the precept. That would be
like cutting a living child in two.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3082 “You can never kill
any sin if you turn your eyes away from the Cross. There is no stream that can
cleanse from inward lusts but the precious blood of Jesus that flowed on
Calvary. Whoever has been victorious over any temptation, it may truly be said
of him, ‘he overcame through the blood of the Lamb.’ So that there is no way of
receiving the blessings of a present salvation except through believing in
Jesus!”—Volume 56, Sermon #3223

“God’s electing love has, in many cases, selected great fools andgreat sinners.
At least I know that God’s people think themselves such. I have said, never
despair of your child, and I will put it to you again—if you have friends who
are infidel, or persecuting, or profane, yet, as long as you live and they live,
it is your business to labor for their conversion and to weep and pray for
them!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3075

“Where there is a Church in the house, every member strives to increase the
other’s comfort, all seek to promote each other’s holiness, each one endeavors
to discharge his duty according to the position in which he is placed in that
Church. And when they meet together, their prayers are earnest and fervent, and
all their actions are not the actions of a worldly family, but of those who have
tasted that the Lord is gracious!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3103

“If you are saved, you are saved entirely through Jesus—and you do not need, and
you do not desire any other Savior! You look to Jesus for all that can be
comprehended in the word, salvation. His name means Savior and you have found
Him to be a Savior to you. So you have received the anointed Savior, Christ
Jesus.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3173

“Look at the man who has sought to be justified by the works of the Law, or in
some way perverted the Gospel of Christ… He sleeps the deep sleep of death,
prepared, as he supposes, to meet the Judge. When he awakes, the spell shall be
dissolved. The terrible sentence, ‘Depart,’ awaits him! O Beloved, I tremble to
think that a man may go up with jaunty step to the threshold of Heaven only to
be cast down to the nethermost pit! As you stand among the graves of your
departed friends, I beseech you to examine yourselves! Only as you can say, ‘To
me to live is Christ,’ have you a right to add, ‘and to die is gain.’”—Volume
54, Sermon #3077

“A man who never gives anything is the worst person in the world to beg from,
but he who has given in the past will probably continue to give. There is no
heart so generous as the heart that has already given—it will still give. God
has blessed millions of others—hosts beyond all counting! Then why should He not
bless you? Lord, You gave to others, give to me also!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3122

“I also think that Peter calls our joy, ‘unspeakable,’ [1 Peter 1:8] because if
we were to try to explain or describe it to carnal men, they could not
understand us. You cannot explain to a person who has never tasted honey, how
sweet it is. Neither can you explain to a man who knows not the joy of the Lord,
how joyous a thing it is. He could not comprehend what your words meant—you
would be talking to him in an altogether unknown tongue!”—Volume 56, Sermon
#3223

“You must not marvel if God should be pleased to bless you to the conversion of
souls, that He should also make you sometimes smart. Remember that Paul, with
all his Grace, could not be without ‘a thorn in the flesh.’ There must also be
‘a messenger of Satan to buffet you,’ lest you should be exalted above measure!
So may you learn to submit cheerfully to a discipline which, though painful to
you, your Heavenly Father knows to be wise!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3110

“Did you ever know a man whom God blessed who had not some oddity or
singularity? I think I never knew such a man or woman either! Whenever God
blesses us, there is sure to be something or other to remind men that the vessel
containing the treasure is an earthen vessel!...Were they wise, they would
understand that this is a part of the Divine appointment, that we should ‘have
this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of
God, and not of us.’”—Volume 55, Sermon #3135

“The old attractions of the Cross have not departed. You cannot preach Christ
and not get a congregation! Be it ‘the Christ’ whom you preach honestly and
preach fully, the people must come to hear! Though they hate and loathe the
Truth of God, they will come again to hear it. They will turn on their heel and
say, ‘We cannot bear it,’ but the next time the doors are opened they will be
there! The Gospel gets them by the ear and holds them!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3085

“Whoever you may be, my dear Friend, though you may be nothing but a poor
“somebody,” yet if you have touched Christ, tell others about it in order that
they may come and touch Him, too! And the Lord bless you, for Christ’s sake!
Amen.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3124 “Truly, the very essence of faith lies there—the
consciousness of being lost in ourselves and found in Christ, and the leaving of
one’s soul in Jesus’hands!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3095

“We cannot make any terms of peace with those who deny the Deity of Christ, nor
ought they to want to be at peace with us, for if Christ is not the Son of God,
we are idolaters. And if He is, they are not Christians. There is a great gulf
between us and them and we do not hesitate for a moment to say on which side of
that gulf we stand. That same Jesus who was nailed to the tree is to us both
Lord and Christ.”—Volume 55, Sermon #3173

“If God bids you do any work for Him, go and do it in His strength without
consulting with flesh and blood. Many a noble purpose has been strangled by a
committee! Many a glorious project that might have been the means of carrying
the Gospel to the utmost ends of the earth has been crushed by timid counselors
who said that it was not practicable! Whereas, had it been attempted, God would
have worked with the worker and great would have been the result. So you go, O
man of God, to the work He has called you to do—and consult not with flesh and
blood!”—Volume 54, Sermon #3078

“We have seen scores of systems of philosophy come and go, and we shall probably
see as many more before we die. Our business is to stand fast to the Truth of
Revelation and let philosophies die as the frogs of Egypt died in the days of
Moses—for die they will, and when fresh hordes come, they also will die, but the
eternal Truth of the ever-blessed God will never die—it will live on in its own
glorious immortality.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3080

“Let us discuss the millennium, the secret rapture and all those other intricate
questions by-and-by, when we have got through more pressing needs! Just now the
vessel is going to pieces, who will man the lifeboat? The house is on a
blaze—who is he that will run the fire-escape up to the window? Here are men
perishing for lack of knowledge and who will tell them that there is life in a
look at the Crucified One? He is the man who shall give men meat to eat! But all
others, though they may carry a dish of most exquisite china, will probably give
them no meat, but only make them angry at being tantalized with empty wind.
Christ’s satisfaction of heart was of a most practical kind—He was subservient
to God as a commissioned Servant, and busy with actually doing the will of
God!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3135

“Lie low, Brothers and Sisters, lie low, for what the old Essex farmer used to
tell me is true, ‘If you are one inch above the ground, you are just that inch
too high.’ So lie low and thus continue to walk in Christ—yourself being
nothing—and Christ being everything. You know that if you get to be something,
Christ cannot then be everything to you. But if you are still nothing—and less
than nothing in your own estimation—as you sink in self-esteem, your Lord will
rise to His right position in your sight and so you will be walking humbly in
Him as you ought!”—Volume 55, Sermon #3173

“Whenever I see a professed Christian walking among his household as though he
were a tyrant, letting no one come near him, without affection or kindness and
simply a domineering master, I ask—Where is the Grace of God in that man? And I
ask the same question with respect to other faults. ”—Volume 54, Sermon #3103

“Hunger will make a man break through stone walls and iron bars, but a soul that
is hungering and thirsting after Christ does not know that there are any walls
or bars, so overpowering is its eagerness to get to Him! It was with such
eagerness as this that we received Christ Jesus the Lord. Are we just as eager
to walk in Him?”—Volume 55, Sermon #3173

“I would give nothing for a supposed deliverance from Hell if it does not come
by way of deliverance from sin! It is sin that makes Hell, for there would be no
Hell if man had no evil within him, as there certainly can be no Heaven for a
man till he is made good and fit to dwell with God, for the fire of Hell is a
guilty conscience before God—and the bliss of Heaven is holiness and
reconciliation to the Most High.”—Volume 54, Sermon #3095

“Oh, the joy of winning a soul! Get a grip from the hand of one whom you were
the means of bringing to Christ—why, after that, all the devils in Hell may
attack you, but you will not care—and all the men in the world may rage against
you and say you do not serve God from proper motives, or do not serve Him in a
discreet way—but since God has set His seal upon your work, you can afford to
laugh at them! Do but win souls, Beloved, through the power of the Holy Spirit,
and you shall find it to be a perennial spring of joy in your own souls!”—Volume
55, Sermon #3135 PRAY THE HOLY SPIRIT WILL USE THESE QUOTES TO BRING MANY TO A
SAVING KNOWLEDGE OF JESUS CHRIST.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 9: VOL. 5
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NOTABLE QUOTES OF CHARLES H. SPURGEON ~ PART 5 ~ July 26, 2010 Dear Reader, This
is the fifth compilation of Brother Spurgeon’s quotes from my work of
modernizing his sermons. All of these quotes are found in volumes 59-63 of his
work. Thus I identify them by the volume and sermon number. If you want to read
or download the sermon from which a quote comes, simply go to our site and look
in SPURGEONSERMONS link on the front page—each link identifies the sermon
numbers in that link. Nothing on our site is copyrighted—feel free to copy
anything—but please use it only for the honor and glory of our Master, Jesus
Christ. My prayer for you and yours is Paul’s to the Ephesians 3:17-19.

Emmett O’Donnell_________________________________

“I am persuaded that the holiest of characters take more matters to God than you
and I are accustomed to do. I mean they not only consult Him, as we do, upon
certain great and critical occasions, but those saints who live nearest to
Christ, go to Him about little matters, thinking nothing to be too trifling to
speak into the ear of Christ.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3335

“Most men choose cheerful company whereby they may be entertained, but the Lord
Jesus evidently selects mourners and delights in those whom He may encourage and
cheer. Blessed be His name!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3336

“Let us bless Him [Jesus Christ]! Let us, tonight, extol this blessed Servant of
God in our hearts, who though King of kings had His ears opened because He loved
His master, He loved His spouse, and He loved His children—and has, therefore,
become their Servant forever!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3337

“THE center of our holy religion is the Cross. The central thought of the whole
of Christianity is Christ and the great point in Christ’s history is His
Crucifixion. We preach Christ—but more—we preach Him Crucified!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3338 “The love of God, itself, is, even to us, as spikenard unperceived
until He brings it to the spiritual senses and makes it sweet to us! The love of
God is like light to a blind eye until the Holy Spirit opens that eye!”—Volume
59, Sermon #3339 “If God’s servants are treated with scorn and harshness they
need not fear, for they are put just where they are, that unconverted men may be
blessed by their agency.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3340

“The Atonement will be no more ours in Heaven than it is now. “We have
redemption by His blood.” Our sin will be no more put away in Glory than it is
at this moment, for our iniquity is even now cast into the depths of the sea!
Our Substitute has finished transgression and made an end of sin. And having
believed in Him, we know that for us the full Atonement is already made and the
utmost ransom forever paid!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3341

“A poor woman upstairs in an attic found the Savior and her finding the Savior
affected three worlds in one moment. It made earth glad. It made Hell howl with
indignation and it set Heaven in a blaze of extraordinary joy!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3342

“All Nature, above as well as around us, is laid under contribution to set forth
our Lord. All the flowers of the field and many of the beasts of the plain—and
now the very orbs of Heaven—are turned into metaphors and symbols by which the
Glory of Jesus may be manifested to us!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3343

“The man that has so prayed as to find complete forgiveness, he is the man that
will never leave off praying as long as he lives! The one gain which covers
everything, the gain of conscious forgiveness, inspires a man to pray about
anything and about everything as long as ever he lives!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3344
“Never mind how poor and needy you are, you may yet be heirs of God, joint-heirs
with Jesus Christ!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3345

“The body that has been bought with His blood—that is to sleep on His bosom,
that is to be awakened in His likeness, that is to dwell with Him forever,
molded after His own image—take care of that body and keep it consecrated unto
the Lord!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3346 “Draw courage from the recollections of the
past and go forward to the fears of the future—and they shall vanish as you
advance, confident in your God.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3347 “It is greatly to be
regretted that there are some persons who do not know the Truth of God because
they have no care to know at all. They have a contempt for anything that God
reveals.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3348 “To be wrapped in praise to God is the highest
state of the soul. To receive the mercy for which we praise God is something,
but to be wholly clothed with praise to God for the mercy received is far
more!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3349

“To be a minister is the aspiration of many a youth. Perhaps if the word were
otherwise rendered, their ambition might cool. Ministers are servants—they are
not guests, but waiters, not landlords, but laborers. The word has been rendered
‘under-rowers,’ men who tug the oar on the lowest bench.”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3350

“Apart from Christ, the Church is a broken thing, divided into sects and
parties, but in Christ Jesus, the Savior’s prayer is answered, ‘That they all
may be one.’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3351 “PERHAPS no verse in the whole of
Scripture [Matthew 11:28] has been handled in the pulpit more frequently than
this, and yet it has not been exhausted and never can it be!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3352 “If my Lord has taught anything, it must be worth my while to learn it. If
Christ lifts the veil, it is my privilege to look—and what He manifests to me I
ought not to be slow to gaze upon”—Volume 59, Sermon #3353 “You who have buried
your little children. You who have wept so bitterly when your dear babes were
snatched from your bosoms may far prefer that sorrow to having your sons and
your daughters live to dishonor your name by plunging into glaring sin!”—Volume
59, Sermon #3354

“It may be useful to us, Brothers, to learn never to draw arguments and
doctrines from metaphors. Many do and there are many supposed doctrines which
really have no better ground-work than mere metaphors…The fact is, the reasoning
from metaphor is always risky and sometimes proves quite absurd!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3355

“I do believe I have sincerely striven to serve my Master, and have served Him
so as to have had given me many seals of my service, but I never did serve Him
in such a way as to be satisfied with my service!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3356

“The chief matter with a hearer when he goes to a town to live and has to
enquire, ‘Where shall I attend on the Lord’s-Day?’ should be this— ‘Where can I
hear most concerning the Lord Jesus Christ? Where shall I hear a man who can
touch my conscience? Where shall I hear truth that will be quick, powerful and
sharp as a two-edged sword to my soul? Where may I hope to be saved?’”—Volume
59, Sermon #3357

“IT is very wise to look within ourselves to discover our own weakness and
spiritual poverty, but it is very unwise to be always dwelling upon that
weakness and poverty—and to forget that our strength does not lie there, nor are
our riches to be found within ourselves! Let us look within to be humbled, but
not to be made unbelieving. Look within, so as to be driven from all confidence
in ourselves, but never so as to shake our absolute confidence in God.”—Volume
59, Sermon #3358

“Though God has made this round world exceedingly fair, yet no work of Creation
reflects so much of His highest Glory as the manifestation of His Grace in a
pardoned sinner!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3359

“I wish we had more Marys who would break the alabaster box of precious ointment
upon His dear head. Oh, for a little extravagance of love, a little fanaticism
of affection for Him, for He deserves ten thousand times more than the most
enthusiastic ever dream of rendering!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3360

“The Christ of God came in lowliness and in shame, to be despised and rejected
of men, but for all that He fought great battles in the midst of His weakness
and won for Himself wondrous spiritual victories.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3361 “God
has not made this world to be a nest for us—and if we try to make it such for
ourselves—He plants thorns in it so that we may be compelled to mount and find
our soul’s true home somewhere else, in a higher and nobler sphere than this
poor world can give!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3362

“To bear a saved sinner away from all further conflict is great Grace. But the
power and love of God are, if anything, even more conspicuous when, like a sheep
surrounded by wolves, or a spark in the midst of the sea, a Believer is enabled
to live on in the teeth of an ungodly world and maintain his integrity to the
end!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3363

“God will not bless us to the Christian Church if we want to make a party to
ourselves, or to take to ourselves the leadership. He will not acknowledge us in
the work if we are merely seeking our own esteem, good name and fame under cover
of a zeal for righteousness and for the Glory of God.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3364

“It seems to be to be one of the peculiar gifts of the Christian Sisterhood to
be the means of holding the entire fabric of the Christian Church in sacred
love! And though in our belief they ought not to do this by public speech, yet
by quiet conversation, active sympathy and the patient endurance and holy
tenacity of affection, they may help to keep the Church well bolted together…
Happy is the Church that abounds in Christian matrons and younger women willing
to be serviceable for Christ!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3365

“Christ’s mission had for one of its many gracious purposes and ends the taking
away of the darkness of human ignorance and the pouring of light upon the
intellect of man. I thank God that many of us, though we know comparatively
little, do know that, whereas we were once blind, now we see!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3366

“The Lord, by calling one out of any society of men, finds for Himself a
recruiting officer who will enlist his fellows beneath the banner of the Cross!
May not this fact encourage some seeking soul to hope that the Lord may save
him, though he is the only thoughtful person in all his family—and then make him
to be the means of salvation to all his kindred?”—Volume 59, Sermon #3367

“The safest part of a Christian’s life is the time of his trial…Smooth water on
the way to Heaven is always a sign that the soul should keep wide awake, for
danger is near!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3368

“God has wondrous ways of making men feel that they are but dust, but when
nothing else can serve His turn He will sweep whole dynasties away, as men
remove an anthill when it has become a nuisance. Yes, He will shake mighty
nations, and make ‘eternal cities,’ as they were called, only to stand as the
memorials and the wrecks of greatness!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3369

“I fear that many, trusting, in the greatness of their mental light, have become
blind to the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Blessed is he who sees
Christ by Christ—the Crucified in the light of His five wounds—the Risen One by
the brilliance of His own life!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3370

“When God blesses us, I say, it is well-doing! He blesses us in our very
creation and much more in our new creation. It is a blessed thing to be born,
but a much more blessed thing to be born-again!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3371

“Servants of Jesus Christ, never be discouraged when you are opposed, but when
things run counter to your wishes, expect that the Lord has provided some better
thing for you! He is driving you away from shallow waters and bringing you into
deeper seas where your nets shall bring you larger draughts. Paul and Silas must
go to prison because a chosen person [the jailer] was to be converted in the
prison who could not otherwise be reached!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3372

“At the first there is nothing, perhaps, more staggering to the young Christian
than to find that his “worst foes” are they of his own household and that they
who should have cherished and nurtured in him the piety which is so excellent a
flower, do their cruel worst to nip it in the bud!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3373

“Oh, the world is scarred with death! What is this earth today, but a great
Aceldema—a field of blood, a vast cemetery? Death has worm-eaten the world
through and through. All its surface bears relics of the human race. Who slew
all these? Who slew all these? Who, indeed, but Sin? Sin, when it is finished,
brings forth death!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3374

“The worst evil that can befall a Christian, I say, is to fall into sin and
continue to do so. On the contrary, one of the richest blessings that a
Christian can enjoy is to be kept aright in his walk and conversation—year after
year to wear a spotless character—year after year to be such an one as Daniel,
that even the man’s enemies can find nothing against him except touching the Law
of his God.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3375“If the times should be full of danger, if
there should be forebodings in the hearts of the bravest, if infidelity should
threaten to put out the light of the Gospel, or if Romanism should seem to blot
out the name of Christ from under Heaven, yet still God can appear!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3376

“A day is surely coming when the Lord Jesus, who came once to save, will descend
a second time to judge! Despised mercy has always been succeeded by deserved
wrath—and so must it be in the end of all things.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3377 “But
what is the meaning of this ‘love of God,’ [Jude 21] in which we are to keep
ourselves? It means, first, Believer, that you are to keep your mind in the
remembrance of the love of God toyou.We, alas, forget too often what a Friend we
have above.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3378

“We all bear trouble in a measure, for, ‘Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks
fly upwards.’ Some have more troubles than others and these often happen to be
those who are dearest to the Lord. If any man escapes the rod, the true-born
children of the royal family of Heaven never can!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3379

“Happy are they who have a religion that is grounded upon a clear knowledge of
eternal Truths of God! A religion which is all excitement and has little
instruction in it, may serve for transient use, but for permanent life purposes
there must be a knowledge of those great Doctrines which are fundamental to the
Gospel system.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3381

“Like a handful of salt scattered over a mass of putridity, like here and there
a lamp hung up in the thick darkness, God has a chosen people and in their
hearts Jesus Christ is great—and shall be great in time and in eternity!”—Volume
59, Sermon #3382

“Unless the great Husbandman shall till us by His Grace, we shall produce
nothing that is good, but everything that is evil. If one of these days I shall
hear that a country has been discovered where wheat grows without the work of
the farmer, I may then, perhaps, hope to find one of our race who will bring
forth holiness without the Grace of God.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3383

“I could wish that our religion would go back somewhat more to that personal
apprehension of Christ than it does. By all means let us have dogmatic teaching,
setting forth those most precious Truths of God that are our consolation, but
better than all is the Person of Christ Himself—the Way, the Truth, and the
Life.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3385

“It is the preaching of Christ which is the power of God and the wisdom of God.
Therefore, wherever we may wander around the circumference, we always feel a
drawing in of our soul toward the center, which is ‘Christ in you, the hope of
glory.’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3386 “Is it not an amazing fact that while others
leave usand forsake us, that God never does?”—Volume 60, Sermon #3387 “If sin is
shut out at the front door, it tries the back gate, or climbs in at the window,
or comes down the chimney. Those who cannot perceive it in themselves are
frequently blinded by its smoke.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3388 “Christ is constantly
raising the spiritually dead and giving them life. Oh that we may be enabled by
God’s Spirit to open up this Truth of God to your understanding and may it be
applied to your hearts!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3389

“Those who fear God are the same persons as those that hope in His mercy and
this is very consoling, for to hope in God’s mercy seems to be but a very small
evidence of Divine Grace and yet it seems to be a very sure sign, for those who
hope in God’s mercy are the same persons who are said to fear Him. They are the
same persons as are described as being His saved ones, His children—the truly
godly ones.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3390

“Brothers and Sisters, you members of the Church about to come around this
Table, give heed to the mandate of the Holy Spirit, by the inspired Apostle!
‘Let each one here examine himself, and so let him eat of this bread.’”—Volume
60, Sermon #3391

“If some of you plume yourselves with the notion that you are righteous, I pray
God to pluck those fine feathers off you and make you see yourselves, for if you
never see your own nothingness, you will never understand Christ’s
All-Sufficiency. Unless you are pulled down, Christ will never lift you
up!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3392

“We can very well suppose that godly men and women might be willing that their
unconverted children should dwell with them in Heaven, but it cannot be, for God
will not have His cleansed ones defiled, nor His glorified ones tried by the
presence of the unbelieving.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3393

“Oh, what astonishment will seize the sons of men when they see the King in His
Glory, whom they would not understand nor serve when He came in the meekness and
gentleness of love!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3394 “We have sinned. God must punish
sin. According to the inexorable laws which God has stamped upon the universe,
the sinner cannot go unpunished. His sin is, in fact, its own punishment and
becomes the mother of unnumbered griefs.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3395

“There is none that does good, no not one, and in the perfect light of Calvary,
we have seen that even the perfections of Jesus will not be seen by a blind
world, nor will they attract a corrupt world. ‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him!’ will
be the verdict of humanity even upon the perfections of the Incarnate
God.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3396

“Zeal is a good thing, but like the horse without a bit, it becomes useless and
even dangerous. Knowledge is the bridle in the mouth of zeal. Zeal is like fire
which may burn the house which it was intended to warm unless it is carefully
governed. There must be knowledge in zeal.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3397

“We cannot love whom we do not know or esteem. If we know nothing about Christ,
have no understanding of Him, have not in any degree occupied our minds with
Him, we may talk about love to Him, but it will be mere talk.”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3398 “It is much better to pray in silence if you will be heard by others, for
we are not to pray to be heard of men, but if you have opportunity to pray
aloud, I am sure you will feel it very helpful to devotion to do so.”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3399 “Every human sin is an attack upon the whole Character and life of
God—and sin, itself, is a dishonor done to the glorious attributes of
Jehovah.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3400 “When Jesus was here among men, the world saw
Him in a certain sense, but yet in truth it did not see Him at all. The world’s
eyes saw the outside of Christ—the flesh of the Man, Christ, but the true Christ
the ungodly eyes could not discern.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3401 “There is no man so
vile but he still wraps himself up in his rags and cajoles himself into the
belief that he has some degree of excellence, spiritual or moral. Before Christ
can come into the heart, all this natural excellence must be tornto
shreds.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3402 “Note, however, particularly, that the center
of the heavenly worship is not God in the act of Creation, but God upon the
Throne. Divine Sovereignty is the very center of Heaven. ”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3403

“When I see Adam in the midst of comfort putting forth his hand to take that one
fruit which his Master had reserved for Himself, I see, indeed, sin and
arrogance, daring assumption and a heinous crime! But I do not see so much of
levity and lawlessness there, as I do in this, that creatures should spit on the
Creator!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3404

“This seems to me to be clear beyond dispute. To ‘profess’ Christ is but an easy
thing. To ‘confess’ Him implies that the circumstances make that confession a
deed of courage, exposing the confessing soul to peril and penalty. But he
gladly accepts the suffering or the shame, and confesses that what may seem to
be a foolish thing to others, is a wise thing to him. He confesses Christ.
”—Volume 60, Sermon #3405

“The Apostle John seems to tell us this when he says, ‘And these things write I
unto you’—nothing about prosperity in this world, but all about fellowship with
Christ—‘And these things we write unto you, that your joy may be full.’ From
which I infer that everything which isrevealed to us inScripture has for its
intentionthe filling upofthe Christian’s joy. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3406 “A man
has a right to live, to bring up his family, to educate them and see them
comfortably settled in life—but that ought to be only for God’s Glory!”—Volume
60, Sermon #3409

“May God grant us Grace to beware of the least touch of self-righteousness, for
it is evil, only evil and that continually! May we always be as timid as the
publican who stood afar off and dared not even lift up his eyes to Heaven,
rather than be as censorious and presumptuous as the Pharisee, whose sole prayer
consisted in flattering himself that he was better than others.”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3410

“Long before time had begun, God had foreknown His chosen, and foreordained them
unto eternal life. They had not chosen Him, for they were not in
existence!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3413 “Observe the condescension of God, that we
are allowed to ask Him to teach us such a lesson as our frailty. And mark the
proof of our own ignorance and our own forgetfulness that we cannot even learn
this lesson unless God teaches us!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3414

“SALVATION is by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is not of works, neither can
it be procured by human merit. It is the free gift of God through the atoning
sacrifice of Christ to every soul that believes. But what is salvation?
Salvation is, in short, deliverance from sin, deliverance from the guilt of it,
from the punishment of it, from the power of it. If, then, any man is saved, he
is delivered from the reigning power of sin. It is not possible, therefore, that
any man should have salvation and yet continue in the indulgence of sin.”—Volume
60, Sermon #3415

“Prayer is itself a blessing. The desire to pray, the disposition to pray, the
resolve, the determination to pray—what hopeful, healthy symptoms these are! But
to be able to pray—ah, what some might give if they could put forth their soul’s
strength in this cheering exercise!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3416

“There is no religion under Heaven, except the evangelical Truth of God that
teaches present salvation!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3417

“Remission, notwithstanding the stern requirements of the Law of God, is not to
be abandoned in sheer despair. The word, remission, means the putting away of
debts. Just as sin may be regarded as a debt incurred to God, so that debt may
be blotted out, cancelled, and obliterated. The sinner, God’s debtor may cease
to be in debt by compensation, by full acquittance and may be set free by virtue
of such remission. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3418

“SIN is greatly aggravated by the mercy of God, of which the sinner has been a
partaker. Sin in a child of God is peculiarly sinful. Instead of its being a
trifle, as some men seem to think, it is a very solemn matter indeed.”—Volume
60, Sermon #3419 “Ah, Lord, it is better for us to lie passive in Your hands
than to be attempting to sit upon Your Throne, holding the balance and judging
Your work!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3420

“Now, it may be profitable, now and then, to look over some of our institutions,
to see whether they are Scriptural—to notice their defects, to see in what
respect they may be improved, or to observe their merits—that we may be induced
still further to carry them on. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3421

“Unless the joy of the Lord is your strength, your soul will breathe a heavy
atmosphere and your utterance will be checked, if it is not chokedby your
misgivings! It is your confidence in Christ and the peace it brings you, that
helps you speak to others as a true witness, because you are an experimental
witness of the power of true religion.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3422

“The Church is a wonderful piece of architecture and well worth our walking
round because, unlike any other, her strength is not merely material. The Church
is built up of living stones. Life flows through the whole. ”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3423

“There must be, in the Lord’s Supper, bread and wine—but bread separated from
the wine—as our Lord speaks of His flesh as separate from His blood, and this
was to indicate that it is as a dying Savior that He is most precious to us. The
blood separated from the flesh indicates death. It is to the death of Jesus that
the Believer first turns His eyes and it is when considering the living,
reigning Christ as having once been slain that our richest comfort comes to
us.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3424

“The first day of our conversion, when we know Christ and have peace through
Him, is a peculiarly green and happy spot in our life’s pilgrimage. We can never
forget it. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3425 “Were the mind more occupied with Christ,
there would be less likelihood of our forgetting Him!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3426

“My dear Friends, we desire to do all we can for the Lord Jesus Christ, but how
very limited are our capacities! If we were to give Him all we have, and give
our bodies to be burned, it would be very little for us to give to such a
Savior. But what a mercy it is that there is no limit to what we may wish. We
can bless Him with our wishes, if we cannot with our acts. ”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3427

“We have heard of some who have said that they have never had any consciousness
of the existence of spirit. Very likely. Very likely. I do not suppose, either,
that pigs or asses, or any dumb driven cattle ever had any spiritual
apprehensions!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3428 “God is perfectly pure. He cannot bear
the slightest trace of sin—and Jesus is ‘holy, harmless, and undefiled, and
separate from sinners.’ God cannot look upon sin, as it is abhorrent to His
Nature, but He can look upon Christ, for ‘in Him was no sin.’”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3429

“Remember what Christ said to Simon Peter when he proved that he knew Him beyond
all the rumors that were floating about, beyond all the opinions that were
entertained, beyond all the prejudices that were nursed among the rulers or the
people of those days. He said, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and
blood have not revealed this unto you, but My Father who is in Heaven.’ No
minister can make us know Christ! No book, no, not even the Bible, itself, apart
from this celestial teaching”—Volume 60, Sermon #3430 “Despite the one great
stain upon his character in the matter of Bathsheba, David was one of the best
and most devout of men. I am sure the older one grows, the more one loves his
Psalms, and what a history of the man you have there! It is a mercy for us that
he was not a better man than he was, or else he could not have written Psalms
suitable to such poor creatures as we are.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3431

“The zeal of God burned at Calvary!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3432 “Doubtless the
words of Inspired men are very precious as a Divine testimony, but when God,
Himself, directly speaks to us in His own name, what an extraordinary weight
attaches to every syllable He utters!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3433 “In a certain
sense Christ died for all men, but since it is evident that many men are lost,
Christ’s dying for all men is not at all a ground upon which any man may hope to
be saved. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3434

“If I rightly read the Scriptures, the lost tribes are to be converted, first,
and gathered afterwards, while the people distinguished among us as Jews are to
be restored to their own land, and then convinced by seeing the Man whom they
pierced, enthroned with honor and majesty. Here the world’s history reaches a
majestic climax!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3435

“How deeply we ought to regret that we glorify Christ so little, bought with His
precious blood, owing all we have to Him. We make but a very poor return and
even when we are helped by the Spirit of God to glorify Christ, yet I am sure we
should always feel an insatiable desire to do it yet more. ”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3436

“Oh, shun the slavery of all who take their religion from men, be they who they
may, whether called priests or presbyters, or from human creeds or
books!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3437

“O, be astonished, you angels, that you were witnesses of it, and you men that
you beheld it! The Infinite came down to earth in the form of an Infant! He who
spans the heavens and holds the ocean in the hollow of His hand, condescended to
hang upon a woman’s breast—the Eternal King became a little Child! Let Bethlehem
tell that He had compassion! There was no way of saving us but by stooping to
us!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3438

“Surely, Brothers and Sisters, the best that man can do for himself, with all
his diligence and all his care, is but as a fading flower! And when he sits
himself down at ease in his contentment and says, ‘I shall see no sorrow. I have
served my Maker. I thank God that I am not as other men,’ even then is he naked,
and poor and blind and miserable—a blighted, blasted, withered flower, though he
thinks ‘himself to be as a rose of Sharon, or a lily of the valley.’ ”—Volume
60, Sermon #3439

“Greater than the greatest sermon that was ever preached in the world, is the
Word made flesh.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3440 “Child of God, you cost Christ too
much for Him to forget you! He recollects every pang He suffered in Gethsemane,
and every groan that He uttered for you upon the Cross.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3441

“If the nation did but know it, the saints in a nation are the aristocrats of
that nation. Those who fear God are the very soul, marrow, and backbone of a
nation. For their sakes God has preserved many a nation. For their sakes He
gives unnumbered blessings.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3442

“SELF-SUFFICIENCY is the sin of nature—all-sufficiency is the supply of Divine
Grace!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3444

“It is delightful to see these exquisite prayers come from holy men in times of
extreme distress. As the sick oyster makes the pearl, and not the healthy one,
so does it seem as if the child of God brought forth gems of prayer in
affliction more pure, brilliant and sparkling than any that he produces in times
of joy and exultation.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3445

“Your great aim must be to glorify Christ on earth, in the hope and expectation
of enjoying Him forever above. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3446 “Under the worst
circumstances, true Christians find the richest comfort if they do but know that
Jesus is with them!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3447 “The full display of the goodness
of God, however, is reserved for the working of His Grace inthe redemption of
man.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3448

“I would sooner discover one fact and lay down one certain truth, than be the
author of ten thousand theories, even though those theories should, for a while,
rule all the thought of mankind!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3449 “What an incredible
thing it is, that while the ox knows its owner and the ass its master’s crib,
man, the object of Divine love, should not know his Lord, his Friend, his
Benefactor! Oh, may you give no rest to your eyes or slumber to your eyelids
till you have opened your mouth to profess the name of the Lord and fled for
refuge to take hold of his righteousness and strength!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3450

“‘The Cross’ is the short term for ‘substitutionary suffering,’ for ‘vicarious
sacrifice,’ for the offering up of the Just for the unjust, that He might bring
us to God.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3451 “This sin of sins—unbelief—is still at this
very hour too common among the people of God. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3452

“Well, when a man is in error about his calling, if it really is not his
calling, let him leave it—but let him first be sure that it is not his calling,
for otherwise he will sin against the express words of Inspiration. The Apostle
Paul says, ‘Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called’—that
is to say, the occupation or profession in life you were engaged in when you
were converted need not be rashly abandoned. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3453

“If you have come to Baptism and to the Lord’s Supper with the faith which works
by love, you have doubtless received benefits by the ordinances—but if you have
come without that faith—Baptism or no Baptism avails nothing whatever!”—Volume
61, Sermon #3454 “Beware, you who refuse to listen to Moses and the Prophets! If
you will not hear them, you will not be converted, though one should rise from
the dead and admonish you of your peril!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3455

“WE like to know how a person used to act, for we think we can infer from that
how he will act. That is not always correct, however, for men change. But in our
Savior’s case, if we study His life, we may very well infer from what He did,
what He will do because He never changes.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3456

“Take but small account of human applause…Heed not the world’s frowns and court
not its smiles. When you are flattered by its approbation, or calumniated by its
persecution, remember that men’s temper and disposition vary like the climate
and change like the weather!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3457

“Did it ever strike you that man, according to the Jewish ceremonial Law, is an
unclean creature? Nothing was clean, according to the Law of Moses, but that
which divided the hoof and chewed the cud. Now man fails in one of these, and by
the Law he is put down as a sinner, as being on a level with the unclean
beasts.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3458 “Indulgences for sin may come from Rome, but
they never come from Zion!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3459

“Think not that all praise is gathered up in singing! It is the praise of God
when the mother tells her child of the goodness of Him who made the stars, and
who spread the world with flowers. It is praise when the young convert tells of
the joy of his heart to his companion and bids him fly to the Fountain where he
has washed and been made clean. It is praise, praise of a high order, too, when
the advanced Believer in his old age tells of the faithfulness of God, and how
not one good thing has failed of all that the Lord God has promised!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3460

“How sweetly does, ‘my Master,’ sound! ‘My Master.’ Why, if nothing else might
bestir us to get up and run to meet Him, it should be the sound of that blessed
word, ‘The Master is here: the Master has come.’”—Volume 61, Sermon #3461 “Every
creature of Adam born, who has not been saved by Grace, is a prisoner to
sin.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3462 “There are some men in such a condition of mind,
of such a blinding sort, that even if the Truth of God could be still more
plain, it would be the most unlikely thing in all the world that they would
receive it!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3463 “Lay it down, then, beyond all question,
that formal worship which is not attended with the heart—which is not the
worship of the spirit—can never be acceptable with the Most High!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3464 “Jesus Christ suffered so that I despair of conceiving His
sufferings, or of conveying them to you by any form of words.”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3465

“Stand fast to the old Truths of God—they will outlast all these philosophies!
Stand fast to the old way of living—it will outlast all the inventions of men!
Stand fast by Christ, for you need no other object of worship but
himself!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3466“The day shall come when this world shall be as
fair as it was at the primeval Sabbath. When there shall be a new Heaven and a
new Earth, wherein shall dwell righteousness…This great work of Christ, this
grand design of making this old world into a new one shall be carried into
effect!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3467

“There is no true child of God that is possessed of a dumb spirit. “Behold he
prays” may be said of each of the Divine family—and place them in what
circumstances you will, you might sooner call a man, living, and prevent his
breathing, than call a man, Christian, and prevent his praying!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3468

“I may sometimes run with Martha to do what Christ needs of me, but I think I
ought more frequently to sit with Mary to receive from Christ what I need from
Him.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3469

“Oh, as I read the matchless story of love without beginning, which can never,
never cease, I marvel that our hearts are not all on fire, that our passions do
not boil over and that our lips do not become like the red lips of Vesuvius when
the burning lava sweeps down her sides!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3470

“Observe that when He was born, midnight turned to midday, and when He died
mid-day turned to midnight. When He was born, Heaven was lit up with splendor
and from angelic choirs the Bethlehem song was heard, while men also rejoiced,
because unto them a child was born, unto them a Son was given. But when he died,
Heaven put out her brightest light!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3471

“Men sit in darkness until Jesus appears. The gloom is thick and dense—not sun,
nor moon, nor star appears, and there can be no light to illumine the
understanding, the affections, the conscience.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3472

“Unbelief is a very prolific sin. Once we doubt the Lord, I know not what we may
do next, and next, and next! It is a sharp turning off of the right road, that
turning to trust in ourselves rather than in the Most High! It won’t do, my
Brothers and Sisters. It won’t do.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3473

“If you have forsaken the drunkard’s haunts, if you have broken off the
swearer’s profane tongue, if the pleasures of sin have ceased their fascination,
you must ascribe it to your Redeemer and say, ‘He delivered me,’ for it is Grace
that has rescued you from the destroyers!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3474

“There are many others who are living in the same self-righteous way—good
self-righteous people, wrapping themselves up in the garment of their goodness
because they have really been very careless about what the Law is. They have not
looked into it. Whether there is a Law of God or not, has really never been
thoroughly and deeply considered by them. They know it as a matter of religious
teaching, but nothing more.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3475

“There is no engagement under Heaven that is more exalting than praising God—and
however great may be the work which is committed to the charge of any of us, we
shall always do well if we pause awhile to spend a time in sacred
praise.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3476

“Men fight hard to try and prove that there is not [sin]. In vain they strive,
for as long as the Inspired Book is extant, and so long as there is one man on
the face of the earth with a clear conscience, healthy and undrugged, to bear
witness with that Book, sin will be discovered to be exceeding sinful!”—Volume
61, Sermon #3477

“When I think of the strength of Divine Grace, I do not marvel that saints would
persevere, but when I remember the weakness of their nature, it seems a miracle
of miracles that there should be one Christian in the world at a single
hour.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3478

“No one in the Church of Rome claims to be now saved—completely and eternally
saved. Such a profession would be heretical! Some few Catholics may hope to
enter Heaven when they die, but the most of them have the miserable prospect of
‘purgatory’ before their eyes. We see constant requests for prayers for departed
souls and this would not be if those souls were saved and glorified with their
Savior!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3479

“Do you want to reach Christ? Your prayers can do it! Would you now adore Him?
Would you now set forth your love? With mingled prayer and praise, like the
offering of the morning and the evening sacrifice, your incense can come up
acceptably before the Lord!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3480

“We, as a Christian Church, are engaged in the great soul-fishery, seeking by
any means to bring some to Christ. Out on the dark waters of the Dead Sea of Sin
we seek to bring the souls of men, not to destroy them, but that Christ may save
them! This is to be the Church’s perpetual work. She must never cease from it.
For this purpose is she kept in the world and if she does not answer this
purpose, she is faulty before her Lord.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3481 “But it appears
to me that there is a work of Grace in the heart where there is a fear of
sinrather than a fear of Hell—where the desire of the soul is not so much to
escape from the punishment, as to escape from the guilt which is the cause of
the punishment.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3482

“I am afraid we don’t render that honor to the blessed Spirit which He deserves.
Our ministry is not deficient, I trust, in magnifying the Christ of God, but too
often the Holy Spirit is not sufficiently honored and, perhaps, this may be a
reason why He does not so many mighty works in the Christian Church as He did at
first.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3483

“It is a sad fault with those Christians who think themselves full of Grace,
when they begin to despise their fellows! They may rest assured they are greatly
mistaken in the estimate they have formed of themselves.”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3484

“…let it be remembered that it is not upon communion with Christ our life
depends. Our salvation stands in the knowledgeof Him, not in communion with Him.
We are made safe by what He has done, not by what we feel. Not our enjoyments,
but His sufferings we must lay as the solid foundation of our hope!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3485

“Your first and chief business with your God has to do with your innermost
self—your real self. You shall come to keep your outward rightly enough if you
will begin to cleanse the inside of the platter first.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3486
“Outside the door of our heart Jesus is a stranger; He is no Savior to us—but
inside the heart which has been opened, by Divine Grace, to admit Him, His power
is displayed, His worth is known and His goodness is felt!”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3487

“The Doctrine of Justification by Faith through the substitutionary Sacrifice of
Christ is very much to my ministry what bread and salt are to the Bible. As
often as ever the table is set, there are those necessary things. I regard that
Doctrine as being one that is to be preached continually, to be mixed up with
all our sermons, even as, under the Law of God it was said, ‘With all your
offerings you shall offer salt.’”—Volume 61, Sermon #3488

“He that lives by feelings will be happy, today, and unhappy tomorrow—and if our
salvation depended upon our feelings, we would be lost one day and saved
another, for they are as fickle as the weather and go up and down like a
barometer!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3489

“Seek a Christ-exalting ministry. Desire to be where your soul will be handled
with fidelity and where Christ will be held up before you with simplicity and
earnestness—for the hearing that God blesses is not the hearing of every man
that speaks, but the hearing of the Word of God that, ‘the Son of Man is come to
seek and to save that which was lost.’”—Volume 61, Sermon #3490

“The Gospel’s message is not so much about your sin as it is about the remedy
for it! And when it comes to deal with your sin, it deals less with it as a
crime than as a disease.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3491 “Let the Gospel be preached,
and these birds of the air, fiends of Hell, will soon by some means try to
remove these Truths from your hearts, lest they should take root in your hearts
and bring forth fruit unto repentance.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3492 “When God draws
the curtain and stands in the sunlight, mercy streams in on the sunbeam! And
when He shuts the eyelids of the day and the evening comes, it is mercy that
puts its finger upon our eyelids and bids us rest.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3493

“From the time when Satan fell, God’s purpose was to break down everything which
set itself up in opposition to Him. From that day till now, no matter how great,
how lofty, how apparently excellent a thing might be, it has been the rule with
God to pull it down if it did not stand in Him and for Him! Yes, and wherever He
has looked, no matter how mean a thing may have been, how low, how degraded to
outward appearance, it has been God’s constant rule to lift it up if it stood in
Him and for Him!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3494

“There is nothing in the world that costs a saint so dear as doubt. If he
disbelieve his God, he most assuredly robs himself of comfort, deprives himself
of strength, and does himself a real injury.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3495

“And now with lowly reverence at the foot of the Cross bow down your soul and
say, ‘My Lord, between me and the greatest reprobate there is no difference but
what Your Grace has made. Between me and lost souls in Hell there is no
difference except what Your Infinite Compassion has deigned to make. I humbly
bless You, and adore You, and love You because You have brought me
near.’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3496

“Never in the heart of any natural man, unless Divine Grace has put it there,
has a desire to reestablish peace been felt or entertained! If any of you long
to be at peace with your Maker, it is because His Spirit has made you long for
it. Left to yourselves, you would go from conflict to conflict, from struggle to
struggle, and perpetuate the encounter, until it ended in your eternal
destruction.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3497 “‘Eloquent sermons’ usually seem to me to
be the least eloquent things in the world, for eloquence means speaking from the
heart—and I cannot believe that the fine periods we sometimes hear read ever
spring anywhere but from the head!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3498

“WE cannot too often turn our thoughts heavenward, for this is one of the great
cures for worldliness. The way to liberate our souls from the bonds that tie us
to earth is to strengthen the cords that kind us to Heaven.”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3499

“ Excuse-makingis the most common trade under Heaven! The slenderest materials
are put to the greatest account. A man who has no valid argument in arrest of
judgment, no feasible reason why he should not be condemned, will go about and
bring a thousand excuses and ten thousand circumstances of extenuation—the whole
of them weak and thin as a spider’s web.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3500

“Now that more than 1800 years ago Jesus Christ, of the seed of David, died upon
Calvary by Crucifixion, we do here proclaim and declare! We set forth again to a
world that is skeptical and denies the fact which is its brightest hope—we set
forth our confident belief that so it was—and as long as this ordinance shall be
celebrated, [Lord’s Supper] there shall be a standing proof in the world that
that was the case!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3501

“I HAVE preached to you, dear Friends, several times from the words, “Come unto
Me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” There is
such sweetness in the precept, such solace in the promise, that I could gladly
hope to preach from it many times more!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3502

“We have had many kindnesses from friends, but never such love as Jesus showed
when, we being His enemies, He yet redeemed us with His most precious
blood.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3504

“Alas, full often we know not what we pray for!...Could some parents have read
the history of their children from the day of their birth, they might rightly
have wished that they had never been born. We had better leave such matters with
God and submit to His Sovereign will. He knows better than we do, for He is
wonderful in counsel and excellent in working. Thank God these affairs are not
in our own hands! They are in far better and wiser keeping than ours.”—Volume
62, Sermon #3505

“Mercy never makes us proud! As mercy is given to the humble, it has a humbling
effect. Wherever it comes, it makes a man lie low before the Throne of the
heavenly Grace, and leads him to ascribe all honor and glory to the God from
whom the mercy comes.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3506

“Now it is easy to believe that God is ours when He smiles upon us and when we
have the sweet fellowship of His love in our hearts—but the point for faith to
attend to is to hold to God when He gives hard words, when His Providence frowns
upon you—and when even His Spirit seems to be withdrawn from you!”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3507

“We full often bemoan our circumstances as altogether disastrous, while God, who
sees the end from the beginning, is working out His ordained purpose.”—Volume
62, Sermon #3508 “Coming to Christ does not mean coming with any natural motion
of the body, for He is in Heaven, and we cannot climb up to the place where He
is—it is a mental coming, a spiritual coming—it is, in one word, a trusting in
and upon Him.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3509 “God is Immutable—He cannot change. His
Covenant is steadfast—He will not alter it. If He has loved you once, He loves
you now.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3510

“What is life but a great battle, lasting from our earliest days until we
sheathe the sword in death? This battle we hope to win and yet, if we succeed,
it will be a distinct and definite response to the challenge before us, ‘Who
ever goes to war at his own expense?’ (1 Cor 9:7). We may be quite sure that if
ever we attempt the warfare of life at our own expense we shall soon find
ourselves failing—and it will end in a miserable defeat.”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3511

“GOD’S Word divides the whole human race into two portions. There is the seed of
the serpent, and the seed of the woman—the children of God, and the children of
the devil—those who are by nature still what they always were, and those who
have been begotten again unto a lively hope by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
from the dead.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3512

“You dishonor Christ if you do not believe in His Deity. He will have nothing to
do with you unless you accept Him as being God as well as Man. You must receive
Him as being, without any diminution, completely and wholly Divine, and you must
accept Him as being your Brother, as being a Man just as you are. This, this is
the Person and, relying upon Him, we shall find salvation! But rejecting His
Deity, He will say to us, ‘You know Me not, and I never knew you!’”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3513 “Take heart, Brothers and Sisters—these things are written for our
example and for our encouragement. His Church can never sink to so low an ebb
that He cannot soon build her up again, nor in our own hearts can the work of
Grace ever decline so grievously that the same mighty power which once quickened
cannot revive and restore us!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3514

“Let not the missionary be afraid, even if for thousands of years to come there
should be little apparent success to the preaching of the Gospel. If the Lord
should tarry another 6,000 years, yes, sixty thousand years—and He may—we are
still to go on working, still to go on laboring, looking for His coming and
expecting it, but not relaxing our efforts because He pleases to delay it, for
the Lord has sworn that all flesh shall know His Glory and you may depend upon
it—there is no spot of earth that shall be left to be Satan’s dominion!”—Volume
62, Sermon #3515

“The Supernatural Grace of God has made a bed of spikes to be a bed of roses to
some of the martyrs. Amidst the flames they have even leaped and sung for very
joy! That was a grand saying of one of the martyr of Mary’s age, who, when he
was told by Bonner that his life would be spared if he would recant, said, ‘Look
here, Bishop, if I had as many lives as I have hairs on my body, I would burn as
many times as that before I would bend myself down before the superstitions of
Rome!’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3516

“If there are any persons in the world who must of necessity be happy, they are
those who have newly found ‘peace through believing.’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3517
“The Gospel of Jesus Christ was not intended for one century or two, but for all
time. ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3518

“The Holy Spirit is needed for the very least form of spiritual life and is
equally necessary for its highest development. Without the Holy Spirit, we
cannot go through the first gate—and without the Spirit we cannot pass the last.
No man can say in his heart that Jesus is the Christ but by the Holy Spirit—much
less can any man attain to the perfection which is necessary to Heaven except
through the work and power of the Spirit of the living God!”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3519

“How terrible must be the deathbed of a man who, after having made a profession,
and perhaps preached the Gospel, has become an apostate!”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3520 “The true solution of the conduct of a man who professes to be pure in
mind and yet commits himself to an unholy course of life, is not that the man
makes that unholy life, pure, but that his unholy living proves that his mind is
not pure at all!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3521 “Our Lord Jesus Christ is a place of
secure refuge for every soul that flies to Him. The moment a sinner believes in
Jesus, he is safe—and continuing to believe, he remains safe in life, safe in
death, safe in judgment, safe in eternity!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3522

“When in the very fact of presenting to God your sacrifice, can you account that
you are losing nothing, but committing your treasure to His custody? Can you
believe that the promise of God is not compromised by your parting with the
earnest that gladdened your eyes?”—Volume 62, Sermon #3523

“Beloved, I infer that it is of infinitely more consequence for me to know that
I love Christ than it is to know the meaning of the little horn, or the ten
toes, or the four great beasts!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3524 “A man is never saved
until he gets to feel something of the nearness of God, God in Christ Jesus, but
yet God. Consciousness of Deity is one of the marks of salvation.”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3525

“Business is rotten through and through, nowadays. The whole style of conducting
your merchandise is so doubly dyed in deceit, that I should not marvel if a
Christian often finds himself a loser by doing the right thing and maintaining a
strict integrity! But we must sooner be losers in this way than lose our
acceptance with God!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3526

“A person under a tyrannizing power who is driven to sin by fear may be far less
guilty than another who is under no such constraint, but who willfully, of his
own heart, chooses the evil.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3527

“Cheer up! Be of good courage, preacher of the Word. You may not find the sheep,
but your Master will! Take heart, you that wait upon the Lord in prayer—you may
see some of your agencies fail and success may not wait upon all your efforts,
but God’s purposes must stand—He will do all His pleasure and at the last it
shall be seen that not a single sheep was left for want of being sought
out.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3528

“Let not the haughty, the arrogant, or the scornful of the children of men
imagine that their paltry conceit can thwart God’s Covenant purpose or bring
discredit on the riches of His mercy.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3529 “That name of
Jesus—a name of highest heavenly Glory, a name of profound peace, a name of
universal good will, a name to knit all mankind in one common brotherhood—has
become, by the perversity of human nature, a by-word and a reproach!”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3530

“He is the happiest man who shall have the most of God’s people lift up their
hearts in prayer for him!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3531 “Jesus is not merely a Son of
Man, but He is preeminently the Son of Man foretold in the prophecy of Daniel
and predicted on the threshold of Paradise in the language of the first promise,
‘The Seed of the women shall bruise the serpent’s head.’”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3532

“Blessed are they to whom it shall be given to enlist under the banner of Christ
at this present time, who shall not be ashamed to confess Him before the sons of
men, or to boldly take up His Cross and to suffer such loss and persecution as
it may please His Providence to ordain for them to bear.”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3533

“Oh, Beloved, the Light of Christ comes out brightest upon the Cross! Someone
called it the Lighthouse of this world’s sea. So it is. This is the Lighthouse
that throws its beams across the dark waters of human guilt and misery, warns
men of the rocks, and guides them to the haven.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3534

“I have been inclined, lately, when I have read the papers, to interpret the
term, ‘the scum of society,’ to refer to those who float on the top, for
certainly there is no rank of society that could have figured more abominably in
the Divorce Court, no rank of society that could have exhibited itself so
detestably upon the racecourse, than the peerage of this realm! And unless God
mends the manners of the Right Honorables, their names will have to be Right
Abominables—the term will be more suitable to them by far!”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3535

“Our first text is to be found in the Gospel according to Luke 10:44, “One thing
is necessary.” This one thing, according to this passage, is faith in Christ
Jesus, the sitting down at the Master’s feet, the drinking in of His
Word.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3536

“May we not draw some comfort from the thought that our prayers never are
intrusions? Whenever we go before God in deep distress, He is always ready to
listen to our cry. Whatever grand purpose or momentous project engage His mind,
He will surely be attentive to the longings of His needy suppliants.”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3537

“He who can talk of the grave and of the hereafter with such intelligence,
thoughtfulness, faith and strong desire as Paul did, is a man to be
envied.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3538

“How gracious a thing it is on God’s part to make prayers for us! He puts them
into our mouths. No one need say, “I cannot pray because I am unable to compose
a sentence.” Here is a prayer [Psalms 106:4] already composed which would be
suitable for the lips of anyone here present—high or low, rich or poor, saint or
sinner!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3539

“Brothers and Sisters, if you wish to give your children a blessing when you
die, be a blessing to them while you live! If you would make your last words
worth the hearing, let your whole life be worth the seeing. It is graceful to
die blessing, but let it be always consistent with the blessedness of our former
life.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3540

“Let no man judge his fellow man. Above all, let no man exalt himself. He that
is in his best estate, today, may be in spiritual poverty tomorrow! He who
rejoices in God and walks in holy consistency may, before another sun has
risen—few, though the hours of interval are—have felt his feet slide from under
him and so fallen from his steadfastness as to have dishonored his God—and
pierced himself through with many sorrows!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3541

“But mark, the limit of His [Jesus Christ] power is not according to the will of
man, for where He does not reign by the joyful consent of His people and the
mighty conquest of His love, He still exercises absolute dominion! Even the
wicked are His servants! They shall be made in some way or other to subserve His
glory, for He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet.”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3542

“It seems to me that the chief business of a Christian while here below is to
speak on God’s behalf.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3543 “A finger never suffers without
the brain participating—and no humble member of the true Church of Christ ever
suffers without Christ, the glorious Head, suffering in sympathy therewith.
”—Volume 63, Sermon #3545

“It is a sign of adoption, a mark of the residence of the Spirit of God within
us, if in our times of trouble we fly to our God! Soul, can you find any
difficulty in doing so? Is this not one of your spiritual instincts? Then, be
afraid lest you are an alien, and no true-born child, for the trueborn child
seeks its Father’s face, cries out for its Father’s notice and creeps into its
Father’s bosom!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3546“All the Seers whose eyes were anointed
of God to look into the future, heralded the advent of a Great Prophet, a Prince
and a Savior, whose claims to homage it would be alike perilous and preposterous
to reject! These Prophets appeared at divers times and various places and,
without any collusion they, one and all, proclaimed the same thing!”—Volume 63,
Sermon #3547

“I am delighted when I have been with young Christians full of their first
joy—and I earnestly pray that it will be very long before those joys are
dampened, but, at the same time, it may be prudent to let them know that should
those joys depart, it will be no evidence whatever that God’s love is departed,
too!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3548

“Some of you may be residing in localities where there are but a few Believers
meeting together. The company looks slender. Do not, I pray you, give place to
despondency. You can surely worship God in sincerity and truth, though you may
lack the excitement of a crowd. Perhaps you live where there are so few that you
can hardly assemble a congregation. Why think yourself denied the privilege of
communion with Christ because there are only one or two gathered together in His
name? Some of the happiest days Believers have ever known have been alone with
Christ!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3549

“Were it the fashion for people to carry brains in their heads, some religions
which are now very rife would soon come to an end! I have stood aghast with
wonder and with awe at the sublime folly of mankind, when I have seen how
eagerly and devoutly they will bow down before baubles and street shows, while
they vainly imagine that they are worshipping God!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3550

“The happiest condition of a Christian out of Heaven is to live in the conscious
enjoyment of the Presence of the Lord Jesus. When the love of Christ is shed
abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit, the Believer need not envy an angel his
harp of gold!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3552 “Do not suppose that Jesus is less human
than you are, yourselves—He is fully human. Do not imagine that He is less
tender than you would be towards the weak and suffering—He is full of
tenderness.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3553 “The most wonderful thing in all this Book
of wonders [Bible] is this—that God should become Man and then, as Man, should
bear the sin of His people.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3554 “The rest that comes of
pardoned sin is sweet, but the rest that comes of conqueredsin through obedience
is sweeter still.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3555

“There are many points and particulars in which the Gospel is offensive to human
nature and revolting to the pride of the creature. It was not intended to please
man. How can we attribute such a purpose to God? Why should He devise a Gospel
to suit the whims of our poor fallen human nature? He intended to save men, but
He never intended to gratify their depraved tastes.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3556

““Observe all Divine Grace must come from Him. Rain comes from God. He rains it.
Every drop of Grace comes from Heaven. You, Sinner, can never get any Grace
unless He gives it you!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3557 “Abide at the Cross,
Beloved—there is no air so healthy and quickening as that which is breathed
there!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3558 “That rock-hewn cell in the garden sanctified
every part of God’s acre where saints lie buried. Instead of longing to live
till Christ comes, as some do, we might rather pray to have fellowship with
Jesus in His death and burial.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3559 “Happy the man who
believes in Jesus, for he becomes at once a contented man. Not only does he find
rest in Christ, but joy and gladness, peace and abiding satisfaction are the
portion of his lot.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3560

“‘As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked,
but that the wicked turn from his way and live’ (Ezekiel 33:11). And whoever of
the whole human race, penitent for past sin, will turn to Jesus, the Savior of
sinners, he shall find in Him pardon for the past and Grace for the
future!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3561

“Those saints of God who appear to you to be favored with perpetual sunshine
could tell you quite another tale. Some whom God highly honors in public, He
often deeply humbles in private. He has a way of taking His children behind the
door and making them see some of the abominations within them, while at the same
time He is giving them to see the beauties of Christ and enabling them to feed
on Him.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3562

“We of mortal race were proved, tried and condemned long ago. It is not
possible, now, for us to have the blessedness of uncorrupted innocence. And yet,
thank God, blessedness is still possible to us, sinners though we are!”—Volume
63, Sermon #3563 ________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________ “Oh, it
is grand praying when our mouth is full of God’s Words, for there is no word
that can prevail with Him like His own!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3484 “When the
Countess of Huntingdon said to Whitfield, ‘What makes you look so sad, Mr.
Whitfield?’ he replied, “Oh, I may well look sad, for I am lost.’ ‘Oh,’ she
said, ‘Mr. Whitfield, I am so glad, for Jesus Christ came to seek and save that
which was lost.’”—Volume 61, Sermon #3475 “Above all things, Christian
fellowship is the chief auxiliary of Christian joy. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3406

“Beware of superficial religion! I think if I might only say two things before I
die, one out of the two would be— beware of surface godliness Take care of the
paint, the tinsel, the varnish, the oil! There must be in us a hungering and a
thirsting after righteousness! There must be in us the broken heart and the
contrite spirit. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3390

“I tremble when I hear of a man’s giving up, one by one, the vital principles of
the Gospel and boasting of his liberality! I hear him say, ‘These are my views,
but others have a right to their views, also.’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3381

“Was there ever such a tender heart elsewhere as that which glowed in the
Master’s bosom and gleamed from His loving eyes? He was a mass of love! He was
Love performing and Love suffering. Love made Him live as He did and love made
Him die as He did! And love still pervades His Nature—now that He lives on high,
still loving the sons of men. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3429

“It is not possible that any one of us should be acquitted on the ground of our
not being guilty, for we must all confess that we have broken the Law of God
thousands of times!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3488 “The Christian has no right to have
anything to do for which he cannot ask God’s help.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3445

“Oh, Brothers and Sisters, you can have no thought—it is impossible you
should—of the depth of the Savior’s sufferings! [On the Cross.] The Greek
liturgy, when it speaks of Christ’s sufferings as, “Your unknown sufferings,”
has just hit the mark. They were unknown—unknown to us and unknown, also,
perhaps, to lost souls in Hell, so dire and so extreme were they!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3471

“Brothers and Sisters, our Lord Jesus Christ would have us to know that we have
not a High Priest who cannot be touched with a feeling of our infirmities. He
would have us be certain that He, Himself, was tempted in all points like as we
are. With equal certainty would He have us to know that the chosen twelve, the
leaders of His host who went forth from Him, were men of like passions with
ourselves. We are not to look upon them as though they were unapproachable
heroes, a sort of Divine character, or as though they were free from our
infirmities and our troubles. They were as we are—and if they excelled us it was
by Divine strength, alone, by strength which we also may receive—by Grace which
is as free to us as it was to them.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3384

“It is a theory held by some persons of skeptical minds that the only benefit of
prayer is the good it does to us…Oh, do they think us such idiots that we would
go on speaking in a keyhole with nobody to hear us? Do they think us brought so
low—so destitute of wit—that we think it worth our while to speak out what is in
our heart if God does not hear and does not answer? I reckon prayer to be the
most idiotic of all occupations unless there is really a God to hear and a God
to answer! And the benefit of prayer is not in itself so much as in the full
confidence that it is a real thing and an effective thing—that God does hear and
does interpose on our behalf!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3399

“The Atonement of Christ is not a new idea—it is an old determination of the
Most High and it is no close secret! God has published it—set it forth. By His
Prophets in His Word—by His preachers in all your streets—God has set forth
Christ to be the Propitiation for human sin!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3488

“The actions of the Christian—I do not claim perfection for them, but I do claim
that the true Christian strives after perfection in his actions, that he seeks
after it, yes, and that, as a rule, he comes nearer to it than his enemies would
allow, or than even his own reflections, when he is examining himself, would
permit him to believe!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3521

“Well now, the place of a lost sinner is the place of darkness. Outer darkness
will be his eternal place, and darkness is his present state—his natural
condition—as the Apostle said, ‘We were sometimes darkness.’”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3471 “I would rather see the whole stock of my sermons in a blaze, all burned
to ashes, than that they should keep anybody from reading the Bible. ”—Volume
60, Sermon #3406

“When the Spirit of God comes to deal with a man, if all the devils in Hell and
all the sinners on earth should laugh around him all day long, it would only
drive the shafts deeper into his soul!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3373 “Oh, it is a
sweet thing, though, perhaps, you may, some of you, think it a hard thing—it is
a sweet thing when God enables you to leave tomorrow with Him and to depend upon
your Father who is in Heaven!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3362 “I like revivals—far be
it from me to ever say a word against them—but I have seen scores of men jump
into religion just as men jump into a bath—and then jump out, again, just as
quickly because they have not felt their deep need of Christ. ”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3390 “The power which rendered the Gospel saving in the olden times was
not Paul’s logic, or Apollo’s eloquence—the saving power lay in the Holy Spirit
accompanying the Divine Truth.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3518 “…when I trust the blood
of Jesus, my sin is all forgiven me in one moment. When I humbly rely upon my
Savior’s finished work, ‘Though sins were as scarlet, they become as wool;
though they were red like crimson, they are whiter than snow.’”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3488 “It was only when Christ bowed His head in the agonies of death
that man knew there was a gate to Paradise! I mean not that the saints did not
know it, but they only knew that this was the gate, that it was the dying Savior
who was the road to Heaven.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3471

“Religion is not to be stowed away in the dark attic of the brain. Christianity
is a heartreligion, and if you cannot say, from the very depths of your being,
‘Christ is all,’ you have neither part nor lot in the blessings and privileges
of the Gospel—and your end will be destruction, everlasting banishment from the
Presence of the Lord!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3446

“Understand me, my dear Brothers and Sisters, Jesus Christ loved you, and He
tells you the Father Himself loved you before the foundation of the world! He
did not begin to love you after you loved Him. Is that a new Truth of God to
you? That is the Doctrine of Election.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3430

“Thrice happy they who hear the pure Truth of Jesus Christ, even though it is
spoken in a rough manner and in a style that has no enchantments for the soft
lovers of rhetoric and elocution!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3365

“Brother, there is no reason why, if you have gone very far in sin, you should
not go equally far in usefulness! On the contrary, there is a reason why you
shoulddo so, for it is a rule of Grace that to whom much is forgiven, the same
loves much—and much love leads to much service.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3367

“When your faith lays its hand upon the dear head of the Redeemer—what if I say
upon the horns of the altar of His Sacrifice—then is your soul secure and
nothing can destroy it!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3522

“We do not expect men, when they speak frequently, so to speak that every
particle of what they say may be correct. We admit them to be fallible—we always
make some allowance for some slips of the tongue. But all through these
thousands of years in which God spoke of Christ and of the Gospel Kingdom, there
never was a single trifling word that was not fulfilled!”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3396

“A great deal is said about the usefulness of education and I suppose that no
intelligent person would say a word against it. The more education the better,
but it is outrageous to suppose that education, even carried to the highest
degree, will necessarily better a man! A man may be all the worse for education
unless the spiritual part of his nature is educated.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3471

“Beginners in the way of Grace, it is a great and solemn Truth of God that every
child of God will hold on until the end, but it is an equally solemn Truth that
many who profess to be the Lord’s, are self-deceivers and will turn out
apostates, after all!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3520

If I might have a perfect righteousness of my own, I would not—I would sooner
have my Lord’s, for my righteousness, were it perfect, were but the
righteousness of a man—but His is the righteousness of God and man, God-Man! Oh,
it is not merely immaculate and complete—it overflows with merit!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3488

“There is a living unity between Christ and His people, as between the husband
and the wife, as between the branch and the stem. We are one with Him by vital
union. Have you realized this, Believer? Do you seek to live as one that is one
with Jesus? Do you try to act as one that has learned His unity to the heavenly
One, to the Second Adam? It is so. If you have believed, you are one with
Him!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3429“If I am living in such a state that I cannot ask
God to carry out for me the enterprises I have embarked in, and entirely rely on
His Providence for the issues, then what I cannot ask Him to do for me, neither
have I any right to do for myself!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3445

“Beloved, long for no joy but that which the Holy Spirit gives you! Thank God
for the comforts of this life, but do not let them become your idols, as they
will be if they become your exceeding joy. Draw from the upper fountains, fill
your pitcher at the eternal springs—ask neither for the cinnamon nor camphor of
this world’s gardens, but let your chief spices be the fruit of the Spirit which
are joy and peace through believing!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3341

“I would have perfect orthodoxy in my head if I could, but I know even if I had
that, an unhallowed life would render it of little service to me. But could I
have a clean heart, other things would come with it and from it, for the pure in
heart shall see God!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3521

“Understand that you cannot save yourself—that you have no right to be
saved—that if saved, it will be by His Sovereign Grace—therefore, cry humbly,
but oh, note the value of the blessing you need and, therefore, pray earnestly!
Do not let Him go except He blesses you. Rob yourself of sleep, Sinner, rather
than rob your soul of Christ!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3490

“Oh, my Brothers and Sisters, it needs an angel to set forth the Person of the
Lord Jesus, and yet an angel might fail, for an angel was never washed in the
Savior’s blood and never redeemed from wrath by Jesus the Substitute!”—Volume
59, Sermon #3382

“The only place of light in the world is where the Cross beams. All other
systems have tried, but they have only increased the darkness. Mohammedanism
was, for a time, a great improvement on anything that went before it, but what
is it now? What is its teaching and what is its influence upon man now? It is
“evil, only evil, and that continually.””—Volume 61, Sermon #3471

“It is said that the working classes do not attend places of worship because we
do not dress ourselves in white, and blue, and green, and I do not know what
other colors besides—in fine because we do not make fools of ourselves! It is
said that people will not come to hear us because of this, but our Lord Jesus
Christ never put on anything like a priestly vestment in His life.”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3410

“Believer, Jesus Christ’s spiritual and most real Presence is with you! This
should greatly comfort you because it is the Presence of One whom you dearly
love and who reciprocates that affection with an accord so intimate that every
hope or fear you feel is reflected in His breast.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3447

“It is not possible for you to shut the door so quickly as to shut out
temptations to sin!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3347

“Child of God, if you happen to be in the dark just now, do not think that some
strange thing has happened to you! Your Master went through the darkness. He
fought upon the Cross and triumphed, but remember that the Savior’s triumph was
on the Cros, and yours will be there too! You will suffer, and your triumph will
be in suffering. You must expect to earn the victory in death. It shall be when
you bow the head and give up the ghost that you shall have your, “It is
finished!” on your lips, and enter into glory won! Expect the darkness if you
have it, wonder not at it, but cheerfully wait until the Light of God shall
come!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3471

“Go, servant of Christ, go where God sends you! There are some prepared of God
to receive you. In the most barren country there are some pieces of soil that,
like oases, are abundantly fertile! In any company of the most depraved of men
there are some hearts made willing by God who will receive the Gospel at once!
We must never think, if God sends us upon what looks like hard ground, that it
is as hard as it looks! It is our unbelief that is hard. If we conquer that,
shall be surprised to find that God has cleared the way for us and, perhaps,
where we looked to find no friend, there shall be a chosen 12 who will be glad
to receive us!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3518

“We live by faith, and if that faith is weak, bless God that weak faith is faith
and that weak faith is true faith!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3489

“There is no such thing as a Lord’s Supper with the bread, alone, nor with the
cup, alone, nor with the bread and wine mingled! They must both be distinct.
Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin. And until the blood has
been poured forth, the flesh still remains and retains its life. But put the
two, distinctly, and you get the idea of death as clearly as you can have
it.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3338

“None make such mighty Christians and such fervent preachers as those who are
lifted up from the lowest depths of sin and washed and purified through the
blood of Jesus Christ!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3367 “The enemies of Christ are very
many. The Church is very feeble, yes, she is like a reed shaken by the wind.
Without her Lord, she is less than nothing—like chaff in the whirlwind!”—Volume
60, Sermon #3427

“…—‘For God so loved the world’—so much and no more—‘that He gave His
only-begotten Son, that whoever believes on Him should not perish, but have
everlasting life.’ The work of Christ thus begins and ends with, ‘ Whoever
believes on Him.’ If you believe not, dying as you are, the death of Christ has
nothing to do with you except to plunge you into yet deeper despair! It is only
to the man who believes, that the blood is applied!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3522 Do
not harbor the idea that the further you go, the less will you have of enjoyment
in religion. Oh, no! It has deep draughts of great bliss! The shallow draughts
will sustain, but oh, it is sacred intoxication with the love of Christ which
brings the highest joy and the most Divine mirth!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3396

“I do not know that I have ever more tenderly felt the Presence of Jesus than
when, while my heart has been broken with a sense of my own worthlessness and
insignificance, I have confidently fled for refuge to the Hope that is set
before me in the finished Sacrifice and the perfect Redemption that Christ has
accomplished.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3447

“Alas, for the Church when she is satisfied with an increase of one or two
during a year! Ah, miserable Church that shall be content if the pool of Baptism
is never stirred by those that profess their faith in Jesus or if at the
sacramental Table there should be no fresh visitors at the feast of love! Ah,
miserable state of religion in which the Churches shall think this to be their
fit and proper condition and shall say they are comfortable while the world is
perishing and none cares for souls!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3365

“There is much mischief done in believing that we are to follow the promises of
Scripture apart from the Law of God!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3473

“No one place is a bit more sacred than another…It is nothing but a relic of
Judaism, or a result of Roman Catholic superstition, to suppose that there are
specially holy places constructed of bricks and mortar, or consecrated stones.
Your bedroom, where you bow the knee, may be as near the gate of Heaven as the
grand cathedral along whose vaulted roofs the music of song has resounded for
centuries!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3522

“But I hear somebody in the corner saying, ‘It is no use my thinking of seeking
Christ, I am too poor.’ Oh, my dear Friend, your mistake, indeed, is a strange
one, for did not Jesus say, ‘To the poor the Gospel is preached’? I’ll be bound
to say you are not poorer than the Savior, Himself, for He said, ‘Foxes have
holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but I, the Son of Man, have not
where to lay My head.’ Gold and silver have no value in His Kingdom! The poorest
is as wealthy as the wealthiest if He comes to Christ!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3490

“That eternal Love of God, by which we were first chosen, was the same Love
which sent the Savior to redeem the chosen. It was that Grace from which all
Covenant mercies spring—the ancient wellhead of distinguishing Grace—which
brought the Savior here!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3380

“No, my Brothers and Sisters, of all the preachers that ever lived, none ever
preached on the wrath of God in such terrible terms as Jesus Christ, Himself!
Though He was full of tenderness and full of love, yet you hear Him speak of the
worm that never dies, and of the fire that never shall be quenched! He loved
men’s souls too well to make them think that sin was a trifle.”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3410

“You may depend upon it, there is no sound bottom to a man’s religion unless he
begins with a broken heart. And that religion that does not begin with a deep
sense of sin, and a thorough heartbreaking conviction, is a repentance that will
have to be repented of before long. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3390

“No matter what your wealth, if you have not Christ, you are miserably poor—but
with Christ, you are rich to all eternity!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3446 “The Divine
Presence and the Divine hand, mysteriously hidden though they are, from all
mortal eyes, are discerned by such as live in fellowship with God, for ‘the
secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him.’ ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3428

“I have often heard expressions from the pulpit and read them in books which led
me to infer that every fallen man has got not only something good in him, but
some strong principle almost akin to the Divine! I believe in the fall of man
and I believe that to be total—and that conscienceis a power which has fallen
with all the rest, and that there does not exist in the world a pure
conscience—except so far as God has purified it by the work of his
Spirit.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3521

“It is not great faith that is essential to salvation, but faith that links the
soul to Christ, and that soul is, therefore, saved!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3489

“Speak of the disinterestedness that has made men heroes from the mere love of
their fellow men? What had Christ to gain? Oh, you lamps of Heaven, what had He
to gain? Your splendor was enough for Him! What could He win but shame,
disgrace, abuse, the spit on His face and the scourging on His
shoulders?”—Volume 59, Sermon #3382 “Without Christ your religion is dead,
corrupt, a stench, a nuisance before God—a thing of abhorrence—for where there
is no Christ there is no life in any devotion, nothing in it for God to see that
can possibly please Him.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3472

“When the Believer feels that Grace is at a very low ebb with him, let him take
care that he does not resort to Sinai for the refreshment of his
evidences.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3397 “In looking back, I cannot remember any day
in my whole life that was at all comparable to the day in which I looked to Him
and was lightened.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3517

“The hypocrite and self-righteous need have no tenderness shown towards them
Caresses would but nourish their conceit. The Savior addresses them with
loathing threats—‘Woe unto you, Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites!’ What indignant
epithets does He use! With what utter contempt does He assail them, calling
them, ‘fools, and blind,’ ‘serpents, and a generation of vipers!’ Yes,
‘whitewashed sepulchers,’ and I know not what besides!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3491

“Oh, there is no talk with Christ so sweet as that which He gives His people
when they walk up the bleak side of the hill with Him, with the snow blowing in
their teeth! Then He covers them with the mantle of His love and lets His soul
out in springs of love, comfort and delight to them!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3373

“That God should be good to creatures is something to be thankful for, but that
He should be good to sinfulcreaturesexhibits His Character in a far more
marvelous light and should compel our gratitude beyond all degree. ”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3448 “He that sows [the word of God] is responsible for the sowing, not
for the reaping. If he does what his Master bids him, it is his Master’s work to
take care of the precious Seed and make it spring up—not the servant’s.”—Volume
62, Sermon #3518

“It is a great sorrow not to see our families growing up in piety and advancing
in holiness—a great grief not to see our Churches making steady progress—and a
heavy trouble, most of all, not to see our own hearts growing in love and other
Divine Graces, and so going onward towards ripe maturity of blessed
character.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3356

“You moral people without Christ, you are lost as much as the immoral! You rich
and respectable people, without Christ, you will be as surely damned as the
prostitute that walks the streets at midnight.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3472 “The
only salvation that is worth being our own is that which is God’s. ‘I will
rejoice in Your salvation.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3362

“The Lord send such seasons to any of you who are backsliding! May He come to
you now and knock at the door of your heart! Oh, open to Him and bid Him come
in, for ,there is no power on earth that can revive a decaying heart like the
coming of Christ afresh by renewed communion!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3427

“Instead of mourning so much that your faith is not strong, bless God that you
have any faith at all, for if He sees that you despise the faith He has given
you, it may be long before He gives you more. Prize that little, and when He
sees that you are so glad and thankful for that little, then will He multiply it
and increase it, and your faith shall mount even to the full assurance of
faith!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3489

“And there is some one Truth of God, perhaps, my Brother, about which you have a
little Light of God, a little more Light than your neighbors. Do not hide the
Light of God! God does not ever light a lamp to put it under a bushel. If you
have received, either by experience or research, any special Light which is
peculiar to you—spread it that it may be, as it should be, the common property
of the Church of God, to the Glory of God!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3355

“Brothers. I believe you cannot preach of God without some men making mischief
of it, even of just so simple a Truth as His Mercy. But when you come to His
Sovereignty—a deep that can never be fathomed—how many have been drowned in it!
I believe we ought to speak about it. I am not of those who say we should be
silent upon it, but how many have been drowned in those deeps, willfully,
because they have said, ‘Who has resisted His will? Why does He find fault? If
it is to be, it is to be. If it will be, it will be.’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3521

“When men wish to speak of brightness they talk of the stars. They who are
righteous are as the stars and they that turn many to righteousness shall shine
as the stars forever and ever!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3343

“Beloved Brothers and Sisters, make your Covenant if you like, and fast if you
please, and pray if you can without ceasing—the more you pray the better. But
when a soul is hungry, it will not recover itself by bodily exercises, but by
feeding!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3397“Without Christ, though you should heap up your
charitable donations, endow your almshouses and hospitals, yes, though you
should give your bodies to be burned, no merit would be imputed to you! All
these things would profit you nothing! Without Christ, even if you might be
raised on the wings of flaming zeal, or pursue your eager course with the
enthusiasm of a martyr, you shall yet prove to be but the slave of your own
passion and the victim of your own folly!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3472

“I want, dear Brother and Sisters, to leave this impression in your minds, that
in the great business of life, whatever it is, while we do not sit still and
fold our hands for lack of work, yet God works in us to will and to do of His
own good pleasure.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3445 “It is a rule with Christ never to
do for us what we can do for ourselves.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3491 “We cannot save
a soul and are powerless apart from the Spirit of God, yet wherever the Spirit
of God is, He fills men with energy! He makes them earnest and intensely
earnest.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3518

“Dear Friend, never forget that God does not deal with you as an individual— He
deals with you as in Christ. If you stood as an individual, you would perish,
for you will be sure to fall. You are so weak and frail and apt to sin, that
with the best resolutions and intentions, you would be sure to turn aside and,
therefore, the blessed Father has put you in a safer place—He has put you in
Christ!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3429

“Self-righteousness is the natural religion of every degraded heart. Only the
Spirit of God can make a man really receive and acknowledge the Truth of
God.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3408

“Alas, Brothers and Sisters, we often stop short in our self-examinations just
when they might be of use to us, like the patient who tears off the plaster just
when it begins to work, or ceases to receive the medicine precisely when it has
reached a point in which it would be useful!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3391 “…the raw
material for a great saint is often a great sinner.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3410

“The spirit of the Broad School robs us of everything like certainty. I should
like to ask some great men of that order whether they believe that anything is
taught in the Scriptures which it would be worthwhile for a person to die
for—and whether the martyrs were not great fools for laying down their lives for
mere opinions which might be right or might be wrong?”—Volume 59, Sermon #3381

“Do not get the idea that a certain quantity of Bible reading, particular times
spent in repeating prayers, regular attendance at a place of worship and the
systematic contribution of a guinea or so to the support of public worship and
private charities will ensure the salvation of your souls! No, you must be
born-again! And that you cannot be, for it is not possible that you could have
been born-again if you are still living without Christ!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3472

“I do not doubt that there are many who are now depending for eternal life upon
having gone to the ‘Sacrament of the Mass,’ and are expecting to enter Heaven
because they have reposed their confidence in a man who was arrogant enough to
call himself the exclusive priest of God. God save us from having our
understanding defiled, for it must be before it can submit to the belief of such
superstition as this!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3521

“Not all the devils in Hell could quench the feeblest spark of Grace that ever
dropped into the heart of man! If God has given you faith as a grain of mustard
seed, it will defy all earth and Hell, all time and eternity ever to destroy
it!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3489 “Every sin-sick soul may have Christ, but as for
you who are Pharisees and trusting in yourselves that you are righteous—if you
know nothing about sin, you can know nothing about Christ. The way to be saved
is to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3446

“I think I may honestly and humbly say that I do try to speak as plainly as any
man can speak—and care nothing about mighty fine words—and yet I do not doubt
but that scores come into this house and go out of it, saying, “Well, I do not
understand it!” How could they? They are under the power of sin which makes the
plainest truth perplexing, and hides from their eyes that which the merest babe
in Grace can plainly see!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3366

“When they prop you up with pillows, when they stand weeping round your expiring
form, when the pulse grows faint and few, when you have to lift the veil and
stand disembodied before the dreadful eyes of an angry God, how will you do
without Christ?”—Volume 61, Sermon #3472

“Those of us who cannot preach with our mouths would do well to preach with our
lives—which is the very best kind of preaching.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3335 “Jesus
Christ…is a Sanctuary! He is the Holy Place of His people’s worship! Treasure
that up! You may worship God anywhere if you get with Christ, but if you forget
Christ, you can worship nowhere! ‘No man comes unto the Father but by Me,’ says
Christ. You can never have an acceptable worship of the Most High except through
Jesus Christ!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3522

“I have noticed that though the disciples often heard Christ preach, they never
said, ‘Lord, teach us how to preach’—but when they heard Him pray—you recollect
the passages—‘As He was praying in a certain place, the disciples said to Him,
Lord, teach us how to pray.’”—Volume 61, Sermon #3491

“Never, I pray you, think that men can understand the goodness of God till they
see Christ Jesus! When they see Him Crucified, they discover how He pardons sin,
but not till an Atonement is made—how He puts away the transgression, but not
till His Law is fulfilled and made honorable by the suffering of the
Only-Begotten.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3448

“I consider the confession of sins to a priest most degrading to that priest. To
make his ear the common sewer of all the filth of a parish is horrible—and for
any man to tell his sin at all to another is depraving to his own mind. ”—Volume
60, Sermon #3428

“If there were but one, I would be glad. When God gives us scores we will be
glad, and glad, and yet glad again! I went home very weary one day with seeing
so many. The second day there were still more and I was more weary! I would like
to die with such weariness, for it is such blessed work—this work of bringing in
souls that are of the Lord’s planting, and of the Lord’s ripening, to the garner
of His Church. Rejoice, then! Rejoice again! Rejoice with the converts!”—Volume
62, Sermon #3517

“Many and many a time has He [God] held back His servants when they were just on
the edge of the fatal precipice, when they were about to take the deadly poison
which would have eternally destroyed their souls! His mercy, in some Providence
which they did not understand, has interposed.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3413

“Now, remember, we never make ourselves love Christ more by flogging ourselves
for not loving Him more. We come to love those better whom we love by
knowingthem better, not by talking to ourselves about the duty of loving them,
for love and duty, somehow or other, do not work well together.”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3398

“I would God that some of you who are lamenting over the burden of your sins and
are pressed down by it, would look to the Son of God pouring out His life and
would trust Him, for then your sins would be gone in a moment!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3362

“I may be addressing some who are members of a newly-organized Church. Dear
Brothers and Sisters, do not despise the day of small things! Rest assured that
God does not save by numbers, and that results are not in the Spiritual Kingdom
in proportion to numbers!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3489

“God won’t save the world without men—He will use instruments until Christ
comes! And while you pray for it, pray for yourselves, that each one of you may
be in earnest, for, other things being equal, God will bless that people most
who work most for Him, pray most to Him, give most to Him, sacrifice most and
are most obedient to His commands. God make us such!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3518

“He [Jesus] did not die for those good people who have not any sin. He had
nothing to do with those good people who are so righteous that they can get to
Heaven their own way. Christ died for the guilty, the lost, the worthless. He
comes like a physician to the sick—like one who gives sustenance to the
perishing poor. Oh, read His life, [in the Bible] for this will help you to come
to Him!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3351

“God generally pays His people back in their own coin. If we sin against Him,
somebody very soon sins against us—in the same way, too. ”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3473 “In this world we see too much of salvation without Christ—I mean we meet
with many who believe that they are saved because they have been baptized, or
confirmed, or passed through the ceremonies of the church to which they belong.
”—Volume 61, Sermon #3449 “I think there is such a harmony between the feeling
of Christians and the purposes of God that you and I can never tell where these
two unite, or where they separate. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3428 “This is a triumph
of the Gospel when men give up what they prize and when they are willing to
suffer great loss in order to get rid of great sin!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3518

“It is for the Christian Church to suffer and to suffer on in confidence and in
faith, and to make the world see that the anvil will outlast a thousand sets of
hammers and will triumph when they are all broken to dust! You, dear Friends,
especially will find it to be your wisest, as well as the most Christian course,
to bear everything that is put upon you and to make no return except by being
more kind and more generous than ever towards those who are most unkind to
you!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3373

“What a mercy it is that Jesus Christ does not believe our actions, for they
very often say, ‘Jesus, we do not love You.’”—Volume 60, Sermon #3398

“If your conversion is an instance of the preacher’s power, you need to be
converted again! If your salvation is the result of your own power, it is a
miserable deception from which may you be delivered! Every man who is saved must
be operated upon by the might of God the Holy Spirit—every jot and tittle of
true regeneration is the Spirit’s work!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3367

“The proper study of mankind is God, but in order to get to God one must know
something about man!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3491

“Are we indifferent, or are incredulous, or what manner of men are we that one
can talk and another can listen to so startling a fact, to so astounding a
revelation without a thrilling emotion, a faltering tongue and tingling ears?
Throughout eternity this will be a ceaseless wonder in Heaven, that the Creator
should stoop to bear the creature’s sin will never cease to be a mystery of
Mercy that challenges endless admiration! ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3523

“Know yourself and you are on the road to knowing Christ, for the knowledge of
self will humble you, will make you feel your need of Jesus and may, in the
hands of God the Holy Spirit, lead you to the finding of the Savior!”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3391

“To meditate upon the attributes of God is one means of seeking knowledge, but
to be conformed to His image is quite another way of understanding Him. Not till
God makes you like Himself can you know what He is! In proportion, then, as we
grow in Grace, and bring forth the fruits of the Spirit more abundantly, we
shall be more and more admitted into the secret of the Lord. ”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3428

“Though it was so costly a provision, it was the most suitable that could be
devised! Who else could have borne our sins but God? No mere man could possibly
have stood as the substitute for millions of the human race! He might, if
innocent, himself, suffer for one, and so save one, but unless Deity should lend
its unutterable perfections, it was not possible for human nature to sustain the
weight of human guilt!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3523

“Do all things for Christ, but let the stimulating motive be that Christ has
done all things for you! There is not even a little thing that is for you to do
to complete the work of Christ.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3445

“I shudder as the procession passes before my mind’s eye, of ministers, deacons,
Elders and influential professors, who have gone through that backdoor. What to
say, I know not. My soul is bowed down. “O God, I had gone there myself, had You
not delivered me!” I think you must all feel the same if you know anything of
the corruptions of your own heart. Even you, my venerable Brothers and Sisters,
who have been preserved so many years in the wilderness, if it were not for the
Grace of God, you, too, concerning faith, had made shipwreck—and so have
perished, even in the harbor’s mouth!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3474

“It really seems as if men would suffer anything for their sins rather than give
them up. It is not always the pleasure of sin which seems to fascinate, but the
very bitterness of sin seems sweet to some.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3494

“It was for the love of His enemies, the love of those who hated and despised
Him and nailed Him to the Cross—it was for this transcendent, unparalleled love
that Christ came to earth! He deserves to be great and I am sure that if you do
not think that Jesus Christ is great, it is because you do not know Him.”—Volume
59, Sermon #3382

“We ought not to give sleep to our eyes until we have asked to be taught of God!
To be ignorant about the things of ordinary daily life is not wisdom, but to be
ignorant about eternal life is stark madness!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3348 “Praise
the Grace that has held you till now! Keep in remembrance the patience of God in
enduring with you, the power of God in restraining you, the love of God in
instructing you, and the goodness of God in keeping you to this day.”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3347 “All the history of an elect child of God, even before conversion,
will be found to be full of traces of the preventing goodness of the
Lord.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3413

“Oh, believe me, my heart is full when I think of sinners saved by simply
telling the story of the Cross! This is a joy that the miser does not know of
when he gloats over his treasure—a joy which the warrior knows not of, even when
he rides in triumph through the streets—a joy which earth could not produce—from
all her mines and all her fountains—the joy of bringing souls to Jesus Christ,
their Savior!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3517 “Try yourselves constantly and ask the
Lord to search you, and come afresh to the blood of Jesus lest you should be
mistaken! There was an Apostle who turned out to be a Judas—many a minister has
been a deceiver! Many a Church member and many a Church officer, too, has been
nothing but a whitewashed sepulcher full of bones and rottenness! Take care,
dear Hearer, lest your lot should be the same. ”—Volume 59, Sermon #3337

“When a man’s highest motive is himself, what a dark and selfish nature he has!
But when his highest motive is his God, what brightness of light will shine upon
all.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3391 “It is a grand thing for a Christian to be like a
pillar of iron against evil, but it is a mark of reprobation to become like an
iron pillar against God and against His Truth—and some men do become
such.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3366

“I can never forget my mother’s teaching. On a Sunday night, when we were at
home, she would have us around the table and explain the Scriptures as we read,
and then pray—and one night she left an impression on my mind that never will be
erased, when she said, ‘I have told you, my dear children, the way of salvation,
and if you perish you will perish justly. I shall have to say, “Amen,” to your
condemnation if you are condemned.’ And I could not bear that! Anybody else
might say, ‘Amen,’ but not my mother!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3489

“The world has its popular music—why should not we stir up some soul-inspiring
melodies? Soldiers go to battle with martial airs—let us go to our battle with
the songs of Zion! When the sailors are tugging and pulling at the rope and
weighing the anchor, they send up a cheery shout and they work better for it,
too. Christian Friends, while you work, lighten the toil with sacred song! Serve
God with gladness!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3474

“You may whet your appetite for logic, but you cannot, with your heart, believe
unto righteousness while you occupy your thoughts, your tongues, or your pens
wrangling about Calvinism and Arminianism, sublapsarianism and
supra-lapsarianism, or any of the endless controversies of the schoolmen and
sectarians! ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3524

“I love the high Doctrines of the Covenant of Grace, I must confess, most
devoutly and devotedly. But of this I am quite certain, that all the counsels of
the Father concerning His people, and all the benefits He has conferred on His
people were bestowed in the Person of His Well-Beloved Son! Still, I know of no
greater pest under Heaven than high Doctrine preached or believed in as an
abstract system of divinity or a blind fatalism by those who have not their
heart set upon the One Mediator whom God appointed, the blessed Redeemer whom He
has accepted as our Representative. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3448

“…any man who supposes that Christ did not love His people before the world
began, or that He will not love them when the world has ceased to be, may well
hear Jesus say, ‘Have I been so long with you, and yet have you not known me, My
Friend Arminius?’”—Volume 60, Sermon #3430

“This is just the way with men, willful, wayward, headstrong—but when they get
the Grace of God, they bend their shoulders to Christ’s yoke and they become
tame and gentle. Because they are happy in God’s love, they are patient in the
ills of this life. ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3525

“The Lord can save any man, woman or child and He can save me! Jesus Christ of
Nazareth is mighty to save and I will rely on Him. If any poor heart shall
reason thus, its logic will be sound and unanswerable. Mercy to one is an
argument for mercy to another, for there is no difference, but the same Lord
over all is rich unto all that call upon Him!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3367

“Oh, if the devil would come in the shape of a devil, he would do little
mischief, but he assumes the fashion of an angel of light, and there it is that
he causes us so much sin and sorrow.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3495

“Better to go to Heaven doubting, than to Hell presuming! Better to enter into
life crippled and maimed, than having two eyes and hands, and feet, to be cast
into the destroying fire! We cannot say too much in praise of assurance—and we
cannot speak too much against presumption. Dread that! Shun it with all your
might!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3362 A gospel with no Gospel has great power of
dispersion, but it has little power of attraction—but the Gospel of Jesus Christ
soon draws a multitude together and, “the right hand of the Lord is
exalted.””—Volume 59, Sermon #3361

“If faith is the eye of the soul, without which we cannot see our Lord savingly,
surely love is the very heart of the soul and there is no spiritual life if love
is absent! I will not say that love is the first Grace, for faithfirst discovers
that Christ loves us, and then we love Him because He first loved us.”—Volume
62, Sermon #3524 “Temporal mercies betoken the freeness of the Divine bounty,
but they are never bestowed as the earnest of God’s special love. Such inferior
gifts He often lavishes in abundance upon those who are not His people.
Spiritual blessings He reserves for His own redeemed, regenerate family! Their
value is enhanced by their significance, because they are proofs of His eternal
love towards us.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3474

“Oh, that we might always recognize that Christ is the Temple of God, and Christ
is the Sacrifice!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3496

“Brothers and Sisters, it is very, very delightful to think that if I preach a
sermon for Christ it is accepted, but I want you to think that if you housewives
are about the house, doing your business there for your husband and children,
you are just as much accepted there as I am when I am preaching! That Prayer
Meeting was very acceptable. Yes, and I know how acceptable it was when you sat
up that night with a sick man. It was done for Jesus’ sake. The man who
addresses thousands is accepted, but he that sits down and talks, even to a
little child, is just as much accepted, and accepted in the same way too, for it
is only ‘in the Beloved’ that either the big or the little can be at
all!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3429

“I know Jesus was very sad when on earth, but yet I have sometimes thought that
of all the men that ever lived, Jesus was the happiest Man, even in His sorrows,
for it is not possible for a heart to be so full of love to others—to be so
benevolent—and not to be happy! To love makes even suffering, in a certain
sense, sweets for the object of loves. ‘The joy that was set before Him’ made
our Savior ‘endure the Cross,’ but not with a common endurance. He so endured it
that He ‘despised the shame’ and though it was shame, and it broke His health,
yet it was shame on which, in the majesty of His love, He trampled with a sacred
joy!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3517

“Salvation is of Free Grace, and is, from the very necessity of its nature,
gratis. You cannot merit it! You cannot earn it! It is not of the will of man,
nor of blood, nor of birth, but, ‘He will have mercy on whom He will have mercy,
and He will have compassion on whom He will have compassion.’”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3449

“ The Father delights in youand looks upon you with doting love—like as a father
takes pleasure in his child, so does He rejoice over you. And Jesus delights in
you. He saw in you the recompense of His agonies, the purchase of His blood, the
partakers of His Glory. And the Holy Spirit delights in you. He has formed your
heart anew and made you a temple for Him to dwell in and, therefore, He watches
you with jealous care.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3474

“I will mention some valuable guards of life and character. One is the habit of
secret prayer. Private prayer should be regularly offered, at least in the
morning and in the evening. We cannot do without set seasons for drawing near to
God. To look into the face of man without having first seen the face of God is
very dangerous—to go out into the world without locking up the heart and giving
God the key is to leave it open to all sorts of spiritual vagrants!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3381

“‘Do you love Me?’ Why, the question means, Are you a Christian? Are you a
disciple? Are you saved? For if any man loves wife, or child, or house more than
Christ, he is not worthy of Him! Christ must have from every one of His
disciples, the heart’s warmest affection! And where that is not freely accorded,
depend upon it, there is no true faith and, consequently, no salvation, no
spiritual life.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3524

“Do you recognize your mission, dear Friends? Do we all understand it?—that, as
truly as Christ was the Messenger of the Father, so every Believer is the
messenger of Christ! You are sent into this world to do an errand, not for
yourselves, but for Your Master! Are You doing it?”—Volume 62, Sermon #3499

“Now, instead of going roundabout to find preparations for Christ by way of
reformation, come to Him as you are, for He will give you all the fitness that
you think you ought to bring. He has got it all. Christ did not come to save the
righteous, but sinners, just as a physician does not present himself to heal
those who are whole, but to heal those who are sick.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3413

“Now the most of this I daresay is not applicable to the most of you. You know I
have been thinking, while preaching, that you might say I had not been preaching
except to some one or two that were here. Well, I will tell you my excuse. ‘What
man of you, if he has an hundred sheep, if he loses one, does not leave the
ninety and nine, and go after that which is gone astray?’ After that
‘gone-astray one’ I have gone! And my Master, too! Amen.”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3525

“Do not be afraid of rejoicing in that Doctrine of the safety of the saints.
Depend upon it, though some have used it to their own destruction and their end
shall be terrible for having perverted the Truth of God to make it a cloak for
sin, yet the children of God have always found that when they are most happy
they can be most active! When they feel most safe they are most grateful and
when they are most grateful they are most courageous and the most
self-sacrificing! Do not be afraid of knowing that you are safe in Christ, for
if your thoughts are troubled about your eternal security, you will not be able
to give the integrity of your manhood and womanhood to the cause of God.”—Volume
59, Sermon #3356

“God is never indifferent towards sin. If, therefore, a man is not in a state in
which God can justify him, he is in a state in which God must condemn him! If
you are not just before God, you are condemned at this very moment. You are not
executed, it is true, but the condemnation has gone forth against you and the
sign that it is so is your unbelief, for, ‘He that believes not is condemned
already, because he has not believed on the Son of God.’”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3392

“It takes as much Divine Energy to make a saint as to create a world and,
therefore, God rejoices in every one of His elect as being the work of His
hands—the very choice design of His heart.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3474 “No man
shall go to Heaven while he lives in and favors any one sin. A man may sin and
be saved, but he cannot love sin and be saved. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3449
“Surely, Brothers and Sisters, we would not wince so much at our afflictions if
we did but know the Master better! From the hand of the Lord we would accept
them, and we would bow to the will of the Lord in bearing them.”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3430

“I am afraid that the most of us do not pray as we should, but if we want to
prevail, like Jacob, we must remember that Jacob wrestled with the Angel and
then he prevailed. Weeping, which reveals the soul’s wrestling, will often do
what nothing else can in bringing us great benedictions.”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3373

“You imagine that you love Christ. Have you fed His lambs? Have you fed His
sheep? Have you given that proof which our Savior imperatively requires of you?
What are you doing for Him now? It is poor love that spends itself in
professions and never comes to any practical result!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3524

“That harvest which does not come of plowing is one which will never fill a
barn—and that salvation which does not come from a sense of sin will never come
to much.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3504 “All Christ belongs to each one of God’s
people! You have got a burden to yourself, but you have also got God to
yourself—think of that!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3355

“The best book of Church history from which to gather ritual, true ritual, is
the Acts of the Apostles. And when the Christian Church shall go back to that,
instead of enquiring about what the primitive Christians did in the second or
third century, she will come much nearer to the knowledge of what she ought to
do!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3411

“Christian, delight yourself in the Lord, and you shall have the desire of your
heart!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3474

“Come to Christ. Bring nothing with you. Come as you are, empty-handed,
penniless and poor. The rivers of milk and wells of wine are all with Him. He is
the banquet giver, and the Banquet, too. To trust Him is to live. To look to
Him, alone, for salvation is to find salvation in that look!”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3449

“For your Master’s work, you must be prepared to forsake all and yield yourself
up to Him unreservedly! You are not true to Christ, nor fit to put your hand to
His plow, if you pull that hand back because it involves any sacrifice, however
heavy. ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3526

“If it should ever be your wretched lot to be a member of a Church that has been
distracted by schism and discord, you will confess that, perhaps of all things
in Christian experience, there is nothing that humbles the soul more, nothing
that wounds the heart more and that does more mischief to the inner life than
personal jealousies and the party divisions they occasion!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3365

“It is clear that in times of trouble godly men and women are at a
premium!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3340 “‘Groans that cannot be uttered’ are prayers
that cannot be refused! There may be most strength in the passionof the soul
when there is least order in the expressionof the soul.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3500

“As for you who do not love my Lord and Master, what can I do but pray for you,
that His great love may now overcome your ignorance and aversion—until, having
first been loved of Him, you love Him in return? Jesus Christ would have you
trust Him! Faith is the first Grace you need. Oh, come and depend upon Him who
did hang upon the Cross! When you rest in Him, your soul is saved and, being
saved, it shall become your constant joy to love Him who loved you and gave
Himself for you! Amen.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3524

“Perhaps you are doing a little, but can you not do more? Is there not some
fresh thing that you can do for Jesus? Can you not get new crowns for His head,
Beloved? Let us give Him fresh praise and if there is any fresh branch of
usefulness, any new mode of serving Him which we have not yet tried, let us ask
for Grace to try it now!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3474 “There is no possibility of
your having an everlasting life here. You don’t desire it if you are Christians!
Neither could you have it if you did desire it—a time will come when you must
depart.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3414

“They say that we speak dreadful things about the wrath to come, but I am sure
that we understate the case. What must the tender, loving, gracious Jesus have
meant by the words, ‘Gather the tares and bind them in bundles to burn
them’”?”—Volume 60, Sermon #3393

“I think I saw the other day in a window, concerning a certain statesman whom I
love to honor, that he would be a better statesman if he were a worse man. I
think not so, but still David, if he had been a better man, would have been a
worse Psalmist, for even the faults of his character, inasmuch as they bring him
down to our poor level, qualify him to write according to the feelings of our
hearts and the emotions of our spirits.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3431

“The true way in which to come to Christ is to believe Him, to trust Him. If any
man trusts in Christ to save him, he has come to Him!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3351

“The Church needs some few conspicuous specimens of self-denying holiness, and
perhaps those few, like standard-bearers lifting up the ensign, would attract
many others—and the Church might lift herself up from the low level of our poor,
weak, beggarly profession! We might then serve Jesus a little after the manner
that He deserves to be served, and surrender ourselves to Him more after the
fashion of His surrendering Himself for us!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3526

“Brothers and Sisters, the very best work which we ever do on earth is to adore.
You are blessed in prayer, but you are seven times blessed in praise!”—Volume
62, Sermon #3501 “Oh, it is delightful to think of going up yonder if for
nothing else than knowing more of Christ understanding more of Divine Love,
drinking deeper into the mystery of godliness through which God was manifest in
the flesh!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3412

“One Doctrine of God’s Word balances another. He who is altogether and only a
Calvinist probably only knows half the Truth of God, but he who is willing to
take the other side, as far as it is true, and to believe all he finds in the
Word of God, will get the whole pearl. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3449

“I have no doubt that there are many professors of religion who are living
without the Law of God. I mean that they are living reputable, respectable
Christian lives and they, themselves, believe they are converted, but they are
alive without the Law. That is, there is mingled with their faith in Christ some
sort of trust in themselves.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3475

“Speaking personally, my happiest times are spent with my Brothers and Sisters
in Christ in the high festivals, when the multitude keep holy day. Draw a circle
around my pulpit and you have hit upon the spot where I am nearest
Heaven!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3341

“They who hate Christ very soon hate God. They get rid of the Christ of the
Gospel, and they soon get rid of God out of Creation, too, and there is no
coming to the Father in any way or fashion except by Christ. He has gone to the
Father, but He is also the way to the Father!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3510

“One-heartedness in a Christian is a great point. “Unite my heart to fear Your
name” is a prayer which every Christian should always pray. “A double-minded man
is unstable in all his ways.” A double-hearted Christian—what shall I say of
him? He is like the eye which when it is single, fills the body with light, but
if it has lost its singleness, it causes the body to be in darkness—and if the
light that is in us is darkness, how great is that darkness! ”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3527

“Household devotion and the pulpit are, under God, the stone walls of
Protestantism! And my prayer is that these may not be broken down.”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3381

“We may often smile and sing about death, and long for evening to approach, that
we may rest with God, but it is at the same time a most solemn thing. The best
way to deal with it is to die daily, to go down to Jordan’s brink and bathe
every morning in that death stream, till death shall be as familiar as life,
till you shall come to think of it with daily expectation!”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3414

“They have called the Master of the house, Beelzebub! What, now, can they call
the men of His household? They must find some lighter name for us! Be encouraged
then, you feeble bands of trembling Christians, encouraged in all your
sufferings and griefs for Christ’s sake, for as He yet rose from the dead and
led captivity captive, even so shall the feeblest of His followers!”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3431

“Dear Brothers, those of us who believe that we are called to be ministers for
Christ are, above all the rest of the Church, bound to devote ourselves to one
thing. “This one thing I do.” If other men have two things to do, we, by our
call and office, if we are not liars in professing to be of God, and traitors to
our office, are bound to do but one thing—and that is to free ourselves from the
blood of all men that we may stand before God as His honest servants.”—Volume
62, Sermon #3527

“If I knew that someone was about to defraud you of your estate, and that unless
you were diligent about it you would lose all your property, I think I should
say to you, ‘Bestir yourself.’ If I knew that some deadly disease had begun to
prey on your constitution and that, if neglected, it would soon gain an
ascendancy with which it were hard to grapple, I think I would say, ‘Go to the
physician. Do not delay, for bodily health is very precious.’ But, dear Friend,
if your estate is precious, much more your soul! And if the health of this poor
clay ought to be looked to, much more the welfare of your soul—the welfare of
your soul forever!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3450

“There is one thing that adoration does—it helps us to see—and when you close
your eyes in adoration, you see more than when you have them open in any other
way!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3501

“The joys of this life with which God blesses us ought to make us increase in
Grace and gratitude, ought to be a sufficient motive for the very highest form
of consecration, but, as a rule, we are only driven to Christ by a storm—the
most of us, I mean. There are blessed and favored exceptions, but most of us
need the rod, must have it and do not seem to learn obedience except through
chastening—the chastening of the Lord!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3368

“Oh, that when our days below come to a close, when we hear the Master’s call
and feel the symptoms of approaching death, we may not be dismayed or
frightened! God grant that we may take leave of this mortal life with peaceful
confidence and holy calm! Should our exit be slow and painful, may we be
steadfast in faith and full of patience! Or should it be otherwise, sudden and
unexpected, may we be no less prepared and ready!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3526

“There is no sharper instrument with which to lance the soul than the broken Law
of God! There is no harrow that can tear the soul like that harrow of the Ten
Commandments. There is no arrow that can go forth and slay the soul’s
self-satisfaction as God’s Commandments do when we see that they are holy, just,
good—and that we have broken every one of them—broken them a thousand times, and
that every breach of the Law is calling out for vengeance against us!”—Volume
61, Sermon #3475

“We are nothing without Christ—but with Him we are full of honor. Oh, to be
among those by whom the world is preserved, the excellent of the earth in whom
the saints delight! God forbid we should be among the base and worthless
tares!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3393 “In the agonies of Jesus, in the shame and
spitting, in the woes and anguish that He endured, we read the sinfulness of
sin, written as in capital letters, that even the half-blind might see! Oh, Sin,
murderer of Christ, you are ‘exceedingly sinful!’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3374

“If, indeed, God has made such a Covenant with me, then I am saved. I rest upon
Christ whom God has said He has set forth to be a Covenant for the people—a
Leader and Commander to the people. My dear Friends, are you all trusting in
Christ alone? Is He all your salvation? Is He all your desire? I think that is
one of the ways by which to discover the true sons of Zion from those that are
not so, by seeing whether Christ is all their salvation!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3356

“As you love God, He will certainly deliver you from all the powers of earth and
Hell.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3433

“Do you need any promise fuller than that which the Bible has in it now, or any
invitation more gracious than that which the Gospel gives to you now? ‘Today is
the accepted time: today is the day of salvation.’ I pray you, my lingering
Friend, linger no longer! Oh, how I wish I could put my hands in yours and lead
you to the Savior! But I cannot. I will, however, pray Him to lead you this very
night!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3450

“To be afraid to die must be because we do not understand it, for if Believers
know that to die is but to enter into the arms of Jesus Christ, surely they will
be able to sing bravely!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3362

“They are never likely to seek a Savior while they are in this condition, for
until a man’s mind is thoroughly made up that he must be saved by Christ or
perish, he will never go to Christ. A divided heart about our personal condition
before God is a deadly sign.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3527

“I wish some persons could have much clearer notions than they have about who it
is that saves. If salvation comes of man—well, say so! And if sinners save
themselves by all manner of means, give them the credit, the glory, the praise
of it! But if it is God who saves, then let Him have the sole and perfect honor
for it! ‘Salvation is of the Lord.” Sinner, you should not try to save yourself!
You cannot do it! If you could, why did Christ come to save you? Your salvation
does not rest in your hands. ‘It is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs,
but of God that shows mercy.’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3366 “None keep the law so
well as those who do not hope to be saved by it, but who, renouncing all
confidence in their own works, and accepting the righteousness which is of God
by faith in Christ Jesus, are moved by gratitude to a height of consecration and
a purity of obedience which mere legalism can never know!”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3502

“Man in all matters of religion and in all his dealings with God, is proud, but
it is amazing how apparently humble men will be when they worship false gods.
They will cut themselves with knives and roll themselves in the mire. We have
known some votaries to kneel before the representation of the Virgin Mary and
lick the very pavement with their tongues by way of penance—and perform the most
degrading rites in honor of their false gods.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3369

“From the first moment in which sin is pardoned, to the last moment in which we
are here on earth, it should always be our delight to sing to our Well-Beloved a
song.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3476 “God’s zeal will not leave a single jot or tittle
of the Covenant of His Grace unfulfilled. He has lifted His hand. He has sworn
by Himself that Christ shall see of the travail of His soul—and the zeal of God
will carry this out.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3432 “When Sovereign Grace has renewed
and changed them, you may easily distinguish the Lord’s sheep from the world’s
goats. ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3528

“Here is a man next door to a worm and yet next door to God—born but yesterday
and yet his existence will go on perpetually with God, for man shall not die! So
momentous, and yet so insignificant! So magnificent, and yet so minute is the
measure of my days!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3414

“It seems to us that its simplicity is a part of its grandeur—that it is more
God-like, to give us a Gospel which can be spoken in few words by simple men,
than to give us something involved and intertwisted—the meaning of which we
would never be able to guess!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3451

“When people say, ‘It is quite enough for me go be wearied with the sermons of
the Sunday. I do not want to go out to Prayer Meetings, lectures and so
forth’—then it is clear that they have no appetite for the Word of God—and
surely this is a bad sign. If you have a bit of wall built to protect the
Sunday, and then six times the distance left without a fence, I believe that
Satan’s cattle will get in and do no end of mischief!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3381

“It does not seem that even with Christ for a Teacher, we would learn much
without the Holy Spirit. The greatest blessing, after all, is not the bodily
Presence of the Savior, though we learn something from that, but it is the
indwelling and the teaching of the Holy Spirit which we most of all
need!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3510

“I am so glad to hear as a regular thing that the departed ones from my own dear
Church have such joy in being harvested. Glory be to God, our people die
well!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3393 “There is such a thing as thanks feeling—feeling
thankful—and this ought to be the general, universal spirit of the
Christian.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3476

“You know how apt the legal preacher is to whip his hearers with—“Do this!” And,
“Do that.” You know how certain Calvinists whip their hearers with, “If you have
felt this,” and, “If you have experienced that,” you may be saved. But the Lord
Himself always makes His people, when they come fully to confide in Him, to lie
down in a good fold and to feed in a fat pasture!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3528

“Some think it is a simple work to preach, and child’s play to sit and listen.
When the great trumpet peals and the dead are awakened, they will think very
differently! They will reckon that speech was never put to so noble a purpose as
when it was used to bring men to reconciliation with their Maker, and that ears
were never used to so good an end as when they were used attentively to hear
what God the Lord would speak when He would bid the rebel come to Him and find
mercy!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3357

“…we thank God that we have a simple Gospel to preach to you, because there are
so many in this world who need saving quite as much as the wisest, but who could
not be saved if the Gospel were not simple.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3451 “It is a
faith which producesworks which saves us. The works do not save us. And a faith
which doesnotproduce works is a faith that will only deceive—and cannot lead us
into Heaven. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3434

“Is there ever a day in the year, or ever a moment in the day, in which the
Christian ought not to be grateful?”—Volume 61, Sermon #3476“When a congregation
hears the Word and tramples it under foot, what marvel if God takes the
candlestick out of the place in His anger? But does He break the candlestick?
No, He moves it to another place! Others get the benefit of the Light which
those despised had it aforetime. Great God of Wonders, we bless You that even
when Your anger burns, Your mercy brightly shines. Amidst the thunder and the
storm, soft showers are rained in silver drops to make glad the earth!”—Volume
62, Sermon #3529

“All your iniquities shall be forgiven you—though you have blasphemed and have
even committed murder, there is pardon for you if you hate those sins and leave
them—and Christ will help you to hate them if you trust Him! He will give you
Grace to quit them, but if you hug those sins, you may prate about faith in
Christ, and you may lie about experience in Grace, but to such things as real
faith and true experience, you are and must be utter strangers unless sin, with
stern resolution, is given up—not so much as one sin hugged, or indulged, or
loved. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3415

“So let the Church of God always feel that she has never come to the place where
she can say, ‘Rest and be thankful.’ ‘Higher, higher, higher, higher,’ must
still be her motto! If her missions have conquered one continent, they must
invade another! If half the world has been converted, there would be no rest to
us till the other half were converted likewise. ‘It is done as You have
commanded, and still there is room—room for more work, because there is room for
more guests at Your feast.’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3529

“Humility is sober thinking. Pride is drunken thinking. He who thinks more of
himself than he should, is intoxicated with conceit—but he that judges aright
and is, therefore, humble—thinks soberly. God give us to be very sober in our
thoughts of ourselves.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3517

“Obedience is not perceived until it is tried, and faith is not known to be firm
and strong until it is put to the test and exercised.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3344

“In the matter of service, it is not for us to allot you your work, but what can
you do? Now, what will you do tonight? ‘Oh, give me till the morning,’ says one.
No! No! We have not an hour that we can afford to waste! Let us serve God
today—we will leave tomorrow to care for itself. Now is the accepted time for
service, as well as salvation!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3355

“How some of you would spring up from your seats tonight if all of a sudden you
got the information that you had been condemned by the courts of your country!
But when I say that you have been condemned by the Court of Heaven, this glides
across your conscience like drops of water, or oil over a marble slab!”—Volume
60, Sermon #3392

“We may say of this Doctrine of the Cross, as David did of Goliath’s sword,
‘There is none like it. It is suitable in all places, wherever we may be
found.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3451 “I do not know a more miserable spirit than an
envious one! Nothing can be more un-Christian than to be angry with my fellow
man because he happens to have more of outward good, and of inward excellence,
too, perhaps, than I may happen to have.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3375 “We must
preach in the street, or at the market, or on the village green! We must take
the Word to the people, if they will not come to the Word.“Go out, go out,” says
the Savior. This is a word that should ring loudly in the ears of many
Christians.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3529

“We have heard some very wise people say that prayer is no doubt beneficial to
those who offer it, but to suppose that it has any effect upon the mind of God
is absurd. Do you not see, Brothers and Sisters, that they think us all idiots!
They must do so, for do you suppose that any but an idiot would go on praying at
all if he did not believe that it had some effect upon the mind of God and that
it prevailed with God?”—Volume 62, Sermon #3510

“If any of you are ready to give up your Sunday school work, or whatever it is
you are engaged in, oh, say not so! God is so zealous that He will not let the
good cause fail.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3432 “If you pray that you may not grieve
the Spirit of God, nor cause Him to depart from you, your daily anxiety shall
bring its results and you shall be happy.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3348 “The most of
the persons whom the Lord Jesus thought upon in the days of His flesh were
unknown to fame and, for my part, I judge that the happiest persons are those
who pass through life unknown of men, but known of God!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3345

“Oh, I wish that our whole life might be a Psalm—that every day might be a
stanza of a mighty poem! That so from the day of our spiritual birth until we
enter Heaven we might be pouring forth sacred minstrelsy in every thought, word
and action of our lives. Let us give Him thankfulness and thanks-living.”—Volume
61, Sermon #3476 “If a man likes to laugh, and wishes to scoff, he can find
folly in Infinite Wisdom. No, he can, if he has eyes that are full enough of
lies, discover faults even in the Immaculate God, Himself!”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3530

“When your faculties shall have been expanded to the heavenly size [in Heaven]
and you shall be elevated to become the peer of the angelic host, even then you
shall feel that the love of God surpasses your powers of knowledge and
comprehension!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3339 “Alas, there are always men who can
excuse their sins by the sins of God’s people. They eat up the sins of God’s
people as they eat up bread—they make a sweet morsel of it!”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3415 “Nothing is known of God till we know Him by experience—nothing that is of
value. All that the ear learns of God from another’s teaching is shallow and
superficial. Your heart must know God by its own deep communing.”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3433

“A Christian cursing is a very awkward spectacle. Even the Pope, when he takes
to cursing, as at least the former one used to do very liberally, seems as if he
could hardly be the vicar of God on earth! Our work is to bless the sons of men.
‘Bless and curse not.’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3517

“The prayer of the Apostles is a suitable prayer for ministers, ‘Lord increase
our faith,’ for if our faith is not increased, we cannot expect that the faith
of the multitude will be!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3452 “The lowest of the low, when
hearing the Word, often accept what the so-called respectable despise.”—Volume
62, Sermon #3529

“We don’t sing enough, my Brothers and Sisters! How often do I stir you up about
the matter of prayer, but perhaps I might be just as earnest about the matter of
praise! Do we sing as much as the birds do? Yet what have birds to sing about,
compared with us? Do you think we sing as much as the angels do? Yet they were
never redeemed by the blood of Christ!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3476

“I have never regretted—and I never shall regret—the day on which I walked to
the little river Lark, in Cambridgeshire, and was there buried with Christ in
Baptism! In this I acted contrary to the opinions of all my friends whom I
respected and esteemed—but as I had read the Greek Testament for myself, I felt
bound to be immersed upon the profession of my faith, and so I was. By that act
I said to the world, ‘I am dead to you, and buried to you in Christ , and I hope
henceforth to live in newness of life.’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3381

“Enoch, also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied concerning the coming of the
Lord. And his prophecy, though, very early, was so clear that the Jew, who
almost closes the Book of Inspiration, quotes it—feeling, I suppose, that he
could not use words mode expressive than those which came from that ancient
Prophet. ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3531

“God makes the preacher whom He sends to be the source of so much good, or the
channel of so much good, for by his preaching comes the hearing, and by the
hearing comes the believing—and out of the believing come the calling upon the
name and the salvation!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3522

“Our death will cause no jar in our life-music! It will involve no pause, or
even discord—it is part of a program—the crowning of our whole history!”—Volume
60, Sermon #3393 “Brothers and Sisters, be much in the sacred and holy palace of
gratitude! You cannot have anything that will more strengthen you for service
than holy thankfulness to God for His favors.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3366 “It is
wrong to tell a man he must repent before he may trust Christ, but it is right
to tell him that, having trusted Christ, it is not possible for him to remain
impenitent. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3434

“I prayed for you just now—the Lord knows how sincerely I prayed—that we might
all meet in Heaven. We never shall, unless we all believe in Jesus, for He is
the one Door—if we will not enter by Him, we cannot enter—there is no stealing
or climbing our way there.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3351

“If unbelief raises difficulties, ‘The Lord is risen’ is the cure for them
all!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3452 “What time you are afraid of dying, trust in the
living Savior, for in Him are life and immortality!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3362

“I pray God for this Church, that she may not be found guilty at the coming of
Christ of not having gone out after the poor. Encourage them to come to this
house at all times, whenever you can. I do not know where we are to put any
more, but there is Thursday evening, and there is Monday evening, and there is
room then. Oh, bring in whomever you can, for perhaps when the Gospel is
preached, God may bless it to them. Let us not be deficient in this.”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3529

“There are some who save a little corner for something else besides Christ.
Beloved, it must come to this—if you and I are ever saved, that Christ as He is
revealed in the Covenant of Grace must be all our salvation! He must be made
unto us of God, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption! Christ is
ALL!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3356

“Oh, if a minister gets to Heaven, it will be a wonder! His responsibilities are
so great. ‘Who is sufficient for these things?’ It will be a marvelous display
of mercy if any of us shall be able to say at last, ‘I am clear of the blood of
all men,’ for we have not only our own blood, but the blood of others to look to
in this matter.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3531

“If you have to put up with far less money, yet if you have an opportunity of
hearing the Gospel, and mixing with God’s people, be not in a haste to throw
away your golden privileges for the sake of those poor brazen gains which are
pitiful in comparison with spiritual wealth!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3375

“I believe that a Christian minister had better, once and for all, as soon as
ever he sets out earnestly preaching the Gospel, make up his mind to give up his
reputation. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3415

“God has chosen unto Himself a people. We are told that their number is a number
that no man can number. Well now, those who are saved are not so very many. They
are a great many more than some bigots would like to believe, but they are a
great many fewer than some enthusiasts would imagine!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3529

“If you are not saved, you will have to live forever in misery! Can you
understand that? You are endowed with an immortality from which it is impossible
for you to escape! In that respect, by that wondrous gift, God has put you on an
elevated position and I pray that you may look at it as such—may, by His Grace,
not fling yourselves away, nor trifle with yourselves, nor do the devil’s
bidding—but seek Him who has promised in His Word, that they that seek Him shall
find Him!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3346

“We may sometimes thank God not only by feeling thankfulness and living
thankfulness, and speaking our thanks, but by that silent blessing of Him which
consists in patient suffering and accepting the evil as well as the good from
Jehovah’s hand. That is often better thanksgiving than the noblest Psalm that
the tongue could utter. To bow down before Him and say, ‘Not my will, but Yours
be done,’ is to render Him a homage equal to the hallelujahs of cherubim and
seraphim. To feel not only resigned, but acquiescent—willing to be anything or
nothing according as the Lord would have it—this is in truth to sing to our
Well-Beloved a song!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3476

“The Christian’s life is a life of dependence upon God. He always has to go to
Him. There is never an hour in which he could do without his God.”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3433 “‘Christ is risen’ is the cure for wounded affections when the
wound rankles through unbelief. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3452

“There will always be those who, not caring to enjoy, themselves, the blessings
of the Great Shepherd’s reign, will sneer at all those who would. Let us accept
their sneers as the only tribute they can render to Christ, and as true a proof
of His excellence and His glory as the admiration of His followers!”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3394

“Questions will be asked tonight by some, ‘When will that day come?’ to which I
would answer, it were better for us to be prepared for it, come when it may,
than to be anxious to fix its date! We can give you no information, because ‘of
that day and of that hour knows no man—no, not even the angels of
Heaven.’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3531

“If you want an image of human nature, you will find it in the rottenness of
Lazarus when he had been dead four days! The Gospel comes to give life to the
dead! It comes to deal out everlasting life to those who have lost it and could
never have obtained it except as a gift from Heaven. Now, is not this humbling
to the high looks of men?”—Volume 59, Sermon #3369

“You hear much about the free will of man. Hear a little about the free will of
God! You would think, from the talk of some, that God was man’s debtor and must
do according to the will of man. But it is not so. He is a Sovereign, and gives
His Grace to whom He chooses, and He would have us know that it is according to
the good pleasure of His will.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3525

“It is said of Luther that he never feared any man and yet he declares that he
never preached a sermon without his knees knocking together because he trembled
lest he should be guilty of the blood of any of his hearers.”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3357 “Dare to be different! Resolve to keep close to Christ! Make a stern
determination to permit nothing in your life, however gainful or pleasurable, if
it would dishonor the name of Jesus!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3381

“And I shall close that list by saying in that day God will have no mercy for
false professors. He will have no mercy upon preachers who could talk glibly,
but whose lives were not consistent with their own teaching. What a condemnation
shall await me if I am not found in Christ after having preached so continuously
to so many thousands! Oh, whatever a man shall be in Hell, may God grant he may
never be an unfaithful minister of Christ, condemned out of his own
mouth!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3531

“I know there are hundreds and thousands of people in this country who would be
greatly troubled in their minds if they did not go to church or chapel twice on
Sundays—and they get comfort in this because their conscience is dead!”—Volume
61, Sermon #3454

“The swan is said to sing her dying song—a myth, I doubt not, but the Christian
is God’s swan, and he sings sweetest at the last. Like old Simeon, he becomes a
poet at the last and pours out his soul before God! And I would we each desired,
if we are spared to old age, to let our last days be perfumed with thanksgiving,
and to bless and magnify the Lord, while yet we linger where mortal ears may
hear the strain!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3476

“We eat bread and drink wine, not out of any foolish superstition that these can
be transmuted into the very flesh and blood of Jesus Christ—a superstition which
would be a disgrace to a Bushman—a superstition which is a disgrace to those who
hold it in this enlightened land, and not a disgrace only, but a vast sin—a
black delusion which is given to them that they may believe a lie—whereby they
involve themselves in the doom of Hell!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3338

“If you have believed, but have never repented of your sins, then beware of your
believing!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3434

“If there were time tonight, I would make an inventory of all the Truths of
Scripture and say after each one, ‘If you know these things, happy are you if
you do them’ [JOHN 13:17]. If you know it to be a privilege to be united with
God’s people, come and join the Church! If you know that Jesus bids you be
baptized and come to His Table to remember Him, I pray you be not disobedient,
even to what you may think to be His least commandment!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3348

“It is the lot of those who are faithful to Christ to find even good men
sometimes turning against them. But what of that? They are responsible to their
Master, not to their fellow servants. Yet it is a hard thing when any come to be
ashamed of you—ashamed of you, though you know that you have done right.”—Volume
62, Sermon #3531

“Hear it, then, all you people, and let everyone that hears hail the gracious
fact—be you saints or sinners, be you saved already, or thirsty for the
knowledge of salvation—the thought that Christ’s errand was not to aggrandize
Himself, but to benefit us, must be welcome! He does not come to be served, but
to serve.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3532

“Oh, I charge you, go back to that blessed day when those blind eyes were opened
and when that dead heart began to feel the Divine Light! Oh, then it was you
said, “He is my God.” You did not come to Him and ask Him to be your God, but He
who gave Himself to you in the Eternal Covenant before the world was, in the
fullness of time, gave Himself to you by His effectual Grace, making you willing
to accept Him and to kiss His silver scepter! Yes, you have been changed from an
enemy into a friend!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3365

“The great power of unbelief receives its antidote in the blessed and
well-ascertained fact that Jesus is risen. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3452

“This is a day in which the stern regulations of the Puritans are cast overboard
and, perhaps, rightly so, some of them—but let us not go to the opposite
extreme, but rather when we feel that anything comes to be a temptation to us,
let us away with it and away with it without a moment’s hesitation—off with the
right foot, the right foot, and out with the right eye!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3415

“Let us never think that the Gospel needs to be rendered attractive by some
additions of our own! It is like a sword that cuts just as well without the
diamonds in the hilt, for the cut of it lies not in the handle, but in the sword
itself. The Gospel will cut and clear its own way.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3394

“Let us wake up to a sense of the dire reality of transgression—it is a
frightful fact, not a foolish fancy. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3477

“There is no freedom except in perfect subjection to the will of God! When every
thought is brought into captivity to the mind of God, then every thought is
free. You have heard much of the freedom of the will. There is no freedom of the
will till Grace has bound the will in fetters of Divine Affection! Then is it
free, and not till then.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3539 “The dying thief rejoiced to
see in his day the fountain which Jesus had opened! Why should not I see it too,
and have a washing from that precious One who comes to serve the vilest and the
meanest of the sons of men? Behold! Behold and wonder! Behold and love! Behold
and trust! Jesus comes from the right hand of God to the manger, to the Cross,
to the sepulcher, not to be served, but that He might serve the sons of
men!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3532

“We must grow in humility! It was remarked by an excellent Divine that growing
souls think themselves nothing, but that grown saints think themselves lessthan
nothing, and I suppose that when they are fully grown they fail to find language
in which to express their sense of insignificance!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3369

“It is a wonderful mercy—a mercy which some of my dear Friends now present would
prize very much if they could have it—it is a wonderful mercy, I say, to live in
the midst of godly people! Contrast it to the living with the ungodly!”—Volume
59, Sermon #3375 “The general principles of the promises of God may be
appropriated by those to whom they are appropriate.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3435

“It may be, certainly it may be, that the Lord will speedily come, but it does
not seem to me at all likely that He will. We are to live anticipating His
coming, as servants who know they will have to give an account when He does
come. That is the practical bearing of the Doctrine upon our life, but there are
many prophecies yet to be fulfilled which seem to show that He is not coming
just now.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3382

“There is more history made in the closet than in the cabinet of the ministry.
There is a greater power at the back of the throne than the carnal eye can see,
and that power is the cry of God’s children.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3540 “In all
companies, on all occasions and under all circumstances, be faithful to your
Master—deny Him not, but openly avow Him before the sons of men!”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3533

“It is very strange how God makes liars tell the truth. The priests do not
pretend to offer you any hope, for what do they tell you? Do they ever say that
these ceremonies will take you to Heaven? Not they! It seems as if God would not
let Satan fabricate the lie, perfectly, for He has left a weak part in it. Where
does the best believer in outward ceremonies go? Ask the priest, and he will
tell you that He goes to “purgatory!’”—Volume 61, Sermon #3454

“The Jewish Rabbi, the Greek philosopher, the ecclesiastical father, and the
modern theological thinker are meteors that dissolve into mist! They make void
the Word of God through their traditions or their conjectures. Flee away from
the nebulous forms and noxious fumes of their old traditions and new
discoveries! Believe what Jesus said, His Apostles taught, and what you have had
revealed to you in His own pure Word! Christ is the true Light of God! ”—Volume
62, Sermon #3534

“Not to speak of what God has done would be ingratitude. It might have a
semblance of humility, but in reality it would be disloyalty to the Most High.
Paul, therefore, did not hesitate to speak of his converts at Thessalonica and
of their good character—and of the good fruit which they had borne and the way
in which they had spread abroad the Gospel. He did not boast—he gave God the
glory of it, but he did speak of what had been done.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3551

“All the way to Heaven is only two steps—the first is to step out of yourselves
and the second is to step into Christ. First to have done with all that you can
do and secondly, to ask for all that Christ has done.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3351
“So, aswe learn and grow in Grace, we are sure to grow in prayer! If we do not
increase in prayerfulness, we may take it as a sign that we are not advancing in
the Divine life. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3416

“All the saints’ praises have this about them—that they are all harmonious. I do
not say that their voicesare. Here and there, there is a Brother who sings very
earnestly through his nose and very often puts out the rest that are round about
him! But it does not matter about the sound of the voice to the ear of man—it is
the sound of the heartto the ear of God!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3476

“He loads us with benefits on the Sabbath. But then we have our Monday mercies
and our Tuesday mercies, too—and right on to the close of Saturday night, the
Lord continues to heap on His mercies, one after another, that He may make us
feel that we shall sooner weary with thanking Him than He will weary in giving
us cause for thankfulness.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3493

“‘I live in the twilight of Christianity,’ said Voltaire, and he unwittingly
spoke a truth. He thought that it was the twilight of the evening, but it was
the twilight of the mornin, for Jesus still shines brighter and brighter—the
true Light of God before which the lamps of superstition and priestcraft must
pale their ineffectual fires! This is what the Savior meant—He was the true
Light.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3534“Brothers and Sisters, I commend you to the
picture of the eagle fluttering and thus setting an example to its little ones.
You may also see before your eyes the great Incarnate God teaching you how to
mount above the trials and temptations of this mortal life and living, even on
earth, a celestial life!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3335

“Find me a Christian whose conversation is full of rich savor, whose judgment is
tempered with charity, one whose fervent zeal is blended with the meekness of
wisdom, and I will guarantee you, as a rule, he has seen much
affliction!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3435

“Wait upon God for guidance as to any change in life you may determine, and if
the two things are equal—to remain where you are, or to move elsewhere—choose to
stay where you are, for the chances are, speaking according to man’s judgment,
in its favor. Reason seems to say that as it is unwise for the bird to wander
from her nest, so it is not desirable for you to wander from your place.
”—Volume 61, Sermon #3453

“We are immortal until our work is done. And amidst infectious or contagious
diseases, if we are called to go there, we may sit as easily as though in balmy
air. It is not ours to preserve our life by neglecting our duty—it is better to
die in service than live in idleness—better to glorify God and depart, than rot
above ground in neglecting what He would have us to do!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3493

“I believe those persons who think they do not feel their need are those who do
really feel their need the most. There is no sense of need so great as when a
man feels that he does not feel and thinks that he does not apprehend the depth
of his own need, for then he is evidently alive to his true condition!”—Volume
62, Sermon #3533

“Have you been into your prayer chamber lately, pleading with God, and have you
felt as if you could not pray? We often pray best when we think that we are
praying worst! When there is the most anguish, sighing and crying in prayer,
there is most of the very essence of prayer.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3398

“Take heed how you hear, because it is not a little thing, nor an easy thing, to
listen to the Gospel of Jesus!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3357

“Sometimes, even when prayer fails, praise will do it. It seems to gird up the
loins. It pours a holy anointing oil upon the head and upon the spirit. It gives
us a joy of the Lord which is always our strength. Sometimes, if you begin to
sing in a dull frame, you can sing yourself up the ladder. Singing will often
make the heart rise.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3476

“‘Savior, You have promised to save those that believe! I believe, therefore you
have saved me!’ I know some think this is presumption, but surely it is worse
than presumption not to believe God! and it is true humility to take God at His
word and to believe Him.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3362

“Though we believe in the efficacy of prayer, at times we believe so feebly that
when the answer comes, as come it does, we are astounded and filled with
amazement! We can scarcely think of it as a purpose of God—it seems rather to us
like a happy coincidence. Surely this adds greatly to the sin of
unbelief!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3495

“That deep, awful solicitude which makes you fear because you do not feel, and
makes you groan because you cannot grieve, is not to be despised, for it is an
experience often associated with gracious operations of the Spirit of
God!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3533 “And if we can copy this great High Priest of our
profession who endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself—if we can
copy Him so as to be neither faint in our minds, nor turn from our Master’s
work—we shall triumph even as He overcame!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3344 “If you love
Christ, you cannot help serving Him! If you believe in Him, there is such
potency in what you believe, such power in the Grace which comes with believing,
that you mustserve Christ! And if you serve Him not, you are not His!”—Volume
60, Sermon #3434

“When experience and patience have produced in us unstaggering faith in God,
what a blessed life we lead! But the unbelieving heir of Heaven, the man of
little faith and little confidence in God—he is blown about by every wind and
every difficulty staggers him—he is ready to weep under every trial!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3375

“We have heard of sermons being preached before this and that honorable company,
but preaching sermonsbeforepeople is not God’s way! We must preach sermons atthe
people, directly tothem, to show that it is not the waving of a sword in the air
like a juggler’s sport, but it is the getting of the sword right into the
conscience and the heart! This, I take it, is the true mission of every minister
of Christ.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3455

“Never let us attempt to come to God by anything but the blood! All other ways
to God, except through the blood of Jesus, are presumptuous. All other fire that
we may put upon the altar, except this, is strange fire, and the Lord’s anger
will go forth against us.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3395 “Our Lord Jesus Christ did
not come into this world merely to be an example, or merely to reveal the
Godhead to the sons of men. He came to make a Substitutionary Sacrifice. He came
to give His soul as a ransom! If you do not believe this Doctrine, you do not
believe Christianity. The very pith and marrow, the very sum and substance of
the mission of Jesus Christ is His coming to give His life that He might stand
in the place of those for whom He died.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3532

“If the Lord were pleased to give us a sign, or if He told us to ask for a sign,
we would be quite right in attaching a high importance thereto, but for us to
doubt a plain promise and, therefore, ask for a sign, is to sin against the
Lord!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3495

“Yes, we sound it forth as with a trumpet, that wherever there is an iniquity
there must be a penalty, for sin must be punished! The good order of the
universe requires it! The justice of God demands it! the Book of God threatens
it! The hand of God continually executes it! The supposition that because God is
merciful, He will, therefore, overlook sin, is as delusive as it is dangerous!
It is one of Satan’s lies.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3477

“Oh, it were a good thing to be made a shame, a blessed thing to be a butt, a
jest, a jeer, a byword—if Christ were but lifted up thereby!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3382

“…the hand that drew back the black curtain that hid the face of God was always
the hand of the Crucified—and whenever men came to see anything of the marvelous
love and goodness of God, they always beheld it in connection with the Messiah,
the Anointed One yet to come.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3436

“I am sure that the sweetness of prayer attracts and draws the Believer. Even as
birds are drawn with baits towards the snare, so towards the holy exercise of
prayer we are drawn by the sweet attractions it has. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3416

“And now, beloved Believer, as you first lived by receiving Grace, you can only
grow in that life by still receiving it! Do not come to this table [Lord’s
supper] and say, ‘What can I bring?’ No, but come and say, ‘What can I take
away?’ Do not say, ‘Am I worthy? That question never ought to be asked. You are
not worthy! But come, unworthy as you are, and take what Jesus has provided for
unworthy sinners!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3338

“Remember the last words of the text, [1 Sam 22:2] ‘And David became a captain
over them.’ Whoever, then, comes to Christ must submit to Christ’s rules. What
are they? One of the first is that you should be nothing at allandthat King
Jesus should be everything. Will you submit to that—that you shall have no
honor, that you shall take to yourselves no credit, that you shall never lean on
your own strength or wisdom—but you shall take Him to be made of God unto you
wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption? I hope you will
not kick at that.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3533

“God’s love to His people is not a thing of yesterday! He loved them before the
world was made and He will love them when the world has ceased to be. ‘It was
given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3531

“I think when a man remains in service at one place for only about two years, he
has need to question whether he was called into the ministry at all. God does
not generally plant trees in His vineyard that need shifting every two years.
God’s trees are full of sap, the cedars of Lebanon which He has planted. They
can stand on the bare mountain’s brow and see the ages of mortals swept away
into the tomb. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3453

“But be assured, O Sinner, that if you build your hope on any theory which
denies that debt must be paid, that crime must be avenged, that sin must be
punished—you are misjudging the Law of God by which you must be judged!”—Volume
61, Sermon #3477 “I think I could as soon doubt that the Deity of Christ is
declared as doubt that the Baptism of Believers is enjoined, for the one thing
appears to me to be as plainly revealed in Scripture as the other!”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3533

“All the knowledge with which a man can cram his brain cannot secure him in his
daily needs until he transfers it from his brain to his right hand and sets to
work with it! If you would get God’s blessings, then, in nature or in Grace,
carry out the Divine Laws into immediate and energetic practice!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3348

“There are some who are comforted much by the belief that Christ will come and
they shall not die. I do not profess to be among the number. I would as soon die
as not, and rather, I think, if I might have my choice, for herein would be a
greater conformity to the sufferings of Christ, in actually passing through the
grave and rising again, than will fall to the lot of those who do not
die.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3493 “A man cannot really believe that Jesus Christ has
taken away his sin by such sufferings as those of the Cross, and yet trifle with
sin! A man is a liar who says, ‘I believe that yonder bleeding Savior suffered
on account of my sins,’ and yet holds good fellowship with the very sins that
put Christ to death!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3434

“It [faith] works by making us love Christ for what He has done for us. It works
by making us love God, so that we say, “Lord, what is Your will, for we wish to
submit to it”? And this makes us cheerful, happy and resigned. It works, in
fact, by making us love the Lord Jesus Christ. If you do not love Jesus, then
your faith is no faith, for the very sound of His name is precious to those who
have true faith!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3454

“This is the cardinal virtue of philosophers—they extinguish one another! Their
fine spun theories do not often survive the fleeting generation that admires
them! A fresh race starts fresh theories of unbelief, which live their day, like
ephemera, and then expire.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3534

“There is a wonderful power in humiliation…There is not one word in the Bible
against a humble soul. There is not one curse against a sinner who feels his
need and comes empty-handed! Come, poor needy one, poor helpless one, you ruined
sinner, without any hope of yourself, you bankrupt sinner, come!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3369

“God never began to love His people. Before Adam fell. Before man was made, or
the mountains were brought forth. Before the blue heavens were stretched abroad,
there were thoughts of love in His heart towards us! He began to create, He
began actually to redeem—but He never began to love. It is eternal or
“everlasting” love which glows in the bosom of God towards every one of His
chosen people!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3561

“Young men, members of this Church, I want you to b thoroughly initiated into
this Doctrine of Redemption. Understand it clearly, and then contend for it
manfully, I pray you. If once you give up this fortress, you will be exposed to
the most dismal skepticism—no, you will be open to stark atheism!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3477

“No good is learned by idlers in idle company. Idle men together kindle a fire
that burns like the flames of Hell.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3532

“Does the plowman plow all day for a little bit of oats or barley, and will not
you plow all day for souls that shall live forever, if saved, to adore the Grace
of God, or shall live forever, if unsaved, in outer darkness and woe? Oh, by the
terrors of the wrath to come and the glory that is to be revealed, gird up your
loins and plow all day!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3383

“We have friends who have been dazed by the light of “public opinion”—a very
bright light is that. And we have known some decent scholars who have been
enraptured with “the light of the 19th Century”—a wonderful luminary, indeed,
but slightly darkened by the follies, frauds and crimes which every day’s
newspaper reveals! We have had the light of knowledge which lauded Aristotle,
and made the heathen author supply a textbook for Christian colleges!”—Volume
62, Sermon #3534

“The ordinary wear and tear of spiritual life requires renewal. Besides that, we
are often the subjects of sinful decline. Backsliding is too common a complaint
among Christians. We can ascend to the top of the mountain and dwell with God,
but our foot soon begins to descend. There is a gravitation towards sinfulness
in the best of men. Oh, that it were not so, but we are very conscious that it
is so and, therefore, we need to have the renewal. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3417

“Brothers, let us who are in the ministry, then, as far as possible, cling to
our churches and to our fields of labor, remembering that ‘as a bird that
wanders from her nest, so is a man that wanders from his place.’”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3453 “In those times, Beloved, [Paul’s day] there must be made a
distinction between men’s gospel and God’s Gospel, for nowadays man’s gospel is
popular enough.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3551

“Beloved, never look man in the face till you have seen the face of God! Oh,
lock up your hearts every morning by prayer and give God the key, so that no
evil may get in while you are out of doors. Oh, you do not know how some members
of this Church grieve us by their inconsistency! I would sooner bury you than
that you should sin so as to grieve God’s Spirit and cause the enemy to
blaspheme. The Lord has kept many, many of you with garments white and
unspotted, but if you want our hearts to break, profess to be Christians, and
then go into sin. ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3535

“If any man would see God unto perfection, let him behold yon bleeding Man! If
he would see God’s love, let him behold the Son of God, Incarnate, suffering in
the sinner’s place! If he would see God’s justice, let him behold the
Only-Begotten of the Father, pierced with every arrow out of Heaven’s quiver,
wounded in every part and particle of His spirit and His body, that He may bear
the curse for guilty men!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3477 “God’s people know what
perfect satisfaction means. When God reveals His love to them and Christ draws
near in the fullness of His Grace, then they would not change places with all
the kings of the earth!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3533

“Time may rob us of our health. The world may rob us of our wealth. Sickness may
deprive us of a thousand comforts, but there is nothing that can separate us
from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord! Our inheritance cannot
be alienated—it is where neither moth nor rust can corrupt, nor thieves break
through and steal!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3365

“The heart’s blood of Jesus is, as it were, the establishment of His last will
and testament. Jesus, the great Testator, has died, has made an end of sin and
His blood is the great seal of His testament and makes it valid to us.”—Volume
60, Sermon #3395 “We are in a wrong state of mind if we are not in a thankful
state of mind. Depend upon it, there is something wrong with you if you cannot
praise God.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3493

“Money circulated is a medium of public benefit, while money hoarded is a means
of private discomfort! A man is but a muckraker who is forever seeking to scrape
everything to himself. A miser is bound to be miserable. Before high Heaven, he
is an object to make the angels weep!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3536

“The perseverance of the Christian is not ensured by the Christian’s resolve to
persevere unto the end, nor by the Christian’s own power, nor by any plans which
the Christian can adopt! That perseverance is secured by the promise of Christ,
by the energy of the Spirit, by the watchfulness of God and by the faithfulness
of God to His own Covenant!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3375

“We call no man, master, upon earth, for One is our Master, and that One is
Christ. No man is Rabbi in the Church, but He is our Rabboni, our Teacher, and
all other teachers are thieves and robbers if they teach on their own
authority.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3436 “A prayer without penitence is a prayer
without acceptance. If no tear has fallen upon it, it is withered. You must come
to God as a sinner through a Savior, but by no other way.”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3340 “Those who refuse to see God in Christ, presently become callous to the
evidence of the eternal power and Godhead anywhere!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3477

“It is very little to love our own relatives, though there are some who do not
do even that. But to love our enemies is the mark of a true Christian—to be
prepared to bear and to forbear, to endure, but never to inflict, to be reviled,
but not to answer, not to rebuke, but to heap coals of fire upon the head of our
foes by endeavoring to do all that we can for the good of those who do us ill.
”—Volume 61, Sermon #3454

“Oh, my Sisters and my Brothers, the best of all preaching, because the most
simple and unostentatious, is to be found in the ordinary communion you hold
with your fellow creatures when, with a good conversation, you avail yourselves
of all the occurrences and opportunities of daily life! In your families the
sweetness of your temper, the gentleness of your manners and the purity of your
actions should bear witness that you have been with Jesus and learned of
Him.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3534

“Oh, how we ought to love God, who has made us near!—a people near unto Him. How
ought heavenly things and holy things to engross our attention! How joyously we
ought to live, too, for with such high favors as these it would be ungrateful to
be unhappy!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3496

“And when Paul had thus named the deed which the Savior did and labeled it with
the title of, ‘the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ he follows it up by
mentioning the heights from which the Savior descended—‘ whothough He was rich’
(2Cor: 8:9)It has been well observed that this little sentence is a clear proof
that our Savior had an existence beforeHe was born into this world—that, in
fact, He was Divine—for it is said that, ‘He was rich, and that He became poor.’
Now, He never was rich in this life—never!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3380

“It is not possible that the Gospel should have shined on those eyes without
either giving light or increasing the blindness. I do not believe that any man
has regularly sat under the sound of a Gospel ministry for three months without
being either sensibly hardened or manifestly softened by it.”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3357

“You aged folk—there are some such here—shall I have to remind any of you that
one thing is necessary—yes, most necessary to you? Death has already put his
bony palm upon your head and frozen your hair to the whiteness of that winter in
which all your strength must fail, and all your beauty fade. Oh, if youhave no
Savior!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3536

“I dread beyond measure that any one of us should have a name to live when we
are dead, for an ordinary sinner who makes no profession may be converted, but
it is extremely rare that a sinner who makes a profession of being what he is
not is ever converted!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3434 “When we preach to sinners,
never think that we mean the riff-raff in the streets. The Gospel, which saves a
sinner, is a message from God to YOU! Think of your own sins and the evil of
your own heart!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3455

“Our sorrows are not worth a thought when once compared with His! Sit down under
the shadow of the Cross and you will find a cooler shade than that of a great
rock in a weary land.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3395 “Beloved, the richest joy that
earth and Heaven could know springs from the crystal fount of Jesus’ side!
Heaven was never so glad as when He ascended up on high.”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3477 “Brothers and Sisters, how assured every one of us may be of our safety if
we are, indeed, Believers in Christ, for if we are made near by love and
friendship to our God, He cannot leave us!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3496 “There is no
going to Heaven unless you undergo a change which shall make you entirely new,
and make all things entirely new to you.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3536 “Many of your
doubts and fears come from unbelief, or of Satan, or of the flesh and are not of
God at all! Blame Him not for what He does not send and does not wish you to
suffer!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3383

“When the eagle has satisfied his hunger, he is strong again and when you and I
have fed upon the Word of God—especially upon the Incarnate Word of God—when we
have been privileged to eat His flesh and drink His blood, as spiritual men know
how, ah, then again, our youth has been renewed!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3417

“Give us Christ and we will make no hard terms about darkness, or light! Only
let us be with Him and it is enough. ‘Forever with the Lord’ is only another
word for glory everlasting!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3370 “God views all men as
guilty and, finding them guilty, He yet chooses unto Himself a people in whom
His Grace shall be resplendent! Therefore do not conclude that He will pass you
by because you are poor and needy.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3345

“The foundation stone of the Church is the Person of Christ. The Doctrine of
Atonement is the interpretation of His work on the earth. If any man believes in
the Atonement of Christ and trusts himself to its fact and its issues, he is a
Christian. He that believes not in our Redeemer’s wondrous passion, and His
complete satisfaction to the justice of God, may call himself what he likes, and
assert his profession by what name he pleases—he is not a Christian!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3477

“Do not, I pray you, be content with mere reformation. Were you before a drunk,
and are you now a teetotaler! Good—very good! Yet, good as it is, it will not
save your soul!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3536 “The Gospel and the essence of that
Gospel, which is the blood of Jesus Christ—it is this which is an Omnipotent
leverage to uplift the filth, debauchery and poverty of this city into life,
into light, and into holiness!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3496 “At all times of the
world’s history, when things appear to have gone to pieces and Satan seems to
rule the hour, do not let us despair, but be quite sure that, somehow or other,
the Light of God will come out of darkness and good out of evil!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3363 “There is no living comfortably, there is no living with the peace
and joy of the Holy Spirit in the heart if we at once wander from the simplicity
of our confidence in Christ!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3453

Oh, how glorious a thing it is to feel, when the light air is all around me and
I know that if I fall I would perish, that yet I cannot fall, for God’s wings
bear me up! And to feel that though there are hosts of enemies able to destroy
me if they can get at me, yet they cannot, for they must first get through God,
Himself, before they can get to the weak soul who hangs upon Jesus and rests
alone in Him!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3335

“All nations, with one accord, have agreed to honor ambassadors. Strange, then,
that all nations and all people should have conspired to disho- nor the
ambassadors ofGod!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3497

“Oh, Sirs, it is well enough to say that a Christian should be consistent, but
if you are not honest in your business, how does your belief help you? It is
well enough to say that a Christian should be godly, but if you are godless in
your families—if family prayer is neglected and private prayer given up—what is
the use of your beliefs, what the use of your perfect creeds?”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3348 “If God had more gratitude from us when we are well, He would help us to
continue in good health, but He knows that we need to be sick, sometimes, to
make us know the value of health and, therefore, He sends us to the bed of
sickness that we may learn a lesson of gratitude.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3375

“Oh, Christians, never be satisfied with being merely saved!...Saved from the
deep which threatened to swallow you up, rejoice that you are preserved from
death, but resolve that the life vouchsafed to you shall be active, earnest,
vigorous, fruitful in every good and work!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3536

“Mere exhortations to propriety are of no avail. You may preach ever so
eloquently on sobriety without rescuing a single drunk! You may eulogize
chastity to the admiration of the lascivious. You may extol honesty in the midst
of knaves and thieves who will praise your fair speech. Precept has no
regenerative power! People do not get good by having goodness preached at
them!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3477

“Deliverance from the power of sin is as much the work of God as deliverance
from the guilt of sin! Where we look for justification, there must we also look
for sanctification, for as we are justified through Jesus Christ, we must expect
to receive sanctification from a heavenly source also.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3366

“If in doubt, this should be the test of the Doctrine—does it glorify Christ?
This should be the test of all our opinions—do they glorify Christ? For nothing
is fit to be within the walls of Zion but that which bows down before Zion’s
King!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3436 “Disobedience of God must be punished by God with
indignation that does not relent and pain that knows no abatement!”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3397 “Believe me, there is no solid joy, no seraphic rapture, no
hallowed peace this side of Heaven, except by living close under the shadow of
the Cross, and nestling in the wounds of Jesus!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3453 “Oh,
there have been a few times in my ministry when I could, with flowing eyes,
beseech you to be reconciled to God, but these dry eyes of mine are not so often
fountains of tears as I could wish!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3497 “Until you hear the
bolts of damnation fast closed upon you, and you are shut up in Hell, doubt not
the right of petition, or the prevalence of your earnest plea! There is an ear
to hear in Heaven as long as there is a heart to plead on earth.”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3537

“Life is nourished, not so much by bread, as by God’s decree that bread should
nourish us, for, “man shall not live by bread, alone, but by every word that
proceeds out of the mouth of God shall man live.” So the ordinances do not feed
your soul, it is God IN the ordinances! It is not the sacramental bread and
wine. it is not Baptism. It is not coming up to listen to a poor mortal like
ourselves. It is not even private prayer—it is God IN the prayer, God IN the
preacher, God IN the ordinance, so that you not only have everything fromGod,
but that which satisfies and renews you is God Himself!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3417

“Beware of the high places—they are very slippery! There is not all the
enjoyment that you may think to be gathered in retirement and in ease, but, on
the contrary, luxury often puffs up, and abundance makes the heart to swell with
vanity! If any of you are prospered in this world, oh, watch, lest you be
mindful to return to the place from where you came out. ”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3478

“It is the duty of the Christian pastor, if he would make full proof of his
ministry, to warn men of the results of sin—to tell them that there is a
judgment—that for every idle word they speak they will have to account. We ought
continually to declare that for every transgression there shall be a recompense
of reward. ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3498

“The mass of mankind who pretend to be religious, suppose this Bible to be
written to all sorts of good people, but not particularly to themselves. And
there are they who think that the commands of Christ are very proper to be read,
and to be heard, and to be proclaimed—but they do not look upon them as being
binding on themselves.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3437

“In the old pictures they put a halo around the head of the saints. But, in
fact, that halo encircles their hearts and penetrates every member of their
bodies. The halo of disinterested consecration to Christ should not be about
their brows, alone, to adorn their portraits, for it encompassed their entire
being, their spirit, soul and body! It environed them, their whole being. ‘This
one thing I do,’ was the slogan of early saints. Let it be your slogan.”—Volume
62, Sermon #3536

“You do not love Christ if you do not love sinners! He came into the world to
seek and to save them, and if you do not try to bring them to Him, you do not
know Christ! How dwells the love of God in you, if you have never cared for poor
dying men? ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3454 “The coming here meant [Matthew 11:28] is
coming by the mind, approaching with the heart—a thing of the inner nature, a
spiritual thing! To come to Christ, then, is just this—in one word it is to
accept Him as your Savior…”—Volume 59, Sermon #3352

“If you want to go back to sin, to carnality, to a love of the world, to your
old condition, you never need to be prevented from doing so by lack of
opportunities!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3478

“Some of my Brothers do not care to preach eternal wrath and its terrors. This
is a cruel mercy, for they ruin souls by hiding from them their ruin! If they
need try to sew without a needle, I cannot help it, but I do not mean to be so
foolish myself! My needle may be old-fashioned, but it is sharp and when it
carries with it the silken thread of the Gospel, I am sure good work is done by
it!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3383

“All the burdens that may devolve upon you through the toils of life, the
calamities of the world, or the visitations of Providence, cannot equal the load
of sin—for this is a burden that oppresses the conscience, crushes the heart and
paralyzes every faculty of the soul.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3537

“Thus, you see, in the bread and the wine, in the bread and wine separated, in
the bread broken and the wine poured out, in the two emblems put on a table— and
in these two being so partaken of that they become united with the fabric of our
body—we set forth the whole mystery of the death of Jesus Christ to ourselves.
May the Spirit of God help us to truly do this!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3338

“No big words of ready talkers, no polished periods, no gift of prayer will ever
be so acceptable to the Lord Jesus Christ as the simple piety that graces the
fireside, that adorns the private and the public life of the Believer. ‘You are
My friends if you do whatever I command you.’ Practically to prove that Jesus
Christ is your Lord is the highest service that you can, any of you, render to
Him!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3437

“If we mourn our imperfections and lack of spotless holiness, our very sighing
and crying are proofs of heavenly life and salvation! The heart is clean, and
the course of the soul is heavenward when the heart can never be satisfied with
anything short of perfect holiness.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3370

“He [God] would bring Peter to repentance and He bade a rooster to crow. It was
a strange preacher, but it was as good as a dean of a cathedral to the Apostle!
Means may seem to be absolutely ridiculous, yet God makes use of the things that
are not, as though they were!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3498

“There have been many messages like circulars from God to us, but the Gospel,
faithfully preached, is a private and personal communication.”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3455

“A Negro, who was noted for his great earnestness in prayer, was once asked how
it was that, whenever he prayed, he seemed to be so earnest, and he said,
‘Because I always have an errand when I go to the King! I always have an errand.
I go to Him knowing that I need something, and I ask Him for it, and I stop till
He gives it to me. And if He does not give it to me, I ask Him again and again,
for I know what I am doing.’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3537

“Depend upon it, faith that is never tried is not faith! It must, sooner or
later, be tested. God does not create useless things. He intends that the faith
which He gives should have its test, and should glorify His name.”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3478

“Oh, Brothers and Sisters, this world seems so little when we think of the world
to come! Now, you who have been envious of the rich, you little think how soon
they will be as poor as you! You who have sometimes thought how richly you were
favored—think how fame is nothing but a breath—and how soon it is gone!”—Volume
59, Sermon #3346

“Next to having Christ, a real longing after Him is one of the most precious
gifts of the Holy Spirit.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3339

“Oh, may it be a blessed night to some of you while you are here! Pray for it,
people of God! ‘The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.’
Let your prayer go up that souls here may so hear the Word of the Gospel of
salvation as being a great message from God and, therefore, may hear it with all
their hearts and so listen to it that it may be salvation unto them according to
the Master’s promise, ‘Incline your ears and come unto Me: hear and your souls
shall live.’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3357

“Brothers and Sisters, we bless God that the day is coming
whenweshallloveHimbestofa. This tenement of our body is falling away by degrees.
These fetters of the flesh are rusting off. We shall soon be free and when the
emancipated spirit shall see Him without a veil to hide Him, then shall our love
to Him be perfected!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3398 “Do not stint yourself! Enlarge
your desire! Open your mouth wide and He will fill it! He gives you carte
blanche—ask for what you will! He puts it before you, ‘Delight yourself also in
the Lord, and He will give you the desire of your heart.’ So may it be to us,
according to our faith, and His shall be the glory!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3537

“I commend to Him in my earnest prayer some of you who are very familiar with my
voice and to whom it is as useless as familiar! You will never be brought to
Christ by me! I fear God will never give me your souls! For these many years
have I labored for them, and they have not been given me. Well, good Master,
call them by some other means, only bring then and grant that this very night
their conscience may be awakened by thoughts which You, Yourself, shall suggest,
and they may come to You.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3498

“What will be your eternal doom if you pass out of this world as soon you must,
without being sprinkled with the blood of Christ and forgiven your iniquities?
Jesus knows the terrors of the world to come! He describes the torments of Hell.
He sees your danger. He warns you. He pities you—He sends His messengers to
counsel you. He bids me say to the very chief of sinners, ‘Come unto Me, and I
will give you rest.’ ‘Only return unto Me and confess your iniquity, and I will
have mercy upon you,’ says the Lord. May God grant that the compassion of Christ
may be seen in your case.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3438

“By this you shall know whether you are Christ’s or not—when you have
opportunity to return[to your sin]—if you don’t return, that shall prove you are
His.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3478

“But, dear Friends, since it is so desirable to be ready to depart, it cannot be
inexpedient sometimes to talk about it—and on my part the more so, because there
is a proneness in all our minds to start aside from that grave topic which, as
God shall help us, shall be our subject this evening—preparation for the great
hereafter!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3538

“You may praise the Lord, you know, by singing—and what a delightful employment
that is! I sometimes wish we all knew how to sing. It is very well for us to
sing our best, but that best might be a great deal better. Our Moravian friends
can, nearly all of them, sing, and if you were to go to their settlement you
would find all of them able to join in the sacred song. It is miserable work
where there are two or three fellows in white surplices who get up to praise.
God, or where there is a big machine out of which the music is brought. I
suppose the Lord does have mercy upon such folly, but how there can be anything
like spiritual worship coming from a box of pipes I cannot understand!”—Volume
59, Sermon #3375

“You cannot get a harvest if you are afraid of disturbing the soil, nor can you
save souls if you never warn them of Hell fire. We must tell the sinner what God
has revealed about sin, righteousness and judgment to come.”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3383 “There must be something very rotten in the state of the man’s life who
loves not some seasons of solitude. Some of us are less alone when we are alone,
and most at home even when others count themselves abroad.”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3493

“My having the faith which works by love implies that I am a new creature! Now
some of you have been puzzling yourselves about whether you have been
born-again, whether you are new creatures. Have you got the faith that works by
love? If so, you are a new creature, for you never saw a man in a natural state
who had faith that works by love!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3454

“My manner must be hurried and should it seem feeble, Brothers and Sisters, I
cannot help it. If you get fellowship with Christ, I care little for the merits
of my sermon, or the perils of your criticism. One thing, alone, I crave, “Let
Him kiss us with the kisses of His mouth”—then shall my soul be well content,
and so will yours be also! ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3480

“According to this Book, we are dead by nature in trespasses and sins—not some
of us, but all of us—the best as well as the worst! We are all dead in
trespasses and sins. Shall dead men sit at the feasts of the Eternal God? Shall
there be corpses at the celestial banquets? Shall the pure air of the New
Jerusalem be defiled with the putrefaction of iniquity? It must not, it cannot
be. We must be quickened—we must be taken from the corruption of our old nature
into the incorruption of the new nature, receiving the incorruptible Seed which
lives and abides forever.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3538

“I give myself up to Christ and to Christ’s religion. I do not mind speaking
upon politics when they touch upon Christianity. I do not mind helping on the
common cause of philanthropy, or any work for the good of my follow men—but to
no work do I give myself with my whole heart and spirit but to that of spreading
abroad the knowledge of Christ’s name!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3411 “Unrepented sin
is unforgivable sin. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3418

“Brothers and Sisters, the Grace of God has not come into us merely to keep us
away from some few notable vices, but to deliver us altogether from the power of
darkness! And if I can sometimes go into sin—just occasionally by way of
pleasure—it proves that I am a stranger to the deliverance which Jesus Christ
gives to His really called and regenerated people!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3366 “The
ground of a Christian’s faith is not moved in the least degree by the time of
his spiritual day, or the state of wealth in his experience. Could we sit
forever on the top of Tabor, we would be no safer than if we were made to dwell
always in the Valley of Humiliation, longing for brighter days. Christ! Christ!
Christ! In Him we are safe!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3370

“The Grace of God constrains men to become Christians, but yet only constrains
them consistently with the laws of their mind! The freedom of the will is as
great a truth as is the Predestination of God. The Grace of God, without
violating our wills, makes men willing in the day of God’s power—and they give
themselves to Jesus Christ. You cannot be a Christian against your will!”—Volume
60, Sermon #3411

“I know every Christian here, if he could state his experience, would tell you
that the Word of God never came with power to his soul until it came right to
him as though he were the only sinner, and the Gospel were meant for him above
all others.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3498

“When Mohamed would charm the world into the belief that he was the Prophet of
God, the Heaven he pictured was not at all the Heaven of holiness and
spirituality. His was a Heaven of unbridled sensualism, where all the passions
were to be enjoyed without let or hindrance for endless years! Such a Heaven
that sinful men would like—therefore, such the Heaven that Mohamed painted for
them, and promised to them!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3538

“Jesus would not have them [His disciples] so spiritually-minded as to forget
that the poor have flesh and blood that require sustenance—and they need to eat
and to drink, to be housed and clothed—the Christian’s charity must not lie in
words only, but in deeds.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3438

“Be not disheartened, my Beloved in the Lord! I tell you, whether you are able
to believe it or not, that if your heart is this night cold as the center of an
iceberg, yet if Christ shall come to you, your soul shall be as coals of juniper
that have a most vehement flame!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3480

“The history of faith is of small importance compared with the quality of
faith!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3363

“There is no Heaven for him who has not been prepared for it by a work of Grace
in his soul. So necessary is this preparation—a preparation forus, and a
preparation inus. And if we ever have such a preparation, beyond all question me
must have it on this sideofour death. It can only be obtained in this world. The
moment one breathes his last, it is all fixed and settled.”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3538

“Your church attendance and your chapel attendance have only increased your
responsibilities if you have rejected the Savior!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3498 “As
long as God exists, the love of God shall be shed abroad in us and our hearts
shall continually love Him in return.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3398

“It is not for the minister of God to smooth the stones, or pare down any of the
angles of the Gospel! He should be tender as a lamb, but yet bold as a lion. It
is as much as his soul is worth to keep back a single word! He may have to
answer for the blood of souls if he trims in the slightest particular.”—Volume
61, Sermon #3455

“When the thief was dying, he did not say, ‘John, pray for me.’ John was there.
He did not look on the mother of Christ and say, ‘Holy Virgin, pray for me.’ He
might have said it. He did not turn to any of the Apostles, or the holy company
that were around the Cross. He knew which way to look and, turning his dying
eyes to Him who suffered on the center Cross, he had no prayer but this, ‘Lord,
remember me.’ ‘Tis all you need! Pray to God, and God alone, for from Him alone
must mercy come to you! ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3539

“Oh, if people did but know how simple a thing believing is, surely they would
believe! Alas, they do not know it, and it becomes all the more difficult to
them because in itself it is so easy! The difficulty of believing lies in there
being no difficulty in it!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3383

“If you believe Him, He will tell you that He came into the world to suffer for
the sins of all who trust Him—that He actually did bear all the punishment which
was due from the hand of God to all the sinners who will trust in Him—and that
God is so rigidly just, severely righteous, yet infinitely gracious in the
pardon of those who will trust in Christ!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3352

“The pardon of a sinner is granted at once! It will be given to any of you
tonight who accept it—yes, and given you in such a way that you shall never lose
it! Once forgiven, you shall be forgiven forever, and none of the consequences
of sin shall be visited upon you. You shall be absolved unreservedly and
eternally, so that when the heavens are on a blaze, and the Great White Throne
is set up, and the last great assize is held, you may stand boldly before the
Judgment Seat and fear no accusation, for the forgiveness which God, Himself,
vouchsafes, He will never revoke!”— “We cannot have a richer source of
consolation than this, that they who have fallen asleep in Christ have not
perished—they have not lost life, but they have gained the fullness of
it!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3499

“‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’ The heart that is
purified with the celestial flame of Divine Love is the heart that can see
God!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3481

“The masses of priests are fictions, without the shadow of Divine Authority.
“Purgatory,” or “Pick-Purse,” as old Latimer used to call it, is an invention
for making fat larders for priests and monks! The Scriptures of the Truth of God
give it no countenance. The Word of God says, “He that is holy, let him be holy
still; he that is filthy, let him be filthy still.” Such as you are when death
comes to you, such will judgment find you, and such will the eternal reward or
the eternal punishment leave you, world without end!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3538

“He knew that we should be very forgetful—and He was moved with compassion with
our forgetfulness when He instituted the blessed Supper, and we can sit around
the Table and break bread, and pour forth the wine in remembrance of
Him.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3438

“Now, suppose I am a great sinner. Well, let me seek to get nearer to God for
that very reason, for there is great salvation provided for great sinners! I am
very weak and unfit for the great service which He has imposed upon me—let me
not, therefore, shun the service or shun my God, but reckon that the weaker I
am, the more room there is for God to get the glory!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3407

“To have no conversions is a very dreadful thing, but to be at ease without
seeing conversions is at all times more dreadful! I could bear a suspension in
the increase of the Church, I think, with some degree of peace of mind if I
found all the members distressed and disturbed about it!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3376

“All things considered, I know of no meditation that is likely to be more
profitable than a frequent consideration of the rest which remains for the
people of God.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3499

“The Lord thinks as much of one of His people as if there were nobody else for
Him to think upon! Poor needy one, the Lord thinks upon you as intensely as if
you were the only being now existing! The Lord is able to concentrate His whole
mind upon any one point without dividing that mind—He has such an infinite
capacity that each one of us may be the center of God’s thoughts—and yet He will
not be forgetting any other beloved one!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3345

“To take away a heart of stone and give a heart of flesh is a miracle. Man
cannot do it—if he attempts it—it shall be to his own shame and confusion. The
Lord must make us anew!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3538

“Ah, there are those who will always repress anything like Divine enthusiasm and
yet, mark you, the brightest ages of the Church have been those in which men
consecrated to God have risen above the dictates of common prudence and have
dared for Christ what others of a cooler temperament could have not
dared!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3481

“It is a good old saying, “If your preaching is to go to the heart, it must come
from the heart.” It must first have moved our souls before we can ever hope to
move the souls of others!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3551

“Jesus Christ said, ‘I thirst,’ and in this He says to every sick girl, and
every sick child, and every sick one throughout the world, ‘The Master, who is
now in Heaven, but who once suffered on earth, despises not the tears of the
sufferers, but has pity on them on their beds of sickness.’”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3385

“The withholding of any part of a sermon which should have been delivered,
should he [the preacher] refrain himself lest he offend anyone, may bring down
upon him a condemnation that he knows not how to escape—and he may have
throughout eternity to bewail that he had God’s message and did not deliver
it!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3455

“Jesus Christ has consecrated the world by His Presence and wherever man chooses
to worship, there is a house for God.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3399 “From first to
last, Jesus Christ has to be the Author and the Finisher of our salvation, or it
never would have been begun, and it never would have been completed!”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3538

“There is no place more terrible to be lost than from the shadow of a pulpit!
The more plain the Gospel, the more sure your ruin if you reject it! The more
earnest the ministry that comes to you with its notes of warning and invitation,
the more horrible your overthrow if your ears refuse the words of Jehovah’s
love! Tonight, I pray you—and I think I speak in God’s name—cast in your lot
with Christ and with God’s people!”— “Whether there will be a necessity for
eating and drinking in Heaven, we will not say, for we are not told, but anyhow
it is met by the text, “The Lamb that is in the midst of the Throne shall feed
them”—if they need food—“and lead them to living fountains of water” if they
need to drink.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3499

“Nothing will endure even the test of time, but the Spirit’s own work upon the
heart and conscience! Anything that comes of man, and not of God, will as surely
disappear as the smoke of the chimney when the wind blows it away, or as the
hoar frost of the morning when the sun has fully risen with his fervent
heat.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3439

“There is a poverty which the poets love—it dwells in a thatched cottage whose
porch is overgrown with woodbine. Perhaps if the poets had rheumatism through
the wind blowing through the decaying walls, they might not sing of it quite so
sweetly. But in London we have a poverty that has neither porch nor
woodbine—poverty that has no cottage, but a single room where scarcely the
decencies of life can be preserved. Beloved, it you have to suffer from this
gloom, remember that the Son of Man had not where to lay His head.”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3370

“Think, Beloved, of what fitness for Heaven is. To be fit for Heaven a man must
be perfect! Go, you who think you can prepare yourselves—be perfect for a day!
The vanity of your own mind, the provocation of this treacherous world, and the
subtle temptation of the devil would make short work of your empty pretensions!
You would be blown about like chaff. Creature perfection, indeed! Was ever
anything so absurd? Men have boasted of attaining it, but their very boasts have
proved that they possessed it not!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3538

“I wish that some who have been professors for years had as clear a faith as the
thief—but they are too often confused between Law and Gospel, works and
Grace—while this poor felon trusted in nothing but the Savior and His mercy.
Blessed be God for clear faith! I rejoice to see it in such a case as this, so
suddenly worked and yet so perfect—so outspoken, so intelligent, so thoroughly
restful!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3363

“We do not find ministers often preaching about this Eternal Purpose, but we do
find the Apostle Paul often writing about it. And the saints of old were
accustomed to dwell upon it with very much delight.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3439

“By your enjoyments in the past, my Brothers and Sisters—by those ravishing
moments when your souls have burned within you with intense delight—ask Him to
come to you again! Beseech Him to favor you tonight with this refreshment. And
mark you, that prayer need not be a selfish one, for all the strength that is
gained in communion with Christ will afterwards be spent in the service of
Christ!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3481

“It is from the good will of God that every good thing which comes to us takes
its rise. Election is according to the pleasure of His good will. He chose us
because He would choose us—because He had a good will towards us. Redemption
springs from that good will. What else but good will could give the Savior to
such unworthy ones as we were?”—Volume 62, Sermon #3540

“Nearness to Christ is an education. Get near to Jesus and you will find that
the Corpus Christi is the true college! He who knows the body of Christ has got
the body of theology, the body of divinity—the true theology of the Word of
God.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3456 “There is no faculty I know of that might not be
cheerfully surrendered if the surrender of it would deprive us of sin!”—Volume
62, Sermon #3499

“Why, do not even some of you come merely because it is the custom to go
somewhere, or because it looks respectable, as if the Lord’s own worship were to
follow and honor the fashion of the day? This is all mischievous and rotten as a
motive. If I did not think it were some good to me to come to worship, or that
it was my duty to God to do it, do you think I would do it to please my
neighbors? No! Let my neighbors please themselves! The honest, upright man in
these things remembers that religion is a personalthing and that to be the mere
slave of fashion and custom of others is sinful degradation!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3357

“Our preservation in that life, our growth in it and all the blessings with
which God loads that life to make it blessed—all these are fruits of His good
will! You cannot find a single blessing that comes to us by the way of merit. We
may say of every blessing, it is according to His loving kindness and His tender
mercies.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3540

“So we will say that the first essential of a truly healthy Christianity is to
love Christ! And the second is to love Christ! And the third is to love
Christ!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3481

“Glory be to God, the privileges of the Covenant of Grace are not only matters
of hope and surmise, but they are matters of faith, conviction and
assurance!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3418 “As long as a Church is satisfied to be
barren, she shall be barren! But when she cries out in the anguish of her
spirit, then shall Jehovah remember her. He hears the cries of His people, but
when she will not cry and is at ease in desolate circumstances, then the
desolation shall continue and the sorrows be multiplied!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3376

“If Divine Grace has kindled a fire in you, it is that your fellow men may burn
with the same flame! If the eternal fount has filled you with living water, it
is that out of the midst of you should flow rivers of living water! You are
blessed that you may bless—whom have you blessed?”—Volume 59, Sermon #3367

“If you are in the mood of Thomas, perhaps you may be insisting upon some signs
and wonders, as he did. Know you that the Master can give you His own sign,
unfold His own wonder and bestow upon you such a blessing that your heart shall
scarcely have room enough to receive it! His tenderness and His care baffle all
our thoughts and expectations!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3541

“We cannot fully exhibit the spirit of Jesus Christ till we have learned that we
must carry out in every place, and in every sphere, the spirit of His
religion.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3399 “The blood of Jesus applied, the Presence of
Jesus enjoyed, and the Love of God fully revealed—these are the causes of the
bliss of the saved in Heaven!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3499 “The Truth, as we learn
it in the Word of God, is most uncomplimentary to man—it rolls him in the very
dust, ranks him with the worms, makes nothing of him—yes, less than
nothing!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3457

“Every word which God has spoken to His people by way of promise is as true
today as when it was first uttered by the Prophet who was originally sent with
it. And if this world should exist through tens of thousands of years, every
promise will still have the raven locks of its youth about it.”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3439

“Pray often, Beloved, for sin will tempt often. Cry mightily, for Satan will
tempt mightily. Innumerable snares will he place in your path—let your countless
entreaties outnumber his devices. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3482 “You are not to
expect the Lord Jesus to speak with you in any other way than by the written
Word applied to the soul by the Holy Spirit. Look for no new revelation! Drive
out the very idea as deceptive!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3336

“Think not lightly of sin and its punishment, lest you come to think lightly of
Christ and what He suffered to redeem you from your guilt! The cry, ‘I thirst,’
is part of the Substitutionary work which Christ performed when He thirsted,
because, otherwise, sinners would have thirsted forever and have been denied all
the pleasure, joy and peace of Heaven.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3385

“As you cut that loaf of bread, each slice of it is flavored with His good will.
When you put on your garments tomorrow morning, though they are those in which
you exercise your toilsome labors, yet are they tokens of God’s good will as
much as those coats of skins which God gave to our first parents! Yes, Beloved,
sitting here tonight, this air we breathe, the power to breathe it and the
health which enabled us to come up to the House of Prayer, and this House,
itself, and the ears with which we hear the words, and the good tidings which
are given us to hear—all these are of His good will, and are the sweeter because
we recognize the favor of God in them!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3540

“I believe that any Christian Church that becomes divided in feeling, so that
the members have no true love, one to another, that lack of unity is an act of
horrible supplication! It does as much as say, ‘Depart from us, You Spirit of
unity! You only dwell where there is love—we will not have love! We will break
Your rest—get away from us!’”—Volume 60, Sermon #3407

“Jesus is gone from us into Heaven, but He continues to reign and rule in our
midst by His Vicegerent, the Holy Spirit! Let us honor Him. Let us rely upon
Him. Let us earnestly seek Him. Let it be ours to declare Him, those of us who
have to speak, and yours to receive Him, those of you who have to hear!”—Volume
62, Sermon #3519

“I do not believe any Christian works too hard, and, as a rule, if those who
kill themselves in Christ’s service were buried in a cemetery by themselves, it
would be a long while before it would get filled. Work hard for Christ.”—Volume
62, Sermon #3499

“Thomas was the first Divine who ever taught the Deity of Christ from His
wounds! Nor has every Divine since then been able to see the Deity of Christ in
His wounded Humanity risen from the dead. This Thomas did. He declared the
proper Humanity of Christ when he touched Him and he declared His proper Deity
when he avowed Him to be both Lord and God!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3541 “The
simplest Sunday school child reading through the Old Testament can see that the
Christ of the New Testament is He of whom the Seers and the Prophets spoke in
vision by the power of the Spirit! But here was human nature left to itself with
the Book in its hand, and totally unable to decipher the evidences or recognize
the Messiah!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3457

“Sin, indeed, will only become more exceedingly sinful the more we strive to
bridle it, unless we cry unto the Strong for strength!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3352
“As many as are led by the Spirit, they are the sons of God, and all who are the
sons of God are led by the Spirit of God! ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3483 “Men little
know the ways in which the Almighty can find them out and bring the evidence
that convicts out of the devices that were intended to cover their sin!”—Volume
62, Sermon #3500 “Intense feeling commonly finds expression in few words.
Silence is sometimes more thrilling than speech. ‘My Lord and my God’ is the
breathing of a contrite heart relieved in having found the Grace it
needs!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3541

“You cannot help a man if you know nothing about him and, therefore, the Lord
sends you into many a thick wood and dark valley that you may meet with His own
redeemed in their wanderings. If you did not know the wilderness, how could you
act as a guide through it? So it is for usefulness that God calls us there—and
as Jesus went there to save, let us learn from Him the great Grace of
self-sacrifice!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3370

“We are in the habit of calling the Bible, ‘the Word of God.’ I suppose that is
accurate enough, but the Word of God is not the Bible—it is Jesus
Christ.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3439

“There are thousands of prayers that are insults to Heaven, but where the Spirit
of God is really at work, the man who wants to be pure, prays sincerely, and
cries mightily to God for purity! And nor will he be content to tolerate
anything—either in his disposition or in his daily life—which would be
inconsistent with the perfect holiness of God.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3482

“Sin is not remitted by reformation. Though you should suddenly become
immaculate as angels (not that such a thing is possible to you, for the
Ethiopian cannot change his skin, nor the leopard his spots), your reformations
could make no atonement to God for the sins that are past in the days that you
have transgressed against Him. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3418

“Were your imagination to stretch her wings and soar ever so far beyond the
narrow bounds of space, she would weary long before she reached the fullness of
God which dwells bodily in our Lord Jesus Christ!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3385

“What though with mingled cruelty and rage men attack the Gospel of Christ, they
strive in vain to thwart the Divine Decree! In ways mysterious and unknown to
us, the Lord asserts His own supremacy. He reigns even where the rulers conspire
and the people rebel against Him! ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3542

“If there is obedience to the Light of God received, that obedience is a fruit
of the Holy Spirit! Not merely the knowledge and the acquiescence in the
knowledge of God’s will, but the power to carry out that will comes from Him,
and from Him only!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3483

“If a man could live a thousand years, the sins of his first year would be as
fresh in the memory of the Almighty as those of the last. Eternity itself will
never wash out a sin! Flow on, you ages, but the scarlet spot is on the sand.
Flow on, still, in mighty streams, but the damning spot is still there. Neither
time nor eternity can cleanse it. Only one thing can remove sin. The lapse of
time cannot. Let not any of you be so foolish as to hope it will.”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3500

“…it is because ministers say so little about the consecration of their
substance to God’s cause that this most important part of true piety is often
treated with levity—and with some even by disgust!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3442 “I
suppose priests are human, though I sometimes question it. Surely, if ever a man
comes to be near akin to a devil, it must be when he assumes to be a priest, and
to have the power to open and to shut the gates of Heaven and Hell!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3457

“Brothers and Sisters, we ought to talk more about God’s wondrous works
aswefindtheminHolyScripture. Do you read them? Alas, in how many a case the
Bible is the least read book in the house! I am inclined to think that although
there may be more Bibles in England than any other book, there is less of Bible
reading than anything else in literature!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3399 “The very
essence of obedience to God lies in the heart, so the heart must be set upon
obedience! It must be a sincere, willing, cheerful obedience, or else it is not
a genuine submission to the Almighty.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3482 “God instructs
His people to mount aloft by stirring up their nests.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3335

“The good will of Him that dwelt in the bush is a greater blessing than all the
blessings in the world—what if I say in Heaven, itself?..You remember how the
old Puritan put it? He had been rich and then was brought to poverty, and he
said he didn’t find much difference, for, he said, when he was rich, he found
God in all, and now that he was poor, he found all in God! Perhaps the latter is
the higher state of the two.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3540

“Let me ask whether you ever laid to heart the teeming millions of the heathen
populations who are dying without a Savior? If you do this, and if all of us do
it, it cannot be long before God shall look upon the earth and send a shower of
Divine Grace, for that anxiety in Christian hearts is the sound of the coming of
abundance of rain [of revival]!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3376

“And still, Beloved, He [the Holy Spirit] is in the Church and we have
fellowship with Him! We commune with Him! We can bear our witness that He makes
intercession for us with groans that cannot be uttered, that He helps our
infirmities and performs for us a thousand offices of love which make us feel,
experimentally and consciously, that the agent of such things is a very
Person!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3519

“No man ever goes wrong who is guided by the Spirit, and no man ever attains
unto true holiness but as the result of the work of the Holy Spirit upon his
understanding and his whole character.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3483 “The world still
clamors, “Crucify!” Go forth, you sons of God, and proclaim the coronation of
the Christ who once wore the crown of thorns!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3457 “A drop
of Grace gives more honor than a world of fame. One spark of love of Christ is
more ennobling to your heart into which it falls than though it were all ablaze
with the stars and orders of all the knighthoods of the kingdom!”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3540 “It seems to me as if the Lamb of God, slain from before the
foundation of the world, had in the purpose of God, from the foundation of the
world, covered all His people’s sins. Therefore, we are accepted in the Beloved,
and dear to the Father’s heart.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3500

“If you could once get the love of God shed abroad in your heart, you would be
flavored by it—and when it is once shed abroad there it will be there to all
eternity! There will be no fear of its being taken away from us when it is once
fully poured out in all its glorious efficacy into our hearts.”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3339

“Never think of the Church of God as if she were in danger. If you do, you will
be like Uzza—you will put forth your hand to steady the Ark and provoke the Lord
to anger against you!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3439 “I do not believe in a perfect
sanctification which allows a man to lay up so much treasure on earth, while so
many works for the Lord Jesus need his help.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3482

“Jesus Christ, Himself, cannot save us apart from His blood. It is a supposition
which only folly has ever made but we must refute even the hypothesis of folly
when it affirms that the example of Christ can put away human sin, that the Holy
life of Jesus Christ has put the race on such a good footing with God that now
He can forgive its faults and its transgression. Not so! Not the holiness of
Jesus! Not the life of Jesus! Not the death of Jesus, but the BLOOD of Jesus
only, for “Without shedding of blood there is no remission.” ”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3418

“The soul full of joy takes a still higher step when it clothes itself with
praise. Such a heart takes to itself no glory, for it is dressed in gratitude
and so hides itself. Nothing is seen of the flesh and its self-exaltation, since
the garment of praise hides the pride of man. ”—Volume 59, Sermon #3349

“Note well the promise, ‘Your eyes shall see the King in His beauty.’ Does not
this suggest to us that the King has been seen, though not in His beauty? He was
seen on earth as the Prophet foretold, ‘despised and rejected of men, a Man of
Sorrows and acquainted with grief.’ And as seen then, we are told there is no
beauty that we should desire Him. There was a time when many were astonished at
Him. His visage was more marred than any man, and His form more than the sons of
men—that was in the day of His humiliation.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3542

“With regard to our Lord’s death, there are some who hang up pictures on the
wall—they think the use of the crucifix and so on to be proper. I find no
teaching of that kind in the Word of God! I do find that too often such things
lead to idolatry.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3501 “If any man would know the will of
God by the Spirit, let him come to the Word that is written here—let him search
this to know what is God’s mind, for, ‘holy men of old spoke as they were moved
by the Spirit.’ We are not to expect new Revelation! The old is perfect and
complete. There is a curse pronounced upon whoever should add to it or take from
it. Let us accept it as the complete mind of God, so far, at any rate, as He
sees fit to reveal it to us. The Holy Spirit speaks to us through the
Word!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3483

“The love of God makes poor men truly rich, little men supremely great, the
despised to be honorable and the nothing to be lifted up among the mighty! I
wish you, then, Beloved, God’s condescending love to ennoble you—‘the good will
of Him that dwelt in the bush’ [Deuteronomy 33:16].”—Volume 62, Sermon #3540

“God loves us to believe Him and to plead earnestly with Him, for even if He
does not think it best to grant our request, He will be pleased for us to go on
to number two and, with full submission cry, ‘Nevertheless, not as I will, but
as You will.’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3370 “‘Other sheep have I,’ said Christ, ‘who
are not of this fold: them also must I bring,’ and, therefore, do we preach,
because they must be brought!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3358

“As to those who are satisfied that they are perfect in spirit, soul and body,
we wait for their last testament—to see what their wills look like when they
die! A man who is perfect before the Lord lays out his substance for God’s
cause, depend on that! He does not merely attend conferences, and talk of good
things, of spirituality of mind and sanctification by faith, and all those
glittering subjects, but he lives for Jesus in some practical work and gives
himself up—and his substance, too—for the honor of the Redeemer’s name and the
diffusion of the glorious Gospel!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3482

“It is not every knock at Mercy’s gate that will open it—he who would prevail
must handle the knocker well and dash it down again, and again, and again! As
the old Puritan says, ‘Cold prayers ask for a denial, but it is red-hot prayers
which prevail.’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3344 “God grant us a refreshing season at
the Communion Table—may we have the company of the King, Himself!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3457 “It is the preacher’s business to set forth Christ
Crucified—evidently crucified among you. The three ways that God has ordained of
representing the death of Christ are the Word read, the Word preached, and this
blessed ordinance of the Supper of the Lord.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3501

“A shepherd’s beauty lies much in his simple garb. A mother’s beauty—very much
of it is to be seen as she appears in the center of a happy and lovely family.
So, beyond all doubt, the beauty of Christ will be most conspicuous when all His
saints are with Him!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3542

“Some Christian people never talk thoroughly good Gospel talk unless somebody is
present in whose esteem it is likely to raise them, or until they get into such
company as they suppose will relish it—and then they feel compelled to
accommodate themselves to the occasion.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3399

“Get near to God—acquaint yourself with Him and be at peace! The remedy for all
trouble is dwelling near to God!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3444

“Yes, within these mortal bodies does the Godhead dwell! He has made our bodies
to be the temples of the Holy Spirit. And what a favor is this, for this
indwelling is the witness of the Spirit within us, the perpetual seal of Divine
Grace. God has put into us a new life, a life like His own—He has created in us
a superior principle, unknown to flesh and blood, for we are not born-again of
the will of man, nor of the will of the flesh, but of the will of God! A
supernatural life has been implanted in us which cannot die because it is born
of God!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3341

“Nothing can be more un-Christian than for a Christian to despise a Jew! Nothing
is more unlike the spirit of our Master than when you laugh at the Jew and speak
of him with contempt. Remember that the King of kings was a Jew!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3386

“Now it has been a matter of fact that when the Jesuit missionaries went to
China and converted a great many to what they called ‘the Christian faith,’ they
never mentioned the fact that Christ died. For years they concealed it, lest the
people should be shocked! Now we, on the other hand, put that first and
foremost! We have no other Christianity than this—that Christ died and rose
again—and we cannot come to the Lord’s Table without showing it.”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3501

“Unholy creatures will never see a holy God! It is not possible! Oh, Sinners,
what do you think of this? You must be changed! You must be cleansed! You must
be converted! The Holy Spirit must regenerate you! You must be born-again!
Otherwise you cannot walk uprightly or stand in the Presence of the King in His
beauty.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3542 “It is a blessing to be a member of a kind,
loving, happy family—but it is an unspeakable blessing to be a member of the
family of Christ and adopted into the family of God!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3371

“Yes, you that seek to be justified by your good works, you may pant, and
strive, and wear out your lives in energetic failures, but success is entirely
impossible! You cannot thus, while you are what you are, produce a righteousness
that God can accept, seeing that you have already sinned.”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3458

“Living in sin is the germ of living forever in Hell! Believing in Jesus is the
root of rejoicing forever in glorious immortality!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3346
“Silence is the thaw of the soul, though it is the frost of the mouth—and when
the soul flows most freely, it feels the inadequacy of the narrow channel of the
lips for its great water floods.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3363

“A man that gets money by squeezing others, by oppressing the poor by hard
bargains, shall not enjoy the Beatific Vision. If you buy and sell, and get gain
by lying, by false pretences, by tricks of trade—yes, even by the customs that
are commonly allowed, though they would look fraudulent if thoroughly
exposed—you shall have no inheritance in the Kingdom of God!”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3542

“We have heard of some in these days who are always preaching a GlorifiedChrist.
We wish them such success as their ministry is likely to bring, but for us, we
preach a Crucified Christ—‘Christ and Him Crucified,’ for it is here, after all,
that the salvation of the sinner lies! Christ Glorified is precious enough—oh,
how unspeakably precious to a soul that is saved!—but first and foremost to a
dying world it is Christ upon the Cross that we have to declare!”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3501

“Oh, how wise it is to say that when we are making plans and promises, ‘If God
wills.’ [Acts 18:21] The short way is to put a little ‘D.V.,’ which means that
you are ashamed to say, ‘If God wills.’”—Volume 61, Sermon #3447

“May we see—as we have seen it in this Church—may we see it renewed among us—may
we see it in every part of Christendom, in every Church in London, in every
Church throughout the whole British Empire, in America and wherever there are
Believers—a deep and awful anxiety for souls that will not let Believers be
quiet, but will give them to exercise an incessant pleading with God which will
stir up His strength and cause Him to make bare His arm!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3376

“May our prayers spring out of our Scriptural studies—may our acquaintance with
the Word be such that we shall be qualified to pray a Daniel prayer!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3484 “The righteous have their troubles. ‘Many are the afflictions of
the righteous.’ But there is a sacred art which Jesus teaches, which enables the
Christian to rejoice in tribulation and to triumph in the midst of
distress!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3352

“‘Come unto Me’ is the whole Gospel. ‘Come unto Me.’ Mix nothing with it.
Acknowledge no other obedience. Obey Christ and Him, alone. Come unto Me. You
cannot go in two opposite directions. Let your tottering footsteps bend their
way to Him alone. Mix anything with Him, and the possibility of your salvation
is gone. ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3502

“Do you think when the ungodly man repeats a prayer, and his heart is absent,
that God accepts the prayer? I tell you that that prayer is in itself a sin and
a great provocation against the Most High!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3458

“’What is the latest news,’ said a certain squire to a companion, accustomed to
hunt with him, who had come up to the Metropolis—‘what is the latest news you
have heard in London?’ ‘The latest news, and the best news I have ever heard,’
was the quick reply, ‘is that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.’
‘Tom,” he said, ‘I do think you are mad!’ ‘William,’ said Tom, ‘I know youare. I
only wish you were cured of your insanity as, by the Grace of God, I have
been!’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3542

“Growth in faith is desirable and it is so, first of all, because unbelief is a
very great sin and where there is little faith there is evidently lurking
unbelief and, consequently, sin—and no true Christian would like to be easy
while he is daily committing sin. It is not possible for us to be weak in faith
without transgressing. Weak faith may bring us a blessing, but weakness in faith
is an evil—and to indulge weakness in faith and not to struggle out of it would
only be a willful increase of guilt!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3384

“Christian people should be acquainted with the history of the Church—if not
with the Church of the past, certainly with the Church of today. We make
ourselves acquainted with the position of the Prussian army and we will buy new
maps about once a week to see all the places and the towns. Should not
Christians make themselves acquainted with the position of Christ’s army and
revise their maps to see how the Kingdom of God is progressing in England, in
the United States, on the Continent, or in the mission stations throughout the
world?”—Volume 61, Sermon #3484 “It is a depth of Grace that He who made the
Heaven and the earth and who is infinitely great and glorious, should condescend
to come into anything like such a relation as this with His poor creatures whom
He has made and whose breath is in their nostrils. Oh, what a stoop—from the
highest loftiness of Glory—to call Himself a Husband to a worm!”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3419

“Remember, you cannot have a half of Christ. You cannot have Him as your
Redeemer, but not as your Ruler! You must take Him as He is. He is a Savior, but
He saves His people from their sins. Now, if you have ever seen Christ as your
Savior, you have seen beauty in Him. He is lovely in your eyes, for the
loveliest sight in the world to a sinner is His Savior!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3542

“All the glory of Redemption is greater than ever there could have been of
dishonor to God by sin! I believe that God is more honored by the world having
sinned, and having been restored by Christ, than He could have been if there had
never been sin upon this planet and if a perfectly sinless race had tenanted its
bounds!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3400

“One would suppose that when the Apostles first went out to preach, if the
religion of the Romish Church is that of the Scripture, they would have needed,
each of them, a wagon to carry with them the various paraphernalia necessary for
the celebration of their services!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3501

“I love that old Saxon word, ‘merry.’ Some are frightened at it. I heard
somebody the other day account it quite wicked to say, ‘A merry Christmas.’ Oh,
that we had merry days all the year round, especially if we could make merry
with such merriment as this [Luke 15:24]! Do begin to be merry. ”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3449

“Is not this the message we are told to circulate, ‘He that believes and is
baptized shall be saved’? Should you not, therefore, avow your faith and confess
your Lord in Baptism?…This seems to me, as I read the Word of God, to have been
the course with all the early Christians. They believed and were baptized. They
did not postpone or procrastinate, but no sooner were they Christians than they
confessed their Christianity in Baptism”—Volume 62, Sermon #3543

“Oh, some of you ungodly ones have tried to pray, but you have not bowed
yourselves. Proud prayers may knock their heads on mercy’s lintel, but they can
never pass through the portal! You cannot expect anything of God unless you put
yourself in the right place, that is, as a beggar at His footstool—then will He
hear you, but not until then.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3484

“You had Grace at first with which to struggle against the envying and every
other sin. You are now alarmed because the warfare of your spirit is so
protracted. ‘He gives more Grace’ to continue the struggle! As long as there is
one passion in your soul that dares to rise, there will be Grace in your soul to
answer!—Volume 61, Sermon #3459

“He [Christ] needed not our love to make Him rich! There was love enough in God
for Him and if He had willed it, He could have made a thousand races of nobler
creatures than ourselves, all of whom would have loved Him with the deepest
love!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3380 “You must, as a Christian, be all a Christian, or
nothing of a Christian! There is no such thing as dividing between God and the
devil, between righteousness and sin. The surrender must be without reserve and
without limit.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3411

“Christ is supreme. You will either have to submit to His scepter willingly, or
else to be broken by His iron rod like a potter’s vessel! Which shall it be? You
must either bow or be broken—make your choice. You must bend or break! God help
you to wisely resolve and gratefully relent.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3502

“There may be in the house where you live no lover of Jesus except yourself.
Take care that your conversation makes the rest know that you have been with
Jesus and have learned of Him!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3543 “There is one thing,
however, which we would say to mourners pressed down with guilt—whatever
heaviness you feel, it is no greater heaviness than sin ought to bring upon a
man, for it is an awful thing to have sinned against God.”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3349 “The real battle between the Papists and the Protestants turns on this—are
men saved by works, or are they saved by Grace?”—Volume 60, Sermon #3408

“The followers of Christ in these days seem to me to have forgotten a great part
of Christianity. How many of you would go tomorrow into a court of law and, if
you were called upon to do it, would take an oath, whereas if there is anything
taught in Scripture, it is expressly taught that you are not to swear at all,
neither by Heaven, nor by earth, nor by any other oath! If Christ ever delivered
a plain precept, it is this—and yet all denominations of Christians seem to have
cast it to the winds with the exception of the Society of Friends.”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3386“It is a great fault of some people in public prayer when they
repeat the name, ‘O Lord, O Lord, O Lord,’ so often—it often amounts to taking
God’s name in vain and is, indeed, a vain repetition! But when the reiteration
of that sacred name comes out of the soul, then it is no vain repetition—then it
cannot be repeated too often and is not open to anything like the criticism
which I used just now.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3484

“If we see our neighbor sin and rebuke him not when the opportunity offers, we
become partakers in his sin. Remember this—on such occasions it is our bounden
duty to speak on God’s behalf!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3543

“All outward, external religion, in which the heart does not join, so far from
being received by the Most High with approbation, must be viewed by Him with
utter abhorrence. How is it possible, then, for a man who loves not God to be
accepted before the King of Kings?”—Volume 61, Sermon #3458

“We are never so weak as when we think we are strong, and never so strong as
when we know we are weak and look out of ourselves to our God!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3371

“I believe that it will be the growing wonder in eternity to find out how
precious a Christ, how powerful, how Immutable—in a word, how Divine a Christ He
is in whom we have trusted! Only the Infinite can understand the Infinite. ‘God
only knows the love of God,’ and only the Father understands the Son.”—Volume
62, Sermon #3502

“The Church has now got all the conversions that she is qualified to get. God
always gives every Church as big a blessing as it is fit to have—and if it
qualifies itself for more—it shall have more! God treats His Churches as parents
treat their sons. They give them but little money when they are children—a penny
will do—but when they get to be young men, they shall have yet more. We have but
little because we are fit to possess and use but little. We are not faithful in
what is given to us—and if the one talent often lies wrapped in a napkin, how
can we expect to have five or ten entrusted to us?”—Volume 59, Sermon #3376

“Merely to do what is absolutely necessary for salvation is a mean, selfish
thing! To be always thinking about whether this or that is necessary to your
being saved—is this how you would show your allegiance to the Savior? Should the
self-denial of our blessed Lord and Master be requited with the selfishness of
followers who are always muttering, ‘ Cui bono? What profit can I make of his
service?’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3543

“‘Whoever offers praise glorifies Me,’ says the Lord. Man is made on purpose to
glorify God. It is his chief end. Then his chief end is comely to him. If he
answers his end, he is comely to Him who made him, and inasmuch as our chief end
is to glorify God, praise becomes comely to the upright.”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3460

“It is a great mercy to be taught the ways of God, to understand His way, to
understand the practical part of it, the statutes. To be made holy is a high
honor, a great privilege. When you are seeking great favors of God, ask for
great holiness!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3455 “God cannot dwell with us if sin is
petted and loved. Sin must be detested and loathed.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3400

“And if you seek the conversion of others, especially remember that it is words
fromGod’s mouth rather than words from your mouththat will effect it. Ask the
Master, for He knows how to draw the bow when you cannot. You might draw it at a
venture, but He can draw at a certainty, so that the arrows shall surely pierce
between the joints of the armor. Here is a prayer for every man and woman that
has to speak for Jesus—‘Open my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Your
praise.’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3543

“The rewards of Grace are of Grace. They are not legal rewards given to us
because we deserve them. As one says, Christ first gives His servants Grace to
serve Him, and then rewards them as if they had served Him in their own
strength, though their service, indeed, is His work in them rather than their
work for Him! It is a gift then.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3358

“‘Neither knows any man the Father, save the Son.’ Christ knows the Father—no
one else knows Him, save the Son. There is none other that can approach God. It
is Christ for your Savior, or no Savior at all! Salvation is in no other and if
you will not have Christ, neither can you have salvation!”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3502

“Cold prayers ask God to deny them—only importunate prayers will be replied
to!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3484

“The Holy Spirit comes to teach all the Truth of God [John 14:26] and I beg yet
again, for the fourth time, to reiterate that all Truth must be necessary for
you and for me, or else the Spirit of God would not have come to teach it to us,
and that while we may give more prominent importance to the greater and more
vital Truths, yet there is not one Truth in Scripture to which we are allowed to
say, ‘Be still! Be quiet—we do not need you.’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3353 “You must
go where Jesus leads—go, therefore, willingly, cheerfully, trustingly and even
joyfully, for it is a triumph to a Christian to bear the cross after Jesus—and
to be crucified and buried with Him were a high honor to any child of God. Go
on, then, for Christ leads the way!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3545

“Ah, I know some of you have felt the power of the Gospel, for you went home and
prayed, perhaps dozens of times—after hearing the sermon! You have gone up to
your chambers and you have begun to pray, but the next morning you have
forgotten. Your goodness has been like the morning dew and has melted when the
heat of the day’s cares have come upon it.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3551

“Sinner, you cannot serve God—you are too sinful! Your heart too evil—your
service too impure! But still, God’s claim upon you for a perfectly holy life
has not ceased. It has not lost its power, nor bated one jot or tittle of its
just and righteous force.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3458 “God is never more glorified
than He is by the believing confidence of His people when difficulties seem to
come in the way.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3462

“I have never been able to hope for perfection in the flesh, but I believe that
every Christian ought to strain after even perfection itself. I am afraid we
have fixed the standard of what a Christian may be a deal too low—of what a
Christian should be it would not be possible to fix the standard too high!
”—Volume 62, Sermon #3504

“I believe some of the expressions that Martin Luther used in prayer, if I were
to use them, would be little short of blasphemy, but as Martin Luther used them,
I believe they were deeply devout and acceptable with God because he knew how to
come close to God.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3484

“Now you and I, and each of us, have a service to perform. We were redeemed and
with a price that we might serve the Lord. We are a royal priesthood, a peculiar
people. We have a priesthood to fulfill. All God’s children, all God’s servants
are priest and kings, and they have a rule to discharge, and a priesthood to
fulfill.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3545

“God always loves His people, but His people do not always know it. Because of
their sins, they do not always enjoy it. Oh, what a blessing it is when the Holy
Spirit sheds abroad the love of God in the soul—when we can say, ‘Truly our
fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ.’”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3371

“Salvation is the great necessity of the human race. We need to be saved from
the consequences of the Fall, from the results of our own transgressions, from
the penalties due to our guilt, the indwelling power of sin and the domination
of our corrupt nature. ”—Volume 63, Sermon #3546 “Other things must, of course,
come across the mind and, for a while, engross it, but the first free thought
off the Believer should be of the Glorious One who loved him from before the
world—and will love him when the world has passed away!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3419

“As soon as you become a Christian, you cannot hate anybody. To be angry without
a cause is a sin to you as soon as you are a Believer in Christ! Unless you are
a fearful hypocrite, you then forgive every man his offenses and you continue to
forgive your brethren even unto 70 times seven, once you become the sincere
disciple of Jesus.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3386

“A faith that never had a tear in its eye, or a blush on its cheek, is not the
faith of God’s elect! He who never felt the burden of sin, never felt the
sweetness of being delivered from it! This poor thief is as clear in the avowal
of his own guilt as in his witness to the Redeemer’s innocence! Reader, could we
say the same of you?”—Volume 59, Sermon #3363

“There are some plants of which they say that the more you tread upon them, the
more they will spread, and certainly it is the case with the Kingdom of our Lord
Jesus Christ. As long as there is a sun in the heavens, and a moon to gladden
the night, so shall the Kingdom of Christ endure!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3465

“Oh, it is a crying sin that men will not only go to Hell, themselves, but they
must drag their children with them! ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3505 “True assurance of
faith is a humble thing, a comforting thing, a sanctifying thing—and it should,
therefore, be the desire of all faithful hearts.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3546

“Get a promise and spread it before the Lord, and say, ‘O Lord, You have said
it—do it!’ God loves to be believed in. He loves you to think He means what He
says. He is a practical God. His word has power in it and He does not like us to
treat His promises as some of us do, as if they were waste paper, as if they
were things to be read for the encouragement of our enthusiasm, but not to be
used as matters of real practical truth!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3484 “It has been
laid down by some theologians as being almost a self-evident Truth that God will
require no more of a man than he can do—but this, by every thoughtful mind—will
be soon discovered to be a self-evident lie instead of being true—for God’s Law
is not changed by our being changed! Whatever God demanded of man when he was
perfect, He demands the same thing of him now that he is imperfect!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3458

“Love has an impetuous force about it. Many waters cannot quench it, neither can
the floods drown it. What love we owe to Him who died, that when we die we may
live again, who rose that we might rise and made a pathway to the skies that we
might follow Him, even to His Throne.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3346 “Did you ever
really hate sin until you learned to love Christ?”—Volume 60, Sermon #3400

“I do not look upon the Church of God as so many pious men and women at work by
themselves, but I see God working by them, working in them, working through
them! They are the workers to the eye, but no further. It is God who works in
them to will and to do of His own good pleasure!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3545

“Tradition says that he sawed the Prophet Isaiah in half for daring to reprove
him! But it is not from tradition, but from Revelation, we learn that he
[Manasseh] made Jerusalem to swim with blood from one end to the other, putting
to death all those who would not go in his ways and follow his devices!”—Volume
62, Sermon #3505

“The Holy Spirit has been given to us. It is a thing that we are to pray for,
that the Holy Spirit may be poured out, but the Holy Spirit ispoured out, was
given to the whole Church on the day of Pentecost in order that He might abide
with us forever!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3376 “I am sure we cannot expect our
children to grow up a godly seed if there is no family prayer! Are your family
prayers, then, what they ought to be?”—Volume 61, Sermon #3484 “It is consistent
with the full enjoyment of salvation to loathe yourself. This is the strange
paradox of the Christian faith. He who justifies himself is condemned—he who
condemns himself is justified. ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3506 “I would that the
Church of God would now recollect that assuredly God is going ahead of her in
all her service at this moment. The world is prepared for the Gospel if we were
but willing to present the Gospel to the world.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3545 “We
never come to Christ till Christ comes to us. ‘Draw me—I will run after You.’
That is the order. It is not, ‘We will run after You, Lord—draw us.’”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3461 “If you have not tasted God’s love, you do not know what life, true
life, means. The richest, the most celestial, the most transporting joy that
mortal mind can know is a full assurance of the love of God!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3371 “Beware of getting spiritually rich in yourself! Nothing is so near akin
to soul-poverty as this!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3546 “Let the supreme aim of life
be not business, not the family, not personal pleasure, but our God! Let all be
secondary and subordinate to Him. Set Him on high in your spirit and let
everything contribute to His service and Kingdom. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3419

“It is a wonder of Divine Grace that the Lord should ever have loved us at all,
for there is nothing in our nature that is lovely. Through our fall there is
everything in us to be hated by His pure and holy mind, but nothing to
esteem—and the best of the best, when they are at their best, are poor
creatures.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3336

“Christ is to be your peace—not your communion with God, nor your high and holy
experiences. All these are very precious and I wish we could always be on
Tabor’s brow. It were well for us if, like, Enoch, we always walked with God,
but still, our communion must never be looked upon as the ground of our peace
with God. It is Christ and Christ, alone, that is our peace!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3386

“Do not write much about them, [past sins] if at all. It is best to do with them
as Noah’s sons did with their father’s nakedness, go back and cast a mantle over
all. God has forgiven them. Remember them only that you may repent and that you
may bless His name, but never mention them without loathing them—utterly
loathing them as if they were disgusting to your spirit and you could not speak
of them without the blush mantling on your cheek!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3506

“What joy it is, then, to think that He went ahead of us and how obediently, no,
triumphantly, may we follow Him, even to death itself! Here, then, is the
blessed fact, in suffering, or service. or departure, Christ goes ahead of
us!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3545“You and I often lose the sweetness of communion
with Christ, I doubt not, throughunbelief. We think so lightly of unbelief, as
though it were an infirmity and not a sin, whereas of all evils, it is the
chief! What can be more displeasing to the tender heart of Jesus than ungenerous
thoughts concerning Him? ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3485

“Those tongues that confess sins are the best tongues to sing with! That tongue
which has been salted with the brine of penitence is fitted to be sweet with the
honey of praise.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3470 “Unanswered prayer should be to every
Christian a search warrant—he should begin to examine himself to see whether
there is not something harbored within which is contrary to the will of
God.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3344

“We have heard say of our friends in America that in some of their churches the
choir is so much esteemed and so highly esteemed by itself, that if the
congregation were to sing, they would almost frown upon them to put them out of
tune, and that there is very little sound of the congregation’s singing heard
compared with those half a dozen perhaps as wicked singers as the music halls
could find, stuck up there to glorify God by insulting Him!”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3460

“Oh, Beloved, Christ often gets great triumph among the rolls of men from the
deep trials of His people, out of which He does rescue them and shall not you
and I be well content that He should stand back and hide His face and even seem
to be an enemy to us, if, out of all this, His glory shall spring? ”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3420

“Beware of thinking that you are increased in goods. You are near to bankruptcy
when you thus make account of your possessions. I counsel you, therefore, to
still bow your knee and cry unto the great Savior, ‘Lord, save me, or I perish!’
That prayer should never be in advance of the most advanced Christian!”—Volume
63, Sermon #3546

“God, in conversion, makes us new men. We are not altered, improved, or mended,
but a new life is given us—we become new creations in Christ Jesus!”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3506 “How could He walk with you while you were casting into His ear a
foul suspicion against His truthfulness and His love? Faith is the hand which
holds the Savior and will not let Him go! Unbelief opens the door and bids Him
go.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3485 “If the Christian were fully equipped to know and
understand the Divine mind without the teaching of the Holy Spirit, then the
Holy Spirit would not have been given.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3353 “He who notices
God’s mercy will never be without a mercy to notice.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3349 “I
believe in free agency, but I never yet met with a Christian who was able to say
that he came to Christ of his own free will without being drawn by the Spirit of
God! Whatever our doctrinal view may be, the experimental fact is the same in
every case.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3362

“Never did salvation spring from the devices of this poor heart. In vain do you
seek to obtain it by any religious ceremonies, or by any bodily exercises. The
source and fountain of salvation are only to be found in the eternal purpose of
God! In the Covenant of God it was resolved, in the Wisdom of God it was
planned, in the great Redemption of God it was effected and by the Spirit of God
it is applied! Jonah went to a strange college to learn this masterpiece of
sound theology, that salvation is of the Lord.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3546

“But as one Truth of God is always to be taken in its relation to another Truth
and not to be isolated from its natural kindred, it is a delightful
consideration that God, in His absolute Sovereignty, never does violence to any
of His other attributes and, above all,never does violenceto the Covenant. The
Covenant still surrounds the Sovereignty and practically hedges it within its
bounds!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3412 “Now, to this hour, this is the mark of the
true Christian. This is to be of the elect. This is the very badge and symbol of
the faithful—they see Jesus.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3401 “Brothers and Sisters, it
is good to loathe ourselves, for it makes us have sympathy with others.”—Volume
62, Sermon #3506

“If your religion is only a pretense. If your heart is black, though your face
is bright. If you have filthiness in the well, though in the bucket there may be
a little clean water, you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bonds of
iniquity! The pure, truthful, holy God abhors hypocrisy!”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3486

“Oh, for Grace to shake off the sorrow that makes some hearts sit still!”—Volume
61, Sermon #3461“We do not expect that God will make fresh Revelations to us. We
are far from believing that voices heard or visions seen, or supposed to be
seen, or dreams, can give any satisfactory evidence of the Divine Love to any
man. I am ashamed of such ministers as would encourage their hearers in the
conviction that their fancies are to be taken as assurances from God!”—Volume
63, Sermon #3546

“What is the use of fit words, fine sentences, fluent speech? These seem to me
full often to be such deceitful acquirements that I would gladly dispense with
them, if I might stammer out my soul’s desires and feel myself to be all the
more sincere because I lacked expression to clothe my thought! Oh, no—the Lord
does not require your long addresses! A groan, a sigh, a sob that seems to swell
in your soul and become too big to find a way of escape—that is prayer!”—Volume
62, Sermon #3519

“But how can we pray forHim? [Christ] Why, that He may have the reward of His
sufferings and see of the travail of His soul—that His Kingdom may come and that
His name may be dear in the hearts of men.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3465

“Christian, your God’s love to you is always the same. He cannot love you more!
He will not love you less! Never, when afflictions multiply, when terrors
frighten you or when your distresses abound, does God’s love falter or flag. Let
the rod fall ever so heavily upon you, the hand that moves, like the heart that
prompts the stroke, is full of love! Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but
trust Him for His Grace. Whether He brings you down into the depths of misery,
or lifts you up into the seventh Heaven of delight, His faithful love never
varies or fluctuates—it is everlasting in its continuity!”—Volume 63, Sermon
#3561


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  CHAPTER 10: VOL. 5 CONTD
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“Christian, your God’s love to you is always the same. He cannot love you more!
He will not love you less! Never, when afflictions multiply, when terrors
frighten you or when your distresses abound, does God’s love falter or flag. Let
the rod fall ever so heavily upon you, the hand that moves, like the heart that
prompts the stroke, is full of love! Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but
trust Him for His Grace. Whether He brings you down into the depths of misery,
or lifts you up into the seventh Heaven of delight, His faithful love never
varies or fluctuates—it is everlasting in its continuity!”—Volume 63, Sermon
#3561

“If I think I am not poor, if I am befriended, I shall not have that gratitude
which a bankrupt would have had if he had nothing left, to whom someone had
generously given a large estate. No, a sense of need helps us to glorify God!
Among the saints, and when on earth, the sweetest voices are those that have
been made sweet by repentance.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3506

“The quickest road to spiritual wealth is prayer! Every prayer is like a ship
sent so the Tarshish of spiritual riches to bring us back treasures better than
gold or silver, or precious stones. Let us not be lax in the commerce, lest our
wealth decline.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3546

“I do not doubt but what there is many a man who believes a false religion and
is as sincere in it as any man is in a true one! But his being sincere in
believing a lie does not transform the lie into a truth! And if he follows a
wrong way, that wrong way will lead to a wrong end—however sincerely it may be
followed!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3486

“Ah, that is a temptation for the mass of us—‘I cannot expect to have fellowship
at the Table because I have not come prepared.’ Brothers and Sisters, you ought
to have come prepared, but, at the same time, if you have not, rise up quickly
and come to the Master as you are!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3461

“If faith can but perceive that Jesus Christ is within the veil at the Father’s
Throne, with His heart full of love towards those who trust in Him, then will He
be to us our peace!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3386 “Christ Jesus will give a pardon
which shall never be revoked! A pardon that cannot hereafter be cancelled. God
never plays fast and loose with men. Whom He once pardons, He never
condemns.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3547

“We are thankful if we have only a little cottage in our own land where we may
dwell, but in Egypt the Son of God must tabernacle for awhile. And when He came
back, He sought not His acquaintance amongst even the tradesmen or the middle
classes, much less among the lofty and the proud in spirit—He put upon Himself
the smock frock of the country—‘a garment without seam, woven from the top
throughout’—and His intimate acquaintances were the fishermen of
Galilee!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3380

“The songs which are made at the sight of mercy are very sweet, but the songs
that are sung before the mercy comes are those which are most acceptable to
God.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3435 “Persecution of the saints of God is a scarlet sin
that calls aloud to Heaven for vengeance! Manasseh was guilty of this, among
other crimes.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3505 “Don’t, don’t, I beseech you, base your
evidence of the possession of salvation upon your joy, because if you do, you
will be in sad trouble when your joy varies or flies. ”—Volume 63, Sermon #3548

“Brothers and Sisters, we do not like the sick bed—we would not choose aching
limbs—especially those of us who are of an active disposition and would be
perpetually telling out the love of Christ! And yet in our temporary
imprisonment we have seen the Lord’s wisdom and have had to look back with
thankfulness upon it. Oh, children of God, your Father knows best! Leave
everything in His hands and be at peace, for all is well. May the Holy Spirit
work quietness of heart in you.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3372 “Brothers and Sisters,
if Christ would, He could prevent our having affliction, but He will not prevent
them because He wants to make something of u. For instance, He wants to make
some of us to be comforters to others, but how can you comfort others in trouble
when you have never experienced the like? ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3420 “If I heard
a bad man speak well of God, I would say, ‘Ah, I do not like that! As a jewel of
gold set in a swine’s snout, so is a good word from such a man as that.’…Praise
is comely to the upright.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3460

“With a fierce determination to ruin himself, man resists the Grace of God, and
were it not that He who created the world puts His hand a second time to the
work, to create in us a new heart, we would continue in our destruction, in our
guilt and enmity to the Most High!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3486

“Oh, I do not wonder at Manasseh’s sin one half as much as I wonder at God’s
mercy!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3505 “Woe unto those who divide Believers—who rob
them of love to one another—who set up another Gospel which is not another, or
in any way detract from the unity of the body of Christ.”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3466

“Let the Lord do as He wills to us! He will never be unkind to us! He has always
been our Friend—He will never be our foe! He will never put us into the furnace
unless He means to purge the dross out of us. Nor will there be one degree more
heat in that furnace than is absolutely necessary—there will always be mercy to
balance the misery—and strength supplied to support the burden to be
borne.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3549

“When persons start up as Prophets, or Prophetesses, and tell us that they have
had special visions from the Lord and they know what is going to happen next
year, we always understand that their proper destination is Bethlehem Hospital
[London insane asylum] and we begin immediately to shun them and their
books!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3353

“The crimes of the world are the burdens of the saints. We cannot make the
ungodly mourn for their guilt, but we can and do deeply mourn over their
insensibility. How can we bear to see our fellow men choosing everlasting
destruction, rejecting their own mercies and plunging themselves into eternal
misery?”—Volume 59, Sermon #3336

“In like manner they who would receive Christ must receive Him now. This is not
a call or a counsel to be trifled with. The procrastination of Felix, which led
him to say, ‘When I have a more convenient season I will send for You,’ is a
very dangerous spirit. Let those who talked as Felix talked beware lest they
perish as Felix perished!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3487

“O that our eyes were as ready with tears of repentance as were hers[Luke 7:37
woman]! O that our hearts were as full of love as hers and our hands as ready to
serve the forgiving Lord! If she has exceeded some of us in the publicity of her
sin, yet has she not exceeded all of us in the fervency of her
affection!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3359

“The fear lest I have not really believed in Jesus, that I have not experienced
a saving repentance, that I have not laid hold upon eternal life, distracts me.
Well, precaution is better than presumption—it is better to go fearing to Heaven
than to go presuming to Hell!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3549

“Oh, my dear Hearers, the God that can forgive great sin can also change hard
hearts! Cry to Him! If you are unsaved, may His Spirit lead you to seek
salvation now.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3505

“But be not deceived! The customs you adopt and the habits you cherish combine
with the depravity of your own nature to weld a chain which the strength of
Hercules could not snap—a chain that makes the creature an abject slave to the
flesh, instead of a liege subject of his adorable Creator.”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3462

“He that believes in Jesus shall never be so left of God as to fall finally from
Grace! He shall never be so deserted as to give up his God, for his God will
never give him up so far as to let him give up his confidence, or his hope, or
his love, or his trust! The Lord, even our God, holds us with His strong right
hand and we shall not be moved!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3387

“Nothing is impossible to those who know how believingly to enquire of
God.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3472 “If you fear because you feel your unworthiness,
it is a blessed fear! Trust in the worthiness of Christ and your fear shall give
place to faith!”—

Volume 63, Sermon #3549 “It is as hard to deliver a man from self-righteousness
as from unrighteousness, as difficult to deliver one man from the frostbite of
his own orderliness as to save another from the heat of his unbridled
passions.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3372

“It is absurd, it is horrible both to faith and to reason to say that Christ’s
body is eaten and that His blood is drunk in tens of thousands of places
wherever priests choose to offer what they call, “the mass!” It is a “mass” of
profanity, indeed! Our Lord Jesus Christ, as to His real, positive, corporeal
Presence, is not here. As to His flesh and His blood, He is not, and cannot be
here!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3401

“There is many a mother’s son whose heart will be turned to God long after his
mother’s bones have been laid in the churchyard. The vision is for an appointed
time—though it tarry, wait for it. Your son will yet be brought to Glory through
your prayers. Pray on, Brothers and Sisters, pray on for those whose sins and
sorrows lay heavily on your heart! Pray on, and God will hear you!”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3505

“In indictments for witchcraft, I suppose, you punish the impostor as a knave,
while you laugh at the victim as a dupe. But in cases of priestcraft, you divide
the scandal more equally. So the Sunday theatricals run their course till the
force of thought, the voice of conscience, and, I might add, the love of
liberty, shall pronounce their doom!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3550

“It would create an almost miraculous change in some people’s lives if they made
a point of speaking most of the precious things and least of the worries and
ills! Why always the poverty? Why always the pains? Why always the dying child?
Why always the husband’s small wages? Why always the unkindness of a friend? Why
not sometimes—yes, why not always—the mercies of the Lord? That is praise and it
is to be our everyday garment, the livery of every servant of Christ!”—Volume
59, Sermon #3349

“Growth in faith also is necessary for oursanctification. It is by faith that
sin is kept down and that all our Divine Graces grow. Unless faith is vigorous,
we cannot expect to be making progress towards perfection. Sanctification is a
daily and unceasing thing. It is carried on in our thoughts and hearts by the
Holy Spirit, but faith in the precious blood is the great means He uses for that
sanctifying.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3384

“I do not envy Gabriel his crown when God gives me souls! I have then thought
that I would rather be here to talk with you and point you to my Master’s Cross,
than be up there and cast my crown at His feet—for surely there can be no joy in
Heaven greater than the joy of doing the Master’s will in winning souls for
Him!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3346

“Although my words were never so weighty, they could not be weighty enough to
fitly describe your momentous peril! It is not possible for human language to
set out the horror of an impenitent soul, the terrible condition of a sinner at
enmity with his God!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3462

“A Believer cannot let his lower nature get the uppermost and yet find that he
is walking agreeably to the Lord’s mind. Your spiritual nature ought to keep
your mental nature under control—and your mental nature ought to keep your
bodily or animal nature entirely in check. ”—Volume 63, Sermon #3552

“Beloved, we must neither let go of God, nor let go of our sense of His power to
save us! We must hold to our possession of Him and hold to the belief that He is
worth possessing, that He is God, All-Sufficient, and that He is still our
God.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3507

“We err when we pin our profession to creeds of human devising. Creeds are
exceedingly useful and I hope they will never be discarded…But our creed must
not be the dogmas of general councils, or the opinions of learned men, much less
must it be the reflection of “modern thought,” which is full of infidelity—it
must be the Truths of God which we have received directly from the Word of
God!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3440

“We think of some poor men that are, for their livelihood, compelled to work in
loathsomeness in our common sewers, but oh, what is all that compared with the
heart! Yet the Infinite Mercy, condescension and Omnipotent Grace of God stooped
down to deal with our inward parts! Admire the condescension of God and have
hope for yourself, poor lost one, because God will deal with your inward
parts!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3486

“There is one privilege I prize at this moment—I cannot tell you how much. It is
this—the liberty to pray, the power to pray, the promise that I shall be heard!
Take the Mercy Seat from me and poverty, faintness and anguish would seize my
soul!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3341 “Those churches which are now writing, ‘Ichabod,’
on their walls and who sorrowfully confess that the congregation is slowly
dwindling, might soon restore their numbers if they did but know how to
pray!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3421

“Well, now, if He did all this for the sake of us who are so unworthy, what
ought you and I to do for His sake, who is so worthy? And if He emptied His
great Self for us, who are as nothing, shall not we be ready to empty our little
selves for Him, who is so great?”—Volume 59, Sermon #3380 “If there is anything
taught in Scripture for certain, it is the Doctrine of the Final Perseverance of
the Saints! I am as sure that Doctrine is as plainly taught as the Doctrine of
the Deity of Christ. Words cannot put it more distinctly than God has graciously
revealed it. Hear what Christ says. ‘I give unto My sheep eternal life, and they
shall never perish; neither shall any pluck them out of My hand.’”—Volume 63,
Sermon #3549

“As soon as you know what your Lord would have you to do, every moment of
unnecessary delay is a sin!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3372 “We must get away from all
building upon our apprehensions of God’s love. It is the love, itself, we must
build on—not on our enjoyment of His Presence, but on His faithfulness and on
His truth. Therefore, be not cast down, but still call Him, ‘My God.’”—Volume
62, Sermon #3507 “There was never a soul divorced from his sins by the
blandishments of rhetoric! You cannot persuade men to give up their favorite
passions by goodly words. The trembling pathos or the withering scorn of your
address will prove, alike, unavailing.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3462

“How can you know wisdom till you have hated sin? God has not introduced you to
the school yet, until He has made you smart under His rod on account of sin.
This is the very beginning of wisdom, to know the bitterness and mischief of
sin, and to turn from it.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3486

“No man is alive unto God, spiritually, except through Christ. Because Christ
lives, we live. When a dead soul gets into living contact with the living Savior
by the power of the Spirit, then it is, that spiritual life begins. The very
first evidence of spiritual life is trusting in Jesus, which shows that as the
first symptom is alliance to Christ, the cause of the life must be somewhere
here, namely, union with Christ!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3401

“‘Neither give place to the devil.’ Idle persons tempt the devil to depart by
being busy—by being prayerful, and by being much with God. Give no place to the
devil.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3466 The virtues, if I may so say, of both sexes were
combined in our Lord—the suavity as well as the staunchness—the feminine as well
as the masculine of our common humanity!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3553 “We are told
not to be covetous. Why? Why should we be covetous? God has said He will never
leave us and if we have Him, we possess all things. Who has need to be covetous
when all things are his and God is his?”—Volume 60, Sermon #3387

“Brothers and Sisters, if we do not experimentally know what it is to have the
Truth of God as it is in Jesus brought to our remembrance by the Holy Spirit, we
must not rest satisfied until we do, for this is one of the marks and evidences,
as well as one of the privilegesof the child of God, that the Holy Spirit is his
personal Teacher.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3353

“Oh, how good it is for us to know that this world’s history is not so black and
bad as to our dim senses it would appear! God is writing it out, sometimes with
a heavy pen, but when complete, it will read like one great poem—magnificent in
its plan and perfect in all its details! ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3508

“In that fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins there is a
fullness that never can be exhausted by all the sin of man! He has finished the
work which His Father gave Him to do. Now the Covenant is ratified with Him that
He shall see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied. In these
respects we are convinced that there is an acquired as well as a personal
fullness in our precious Lord!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3553

“Beloved, we do not wonder if persons sneer at the Gospel in itself, or if
others hear it and are unaffected by it, for the Gospel, in itself, is like a
sword without a warrior’s arm to wield it. But when the Spirit of God comes, man
is a doubter no longer! When He lays home the Truth of God, He cuts so to the
dividing of soul and spirit, joint and marrow, so that men are convinced,
converted, SAVED—and the Truth is to them, indeed, a living thing! Pray, O
beloved members of this Church, pray that the Word of God, even our Gospel, may
come with the Holy Spirit!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3551

“You know that truth is one thing, but wisdom is better than knowledge, for
wisdom is the right way of using knowledge! Many a knowingman is a fool. A wise
man is a ‘knowing’ man, although ‘a knowing man’ is not always wise.”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3486 “One of the first uses of the Prayer Meeting, then, is to encourage
a discouraged people.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3421

“Brothers, if you seek the life of other souls and desire to see them brought to
God, preach Christ to them! Do you not see, ‘Because I live you shall live’?
Then no sinner will ever live spiritually apart from Christ. Though you and I
cannot quicken them, yet we can preach the Gospel to them—and faith comes by
hearing! And where faith is, there is life.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3401 “Do you
suffer from spiritual poverty? It is your own fault, for He gives more Grace. If
you have not got it, it is not because it is not to be had, but because you have
not gone for it—you have not sought for it—you have not walked in such a way
that you could possess it and exhibit its fruit!—Volume 61, Sermon #3459

“No child of God can be very long without trouble of some kind or other, for,
sure it is that the road to Heaven will always be rough.”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3508 “Dear Hearer, you must go to Christ for yourself! All who ever were saved
have done so, and you certainly will not be saved unless you are led to do the
same! It is a personalfilling.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3553 “Let none of us ever
fall into the gross error of those who imagine that there is attached to certain
ceremonies a certain degree of Divine Grace. It is not so. He is not a Christian
who is one outwardly—he is a Christian who is one inwardly.”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3475

“Whatever some may say about the Doctrine of Substitution, Christ is still the
Power of God and the Wisdom of God. The way, so simple, yet so sublime, by which
God is just and yet the justifier of him that believes, exhibits the Infinite
Wisdom of the Most High!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3362

“True faith confesses Christ and, at the same time, confesses its sin. There
must be repentance of sin and acknowledgment of it before God if faith is to
give proof of its truth.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3363 “So observe that what God
requires of us in one place, God gives us in another! He deals with sinners very
honestly—He tells them what He wants. He then deals with them very generously,
for He gives them what they need!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3486 “We are told that men
can be regenerated by baptism—and we have seen these regenerated infants develop
into what, to our minds, was nothing more than ‘baptized heathens, washed to
deeper stains.’”—Volume 61, Sermon #3462 “You may, my dear Hearer, be so tried
that you think nobody ever had such a trial. Well, then, your faith may look out
for such a deliverance as nobody else ever experienced! If you have an excess of
grief, you shall have the more abundant relief.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3508 “Oh, if
any of you desire to find Jesus Christ, the doing must be in the way of undoing!
You must be emptied to be filled! The preparation is a consciousness that you
are not prepared! In such unpreparedness you are prepared for Christ!”—Volume
63, Sermon #3553 “This is thesin which causes men to perish, that they believe
not in Christ. “He that believes not is condemned already, because He has not
believed on the Son of God.””—Volume 59, Sermon #3376 “Blessed be God, this is
the only contention among the birds of Paradise—which owes the most, which shall
love the best, which shall lie lowest and which shall extol their Lord the most
zealously! Charming rivalry of humility! Let us have more of it below.”—Volume
59, Sermon #3349 “Let us, in all things, great or small, ask counsel of Christ!
And when once we know His will, let us never have a second thought! It is not
ours to reason or to question, but it is ours to suffer loss and endure
reproach, if need be, when we have His orders.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3440

“The fact is that the Grace of God makes the people of God to sing sweetly where
other people would murmur! They are satisfied where others would find easy
ground for discontent. But how easy it is—how easy it must be for a man to be
contented when he knows that God has promised to be with him in all
circumstances and at all times!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3387

“A man who finds a treasure hid in a field will congratulate himself on his good
fortune. A woman, when she embraces her first-born child, will dote on him with
exquisite fondness. Shall no strong emotions prove our sincerity when we receive
the Lord of Life and Glory?”—Volume 61, Sermon #3487

“That thirst, that hunger, those pangs He [Christ] felt often throughout His
life of weariness and woe—those were caused by sin being laid upon Him! It was
not possible that He should be perfectly happy while sin was upon Him—it would
have been impossible for Him to have been unhappy had not sin
beenimputedtoHim.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3554

“A more frequent, or a more fearful wretchedness of heart than I have suffered
it is not likely any of you ever felt. Yet do I know that my Redeemer lives,
that the battle is sure, that the victory is safe. If my testimony is worth
anything, I have always found that when I am most distressed about circumstances
that I cannot control, when my hope seems to flicker where it ought to flare,
when the worthlessness and wretchedness of my nature obscure the evident of any
goodness and virtue imparted to me or worked in me—just then it is that a sweet
spring of cool consolation bubbles up to quench my thirst and a sweet voice
greets my ears, ‘It is I. be not afraid.’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3508

“You, dear Hearers, have perhaps said to yourselves, “I cannot be saved because
I am not holy.” The truth is you cannot be holy because you are not saved—being
saved comes first. Holiness is never the root—it is always the fruit! It is not
the cause, it is the effect! You must come to Jesus as you are and trust Him.
And then He will give you the Holy Spirit to work in you the new heart, the new
desire—and to make you a new creature.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3519

“There is one sweet reason that Jesus gives why He died for His people. You
remember it. He loved His Church and gave Himself for it, that He might present
it to Himself, ‘without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing.’”—Volume 63, Sermon
#3554 “‘All things are possible to him that believes,’ and more than all is
possible to him that loves!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3339

“I think this Book [Revelation] has been trailed in the mire by being used as a
sort of astrologer’s book to tell us about the future, instead of being used
practically to humble us before God and to teach us to lean upon eternal wisdom,
which knows all things from the beginning.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3467

“All Grace leads us to gratitude. Grace never leads us to lift up ourselves and
say, “I have done well to obtain it.” Grace, like the cargo in the vessel, makes
the ship sink deeper in the stream. He that has most Grace is the lowliest man.
You shall measure your rising in Grace by your sinking in humility.—Volume 61,
Sermon #3459

“Notice one thing more in these three words, that the participle is in the
present. ‘To whom coming,’ not, ‘Having come to Him,’ though I trust many of us
havecome, but the way of salvation is not to come to Christ and then forget it,
but to continue coming, to be always coming!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3509

“There are those who think that pardon through atoning blood will make men live
in sin. They little know what is in the heart of the redeemed, for, being bought
with such a price, we would be perfect if we could! So much has been done for us
that if we could do for Christ ten thousand times more than we have ever done,
we would only rejoice to do it, cost what it may!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3554

“There is a mysterious, supernatural energy which comes from the Third Person of
the Blessed Trinity which really, at this day, falls upon men—as really as when
Peter spoke with unknown tongues or worked miracles. And though the power of
working miracles is not given now, yet spiritual power is given and this
spiritual power is as manifest, and just as certainly with us, today, if we
possess the Spirit, as it was with the Apostles!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3421

“There is infinitely more solace and satisfaction here than I can bring out. I
must leave it with you and commend it to your meditation. I am sure there is no
more delightful manna for the pilgrims in the wilderness to feed upon than this
Doctrine applied to the heart! The love ofGod towards us personally in Jesus
Christis an everlasting love.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3561 “To go in up to the
ankles in the sea of Christ’s love is well, but oh, to pass up to the loins and
to get still further until you find it “a river to swim in”—this is to know the
true delights of godliness!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3396 “All the ceremonies that
can possibly be practiced, with the sanction of antiquity or the invention of
modern priestcraft to recommend them, can have no effect in changing the bias of
the human will, or in renewing the qualities of human nature!”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3462

“Ah, Beloved, it is useless to receive Christ nominally, professionally,
ceremonially, or with rites and ceremonies, to do Him empty homage! By a sincere
reception of Him who was sent of God, your nature, your disposition and your
habits will be transformed from what they were, and conformed to what He is—and
the change will be conspicuous, for if you are in Christ, and Christ is in you,
all will become new!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3487

“A man may have been a condemned sinner five minutes ago, but the moment that he
knows Christ, he is a justified soul! By that very knowledge, or, as I have
said, by that faith, by that simple dependence on the Christ whom he has learned
to know, the man is just and he may go on his way rejoicing!”—Volume 63, Sermon
#3554

“The Christian is always coming to Christ. He does not look upon faith as a
matter of 20 years ago, and done with, but he comes today and he will come
tomorrow! ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3509

“But if you join a Christian Church, take heed how you live, for your actions
may become doubly watched—and will be doubly sinful if you fall into
inconsistency! You are a servant in the family and a member of a Christian
Church—there must be in you no eye-service! There must be about you nothing
which would dishonor a good servant of Jesus Christ! You are a husband—you have
no business to be a bad-tempered, domineering tyrant to your wife! If you are,
you ought not to be a member of a Christian Church at all!”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3411

“Pray the Holy Spirit to write upon your souls, to carve deeply upon your
hearts, all that Jesus Christ may speak to you!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3440

“But Jesus is Immortal and about Him, He wears the golden band to show that He
excels all the priests of Aaron’s line. As for those persons who, in modern
times, pretend to be priests, our Lord Jesus Christ is not to be mentioned in
the same day with them. They are all deceivers!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3555

“There are many who cannot believe in Jesus because—now let them themselves
estimate the force of this—they cannot believe in Jesus because they have a
besetting sin that they cannot give up! There is the bottom of most men’s doubt!
They would not doubt if they did not sin.”— Volume 61, Sermon #3463

“There is no exaggeration in the language of the spouse when she says, ‘Yes, He
is altogether lovely.’ Such as receive Him with their hearts, will find that the
most rapturous expressions that saints have ever used do not exceed, but fall
infinitely short of the delight, the heavenly joys, which He brings into the
soul!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3487

“All caste of priesthood is forever abolished! Every man that fears God, and
every woman, too, is a priest according to the Word of God which is written, “He
has made us kings and priests unto God.” The priesthood is common to all the
saints—not confined to some!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3555

“Child of God, let me bring to your remembrance, tonight, the fact that you are
by nature no better than the vilest of the vile! ‘Children of wrath even as
others,’ are we. Even you who are favored by Divine Grace to enter into rich
fellowship with Christ are no better, naturally, than the lost spirits in
Hell!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3347

“I have often told you, my dear Brothers and Sisters, that when you get a little
above the ground, if it is only an inch, you get too high. When you begin to
think that surely you are a saint, and that you have some good thing to trust
to, that rotten stuff must all be pulled to pieces! Believe me, God will not let
His people wear a rag of their own spinning—they must be clothed with Christ’s
Righteousness from head to foot!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3509

“Whenever the Lord lays bare His arm for war, He first gathers His saints into a
place of safety! He did not destroy the world by the flood till Noah and his
family were safe in the ark. He would not suffer a single fire drop to fall on
Sodom till Lot had escaped to Zoar. He carefully preserves His own—nor flood,
nor flame, nor pestilence, nor famine shall do them harm! We read in the
Revelation that the angel said, ‘Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the
trees till we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads.’”—Volume
59, Sermon #3377

“We have heard that the ordinances of God’s House have a blessing connected with
them. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. That in the keeping of His commandments
there is great reward—and as we have heard, so have we seen. I am sure that the
blessed Supper of the Lord, though many of His people come to the table every
week, never seems to grow stale.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3396

“Nothing but condemnation can be the lot of the man or woman who despises pardon
and treats forgiveness with contempt. When simply to trust Christ saves the
soul, to distrust Him is the direst and most damnable of sins! It is suicidal!
Unbeliever, you refuse to pass through the only Door that can lead you to
Heaven!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3555

“If there were fewer unregenerate sinners than there are, we would probably be
more concerned about them. If there were only a dozen unconverted persons in the
world, all the Church of God would be praying for their conversion, but because
there are many millions of them, they are so common that we do not look upon
them with the awe, the tenderness and the yearning sympathy which we ought to
feel.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3353

“If men were not idiotic, they would shake off from themselves all idea of
sacramental efficacy and everything that is akin to it! They would see that what
God wants is the heart, the soul, the love, the trust, the confidenceof
rational, intelligent beings—not the going through of certain forms!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3464

“From a certain sort of sins we are very easily separated by the Grace of God
early in our spiritual life, but when those are gone, another layer of evils
comes into sight and the work has to be repeated. The complete removal of our
connection with sin is a work demanding the Divine skill and power of the Holy
Spirit and by Him only will it be accomplished. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3388 “But,
oh, my Hearer, perhaps you have no pretensions to be a child of His! Perhaps you
may have played the hypocrite and made a profession in your own strength. You
turned back from the company of those who fear the Lord because you never were
truly converted! If it is so, let the mercy, which God shows to sinners,
embolden you to cry to Him. And may He break you to pieces now with the hammer
of His Word. So may He save you and so shall His praise be exceedingly great in
your salvation! ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3510

“Surely the very angels are not so comely as the Church is, now that Christ has
cleansed her. The heavens are not pure in His sight and He charged His angels
with folly—but the blood-washed Church is pure and no folly is charged on her!
Her righteousness is the righteousness of her Creator, and her purity is the
holiness of God, Himself!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3554

“When you receive Christ in at the front door, you must not keep the devil in
the back parlor! Every traitor sin must be ejected when the Great King takes up
His residence in your heart! The thorough cleansing of your house from every
defilement is the smallest tribute we can expect you pay in deference to your
royal Guest. The soul that receives Christ joyfully sighs and groans because it
cannot make, as it would, a clean sweep of its sin!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3487

“Anything that would make us pray would be a blessing—and if ever we should come
to times of persecution again, we must fly to the shadow of the Eternal and,
keeping close together in simple, intense prayer—we shall find a shelter from
the blast.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3421 “Jesus will never again be an object of
indifference to a forgiven sinner. If the Lord has pardoned you, you will
henceforth feel the deepest interest in your Savior and in all things which
concern His Kingdom and work among men.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3359 “Principle
would prevail over policy to the end, if in their hearts they believed the Truth
of God as it is in Jesus! It were no dishonor to a prince to go and sit down
side by side with a pauper, were they both true followers of Jesus Christ!
”—Volume 63, Sermon #3556 “If a sick man cares more for pardon than for health,
it is a good sign. Soul mercies will be prized above all others where faith is
in active exercise.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3363 “Don’t struggle, Sinner, after
righteousness in your own strength—fall back and rest on the Infinite Love of
God in Christ Jesus! ‘Tis all you have to do—to leave off doing and let Christ
do everything!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3441 “We must take care how we live, for this
is the only lifetime we shall have in which to settle the life that lasts
forever! ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3511

We [ministers] shall not be good stewards in the management of our fellow
servants unless we are ourselves filled with the Grace of God! We must set our
fellow servants an example of zeal and tenderness, constancy, hopefulness,
energy andobedience. We must ourselves practice constant selfdenial and select
as our own part of the work that which is the hardest and most humiliating. We
are to rise above our fellows by superior selfforgetfulness. Be it ours to lead
the forlorn hopes and bear the heaviest burdens.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3350

“As the ringleaders of riotous transgression, when converted, often make the
best revivalist preachers, so those who seem to be the most loyal subjects of
Christ, when they become renegades, prove to be the bitterest foes and the
blackest sinners!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3556

“Do I hear anyone say, ‘Perhaps as he grows older the power of sin will grow
weaker’? I have heard that suggestion many times but my solemn conviction is
that if you want the worst of man, you will find them among the oldest of men!
And if you seek a confirmed criminal, you most generally find him with gray
hairs upon his head.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3462

“Predestination can never be contrary to the promise. It is not in Election, or
Reprobation, or in any Doctrine that asserts Divine Sovereignty to make the
promise of God to be of none effect!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3412

“No man shall be a loser in the long run by loving and serving God. If you are
willing and obedient, trusting yourself with Christ, you shall find those awful
wheels of Providence revolve for your welfare. The beasts of the field shall be
in league with you, and the stones of the field shall be at peace with you. All
things shall work together for good to them that love God.”—Volume 62, Sermon
#3511

“There are so many instances in which God has heard the prayer of persons in
deep trouble, that the most troubled of all men ought to be encouraged to
pray!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3468

“‘Masses’ for the repose of the soul indicate the incompleteness of the
salvation which Rome has to offer. Well may it be so, since Papal salvation is
by works—and even if salvation by good works were possible, no man can ever be
sure that he has performed enough of them to secure his salvation!”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3479 “Think not lightly of the doom of the lost, lest you think lightly
of sin, and lightly of Christ, for as you have heard and infinitely more than
you have heard, shall you see!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3396

“The mere form of outward worship is nothing—it is not acceptable with
God.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3464 “‘The Father judges no man, but has committed all
judgment unto the Son.’ I know of no Truth of God more dreadful to meditate
upon! Think of it, you careless ones—the very Christ who died on Calvary is He
by whom you will be sentenced!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3377 “When Believers do not
agree and are picking holes in each other’s coats, they do not really love one
another—and then their prayers cannot succeed.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3421 “God
cannot linger when a sinner cries. When a sinner weeps, Christ will soon have
pity on him. But, anyhow, keep on till He comes. Seek till He rains
righteousness upon you. ”—Volume 63, Sermon #3557

“Now I am not pretending that piety will procure wealth, or that if you espouse
Christ’s cause you shall grow rich…You are none the less likely to prosper in
business for being a Christian. I am not going to predict that you shall be
without sickness, much less without temptation, for, “whom the Lord loves, He
chastens, and scourges every son whom He receives.” But I am sure of this, that
if you put your trust in God and do right, no temporal circumstances shall ever
happen to you which shall not be for your eternal good!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3511

“Let us be thankful if God does not give us our portion here. It is one of the
things to be dreaded—the having your portion in this life! It is said of some
that they have their portion in this life—and our Lord said of the
Pharisees—‘Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.’ Oh, let us pray God
not to give us our reward here!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3380

“Sinner, have you prayed? Pray again. Have you prayed twice? Pray again! Has it
come to three times? Pray again! Has it come to four times? Pray again! Does it
amount to six times? Pray again! Let there be no stint in prayer. You have kept
God waiting long enough. You must not marvel if He should now tarry awhile. Pray
again! Pray again! Say, ‘I am resolved that I will not give it up until You
shall rain Your comfort, Your righteousness, Your Grace, upon me.’”—Volume 63,
Sermon #3557

“Have you never heard how the martyrs used to sing at the stakes? Why was it?
Not because the fire was made of roses—they did not find the firewood to be less
hot to them than they would have been to others—but it was because the love of
God was shed abroad in their hearts and, therefore, they could endure all things
for Christ’s sake, seeing that His love was theirs. It sweetens all.”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3339

“How sad to see a mind capable of thought and reason bowed down at the feet of
witches and mutterers of spells! How horrible to see a man making a league with
death and a covenant with Hell! Still, if a man should have gone this length, he
may yet be recovered out of the snare of the devil by Almighty Grace! Friend, if
you have even wandered into this infamous wickedness, you need not despair, for
Jesus lives to save the vilest of the vile!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3354

“Of the nations, though they reject Christ and continue in their idolatry, yet
there are some choice spirits who come—some whom the Lord looks upon with great
delight—and these shall come.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3442

“Our text says they are fools. Well, that is my opinion, but it does not matter
what my opinion may be. The point that does matter, however, is that it is God’s
opinion of every man who is not a Believer or trusting in Him. In plain English,
every such man is a fool. That is God’s opinion of him—God who cannot err—who is
never too severe, but who speaks the literal truth—that he who is not a Believer
is a fool! ”—Volume 62, Sermon #3512

“Oh, Sinner, be not discouraged, but seek the Lord, for you have His promise He
will be found of you!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3557

“There are some who from their childhood have been taught to say a form of
prayer. I shall neither commend nor censure, but I will say this—you may repeat
that form of prayer for twenty, forty, 50 years, and yet never have prayed a
single word in all your life!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3464

“The Church began with feeble numbers, with small wealth. I might add, with
comparatively little talent, but she was clothed with the Holy Spirit—she was,
therefore, mighty!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3361

“We can only honor God and bless men by being holy, harmless, undefiled and
separate from sinners. O corn of the Lord’s threshing floor, you must be beaten
and bruised, or perish as a worthless heap! Eminent usefulness usually
necessitates eminent affliction.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3388 “By what means are we
to put away this old sin? There it stands. Suppose we obey God from this time
forth till we die without a single fault—we shall then only have done what it
was our duty to perform and God had a right to expect of us!”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3408

“If you are to have a hope in mercy, you must know that it is mercy! You must
know that you need it as mercy! You must be clean divorced from every confidence
except in mercy! You must come to this, that it must be Grace first, last, and
midst—Grace everywhere—otherwise else it will never serve or save such a poor
helpless castaway as you are. A sound hope, then, is one in which a man knows
that he needs mercy!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3390

“They say that there is no Hell. He will never say that who has ever felt the
pains of a guilty conscience—the pangs of unforgiven sin to a soul that is made
alive by the Spirit of God!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3476 “Prayer alone would not be
a sufficient proof of love, but He who dies and prays, whose life is a prayer,
and whose death is a prayer, proves His love by adding to His life and death the
vocal utterance of both in this cry, ‘Father, forgive them.’”—Volume 63, Sermon
#3558

“You young men in the great firms of London. You working men that work in the
factories—you are sneered at. Let them sneer! If they can sneer you out of your
religion, you have not got any worth having! Remember you can be laughed into
Hell, but you can never be laughed out of it!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3512

“He who would serve God to any purpose must be willing to serve Him all alone.
If you cannot stand the brunt of being forsaken, you will scarcely do to be a
soldier of the Cross. Those whom Christ will greatly use must learn to be
misunderstood, to be misrepresented by their Brothers and Sisters and in their
more daring projects to be looked upon as being perfectly beside
themselves.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3364

“You might just as well say the Lord’s Prayer backwards as forwards for the
matter of its acceptance with God, except you say it with your heart!”—Volume
61, Sermon #3464 “It is of no use holding special services for the quickening of
the spiritually dead unless the Holy Spirit is brought into the field by our
prayers!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3421 “If Jesus prays, and proves His love by
prayer, and if the saints on earth who love you pray for you, depend upon it,
prayer is no light thing.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3558

“Our dear babies that died in infancy, we believe to be all washed in the blood
of Jesus, and all saved—but for the rest of mankind who have lived to years of
responsibility, there will be only one of two things—they must either be saved
because they had faith in Christ, or else the full weight of Divine Wrath must
fall upon them! Either the mark of Christ’s pen, or of Christ’s sword, must be
upon everyone!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3377

“The best refuge for a Believer in times of persecution is his secret resort to
God! Let him go on his knees and say, ‘My Lord, I have been counted worthy to be
spoken ill of for Your name’s sake. Help me to bear it. Now is my time of trial.
Strengthen me to bear this reproach. Grant that it may be no heavy burden to me,
but may I rather rejoice in it for Your name’s sake.’ God will help you,
beloved.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3512

“The Lord does not expect you, Beloved, while you are in this world at, any
rate, to know everything, but He does expect that you who call yourselves His
people should also be as little children, who are quite willing to
learn!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3464

“It is a poor faith that can only see Christ in the sunlight. It is a brave
faith that sees Him at midnight. It is poor faith that believes that Jesus is
there when all prospers, but it is right faith that knows He is there when
nothing prospers except faith, which prospers most when tried.”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3443

“Oh, my dear Hearers, there are none of us who know to the full extent the sin
of our sin! The most tender heart here does not know the blackness of its
sin!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3558

“There are such here tonight of whom I might speak—only the Lord bless them and
keep them as they are—for I have seen Apostolic Christianity here! If I have
seen it nowhere else, I have seen it here among some of my Brothers and Sisters
here present, whose service for the Lord shall be remembered in the Day of
Account! They wish it not to be known here, nor will it be, but they have, with
tears and prayers, devoted themselves to Christ and served Him well—and He will
remember them in that Day.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3551

“Oh, Sinner, have hope for yourself, willful and wicked as you may have been! If
you cannot amend your ways and change your heart, He can do it for you! The iron
bands of habit He can snap. The adamantine net of lasciviousness He can break in
pieces! From the degrading abominations of drunkenness He can extricate you! All
the charms of worldliness He can dissolve! He can set you free, though you are
now a captive fast in the inner prison with your feet in the stocks! While the
Holy Spirit lives, while Jesus intercedes, while the Father is willing to
receive prodigals, let no one despair! Grace makes the most worthless creatures
welcome to the most inestimable blessings! What Paul said to saints I venture to
say to sinners, Covet earnestly the best gifts.’ Amen.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3519

“There are those who say that Christ has thus given Himself for every man now
living, or that ever did or shall live. We are not able to subscribe to the
statement, though there is a Truth in it, that in a certain sense He is “the
Savior of all men,” but then it is added, ‘Especially of them who
believe.’”—Volume 62, Sermon #3513

“Our [ministers] example must encourage others to wait upon the Lord. As our
business is to tell them the mind of God, let us study that mind very
carefully.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3350 “…you would have need to die like Christ to
know what sin means in its infinite, its boundless guilt!”—Volume 63, Sermon
#3558

“If we are not perfect, yet at least let us be sincere! And if there are sins
into which we fall through inadvertence and surprise, yet at least uprightness
before our fellow men is one thing that must not be lacking—cannot be lacking in
a gracious soul—in a true child of God whom God accepts.”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3464

“Judge not, O Believer, that God hates you because He afflicts you! But
interpret truly and see that He honors you by every stroke which He lays upon
you…Remember, however, that as threshing is a sign of the impurity of the wheat,
so is afflictionan indicationof the present imperfection of the Christian. If
you were no more connected with evil, you would be no more corrected with
sorrow.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3388

“Brother and Sisters, just as the life of the baby would not be sustained unless
something was done for it which it could not do for itself, so the life of the
Christian is of the same sort—dependent upon the blessed offices of God the Holy
Spirit, and of the gracious Redeemer who watches over all the children of Grace
as a nurse watches over her child.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3444

“I believe that when any professor falls into a filthy sin, it is not the
beginning, but the culmination of a process and growth in iniquity! The open sin
comes at the heels of a long succession of neglected prayers, of neglected
worship of God in the family, a neglect of all communion with Christ and
negligence of every good thing. It is the fruit, not the seed of the evil, which
poisons the air and excites the public contempt.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3422

“My good works cannot save me, cannot even help to save me— but they are
evidences of my being saved—and if I am notzealous for good works, I lack the
evidence of salvation and I have no right whatever to conclude that I shall
receive one jot of benefit from Christ’s sufferings upon the Cross!”—Volume 62,
Sermon #3513

“Irregularities among men do not disorganize the ordained purposes of Heaven,
and what we think to be chaos is a well-ordered system, far beyond our
imagination, into which we vainly attempt to peer.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3559

“Whenever our spiritual life is very weak and we want it to grow stronger, let
us get to the living Christ for the supply of His strength. When you feel you
are ready to die, spiritually, go to the Savior for revived life. The text is
like a hand that points us to the storehouse. Contemplate Christ! Believe in
Christ! Draw yourselves by faith nearer and nearer to the Lord Jesus Christ, and
so shall your life receive a Divine impetus which it has not known for many a
day. ‘Because I live, you shall live also.’”—Volume 60, Sermon #3401

“Worship, then, can never go up from all the pealing organs in the world if
men’s hearts go not with them!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3464

“The common sin of God’s people is slackness in prayer. If there is one sin that
needs to be preached about more than another just now, it is the sin of the
omission of secret dealings with God. This is the secret of our spiritual
leanness, the secret of many of our trials, of our lack of joy, our loss of
confidence in God.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3339

“There was no difference at birth and no intrinsic essential difference of moral
constitution between Peter and Judas, between Paul and Demas, between the
brightest Apostle and the bloodiest persecutor! We have grown in Grace—had we
been left to ourselves, we would have rotted in sin! We have gone from strength
to strength in the way of holiness, but if it had not been for Divine Grace that
interposed most sovereignly, we should have gone from depth to depth in the way
of crime!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3347

“If men attack any Truth revealed to us by Christ, they do in effect what the
soldier did in fact—they do spirituallyas this Roman soldier did literally—they
thrust at His heart! If you disparage the words that Jesus spoke, or call in
question the Truth that He showed to His disciples and made manifest in the Word
of God, what is there left of that mission in which He made known the will of
God, the Father?”—Volume 63, Sermon #3559 “God gets some of His richest praise
amidst dying groans—and He gets delightful music from His people’s triumphant
cries.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3464

“It seems to me that this is the order in which God would have His Church carry
out every evangelical enterprise, forgetting and ignoring all fleshly
distinctions, understanding that men are either sinners or saints. As to
circumcision or uncircumcision, vast as its importance in the kingdom of Israel,
it is of no account in the Kingdom of God!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3514

“Such was this Manasseh—the very chief of sinners! I feel certain that among
those whom I address there is not a grosser sinner than he was. And I might
almost say there never lived a worse! He has an evil eminence among the lovers
of iniquity and yet he was saved by DivineGrace! O you who hear these words or
read them, never dare to doubt the possibility of your being forgiven! If such a
wretch as Manasseh was brought to repentance, surely no one need
despair!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3354

“Hearts belong to God and He has the keys and opens them—sweetly opens
them.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3442 “The heart of Christ was opened by the spear, and
often the heart of the Truth of God is revealed by the opposition brought to
bear against it.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3559 “Intercession is an instinct of the
renewed heart. When the Believer find that he is safe, he must pray for his
fellow men.”—CHS—Volume 59, Sermon #3377 “It is the joy of some of us that we
belong altogether to Christ. We would not have another honor—we wish to live to
Him, loving Him and serving Him as long as we have any being!”—Volume 60, Sermon
#34356

“A man leaves father and mother, and cleaves to his wife and they become one
flesh—but what shall I say of the great mystery of this glorious Lover who left
His Father’s house and cleaved unto His Church—and became one flesh with her
that He might lift her up and set her upon His own throne, that she might reign
with Him as the Bride, the Lamb’s Wife?”—Volume 62, Sermon #3514

“If there were only one unsaved soul now remaining in London, why, the whole
Church would be awake and in earnest to pray for that one soul! But when I say
to you that, Sabbath after Sabbath, these aisles are thronged, and these pews,
too, and that yet a very large proportion of the congregation remain
unconverted—why, you hear it and you say, “Well, it is a very sad fact”—but it
does not impress your hearts!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3364

“The spear let loose the blood and water from the heart of Jesus, and the spear
of persecution lets loose the Gospel—and compels Christian men who might have
rested in inglorious ease to go forward and laboriously dispense the Gospel of
salvation, telling the Grace of God to perishing men!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3559

“Faith, then, not only sees Jesus when He is corporeally absent, and sees Him
without corporeal eyes, but sees Him when to sense it seems quite impossible
that Jesus should be there!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3443 “I cannot always get to
God, I know, but I at least hope I may groan until I do.”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3464

“I believe the perseverance of the saints to be the very gem of the Gospel!...
In this my soul rejoices, that I have a salvation to preach to you which, if you
receive it, will effectually save you if your hearts are given to Christ and
will keep you, and preserve you, and bring you into the eternal Kingdom of His
Glory.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3362

“The history of the Church of God is an aggregation of histories, all of them
miraculous, for the Christian Church is a miracle so far as its life is
concerned—it is life in the midst of death—not only life in the sepulcher, but
life in the very midst of death itself.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3423 “No saint shall
be tempted beyond the proper measure—and the limit is fixed by a tenderness
which never deals a needless stroke!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3388

“So, too (but let no man turn this into evil), the very sin of men which does
wound Christ becomes the means of magnifying God’s Grace! Though it is a vile
thing to say, ‘Let us sin that Grace may abound,’ yet is it a most glorious
Truth of God that where sin abounds, Grace does much more abound!”—Volume 63,
Sermon #3559 “There is an everlasting consolation for the Church in those grand
Doctrines of Grace revealed to us in Covenant, such as Election, Particular
Redemption, Effectual Calling, Final Perseverance, and the Faithfulness of God.
Resting in His love, God forbid that we should ever keep back these grand
Truths—they are the wells of salvation from which we rejoice to draw the Water
of Life!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3514

“If we have helped the poor and have only received ingratitude, let us be very
thankful that it proves that our reward is not here! If we labor for Christ and
are misrepresented, let us be thankful, for again it proves that our reward is
not of men and in time, but is of God and for all eternity! To have our reward,
here, and our portion from men is a thing to be deprecated with tears, cries and
groans! God grant us to know our riches to be of a better sort than that which
the worldling covets.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3380

“Remember, however, that the only real mode of growth in faith is bythe power of
the Holy Spirit. As I said at the commencement of this discourse, Peter’s growth
in faith came upon him at Pentecost. And it was the same with the others of the
twelve—they became new men because the Spirit’s power rested upon them.”—Volume
59, Sermon #3384

“The reason why Jesus Christ is able to forgive sin and to make unjust men just,
is this—because He bears their iniquities.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3465 “There is no
believing in Jesus with a proud heart! He that trusts Christ must feel himself
to be guilty, and acknowledge it. He never will savingly believe till he has
been thoroughly convinced of sin.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3560

“What wonders faith can work! The first saint [Abel] who entered Heaven, entered
there, it is certain, by faith! It was faith that enabled him to present an
acceptable sacrifice, and it was faith that presented him to Heaven. If the
first who entered Heaven entered there by faith, rest assured that will be true
to the last—and none will enter there but those who believe.”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3478

“Oh, the power of the love of God has in governing and influencing a man!
Nothing can master a strong temper, a forceful will, an obstinate disposition,
or a wayward heart like the love of God!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3378

“…the best way to make a Christian happy is to make him useful, plowing the
fields which God has watered, and gathering the fruits which He has ripened. A
Christian Church never enjoys so much concord, love, and happiness as when every
member is kept hard at work for God, every soul upon the stretch of anxiety to
do good and communicate, every disciple a good soldier of the Cross, fighting
the common enemy.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3514

“Procrastinators are among the most hopeless of people! He that has “tomorrow”
quivering on his lips is never likely to have Grace reigning in his
heart.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3560 “Faith in Christ is faith in God—he that trusts
the Son has accepted the witness of the Father.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3437 “My
Brothers and Sisters, I believe that when kings and potentates meet in the
cabinet chamber and consult together according to their ambition, a Counselor
whom they never see pulls the strings and they are only His puppets.”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3412 “Surely I shall not be wrong if I say that in our times the pulpit
has to become the tower of the watchmen. While that is well and faithfully
maintained, no assaults of the foe shall prevail!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3423
“Salvation in our case means deliverance from guilt and ruin. And this could not
have been laid hold of by any measure of good works since we are not in a
condition to perform any.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3479 “As the Lord lives, you must
turn or burn! You must either repent or be ruined forever! May God give you
wisdom to choose the better part!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3560 “Someone went to hear
a certain preacher last Sunday and complained that he did not preach Christ.
Another remarked that perhaps it was not the due season, but my Brothers, the
due season for preaching Christ is every time you preach!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3350

“If a minister can be content to go on preaching without converts or Baptisms,
the Lord have mercy upon his miserable soul! Can he be a minister of Christ who
does not win souls? A man might as well be a hunter and never take any prey—a
fisherman and always come home with empty nets—a farmer, and never reap a
harvest!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3514

“You may believe false Doctrine with great earnestness, but you will find it
false for all that! You may give yourself up indefatigably to the pursuit of the
wrong religion, but it will ruin your souls!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3466 “You need
no other priest, but the great ‘Apostle and High Priest of our profession’! You
need no mediator with God, but the one Mediator, the Man, Christ Jesus, who is
also equal with God.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3442

“We ought to blame ourselves when we find our faith to be weak, but we must
never commend ourselves when faith is strong. The weakness of faith is ours, but
the strength of faith comes of the Holy Spirit and of Him alone.”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3341

“I well might shrink from speaking thus, were it not that fidelity to your souls
makes such demands that I must ring the warning. If you die without faith in
Christ, behold there is a gulf fixed between you and Heaven. I do not know what
that means, but I know what idea it gives to me, and should give to you. Between
Heaven and Hell there is no traffic! None ever passed from Hell to
Heaven!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3560

“Never doubt the true progress of the Church. Believe that, notwithstanding
every discouragement that checks our progress, the cause of God goes on—it must
go on and it shallgo on till King Jesus is universally acknowledged King of
Kings and Lord of Lords!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3514

“Young people, never imagine that all the training in the world can rid you of
your evil without an earnest struggle on your own part! Don’t conceive that a
mother’s prayers will give you tenderness of conscience unless you also learn of
Christ for yourselves.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3355

“I do not believe in any such nonsense as that you can be responsible for other
people’s souls, so that others may assist you with their vigilance. Never, I
beseech you, Englishmen and Englishwomen, never be such fools as to put
yourselves at the feet of a priest!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3378

“The Christian is never so much at liberty as when he is under law to Christ. He
knows the difference between license and liberty. He has a liberty to do as he
wills because he wills to do as God wills him to do—and herein lies the only
freedom which we desire!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3388 “Do not think that yours is an
extreme case because your spiritual life is one of much contest with sin. So far
from being extreme, I believe it is but a specimen of the way in which the Lord
deals with all His beloved ones.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3562

“I believe that in proportion as Christian people are well-instructed, the
attacks of the adversary will be repelled and defeated. But if we only gather
together undisciplined bodies of men and women who merely come to hear
preaching, but receive little or no instruction, they will become like flocks of
sheep—the prey of the wolf whenever he shall come.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3423

“A notion is abroad that if you are but earnest and sincere, you will be all
right. Permit me to remind you that if you travel ever so earnestly to the
north, you will never reach the south. And if you earnestly take prussic acid,
you will die! And if you earnestly cut off a limb, you will be wounded. You must
not only be earnest, but you must be right in it!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3466

“There is a great God above who reckons this to be among the greatest of all
human crimes—that they reject His Son. We speak of unbelief very lightly, and
there are some who trifle with it as if it had no moral quality at all—but God
does not!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3437 “We are not to come to God and ask Him to do
for us what we can do for ourselves. There is no room for the exercise of faith
where reason and human strength will suffice. Faith is a vessel expressly built
for the deep seas.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3562 “You were, apparently, once brave
soldiers, but you deserted and went over to the enemy. Still, if you are the
Lord’s people, one of the signs of God’s Grace to His Church will be the
recovery of backsliders.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3514

“Young men went to see the martyrdom of saints and as they saw their holy
patience, they came to be Believers themselves , till dying Christians became
the most powerful preachers of the Gospel and even the saints that believed were
comforted by the sight of the death of the martyr—they went to see how to die,
they went to learn the way to give themselves up for Christ!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3361

“How blessed it is when some Brother or Sister finds it in their heart to
consecrate more of their substance than is ordinary to the Lord’s work, not
grudging what they can spare, but glorying over what they can sacrifice!”—Volume
63, Sermon #3562

“I have a great many things that God has given me that I much value, but of all
the things I ever had, next to His dear Son, that which I value most is the
cross that is the heaviest. I have got more good out of my affliction than out
of all my prosperity! I would not be without a cross for all the world!”—Volume
61, Sermon #3443 “I will venture to say—and I should not wonder that some of you
will not like it to be said, that I believe it is anti-Christian and unholy for
any

Christian to live with the objective of accumulating wealth…what I said was
this, that to live with the objective of accumulating wealth is
antiChristian.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3380

“Jesus Christ is the only food that can make His people strong for service. Feed
on Him and you shall run and not be weary! You shall walk and not faint. It is
meat indeed because it gives us strength that is all but boundless. It clothes a
mortal man with the might of God. It makes the feeblest Christian in the Church,
when he has fed upon Christ, to be as a giant to suffer or to do!”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3424

“Sin is pardonable! The Lord God is merciful and gracious!…Hear Jehovah’s voice
out of Heaven, ‘I, even I, am He that blots out your iniquities for My name’s
sake: I will not remember your sins.’”—Volume 63, Sermon #3563 “The Lord
multiplies His Grace! He is always slow to anger, but He is always lavish with
His Grace.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3514 “If you are persuaded in your own soul that
what you believe and what you do are acceptable to God, whether they are
acceptable to man or not is of very small consequence!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3466

“I have often noticed that those who prate loudest of good works are those that
have the fewest good deeds to make mention of. Like little traders in the
streets with their little stock of commodities, they had need cry and advertise
their wares because they have so little to sell! Whereas a diamond merchant or
dealer in bullion sits still and never makes a noise at all because he has
precious treasure by him.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3408

“Sin will soon prevent your enjoying the love of God. Let the Christian linger
to walk disorderly and he will soon begin to talk lightly of his wickedness, and
this, again, will soon stop his communion with God. Though the Christian shall
not perish, yet many of his joys shall—though God will keep him so that he shall
not be utterly destroyed—yet the gladsome sense of the love of God will soon
depart when sin comes in to lead astray.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3378

“Your confidence in Christ, especially my dear young Friend, I trust does not
depend upon the smile of your relatives. If it did, then their frown might crush
it. Walk with your Savior in the lowly walk of holy confidence, and let not your
faith rest in man, but in the smile of God!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3466

“Oh, how wondrous is the Sovereignty of God! The devil cannot dye a soul so
scarlet in sin but what the blood of Christ can make it white as snow! Satan
cannot drive a chosen sheep of Christ so far on the mountains of vanity, or into
the deserts of sin, but what the Great Shepherd of the sheep can find that sheep
and bring it back!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3515

“So, my Brother and Sisters, when we have confessed our own sins, and have found
mercy, then we should begin to be intercessors for others! We should make
confession for the sins of our families, for the sins of our city, for the sins
of our country. If no longer need we plead for salvation for ourselves because
we have obtained it, let us give the full force of our prayers for the benefit
of others!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3484

“No man can put on the robes of Christ’s righteousness till he has taken off his
own. Christ will never go shares in our salvation.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3402 “The
holier the Christian becomes, the more readily he perceives his imperfections
and the wickedness of his sins. And sin, instead of becoming more bearable to a
Christian, becomes growingly more and more intolerable!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3347

“‘It has pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell.’ ‘All
fullness’—mark the word. ‘Fullness’ is a big word but ‘all fullness’ is bigger,
and all fullness dwells in Him—that is, it is remaining in Him, always fullness
and always remaining all fullness—that is the greatest word of all! He is both
meat and drink, He is all that we need!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3424

“Prayer is one of the most blessed engagements and occupations of men while they
are out of Heaven—to ask of the All-Bountiful One the mercies which they need.
But there are some here tonight who never pray—who never really ask of God what
they require. They take the attitude of supplicants, perhaps as a matter of
habit, but there they are like kneeling corpses!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3389

“The Lord, when He gets men’s hearts and washes away their sins, takes them into
His service, and makes those who were most ready to serve Satan become most
willing to serve Him!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3515

“Dear Brothers and Sisters, you and I, if we are believers in Christ, are this
day completely pardoned. There is no sin in God’s book against us. We are wholly
and completely justified! The righteousness of Jesus Christ covers us from head
to foot and we stand before God as if we had never sinned!”—Volume 61, Sermon
#3466 “There is nothing Christ did, except the great Atoning work, which His
people shall not do in and through Him, by the exercise of their faith!”—Volume
63, Sermon #3562

“Oh, this is a high mark of Grace, when the Christian expects his Lord to
come—and lives like one that expects Him every moment! If you and I knew tonight
that the Lord would come before this service was over, in what state of heart
should we sit in these pews? In that state of heart we ought to be!”—Volume 63,
Sermon #3551

“Brothers, take care that you use your talents for your Master, and only for
your Master. It is disloyalty to our Master if we wish to be soulwinners in
order to be thought to be so! It is unfaithfulness to Jesus if we even preach
sound Doctrine with the view to be thought sound, or pray earnestly with the
desire that we may be known as praying men.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3350

“It matters not how great the growth of a Christian, nor how mature his
experience, he still owes all he has and all he is to his union with Christ—he
cannot keep his own soul alive!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3444 “There is no honor in
the whole universe—no, not the honor of the angels, themselves—that can exceed
the honor that is put upon the man who believes in Jesus Christ.”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3402 “We must attempt some things which look like impossibilities, or we
shall never keep up the esprit of the true soldiers of the Cross.”—Volume 63,
Sermon #3562

“You can easily learn to say a form of prayer, or to read one from a book, but a
prayer that can fairly be called a cryis the fruit of Grace! The cry is the
natural expression of distress. There is no hypocrisy in a cry. When one is
sorely sick and ready to die, and cries out in anguish, it is the genuine
expression of an oppressed spirit! God always teaches His children to pray such
prayers as those.”—Volume 62, Sermon #3515

“Swelling words have been spoken and great attempts taken in hand to renovate
society, but you can never renovate society till you have renovated the
individual members who compose society!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3467

“I would like to see you, my dear Friends who are poor, feeling that out of your
poverty it is your privilege to give continually to Him who loved you and gave
Himself for you, not casting the burden of God’s work upon the few rich that may
be among us, but every man honestly taking his share in the Church’s burden,
which, indeed, is not her burden, but her privilege and her delight! I would
like to see you bring in your gifts to God’s treasury, not because you are asked
to do so, or prompted, or driven to it, but because you love to do it out of
love to Him.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3380

“The true spirit of a Christian is perpetual thankfulness.”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3424 “But the Church had to suffer from something which excelled heresy because
it was the aggregation of heresy,superstition, and apostasy. I mean the spread
of Popery.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3361

“Christ can teach the blasphemer to pray! He can take the profane into His
school and teach them all to cry—and what all the clergy and ministry in the
land could not do, namely, teach a man to pray one sincere prayer—God the Holy
Spirit can do to the very offscouring and the scum of the universe when once He
comes to deal with them in the way of Grace!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3515

“How watchful we ought to be against unbelief, for of all sins, this is one of
the most heinous.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3562

“We are told that as we are born-again, we are to consider ourselves as newborn
babes, and are to desire the unadulterated milk of God’s Word, that we may grow
thereby. It is not enough to be alive—we should desire to grow. To be saved is a
great blessing—we ought not, however, to be contented with being barely saved—we
should seek after the Graces of the Spirit and the excellent work of God within
us.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3485

“It is the preaching of the Cross of Jesus that is to make the world new! It is
not the philosophies of men, but the Wisdom of God which effects the change. In
the Presence of Christ your philosophies must sink into darkness as stars in the
presence of the sun.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3467

“The Law of God is such a Law that Adam failed to keep it, though innocent. How,
then, shall you keep it while imperfect? It is a spiritual Law, a Law touching
not only our actions, but your words and your thoughts—how can you keep it? And
yet, if you keep it not, it brandishes its great whip with the thongs and brings
it down upon the conscience with terrible effect. If you keep not the Law,
remember the sentence, ‘Cursed is everyone that continues not in all things
written in the Book of the Law to do them.’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3355 “Repentance
and faith are two inseparable companions—they flourish or decay together like
the two arms of the human body. If faith could enter Heaven, repentance would
certainly pass the gate at the same time.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3336

“To walk on water is not an essential characteristic of faith, but to pray when
you begin to sink, is. To do great wonders for Christ is not indispensable to
your soul’s being saved, but to have the faculty of always turning the heart to
Him in time of distress is one of the sure marks of Divine Grace in the
soul.”—Volume 63, Sermon #3562

“When you read the newspaper, read it to see how your heavenly Father is
managing the world for the good of His own children! All else—be it the disposal
of a throne, the settlement of a political question, or the winning of a boat
race—all else, I say, are minor things compared with the interests of the
Election of Grace! All things are revolving and cooperating for good. They are
working together for good to them that love God, and are the called according to
the purpose of His Grace. By them He will make manifest throughout the ages unto
the angels and the principalities, His manifold wisdom.”—Volume 60, Sermon #3412
“The most valorous Believer sometimes finds his faith turn to unbelief.”—Volume
61, Sermon #3444

“It may be sport to some of you to sit and hear, but it is awful as death for us
to stand and preach. I mean, it is no child’s play for a man to feel, ‘I stand
in God’s place to that people this night, and as though God did beseech them by
me, I am to pray them, as in Christ’s stead, to be reconciled to God.’ He that
can toy with his ministry and count it to be like a trade, or like any other
profession, was never called of God!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3402

“If ever you get the love of God in your heart, go down on your knees and ask
the Holy Spirit to always keep it there! You shall never catch this bird and
shall never be able to keep it unless the Holy Spirit helps you. Oh, to be
crucified with Christ! We may well desire it—to be fastened to His Cross so that
we shall never again desire to wander, but feel ourselves the happy bond-slaves,
the free servants, of our Lord Jesus Christ!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3378

“I believe that the harps of Heaven will be sweeter than the prayers of God’s
people on earth, but then they must be very, very sweet, indeed, for a prayer
that comes to the living soul in the power of the Holy Spirit has an element of
Divinity about it!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3468

“I pray you, then, my dear Hearers, if you would be saved, be diligent in
hearing the Gospel! I would urge you to frequent those places of worship most
where there is most of Christ preached. Do not seek after eloquence, oratory,
gaudy periods or grotesque observations that might amuse you. You have something
else to do on the Lord’s Day besides being amused and having your ears
tickled!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3389

“And what do you think? Can it be child’s play to die? To finish one’s course—to
know that alterations and corrections cannot be made? Our flesh creeps at the
prospect of the grave—but our soul trembles at the outlook and the
judgment!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3516

“No man enters eternal life on earth, or in Heaven, as his due—it is the gift of
God. We say, ‘Nothing is freer than a gift.’ Salvation is so purely, so
absolutely a gift of God that nothing can be more free! God gives it because He
chooses to give it according to that grand text which has made many a man bite
his lip in wrath—‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. I will have
compassion on whom I will have compassion.’”—Volume 61, Sermon #3479

“Everything that any one of us shall need between here and Heaven is ready for
us, but it is all in Christ—there is not a grain of it in ourselves.”—Volume 61,
Sermon #3444 “Among the choicest seasons in a Christian’s life, however, are
those in which he finds himself honored ofGod inthe conversionofsoul. Those are
days of Heaven upon earth!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3425

“Ah, Soul, God does listen to the chattering of cranes! I know He does, for I
have read in His Word what is tantamount to that in the text [Isaiah 38:14], “He
hears the young ravens when they cry.” And surely if He hears a raven’s cry and
if not a sparrow falls to the ground without our Father, your prayer, though it
may be very indistinct and the language, itself, may be very unworthy of the
Divine ear, yet it shall command an audience and will bring down a blessing from
above!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3468

“Oh, Spirit of God, bring back Your Church to a belief in the Gospel! Bring back
her ministers to preach it once again with the Holy Spirit, and not striving
after wit and learning. Then shall we see Your arm made bare, O God, in the eyes
of all the people, and the myriads shall be brought to rally round the Throne of
God and the Lamb! The Gospel must succeed! It shall succeed! It cannot be
prevented from succeeding—a multitude that no man can number must be
saved!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3403

“Should not the love of disciples to their Lord be stronger than the love of the
husband to his wife, of the mother to her child, or of friend to friend—a love
compared with which there is no love on earth to be found—a love that is strong
as death?”—Volume 62, Sermon #3516 “I do not intend to speculate with my
Master’s Gospel, by dreaming that I can improve it by my own deep thinking, or
by soaring aloft with the philosophers! We will not, even with the idea of
saving souls, speak other than the Gospel! If I could create a great excitement
by delivering novel doctrine, I would abhor the thought! To raise a revival by
suppressing the Truth of God is dealing deceitfully—it is a pious fraud and our
Lord wants no gain which might come by such a transaction!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3350

“If the Gospel of Jesus Christ is faithfully preached, no matter by whom, if it
is the whole Gospel affectionately declared, prayed over, believingly delivered,
it will always glorify God’s name!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3361 “Christians should
be good citizens. Though in one respect they are not citizens of this world, yet
as they find themselves in it, they should seek the good of those among whom
they dwell and be patterns of order.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3485

“What is my crime, if my prayer is clamorous? Did the Lord ever say He would not
hear a clamorous prayer? Has not He rather told us a parable in which the woman
gained by clamor from the unjust judge the vindication of her rights? What if my
prayer is repetitious? Did He ever say He would not hear me because I had no
variety of expression? Oh, I must not condemn what God has not
condemned!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3468

“Some of us will never forget our grief for sin—it was a bitterness with which
no stranger could intermeddle. We shall never forget the anguish of our soul and
our deep humiliation which no ashes could sufficiently symbolize. Like the
patriarch of old, we cried, ‘I abhor myself and repent in dust and
ashes.’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3336

“If you live to His praise and rest in his love, you shall find that that love
is strong as death! Instead of its growing cooler and weaker when the outward
man decays, that love of yours shall get to the land of Beulah and you shall sit
upon the banks of Jordan, expecting the coming of the Master and singing happy
canticles and blessed love songs, even in the prospect of your departure! Love
is strong as death!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3516

“One would think that even nature, itself, might lead parents to admire that
which should make their children virtuous, preserve them in this life and bless
them in the life to come. But such is the enmity of the human heart against
Christ and His Gospel, that hundreds of parents have been monsters to their
children when those children have been obedient subjects to Christ!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3347

“But, my Brothers and Sisters, bad as man is, I think he never was so bad—or
rather, his badness never came out to the full so much—as when gathering all his
spite, his pride, his lust, his desperate defiance, his abominable wickedness
into one mouthful—he spat into the face of the Son of God, Himself!”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3404

“I do believe, my dear Friends, that few will miss a blessing who hear a Gospel
minister anxiously desiring to get a blessing. In these waters, men shall catch
what they fish for! And if you seek earnestly after God’s blessing, you shall
find it! Thirst for it! Pant for it! Long for it! You already have the beginning
of it, for to desire Grace is an evidence that you have Grace in a measure! And
to seek earnestly Christ is already to have something from Christ—a foretaste of
the feast they enjoy who find Him!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3389

“Never neglect the means, but never depend upon the means. Go above the means to
the God of the means, and do not be satisfied with the mere means of Grace, but
try to get the Grace of the means!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3444 “Your religion is
not of a first-class order if it is altogether looking at your practice, and not
at the finished and perfect work of Christ.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3469

“I think the idea prevails among pious people that everything we do for Christ
ought to be done in a quiet, gentle, soft, milk-sop fashion—that we must pray in
a very smooth tone of voice, speak in a whisper and sing so as not to shock
anybody’s nerves! This seems to me to be totally inconsistent and utterly alien
to the spirit of genuine Christianity!”—Volume 62, Sermon #3516

“We overcome sin through the blood of the Lamb applied to us day by day by the
hyssop of faith. Brethren, if you neglect your faith, you will soon find that,
struggle as you will, to advance in other Graces, your struggles will be all in
vain. Faith, faith, faith—this is the reservoir and if this is not well filled,
the pipes will soon run dry.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3384

“Every Christian should make it to be one of the grand aims of his life, if not
the grandest, to bring others to reconciliation with God through Jesus
Christ!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3425

“I think experienced Christians begin to dread their joy and to expect blessings
from their sorrows. When things apparently go bad, they know they really go
well, and when things apparently go well, we are very apt to fear and tremble
for all the good which God makes to pass before us and fear, lest in the dead
calm, there may lurk some mischief to our souls.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3379 “If I
knew that I should see my Lord before another sun should rise, how would I
preach? I ought to preach just in that way as though He were sure to come at
once and there could be no doubt about it!”—Volume 63, Sermon #3551

“Persecution is unprincipled. It violates the law of love to which we owe a
supreme allegiance. But true faith never can hold fellowship with infidelity!
Vital godliness must be at hostility with all unrighteousness of men.”—Volume
62, Sermon #3516

“Religion is the one thing necessary to us all. It is the one thing necessary to
the minister. Without true religion in his heart, he is an impostor!... But
religion is also the one thing necessary for the hearers—so necessary, indeed,
that if they have it not, all the sermons and prayers in the world will be but
as fuel for their condemnation!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3469

“A general confession may be very proper in the congregation, but it is only
acceptable to God as it becomes an individual and particular confession in the
case of each one using the words.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3355

“Do I seem to you to talk sarcastically? Be it admitted I do! Were it possible
for me to kick this idea of human merit like a football round the world, Sirs.
Were it possible to set it in the pillory of scorn and pelt it with I know not
what of filth, I would feel that I had the Apostle Paul standing by my side and
saying, ‘What things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yes,
doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellence of the knowledge
of Christ Jesus my Lord.’ And I would hear him say of his own righteousness, ‘I
count it as dung, that I may win Christ, and be found in Him.’ He could not have
taken a coarser figure, nor one which expressed more thoroughly his hearty
contempt of everything like self-righteousness—‘I count it as dung that I may
win Christ, and be found in Him.’”—Volume 60, Sermon #3408

“Now, when ought a man to do this [e baptized]? It is a duty. When and how ought
he to do it? I answer that as soon as ever a soul has believed in Christ,its
next duty is toconfess inChrist. It ought never to be delayed. And where it has
been, the delay ought to be made up by a speedy obedience. ”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3405 “This is the triumph of God’s Grace—not that He takes men to Heaven as we
might carry machines there, but that He expressly acts upon the human mind,
leaves it as free as ever it was, and yet makes it perfectly obedient to His own
will!”—Volume 61, Sermon #3469

“Let us pray for holiness and we shall get happiness! Let us ask to be
heavenly-minded and we shall get Heaven! There is no fear about our joy if we
can get holiness. Very much in proportion as we shall become fit for Heaven
shall we have days of Heaven upon earth. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3425

“Why does the Lord deal roughly with His servants when He means to bless them?
Is it not to keep them sober? High spiritual joys have about them an
intoxicating element to our poor nature. ‘Lest I should be exalted above
measure,’ said the Apostle Paul, ‘there was given unto me a thorn in the flesh,
a messenger of Satan to buffet me.’ Sometimes the trial comes before the mercy,
sometimes with the mercy, sometimes after the mercy—but a trial and a high
degree of spiritual joy are usually wedded together so that when you get the
one—you may look out of the window for the other.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3379

“At this present moment I suppose that not less than 300 of our sons that have
been borne upon our knees are preaching the Gospel while I am preaching here—I
mean ministers of Christ preaching the Gospel. Besides that, all round these
streets are our Evangelists preaching at street corners. There ought to be more
of them. Some of you that come to hear me on Sunday nights ought not to come. If
you have got the Grace of God in your heart, come and get enough spiritual meat
to feed you, but remember that London is perishing for the lack of the Gospel!
How dare you, then, sit still to enjoy the Gospel while men are
perishing?”—Volume 63, Sermon #3551

“Where there is not a thorough separation from the world, there is cause to fear
there is no close union to Christ. The best part of our confession to Christ
lies in the practically giving up everything which Christ would not sanction,
and the following out of whatever Christ would ordain!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3405

“The man who finds the ministry an easy life will also find that it will bring a
hard death. If we are not laborers, we are not true stewards, for we are to be
examples of diligence to the household. I like Adam Clarke’s precept—‘Kill
yourselves with work and pray yourselves alive again.’ We shall never do our
duty either to God or man if we are sluggards.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3350

“Do men tell us there are no such things as miracles? Why, every Christian is a
living reply to their allegation! No such thing as a miracle? The existence of a
Believer from day to day is a string of miracles which the laws of Nature will
not account for. Every Christian will tell you that his experience is miraculous
from the beginning of his faith to this day, and so will it continue to be to
the end. ”—Volume 61, Sermon #3470 “There is nothing in the world that makes so
much stir as preaching Christ!...I know not why it is, but so it is, that even
those who dislike the Gospel will come to hear it! And though sometimes they set
their teeth together and curse the men that preach it, yet they come again—they
cannot help it.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3361

“Men are not saved by their works—we declare that plainly enough—but if faith
does not producegood works, it is a dead faith and it leaves you a dead soul to
become corrupt and to be cast out from the sight of the Most High. ”—Volume 60,
Sermon #3390

“Perfect obedience is what Jesus Christ has a right to claim from us! Oh, that
He would give us Grace that He might receive according to His rights! Is there
any duty, my Brothers and Sisters, which you have not yet fulfilled and which
presses upon your conscience? Or is there some other duty on which your
conscience is but partially enlightened? Ask for a quickened conscience and when
you obtain it, never tamper with it!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3355

“This is a flimsy age—a superficial age. It has its waves of religious
excitement, but they are all on the surface. We have not many of those great
ground-swell waves where the ocean of manhood seems to heave up from the very
bottom. These are the waves that work wonders for men and glorify God. May we
have many such in our own souls!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3426

“Never does a child of God pass through trial without some special provision
being made for him during his time of need.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3379

“It is impossible for God to deal towards His people contrary to the spirit
which breathes in the two Immutable things in which it is impossible for Him to
lie, and by which He has given strong consolation to those who have fled for
refuge to the hope which is set before them in the Gospel.”—Volume 60, Sermon
#3412

“The God that answers by fire is a God who shall reign over this world! And the
God of Christianity is that God of fire! Hence, Beloved, since you are expected
to operate upon others by your life and teaching, you must not dream of
concealing your faith, for your religion requires it. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3405

“Whenever Believers permit the fires of sin to burn, they are made, before long,
to cast the ashes of repentance upon their heads and shrink into the
dust.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3336

“I read the other day that some of us were the echoes of a dead Puritanism, that
we were not abreast of the age and were preaching a faith that was practically
dead! Sirs, they lie in their throats that say so, and some of them know it, for
the Gospel is no more dead than they are, nor half so much!”—Volume 59, Sermon
#3361

“If you will have the world, you shall have it—but you shall not have Christ.
”—Volume 60, Sermon #3426

“‘What are you doing, now?’ said a good old Divine to a Brother who was dying.
He said, ‘I am doing now what I have done many times before in health—I am
taking all my good works and all my bad works—indeed, they are so much alike
that I can scarcely tell which is which—and I am tying them all in one bundle
and throwing them overboard as fast as I can! And I am just clinging to Christ
with all my heart and all my soul.’This is the only way of safety. None but
Jesus! Nothing of yours—not one brass farthing—but Christ, Christ, Christ—Christ
at the top and the bottom, at the beginning and the end, first, last and
throughout!’”—Volume 59, Sermon #3384

“You tell me you trust in God, and yet there has been no change of life in you!
Oh, Sirs! Unless you are converted and become as little children, you shall in
no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3390 “Until I see that
the Lord Jesus Christ has set up a theater, or planned a miracle play, I shall
not think of emulating the stage or competing with the music hall! If I do my
own business, by preaching the Gospel, I shall have enough to do.”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3350

“If you will follow your doubts and fears to their roots, you will find that
they grow from the dunghill of your sins—and when the Lord cleanses out the evil
of our hearts and creates a new spirit within us, the oil of joy perfumes the
soul and we are glad in His salvation.”—Volume 59, Sermon #3341

“ All the doctrines of the Bible have a tendency, when properly understood and
received, to foster the Christian’s joy. ”—Volume 60, Sermon #3406

“Why those stakes, those dungeons and those racks? Why the snows of Piedmont
dyed scarlet with human gore? Why the glens of Scotland marked with the lurking
places of the saints? Because this world hates the people of God!”—Volume 59,
Sermon #3347“We give the Lord some scanty five or ten minutes, or a quarter of
an hour, whereas our Puritan forefathers prayed sometimes for hours! But it
would matter little about the time if we did but give the spirit…Oh, that we
wrestled with the Angel and prevailed! My Brothers and Sisters, we have,
everyone of us, something to take before God in prayer—and we rob the church of
our contributions to her treasury of intercession if we do not put our share
into it!”—Volume 59, Sermon #3355

“You are a wife—you ought not to be an untidy, idle, novel-reading woman,
neglecting your family duties! If so, I do not care what classes you attend, or
what Prayer Meetings—you have no business to act like that—and yet profess to be
a Christian!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3411 “The mercy of God, wherever it comes,
makes men pray. You never bend your knees and yet you say you trust in God’s
mercy? Oh, Sir, you are deceiving your own soul!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3390

“The great question is, ‘What say the Scriptures? What does the Old Book say?’
If it does not teach that the salvation of a sinner is altogether by Grace and
not of works, it does not teach anything at all! And there are no words in any
language that mean anything! I must be made to believe that black is white and
that God has purposely and willfully written a book to deceive us, before I can
believe salvation to be by works!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3408

“Oh, that Doctrine of Election! I wish some of you would acquaint yourselves
with it in the Psalmody of the Church, rather than in the wrangling of the
schools! It is a tree that puts forth its luxuriance in the tropical climate of
Divine Love—but it looks dwarfed and barren in the arctic regions of human
logic!”—Volume 60, Sermon #3406

“Oh, that every sinner here were led to resign himself, now, to the Holy
Spirit’s will, for He would lead him to the Cross at once! The Holy Spirit never
leads a man into self-righteousness, never leads him to put his trust in
sacraments, but leads him right away to the feet of Jesus. May the Holy Spirit
guide you and all of us there, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord!
Amen.”—Volume 61, Sermon #3483


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/spurgeon-ch-notable-quotes-vol-1-5/
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