A single small insignificant sin (in our perspective) that we made deserves an everlasting punishment of everlasting wrath of God in Everlasting fire of hell. Thanks be to God by providing His Son as the absorber of the Divine wrath. Jesus bore the sin and the punishment for His people

The cross stands for definite realities which embody and express the leading characteristics of Christ's agony.

Faith endures as seeing Him who is invisible; endures the disappointments, the hardships, and the heart-aches of life, by recognizing that all comes from the hand of Him who is too wise to err and too loving to be unkind.

Like the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the miraculous birth of our Savior, the truth of election must be received with simple, unquestioning faith.

The bridge of grace will bear your weight, brother. Thousands of big sinners have gone across that bridge, yea, tens of thousands have gone over it. Some have been the chief of sinners and some have come at the very last of their days but the arch has never yielded beneath their weight. I will go with them trusting to the same support. It will bear me over as it has for them.

Seek not to understand that thou mayest believe, but believe that thou mayest understand.

Faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.

Faith, as Paul saw it, was a living, flaming thing leading to surrender and obedience to the commandments of Christ.

If God gives you a watch, are you honoring Him more by asking Him what time it is or by simply consulting the watch?

"Let God be true but every man a liar" is the language of true faith.

The revived begin to get a concern for the members of their own family - husband, wife, father, mother, children, brother, sister - who do not know that they are outside. They tell them about it; they feel they must. There is a constraint that is driving them. They talk about it to people, to friends and to everybody, and they begin to pray for them. Prayer is always a great feature of every revival, great prayer meetings, intercession hour after hour. They pray for these people by name and they plead, and they will not let God go, as it were.

We must be very careful to draw this distinction between essentials and non-essentials lest we become guilty of schism and begin to rend the body of Christ.
Topics: Unity
Source: What is an Evangelical? The Banner of Truth Trust, 1992, p. 90

Indeed I can put it, finally like this; the ultimate cause of all spiritual depression is unbelief. For if it were not or unbelief even the devil could do nothing. It is because we listen to the devil instead of listening to God that we go down before him and fall before his attacks.

The gospel is open to all; the most respectable sinner has no more claim on it than the worst

Whenever I see myself before God and realize something of what my blessed Lord has done for me at Calvary, I am ready to forgive anybody anything. I cannot withhold it. I do not even want to withhold it.

Whenever I see myself before God and realize something of what my blessed Lord has done for me at Calvary, I am ready to forgive anybody anything. I cannot withhold it. I do not even want to withhold it.

As Christians we should never feel sorry for ourselves. The moment we do so, we lose our energy, we lose the will to fight and the will to live, and are paralyzed.

If we only spent more of our time in looking at Him we should soon forget ourselves.
Topics: Self-confidence
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 88

I can forgive a man for a bad sermon, I can forgive the preacher almost anything if he gives me a sense of God, if he gives me something for my soul, if he gives me the sense that, though he is inadequate himself, he is handling something which is very great and very glorious, if he gives me some dim glimpse of the majesty and the glory of God, the love of Christ my Saviour, and the magnificence of the Gospel. If he does that I am his debtor, and I am profoundly grateful to him.

Be natural; forget yourself; be so absorbed in what you are doing and in the realisation of the presence of God, and in the glory and the greatness of the Truth that you are preaching, and the occasion that brings you together, that you forget yourself completely. That is the right condition; that is the only place of safety; that is the only way in which you can honour God. Self is the greatest enemy of the preacher, more so than in the case of any other man in society. And the only way to deal with self is to be so taken up with, and so enraptured by, the glory of what you are doing, that you forget yourself altogether.

There is all the difference in the world between preaching merely from human understanding and energy, and preaching in the conscious smile of God.

What is the chief end of preaching? I like to think it is this: It is to give men and women a sense of God and His presence.

What is preaching? Logic on fire! Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire. A true understanding and experience of the Truth must lead to this. I say again that a man who can speak about these things dispassionately has no right whatsoever to be in a pulpit; and should never be allowed to enter one.
Topics: Preaching, Theology, Truth
Source: Preachers and Preaching, Zondervan, 1971, p. 97.

The work of preaching is the highest and greatest and most glorious calling to which anyone can ever be called.
Topics: Preaching

The big difference between a lecture and a sermon is that a sermon does not start with a subject; a sermon should always be expository. In a sermon the theme or the doctrine is something that arises out of the text and its context, it is something which is illustrated by that text and context.
Topics: Preaching
Source: Preachers and Preaching, Zondervan, 1971, pg. 71,

That is what preaching (the Bible) is meant to do. It addresses us in such a manner as to bring us under judgment; and it deals with us in such a way that we feel our whole life is involved, and we go out saying, "I can never go back and live just as I did before. This has done something to me; it has made a difference to me. I am a different person as the result of listening to this."
Topics: Preaching
Source: Preachers and Preaching, Zondervan, 1971, p. 56.

Preaching the Word is the primary task of the Church, the primary task of the leaders of the Church, the people who are set in this position of authority; and we must not allow anything to deflect us from this, however good the cause, however great the need.
Topics: Preaching
Source: Preachers and Preaching, Zondervan, 1971, p. 23.

I have always felt when someone has come to me and told me that he has been called to be a preacher, that my main business is to put every conceivable obstacle that I can think of in his way.
Topics: Preaching
Source: Preachers and Preaching, Zondervan, 1971, p. 108,

Avoid cleverness and smartness. The people will detect this, and they will get the impression that you are more interested in yourself and your cleverness than in the truth of God and their souls.
Topics: Preaching
Source: Preaching and Preachers, Zondervan, 1972, p. 209.

Any true definition of preaching must say that that man is there to deliver the message of God, a message from God to those people. If you prefer the language of Paul, he is 'an ambassador for Christ.' That is what he is. He has been sent, he is a commissioned person, and he is standing there as the mouthpiece of God and of Christ to address these people.
Topics: Preaching
Source: Preachers and Preaching, Zondervan, 1971, p. 53.

A man who feels he is competent, and that he can do this easily, and so rushes to preach without any sense of fear or trembling, or any hesitation whatsoever, is a man who is proclaiming that he has never been "called" to be a preacher.
Topics: Preaching
Source: Preachers and Preaching, Zondervan, 1971, p. 107,

We should go into His presence as a child goes to his father. We do it with reverence and godly fear, of course, but we should go with a childlike confidence and simplicity.

Give yourself to it,[the call to prayer] yield to it; and you will find not only that you have not been wasting time with respect to the matter with which you are dealing but that actually it has helped you greatly in that respect. You will experience an ease and a facility in understanding what you were reading, in thinking, in ordering matter for a sermon, in writing, in everything which is quite astonishing. Such a call to prayer must never be regarded as a distraction; always respond to it immediately, and thank God if it happens to you frequently.

Always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this always obey such an impulse.

Prayer, in many ways, is the supreme expression of our faith in God.

Philosophy has always been the cause of the church going astray, for philosophy means, ultimately, a trusting to human reason and human understanding. The philosopher wants to encompass all truth; he wants to categorize and explain everything, and that is why (philosophy is) diametrically opposed to the preaching of the gospel.

The divine Instructor has taken us under his wing and he is putting us through our exercises so that hands which hang down can be lifted up, and feet are straightened out, and a lame man is helped to walk. The Instructor is saying such things as, now "Keep moving, don't let yourself get stiff, keep the joints moving, keep them as supple as you can.

There is nothing which so certifies the genuineness of a man's faith as his patience and his patient endurance, his keeping on steadily in spite of everything.
Topics: Patience
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 229

Human will-power alone is not enough. Will-power is excellent and we should always be using it; but it is not enough. A desire to live a good life is not enough. Obviously we should all have that desire, but it will not guarantee success. So let me put it thus: Hold on to your principles of morality and ethics, use your willpower to the limit, pay great heed to every noble, uplifting desire that is in you; but realize that these things alone are not enough, that they will never bring you to the desired place. We have to realize that all our best is totally inadequate, that a spiritual battle must be fought in a spiritual manner.

Love is not just a sentiment. Love is a great controlling passion and it always expresses itself in terms of obedience.
Topics: Love, Obedience

You can have knowledge, and you can be meticulous in your preparation; but without the unction of the Holy Spirit you will have no power, and your preaching will not be effective.
Topics: Knowledge, Preaching, Holy Spirit
Source: Preaching and Preachers, Zondervan, 1972, p. 319.

Our justification means not only that our sins are forgiven and that we have been declared to be righteous by God Himself, not merely that we were righteous at the moment when we believed, but permanently righteous. For justification means this also, that we are given by God the positive righteousness of His own Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Topics: Justification
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 74

You must be made miserable before you can know true Christian joy. Indeed the real trouble with the miserable Christian is that he has never been truly made miserable because of conviction of sin. He has by-passed the essential preliminary to joy, he has been assuming something that he has no right to assume.
Topics: Joy, Conviction
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 28

We all tend to go to extremes; some rely only on their own preparation and look for nothing more; others, as I say, tend to despise preparation and trust to the unction, the anointing and the inspiration of the Spirit alone. But there must be no "either/or" here; it is always "both/and." These two things must go together.
Topics: Holy Spirit
Source: Preaching and Preachers, Zondervan, 1972, p. 305.

Holiness is not something we are called upon to do in order that we may become something; it is something we are to do because of what we already are.

When man truly becomes what he is meant to be under God he then begins to realize what faculties and propensities he has, and he begins to use them. And so you will find that the greatest periods and epochs in the history of countries have always been those eras that have followed in the wake of great religious reformation and revivals.
Topics: History, Revival
Source: Preachers and Preaching, Zondervan, 1971, p. 36.

We all desire to be happy. That is something that is innate in human nature; nobody wants to be miserable, though I am aware of the fact that there are people who seem to enjoy being miserable and some who seem to find their happiness in being unhappy!
Topics: Happiness
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 109

It is grace at the beginning, and grace at the end. So that when you and I come to lie upon our death beds, the one thing that should comfort and help and strengthen us there is the thing that helped us in the beginning. Not what we have been, not what we have done, but the Grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. The Christian life starts with grace, it must continue with grace, it ends with grace. Grace wondrous grace. By the grace of God I am what I am. Yet not I, but the Grace of God which was with me.

The ultimate test of our spirituality is the measure of our amazement at the grace of God.

We must come back to the soul and to God who made it. We were made for Him, we are meant for Him, we have a correspondence with Him, and we will never come to rest until, like that needle on the compass, we strike that northern point, and there we come to rest - nowhere else.
Topics: God, Rest
Source: I Am Not Ashamed: Advice to Timothy, Baker, 1996, p. 82-83

It was God's hand that laid hold of me, and drew me out, and separated me to this work.

Not to be in fellowship with those who are born again is to be guilty of schism, which is sinful.
Topics: Fellowship, Unity
Source: What is an Evangelical? The Banner of Truth Trust, 1992, p. 90.

We must not concentrate overmuch upon our feelings. Do not spend too much time feeling your own pulse taking your own spiritual temperature, do not spend too much time analyzing your feelings. That is the high road to morbidity.
Topics: Feelings
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 115

I must never ask myself in the first instance: What do I feel about this? The first question is, Do I believe it? Do I accept it, has it gripped me?
Topics: Feelings
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 115

I must never ask myself in the first instance: What do I feel about this? The first question is, Do I believe it? Do I accept it, has it gripped me?
Topics: Feelings
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 115

Feelings must be engaged. They are meant to be involved. [Yet] our danger is to submit ourselves to our feelings and to allow them to dictate to us, to govern and to master us and to control the whole of our lives.
Topics: Feelings
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 110, 112

Fasting, if we conceive of it truly, must not be confined to the question of food and drink; fasting should really be made to include abstinence from anything which is legitimate in and of itself for the sake of some special spiritual purpose. There are many bodily functions which are right and normal and perfectly legitimate, but which for special peculiar reasons in certain circumstances should be controlled. That is fasting.

There is a very real danger of our putting our faith in our sermon rather than in the Spirit. Our faith should not be in the sermon, it should be in the Holy Spirit Himself.
Topics: Faith, Preaching, Holy Spirit
Source: Preaching and Preachers, Zondervan, 1972, p. 230.

Faith holds on to truth and reason from what it knows to be fact.
Topics: Faith, Truth
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 144

Faith is this extraordinary principle which links man to God; faith is this thing that keeps a man from hell and puts him in heaven; it is the connection between this world and the world to come; faith is this mystic astounding thing that can take a man dead in trespasses and sins and make him live as a new being, a new man in Christ Jesus.
Topics: Faith
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 227

Faith is a refusal to panic.
Topics: Faith
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 143

People seem to think that the masses are outside the Christian church because our evangelistic methods are not what they ought to be. That is not the answer. People are outside the church because looking at us they say, "What is the point of being Christians? - look at them!" They are judging Christ by you and me. And you cannot stop them and you cannot blame them.

First of all, the evangelical is one who is entirely subservient to the Bible. This is true of every evangelical. He is a man of one book; he starts with it; he submits himself to it; this is his authority.
Topics: Evangelism
Source: What is an Evangelical? The Banner of Truth Trust, 1992, p. 42.

"Schism" - People who were agreed about the centralities of the faith dividing and separating from one another over matters that were not essential to salvation, not absolutely vital. This is always one of the dangers afflicting us as evangelicals. We can be so rigid, so over-strict, and so narrow that we become guilty of schism.
Topics: Doctrine, Unity
Source: What is an Evangelical? The Banner of Truth Trust, 1992, p. 20-21.

There is no purpose in having a basis or a confession of faith unless it is applied. So we must assert the element of discipline as being essential to the true life of the church. And what calls itself a church which does not believe in discipline, and does not use it and apply it, is therefore not a true church.
Topics: Discipline
Source: What is an Evangelical? The Banner of Truth Trust, 1992, p. 83.

The Scriptures do grant clearly by their teaching that it is possible for a Christian to be depressed. Not that they justify this, but they do recognize the fact.
Topics: Depression
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 107

A depressed Christian is a contradiction in terms, and he is a very poor recommendation for the gospel. Nothing is more important, therefore, than that we should be delivered from a condition which gives other people, looking at us, the impression that to be a Christian means to be unhappy, to be sad, to be morbid, and that the Christian is one who "scorns delights and lives laborious days."
Topics: Depression
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 11

There is something essentially wrong with a man who calls himself a Christian and who can listen to a truly evangelistic sermon without coming under conviction again, without feeling something of his own unworthiness, and rejoicing when he hears the Gospel remedy being presented.
Topics: Conviction
Source: Preachers and Preaching, Zondervan, 1971, p. 150

The main trouble with the Christian Church today is that she is too much like a clinic, too much like a hospital; that is why the great world is going to hell outside! Look at the great campaign, look at it objectively, look at it from God's standpoint. Forget yourself and your temporary troubles and ills for the moment; fight in the army. It is not a clinic you need; you must realize that we are in a barracks, and that we are involved in a mighty campaign.

We must grasp once again, the idea of church membership as being the membership of the body of Christ and as the biggest honour which can come a man's way in this world.
Topics: Church
Source: Knowing the Times, The Banner of Truth Trust, 1989, p. 30.

The church is always to be under the Word; she must be; we must keep her there. You must not assume that because the church started correctly, she will continue so. She did not do so in the New Testament times; she has not done so since. Without being constantly reformed by the Word the church becomes something very different. We must always keep the church under the Word.
Topics: Church
Source: What is an Evangelical? The Banner of Truth Trust, 1992, p. 30.

The most vital question to ask about all who claim to be Christian is this: Have they a soul thirst for God? Do they long for this? Is there something about them that tells you that they are always waiting for His next manifestation of Himself? Is their life centred on Him? Can they say with Paul that they forget everything in the past? Do they press forward more and more that they might know Him and that the knowledge might increase, until eventually beyond death and the grave they may bask eternally in 'the sunshine of His face?' That I might know him!

The tragedy is that many of us are living desperate Christian life. Sunday comes and we get some strength, and then we lose some on Monday; a good deal is gone by Tuesday and we wonder whether we have anything left. On Wednesday it has all gone and then we exist. Or perhaps refreshment comes in some other way, some meeting we attend, some friends we meet. Now that is the old order of things, that is not the new. He puts a well within us. We are not always drawing from somewhere outside. The well, the spring, goes on springing up from within into everlasting life.

You are either a Christian or you are not a Christian; you cannot be partly a Christian. You are either "dead" or "alive"; you are either "born" or "not born".

To be a Christian is not only to believe the teaching of Christ, and to practice it; it is not only to try to follow the pattern and example of Christ; it is to be so vitally related to Christ that His life and His power are working in us. It is to be "in Christ," it is for Christ to be in us
Topics: Christians
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 293-294

There are other people who are prepared to argue and discuss and even change their opinion, but they do not do anything about it. The evangelical, however, is a man who acts on his convictions. There would never have been Protestantism if this were not true.
Topics: Christians
Source: What is an Evangelical? The Banner of Truth Trust, 1992, p. 53.

It is not a true Gospel that gives us the impression that the Christian life is easy, and that there are no problems to be faced. That is not the New Testament teaching. The New Testament is most alarming at first, indeed terrifying, as it shows us the problems by which we are confronted. But follow it-go on! It does not stop halfway, it goes on to this addition, this second half; and here it shows us the way in which, though that is the truth concerning the battle, we can be enabled to wage it, and not only to wage it, but to triumph in it. It shows us that we are meant to be "more than conquerors."

I have always found it depressing to listen to the kind of people who, whenever you meet them, will always for sure tell you the story of their conversion many years ago. They tell you that story every time. I have known people do exactly the same thing with revival. There is always something about an initial experience that is remarkable and outstanding. And a time of revival is so amazing and wonderful that it is not surprising that people go on talking about it. But, if they give the impression that they have had nothing since that wonderful experience, that ever after they have been walking through a wilderness, and travelling through a desert, then it is absolutely wrong. Their idea of the Christian life is of a dramatic experience, perhaps at the outset, after which they just trudge along, living on the strength of that and partly keeping their eye turned backwards as they go forward.

To dwell on the past simply causes failure in the present. While you are sitting down and bemoaning the past and regretting all the things you have not done, you are crippling yourself and preventing yourself from working in the present. Is that Christianity? Of course it is not.
Topics: Christianity, Failure
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 83

I am in Christ; he is the Head of the body. There is an intimate organic relationship. So John Ryland puts the logical question, 'While Christ is rich' - he is the Lord of glory, the Lord of everything - 'While Christ is rich, can I be poor?' Beloved Christian people, there is something wrong somewhere, is there not? We are in him, we belong to him, he is our Head, we are his people and he is so rich - "The unsearchable riches of Christ" - so how can we be poor?

Why believe the devil instead of believing God? Rise up and realize the truth about yourself - that all the past has gone, and you are one with Christ, and all your sins have been blotted out once and for ever. O let us remember that it is sin to doubt God's Word. It is sin to allow the past, which God has dealt with, to rob us of our joy and our usefulness in the present and in the future.
Topics: Believing
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 76