I am currently reading The Indwelling life of Christ by Ian Major Thomas. I loved the following quote:
Are you bewildered about your Christian experience? You know you are redeemed, but beneath the outward practice and profession of your faith you are conscious of the inner nagging of a troubled spirit. True inner peace eludes you, and you sigh for release. Perhaps like many others you have said to yourself, “I need a new church home, a new spiritual environment.”
If you try out yet another new church, all that will happen is that you will simply encounter as much trouble as you found in the last one. There is nothing wrong with your spiritual environment, but there is something desperately wrong with you. If you fail to correct that, you will be a spiritual tramp all the days of your life.
EVANGELISM is just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. –D. T. Niles
If your Gospel isn’t touching others, it hasn’t touched you! –Curry R. Blake
We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God. — John Stott
The greatest hindrances to the evangelization of the world are those within the church. –John R. Mott
The Great Commission is not an option to be considered; it is a command to be obeyed. –Hudson Taylor
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. –Jim Elliot
People who don’t believe in missions have not read the New Testament. Right from the beginning Jesus said the field is the world. The early church took Him at His word and went East, West, North and South. – J. Howard Edington
The Holy Spirit can’t save saints or seats. If we don’t know any non-Christians, how can we introduce them to the Savior? –Paul Little
Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. — John Piper
Evangelization is a process of bringing the gospel to people where they are, not where you would like them to be. When the gospel reaches a people where they are, their response to the gospel is the church in a new place… –Vincent Donovan
The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become. – Henry Martyn
How you believe God perceives people will determine how you respond to them. –Jacquelyn K. Heasley
Life is too short and hell is too hot to just play church. –Larry Osborne
Some wish to live within the sound of a chapel bell; I wish to run a rescue mission within a yard of hell. — C.T. Studd
It is possible to do evangelism without planting churches, but it is not possible to plant churches without doing evangelism. –unknown
God’s plan in these last days is revival in His worldwide church and through the revived church the reaping of a final great harvest of souls. –N. Grubb
The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. –C. S. Lewis
We talk of the Second Coming; half the world has never heard of the first. – Oswald J. Smith
We Christians are debtors to all men at all times in all places, but we are so smug to the lostness of men. We’ve been “living in Laodicea “, lax, loose, lustful, and lazy. Why is there this criminal indifference to the lostness of men? Our condemnation is that we know how to live better than we are living. –Leonard Ravenhill
Being an extrovert isn’t essential to EVANGELISM–obedience and love are. –Rebecca M. Pippert
It is now possible to live a “christian life” without doing the things that Jesus commanded us to do. We have hired people to go into all the world, to visit those in prison, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to care for widows and orphans. The average Christian doesn’t have to do it. –Cal Thomas
Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love. – Roland Allen
Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin, and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on earth. –John Wesley
“If sinners be damned, at least let them leap to Hell over our bodies. If they will perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees. Let no one go there unwarned and unprayed for.” Spurgeon
Some that concern the life we need to live for the world that needs a witness:
“Live simply so that others can simply live.” unknown
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Jim Elliot
Trust and obey not think and decide.
Never doubt in the dark what God has revealed in the light.
Thanks to Guy Muse Missionary to Ecuador for the compilation of the above quotes on his blog.
I believe that it is an advantage to have wealth when wealth is kept in its right place; but the difficulty is that the horse often runs away with the rider, and he who has wealth too often loses his liberty, and falls into sore bondage, by becoming the slave of his own possessions.
Covetousness breeds an insensibility in the heart, a mortification in the conscience, a blindness in the mind. It is as hard to convict a man of it as to make a deaf ear hear of its own deficiencies.
I observe, growing up everywhere, a trifling with the Word of God, a questioning of this, and a questioning of that. I am not half so much concerned about the false doctrine that is being taught, when the teacher of it thinks he gets it from the Bible, as I am when I find men treating the Bible as though it were just nothing at all, or, at least, an exceedingly small matter. If the Scripture stands in their way, our modern divines drive a tunnel through it, as readily as men make a railroad through a hill. They toss the sacred Book on one side, as if it were quite a common document which might be treated with indifference, since the age has out grown its Bible. Now, mark this: by this shall you know whether you are a child of God, or not; by the respect that you have to your Father’s Word. If you have small respect for that Word, the evidences of a bastard are upon you. If you tremble at God’s Word, if you stand in awe of it, if you can read the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm through, and can join with David in intense delight in the Law of God, you have the traits of a true-born child of God, and the Book is yours, with all that it contains; but if not, you are one of the children of that evil one who questioned the Word of the Lord in the beginning, and continues to deny it to this day. If you pick and choose in the teachings of inspiration; if you believe this, and slight that, you make yourself a judge of that which is your Judge, and you have not the tokens of a child of God.
I cannot under the influence of this grand text find room for doubt or fear. I cannot stand here and be miserable to-night. I am not going to attempt such a thing; but I cannot be despondent with such a text as this, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.” I defy the devil himself to mention circumstances under which I ought to be miserable if this text is true. Child of God, nothing ought to make you unhappy when you can realize this precious text.
For we which have believed do enter into rest. Hebrews 4:3
As I was reading and studying for tomorrow I just looked up George Muller in Spurgeon’s writings. I wasn’t going to burden you with more to read but I couldn’t help myself when I read this great quote. It has much to do with the great stress that many of you are under due to financial hardship!
I know there are some Christians who do not believe about daily bread and are worried about it. There are some who cannot believe. They get wanting to drive their own horses instead of sitting in the chariot and allowing the Lord to drive. They lose their rest.
I know there are some who want to carve for themselves, but they cut their fingers and get but a small slice upon their plates; whereas if they left it all to God and did their part to it, namely, were obedient to God’s will and left the rest to Him, they would fare far better. They do not believe, and, therefore, do not rest; but you shall always find that in proportion as they believe they rest.
Did you ever hear of a more restful man than George Muller, of Bristol? — a perfectly happy man with the care of an establishment with more than two thousand children — no care at all because he believes his Father about it and he leaves the Lord to manage the orphanage. I often wish ! could do that. Don’t you wish so, too?
Who are you that should say, “I have cast my burden on the Lord,” and then go back and take it again? How is it you can talk of leaving it with Him, and then, after all, try and bear it yourself? But he that believes has entered into rest.
Abraham Lincoln used to remark that he could get any number of men who are “willing to shed their last drop of blood,” but he found it difficult to get men to shed their first drop to make a beginning. Don’t talk about what you will do for Jesus by and by. Just begin now to love Him, serve Him, and follow where He may lead.
The church wants mature Christians very greatly, and especially when there are many fresh converts added to it. New converts furnish impetus to the church, but her backbone and substance must, under God, lie with the mature members.
We want mature Christians in the army of Christ, to play the part of veterans, to inspire the rest with coolness, courage, and steadfastness; for if the whole army is made up of raw recruits the tendency will be for them to waver when the onslaught is fiercer than usual. The old guard, the men who have breathed smoke and eaten fire before, do not waver when the battle rages like a tempest, they can die but they cannot surrender. When they hear the cry of “Forward,” they may not rush to the front so nimbly as the younger soldiers, but they drag up the heavy artillery, and their advance once made is secure. They do not reel when the shots fly thick, but still hold their own, for they remember former fights when Jehovah covered their heads.
The church wants in these days of flimsiness and timeserving, more decided, thoroughgoing, well-instructed, and confirmed believers.
We are assailed by all sorts of new doctrines. The old faith is attacked by so-called reformers, who would reform it all away. I expect to hear tidings of some new doctrine once a week. So often as the, moon changes, some prophet or other is moved to propound a now theory, and believe me, he will contend more valiantly for his novelty than ever he did for the gospel.
The discoverer thinks himself a modern Luther, and of his doctrine he thinks as much as David of Goliath’s sword, “There is none like it.” As Martin Luther said of certain in his day, these inventors of new doctrines stare at their discoveries like a cow at a new gate, as if there were nothing else in all the world but the one thing for them to stare at.
We are all expected to go mad for their fashions, and march to their piping. To whom we give place; no, not for an hour.
They may muster a troop of raw recruits, and lead them whither they would, but for confirmed believers they sound their bugles in vain. Children run after every new toy; any little performance in the street, and the boys are all agog, gaping at it; but their fathers have work to do abroad, and their mothers have other matters at home; your drum and whistle will not, draw them out. For the solidity of the church, for her steadfastness in the faith, for her defense against the constantly recurring attacks of heretics and infidels, and for her permanent advance and the seizing of fresh provinces for Christ, we want not only your young, hot blood, which may God always send to us, for it is of immense service, and we cannot do without it, but we need also the cool, steady, well-disciplined, deeply-experienced. hearts of men who know by experience the truth of God, and hold fast what they have learned in the school of Christ.
It is very easy to offer unto God a sort of “other people’s obedience” — to fancy that we are serving God, when we are finding fault with our neighbors, and lamenting that they are not so godly as they ought to be. Truly, we cannot help seeing their shortcomings; but we should do well to be less observant of them than we
are. Let us turn our magnifying glasses upon ourselves. It is not so much our business to be weeding other people’s gardens as to keep our own vineyard. To the Lord each one should cry, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”
Once I had nothing but a heart of stone, and although through grace I now have a new and fleshy heart, much of my former obduracy remains. I am not affected by the death of Jesus as I ought to be; neither am I moved by the ruin of my fellow men, the wickedness of the times, the chastisement of my heavenly Father, and my own failures, as I should be. O that my heart would melt at the recital of my Saviour’s sufferings and death. Would to God I were rid of this nether millstone within me, this hateful body of death. Blessed be the name of the Lord, the disease is not incurable, the Saviour’s precious blood is the universal solvent, and me, even me, it will effectually soften, till my heart melts as wax before the fire.
(Charles H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening : April 28 PM)
