“With full consciousness of our own demerit we may yet take our place in the love of God, and the poorest and weakest of us may without offense claim for ourselves all the riches of the Godhead in mercy given. I have every right to claim all for myself, knowing that an infinite God can give all of Himself to each of His children. He does not distribute Himself that each may have a part, but to each one He gives all of Himself as fully as if there were no others.”

“Some who desire to be teachers of the Word, but who understand neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm, insist upon “naked” faith as the only way to know spiritual things. By this they mean a conviction of the trustworthiness of the Word of God (a conviction, it may be noted, which the devils share with them). But the man who has been taught even slightly by the Spirit of Truth will rebel at this perversion. His language will be, “I have heard Him and observed Him. What have I to do any more with idols?” For he cannot love a God who is no more than a deduction from a text. He will crave to know God with a vital awareness that goes beyond words and to live in the intimacy of personal communion. To seek our divinity merely in books and writings is to seek the living among the dead; we do but in vain many times seek God in these, where His truth too often is not so much enshrined as entombed. He is best discerned by an intellectual touch of Him. We must see with our eyes, and hear with our ears, and our hands must handle of the Word of Life. Nothing can take the place of the touch of God in the”

“That eternal life which was with the Father is now the possession of believing men, and that life is not God’s gift only, but His very self.”

“The experiences of men who walked with God in olden times agree to teach that the Lord cannot fully bless a man until He has first conquered him. The degree of blessing enjoyed by any man will correspond exactly with the completeness of God’s victory over him. This is a badly neglected tenet of the Christian’s creed, not understood by many in this self-assured age, but it is nevertheless of living importance to us all. This spiritual principle is well illustrated in the book of Genesis. Jacob was the wily old heel-catcher whose very strength was to him a near-fatal weakness. For two-thirds of his total life he had carried in his nature something hard and unconquered. Not his glorious vision in the wilderness nor his long bitter discipline in Haran had broken his harmful strength. He stood at the ford of Jabbok at the time of the going down of the sun, a shrewd, intelligent old master of applied psychology learned the hard way. The picture he presented was not a pretty one. He was a vessel marred in the making. His hope lay in his own defeat. This he did not know at the setting of the day, but had learned before the rising of the sun. All night he resisted God until in kindness God touched the hollow of his thigh and won the victory over him. It was only after he had gone down to humiliating defeat that he began to feel the joy of release from his own evil strength, the delight of God’s conquest over him. Then he cried aloud for the blessing and refused to let go till it came. It had been a long fight, but for God (and for reasons known only to Him) Jacob had been worth the effort. Now he became another man, the stubborn and self-willed rebel was turned into a meek and dignified friend of God. He had prevailed indeed, but through weakness, not through strength.”

“I can know about God, that’s the body of truth. But I can’t know God, the soul of truth, unless I am ready to be obedient.”

“It is a truth known to everyone, a kind of common property of all religious persons, but for the very reason that it is so common it now has but little meaning for any of us.”

“Only the servants of truth can ever know truth. Only those who obey can ever have the inward change.”

“for the work of Christ sweeps away both his good and evil and turns him into another man. The returning sinner is not saved by some judicial transaction apart from a corresponding moral change. Salvation must include a judicial change of status, but what is overlooked by most teachers is that it also includes an actual change in the life of the individual. And by this we mean more than a surface change—we mean a transformation as deep as the roots of his human life. If it does not go that deep it does not go deep enough.”

“The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” The life is in the speaking words. God’s word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God’s word in the universe.”

“is important that we get still to wait on God. And it is best that we get alone, preferably with our Bible outspread before us. Then if we will we may draw near to God and begin to hear Him speak to us in our hearts.”

“The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God’s continuous speech. It”

“Paul says (1 Corinthians 2:4-5): "My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”

“Unless we get to know what God is like, unless we know God, we will accept all the superficial nonsense that passes for Christianity today. Our perception of God determines our perception of worship.”

“I delight in the fact that God is an artist, and the handiwork and the fingers of God are upon everything he does. No artist can escape himself.”

“To study the history of the Christian church down through the ages, it is easy to see that she lived on the character of God alone. Unlike religions that have come and gone throughout the centuries, Christianity surpasses them all, especially in this one area: magnifying the character of God. Religion is all about work and gaining God’s approval. History shows us that this is impossible. Christianity is all about worshiping God, celebrating and delighting in the amazing character of God. No other religion has risen as high as Christianity in its relationship to God. Everything about Christianity is focused on God. The church has preached God, prayed to God, declared God among the nations, honored God, and elevated God in every generation. When the church is acting like the church, God is being exalted among the nations.”

“Down in the South, some politician with a little education was running against another man and he knew some of the voters in the mountains were not so much up on definitions. So he started a rumor that his opponent had been celibate up until the time he was married; that he had been guilty of celibacy. And the people said, "Why, I never thought or dreamed of such a thing. That man was guilty of celibacy before he was married. We won't vote for him." He swept an easy victory because this other man had been single up to the time he was married.”

“The awesomeness and beauty and perfection of our God need to be the focus in our evangelical churches today. All efforts need to be directed here. I know the temptation is to correlate the church with the world in our misguided attempt to reach the world. But you cannot reach the world by becoming like the world. The only way to reach the world is to become something altogether other than the world. That is what we have in Christianity.”

“It is not what a church believes that matters so much as what that church believes enough to emphasize. It is not what a preacher will admit theologically when you pin him down and make him talk; it is what he believes with sufficient urgency to make it a living, constant part of his message.”

“It is hard to get people to think, but it is harder still to get them to thirst. We can encourage people to exercise physically, and they will see immediate results if they work at it hard enough. And we can get a few to exercise intellectually. But when it comes to making people spiritually thirsty, it takes the Holy Spirit to do that. I have discovered that the frustrating aspect of preaching and teaching is that the preacher and teacher cannot do the work of change for people. It must be a work of the Holy Spirit within the heart of the believer. I can encourage people to read books, but I cannot talk people into a hunger and thirst for the things of God. It takes the Holy Spirit to do that.”

“A person does not have to be old to be spiritual, and we do not have to live through the decades in order to find this out. It is too bad that it is so for most people. I wonder if it is not because we have assumed that our young people are all about half-cracked and that in religious things they have to be clowned to, played down to, talked down to, teased along, amused and entertained. The result is that for the first years of their life until gray hairs begin to appear, we entertain them, tease them along and amuse them; and then when they get so they do not care for that amusement and entertainment anymore, then we say now they will become saints. I think it is a wretched way to treat young men and women.”