Christian Writers and Preachers

All supposed leadings of God should be tested by the Word of God. The Bible is God’s revealed will. Any leading that contradicts the plain teaching of the Bible is certainly not the leading of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit does not contradict Himself.

—R. A. Torrey

God of patience and endurance,

Steadfast as the steadfast stars

Stands Thy promise, Thine assurance

Unto Thine ambassadors:

I, thy God, will strengthen thee . . .

Where I am, there thou shalt be.

—Amy Carmichael

Cross and crown, death and resurrection, humiliation and exaltation lie on the same line. As Jesus Himself put it after His resurrection: It was necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and so enter His glory (Luke 24:26).

—Herman Bavinck

We might well pray for God to invade & conquer us, for until He does we remain in peril. The strength of our flesh is an ever present danger to our souls. Deliverance can come only by the defeat of our old life. Safety & peace come only after we have been forced to our knees.

The victory of Calvary was won that night in the garden of Gethsemane. The calm majesty of His bearing in meeting the awful onslaughts of Pilate’s judgment hall and of Calvary was the outcome of the struggle, agony, and victory of Gethsemane.

—R. A. Torrey

It is quite the fashion to contemptuously contrast the pray-ers with the do-ers – forgetting that in the history of the church the real do-ers have been the pray-ers, that those who have done the most in the church’s history have been, without exception, men and women of prayer.

—R. A. Torrey

The Bible has a way of putting more in a single sentence than other writers can put in a whole book. Yet there are some who would tell us that the Bible is no more God’s book than other books. Either they have not read the Bible, or they have read it with their eyes closed.

—R. A. Torrey

Let us ask that the stillness in which only His lights can shine may be ever around us, the stillness of the calm of His presence. And oh, let us ask that in this dark world we may so shine that others may see to read His love in the face of our loving Jesus.

—Amy Carmichael

Let us bear a faithful testimony, in our several stations, against all ungodliness and unrighteousness, and with all our might recommend that inward and outward holiness without which no man shall see the Lord!

—John Wesley

The great aim and scope at all Christ’s ordinances and officers, are to bring men into union with Christ, and so build them up to perfection in him; or to unite them to, and confirm them in Christ.

—John Flavel

Allowing then that a life of religion were a life of misery; that a life of wickedness were a life of happiness; and, that a man were assured of enjoying that happiness for the term of threescore years…

—John Wesley

Since the fall of man the earth has been a disaster area & everyone lives with a critical emergency. Nothing is normal. Everything is wrong & everyone is wrong until made right by the redeeming work of Christ & the effective operation of the Holy Spirit.

—AW Tozer

At the creation the morning stars sang together and all the children of God rejoiced. At the birth of Christ the multitude of heavenly hosts raised the jubilee of God’s good will. On the birthday of the church that church itself sings the wonderful works of God in myriad tones.

—Herman Bavinck

Lord, if it be most for thy glory, let me proceed in it; but if thou seest that it will in any wise hinder my usefulness in thy cause, oh prevent my proceeding…all I want, respecting this world, is such circumstances as may best capacitate me to do service for God in the world.

—David Brainerd

Lest I should faint before the race be run,

Lest I should quail before the fight be won,

O heavenly Intercessor and my Lord,

Fulfill to me Thy comfortable word—

Thy Peter’s word. How can I be afraid

If Thou dost say to me, But I have prayed?

—Amy Carmichael

Cast yourselves on his undeserved mercy; he is full of love, and will not spurn you: surrender yourselves into his hands, and solemnly resolve, through his grace, to dedicate henceforth all your faculties and powers to his service.

—William Wilberforce

When He shouted on the cross, “It is finished!” it was the shout of a conqueror. He had overcome every enemy. He had met sin and death. He had met every foe that you and I have got to meet, and had come off victor.

—D. L. Moody

There is one thing that I fear more than anything else, and that is the dead, cold formalism of the Church of God. So many of us are just sleeping and slumbering while souls are perishing. Some are beginning to rub our eyes and get them half-opened, but as a whole we are asleep.

—D. L. Moody

I have found that the man who believes in the Bible always comes out ahead in the long run, and that the man who is too wise and too advanced to believe the Word of God come out behind, in the long run, every time.

—R. A. Torrey

Let me pray for all my fellow-creatures, for all that are in pagan ignorance, particularly for the poor negroes, both in Africa the the West Indies. O Lord, do Thou at length visit them with spiritual blessings and a termination of their temporal sufferings. Amen.

—William Wilberforce

In whatever class or order of society Christianity prevails, she sets herself to rectify the particular faults, or, if we would speak more distinctly, to counteract the particular mode of selfishness, to which that class is liable.

—William Wilberforce

I longed to make some returns to God; but found I had nothing to return: I could only rejoice, that God had done the work himself; and that none in heaven or earth might pretend to share the honour of it with him.

—David Brainerd

I will press forward and labour to know God better, and love him more, assuredly I may, because God will give his Holy Spirit to them that ask him, and the Holy Ghost will shed abroad the love of God in the heart.

—William Wilberforce

If we rest in Christ’s atoning work we shall do good works, but they will be the outcome of being saved and the outcome of believing on Christ as our sin-bearer. Our good works will not be the ground of our salvation, but the result of our salvation and the proof of it. 2/2

—R. A. Torrey

Christ’s humiliation and sufferings are a most complete and sufficient meritorious cause of our salvation, to which nothing can be added to make it more apt, and able to procure our salvation, than it already is.

—John Flavel

Christ pleads the cause of believers by his blood. Unlike other advocates, it is not enough for him to lay out only words, which is a cheaper way of pleading; but he pleads for us by the voice of his own blood (Heb.12:24).

—John Flavel

By the grace of God, know thyself. Know and feel that thou wast shapen in wickedness, and in sin did thy mother conceive thee; and that thou thyself hast been heaping sin upon sin, ever since thou couldst discern good from evil.

—John Wesley

Theology is the science which derives the knowledge of God from His revelation, which studies and thinks into it under the guidance of His Spirit, and then tries to describe it so that it ministers to His honor.

—Herman Bavinck

He who has felt that Face of beauty,

Which wakes the world’s great hymn,

For one unutterable moment

Bent in love o’er him,

In that look finds earth, heaven, men and angels

Grow nearer through Him.

—Amy Carmichael

I have a Savior; though I sought

Through earth and air and sea,

I could not find a word, a thought,

To show Him worthily.

But planted here in rock and moss

I see the Sign of utmost loss;

I hear a word—On Calvary’s Cross

Love gave Himself for thee.

—Amy Carmichael