Quotes from C. S. Lewis, Charles Spurgeon, D. L. Moody, A. W. Tozer, Herman Bavinck, Amy Carmichael, and others.
Quotes from Christian Writers and Preachers
I remind you that it is characteristic of the natural man to keep himself so busy with unimportant trifles that he is able to avoid the settling of the most important matters relating to life & existence.
—AW Tozer
Gratitude. It is impossible to be too thankful to God, but it might be good to try it.
—AW Tozer
The Sabbath is the best of days; no other day is like it. And the church is the meeting of God with His people; no other gathering can take its place or compensate for its loss.
—Herman Bavinck
Prevenient grace may be simple conviction or a strange longing which nothing can satisfy or powerful aspiration after eternal values or feeling of disgust for sin & desire to be delivered from its repulsive coils. These strange workings within are the stirrings of the Holy Spirit
—A. W. Tozer
God has given us the Holy Spirit to illuminate our minds. He is eyes & understanding to us. We dare not try to get on without Him.
—AW Tozer
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
God pervades time and every moment of time with his eternity. In every second throbs the heartbeat of eternity.
—Herman Bavinck
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
In order for our hearts to find rest in God, naturally we must possess some knowledge of him, for the unknown is unloved.
—Herman Bavinck
He has given us His word; He has placed Himself at our disposal in response to believing prayer; He has made available to us the infinite moral power of His Holy Spirit to enable us to do His will here on earth. There is no excuse for our acting like timid weaklings.
—AW Tozer
The driver on the highway is safe, not when he reads the signs but when he obeys them. So it is with the Scriptures.
— AW Tozer
Since the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father He feels toward His people exactly as the Father feels. He will always act like Jesus, toward sinners in compassion, toward saints in warm affection, toward human suffering in tenderest pity and love.
—AW Tozer
The Church’s mightiest influence is felt when she is different from the world in which she lives.
—AW Tozer
The world situation is such that nothing less than God can straighten it out;
Let us not fail the world & disappoint God by failing to pray
—AW Tozer
God remains eternal and inhabits eternity, but uses time with a view to manifesting his eternal thoughts and perfections. He makes time subservient to eternity and thus proves himself to be the King of the ages (1 Tim. 1:17).
—Herman Bavinck
We pray earnestly, O God, that we may not be found among those with hardened hearts, no longer able to hear Thy voice.
—AW Tozer
Time is not a separate substance, a real something, but a mode of existence. If there were no creatures, there would be no time.
—Herman Bavinck
It is a mistake to look for grace to visit us as a kind of benign magic, or to expect God’s help to come as a windfall apart from conditions known & met. To desire revival, for instance, and at the same time to neglect prayer & devotion is to wish one way and walk another.
—Tozer
Gratitude and joy drove them to do good works before the thought that they had to do them even crossed their mind.
—Herman Bavinck
God is never portrayed or presented as being feminine.
—Herman Bavinck
A knowledge of God is available to man only when, and in so far as, God freely chooses to reveal Himself.
—Herman Bavinck
The faith in providence stands in the most intimate of relationships with the faith in redemption.
—Herman Bavinck
At the creation the morning stars sang, and all the children of God shouted with joy. At the birth of Christ a multitude of heavenly hosts raised a song of jubilation to God’s good pleasure.
—Herman Bavinck
For when the sense of religion diminishes, the notion of good and evil is erased, the sense of responsibility and guilt is suppressed, so that passion and lust have free rein and the wickedness of the heart breaks forth openly in the form of shameless evil acts.
—Herman Bavinck
There is so much narrow-mindedness, so much pettiness among us, and the worst thing is that this is regarded as piety.
—Herman Bavinck
Not law but gospel, not demand but promise is the center of revelation, even in the days of the old covenant, to which man’s part is to respond in faith and in the walk of faith (Gen. 17:1), just as Paul in Romans 4 and Galatians 3 understood the revelation of God to Abraham.
—Herman Bavinck
Everything depends on the physical resurrection of Christ.
—Herman Bavinck
To acquire knowledge, Scripture refers man not to his own reason but to God’s revelation in all his works. Lift up your eyes, and see the one who has created all things; [lift them up] to the teaching and the testimony; otherwise, they shall perish.
—Herman Bavinck
Christianity, according to its own confession, does not exist through the strength and fidelity of its confessors, but the life and will of its Mediator.
—Herman Bavinck
God pervades time and every moment of time with his eternity; he maintains a definite relation to time, entering into it with his eternity. Between eternity and time there is a distinction not only in quantity and degree but also in quality and essence.
—Herman Bavinck