Christian Writers and Preachers

Why should you be enemies to your own peace? To read over the evidences of God’s love to your souls as a man does a book that he intends to refute? Why do you study to find evasions, to turn off these comforts that are due to you?

—John Flavel

To suffer sin to lodge quietly in the heart, to let thy heart habitually and without control wander from God, is a sad, a dangerous symptom indeed.

—John Flavel

It was not persecutions and prisons, but worldliness and wantonness that poisoned the church: neither was it the earthly glory of its professors, but the blood of its martyrs that was the seed of the church.

—John Flavel

If he (the truly gracious soul) and his God have not met in secret and had some communion in the morning, he sensibly finds it in the deadness and unprofitableness of his heart and life all the day after.

—John Flavel

The conscience men make of secret as well as of public duties will tell them what their hearts and graces are, true or false.

—John Flavel

Heart-work is hard work indeed. To shuffle over religious duties with a loose and heedless spirit, will cost no great pains; but to set thyself before the Lord, and tie up thy loose and vain thoughts to a constant and serious attendance upon him; this will cost thee something.

—John Flavel

Consider what heavy burdens death will ease your shoulders of.

Death is the best physician; it will cure you of all diseases at once.

—John Flavel

The engagements of men’s hearts to God in duties will tell them what they are. The hypocrite takes little heed to his heart. They are not afflicted really for the hardness, deadness, unbelief, and wanderings of their hearts in duty as upright ones are.

—John Flavel

A true minister of the gospel will feed us on the Word of God, but that is not enough. He feeds us but one or two days of the week, and we need to be fed every day.

—R. A. Torrey

Unite with a church that has a real active interest in the salvation of the lost, where young Christians are looked after and helped, where minister and people have a love for the poor and outcast, a church that regards its mission in the world to seek and save the lost.”

—R. A. Torrey

To be troubled for grosser sins and have no trouble for ordinary sins daily incurred is an ill sign of a bad heart.

—John Flavel

Strive to be Christ-like, if ever you would be lovely in the eyes of God and man. Certainly, my brethren, it is only the Spirit of Christ within you, and the beauty of Christ upon you, which can make you lovely persons.

—John Flavel

As the fear of God, so the love of God is a principle of restraint from sin to the soul that is upright. This kept back Joseph from sin: How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?

—John Flavel

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

Can you say, Christians, that you are willing to have your mistakes directed by God or men, your corruptions discovered, anything that helps to the pulling up the roots of corruption? Surely thus it must be if you will be for Christ, all faithful admonitions and afflictions.

—John Flavel

It is not a question of what we feel, but of what God says. God’s Word is always to be believed. Our own feelings are oftentimes to be doubted.

—R. A. Torrey

Still good advice (whether pocket Bibles or phones):

In everyone’s life many minutes each day are lost, waiting for meals, riding on trains, etc. … Carry a pocket Bible with you, and save those golden moments by putting them to the very best use, listening to the voice of God.

—R. A. Torrey

The gracious soul hates not only this or that particular sin, but the whole kind—everything that is sinful. True hatred is of the whole nature or kind. I hate every false way (Ps. 119:104).

—John Flavel

We can have no saving benefit separate and apart from the person of Christ: many would willingly receive his privileges, who will not receive his person; but it cannot be; if we will have one, we must take the other too.

—John Flavel

The Holy Spirit can take a man whose mind is blind to the truth of God, whose will is at enmity with God, whose affections are corrupt and vile, and transform that man, impart to him a new nature, so that he thinks God’s thoughts, love what God loves, and hate what God hates.

—R. A. Torrey

Begin the day with thanksgiving and prayer. Thanksgiving for the definite mercies of the past, prayer for the definite needs of the present day.

—R. A. Torrey

There is only one ground upon which man may meet God with joy and not with despair. That ground is the atoning blood of Jesus Christ.

—R. A. Torrey

There is nothing that reveals what is in the human heart so clearly as what a man does with Christ.

—R. A. Torrey

We live in a day in which false doctrine abounds on every hand and the only Christian who is safe from being led into error is the one who studies his Bible for himself daily.

—R. A. Torrey

The soul’s proper food is found in one book, the Bible.

—R. A. Torrey

Any one of us, no matter how outcast or vile, can go boldly into the Holy of Holies on the ground of the shed blood, and the best man or woman that ever walked this earth can meet God on no other ground than the shed blood.

—R. A. Torrey

An upright soul may fall into sin, yet he is restless and unquiet in that condition, like a bone out of joint, and that shows he is not one of sin’s servants.

—John Flavel

Your heart may be kept from shrinking back at [death] by considering the necessity of death, in order to the full fruition of God. Whether you are willing to die or not, I assure you there is no other way to obtain the full satisfaction of your soul and complete its happiness.

—John Flavel

We should confess Christ constantly. We should not be ashamed of our Lord and King. We should let people know that we are on His side. In the home, in the church, at our work, and at our play, we should let others know where we stand.

—R. A. Torrey

Unite with a church where they believe in the Bible and where they preach the Bible. Avoid the churches where words are spoken, open or veiled, that have a tendency to undermine your faith in the Bible as a reliable revelation from God, the only rule of faith and practice.

—R. A. Torrey