Great Throughts Treasury

"The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed."

"At the very time when we have been boasting of our enlightenment and knowledge and understanding, there is this tragic breakdown in personal relationships."

"Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them but they are talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you."

"To dwell on the past simply causes failure in the present. While you are sitting down and bemoaning the past and regretting all the things you have not done, you are crippling yourself and preventing yourself from working in the present."

"Prayer is beyond any question the highest activity of the human soul. Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God."

"The terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man's troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy."

"You are no more hopeless than the most moral and respectable person in the world."

"Always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this always obey such an impulse."

"But observe that [Peter] never ceases to be a bold man; he does not become nervous and diffident. No, he does not change in that way. The essential personality remains; and yet he is 'poor in spirit' at the same time."

"Be natural; forget yourself; be so absorbed in what you are doing and in the realization of the presence of God, and in the glory and the greatness of the Truth that you are preaching, and the occasion that brings you together,...that you forget yourself completely. That is the right condition; that is the only place of safety; that is the only way in which you can honor God. Self is the greatest enemy of the preacher, more so than in the case of any other man in society. And the only way to deal with self is to be so taken up with, and so enraptured by, the glory of what you are doing, that you forget yourself altogether."

"Does it grieve you my friends, that the name of God is being taken in vain and desecrated? Does it grieve you that we are living in a godless age...But, we are living in such an age and the main reason we should be praying about revival is that we are anxious to see God's name vindicated and His glory manifested. We should be anxious to see something happening that will arrest the nations, all the peoples, and cause them to stop and to think again."

"Be still, and know that I am God'. We must not interpret that 'Be still' in a sentimental manner. Some regard it as a kind of exhortation to us to be silent; but it is nothing of the sort. It means, 'Give up (or 'Give in') and admit I am God. God is addressing people who are opposed to Him"

"Every painful consequence of sin is a part of the punishment meted out for sin."

"Failures in the past are not to make us depressed, but to spur us on to action. ?if you really believe what you say about the past, if you really do bemoan the fact that you have wasted so much time in the past, the thing to do is to make up for it in the present. Is not that common sense?"

"Give yourself to it,[the call to prayer] yield to it; and you will find not only that you have not been wasting time with respect to the matter with which you are dealing but that actually it has helped you greatly in that respect. You will experience an ease and a facility in understanding what you were reading, in thinking, in ordering matter for a sermon, in writing, in everything which is quite astonishing. Such a call to prayer must never be regarded as a distraction; always respond to it immediately and thank God if it happens to you frequently."

"Fasting, if we conceive of it truly, must not... be confined to the question of food and drink; fasting should really be made to include abstinence from anything which is legitimate in and of itself for the sake of some special spiritual purpose. There are many bodily functions which are right and normal and perfectly legitimate, but which for special peculiar reasons in certain circumstances should be controlled. That is fasting."

"Faith is a refusal to panic."

"God permits war in order that men may bear the consequences of their sins as punishment. How clearly this is shown time and time again in the story of the children of Israel!"

"How easy it is to read the Scriptures and give a kind of nominal assent to the truth and yet never to appropriate what it tells us!"

"Human will-power alone is not enough. Will-power is excellent and we should always be using it; but it is not enough. A desire to live a good life is not enough. Obviously we should all have that desire, but it will not guarantee success. So let me put it thus: Hold on to your principles of morality and ethics, use your willpower to the limit, pay great heed to every noble, uplifting desire that is in you; but realize that these things alone are not enough, that they will never bring you to the desired place. We have to realize that all our best is totally inadequate, that a spiritual battle must be fought in a spiritual manner"

"Holiness is not something we are called upon to do in order that we may become something; it is something we are to do because of what we already are."

"Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking? Your self is talking to you. Now this man?s treatment was this; instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself. ?Why art thou cast down, O my soul?? he asks. His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says: ?Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you.?? The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: ?Why art thou cast down?? what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: ?Hope thou in God?? instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: ?I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God.?"

"I can forgive a man for a bad sermon, I can forgive the preacher almost anything if he gives me a sense of God, if he gives me something for my soul, if he gives me the sense that, though he is inadequate himself, he is handling something which is very great and very glorious, if he gives me some dim glimpse of the majesty and the glory of God, the love of"

"I will not glory, even in my orthodoxy, for even that can be a snare if I make a god of it... Let us rejoice in Him in all His fullness and in Him alone."

"Indeed I can put it, finally like this; the ultimate cause of all spiritual depression is unbelief. For if it were not or unbelief even the devil could do nothing. It is because we listen to the devil instead of listening to God that we go down before him and fall before his attacks."

"I have always found it depressing to listen to the kind of people who, whenever you meet them, will always for sure tell you the story of their conversion many years ago. They tell you that story every time. I have known people do exactly the same thing with revival. There is always something about an initial experience that is remarkable and outstanding. And a time of revival is so amazing and wonderful that it is not surprising that people go on talking about it. But, if they give the impression that they have had nothing since that wonderful experience, that ever after they have been walking through a wilderness, and travelling through a desert, then it is absolutely wrong."

"It is ?the fight of faith?, you are walking on turbulent waves and the only way to keep walking is to keep looking at Him."

"It doesn?t matter if you have almost entered into the depths of hell. It does not matter if you are guilty of murder as well as every other vile sin. It does not matter from the standpoint of being justified before God at all. You are no more hopeless than the most moral and respectable person in the world."

"Let us then lay this down as a principle. We must never for a second worry about anything that cannot be affected or changed by us. It is a waste of energy?You can sit down and be miserable and you can go round and round in circles of regret for the rest of your life but it will make no difference to what you have done."

"It is very foolish to ignore the past. The man who does ignore it, and assumes that our problems are quite new, and that therefore the past has nothing at all to teach us, is a man who is not only grossly ignorant of the Scriptures, he is equally ignorant of some of the greatest lessons even in secular history."

"Matters in the Kingdom but the grace of God? God has a different way of looking at things. He does not see as men do; He does not compute as they do; it is all grace from beginning to end? stop looking at what you have not done and the years you have missed and realize that in His kingdom it is His grace alone that matters."

"Love is not just a sentiment. Love is a great controlling passion and it always expresses itself in terms of obedience."

"Meekness does not mean indolence."

"People seem to think that the masses are outside the Christian church because our evangelistic methods are not what they ought to be. That is not the answer. People are outside the church because looking at us they say, "What is the point of being Christians? - look at them!" They are judging Christ by you and me. And you cannot stop them and you cannot blame them."

"Praise God for the fact that you are what you are, and that you are in the Kingdom."

"Monasticism is really based on the idea that if you leave people, you leave the spirit of the world. But you do not. You can leave the world in a physical sense, you can leave the crowd and the people; but there in your lonely cell the spirit of the world may still be with you."

"Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire. A true understanding and experience of the Truth must lead to this... A man who can speak about these things dispassionately has no right whatsoever to be in a pulpit; and should never be allowed to enter one."

"The divine Instructor has taken us under his wing and he is putting us through our exercises so that hands which hang down can be lifted up, and feet are straightened out, and a lame man is helped to walk. The Instructor is saying such things as, now "Keep moving, don't let yourself get stiff, keep the joints moving, keep them as supple as you can."

"Some people, even in worship, seem to think that they must say their 'Amen' in a particular way, or must say it often. Thinking that this is a sign of spirituality, they make themselves a nuisance at times to others and so get into trouble about that. That is not commended in Scripture; it is a false notion of worship."

"The Church is in eclipse at the moment, but what does it matter? It is God?s! And the Church will be brought to the place which God has purposed for her."

"The Bible does not isolate war, as if it were something separate and unique and quite apart, as we tend to do in our thinking. It is but one of the manifestations of sin, one of the consequences of sin."

"The main trouble with the Christian Church today is that she is too much like a clinic, too much like a hospital; that is why the great world is going to hell outside!... Look at the great campaign, look at it objectively, look at it from God's standpoint. Forget yourself and your temporary troubles and ills for the moment; fight in the army. It is not a clinic you need; you must realize that we are in a barracks, and that we are involved in a mighty campaign"

"The Holy Spirit never browbeats us. He always persuades."

"The heretics were never dishonest men; they were mistaken men. They should not be thought of as men who were deliberately setting out to go wrong and to teach something that is wrong; they have been some of the most sincere men that the Church has ever known. What was the matter with them? Their trouble was this: they evolved a theory and they were rather pleased with it; then they went back with this theory to the Bible, and they seemed to find it everywhere."

"The tragedy is that many of us are living... desperate Christian life. Sunday comes and we get some strength, and then we lose some on Monday; a good deal is gone by Tuesday and we wonder whether we have anything left. On Wednesday it has all gone and then we exist. Or perhaps refreshment comes in some other way, some meeting we attend, some friends we meet...Now that is the old order of things, that is not the new. So our Lord goes on to put it like this: 'Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life' (verses 13-14). He puts a well within us. We are not always drawing from somewhere outside. The well, the spring, goes on springing up from within into everlasting life."

"The ultimate test of our spirituality is the measure of our amazement at the grace of God."

"The very God whom we have offended has Himself provided the way whereby the offence has been dealt with. His anger, His wrath against sin and the sinner, has been satisfied, appeased and He therefore can now thus reconcile man unto Himself."

"There is all the difference in the world between preaching merely from human understanding and energy, and preaching in the conscious smile of God."

"There are other people who are prepared to argue and discuss and even change their opinion, but they do not do anything about it. The evangelical, however, is a man who acts on his convictions. There would never have been Protestantism if this were not true."

"They [the revived] begin to get a concern for the members of their own family - husband, wife, father, mother, children, brother, sister - who do not know that they are outside. They tell them about it; they feel they must. There is a constraint that is driving them. They talk about it to people, to friends and to everybody, and they begin to pray for them. Prayer is always a great feature of every revival, great prayer meetings, intercession hour after hour. They pray for these people by name and they plead, and they will not let God go, as it were."