Martyn Lloyd-Jones (43)
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Prayer is always essential, but thought is essential, too, because prayer can be just an escape mechanism, almost at times a cry in the dark by people who are desperate and defeated. Prayer must be intelligent, and it is only to those who realize that their bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost that the answer will be given and the power will come.Spiritual Depression (173)
And have we not all known what it is to find that, somehow, we have less to say to God when we are alone than when we are in the presence of others? It should not be so; but it often is.Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (322)
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?
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!
It is tragic that we are so negligent about the eternal and are so concerned about that which must inevitably come to an end. It is better to be a cripple in this life, says our Lord, than to lose everything in the next. Put your soul and its eternal destiny before everything else.Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (217)
The glory of the gospel is that when the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It is then that the world is made to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first.Studies on the Sermon on the Mount (28)
There is nothing so likely to lead to heresy and error as to start with the parts rather than the whole.Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (24)
I am profoundly grateful to God that He did not grant me certain things for which I asked, and that He shut certain doors in my face.
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
When a man truly sees himself, he knows nobody can say anything about him that is too bad.
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 has done, and 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'.Spiritual Depression, p. 21
the greatest problem that any man who preaches the gospel ever has to face is that while he is preaching he is in danger of looking at himself and watching himself and always being conscious of himself.Spiritual Depression (125)
we must never look at any sin in our past life in any way except that which leads us to praise God and to magnify His grace in Christ Jesus.Spiritual Depression (75)
Let us remember that our justification means not only that our sins are forgiven and that we have been declared to be righteous by God Himself, not merely that we were righteous at that moment when we believed, but permanently righteous.Spiritual Depression (74)
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.
No man can tell what he will feel like tomorrow morning; you do not control that. Our business is to do something about these changing moods and not to allow ourselves to become victims of them.
The Church has been trying to preach morality and ethics without the Gospel as a basis; it has been preaching morality without godliness; and it simply does not work. It never has done, and it never will. And the result is that the Church, having abandoned her real task, has left humanity more or less to its own devices.
We are all in such a hurry, we want everything at once. We believe that all truth can be stated in a few minutes. The answer to that is that it cannot.
The preacher must be a serious man; he must never give the impression that preaching is something light or superficial or trivial.
When the church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It is then that the world is made to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first.
What is the chief end of preaching? I like to think it is this. It is to give men and women a sense of God and His presence.
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.
To love to preach is one thing, to love those to whom we preach quite another.
he man who is meek is not even sensitive about himself. He is not always watching himself and his own interests. He is not always on the defensive… To be truly meek means we no longer protect ourselves, because we see there is nothing worth defending… The man who is truly meek never pities himself, he is never sorry for himself. He never talks to himself and says, "You are having a hard time, how unkind these people are not to understand you.
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. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell.
To make it quite practical I have a very simple test. After I have explained the way of Christ to somebody I say "Now, are you ready to say that you are a Christian?" And they hesitate. And then I say, "What's the matter? Why are you hesitating?" And so often people say, "I don't feel like I'm good enough yet. I don't think I'm ready to say I'm a Christian now." And at once I know that I have been wasting my breath. They are still thinking in terms of themselves. They have to do it. It sounds very modest to say, "Well, I don't think I' good enough," but it's a very denial of the faith. The very essence of the Christian faith is to say that He is good enough and I am in Him. As long as you go on thinking about yourself like that and saying, "I'm not good enough; Oh, I'm not good enough," you are denying God – you are denying the gospel – you are denying the very essence of the faith and you will never be happy. You think you're better at times and then again you will find you are not as good at other times than you thought you were. You will be up and down forever. How can I put it plainly? 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.
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.
Great preaching always depends upon great themes. Great themes always produce great speaking in any realm, and this is particularly true, of course, in the realm of the Church. While men believed in the Scriptures as the authoritative Word of God and spoke on the basis of that authority you had great preaching. But once that went, and men began to speculate, and to theorise, and put up hypotheses and so on, the eloquence and the greatness of the spoken word inevitably declined and began to wane.Preaching & Preachers, 18
We have somehow got hold of the idea that error is only that which is outrageously wrong; and we do not seem to understand that the most dangerous person of all is the one who does not emphasize the right things.Sermon on the Mount (2:244)
the man who is dejected and disquieted and miserable, who is unhappy and depressed always shows it in his face. He looks troubled and he looks worried. You take one glance at him and you see his condition - but when I really look at God, as I get better, my face gets better also-- 'He is the health of my countenance'. I lose that drawn, haggard, vexed, troubled, perplexed, introspective appearance and I begin to look composed, and calm, balanced and bright. This is not the putting on of a mask, but something that is inevitable. Spiritual Depression, p. 13
We cross the line from self-examination to introspection when, in a sense, we do nothing but examine ourselves, and when such self-examination becomes the main and chief end in our life. We are meant to examine ourselves periodically, but if we are always doing it, always, as it were, putting our soul on a plate and dissecting it, that is introspection. And if we are always talking to people about ourselves and our problems and troubles, our face and saying: I am in great difficulty-- it probably means that we are all the time centred upon ourselves. That is introspection, and that in turns leads us to the condition known as morbidity.Spiritual Depression, p. 17
Do you know that the essence of true prayer is found in the two words in verse 9, Our Father? I suggest that if you can say from your heart, whatever your condition, My Father, in a sense your prayer is already answered. It is just this realization of our relationship to God that we so sadly lack.Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (327)
Joy is something very deep and profound, something that affects the whole and entire personality. In other words it comes to this; there is only one thing that can give true joy and that is contemplation of the Lord Jesus Christ. He satisfies my mind; He satisfies my emotions; He satisfies my every desire. He and His great salvation include the whole personality and nothing less, and in Him I am complete. Joy, in other words, is the response and the reaction of the soul to a knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.Life in Christ, 30
We are not under the law in the sense that it condemns us; it no longer pronounces judgment or condemnation on us. No! but we are meant to live it, and we are even meant to go beyond it.Studies on the Sermon on the Mount (8)
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.Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (7)
I am a great advocate of schemes of Bible reading, but we have to be careful that in our use of such schemes we are not content just to read the portion for the day and then to rush off without thought and meditation.Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (6)
Before you make your requests known unto God, pray, worship, adore. Come into the presence of God and for the time being forget your problems. Do not start with them. Just realize that you are face to face with God.Spiritual Depression (267)
The presence of the Holy Spirit within us reminds us of our sonship, yes, our adult sonship. We are not infants, the very term means that we are grown sons and have reached full age. We are sons in the fullest sense and in the possession of all our faculties. The clear realization of this gets rid of the spirit of bondage again to fear.Spiritual Depression (172)
There is a right fear of God, and we neglect and ignore that at our peril; but there is also a wrong fear of God and that is a craven fear; 'a fear that hath torment'. Those people, I suggest, tend to develop this kind of wrong fear. They regard God as a taskmaster, they regard Him as Someone who is constantly watching to discover faults and blemishes in them, and to punish them accordingly.Spiritual Depression (168)
We must never for a second worry about anything that cannot be affected or changed by us. It is a waste of energy. If you can do nothing about a situation stop thinking about it; never again look back at it, never think of it.Spiritual Depression (82)
If you can defeat him [Satan] and get rid of him by using common sense and ordinary wisdom, do so. It is perfectly right and legitimate for the Christian to do that. I am saying all this because I often find that people are in difficulty about this matter and are spending their time in praying about a matter instead of doing something that is perfectly obvious from the standpoint of common sense.Spiritual Depression (82)
He puts things to us in such an attractive manner that we find that we have fallen almost before we realize that anything has happened at all.Spiritual Depression (80)
Top Authors
1. Charles Spurgeon (107)
2. J.C. Ryle (103)
3. Thomas Watson (87)
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5. John Calvin (76)
6. J.I. Packer (72)
7. Louis Berkhof (62)
8. C.S. Lewis (49)
9. George Swinnock (49)
10. A.W. Pink (47)
11. Francis Schaeffer (47)
12. Gerald Bray (46)
13. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (43)
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15. Abraham Kuyper (40)
16. B.B. Warfield (37)
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2. J.C. Ryle (103)
3. Thomas Watson (87)
4. John Piper (80)
5. John Calvin (76)
6. J.I. Packer (72)
7. Louis Berkhof (62)
8. C.S. Lewis (49)
9. George Swinnock (49)
10. A.W. Pink (47)
11. Francis Schaeffer (47)
12. Gerald Bray (46)
13. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (43)
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15. Abraham Kuyper (40)
16. B.B. Warfield (37)
17. Thomas Brooks (36)
18. John Flavel (36)
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6. Gospel (71)
7. Suffering (55)
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14. Fear (30)
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