The Lost Practice of Piety

Come from your knees to the sermon, and come from the sermon to your knees. The sermon does not prosper because it is not watered with prayers and tears, nor covered with meditation.

If the sinner's eye be blind to God, it sees not anything to be reverenced in the Lord's authority. And neither education, nor station, nor privileges are sufficient to keep men from this presumption. The heart may continue unrenewed amid all such blessings.

Our High Priest welcomes sinners under the wide name, "Him that cometh"; the advancing footstep of a sinner to His altar, whether he be great or small, is a sweet sound in our Aaron's ear.

God has not given us the authority to establish values for different sins. Instead, He says through James, 'Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.'

The root of an unmortified course is the digestion of sin without bitterness in the heart. When a man has confirmed his imagination to such an apprehension of grace and mercy as to be able, without bitterness, to swallow and digest daily sins, that man is at the brink of turning the grace of God into lasciviousness and being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

If we neglect to make use of what we have received, God may justly hold His hand from giving us more. His graces, as well as His gifts, are bestowed on us to use, exercise, and trade with. Not to be daily mortifying sin is to sin against the goodness, kindness, wisdom, grace, and love of God, who has furnished us with a principle of doing it.

When Christ calls you to follow Him, it overrides every other noble obligation you think you have.

There is no royal road to a knowledge of the Bible. There must be patient, daily, systematic reading of the Book, or the Book will not be known.

There is such a thing as a temporary emotion in the mere semblance of repentance; this emotion has very weak legs and cannot carry the behavior in the long walk of obedience.

The scriptures are not poetic exaggerations; rather, they are a vast understatement.

Lead Me, Lord

'Follow me,' says Christ, to the two men. Now see what answers they give to Christ, 'Allow me first to go and bury my father,' says one. This man purposes to follow Christ, only he would stay to bury his father. Says the other, 'Lord, I will follow you—but let me first go and bid them farewell which are at my house.' I will follow you—but only I would first go and take my leave of my friends, or set my house in order. And yet we do not find that they ever followed Christ, notwithstanding their fair purposes.

I don’t have an answer key to life’s questions. If I did, we could just read through them, but what good would it do? At the end of the list with all these fascinating answers, these great questions, these riddles solved in our own hearts, you and I would all say things like “wow, I never thought that would be the answer” and then we would go home, unchanged. The value of the plaguing questions is that they bother us enough to drive us to God.

The cross of Christ is not a billboard where God says that you are too precious to send to hell. The cross of Christ is the great display that God is Just, that Someone has obeyed the law and that Someone else has suffered the penalty.

Cling to Christ, and show the world how you love Him. Show it by obedience to His commandments. Show it by conformity to His image. Show it by following His example.

To be a mere nominal Christian, and go to church, is cheap and easy work. But to hear Christ's voice, and follow Christ, and believe in Christ, and confess Christ, requires much self-denial.