What They Said

“If one does not make human knowledge wholly dependent upon the original self-knowledge and consequent revelation of God to man, then man will have to seek knowledge within himself as the final reference point. Then he will have to seek an exhaustive understanding of reality.  He will have to hold that if he cannot attain to such an exhaustive understanding of reality he has no true knowledge of anything at all. Either man must then know everything or he knows nothing. This is the dilemma that confronts every form of non-Christian epistemology.”

Cornelius Van Til

“You may deem it a strange prophecy, but I predict that the time will come in this once free America when the battle for religious liberty will have to be fought over again, and will probably be lost, because the people are already ignorant of its true basis and conditions.”

Robert Lewis Dabney

“He is your friend who pushes you nearer to God.”

Abraham Kuyper

“No man can ever raise above that that which he aims.”

A. A. Hodge

“The grace of God exalts a man without inflating him, and humbles a man without debasing him.”

Charles Hodge

“Good education is not regeneration. Education may chain up men's lusts, but cannot change their hearts.”

Thomas Boston

“Our ignorance of God is too great, because our estimations of God are too little.”

Stephen Charnock

“Indeed, the knowledge of a proud man is the throne of Satan in his mind.”

John Owen

“Sanctification is not a work of nature, but a work of grace. It is a transformation of character effected not by moral influences, but supernaturally by the Holy Spirit.”

Charles Hodge

“Grace is free sovereign favor to the ill-deserving.”

B.B. Warfield

“It is that perfection of God by which he is devoid of all change, not only in His Being, but also in His perfections, and in His purposes and promises.”

Louis Berkhof

“The essence of Christianity consists therein: that the creation of the Father, destroyed by sin, is again restored in the death of the Son of God and recreated by the grace of the Holy Spirit to a Kingdom of God.”

Herman Bavinck

"Firmly believing that my times are in God's hand, I here submit myself and all my affairs for the ensuing year to the wise and gracious disposal of the divine providence. Whether God appoint for me health or sickness, peace or trouble, comforts or crosses, life or death, his holy will be done.

All my time, strength, and service, I devote to the honor of the Lord Jesus; my studies and all my ministerial labors, and even my common actions. It is my earnest expectation, hope, and desire, my constant aim and endeavor, that Jesus Christ may be magnified in my body.

In everything wherein I have to do with God, my entire dependence is upon Jesus Christ for strength and righteousness. And whatever I do in word or deed, I desire to do all in his name, to make him my Alpha and Omega. I have all by him, and I would use all for him.

If this should prove a year of affliction, a sorrowful year upon my account, I will fetch all my supports and comforts from the Lord Jesus and stay myself upon him, his everlasting consolations, and the good hope I have in him through grace.

And if it should be my dying year, my times are in the hand of the Lord Jesus. And with a humble reliance upon his mediation, I would venture into another world looking for the blessed hope. Dying as well as living, Jesus Christ will, I trust, be gain and advantage to me.

Oh, that the grace of God may be sufficient for me, to keep in me always a humble sense of my own unworthiness, weakness, folly, and infirmity, together with a humble dependence upon the Lord Jesus Christ for both righteousness and strength."

Matthew Henry

“You have not the making of your own cross, although unbelief is a master carpenter at cross-making; neither are you permitted to choose your own cross, although self-will would fain be lord and master; but your cross is prepared and appointed for you by divine love, and you are cheerfully to accept it; you are to take up the cross as your chosen badge and burden, and not to stand cavilling at it.”

Charles Spurgeon

“We should always be wearing the garment of praise, not just waving a palm-branch now and then.”

Andrew Bonar

“We have to die to live.  That is the central law of life.  We must burn to give light to the world, or to give forth odor of incense to God's praise.  We cannot save ourselves and at the same time make anything worthy of our life, or be in any deep and true sense an honor to God and a blessing to the world.  The altar stands in the foreground of every life, and can be passed by only at the cost of all that is noblest and best.”

J.R. Miller

“It is as easy for him to save a great as a small sinner.  No one was ever saved because his sins were small; no one was ever rejected on account of the greatness of his sins.  Where sin abounded, grace shall much more abound.”

Archibald Alexander

"Whose fan is in His hand, and He will throughly purge His floor."—Matt. iii. 12.

“The fan of Jesus is in His hand, and He will throughly cleanse His threshing-floor.

The words are not words of terror alone. They do not tell me simply that He will separate false souls from true at last, those who have merely a name to live from those within whom the power of godliness dwells and advances. That is solemn fact which I have need to lay to heart; but there is more than that.

The words are words of richest comfort also. For the wheat and the chaff are within the same life—the life which the Saviour has redeemed and is regenerating from day to day. Is this life mine?

Then in my history He will employ His winnowing and cleansing fan. It is the fan of His testing and purifying providence. It is the fan of His teaching and purging Word. It is the fan of His sifting and sanctifying Spirit. Through one agency and through another He will busy Himself about my nature, until all that is worthless and all that is evil have gone from me completely and for ever.

He can be satisfied with nothing short of my absolute and stainless perfection. It will mean a long, long patience on His part. It will mean an arduous and sometimes an agonising discipline for me. But by and by the chaff will have disappeared from my soul. By and by I shall be pure and ripe and precious wheat, which, in His great harvest home, He will carry with joy into His heavenly garner. It is a hope which may bring tears of gladness to my eyes. It is an expectation to fill my heart with melody and music.”

Alexander Smellie

“Let us mark this well. It is high time to dismiss from our minds those loose ideas about idolatry, which are common in this day. We must not think, as many do, that there are only two sorts of idolatry–the spiritual idolatry of the man who loves his wife, or child, or money more than God; and the open, gross idolatry of the man who bows down to an image of wood, or metal, or stone, because he knows no better. We may rest assured that idolatry is a sin which occupies a far wider field than this. It is not merely a thing in pagan lands, that we may hear of and pity at missionary meetings; nor yet is it a thing confined to our own hearts, that we may confess before the mercy-seat upon our knees. It is a pestilence that walks in the Church of the Living Christ to a much greater extent than many suppose. It is an evil that, like the man of sin, “that sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God” (2 Thessalonians 2:4).”

J.C. Ryle

“Believe God's word and power more than you believe your own feelings and experiences. Your Rock is Christ, and it is not the Rock which ebbs and flows, but your sea.”

Samuel Rutherford

“God is incomparable in His work of creation.  The creature cannot create.  We can alter the form, but we cannot produce the matter.  A goldsmith can make a sparkling jewel, but he requires precious stones to do so.  He cannot make gold out of dust, or diamonds out of dirt.  We cannot create one grain of corn or one blade of grass.  We can put the matter unto a better form, but we cannot make matter when there is none.”

George Swinnock

“To be "born of God" is to be the SUBJECT OF AN INWARD CHANGE of heart, so complete, that it is like passing into a new existence. It is the introduction into the human soul of a seed from heaven, a new principle, a Divine nature, a new will. Certainly it is no outward bodily alteration; but it is no less certain that it is an entire alteration of the inward man. It adds no new faculties to our minds; but it gives an entirely new bent and bias to our old ones. The tastes and opinions of one "born of God," his views of sin, of the world, of the Bible, of God, and of Christ, are so thoroughly new, that he is to all intents and purposes what St. Paul calls "a new creature." In fact, as the Church Catechism truly says, it is "a death unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness.””

J.C. Ryle

“O, beloved, would to God we knew more of this joy of perfect and complete surrender. It is our will clashing with our Father's will that gives disquiet. Were our will but one with His, it would be utterly impossible for us ever to be anything else than serene, calm and happy. Within our soul would dwell a deep of calm contentedness. Having no- choice of our own, the soul would find equal joy in all.  The " even so Father" would prove perpetual music in the breast.”

Archibald Brown

"But let none think that public prayer will make up for closet communion."

George Muller

“I long for the day when the precepts of the Christian religion shall be the rule among all classes of men,in all transactions. I often hear it said " Do not bring religion into politics." This is precisely where it ought to be brought, and set there in the face of all men as on a candlestick. I would have the Cabinet and the Members of Parliament do the work of the nation as before the Lord, and I would have the nation, either in making war or peace, consider the matter by the light of righteousness. "We are to deal with other nations about this or that upon the principles of the New Testament I thank God that I have lived to see the attempt made in one or two instances, and I pray that the principle may become dominant and permanent We have had enough of clever men without conscience, let us now see what honest, God-fearing men will do. But we are told that we must study "British interests, as if it were not always to a nation's truest interest to do righteousness. "But we must follow out our policy." I say, No! Let the policies which are founded on wrong be cast like idols to the moles and to the bats. Stand to that most admirable of policies,—" As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise." Whether we are kings, or queens, or prime ministers, or members of parliament, or crossing sweepers, this is our rule if we are Christians.”

Charles Spurgeon

“Sometimes we don't need another chance to express how we feel or to ask someone to understand our situation.  Sometimes we just need a firm kick in the pants.  An unsmiling expectation that if we mean all these wonderful things we talk about and sing about, then lets see something to prove it.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer