Take heed to yourselves, lest your example contradict your doctrine lest you unsay with your lives, what you say with your tongues, and be the greatest hinderers of the success of your own labors!
Until men are deeply humbled for their sin they can part with Christ and salvation for a lust, for a little worldly gain, for that which is less than nothing! But when God has enlightened their consciences and broken their hearts then they would give a world for Christ!
Is it but right that our hearts should be on God when the heart of God is so much on us! Lord, I surrender I am completely overcome by your love!
I take the love of God and self-denial to be the sum of all saving grace and religion.
In our first paradise in Eden, there was a way to go out but no way to go in again.
But as for the Heavenly paradise, there is a way to go in but no way to go out.
Of all the preaching in the world I hate that preaching most, which tends to make the hearers laugh, or to move their minds with tickling levity and affect them as stage play does instead of affecting them with a holy reverence for God.
See that your chief study is about your heart that there's God's image may be planted, and His interest advanced, and the flesh subdued, and the love of every sin cast out, and the love of holiness be nourished. The first and great work of a Christian is about his heart.
If my life is short, then why should I be sad to welcome endless glory?
It is a contradiction to be a true Christian and not humble.
I preached as never sure to preach again as a dying man to dying men!
Mere idleness and forgetting God, will keep a soul as certainly from Heaven, as a profane, licentious, fleshly life!
Suffering so unbolts the door of the heart that the Word has easier entrance.
Do not content yourselves with being in a state of grace but be also careful that your graces are kept in vigorous and lively exercise, and that you preach to yourselves the sermons which you study before you preach them to others.
You little know what you have done, when you have first broken the bounds of modesty. You have opened the door of your imagination to the devil so that he can, almost at his pleasure ever after, represent the same sinful pleasure to you anew.
That which once will be no more. Yesterday will never come again. Today is passing away and will not return. You may work while it is day; but when you have lost that day it will not return for you to work in. While your candle burns, you may make use of its light but when it is done, it is too late to use it.
I am but a pen in God's hands what praise is due to a pen?
Heaven will pay for any loss we may suffer to gain it but nothing can pay for the loss of Heaven!
Why are our hearts not continually set on Heaven? Why do we not dwell there in constant contemplation? Bend your soul to study eternity, busy yourself about the life to come, habituate yourself to such contemplations. Let not those thoughts be seldom and cursory but bathe yourself in Heaven's delights.
He who has not so much sense of his faults as sincerely to lament them will hardly have so much more as to move him to reform them.
[Richard Baxter]
