Alexander MacLaren Quotes

If God sends us on stony paths, He will provide us with strong shoes.

Peace comes not from the absence of trouble, but from the presence of God.

He who has the Holy Spirit in His heart and the Scripture in his hands has all he needs.

Being in Christ, it is safe to forget the past; it is possible to be sure of the future; it is possible to be diligent in the present.

The world takes its notions of God from the people who say that they belong to God's family. They read us a great deal more than they read the Bible. They see us; they only hear about Jesus Christ.

The more we work the more we need to pray. In this day of activity there is great danger, not of doing too much, but of praying too little for so much work.

The Gospel is not a mere message of deliverance, but a canon of conduct; it is not a theology to be accepted, but it is ethics to be lived. It is not to be believed only, but it is to be taken into life as a guide.

The prayer that begins with trustfulness, and passes on into waiting, will always end in thankfulness, triumph, and praise.

No man loveth God except the man who has first learned that God loves him.

Only he who can say, 'The Lord is the strength of my life' can go on to say, 'Of whom shall I be afraid?'

The apostolic church thought more about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ than about death and heaven. The early Christians were looking, not for a cleft in the ground called a grave but for a cleavage in the sky called Glory.

Do not let the loud utterances of your own wills anticipate, nor drown, the still, small voice in which God speaks. Bridle impatience till He does. If you cannot hear His whisper, wait till you do. Take care of running before you are sent. Keep your wills in equipoise till God's hand gives the impulse and direction.

True peace comes not from the absence of trouble, but from the presence of God and will be deep and passing all understanding in the exact measure in which we live in and partake of the love of God.

Conflict, not progress, is the word that defines man's path from darkness into light. No holiness is won by any other means than this, that wickedness should be slain day by day, and hour by hour.

As the flowers follow the sun, and silently hold up their petals to be tinted and enlarged by its shining, so must we, if we would know the joy of God, hold our souls, wills, hearts, and minds, still before Him, whose voice commands, whose love warns, whose truth makes fair our whole being. God speaks for the most part in such silence only. If the soul be full of tumult and jangling voices, His voice is little likely to be heard.

The gospel is not speculation but fact. It is truth, because it is the record of a person who is the Truth.

It is not my strength that grows, so much as God's strength in me, which is given more abundantly as the days roll. It is so given on one condition. If my faith has laid hold of the infinite, the exhaustless, the immortal energy of God, unless there is something fearfully wrong about me, I shall be getting purer, nobler, wiser, more observant of His will; gentler, like Christ; every way fitter for His service, and for larger service, as the days increase.

We must have the glory sink into us before it can be reflected from us. In deep inward beholding we must have Christ in our hearts, that He may shine forth from our lives.

If you would win the world, melt it, do not hammer it.

There can be no faith so feeble that Christ does not respond to it.

Fruitful and acceptable worship begins before it begins.

Seek to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life.

God is His own motive. His love is not drawn out by our loveableness, but wells up, like an artesian spring, from the depths of His nature.

In making our decisions, we must use the brains that God has given us. But we must also use our hearts which He also gave us. A man who has not learned to say, No -who is not resolved that he will take God's way, in spite of every dog that can bay or bark at him, in spite of every silvery choice that woos him aside-will be a weak and a wretched man till he dies.

Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side.