Oswald J. Smith Quotes

Any church that is not seriously involved in helping fulfill the Great Commission has forfeited its biblical right to exist.

We talk of the second coming, half the world has never heard of the first.

Oh my friends, we are loaded with countless church activities, while the real work of the church, that of evangelizing and winning the lost is almost entirely neglected.

The world does not need sermons; it needs a message. You can go to seminary and learn how to preach sermons, but you will have to go to God to get messages.

I am perfectly confident that the man who does not spend hours alone with God will never know the anointing of the Holy Spirit. The world must be left outside until God alone fills the vision...God has promised to answer prayer. It is not that He is unwilling, for the fact is, He is more willing to give than we are to receive. But the trouble is, we are not ready...

Oh, to realize that souls, precious, never dying souls, are perishing all around us, going out into the blackness of darkness and despair, eternally lost, and yet to feel no anguish, shed no tears, know no travail! How little we know of the compassion of Jesus!

It matters not how spiritual a church may profess to be, if souls are not saved, something is radically wrong, and the professed spirituality is simply a false experience, a delusion of the devil. People who are satisfied to meet together simply to have a good time among themselves are far away from God. Real spirituality always has an outcome.

The supreme task of the church is the evangelization of the world. No one has the right to hear the gospel twice until everyone has had an opportunity to hear it at least once.

Oh, how few find time for prayer! There is time for everything else, time to sleep and time to eat, time to read the newspaper and the novel, time to visit friends, time for everything else under the sun, but-no time for prayer, the most important of all things, the one great essential!

The heart of the human problem, is the problem of the human heart.

The church that does not evangelize will fossilize.

I want Thy plan, O God, for my life. May I be happy and contented whether in the homeland or on the foreign field; whether married or alone, in happiness or sorrow, health or sickness, prosperity or adversity -- I want Thy plan, O God, for my life. I want it; oh, I want it.

The light that shines the farthest will shine the brightest at home.

The Lord did not tell us to build beautiful churches, but to evangelize the world

No one has the right to hear the gospel twice, while there remains someone who has not heard it once.

The mission of the church is missions.

Our work is to preach the gospel and we must not be sidetracked.

In the Irish Revival of 1859, people became so weak that they could not get back to their homes. Men and women would fall by the wayside and would be found hours later pleading with God to save their souls. They felt that they were slipping into hell and that nothing else in life mattered but to get right with God... To them eternity meant everything. Nothing else was of any consequence. They felt that if God did not have mercy on them and save them, they were doomed for all time to come.

We all want to do the will of God, and we know that there is nothing nearer to His heart than the evangelization of the world.

The only generation that can reach this generation is our generation.

Let me say that it is not a question of us getting more of the Holy Spirit, but rather of the Holy Spirit getting more of us.

If God wills the evangelization of the world, and you refuse to support missions, then you are opposed to the will of God.

He who would preach powerfully must pray effectively.

You must go or send a substitute.

God does not have to come and tell me what I must do for Him; He brings me into a relationship with Himself where I hear His call and understand what He wants me to do, and I do it out of sheer love to Him... When people say they have had a call to foreign service, or to any particular sphere of work, they mean that their relationship to God has enabled them to realize what they can do for God.