Home › C › Church

Church: Quotations from Burning Words

God has made a covenant with His people, has given Himself for their portion, His Son for their price, His Spirit for their guide in the way, His earth for their accommodation by the way, His angels for their guard, the powers of darkness and death for their spoil, everlasting glory for their crown.— RICHARD ALLEINE

The everlasting covenant which God has made with Jesus, and through Jesus with all His beloved people, individually, is a strong ground of consolation amidst the tremblings of human hope, the fluctuations of creature things, and the instability of all that earth calls good.— OCTAVIUS WINSLOW

So, from generation to generation, the spiritual church is rising upwards toward its perfection; and, though one after another the workmen pass away, the fabric remains, and the great Master-builder carries on the undertaking. Be it ours to build in our portion in a solid and substantial manner, so that they who come after us may be at once thankful for our thoroughness, and inspired by our example.— Wm. M. TAYLOR,

A strong church is made up of well-ordered families, where intelligent, Christian parents bring up their children in the fear of the Lord, where the home of the week has its counterpart in the home of the Sabbath, where the hopes and joys of the living, and the blessed memories of the dead bind to the Lord and His church, where young men and maidens are glad when it is said to them, "Let us go unto the house of the Lord," where the tranquillity, and purity, and holy peace, the light and the love, form to the opening minds of the children a type and prophecy of the eternal Sabbath and the heaven above.— JOHN HALL

I know that with consecration on the part of believers, separation from the world, disentanglement from enslaving sins, and a mighty baptism of the Holy Spirit, the church would become a conquering power in the world, not by its constructed theology, not by its Sabbath services, not by its arguments to convince the intellect, but by its simple story of Jesus' love, by the Cross, the CROSS - God's hammer, God's fire.— A. E. KITTREDGE

One day of good preaching is no match for six days of inconsistent practice. God will never honor His church with complete success until it completely honors Him.— T. L. CUYLER

Depend upon it, as long as the church is living so much like the world, we cannot expect our children to be brought into the fold.— D. L. MOODY

We must reinstate Jesus in the rightful place which belongs to Him in the church; or the church will soon be driven into the wilderness.— BISHOP CLARK

What if every Christian would say: "Lord, I want a revival. Let it begin in me. Give me the earnestness, faith, and tenderness that I am looking for in others. Make me such a devoted worker as I think my minister or brother or sister ought to be. Let the revival begin in me, and begin now. 'Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?'"— THE CONGREGATIONALIST

If the Church would have her face shine, she must go up into the mount, and be alone with God. If she would have her courts of worship resound with eucharistic praises, she must open her eyes, and see humanity lying lame at the temple gates, and heal it in the miraculous name of Jesus.— BISHOP HUNTINGTON

I think I speak not too strongly when I say that a church in the land without the Spirit of God is rather a curse than a blessing. If you have not the Spirit of God, Christian worker, remember you stand in somebody else's way; you are a tree bearing no fruit, standing where another fruitful tree might grow.— C. H. SPURGEON

IO Congregations must justify their existence. If they only bring people together to be "very much pleased," why, the Lecture Bureaus will contract for all that. "Did you worship? Were you edified? Did the Lord speak to you? Did you speak to Him? Do you mean more seriously to be pure, honest, upright, generous, manly, holy, from what you did and heard to-day?" These are the questions which the best part of mankind feel to be proper, and to which we must have affirmative replies.— JOHN HALL

The one injurious and fatal fact of our present church work is the barrier between the churches and the poorest classes. The first thing for us to do is to demolish this barrier. The impression is abroad among the poor that they are not wanted in the churches. This impression is either correct or incorrect. If it is correct, then there is no missionary work, for us who are pastors, half so urgent as the conversion of our congregations to Christianity. If it is incorrect, we are still guilty before God in that we have allowed such an impression to go abroad; and we are bound to address ourselves, at once and with all diligence, to the business of convincing the poor people that they are wanted, and will be made welcome in the churches,— W. GLADDEN

Let the church come to God in the strength of a perfect weakness, in the power of a felt helplessness and a child-like confidence, and then, either she has no strength, and has no right to be, or she has a strength that is infinite. Then and thus, will she stretch out the rod over the seas of difficulty that lie before her, and the waters shall divide, and she shall pass through, and sing the song of deliverance.— MARK HOPKINS

The health of a church depends not merely on the creed which it professes, not even on the wisdom and holiness of a few great ecclesiastics, but on the faith and virtue of its individual members.— CHARLES KINGSLEY

Do you recall the laughter of the Philistines at the helpless Sampson? You can hear the echo of that laughter to-day, as the church, shorn of her strength by her own sin, is an object of ridicule to the world, who cry in derision, "Where is your boasted triumph and your Millennial glory?"— A. E. KITTREDGE

There is nothing more pitiable than a soulless, sapless, shriveled church, seeking to thrive in a worldly atmosphere, rooted in barren professions, bearing no fruit, and maintaining only the semblance of existence; such a church cannot long survive,— GEORGE C. LORIMER

How long must the church live before it will learn that strength is won by action, and success by work, and that all this immeasurable feeding without action and work is a positive damage to it - that it is the procurer of spiritual obesity, gout, and debility.— J. G. HOLLAND

A lazy, indolent church tends toward unbelief; an earnest, busy church, in hand-to-hand conflict with sin and misery, grows stronger in faith.— JOHN HALL

I believe that the root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian church has ever suffered, has been the effort of men to earn, rather than to receive, their salvation.— JOHN RUSKIN

Doubts about the fundamentals of the gospel exist in certain churches, I am told, to a large extent. My dear friends, where there is a warm-hearted church, you do not hear of them. I never saw a fly light on a red-hot plate.— C. H. SPURGEON

What is the average type of a counterfeit church? A hammock, attached on one side to the cross, and, on the other, held and swung to and fro by the forefinger of Mammon; its freight of nominal Christians elegantly moaning meanwhile over the evils of the times, and not at ease unless fanned by eloquence and music, and sprinkled by social adulations into perfumed, unheroic slumber.— JOSEPH COok

I never yet have known the Spirit of God to work where the Lord's people were divided.— D. L. MOODY

Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken.— GEORGE MACDONALD

The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preserve the purity of it. -— MATTHEW HENRY

Antedating our history, possessing and illumining the hearts of the founders of liberty in our free land, and constantly exerting the soul-equalizing and soul-elevating principles of the gospel of Christ as they fall from Sabbath to Sabbath on the masses of the people, the Christian church stands before all men as the pillar and ground of civil liberty in the world.— W. H. PERRINE

The church may go through her dark ages, but Christ is with her in the midnight; she may pass through her fiery furnace, but Christ is in the midst of the flame with her.— C. H. SPURGEON

Persecution has not crushed it, power has not beaten it back, time has not abated its force, and, what is most wonderful of all, the abuses and treasons of its friends have not shaken its stability.— HORACE BUSHNELL

Any church which forsakes the regular and uniform for the periodical and spasmodic service of God, is doomed to decay; any church which relies for its spiritual strength and growth entirely upon seasons of "revival," will very soon have no genuine revivals to rely on. Our holy God will not conform His blessings to man's moods and moral caprice. If a church is declining, it may require a "revival" to restore it; but what need was there of its declining?— T. L. CUYLER

And this is the mission of the church - not civilization, but salvation - not better laws, purer legislation, social elevation, human equality, and liberty, but FIRST, the "kingdom of God and His righteousness;" regenerated hearts, and all other things will follow.— A. E. KITTREDGE

In the true, original, catholic, evangelical religion of Jesus Christ, and in this alone, all the divided religions of Christendom find their union, their repose, their support. Find out His mind, His character, His will; and in His greatness we shall rise above our littlenesses; in His strength we shall lose our weakness; in His peace we shall forget our discord.— DEAN STANLEY

One family - we dwell in Him, One church above, beneath, Though now divided by the stream, The narrow stream of death.— CHARLES WESLEY

The church itself has got to go outside of its own borders and carry the gospel to every creature, or it is no church of Christ; and any mutual improvement club which thinks that by reading its Shakspeare, or by acting its pretty tableaux, or by having this or that little reading from Spenser and from Chaucer, it is going to lift itself up into any higher order of culture or life, is wholly mistaken, unless as an essential part of its duty, it goes out into the world, finds those that are falling down, and lifts them up to the majesty of freemen, who are sons of God.— EDWARD E. HALE

CHURCH (SANCTUARY). They who would grow in grace, must love the habitation of God's house. It is those that are planted in the courts of the Lord who shall flourish, and not those that are occasionally there.— JOHN ANGEL JAMES

When I go to the house of God I do not want amusement; I want the doctrine which is according to godliness. I want to hear the remedy against the harassing of my guilt and the disorder of my affections. I want to be led from weariness and disappointment to that goodness which filleth the hungry soul. I want to have light upon the mystery of Providence; to be taught how the judgments of the Lord are right; how I shall be prepared for duty and for trial; how I may fear God all the days of my life, and close them in peace.— JOHN M. MASON

It is better to have a plain, substantial building, with no extravagance about it, but without a debt, than to have the most splendid specimen of Gothic architecture that is overlaid by a mortgage.— Wm. M. TAYLOR

We have houses of God built in defiance of the laws of God. On the walls of one of these monstrosities I saw this most appropriate motto: "This is the house of God; how dreadful is this place!"— PROF. SHEPPARD