(A Periodic List of My Favorite Phrases That "Sing")
"More Spurgeon quotations, please?" Gladly. These comprise the seventh installment of ten delightful, insightful quotations that have captured my mind and heart. Each come from the pen of C. H. Spurgeon (who was unusually gifted pastor/preacher in England, with a 12,000 volume library ... that he'd read!):
61. “We are in a sense, our own tools, and therefore must keep ourselves in order... I can only use my own voice... so I must train my vocal powers. I can only think with my own brain, and feel with my own heart, and therefore I must educate my intellectual and emotional faculties ... It is not great talents God blesses so much as likeness to Jesus. A holy minister (communicator) is an awful (awe-full) weapon in the hand of God.”
62. “If your zeal grows dull, you will not pray well in the pulpit; you will pray worse in the family, and worst in the study alone. When your soul becomes lean, your hearers, without knowing how or why, will find that your prayers in public have little savor for them; they will feel your barrenness, perhaps before you perceive it yourself. Your discourse will next betray your declension -- there will be a perceptible loss of spiritual force.”
63. “Moreover, as the result of your own decline, everyone of your hearers will suffer more or less ... It is with us and our hearers as it is with the watches and the public clock; if our watch be wrong, very few will be misled by it but ourselves; but if the Greenwich Observatory should go amiss, half of London would lose its reckoning. So it is with the minister: he is the parish-clock, many take their time from him, and if he be incorrect, then they all go wrongly. This we cannot endure to think of, my brethren.”
64. “Take heed, therefore, my brethren, for the enemy hath a special eye upon you.”
65. “We have all heard the story of the man who preached so well and lived so badly, that when he was in the pulpit everybody said he ought never to come out again, and when he was out of it they all declared he never ought to enter it again. .... Our characters must be more persuasive than our speech.”
66. “We must remember that we are very much looked at ... we are watched by a thousand eagle eyes; let us so act that we shall never need to care if all heaven, and earth, and hell, swelled the list of spectators.”
67. "As well might a gnat seek to drink in the ocean, as a finite creature to comprehend the Eternal God."
68. "Few preachers of religion do believe thoroughly the doctrine of the Fall, or else they think that when Adam fell down he broke his little finger, and did not break his neck and ruin the race."
69. "There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write 'damnation' with your fingers."
70. "Do you think to come to Jesus up the ladder of knowledge? Come down, sir; you will meet him at the foot."