Alexander MacLaren Quotes

The sum of the whole matter is this: He who is one in will and heart with God is a Christian. He who loves God is one in will and heart with Him. He who trusts Christ loves God. That is Christianity in its ultimate purpose and result. That is Christianity in its means and working forces. That is Christianity in its starting point and foundation.

Let the current of your being set towards God, then your life will be filled and calmed by one master-passion which unites and stills the soul.

That which of all things unfits man for the reception of Christ as a Savior, is not gross profligacy and outward, vehement transgression, but it is self-complacency, fatal self-righteousness and self-sufficiency.

Fruitful and acceptable worship begins before it begins.

To pursue joy is to lose it. The only way to get it is to follow steadily the path of duty.

As we look upon that agony and those tearful prayers, let us not only look with thankfulness; but let that kneeling Saviour teach us that in prayer alone can we be forearmed against our lesser sorrows; that strength to bear flows into the heart that is opened in supplication; and that a sorrow which we are made able to endure is more truly conquered than a sorrow which we avoid

Did any of you, parents, ever hear your child wake from sleep with some panic fear and shriek the mother's name through the darkness? Was not that a more powerful appeal than all words? And, depend upon it, that the soul which cries aloud on God, "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," though it have "no language but a cry," will never call in vain.

Every life has dark tracts and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas.

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

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.

God gives us power to bear all the sorrows of His making; but He does not give us power to bear the sorrows of our own making, which the anticipation of sorrow most assuredly is.

Love is the only fire that is hot enough to melt the iron obstinacy of a creatures's will.

Man's course begins in a garden, but it ends in a city.

You cannot put patience and experience into a parenthesis, and, omitting them, bring hope out of tribulation.

Unbelief is criminal because it is a moral act, an act of the whole nature.-Belief or unbelief is a test of a man's whole spiritual condition, because it is the whole being, affections, will, conscience, as well as the understanding, which are concerned in it.

Here is the manliness of manhood, that a man has a good reason for what he does, and has a will in doing it.

The grave has a door on its inner side.

"Oh, when we are journeying through the murky night and the dark woods of affliction and sorrow, it is something to find here and there a spray broken, or a leafy stem bent down with the tread of His foot and the brush of His hand as He passed; and to remember that the path He trod He has hallowed, and thus to find lingering fragrance and hidden strength in the remembrance of Him as "in all points tempted like as we are," bearing grief for us, bearing grief with us, bearing grief like us."

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.

Embrace in one act the two truths-thine own sin, and God's infinite mercy in Jesus Christ.

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

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

The grace of God, says Luther, "is like a flying summer shower." It has fallen upon more than one land, and passed on. Judea had it, and lies barren and dry. These Asiatic coasts had it, and flung it away.

In heaven after ages of ages of growing glory, we shall have to say, as each new wave of the shoreless, sunlit sea bears us onward, It doth not yet appear what we shall be.

Let me always remember that it is not the amount of religious knowledge which I have, but the amount which I use, that determines my religious position and character.

Why should we live halfway up the hill and swathed in the mists, when we might have an unclouded sky and a radiant sun over our heads if we would climb higher and walk in the light of His face?

He that has no present Christ has a future, dark, chaotic, heaving with its destructive ocean; and over it there goes forever--black-pinioned winging its solitary and hopeless flight, the raven of his anxious thoughts, and finds no place to rest, and comes back again to the desolate ark with its foreboding croak of evil in the present and evil in the future.

If life has not made you by God's grace, through faith, holy--think you, will death without faith do it? The cold waters of that narrow stream are no purifying bath in which you may wash and be clean. No! no! as you go down into them, you will come up from them.

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.

Don't waste your sorrows

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.

All that this world knows of living lies in giving - and more giving; He that keeps, be sure he loses -Friendship grows by what it uses.

Remember that vision on the Mount of Transfiguration; and let it be ours, even in the glare of earthly joys and brightnesses, to lift up our eyes, like those wondering three, and see no man any more, save Jesus only.

Faith is the sight of the inward eye.

Transiency is stamped on all our possessions, occupations, and delights. We have the hunger for eternity in our souls, the thought of eternity in our hearts, the destination for eternity written on our inmost being, and the need to ally ourselves with eternity proclaimed by the most short-lived trifles of time. Either these things will be the blessing or the curse of our lives. Which do yon mean that they shall be for you?

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

While the agent of renovation is the Divine Spirit, and the condition of renovation is our cleaving to Christ, the medium of renovation and the weapon which the transforming grace employs is "the word of the truth of the gospel," whereby we are sanctified.

The cup which my Saviour giveth me, can it be anything but a cup of salvation?

I am satisfied, for I awake in Thy likeness.

The hand that holds the seven stars is as loving as the hand that was laid in blessing upon the little children; the face that is as the sun shining in its strength beams with as much love as when it drew publicans and harlots to His feet. The breast that is girt with the golden girdle is the same breast upon which John leaned his happy head.

Do not let the empty cup be your first teacher of the blessings you had when it was full. Do not let a bard place here and there in the bed destroy your rest. Seek, as a plain duty, to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life.

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

Every sin is a mistake, as well as a wrong; and the epitaph for the sinner is, "Thou fool!"

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.

So for us, the condition and preparation on and by which we are sheltered by that great hand, is the faith that asks, and the asking of faith. We must forsake the earthly props, but we must also believingly desire to be upheld by the heavenly arms. We make God responsible for our safety when we abandon other defense, and commit ourselves to Him.

It is not the thinker who is the true king of men, as we sometimes hear it proudly said. We need one who will not only show, but be the Truth; who will not only point, but open and be the Way; who will not only communicate thought, but give, because He is the Life. Not the rabbi's pulpit, nor the teacher's desk, still less the gilded chairs of earthly monarchs, least of all the' tents of conquerors, are the throne of the true king. He rules from the cross.

Ah, there is nothing more beautiful than the difference between the thought about sinful creatures which is natural to a holy being, and the thought about sinful creatures which is natural to a self-righteous being. The one is all contempt; the other, all pity.