God never promises to remove us from our struggles. He does promise, however, to change the way we look at them.
Faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.
Past grace is glorified by intense and joyful gratitude. Future grace is glorified by intense and joyful confidence. This faith is what frees us and empowers us for venturesome obedience n the cause of Christ.
Only if we trust God to turn past calamities into future comfort can we look with gratitude for all things.
Faith , like light, should always be simple and unbending; while love, like warmth, should beam forth on every side, and bend to every necessity of our brethren.
Faith is awe in the presence of the divine incognito.
Those who pin their faith on other men's sleeves, and walk in the way of the world, have turned away from following after Christ.
Faith is a living, daring confidence in God's grace. It is so sure and certain that a man could stake his life on it a thousand times.
Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.
Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing yet had been done.
We trust not because "a God" exists, but because this God exists.
There are three acts of faith; assent, acceptance, and assurance.
When you have no helpers, see your helpers in God. When you have many helpers, see God in all your helpers. When you have nothing but God, see all in God. When you have everything, see God in everything. Under all conditions, stay thy heart only on the Lord.
A little faith will bring your soul to heaven, but a lot of faith will bring heaven to your soul.
Unfaith turns Christianity into only a philosophy. Of course, Christianity is a philosophy -- though not a rationalistic one because we have not worked it out from ourselves. Rather, God has told us the answers. In this sense it is the true philosophy, for it gives the right answers to man's philosophic and intellectual questions. However, while it is the true philosophy, our Father in heaven did not mean it to be only theorectical or abstract. He meant it to tell us about Himself -- how we can get to heaven, but equally, how we can live right now in the universe as it is with both the seen and the unseen portions standing in equal reality. If Christians just use Christianity as a matter of mental assent between conversion and death, if they only use it to answer intellectual questions, it is like using a silver spoon for a screw driver. I can believe that a silver spoon makes a good screw driver at certain times. But it is made for something else. To take the silver spoon that's meant to feed you, moment by moment, and keep it in your tool box to use only as a screw driver is silly.
Faith goes up the stairs that love has made and looks out of the windows which hope has opened.
Apologetic work is so dangerous to one's faith. A doctrine never seems dimmer to me than when I have just successfully defended it.
God loves with a great love the man whose heart is bursting with a passion for the impossible.
Conversion, then, is repentance (turning from sin and unbelief) and faith (trusting in Christ alone for salvation). They are two sides of the same coin. One side is tails -- turn tail on the fruits of unbelief. The other side is heads -- head straight for Jesus and trust his promises. You can't have the one without the other any more than you can face two ways at once, or serve two masters.
Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that 'the just shall live by his faith.' Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.
Christianity is not just a mental assent that certain doctrines are true -- not even that the right doctrines are true. This is only the beginning. This would be rather like a starving man sitting in front of great heaps of food and saying, "I believe the food exists; I believe it is real," and yet never eating it. It is not enough merely to say, "I am a Christian," and then in practice to live as if present contact with the supernatural were something far off and strange. Many Christians I know seem to act as though they come in contact with the supernatural just twice -- once when they are justified and become a Christian and once when they die. The rest of the time they act as though they were sitting in the materialist's chair.
We have a God who delights in impossibilities.
Oh! men and brethren, what would this heart feel if I could but believe that there were some among you who would go home and pray for a revival men whose faith is large enough, and their love fiery enough to lead them from this moment to exercise unceasing intercessions that God would appear among us and do wondrous things here, as in the times of former generations.
So-called "positive thinking" is no weapon against fear. Only positive faith can rout the black menace of fear and give life radiance.
The word hope I take for faith; and indeed hope is nothing else but the constancy of faith.
As the flower is before the fruit, so is faith before good works.
The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.
Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.
Faith sees the invisible, believes the unbelievable, and receives the impossible.
It must be asserted that petitionary prayer only flourishes where there is a twofold belief: that God's name is hallowed too irregularly, his kingdom has come too little, and his will is done too infrequently; second, that God himself can change this situation.
Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.
I have found that there are three stages in every great work of God: first, it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done.
Our twentieth century, far from being notable for scientific scepticism, is one of the most credulous eras in all history. It is not that people believe in nothing - which would be bad enough - but that they believe in anything - which is really terrible.
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