Lindsay > Lindsay's Quotes

“I have a great need for Christ: I have a great Christ for my need.”
― Charles H. Spurgeon

“The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God.”
― John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist

“We must not offer people a system of redemption, a set of insights and principles. We offer people a Redeemer.”
― Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change

“There is no place in God’s world where there are no people who will come and share a home as long as it is a real home.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer

“The fear of God reigning in the heart is the beauty of the soul.”
― Matthew Henry

“Men have a great deal of pleasure in human knowledge, in studies of natural things; but this is nothing to that joy which arises from divine light shining into the soul. This spiritual light is the dawning of the light of glory in the heart. There is nothing so powerful as this to support persons in affliction, and to give the mind peace and brightness in this stormy and dark world. This knowledge will wean from the world, and raise the inclination to heavenly things. It will turn the heart to God as the fountain of good, and to choose him for the only portion. This light, and this only, will bring the soul to a saving close with Christ. It conforms the heart to the gospel, mortifies its enmity and opposition against the scheme of salvation therein revealed: it causes the heart to embrace the joyful tidings, and entirely to adhere to, and acquiesce in the revelation of Christ as our Savior.”
― Jonathan Edwards

“The only reason why anything virtuous or lively survives in us is this, 'the LORD is there'" (Ez. 35:10)”
― Charles Spurgeon

“The fatal flaw of human wisdom is that it promises that you can change your relationships without needing to change yourself.

Every painful thing we experience in relationships is meant to remind us of our need for God. And every good thing we experience is meant to be a metaphor of what we can only find in Him.... We settle for the satisfaction of human relationships when they were meant to point us to the perfect relational satisfaction found only with God.”
― Paul David Tripp

“If I am seeking to get identity from you ,I will watch you too closely, listen to you too intently, and need you to fundamentally. I will ride the roller coaster of your best and worst moments and everything in between. And because I am watching you too closely, I will become acutely aware of your weaknesses and failures. I will become overly critical, frustrated, disappointed, hopeless, and angry. I will be angry not because you are a sinner but because you have failed to deliver the one thing I seek from you: identity. But none of us will ever get the well-being that comes from knowing who we are from our relationships. Instead we will be left with damaged relationships filled with hurt, frustration and anger.”
― Paul David Tripp

“Our purpose (in relationship) is to get what we want but God's purpose is to give us what we really need. We think things are going well only if we are getting along with others. But God says that it is also when we are not getting along with others that he is accomplishing his purpose.

God has designed our relationship to function as both a diagnosis and a cure.”
― Paul David Tripp

“Human beings by their very nature are worshipers. Worship is not something we do; it defines who we are. You cannot divide human beings into those who worship and those who don’t. Everybody worships; it’s just a matter of what, or whom, we serve.”
― Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change

“Remember the perfections of that God whom you worship, that he is a Spirit, and therefore to be worshipped in spirit and truth; and that he is most great and terrible, and therefore to be worshipped with seriousness and reverence, and not to be dallied with, or served with toys or lifeless lip-service; and that he is most holy, pure, and jealous, and therefore to be purely worshipped; and that he is still present with you, and all things are naked and open to him with whom we have to do. The knowledge of God, and the remembrance of his all-seeing presence, are the most powerful means against hypocrisy.”
― Richard Baxter

“Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god.”
― Denis de Rougemont

“Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.”
― Robert Merton

“This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“There are times when solitude is better than society, and silence is wiser than speech. We should be better Christians if we were more alone, waiting upon God, and gathering through meditation on His Word spiritual strength for labour in his service. We ought to muse upon the things of God, because we thus get the real nutriment out of them. . . . Why is it that some Christians, although they hear many sermons, make but slow advances in the divine life? Because they neglect their closets, and do not thoughtfully meditate on God's Word. They love the wheat, but they do not grind it; they would have the corn, but they will not go forth into the fields to gather it; the fruit hangs upon the tree, but they will not pluck it; the water flows at their feet, but they will not stoop to drink it. From such folly deliver us, O Lord. . . .”
― Charles Spurgeon

“I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.”
― Saint Augustine

“In the moral realm, there is very little consensus left in Western countries over the proper basis of moral behavior. And because of the power of the media, for millions of men and women the only venue where moral questions are discussed and weighed is the talk show, where more often than not the primary aim is to entertain, even shock, not to think. When Geraldo and Oprah become the arbiters of public morality, when the opinion of the latest media personality is sought on everything from abortion to transvestites, when banality is mistaken for profundity because [it's] uttered by a movie star or a basketball player, it is not surprising that there is less thought than hype. Oprah shapes more of the nation's grasp of right and wrong than most of the pulpits in the land. Personal and social ethics have been removed from the realms of truth and structures of thoughts; they have not only been relativized, but they have been democratized and trivialized.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“Modernist discourse [...] incorporates semantic devices - such as the labeling of theism as 'religion' and naturalism as 'science' - that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open.”
― Phillip E. Johnson, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law Education

“The venerable dead are waiting in my library to entertain me and relieve me from the nonsense of surviving mortals.”
― Samuel Davies

“I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.”
― Martin Luther

“He is wretched indeed, who goes up and down in the world, without a God to take care of him, to be his guide and protector, and to bless him in his affairs [. . .] That unconverted men are without God shows that they are liable to all manner of evil [. . .] liable to the power of the devil, to the power of all manner of temptation [. . .] to be deceived and seduced into erroneous opinions [. . .] to embrace damnable doctrines [. . .] to be given up of God to judicial hardness of heart [. . .] to commit all manner of sin, and even the unpardonable sin itself. They cannot be sure they shall not commit that sin. They are liable to build up a false hope of heaven, and so to go hoping to hell [. . .] to die senseless and stupid, as many have died [. . .] to die in such a case as Saul and Judas did, fearless of hell. They have no security from it. They are liable to all manner of mischief, since they are without God. They cannot tell what shall befall them, nor when they are secure from anything. They are not safe one moment. Ten thousand fatal mischiefs may befall them, that may make them miserable forever. They, who have God for their God, are safe from all such evils. It is not possible that they should befall them. God is their covenant God, and they have his faithful promise to be their refuge.”
― Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2 Volumes

“Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.”
― Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Nothing can be rightly known, if God be not known; nor is any study well managed, nor to any great purpose, if God is not studied. We know little of the creature, till we know it as it stands related to the Creator: single letters, and syllables uncomposed, are no better than nonsense. He who overlooketh him who is the 'Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending,' and seeth not him in all who is the All of all, doth see nothing at all. All creatures, as such, are broken syllables; they signify nothing as separated from God. Were they separated actually, they would cease to be, and the separation would be annhiliation; and when we separate them in our fancies, we make nothing of them to ourselves. It is one thing to know the creatures as Aristotle, and another thing to know them as a Christian. None but a Christian can read one line of his Physics so as to understand it rightly. It is a high and excellent study, and of greater use than many apprehend; but it is the smallest part of it that Aristotle can teach us.”
― Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor

“Have your heart right with Christ, and he will visit you often, and so turn weekdays into Sundays, meals into sacraments, homes into temples, and earth into heaven.”
― C.H. Spurgeon

“I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading.”
― Charles Lamb

“Make careful choice of the books which you read:
let the holy Scriptures ever have the preeminence.
Let Scripture be first and most in your hearts and
hands and other books be used as subservient to it.

While reading ask yourself:

1. Could I spend this time no better?

2. Are there better books that would edify me more?

3. Are the lovers of such a book as this the greatest
lovers of the Book of God and of a holy life?

4. Does this book increase my love to the Word of God,
kill my sin, and prepare me for the life to come?

"The words of the wise are like goads, their collected
sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one Shepherd.
Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of
making many books there is no end, and much study
wearies the body." Ecclesiastes 12:11-12”
― Richard Baxter

“Oh teach the mind t' aetherial heights to rise,
And view familiar, in its native skies,
Thy source of good; thy splendor to descry,
And on thy self, undazled, fix her eye.
Oh quicken this dull mass of mortal clay;
Shine through the soul, and drive its clouds away!
For thou art Light. In thee the righteous find
Calm rest, and soft serenity of mind;
Thee they regard alone; to thee they tend;
At once our great original and end,
At once our means, our end, our guide, our way,
Our utmost bound, and our eternal stay!”
― Anicius Boethuis

“Music is at its best when it is pleasingly melancholic.”
― Charles Spurgeon

“To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.”
― Blaise Pascal