“We see now that the whole cause of our trouble is that people do not base their lives upon God. They have set themselves up as gods, and the gods are fighting one another, and life has been chaos”

“Never do anything which you know perfectly well is going to be the means of temptation to you. If you know that certain things, which may not be bad in and of themselves, generally get you down and you are a worse person afterwards than you were before, do not do them; never, as it were, provide yourself with the occasion to sin.”

“The cross of Christ justifies God; He remains holy because He has punished sin in the death, the shed blood, of His Son.”

“Alas! How the Church is allowing the world and its methods to influence and control her outlook and life.”

“There is a joy possible in this life, he [the apostle John] says. Your joy can be full in this world, and it is a joy that is based upon fellowship with God.”

“The more I read the Bible and see the picture of the Christian man, the more I understand the nature of sin and life in this world, and what God has done for me in Christ, then the more I shall desire the things of God and hate the other. So I suggest that the best practical step is to read God's word, and to be thoroughly soaked in it.”

“Thank God that it is not a matter of intellect, because if the recognition of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ were a matter of intellect and ability, then the way of salvation would not be a fair one. People with brains would have a great advantage over everybody else, and those who were ignorant and had not much intellectual power, would not be able to understand and grasp the truth. Consequently, they would not be saved and it would be a salvation for certain special intellectual people only. But thank God it is not that at all! In this matter of the recognition of the Lord Jesus Christ we are all exactly on a level, we are all in the same position. The greatest brain is never big enough to understand and to grasp it, but the Holy Spirit can enable the most ignorant unintelligent to understand.”

“The most wonderful thing of all about the cross is that it reveals the love of God to us. It is not surprising that Paul should say to the Romans, "God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." How do we see the love of God in the cross? Ah, says the modern man, I see it in this way, that though man rejected and murdered the Son of God, God in His love still says, "All right, I still forgive you. Though you have done that to My Son, I still forgive you." Yes, that is part of it, but it is the smallest part of it. That is not the real love of God. God was not a passive spectator of the death of His Son. That is how the moderns put it - that God in heaven looked down upon it all, saw men killing His own Son, and said, "All right, I will still forgive you." But it was not we who brought God's Son to the cross. It was God. It was the predeterminate counsel and foreknowledge of God. If you really want to know what the love of God means, read what Paul wrote to the Romans: "For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh." God condemned sin in the flesh of His own Son. This is the love of God. Read again Isaiah 53, that wonderful prophecy of what happened on Calvary's hill. You notice how he goes on repeating it: "Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows... it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief." These are the terms. And they are nothing but a plain, factual description of what happened on the cross.”

“All this teaching that repentance does not matter, and that it does not matter whether you have a sense of sin, and whether you realize your need of forgiveness, and that all you have to do is to 'Come to Jesus as you are' is utterly unscriptural. Indeed it is illogical.”

“Preaching has very largely become a profession. Instead of real Christian sermons we are given secondhand expositions of psychology. The preachers say they that give the congregations what they ask for! What a terrible condemnation both of the preachers themselves & their congregations!”

“The meek man… does not assert himself. He does not demand anything for himself. He does not take all his rights as claims. He does not make demands for his position, his privileges, his possessions, his status in life. He leaves everything— M. Lloyd Jones Quote Read: 1/26/18”

“The gospel commends itself to me because of its truth, because it does not just say, "Well now, let's forget our troubles and think of something beautiful." It says, "In the world you shall have tribulation..." (John 16:33). It says that in a world like this, dominated by Satan, there will be "wars and rumors of wars" (Matthew 24:6). It is psychology and not the gospel that just tries to ask us forget our troubles for the time being. The gospel of Jesus Christ always, therefore, of necessity annoys certain people, people who think that a place of worship is just a place where you listen to beautiful things, and therefore while you are sitting there, you forget your problems and the problems of the world. These people are certain to be annoyed. The gospel confronts us with the facts. It is all based upon a person; it is based upon certain things that happened historically. It comes and tells me, "Let not your heart be troubled." But it comes in the light of Gethsemane and Jesus' trial and cruel death upon the cross, the broken body, the burial, the utter hopelessness, and despair. Then, and only then, it goes on to tell me of the Resurrection and the glory of the Ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit that puts me in an entirely different position. It has taken me through the facts, through the tunnel of darkness to the dawn that lights the other end.”

“Any true definition of preaching must say that that man is there to deliver the message of God, a message from God to those people. If you prefer the language of Paul, he is 'an ambassador for Christ'. That is what he is. He has been sent, he is a commissioned person, and he is standing there as the mouthpiece of God and of Christ to address these people. In other words he is not there merely to talk to them, he is not there to entertain them. He is there - and I want to emphasize this - to do something to those people; he is there to produce results of various kinds, he is there to influence people. He is not merely to influence a part of them; he is not only to influence their minds, not only their emotions, or merely to bring pressure to bear upon their wills and to induce them to some kind of activity. He is there to deal with the whole person; and his preaching is meant to affect the whole person at the very centre of life. Preaching should make such a difference to a man who is listening that he is never the same again. Preaching, in other words, is a transaction between the preacher and the listener. It does something for the soul of man, for the whole of the person, the entire man; it deals with him in a vital and radical manner I remember a remark made to me a few years back about some studies of mine on “The Sermon on the Mount.” I had deliberately published them in sermonic form. There were many who advised me not to do that on the grounds that people no longer like sermons. The days for sermons, I was told, were past, and I was pressed to turn my sermons into essays and to give them a different form. I was most interested therefore when this man to whom I was talking, and he is a very well-known Christian layman in Britain, said, "I like these studies of yours on “The Sermon on the Mount” because they speak to me.” Then he went on to say, “I have been recommended many books by learned preachers and professors but,” he said, “what I feel about those books is that it always seems to be professors writing to professors; they do not speak to me. But,” he said, “your stuff speaks to me.” Now he was an able man, and a man in a prominent position, but that is how he put it. I think there is a great deal of truth in this. He felt that so much that he had been recommended to read was very learned and very clever and scholarly, but as he put it, it was “professors writing to professors.” This is, I believe, is a most important point for us to bear in mind when we read sermons. I have referred already to the danger of giving the literary style too much prominence. I remember reading an article in a literary journal some five or six years ago which I thought was most illuminating because the writer was making the selfsame point in his own field. His case was that the trouble today is that far too often instead of getting true literature we tend to get “reviewers writing books for reviewers.” These men review one another's books, with the result that when they write, what they have in their mind too often is the reviewer and not the reading public to whom the book should be addressed, at any rate in the first instance. The same thing tends to happen in connection with preaching. This ruins preaching, which should always be a transaction between preacher and listener with something vital and living taking place. It is not the mere imparting of knowledge, there is something much bigger involved. The total person is engaged on both sides; and if we fail to realize this our preaching will be a failure.”

“Our knowledge has been a knowledge of things, mechanical things, scientific things, a knowledge of life in a more or less purely biological or mechanical sense. But our knowledge of the real factors that make life life, have not increased at all.”

“The trouble with man is not in his intellect, it is in his nature--the passions and the lusts...and though you try to educate and control man it will avail nothing as long as his nature is sinful and fallen and he is a creature of passion and dishonor.”

“The primary task of the Church is to evangelize and preach the gospel...If the Church is always denouncing one particular section of society, she is shutting the evangelistic door upon that section.”

“There is nothing in God's universe that is so utterly useless as a merely formal Christian. I mean by that, one who has the name but not the quality of a Christian...He has enough 'Christianity' to spoil everything else, but not enough to give him real happiness, peace and joy and abundance of life...They do not function as worldlings or Christians. They are nothing, neither salt nor light, neither one thing nor the other.”

“Always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this – always obey such an impulse. Where does it come from? It is the work of the Holy Spirit (Phil 2:12-13). This often leads to some of the most remarkable experiences in the life of the minister. So never resist, never postpone it, never push it aside because you are busy. Give yourself to it, yield to it; and you will find not only that you have not been wasting time with respect to the matter with which you are dealing but that actually it has helped you greatly in that respect. You will experience an ease and a facility in understanding what you were reading, in thinking, in ordering matter for a sermon, in writing, in everything which is quite astonishing. Such a call to prayer must never be regarded as a distraction; always respond to it immediately, and thank God if it happens to you frequently." (Preaching & Preachers, 170-171)”

“Faith is a willingness to submit oneself to the biblical limits.”

“If you have never been ashamed to openly proclaim the gospel, it is not because you are so courageous, it is because you probably don’t understand the gospel.”