Vance Havner
Sometimes your medicine bottle has on it, "shake well before using." That is what God has to do with some of His people. He has to shake them well before they are ever usable.Collection: Adversity
We have always needed old people to keep things from going too fast and young people to keep them from going too slow. Youth has fire and age has light and we need both.Collection: Christian
If you are what you've always been, you are not a Christian. A Christian is a new creation.Collection: Christian
Too many Christians live their Christian lives inside their heads; it never gets out through hands and feet and lips.Collection: Christian
The temple of truth has never suffered so much from woodpeckers on the outside as from termites within.Collection: Woodpeckers
There is a trend today that would put a new robe on the prodigal son while he is still feeding hogs. Some would put the ring on his finger while he still in the pigsty. Others would paint the pigsty and advocate bigger and better hog pens.Collection: Son
Too many are willing to sit at God’s table, but not work in his field.Collection: Tables
The preacher who is concerned with gaining a reputation, rising in his profession, is always in bondage. The itch for bigness is a dangerous thing. It has made a castaway of many a man whom God once richly blessed. A man should desire to be neither larger nor smaller than pleases God. Better than that, he should not bother at all about how large or how small but rather how faithful he shall be.Collection: Blessed
He who waits on God loses no time.Collection: Waiting
No man can be a Christian by knowingly and willfully taking Christ on the installment plan, as Savior now, and Lord later.Collection: Christian
The gospel is for lifeboats, not showboats, and a man must make up his mind which boat he is going to operate.Collection: Christian
Salvation is a helmet, not a nightcap.Collection: Salvation
The last word of our Lord to the church was not the Great Commission. The last thing He said to the church was 'Repent.' He said that to five out of seven.Collection: Church
The primary qualification for a missionary is not love for souls, as we so often hear, but love for Christ.Collection: Soul
Our efficiency without God's sufficiency is only a deficiency.Collection: Christian
A wife who is 85 percent faithful to her husband is not faithful at all. There is no such thing as part-time loyalty to Jesus Christ.Collection: Loyalty
The thermometer of a church is its prayer meeting.Collection: Prayer
In other days people chose a church on the basis of their doctrinal convictions. Now, lacking doctrinal convictions, they choose for social reasons.Collection: Christian
There is no devil in the first two chapters of the Bible and no devil in the last two chapters. Thank God for a book that disposes of the devil!Collection: Book
There was a time when ministers spoke forthrightly and named things. We don't name anything anymore. Finney had a sermon on How to Preach so as to Convert Nobody. He said 'Preach on sin but never mention any of the sins of your congregation - that will do it.'Collection: Names
When I pastored a country church, a farmer didn't like the sermons I preached on hell. He said, Preach about the meek and lowly Jesus. I said, That's where I got my information about hell.Collection: Country
One man with a genuine experience with God is worth more than a library full of arguments.Collection: Men
There never has been a culture since this world began in which a New Testament Christian could feel at home.Collection: Christian
I have often been reminded of the wild duck that came down on migration into a barnyard and liked it so well that he stayed there. In the fall his erstwhile companions passed overhead and his first impulse was to rise and join them, but he had fed too well and could rise no higher than the eaves of the barn. The day came when his old fellow travelers could pass overhead without his even hearing their call. I have seen men and women who once mounted up with wings like eagles but are now content to live in the barnyard of this world.Collection: Christian
We are the salt of the earth, mind you, not the sugar. Our ministry is to truly cleanse and not just to change the taste.Collection: Mind
Faith doesn't wait until it understands; in that case it wouldn't be faith.Collection: Waiting
More Bibles are bought and fewer read than any other book.Collection: Christian
We have suffered from the preaching of cheap grace. Grace is free, but it is not cheap. People will take anything that is free, but they are not interested in discipleship. They will take Christ as Savior but not as Lord.Collection: People
Our Lord approved neither idol worship or idle worship but ideal worship in Spirit and truth.Collection: Idols
We may never be martyrs but we can die to self, to sin, to the world, to our plans and ambitions. That is the significance of baptism; we died with Christ and rose to new life.Collection: Ambition
A preacher who is too big for a little crowd would be too little for a big crowd.Collection: Would Be
I preach on specific sins because people are not convicted by sermons on sin in general. It was when our Lord said to the Samaritan woman, 'Go call thy husband...' (John 4:16), that she really faced up to her sinfulness.Collection: Husband
Because the Lord loves us He chastens and rebukes us. Modern sentimentality has reduced God to a tolerant indulgent grandfatherly being who winks at our transgressions.Collection: Christian
The alternative to discipline is disasterCollection: Christian
Satan does some of his worst work on exhausted Christians when nerves are frayed and the mind is faint.Collection: Christian
Plenty of church members are shaky about what they believe, while not many are shaken by what they believe.Collection: Believe
We justify ourselves when we should judge ourselves. If we learned humility, it might spare us the humiliation.Collection: Christian
Somehow the idea has gotten around that it is unchristian to take a stand against heresy. Some of us need to read the New Testament again.Collection: Ideas
A soft and sheltered Christianity, afraid to be lean and lone, unwilling to face the storms and brave the heights, will end up fat and foul in the cages of conformity.Collection: Brave
Some preachers ought to put more fire into their sermons or more sermons into the fire.Collection: Fire
A revival is the church falling in love with Jesus Christ all over again.Collection: Christian
Before we can strengthen believers or win the lost, we must be converted from the self-life to the Christ-life. . . "Not I, but Christ."Collection: Christian
The early Christians condemned false doctrine in a way that sounds almost unchristian today.Collection: Christian
The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself.Collection: Devil
Nobody in pulpit or pew needs a revival more than a bitter-spirited fundamentalist with his dispensations right and his disposition wrong.Collection: Needs
It is not that God is stingy and must be coaxed, for He "giveth liberally and upbraideth not." It is that we ourselves are so shallow and sinful that we need to tarry before Him until our restless natures can be stilled and the clamor of outside voices be deadened so that we can hear His voice. Such a state is not easily reached, and the men God uses have paid a price in wrestlings and prevailing prayer. But it is such men who rise from their knees confident of His power and go forth to speak with authority.Collection: Prayer
The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.Collection: People
The man who sets out to live the life worthwhile-to follow his vision and speak his heart-need not look for position, honors, prosperity.Collection: Christian
I would say to today's young minister, 'Be not afraid to give much time to solitary walks and meditation'.Collection: Giving