Humility ... is less an act than a disposition of mind. It is not so much a single performance of some detached humble deed, as an incessant watchfulness against every propensity to pride.
~ Hannah More
The Calvinist is counter-cultural in the modern world. There is much to discuss. There is much to ignore. When matters relate to music, the arts and worship, they come very close to home for composer Abigail J. Fox. These are her occasional essays, not to court controversy but to take a stand.
Humility ... is less an act than a disposition of mind. It is not so much a single performance of some detached humble deed, as an incessant watchfulness against every propensity to pride.
~ Hannah More
Those that have so much power over others as to be able to oppress them have seldom so much power over themselves as not to oppress.
~ Matthew Henry
Look to no motive to do good to men below the glory of God. And remember, thy doing it may be the means of His visiting them, as He visited thee, with His great salvation. O blessed fruit of brotherly love! may it be the happy effect of thy light shining before men.
~ William Romaine
An age which values itself on parody, burlesque, irony, and caricature, produces little that is sublime, either in genius or in virtue; but they amuse and we live in an age which must be amused, though genius, feeling, truth, and principle be the sacrifice.
~ Hannah More
God looks down with an eye of favour upon those who sincerely look up to him with an eye of faith.
~ Matthew Henry
When the Spirit would glorify Jesus, he humbles you. When he would glorify his fulness, he makes you feel your emptiness. When he would bring you to rely on his strength, he convinces you of your weakness. When he would magnify the comforts of Jesus, he makes you sensible of your misery. When he would fix your heart on his heaven, he makes you feel your deserved hell. When he would exalt his righteousness, you find you are a poor miserable sinner.
~ William Romaine
Men and women are fearfully and wonderfully made. We are not made up merely of brains, and head, and intellect and reason. We are frail, dying creatures, who have got hearts, and feelings, and consciences; and we live in a world of sorrow, and disappointment, and sickness, and death. And what can help us in a world like this? ... None but He who said, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11.28). None but He who has thrown light on the grave, and the world beyond it, and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel ...
~ J. C. Ryle
One error into which even some good people are apt to fall, is that endeavouring to deceive young minds by temporising expedients. In order to allure them to be become religious, they exhibit false, or fait, or inadequate views of Christianity; and while they represent it as it really is, as a life of superior happiness and advantage, they conceal its difficulties, and like the Jesuitical Chinese missionaries, extenuate, or sink, or deny, such parts of it as are least alluring to human pride. In attempting to disguise its principles, they destroy its efficacy. They deny the cross instead of making it the badge of a Christian.
~ Hannah More
Nature is content with a little and that which is most natural, grace with less, but lust with nothing.
~ Matthew Henry
I would walk close with Him in His way, not to buy His love, it is inestimable; not to merit it, free grace and merit cannot stand together; not that I may deserve it for my walk, but may freely receive it of Him in my walk; not that He may give it me for walking with Him, but that in walking with Him, I may enjoy what He has already given me. His love is a free gift. I would be faith enjoy it in time, as I hope by sense to enjoy it in eternity.
~ William Romaine
Is adverse Providence, when ponder’d well,
So dimly writ or difficult to spell,
Thou canst not read with readiness and ease
Providence adverse in events like these?
Know then, that heavenly wisdom on this ball
Creates, gives birth to, guides consummates all;
That, while laborious and quick-thoughted man
Snuffs up the praise of what he seems to plan,
He first conceives, then perfects his design,
As a mere instrument in hands divine:
Blind to the working of that secret power
That balances the wings of every hour,
The busy trifler dreams himself alone,
Frames many a purpose, and God works his own.
States thrive or wither as moons wax and wane,
Even as His will and His decrees ordain;
While honour, virtue, piety, bear sway,
They flourish; and, as these decline, decay.
In just resentment of His injured laws,
He pours contempt on them and on their cause;
Strikes the rough thread of error right athwart
The web of every scheme they have at heart;
Bids rottenness invade and bring to dust
The pillars of supprt in which they trust,
And do His errand of disgrace and shame
On the chief strength and glory of the frame.
None ever yet impeded what He wrought,
None bars Him out from his most secret-thought;
Darkness itself before His eye is light,
And Hell’s close mischief naked in His sight.
~ William Cowper in "Expostulation"
You may as well think to blend the darkest shades of midnight with the blaze of the noon-day sun, without dissipating the gloom of the one or softening radiance of the other, as to attempt a compromise between systems of religion, one of which admits and the other rejects the great doctrine of redemption by the atoning blood and life-giving Spirit of Christ.
~ William B. Sprague
Above all things then you should beware that your pupils do not take up with a vague, general, and undefined religion, but look to it that their Christianity be really the religion of Christ. Instead of slurring over the doctrines of the Cross, as disreputable appendages to our religion, which are to be disguised or got over as well as we can, but which are never to be dwelt upon, taken care to make these your grand fundamental articles. Do not dilute or explain away these doctrines, and by some elegant periphrasis hint at a Saviour, instead of making him the foundation-stone of your system. Do not convey primary, and plain, and awful, and indispensable truths elliptically, I mean as something that is to be understood without being expressed; nor study fashionable circumlocutions to avoid names and things on which our salvation hangs in order to prevent your discourse from being offensive.
~ Hannah More
The life of faith is called the fight of faith (1 Tim. 6.12); and truly called so. For, where divine faith is given, it is seldom exercised without a conflict in the heart, which loves an earthly refuge, and dreads a ‘naked’ promise; dearly loves a human prop and always seeks some wooden buttress to support God’s iron pillar. On this account, men dare not trust to Christ’s atonement alone for their peace, but clap their feeble shoulder to his cross, to strengthen it ...
~ John Berridge
It is the proper work of the grace of Jesus, to humble the proud sinner, to make him and to keep him sensible of his wants, convinced always that he has not any good of his own, and cannot possibly of himself obtain any, either in earth or heaven, but what he must be receiving every moment out of the fullness of Jesus. The devil fell by pride, and he drew man into the same crime. He promised him independence, and he still persuades deceived man to set up for himself. That’s the scheme of all unawakened men - they are resolved to be happy in spite of God. The Spirit of Jesus is sent to humble this proud sinner, which he does, by giving him a view of God’s holy nature, and God’s holy law. This makes sin, and consequently the sinner, hateful; discovers his guilt and his danger: if he attempts to do anything to make God love him, the Holy Spirit humbles him for that very thing, by showing him the sinfulness of his motive, and the imperfection of the action. Whatever he seeks to rest in, the Spirit of Jesus detects the false foundation, till he leaves him not resource but to believe in the only begotten Son of God.
~ William Romaine
He is unworthy the name of a Christian who is not as willing to hide himself when God commands, as to act in a public capacity.
~ George Whitefield
There is so little of the Author of Christianity left in his own religion, that an apprehensive believer is ready to exclaim, with the woman at the sepulchre, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.’ The locality of Hell and the existence of an Evil Spirit are annihilated, or considered as abstract ideas. When they are alluded to, it is periphrastically; or they are discontinued not on the ground of their being awful and terrible, but they are set aside as topics too vulgar for the polished, too liberal for the learned, and as savouring too much of credulity for the enlightened.
Read moreMan gropes about as though walking in darkness. His way is beset on all sides with problems that press in upon him and clamour for a solution. To these problems man can often turn but an uncomprehending glance, for he has no knowledge to apply to their solution. Professing to know and also to be wise, nevertheless he does not know, and hence his decisions and judgments are not those of wisdom and knowledge. With God, however, knowledge is to be found, as well as the ability to apply this knowledge. God is all-knowing and God is all-wise. To be able to address such a God is a blessing indeed.
~ E. J. Young, on Psalm 139 v.2
God consults our benefit rather than our desires. We would go out of the ark before the ground is dried: and perhaps, if the door be shut, are ready to remove the covering. God’s time of showing mercy is certainly the best time, when the mercy is ripe for us and we are ready for it.
~ Matthew Henry
... just because we are not doing God’s work for Him, but He is doing His own work through us; just because we do what work He appoints to us; not we but He is responsible for the harvest. All that is required of stewards is that they be found faithful ... Let us then labour on in whatever sphere God gives it to us to labour, content, happy, strenuous, untiring, determined only to do God’s work in God’s way; not seeking to intrude into work to which He has not appointed us, and not repining because He has given us this work and not that. Each one to his own labour, and God the rewarder of all!
~ B. B. Warfield