Quotes from Alexander MacLaren

Conflict, not progress, is the word that defines man's path from darkness into light. No holiness is won by any other means than this, that wickedness should be slain day by day, and hour by hour.

You cannot put patience and experience into a parenthesis, and, omitting them, bring hope out of tribulation.

Peace comes not from the absence of trouble, but from the presence of God.

True peace comes not from the absence of trouble, but from the presence of God and will be deep and passing all understanding in the exact measure in which we live in and partake of the love of God.

Being in Christ, it is safe to forget the past; it is possible to be sure of the future; it is possible to be diligent in the present.

The world takes its notions of God from the people who say that they belong to God's family. They read us a great deal more than they read the Bible. They see us; they only hear about Jesus Christ.

If God sends us on stony paths, He will provide us with strong shoes.

You must cast yourself on God's gospel with all your weight, without any hanging back, without any doubt, without even the shadow of a suspicion that it will give.

The root of all steadfastness is in consecration to God.

If our faith in God is not the veriest sham, it demands, and will produce, the abandonment sometimes, the subordination always, of external helps and material good.

Be sure that your soul is never so intensely alive as when in the deepest abnegation it waits hushed before God .

God keeps giving Himself as long as we bring that into which He can pour Himself. And when we stop bringing, He stops giving.

God gives us power to bear all the sorrows of His making; but He does not give us power to bear the sorrows of our own making, which the anticipation of sorrow most assuredly is.

Embrace in one act the two truths-thine own sin, and God's infinite mercy in Jesus Christ.

The vision of the Divine presence ever takes the form which our circumstances most require.

We believe that the history of the world is but the history of His influence and that the center of the whole universe is the cross of Calvary.

All that this world knows of living lies in giving -- and more giving; He that keeps, be sure he loses -Friendship grows by what it uses.

Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side.

Every life has dark tracts and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas.

Man's course begins in a garden, but it ends in a city.

Only he who can say, The Lord is my strength, can say, Of whom shall I be afraid?

We believe that the history of the world is but the history of His influence and that the center of the whole universe is the cross of Calvary.

The Gospel is not a mere message of deliverance, but a canon of conduct; it is not a theology to be accepted, but it is ethics to be lived. It is not to be believed only, but it is to be taken into life as a guide.

Love is the only fire that is hot enough to melt the iron obstinacy of a creatures will.