Martyn Quotes

The Christian faith is ultimately not only a matter of doctrine or understanding or of intellect, it is a condition of the heart.

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.

Faith is the refusal to panic.

The nearer a man gets to God, the greater he sees his sin.

Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?

If you look at your past and are depressed it means that you are listening to the devil.

The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.

The glory of the gospel is that when the church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it.

There is nothing more foolish or self-defeating than for a Christian to say that he is not interested in doctrines.

The ultimate test of our spirituality is the measure of our amazement at the grace of God.

Conviction is not repentance; conviction leads to repentance. But you can be convicted without repentance.

The Christian is a man who can be certain about the ultimate even when he is most uncertain about the immediate.

Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God.

The gospel is not something partial or piecemeal: it takes in the whole life, the whole of history, the whole world. It tells us about creation and the final judgment and everything in between.

The gospel is meant to control and govern everything in our lives.

Prayer is beyond any question the highest activity of the human soul. Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God.

Spiritual depression or unhappiness in the Christian life is very often due to our failure to realize the greatness of the gospel.

I am immortal until God's work for me to do is done. The Lord reigns.

You can have knowledge, and you can be meticulous in your preparation; but without the unction of the Holy Spirit you will have no power, and your preaching will not be effective.

We should go into His presence as a child goes to his father. We do it with reverence and godly fear, of course, but we should go with a childlike confidence and simplicity.

I have rightfully no other business each day but to do God's work as a servant, constantly regarding His pleasure. May I have grace to live above every human motive, simply with God and to God.

The eternal everlasting God has become our Father and the moment we realize that, it transforms everything.

The devil's one object is so to depress God's people that he can go to the man of the world and say: There are God's people. Do you want to be like that?

You are either a Christian or you are not a Christian; you cannot be partly a Christian. You are either "dead" or "alive"; you are either "born" or "not born".

If [God] has work for me to do, I cannot die.

Let me burn out for God. After all, whatever God may appoint, prayer is the great thing. Oh, that I might be a man of prayer!

The power of gentleness is irresistible.

If we only spent more of our time in looking at Him we should soon forget ourselves.

The devil is so subtle that he dominates man and persuades him at the same time that he is not being dominated.

To love to preach is one thing; to love to whom you preach is quite another.

All teaching and all truth and all doctrine must be tested in the light of the scriptures.

What is the chief end of preaching? I like to think it is this: It is to give men and women a sense of God and His presence.

Grace is favor shown to people who do not deserve any favor at all.

We must cease to think of the church as a gathering of institutions and organizations, and we must get back to the notion that we are the people of God.

The Gospel is open to all; the most respectable sinner has no more claim on it than the worst.

There is a very real danger of our putting our faith in our sermon rather than in the Spirit. Our faith should not be in the sermon, it should be in the Holy Spirit Himself.

If you doubt your sins have been forgiven, that in itself is sin.

People who think that once they are converted all will be happy, have forgotten Satan.

Prayer, in many ways, is the supreme expression of our faith in God.

There is no happiness finally, there is no peace, there is no joy except we be right with God. The miserable Christian is wrong in his ideas as to how this rightness with God is to be obtained.

Though we claim to believe the whole of Scripture, in practice we frequently deny much of it by ignoring it.

The worst thing that can happen to a man is to succeed before he is ready.

There is nothing which so certifies the genuineness of a man's faith as his patience and his patient endurance, his keeping on steadily in spite of everything.

Even if I should never see a native converted, God may design by my patience and continuance in the Word to encourage future missionaries.

There are powers that can counterfeit almost everything in the Christian life.

I see no business in life but the work of Christ.

Holiness is not something we are called upon to do in order that we may become something; it is something we are to do because of what we already are.

When a man truly sees himself, he knows nobody can say anything about him that is too bad.

The man who pauses in his honesty wants little of a villain.

A revival means days of heaven upon earth.