Vance Havner Quotes
Satan does some of his worst work on exhausted Christians when nerves are frayed and the mind is faint.
Where are the marks of the cross in your life? Are there any points of identification with your Lord? Alas, too many Christians wear medals but carry no scars.
What we love usually manages to get into our conversation. What is down in the well of the heart will come up in the bucket of the speech.
If the devil cannot keep you from being saved, if next he fails to make you backslide, then he undertakes to keep you just an average Christian. Here he succeeds with most believers.
Nobody in pulpit or pew needs a revival more than a bitter-spirited fundamentalist with his dispensations right and his disposition wrong.
God judges what we tolerate as well as what we practice. Too often we put up with things we ought to put out.
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!
We are challenged these days, but not changed; convicted, but not converted. We hear, but do not; and thereby we deceive ourselves.
The only way to meet the modern demon-stration of the powers of darkness is by a demonstration of the power of God.
The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself.
God is on the lookout today for a man who will be quiet enough to get a message from Him, brave enough to preach it, and honest enough to live it.
Too many Christians live their Christian lives inside their heads; it never gets out through hands and feet and lips.
Jesus Christ demands more complete allegiance than any dictator who ever lived. The difference is, He has a right to it.
A picture of Christ was hung in the back of a pulpit. When the minister rose to speak one Sunday morning, a little boy asked his mother, 'Mother, who is that man who stands so we can't see Jesus?'
In other days people chose a church on the basis of their doctrinal convictions. Now, lacking doctrinal convictions, they choose for social reasons.
Christmas is based on an exchange of gifts, the gift of God to man - His unspeakable gift of His Son, and the gift of man to God - when we present our bodies a living sacrifice.
The temple of truth has never suffered so much from woodpeckers on the outside as from termites within.
Our Lord sent His disciples out as sheep among wolves; now the wolves are being invited into the sheepfold.
We are suffering from a believism that never has believed, and a receivism that never has received, and it leads to deceivism.
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.
God has a place and purpose for you, somewhere for you to be and something for you to do. You never will be happy elsewhere, nor can you please God anywhere but there.
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.
The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.
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.
Nothing is needed so much as a holy indignation against sin. It is true that there is not enough love for God, and one sign of it is that there is not enough hatred for sin.
Some missionaries bound for Africa were laughed at by the boat captain. 'You'll only die over there,' he said. But a missionary replied, 'Captain, we died before we started.'
We justify ourselves when we should judge ourselves. If we learned humility, it might spare us the humiliation.
Our Lord holds the keys to the doors of Christian service. You don't have to chase 'key men' around if you know the Keeper of the keys!
Most people would not want to live where there are no churches but many people live as though there were no churches.
God knows His own. It is well that He does, for sometimes it would be difficult for us to determine who are His!
I suspect that much of our praying to be used is selfish, and underneath it is the sneaking desire to make our mark and be recognized.
If you are what you've always been, you are not a Christian. A Christian is a new creation.
The same church members who yell like Comanche Indians at a ball game on Saturday sit like wooden Indians in church on Sunday.
Civilization today reminds me of an ape with a blowtorch playing in a room full of dynamite. It looks like the monkeys are about to operate the zoo, and the inmates are taking over the asylum.
The early Christians condemned false doctrine in a way that sounds almost unchristian today.
I'm convinced that a large percentage of people that we call worldly Christians are perhaps not Christian to begin with and that may be the trouble.
To build character of purpose and integrity is our high mark, and that cannot be done in a world where there are no adverse elements.
You have not really learned a commandment until you have obeyed it. The Church suffers today from Christians who know volumes more than they practice.