Vance Havner Quotes

Silence, you know, is the best place to get close to spirit for me.

Multi-tasking is keeping me from whole-hearted worship.

The Christian life has been nothing more and nothing less than a daily dependence on and a rediscovery of God's grace.

A church in the land without the Spirit is rather a curse than a blessing. If you have not the Spirit of God, Christian worker, remember that you stand in somebody else's way; you are a fruitless tree standing where a fruitful tree might grow.

Follow Christ in the denial of all the wills of self, and then all is put away that separates you from God; the heaven born new creature will come to life in you, which alone knows and enjoys the things of God, and has his daily food of gladness in that manifold blessed, and blessed, which Christ preached on the mount.

The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.

In church I feel very close to the publican of the parable.

It's strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on. If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self.

Sannyas is only a declaration. The work is meditation. In one single word, my religion is complete, and that is meditation.

In order to see Jesus, we first need to let him look at us!

Meet the world with the fullness of your being, and you shall meet God. Of you wish to believe, love.

They that know God will be humble. They that know themselves cannot be proud.

I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

If you can come to this nowness without sex, sex, by and by will become useless, it will disappear. It will not be a desire then. If you want to move in it you can move into it as a fun, but not as a desire. Then there is no obsession in it because you are not dependent on it.

For Christians, as for all people of faith, reflection, meditation and prayer help us to renew ourselves in God's love, as we strive daily to become better people. The Christmas message shows us that this love is for everyone. There is no one beyond its reach.

Salvation is not a religion. It's not rules or regulations or rituals. Salvation is a relationship. That relationship doesn't begin when you get to Heaven; it begins here on Earth.

There is a tradition that the church represents, without which we wouldn't have the church, that's all about diving deep beneath the surface of the culture and finding those timeless, eternal truths that the whole Christian enterprise is rooted in. And one of those is that you don't come to God at 180 miles an hour.

Christians aren't people who never sin or always do the right thing. We're people who live in continual repentance.

Be aware, and wine becomes water. Be aware - sex becomes love. Be aware - love becomes prayer. Be aware - prayer becomes meditation. Simply one thing has to be remembered: do whatsoever you like, but do it with full consciousness, and then you will not go astray.

The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there.

Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.

Strength comes from solitude, a waiting, a communion with the best in us, which is at one with the divine spark.

If you seek answers you won't find them, but if you seek God, the answers will find you.

I have never met the man I could despair of after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God.

Wherever you are, be all there! Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God.