Julia Ward Howe Quotes

I didn't want to submit to the army and then, on the day of judgment, have God say to me, 'Why did you do that?' This life is a trial, and you realize that what you do is going to be written down for Judgment Day.

God's standard of judgment goes down to the intents of the heart.

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

Fear not: for God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not.

I don't really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart.

Divine Providence is connected with Divine intellectual influence, and the same beings which are benefited by the latter so as to become intellectual, and to comprehend things comprehensible to rational beings, are also under the control of Divine Providence, which examines all their deeds with a view of rewarding or punishing them. ...the method of which our mind is incapable of understanding.

Somebody has been a complete ratbag all their life and they've gotten away with it, and they die happy and rich, we so much want to believe that they're going off to the halls of judgment, that their heart will be weighed against the feather of truth, that it will be heavy with sin and it will be eaten by a crocodile. It's almost essential to our well-being to have a fallback position like that. It may appear as if you've gotten away with it, but you'll pay for it later.

Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.

The Christian church was designed to make sinners sweat. I have always believed that, and I still believe it. The messages preached in our churches should make backslidden Christians sweat. And if I achieve that objective when I preach, I thank God with all of my heart, no matter what people think of me.

I just think that only God will judge a person's heart.

No one will be offended if we tell them that they are good people who could be a little better. The offense comes when we tell them that they - and we - are ungodly people who cannot impress God or escape his tribunal. Until our preaching of the law has exposed our hearts and God's holiness at that profound level, our hearers will never flee to Christ alone for safety even if they come to us for advice.

O ye powers that search The heart of man, and weigh his inmost thoughts, If I have done amiss, impute it not! The best may err, but you are good.

The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success.

God does not care what good you did, but why you did it. He does not grade the fruit but probes the core and tests the root.

What is it that renders death terrible? Sin. We must therefore fear sin, not death.

God will have life to be real; we will be damned, but it shall be theatrical.

When preachers teach biblically and clearly about the judgment of God and the dangers of hell, men begin to see that their greatest need is to be saved from eternal condemnation, and the more "practical" needs of this present age become trivial in comparison.

But in that backroom or whatever it is when God confronts me with my sins, I do not believe any of the kills I had during the war will be among them. Everyone I shot was evil. I had good cause on every shot. They all deserved to die.

The law is not known, since there is nothing in it to know. We come across it only through its action, and it acts only through its sentence and its execution. It is not distinguishable from the application. We know it only through its imprint on our heart and our flesh: we are guilty, necessarily guilty. Guilt is like the moral thread which duplicates the thread of time.

God holds his people responsible for righteousness, not for results.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to 'know of the doctrine'.

The works of the righteous would be mortal sins if they would not be feared as mortal sins by the righteous themselves out of pious fear of God.

I do think that the badmouthing and alienating of a child from a parent is one of the few unforgivable sins. I do think those people will have to answer to God who will say, “You allowed your anger to destroy the relationship of your child to the other parent? Isn't that why I gave you a conscience?