Charles Simeon Quotes

God also allows suffering so that we might learn what it means to depend on Him, not on our own strength and resources.

Christian growth doesn't happen by first behaving better, but by believing better--believi ng in bigger, deeper, brighter ways what Christ has already secured for sinners.

It should console us for the fact that sin has not totally disappeared from the world, that the saints are not wholly deprived of employment.

I am not in the least surprised that your impression of death becomes more lively, in proportion as age and infirmity bring it nearer. God makes use of this rough trial to undeceive us in respect to our courage, to make us feel our weakness, and to keep us in all humility in His hands.

The duties of religion, sincerely and regularly performed, will always be sufficient to exalt the meanest and to exercise the highest understanding.

No one can sense his own weakness is at least a small temptation is not allowed to afflict either his body or his soul. Then, comparing his weakness to the help of God, a man comes to know its magnitude. But whoever does not know that he needs God's help, let him make many prayers. Insofar as he multiplies them, in that measure will he be humbled.

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and they that lack the beginning have neither middle nor end

Faith, and hope, and patience and all the strong, beautiful, vital forces of piety are withered and dead in a prayerless life. The life of the individual believer, his personal salvation, and personal Christian graces have their being, bloom, and fruitage in prayer.

The Holy Spirit never convicts (Christians) of your sins. He never comes to point out your faults…. It does not take a revelation from the Holy Spirit to see that you have failed. However, when you know that you’ve failed what you do need is for the Holy Spirit to convict you of your righteousness.

With age, I have become both more pious and more shameless.

Is my growing old making me any closer to Christ? Am I only getting older or am I getting more godly?

The discipline of the Old Testament may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the New Testament, as a discipline teaching us to die to it.

A true Christian will be sensitive to the sin in their life and it will lead them to brokenness and genuine confession, but the person who says they are a Christian and are not sensitive to sin, it does not lead them to confession, a person who is that way is not a Christian.

True Christian is not an angel; he is not a halfangelic being, in whom is no weakness, or blemish, or infirmity: he is nothing of the kind. He is nothing more than a sinner who has found out his sinfulness, and has learned the blessed secret of living by faith in Christ.

He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray

Blessed is that Christian who can accept at the start by simple faith that which others reach only through years of questioning and reach it only then because they give up trying to analyze it and decide to accept it.

Piety is the fermentation of the forming mind and the putrefaction of the disintegrating one.

Our weaknesses are not as negative as we may believe. They make us rely upon God's grace and power for greater Christlikeness and ministry.

One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.

As we grow in holiness, we grow in hatred of sin; and God, being infinitely holy, has an infinite hatred of sin.

Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this.

I would say that God custom designed my weaknesses. I am not making God responsible for my sins.

The great enemy of the life of faith in God is not sin, but the good which is not good enough. The good is always the enemy of the best.

Now if you will stop here and ask yourself why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.

God is more concerned with conforming me to the likeness of His Son than leaving me in my comfort zones. God is more interested in inward qualities than outward circumstances - things like refining my faith, humbling my heart, cleaning up my thought life and strengthening my character.