Theme: Repentance
Before you can speak peace to your heart, you must be brought to see that God may damn you for the best prayer you ever put up.
Confess and forsake your sins. God will never lead you as one of his hidden ones, and let you into his secrets, unless you confess and forsake your sins. Not be always confessing and never forsake, but confess and forsake too.
Be not content, O sinner, in this estate!
Assuredly the contemplation of the death of Christ is one of the surest and speediest methods of gaining repentance. Do not sit down and try to pump up repentance from the dry well of corrupt nature.
A man had better be at the trouble of setting a bone, than to be lame, and in pain all his life.
Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee!
It is a life and walk of faith we have entered upon, and if we fail in it our only recovery must lie in an increase of faith, not in a lessening of it.
For love of Thy love I do it; reviewing my most wicked ways in the very bitterness of my remembrance, that Thou mayest grow sweet unto me.
You must not only recall them to mind, but you must actually renounce them, and leave them off.
Faith and repentance, like Siamese twins, are vitally joined together. In proportion as we believe in the forgiving love of Christ, in that proportion we repent; and in proportion as we repent of sin and hate evil, we rejoice in the fullness of the absolution which Jesus is exalted to bestow.
You must be divorced from your sin, or you cannot be married to Christ.
Repentance is an act of the will—in its beginning there may be no sense of gladness or reconciliation with God.
Therefore Yahweh says, ‘If you return, then I will bring you again, that you may stand before me; and if you take out the precious from the vile, you will be as my mouth. They will return to you, but you will not return to them.’
Therefore thus saith the LORD, If thou return, then will I bring thee again, and thou shalt stand before me: and if thou take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as my mouth: let them return unto thee; but return not thou unto them.
It is when a man is brought to this confession that deliverance is at hand.
Spread all your wickedness before him, and do not plead your goodness; but plead your badness, and your necessity.
How the earthly father would love a child who would creep into his room with angry, troubled face, and sit down at his feet, saying when asked what he wanted: ‘I feel so naughty, papa, and I want to get good’!
And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made.
Repentance and forgiveness are riveted together by the eternal purpose of God.
We are guilty for our past lives. We may be sorry for the past. But it is not enough that we are sorry.
Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart, which Thou hadst pity upon in the bottom of the bottomless pit.
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