I have ever found that when I have thought the battle was over and the conquest gained, and so let down my watch, the enemy has risen up and done me the greatest injury.
I never got away from Jesus, and Him crucified, and I found that when my people were gripped by this great evangelical doctrine of Christ and Him crucified, I had no need to give them instructions about morality. I found that one followed as the sure and inevitable fruit of the other… I find my Indians begin to put on the garments of holiness and their common life begins to be sanctified even in small matters when they are possessed by the doctrine of Christ and Him crucified.
The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best.
In the silences I make in the midst of the turmoil of life I have appointments with God. From these silences I come forth with spirit refreshed, and with a renewed sense of power. I hear a voice in the silences, and become increasingly aware that it is the voice of God.
Give yourself to prayer, to reading and meditation on divine truths: strive to penetrate to the bottom of them and never be content with a superficial knowledge.
Mr. Brainerd’s Remains, consisting of Letters and Other Papers, Letters to His Friends, Letter IX.
As long as I see anything to be done for God, life is worth having; but O how vain and unworthy it is to live for any lower end.
I was a little better than speechless all day. O my God, I am speedily coming to Thee! Hasten the day, O Lord, if it be Thy blessed will. Oh, come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.
Oh, how precious is time, and how it pains me to see it slide away, while I do so little to any good purpose.
God was so precious to my soul that the world with all its enjoyments appeared vile. I had no more value for the favor of men than for pebbles.
I care not where I go, or how I live, or what I endure so that I may save souls. When I sleep I dream of them; when I awake they are first in my thoughts…no amount of scholastic attainment, of able and profound exposition of brilliant and stirring eloquence can atone for the absence of a deep impassioned sympathetic love for human souls.
Of late God has been pleased to keep my soul hungry almost continually, so that I have been filled with a kind of pleasing pain. When I really enjoy God, I feel my desires of Him the more insatiable and my thirstings after holiness more unquenchable.