Frederick William Robertson Quotes
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There is an inward state of the heart which makes truth credible the moment it is stated. It is credible to some men because of what they are. Love is credible to a loving heart; purity is credible to a pure mind; life is credible to a spirit in which life beats strongly - it is incredible to other men.
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Child of God, if you would have your thought of God something beyond a cold feeling of His presence, let faith appropriate Christ.
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There is rest in this world nowhere except in Christ, the manifested love of God. Trust in excellence, and the better you become, the keener is the feeling of deficiency. Wrap up all in doubt, and there is a stern voice that will thunder at last out of the wilderness upon your dream.
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My Saviour! fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my clumsy hand has drawn of a Divine life, with the fullness of Thy perfect picture. I feel the beauty I cannot realize; robe me in Thine unutterable purity.
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He who seeks truth must be content with a lonely, little-trodden path. If he cannot worship her till she has been canonized by the shouts of the multitude, he must take his place with the members of that wretched crowd who shouted for two long hours, 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians!' till truth, reason, and calmness were all drowned in noise.
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Life passes; work is permanent. It is all going - fleeting and withering. Youth goes. Mind decays. That which is done remains. Through ages, through eternity, what you have done for God, that, and only that, you are. Deeds never die.
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A consistent Christian may not have rapture; he has that which is much better than rapture - calmness - God's serene and perpetual presence.
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The Christian life is not knowing or hearing, but doing.
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Christ's miracles were vivid manifestations to the senses that He is the Saviour of the body - and now as then the issues of life and death are in His hands - that our daily existence is a perpetual miracle. The extraordinary was simply a manifestation of God's power in the ordinary.
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Life, like war, is a series of mistakes; and he is not the best Christian nor the best general who makes the fewest false steps. Poor mediocrity may secure that; but he is the best who wins the most splendid victories by the retrieval of mistakes. Forget mistakes; organize victory out of mistakes.
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Every unfulfilled aspiration of humanity in the past; all partial representation of perfect character; all sacrifices, nay, even those of idolatry, point to the fulfillment of what we want, the answer to every longing - the type of perfect humanity, the Lord Jesus Christ.
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Mourning after an absent God is an evidence of a love as strong, as rejoicing in a present one.
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Brethren, are you in earnest? If so, though your faith be weak, and your struggles unsatisfactory, you may begin the hymn of triumph now, for victory is pledged. Thanks be to God, which ' - not shall give, but 'giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.'
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You cannot undo your acts. If you have depraved another's will, and injured another's soul, it may be in the grace of God that hereafter you will be personally accepted, and the consequence of your guilt inwardly done away; but your penitence cannot undo the evil you have done. The forgiveness of God - the blood of Christ itself - does not undo the past.
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By experience; by a sense of human frailty; by a perception of 'the soul of goodness in things evil;' by a cheerful trust in human nature; by a strong sense of God's love; by long and disciplined realization of the atoning love of Christ; only thus can we get a free, manly, large, princely spirit of forgiveness.
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This is the true liberty of Christ, when a free man binds himself in love to duty. Not in shrinking from our distasteful occupations, but in fulfilling them, do we realize our high origin.
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You reap what you sow - not something else, but that. An act of love makes the soul more loving. A deed of humbleness deepens humbleness. The thing reaped is the very thing sown, multiplied a hundred fold. You have sown a seed of life, you reap life everlasting.
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It is perilous to separate thinking rightly from acting rightly. He is already half false who speculates on truth and does not do it. Truth is given, not to be contemplated, but to be done. Life is an action - not a thought. And the penalty paid by him who speculates on truth, is that by degrees the very truth he holds becomes a falsehood.
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He who lives to God rests in his Redeemer's love, and is trying to get rid of his old nature - to him every sorrow, every bereavement, every pain, will come charged with blessings, and death itself will be no longer the ' king of terrors,' but the messenger of grace.
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Only what coronation is in an earthly way, baptism is in a heavenly way; God's authoritative declaration in material form of a spiritual reality.
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In all matters of eternal truth, the soul is before the intellect; the things of God are spiritually discerned. You know truth by being true; you recognize God by being like Him.
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There are few signs in a soul's state more alarming than that of religious indifference, that is, the spirit of thinking all religions equally true- the real meaning of which is, that all religions are equally false.
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This is the secret of Christ's kingship- 'He became obedient - wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him.' And this is the secret of all obedience and all command. Obedience to a law above you subjugates minds to you who never would have yielded to mere will.
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Sow the seeds of life - humbleness, pure-heartedness, love; and in the long eternity which lies before the soul, every minutest grain will come up again with an increase of thirty, sixty, or a hundred fold.