Alexander MacLaren Quotes - Daily Verses by Topic

Being in Christ, it is safe to forget the past; it is possible to be sure of the future; it is possible to be diligent in the present.
– Alexander MacLaren
Christ

Only he who can say, “The Lord is the strength of my life” can say, “Of whom shall I be afraid?”
– Alexander MacLaren
Strength | Fear

The cross is the center of the world’s history; the incarnation of Christ and the crucifixion of our Lord are the pivot round which all the events of the ages revolve. The testimony of Christ was the spirit of prophecy, and the growing power of Jesus is the spirit of history.
– Alexander MacLaren
The Cross

The gospel is not speculation but fact. It is truth, because it is the record of a Person who is the Truth.
– Alexander MacLaren
The Gospel

Seek to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life.
– Alexander MacLaren
Joy

Each of us may be sure that if God sends us on stony paths He will provide us with strong shoes, and He will not send us out on any journey for which He does not equip us well.
– Alexander MacLaren
Grace | Service

Faith, which is trust, and fear are opposite poles. If a man has the one, he can scarcely have the other in vigorous operation. He that has his trust set upon God does not need to dread anything except the weakening or the paralyzing of that trust.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith | Fear

It is of no use to say to men, “Let not your heart be troubled,” unless you finish the verse and say, “Believe in God, believe also in Christ.”
– Alexander MacLaren
Trials | Believing

Kindness makes a person attractive. If you would win the world, melt it, do not hammer it.
– Alexander MacLaren
Kindness

The mystery of the universe, and the meaning of God’s world, are shrouded in hopeless obscurity, until we learn to feel that all laws suppose a lawgiver, and that all working involves a Divine energy.
– Alexander MacLaren
Providence

To pursue joy is to lose it. The only way to get it is to follow steadily the path of duty, without thinking of joy, and then, like sheep, it comes most surely unsought, and we “being in the way,” the angel of God, bright-haired joy, is sure to meet us.
– Alexander MacLaren
Joy

Faith does not grasp a doctrine, but a heart. The trust which Christ requires is the bond that unites souls with Him; and the very life of it is entire committal of myself to Him in all my relations and for all my needs, and absolute utter confidence in Him as all sufficient for everything that I can require.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith | Commitment

There is nothing more impotent than words which lie dormant in our brains and have no influence on our lives.
– Alexander MacLaren
Life

Only he who can say, “The Lord is the strength of my life” can say, “Of whom shall I be afraid?”
– Alexander MacLaren
Strength | Fear

The tears of Christ are the pity of God. The gentleness of Jesus is the long-suffering of God. The tenderness of Jesus is the love of God. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.
– Alexander MacLaren
God | Mercy

The vision of the Divine Presence ever takes the form which our circumstances most require.
– Alexander MacLaren
Providence

If you want to live in this world, doing the duty of life, knowing the blessings of it, doing your work heartily, and yet not absorbed by it, remember that the one power whereby you can so act is, that all shall be consecrated to Christ, and done for His sake.
– Alexander MacLaren
Service | Power | Consecration

While the agent of renovation is the Divine Spirit, and the condition of renovation is our cleaving to Christ, the medium of renovation and the weapon which the transforming grace employs is “the word of the truth of the gospel,” whereby we are sanctified.
– Alexander MacLaren
Renewal | Sanctification

The joys of heaven are not the joys of passive contemplation, of dreamy remembrance, of perfect repose; but they are described thus: “They rest not day nor night.” “His servants serve Him, and see His face.”
– Alexander MacLaren
Joy | Heaven

The risen life of Jesus is the nourishment and strengthening and blessing and life of a Christian. Our daily experience ought to be that there comes, wavelet by wavelet, that silent, gentle, and yet omnipotent influx into our empty hearts, this very life of Christ Himself.
– Alexander MacLaren
Resurrection

In such a world as this, with such hearts as ours, weakness is wickedness in the long run. Whoever lets himself be shaped and guided by anything lower than an inflexible will, fixed in obedience to God, will in the end be shaped into a deformity, and guided to wreck and ruin.
– Alexander MacLaren
Weakness

Logically, faith comes first, and love next; but in life they will spring up together in the soul; the interval which separates them is impalpable, and in every act of trust, love is present; and fundamental to every emotion of love to Christ is trust in Christ.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith | Love

No unwelcome tasks become any the less unwelcome by putting them off till tomorrow. It is only when they are behind us and done, that we begin to find that there is a sweetness to be tasted afterwards, and that the remembrance of unwelcome duties unhesitatingly done is welcome and pleasant. Accomplished, they are full of blessing, and there is a smile on their faces as they leave us. Undone, they stand threatening and disturbing our tranquility, and hindering our communion with God. If there be lying before you any bit of work from which you shrink, go straight up to it, and do it at once. The only way to get rid of it is to do it.
– Alexander MacLaren
Responsibility

The sum of the whole matter is this: He who is one in will and heart with God is a Christian. He who loves God is one in will and heart with Him. He who trusts Christ loves God. That is Christianity in its ultimate purpose and result. That is Christianity in its means and working forces. That is Christianity in its starting point and foundation.
– Alexander MacLaren
Christianity

There can be no faith so feeble that Christ does not respond to it.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith

Fruitful and acceptable worship begins before it begins.
– Alexander MacLaren
Worship

Do not let the empty cup be your first teacher of the blessings you had when it was full. Do not let a bard place here and there in the bed destroy your rest. Seek, as a plain duty, to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life.
– Alexander MacLaren
Joy

The apostolic church thought more about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ than about death and heaven. The early Christians were looking, not for a cleft in the ground called a grave but for a cleavage in the sky called Glory.
– Alexander MacLaren
Heaven

Unbelief is criminal because it is a moral act, an act of the whole nature. Belief or unbelief is a test of a man’s whole spiritual condition, because it is the whole being, affections, will, conscience, as well as the understanding, which are concerned in it.
– Alexander MacLaren
Unbelief

Ability involves responsibility; power, to its last particle, is duty.
– Alexander MacLaren
Responsibility | Power

“I will” is no word for man. There is a far diviner one, “I ought.” Bow passion to reason, reason to conscience, and conscience to God, and then be as resolute and determined as you choose.
– Alexander MacLaren
Perseverance

The act of faith, which separates us from all men, unites us for the first time in real brotherhood; and they who, one by one, come to Jesus and meet Him alone, next find that they are come to the city of God “and to an innumerable company.”
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith | Unity

We believe that to Christ belongs creative power–that “without Him was not anything made which was made.” We believe that from Him came all life at first. In Him life was as in its deep source. He is the fountain of life. We believe that as not being comes into existence without His creative power, so none continues to exist without His sustaining energy. We believe that the history of the world is but the history of His influence, and that the centre of the whole universe is the cross of Cavalry.
– Alexander MacLaren
Creation

The temptation once yielded to gains power. The crack in the embankment which lets a drop or two ooze through is soon a hole which lets out a flood.
– Alexander MacLaren
Temptation

Faith has in it the recognition of the certainty and the justice of a judgment that is coming down crashing on every human head; and then from the midst of these fears and sorrows and the tempest of that great darkness there rises up in the night of terrors the shining of one perhaps pale, quivering, distant, but divinely given hope, “My Savior! My Savior! He is righteous; He has died; He lives! I will stay no longer; I will cast myself upon Him!
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith

Oh, when we are journeying through the murky night and the dark woods of affliction and sorrow, it is something to find here and there a spray broken, or a leafy stem bent down with the tread of His foot and the brush of His hand as He passed; and to remember that the path He trod He has hallowed, and thus to find lingering fragrance and hidden strength in the remembrance of Him as “in all points tempted like as we are,” bearing grief for us, bearing grief with us, bearing grief like us.
– Alexander MacLaren
Affliction | Grief

If our faith in God is not the veriest sham, it demands, and will produce, the abandonment sometimes, the subordination always, of eternal helps and material good.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith

“Tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope.” That is the order. You cannot put patience and experience into a parenthesis, and, omitting them, bring hope out of tribulation.
– Alexander MacLaren
Tribulation

Faith refers to Christ. Holiness depends on faith. Heaven depends on holiness.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith | Holiness

You have to live with Him day by day, and year by year, and to learn to know Him as we learn to know husbands and wives, by continual experience of a sweet and unfailing love, by many a sacred hour of interchange of affection and reception of gifts and counsels.
– Alexander MacLaren
Holiness

Faith is the sight of the inward eye.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith

Grieve not the Christ of God, who redeems us; and remember that we grieve Him most when we will not let Him pour His love upon us, but turn a sullen, unresponsive unbelief towards His pleading grace, as some glacier shuts out the sunshine from the mountainside with its thick-ribbed ice.
– Alexander MacLaren
Unbelief | Redemption

Christ wrought out His perfect obedience as a man, through temptation, and by suffering.
– Alexander MacLaren
Christ

The prayer that begins with trustfulness, and passes on into waiting, will always end in thankfulness, triumph, and praise.
– Alexander MacLaren
Prayer

God gives us power to bear all the sorrows of His making; but He does not give us power to bear the sorrows of our own making, which the anticipation of sorrow most assuredly is.
– Alexander MacLaren
Power

Faith refers to Christ. Holiness depends on faith. Heaven depends on holiness.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith | Holiness

That is faith, cleaving to Christ, twining round Him with all the tendrils of our heart, as the vine does round its support.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith

Oh! it irradiates all our days with lofty beauty, and it makes them all hallowed and divine, when we feel that not the apparent greatness, not the prominence nor noise with which it is done, nor the external consequences which flow from it, but the motive from which it flowed, determines the worth of our deed in God’s eyes. Faithfulness is faithfulness, on whatsoever scale it be set forth.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faithful

Ah, there is nothing more beautiful than the difference between the thought about sinful creatures which is natural to a holy being, and the thought about sinful creatures which is natural to a self-righteous being. The one is all contempt; the other, all pity.
– Alexander MacLaren
God | Self-righteousness

Men come and go; leaders, teachers, thinkers speak and work for a season, and then fall silent and impotent. He abides. They die, but He lives. They are lights kindled, and, therefore, sooner or later quenched; but He is the true light from which they draw all their brightness, and He shines for evermore.
– Alexander MacLaren
God

Christ wrought out His perfect obedience as a man, through temptation, and by suffering.
– Alexander MacLaren
Christ

That which of all things unfits man for the reception of Christ as a Savior, is not gross profligacy and outward, vehement transgression, but it is self-complacency, fatal self-righteousness and self-sufficiency.
– Alexander MacLaren
Self-righteousness

Nothing but Christian faith gives to the furthest future the solidity and definiteness which it must have if it is to be a breakwater for us against the fluctuating sea of present cares and thoughts.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith

It is not the thinker who is the true king of men, as we sometimes hear it proudly said. We need one who will not only show, but be the Truth; who will not only point, but open and be the way; who will not only communicate thought, but give, because He is the Life. Not the rabbi’s pulpit, nor the teacher’s desk, still less the gilded chairs of earthly monarchs, least of all the tents of conquerors, are the throne of the true king. He rules from the cross.
– Alexander MacLaren
Jesus

Ordinary human motives will appeal in vain to the ears which have heard the tones of the heavenly music; and all the pomp of life will show poor and tawdry to the sight that has gazed on the vision of the great white throne and the crystal sea.
– Alexander MacLaren
Holiness

The gospel is not speculation but fact. It is truth, because it is the record of a Person who is the Truth.
– Alexander MacLaren
The Gospel

If life has not made you by God’s grace, through faith, holy–think you, will death without faith do it? The cold waters of that narrow stream are no purifying bath in which you may wash and be clean. No! No! As you go down into them, you will come up from them.
– Alexander MacLaren
Death | Faith

Did any of you, parents, ever hear your child wake from sleep with some panic fear and shriek the mother’s name through the darkness? Was not that a more powerful appeal than all words? And, depend upon it, that the soul which cries aloud on God, “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” though it have “no language but a cry,” will never call in vain.
– Alexander MacLaren
Prayer | Mercy

In danger Christ lashes us to Himself, as the Alpine guides do when there is perilous ice to get over.
– Alexander MacLaren
Grace

We are only asking you to give to Christ that which you give to others, to transfer the old emotions, the blessed emotions, the exercise of which makes gladness in the life here below, to transfer them to Him, and to rest safe in the Lord. Faith is trust.
– Alexander MacLaren
Obedience

Kindness does not require us to be blind to facts or to live in fancies, but it does require us to cherish a habit of goodwill, ready to show pity if sorrow appears, and slow to turn away even if hostility appears.
– Alexander MacLaren
Kindness

True faith, by a mighty effort of the will, fixes its gaze on our Divine Helper, and there finds it possible and wise to lose its fears. It is madness to say, “I will not be afraid;” it is wisdom and peace to say, “I will trust and not be afraid.”
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith

Surely scripture is right when it makes the sin of sins that unbelief, which is at bottom nothing else than a refusal to take the cup of salvation. Surely no sharper grief can be inflicted upon the Spirit of God than when we leave His gifts neglected and unappropriated.
– Alexander MacLaren
Unbelief

Do not let the loud utterances of your own wills anticipate, nor drown, the still, small voice in which God speaks. Bridle impatience till He does. If you cannot hear His whisper, wait till you do. Take care of running before you are sent. Keep your wills in equipoise till God’s hand gives the impulse and direction.
– Alexander MacLaren
Impatience

So for us, the condition and preparation on and by which we are sheltered by that great hand, is the faith that asks, and the asking of faith. We must forsake the earthly props, but we must also believingly desire to be upheld by the heavenly arms. We make God responsible for our safety when we abandon other defense, and commit ourselves to Him.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith

“I am going down into the pit; you hold the ropes,”; said Carey the pioneer missionary. They that hold the ropes, and the daring miner that swings away down in the darkness, are one in work, may be one in the motive, and, if they are, shall be one in the reward.
– Alexander MacLaren
Helping | Rewards

A man who has not learned to say “no”–who is not resolved that he will take God’s way in spite of every dog that can bark at him, in spite of every silvery voice that can woo him aside–will be a weak and wretched man till he dies.
– Alexander MacLaren
Weakness

Love is the only fire that is hot enough to melt the iron obstinacy of a creature’s will.
– Alexander MacLaren
Love

He that has no present Christ has a future, dark, chaotic, heaving with its destructive ocean; and over it there goes forever–black-pinioned winging its solitary and hopeless flight, the raven of his anxious thoughts, and finds no place to rest, and comes back again to the desolate ark with its foreboding croak of evil in the present and evil in the future.
– Alexander MacLaren
Rebellion | The Future

It was a deep true thought which the old painters had, when they drew John as likest to his Lord. Love makes us like.
– Alexander MacLaren
Love

Here is the manliness of manhood that a man has a good reason for what he does, and has a will in doing it.
– Alexander MacLaren
Men

God keeps giving Himself as long as we bring that into which He can pour Himself. And when we stop bringing, He stops giving.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith

In danger Christ lashes us to Himself, as the Alpine guides do when there is perilous ice to get over.
– Alexander MacLaren
Grace

Heaven is endless longing, accompanied with an endless fruition–a longing which is blessedness, a longing which is life.
– Alexander MacLaren
Heaven

The vision of the Divine Presence ever takes the form which our circumstances most require.
– Alexander MacLaren
Providence

The true confidence which is faith in Christ, and the true diffidence which is utter distrust of myself–are identical.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith

God keeps giving Himself as long as we bring that into which He can pour Himself. And when we stop bringing, He stops giving.
– Alexander MacLaren
Faith

We must have the glory sink into us before it can be reflected from us. In deep inward beholding we must have Christ in our hearts that He may shine forth from our lives.
– Alexander MacLaren
The Heart

Every life has dark tracks and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas.
– Alexander MacLaren
Life

The prayer that begins with trustfulness, and passes on into waiting, will always end in thankfulness, triumph, and praise.
– Alexander MacLaren
1
Prayer

Remember that vision on the Mount of Transfiguration; and let it be ours, even in the glare of earthly joys and brightnesses, to lift up our eyes, like those wondering three, and see no man any more, save Jesus only.
– Alexander MacLaren
Jesus

Let the current of your being set towards God, then your life will be filled and calmed by one master-passion which unites and stills the soul.
– Alexander MacLaren
Passion

Anxious care rests on a basis of heathen worldly-mindedness, and of heathen misunderstanding of the character of God.
– Alexander MacLaren
Anxiety | Worldliness

Christ’s voice sounds now for each of us in loving invitation; and dead in sin and hardness of heart though we be, we can listen and live. Christ Himself, my brother, sows the seed now. Do you take care that it falls not on, but in, your souls.
– Alexander MacLaren
Salvation

Love is the only fire that is hot enough to melt the iron obstinacy of a creature’s will.
– Alexander MacLaren
Love

It is of no use to say to men, “Let not your heart be troubled,” unless you finish the verse and say, “Believe in God, believe also in Christ.”
– Alexander MacLaren
Trials | Believing

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