Character – Some day, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.
Phillips Brooks (Clergyman, 1835 – 1893)
Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is the child of God.
Phillips Brooks (Clergyman, 1835 – 1893)
Life is too short to nurse one’s misery. Hurry across the lowlands so that you may spend more time on the mountain tops.
Phillips Brooks (Clergyman, 1835 – 1893)
Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.
Phillips Brooks (Clergyman, 1835 – 1893)
Pray the largest prayers. You cannot think a prayer so large that God, in answering it, will not wish you had made it larger. Pray not for crutches but for wings.
Phillips Brooks (Clergyman, 1835 – 1893)
O, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.
Phillips Brooks (Clergyman, 1835 – 1893)
Do not be content with the old anointing. It is essential to a more holy and happy life…that you seek to be anointed with new oil. Do not be satisfied with past experiences. Seek to have a new revelation of Christ to your soul. Seek the renewed application of His precious blood to your conscience. Oh, seek the fresh oil!
Octavius Winslow (Preacher, 1808 – 1878)
It is then, we say, in the successive stages of his experience, that the believer sees more distinctly, and adores more profoundly, and grasps more firmly, the finished righteousness of Christ. And what is the school in which he learns his nothingness, his poverty, his utter destitution? The school of deep and sanctified affliction. In no other school is it learned, and under no other teacher but God. Here his high thoughts are brought low, and the Lord alone is exalted.
Octavius Winslow (Preacher, 1808 – 1878)
If God has laid your sins upon the Son of His love, you may rest assured that He will never lay them a second time upon you; since, if Christ has borne them and atoned for them to Divine justice, they never again can be found.
Octavius Winslow (Preacher, 1808 – 1878)
The death of Jesus was the opening and the emptying of the full heart of God; it was the outgushing of that ocean of infinite mercy that heaved and panted and longed for an outlet; it was God showing how he could love a poor, guilty sinner.
Octavius Winslow (Preacher, 1808 – 1878)