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Alexander MacLaren – Provocative Quotes

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Alexander MacLaren (1826 – 1910) was a beloved Scottish Baptist minister who preached his sermons over a sixty-five year career. According to the website www.ccel.org: “He lived more than almost any of the great preachers of his time between his study, his pulpit, his pen.”1

It was said of MacLaren that his life was his ministry and his ministry was his life. He studied Greek and Hebrew in college and his passion was to preach the gospel with reverence, love, and holy awe. His fame spread throughout the English-speaking world and his sermons were beloved by his several congregations.

Below are some of his provocative quotes that I pray touch your heart and soul.2

“Peace comes not from the absence of trouble, but from the presence of God.”

“If God sends us on stony paths, He will provide us with strong shoes.”

“He who has the Holy Spirit in His heart and the Scripture in his hands has all he needs.”

“The world takes its notions of God from the people who say that they belong to God’s family. They read us a great deal more than they read the Bible. They see us; they only hear about Jesus Christ.”

“The more we work the more we need to pray. In this day of activity there is great danger, not of doing too much, but of praying too little for so much work.”

“The Gospel is not a mere message of deliverance, but a canon of conduct; it is not a theology to be accepted, but it is ethics to be lived. It is not to be believed only, but it is to be taken into life as a guide.”

“Only he who can say, ‘The Lord is the strength of my life’ can go on to say, ‘Of whom shall I be afraid?’”

“As the flowers follow the sun, and silently hold up their petals to be tinted and enlarged by its shining, so must we, if we would know the joy of God, hold our souls, wills, hearts, and minds, still before Him, whose voice commands, whose love warns, whose truth makes fair our whole being. God speaks for the most part in such silence only. If the soul be full of tumult and jangling voices, His voice is little likely to be heard.”

“The gospel is not speculation but fact. It is truth, because it is the record of a person who is the Truth.”

“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.”

“Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side.”

“Love is the only fire that is hot enough to melt the iron obstinacy of a creature’s will.”

“God keeps giving Himself as long as we bring that into which He can pour Himself. And when we stop bringing, He stops giving.”

“If you would win the world, melt it, do not hammer it.”

“Conflict, not progress, is the word that defines man’s path from darkness into light. No holiness is won by any other means than this, that wickedness should be slain day by day, and hour by hour.”

“The root of all steadfastness is in consecration to God.”

“Why should we live halfway up the hill and swathed in the mists, when we might have an unclouded sky and a radiant sun over our heads if we would climb higher and walk in the light of His face?”

“To pursue joy is to lose it. The only way to get it is to follow steadily the path of duty.”

“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.”

“Love Christ, and then the eternity in the heart will not be a great aching void, but will be filled with the everlasting life which Christ gives and is.”

“Man’s course begins in a garden, but it ends in a city.”

“Embrace in one act the two truths – thine own sin, and God’s infinite mercy in Jesus Christ.”

“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.”


1 Author info: Alexander MacLaren – Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org)

2 All of the following quotes are from the website below:

  TOP 25 QUOTES BY ALEXANDER MACLAREN (of 121) | A-Z Quotes (azquotes.com)