Watchman Nee - My Top 20 Quotes

Watchman Nee, 1903-1972

This is from the blog CrossQuotes:

Victory is the normal experience of a Christian; defeat should be the abnormal experience.

A Christian life is an unending engagement on the battlefield.

A Christian should know more about the operation of his spirit than about the activity of his mind.

Our prayers lay the track down on which God’s power can come. Like a mighty locomotive, his power is irresistible, but it cannot reach us without rails.

A forgiven sinner is quite different from an ordinary sinner, and a consecrated Christian is quite different from an ordinary Christian.

Our old history ends with the Cross; our new history begins with the resurrection.

The Blood deals with what we have done, whereas the Cross deals with what we are. The Blood disposes of our sins, while the Cross strikes at the root of our capacity for sin….

True spiritual life depends not on probing our feelings and thoughts from dawn to dusk but on “looking off” to the Savior!

He can only keep those who have handed themselves over to Him.

Now is the hour we should humbly prostrate ourselves before God, willing to be convicted afresh of our sins by the Holy Spirit.

Christians should not be content merely with knowing mentally the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as given in the Bible; they also need to know Him experimentally.

Oftentimes a carnal Christian is troubled by outside matters. Persons or affairs or things in the world around readily invade his inward man and disturb the peace in his spirit.

If you would test the character of anything, you only need to enquire whether that thing leads you to God or away from God.

They simply do what they feel like doing.

God wants us to love Him more than our Isaac.

God’s means of delivering us from sin is not by making us stronger and stronger, but by making us weaker and weaker. That is surely rather a peculiar way of victory, you say; but it is the divine way. God sets us free from the dominion of sin, not by strengthening our old man but by crucifying him; not by helping him to do anything, but by removing him from the scene of action.

The sight of any trouble strikes terror into the heart of those who do not have faith, but those who trust Him say, “Here comes my food!”

The breaking of the alabaster box and the anointing of the Lord filled the house with the odor, with the sweetest odor. Everyone could smell it. Whenever you meet someone who has really suffered; been limited, gone through things for the Lord, willing to be imprisoned by the Lord, just being satisfied with Him and nothing else, immediately you scent the fragrance. There is a savor of the Lord. Something has been crushed, something has been broken, and there is a resulting odor of sweetness.

Outside of Christ, I am only a sinner, but in Christ, I am saved. Outside of Christ, I am empty; in Christ, I am full. Outside of Christ, I am weak; in Christ, I am strong. Outside of Christ, I cannot; in Christ, I am more than able. Outside of Christ, I have been defeated; in Christ, I am already victorious. How meaningful are the words, “in Christ.”

Historically, Pentecost followed Calvary; experientially, being filled with the power of the Holy Spirit follows the bearing of the cross.

People who are lazy, careless, doubtful-minded or arrogant need not expect God to reveal His secret or covenant to them.

Some Quotes from Range Magazine

Winston Churchill

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."

--Winston Churchill

"America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold:  its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life.  If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within."

--Joseph Stalin

"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting an inexperienced man like him with the presidency.  It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.  The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America.  Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.  The Republic can survive a Barack Obama.  It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president."

--From the newspaper Prager Zeitung, Czech Republic, April 28, 2010

"Scruffy progressive protesters locked themselves together across railroad tracks, blocked traffic and shouted profanities at police on Tuesday in a coordinated 'West Coast Port Shutdown.'  Truckers lost wages.  Shippers lost business.  This is what the Occupy Wall Street movement calls 'victory.'"

--Michelle Malkin

"The smaller the mind, the greater the conceit."

--Aesop

"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government--lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."

--Patrick Henry


[Compiled by Gail Brooks, Carrie Depaoli & Paul J. Etzler]

Range Magazine
Spring 2012

Stimulus Sermon

Some Great Quotes

Oswald Chambers, 1874-1917

"Be reckless immediately, fling it all out on Him. You do not know when His voice will come, but whenever the realization of God comes in the faintest way imaginable, recklessly abandon. It is only by abandon that you recognize Him. You will only realize His voice more clearly by recklessness."

--Oswald Chambers

"I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for the day."

--Abraham Lincoln

"I shall not live 'till I see God; and when I have seen him, I shall never die."

--John Donne

"The most important thought I ever had was that of my individual responsibility to God."

--Daniel Webster

"The tests of life are to make, not break us. Trouble may demolish a man's business but build his character. The blow at the outward man may be the greatest blessing to the inner man. If God, then, puts or permits anything hard in our lives, be sure that the real peril, the real trouble, is what we shall lose if we flinch or rebel."

--Maltbie D. Babcock

"To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead as to its own. Such an one can do no deed however small but it is clothed with something of God's power and authority."

--Meister Eckhart

"Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties."

--Charles H. Spurgeon

"The wisdom of this world is precious in the eye of the world; and the wisdom of God in His poor, weak, despised earthen vessels is still foolishness with them; but the Lord so orders it, that He still justifies his despised wisdom in his despised vessels, and makes the wisdom of the world appear foolish to all the single and uprighthearted, who thirst after and wait for the revelation of His truth."

--Isaac Penington

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."

--William Shedd

"Men return again and again to the few who have mastered the spiritual secret, whose life has been hid with Christ in God. These are of the old time religion, hung to the nails of the Cross."

--Robert Murray McCheyne

"Have you noticed how much praying for revival has been going on of late and how little revival has resulted? I believe the problem is that we have been trying to substitute praying for obedience, and it simply will not work. To pray for revival while ignoring the plain precept laid down in Scriptures is to waste a lot of words and get nothing for our trouble. Prayer will become effective when we stop using it as a substitute for obedience."

--A.W. Tozer

"All God's revelations are sealed until they are opened to us by obedience. You will never get them open by philosophy or thinking. Immediately you obey, a flash of light comes. Let God's truth work in you by soaking in it, not by worrying into it. The only way you can get to know is to stop trying to find out and being born again. Obey God in the thing He shows you, and instantly the next thing is opened up. One reads tomes on the Holy Spirit, when one five minutes of drastic obedience would make things as clear as a sunbeam. 'I suppose I shall understand these things some day!' You can understand them now. It is not study that does it, but obedience. The tiniest fragment of obedience, and heaven opens and the profoundest truths of God are yours straight away. God will never reveal more truth about Himself until you have obeyed what you know already. Beware of becoming 'wise and prudent.'"

--Oswald Chambers

"Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a living presence."

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Though swordless, these soldiers of Christ fought the might of imperial Rome and won…
Unlettered they unblushingly declared the whole counsel of God and eventually staggered the intellectual Greeks."

--Leonard Ravenhill

"The beginning of true nobility comes when a man ceases to be interested in the judgment of men and becomes interested in the judgment of God." 

--J. Gresham Machen

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