Which are the people who have influenced us most? Not the ones who thought they did, but those who had not the remotest notion that they were influencing us. In the Christian life, the implicit is never conscious, if it is conscious it ceases to have this unaffected loveliness which is the characteristic of the touch of Jesus. We always know when Jesus is at work because He produces in the commonplace something that is inspiring.

By realizing the reality of our Prince within us, we are never bothered again by the fact that we do not understand ourselves, or that other people do not understand us. The only One who truly understands me is the One who made me and who redeems me... It is a tremendous freedom to get rid of every kind of self-consideration and learn to care about only one thing - the relationship between our Prince and ourselves.

If you have become bitter and sour, it is because when God gave you a blessing you hoarded it. Yet if you had poured it out to Him, you would have been the sweetest person on earth. If you are always keeping blessings to yourself and never learning to pour out anything “to the Lord,” other people will never have their vision of God expanded through you.

Never water down or minimise the mighty Gospel of God by considering that people may be misled by certain statements. Present the Gospel in all its fullness and God will guard His own truth.

People pour themselves into their own doctrines, and God has to blast them out of their preconceived ideas before they can become devoted to Jesus Christ.

What is the sign of a friend? Is it that he tells you his secret sorrows? No, it is that he tells you his secret joys. Many people will confide their secret sorrows to you, but the final mark of intimacy is when they share their secret joys with you.

A practical help in keeping your personal purity unblemished in your relations with other people is to begin to see them as God does. Say to yourself, “That man or that woman is perfect in Christ Jesus! That friend or that relative is perfect in Christ Jesus!

There is nothing to be valued more highly than to have people praying for us; God links up His power in answer to their prayers.

People say that it is so hard to bring Jesus Christ and present him before the lives of men today. Of course it is. It is so hard that it is impossible except by the power of the indwelling Holy Ghost.

How many people have you made homesick for God?

We all know people who have been made much meaner and more irritable and more intolerable to live with by suffering: it is not right to say that all suffering perfects. It only perfects one type of person ...... the one who accepts the call of God in Christ Jesus.

We must keep ourselves in touch, not with theories, but with people, and never get out of touch with human beings, if we are going to use the word of God skilfully amongst them.

True intercession involves bringing the person, or the circumstance that seems to be crashing in on you, before God, until you are changed by His attitude toward that person or circumstance. People describe intercession by saying, "It is putting yourself in someone else’s place." That is not true! Intercession is putting yourself in God’s place; it is having His mind and His perspective.

The people who influence us are those who have stood unconsciously for the right thing. They are like the stars and the lilies, and the joy of God flows through them all the time.

All of God’s people are ordinary people who have been made extraordinary by the purpose He has given them.

When we lose sight of God we become hard and dogmatic. We hurl our own petitions at God's throne and dictate to Him as to what we wish Him to do. We do not worship God, nor do we seek to form the mind of Christ. If we are hard towards God, we will become hard towards other people.

God brings you to places, among people, and into certain conditions to accomplish a definite purpose through the intercession of the Spirit in you. Your part in intercessory prayer is not to agonize over how to intercede, but to use the everyday circumstances and people God puts around you by His providence to bring them before His throne, and to allow the Spirit in you the opportunity to intercede for them. In this way God is going to touch the whole world with His saints.

Obedience to the call of Christ nearly always costs everything to two people- the one who is called, and the one who loves that one.

It is inbred in us that we have to do exceptional things for God: but we have not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is not learned in five minutes

Never believe that the so-called random events of life are anything less than God’s appointed order. Be ready to discover His divine designs anywhere and everywhere.

Do you believe that God can change bitter circumstances into sweet blessing? Are you willing to let Him?

The greatest need we have is not to do things, but to believe things.

There comes the baffling call of God in our lives also. The call of God can never be stated explicitly; it is implicit. The call of God is like the call of the sea, no one hears it but the one who has the nature of the sea in him. It cannot be stated definitely what the call of God is to, because his call is to be in comradeship with himself, for his own purposes, and the test is to believe that God knows what he is after.

Never run away with the idea that it doesn't matter much what we believe or think; it does. What we believe and think, we are; not what we say we believe and think, but what we really do believe and think, we are; there is no divorce at all.

Watch the things you say you can't believe, and then recall the things you accept without thinking, like your own existence.

It is easy to say we believe in God as long as we remain in the little world we choose to live in; but get out into the great world of facts, the noisy world where people are absolutely indifferent to you, where your message is nothing more than a crazy tale belonging to a bygone age, can you believe God there?

When we become advocates of a creed, something dies; we do not believe God, we only believe our belief about Him.

It is much easier to do something than to trust in God. That is why there are so few fellow workers with God and so many workers for Him. We would far rather work for God than believe in Him.

Seeing is never believing: we interpret what we see in the light of what we believe. Faith is confidence in God before you see God emerging, therefore the nature of faith is that it must be tried.

To terrorize a man into believing in God is never the work of God, but the work of human expediency. If we want to convince a congregation of a certain thing, we may use terror to frighten them into it; but never say that is God's way, it is our way. To call that God's method is a travesty to the character of God.

Spiritual character is only made by standing loyal to God's character, no matter what distress the trial of faith brings. The distress and agony the prophets experienced was the agony of believing God when everything that was happening contradicted what they proclaimed Him to be; there was nothing to prove that God was just and true, but everything to prove the opposite.

I have no right to say I believe in God unless I order my life as under His all-seeing Eye.

Perseverance is more than endurance." It is endurance combined with absolute assurance and certainty that what we are looking for is going to happen. Perseverance means more than just hanging on, which may only be exposing our fear of letting go and falling. Perseverance is our supreme effort of refusing to believe that our hero is going to be conquered.

Believe steadfastly on Him and everything that challenges you will strengthen your faith. There is continual testing in the life of faith up to the point of our physical death, which is the last great test. Faith is absolute trust in God-trust that could never imagine that He would forsake us.

If we believe in Jesus, it is not what we gain but what He pours through us that really counts. God’s purpose is not simply to make us beautiful, plump grapes, but to make us grapes so that He may squeeze the sweetness out of us.

Accepting that the world is full of uncertainty and ambiguity does not and should not stop people from being pretty sure about a lot of things.

Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different.

The mark of a mature, psychologically healthy mind is indeed the ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only as much as there really is. Uncertainty is no virtue when the facts are clear, and ambiguity is mere obfuscation when more precise terms are applicable.

It's not leftovers that are wasteful, but those who either don't know what to do with them or can't be bothered.

Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones.

People should not expect the state to protect them from fraudsters. If we do, we get into the habit of neglecting our own powers of intellectual discernment.

Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone 'just doing my job' or the infernal self-checkout machine.

It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.

From time to time, it is worth wandering around the fuzzy border regions of what you do, if only to remind yourself that no human activity is an island.

Cooking can be rewarding when it is a choice and no longer the onerous duty of the housewife, and when a dishwasher can lighten the load at the other end of the process.

There are many things you shouldn't measure. Don't, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!

I don't think anyone who genuinely embraced sincerity, charity and modesty could be intolerant or divisive.

Seek first what is true and of value, and then whatever happiness follows will be of the appropriate quantity and, more importantly, quality.

When you do the right thing, but not to any particular person, we instinctively feel that we have earned some sort of pay back. Since no-one will do that for us, we opt for self-service reciprocation.

One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.