David Lloyd-Jones quotes:

Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?

The whole man is involved, the mind, the heart and the will, and a common cause of spiritual depression is the failure to realize that the Christian life is a whole life, a balanced life.

I sometimes think that the very essence of the whole Christian position and the secret of a successful spiritual life is just to realize two things... I must have complete, absolute confidence in God and no confidence in myself."

There is nothing which so certifies the genuineness of a man's faith as his patience and his patient endurance, his keeping on steadily in spite of everything.

The ultimate cause of spiritual depression is unbelief. For if it were not for unbelief, even the devil could do nothing. It is because we listen to the devil instead of listening to God that we go down before him and fall before his attacks.

We need less travelling by jet plaes from congress to congress... but more kneeling and praying and pleading to God to have mercy on us, more crying to God to arise and scatter his enemies and make himself known.

We all tend to go to extremes; some rely only on their own preparation and look for nothing more; others, as I say, tend to despise preparation and trust to the unction, the anointing and the inspiration of the Spirit alone. But there must be no "either/or" here; it is always "both/and." These two things must go together.

The Christian faith is ultimately not only a matter of doctrine or understanding or of intellect, it is a condition of the heart.

The Christian is a man who can be certain about the ultimate even when he is most uncertain about the immediate.

We must re-grasp the idea of church membership as being the membership of the body of Christ and as the biggest honour which can come man's way in this world.

whenever you put happiness before righteousness, you will be doomed to misery. That is the great message of the Bible from beginning to end. They alone are truly happy who are seeking to be righteous.

The ultimate test of our spirituality is the measure of our amazement at the grace of God.

Faith is the refusal to panic.

What is the chief end of preaching? I like to think it is this: It is to give men and women a sense of God and His presence.

It is grace at the beginning, and grace at the end. So that when you and I come to lie upon our death beds, the one thing that should comfort and help and strengthen us there is the thing that helped us in the beginning. Not what we have been, not what we have done, but the Grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. The Christian life starts with grace, it must continue with grace, it ends with grace. Grace wondrous grace. By the grace of God I am what I am. Yet not I, but the Grace of God which was with me.

I am not asking whether you know things about Him but do you know God, are you enjoying God, is God the centre of your life, the soul of your being, the source of your greatest joy? He is meant to be.

The terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man's troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell.

There is nothing more foolish or self-defeating than for a Christian to say that he is not interested in doctrines.

Always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this: always obey such an impulse.

The most vital question to ask about all who claim to be Christian is this: Have they a soul thirst for God? ... Is their life centered on Him? Do they press forward more and more that they might know Him...

The church is always to be under the Word; she must be; we must keep her there. You must not assume that because the church started correctly, she will continue so. She did not do so in the New Testament times; she has not done so since. Without being constantly reformed by the Word the church becomes something very different.

The nearer a man gets to God, the greater he sees his sin.

There are ideas in our hearts, there are wishes, there are aspirations, there are groanings, there are sighings that the world knows nothing about; but God knows them. So words are not always necessary. When we cannot express our feelings except in wordless groanings, God knows exactly what is happening.

You are either a Christian or you are not a Christian; you cannot be partly a Christian. You are either "dead" or "alive"; you are either "born" or "not born".

To be a Christian is not only to believe the teaching of Christ, and to practice it; it is not only to try to follow the pattern and example of Christ; it is to be so vitally related to Christ that His life and His power are working in us. It is to be "in Christ," it is for Christ to be in us.

What is preaching? Logic on fire! Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire. A true understanding and experience of the Truth must lead to this. I say again that a man who can speak about these things dispassionately has no right whatsoever to be in a pulpit; and should never be allowed to enter one.

The glory of the gospel is that when the church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it.

Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God.

The gospel is not something partial or piecemeal: it takes in the whole life, the whole of history, the whole world. It tells us about creation and the final judgment and everything in between.

Spiritual depression or unhappiness in the Christian life is very often due to our failure to realize the greatness of the gospel.

You pray and make your requests made known unto God, and God will do something.' It is not your prayer that is going to do it, it is not you who is going to do it, but God. 'The peace of God that passeth all understanding'-He, through it all, 'will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus'.

You can have knowledge, and you can be meticulous in your preparation; but without the unction of the Holy Spirit you will have no power, and your preaching will not be effective.

If you look at your past and are depressed it means that you are listening to the devil.

Be still, and know that I am God. We must not interpret that 'Be still' in a sentimental manner. Some regard it as a kind of exhortation to us to be silent; but it is nothing of the sort. It means, 'Give up -or 'Give in' and admit I am God'. God is addressing people who are opposed to Him.

If you doubt your sins have been forgiven, that in itself is sin.

There is a very real danger of our putting our faith in our sermon rather than in the Spirit. Our faith should not be in the sermon, it should be in the Holy Spirit Himself.

Conviction is not repentance; conviction leads to repentance. But you can be convicted without repentance.

The eternal everlasting God has become our Father and the moment we realize that, it transforms everything.

You must be made miserable before you can know true Christian joy. Indeed the real trouble with the miserable Christian is that he has never been truly made miserable because of conviction of sin. He has by-passed the essential preliminary to joy, he has been assuming something that he has no right to assume.

The worst thing that can happen to a man is to succeed before he is ready.

The devil's one object is so to depress God's people that he can go to the man of the world and say: There are God's people. Do you want to be like that?

Faith is this extraordinary principle which links man to God; faith is this thing that keeps a man from hell and puts him in heaven; it is the connection between this world and the world to come; faith is this mystic astounding thing that can take a man dead in trespasses and sins and make him live as a new being, a new man in Christ Jesus.

To love to preach is one thing; to love to whom you preach is quite another.

All teaching and all truth and all doctrine must be tested in the light of the scriptures.

People are often unhappy in the Christian life because they have thought of Christianity, and the whole message of the gospel, in inadequate terms.

We must cease to think of the church as a gathering of institutions and organizations, and we must get back to the notion that we are the people of God.

Man was never meant to be a god, but he is forever trying to deify himself.

There are powers that can counterfeit almost everything in the Christian life.

If we only spent more of our time in looking at Him we should soon forget ourselves.

The Gospel is open to all; the most respectable sinner has no more claim on it than the worst.

We should go into His presence as a child goes to his father. We do it with reverence and godly fear, of course, but we should go with a childlike confidence and simplicity.

Prayer, in many ways, is the supreme expression of our faith in God.

The very God whom we have offended has Himself provided the way whereby the offense has been dealt with. His anger, His wrath against sin and the sinner, has been satisfied, appeased and He therefore can now thus reconcile man unto Himself.

People who think that once they are converted all will be happy, have forgotten Satan.

So let me put it thus: Hold on to your principles of morality and ethics, use your willpower to the limit, pay great heed to every noble, uplifting desire that is in you; but realize that these things alone are not enough, that they will never bring you to the desired place. We have to realize that all our best is totally inadequate, that a spiritual battle must be fought in a spiritual manner.

The introduction is the first and best chance to win the attention of people who otherwise would not care. The first thing you have to do is make people believe that what you have to say is relevant and important.

First of all, the evangelical is one who is entirely subservient to the Bible. This is true of every evangelical. He is a man of one book; he starts with it; he submits himself to it; this is his authority.

Preaching the Word is the primary task of the Church, the primary task of the leaders of the Church, the people who are set in this position of authority; and we must not allow anything to deflect us from this, however good the cause, however great the need.

Grace is favor shown to people who do not deserve any favor at all.

Though we claim to believe the whole of Scripture, in practice we frequently deny much of it by ignoring it.

...There is a great need of more familiarity with the Scriptures and their teaching in order that we may be crushed to our knees with a sense of humility and be made to cry to God that He would visit us again.

The Christian is not superficial in any sense, but is fundamentally serious and fundamentally happy. You see, the joy of the Christian is a holy joy; the happiness of the Christian is a serious happiness. ... it is a solemn joy, it is a holy joy, it is a serious happiness; so that, though he is grave and sober-minded and serious, he is never cold and prohibitive.

A Christian is something before he does anything; and we have to be Christian before we can act as Christians.

A revival means days of heaven upon earth.

You must go on to remind yourself of God - who God is, and what God is, and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do.

There is no happiness finally, there is no peace, there is no joy except we be right with God. The miserable Christian is wrong in his ideas as to how this rightness with God is to be obtained.

If you can explain what is happening in a church, apart from the sovereign act of God, it is not revival.

If in a Christian pulpit you have no business saying, "I suggest to you" No! "These things I declare to you."

The devil is so subtle that he dominates man and persuades him at the same time that he is not being dominated.

Faith is a refusal to panic, come what may.

The gospel is meant to control and govern everything in our lives.

Faith always shows itself in the whole personality.

Human will-power alone is not enough. Will-power is excellent and we should always be using it; but it is not enough. A desire to live a good life is not enough. Obviously we should all have that desire, but it will not guarantee success.

A man who imagines that because he has a head full of knowledge that he is sufficient for these things had better start learning again. 'Who is sufficient for these things?' What are you doing? You are not simply imparting information, you are dealing with souls, you are dealing with pilgrims on the way to eternity, you are dealing with matters not only of life and death in this world, but with eternal destiny.