Donald S. Whitney > Quotes

“Can we expect the flames of our worship of God to burn brightly in public on the Lord’s Day when they barely flicker for Him in secret on other days?”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“No Spiritual Discipline is more important than the intake of God’s Word. Nothing can substitute for it. There simply is no healthy Christian life apart from a diet of the milk and meat of Scripture. The reasons for this are obvious. In the Bible God tells us about Himself, and especially about Jesus Christ, the incarnation of God. The Bible unfolds the Law of God to us and shows us how we’ve all broken it. There we learn how Christ died as a sinless, willing Substitute for breakers of God’s Law and how we must repent and believe in Him to be right with God. In the Bible we learn the ways and will of the Lord. We find in Scripture how God wants us to live, and what brings the most joy and satisfaction in life. None of this eternally essential information can be found anywhere else except the Bible. Therefore if we would know God and be godly, we must know the Word of God—intimately.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“Why do so many Christians neglect the study of God’s Word? R. C. Sproul said it painfully well: “Here then, is the real problem of our negligence. We fail in our duty to study God’s Word not so much because it is difficult to understand, not so much because it is dull and boring, but because it is work. Our problem is not a lack of intelligence or a lack of passion. Our problem is that we are lazy.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life with Bonus Content

“And in my own pastoral and personal Christian experience, I can say that I’ve never known a man or woman who came to spiritual maturity except through discipline. Godliness comes through discipline.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“The reason we come away so cold from reading the word is because we do not warm ourselves at the fire of meditation.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“What value is there to reading one, three, or more chapters of Scripture only to find that after you’ve finished, you can’t recall a thing you’ve read? It’s better to read a small amount of Scripture and meditate on it than to read an extensive section without meditation.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“If you will not worship God seven days a week,” said A. W. Tozer, “you do not worship Him on one day a week.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“The text of the Bible means what God inspired it to mean, not “what it means to me.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Praying the Bible

“Consistent, father-led family worship is one of the best, steadiest, and most easily measurable ways to bring up children in the Lord’s “discipline and instruction.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Family Worship

“I maintain that people—truly born-again, genuinely Christian people—often do not pray simply because they do not feel like it. And the reason they don’t feel like praying is that when they do pray, they tend to say the same old things about the same old things.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Praying the Bible

“But don’t stop worshiping. Never give up in the desert. You don’t know how wide it is, and you may be almost across.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“But even though disciplining yourself is sometimes diffcult and involves struggle, self-discipline is not self-punishment. It is instead an attempt to do what, prompted by the Spirit, you actually want in your heart to do.”
― Donald Whitney

“To read the Bible and not to meditate was seen as an unfruitful exercise: better to read one chapter and meditate afterward than to read several chapters and not to meditate.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“So basically what you are doing is taking words that originated in the heart and mind of God and circulating them through your heart and mind back to God. By this means his words become the wings of your prayers.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Praying the Bible

“To pray the Bible, you simply go through the passage line by line, talking to God about whatever comes to mind as you read the text.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Praying the Bible

“We could summarize the views of our Christian heroes across the centuries with a sentence from Jonathan Edwards: “Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Family Worship

“Too much attention to a particular sin or sins, and/or too little attention to communion with God (two things that often occur in tandem) inevitably shrivel the soul of a Christian.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Ten Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health

“No Spiritual Discipline is more important than the intake of God’s Word. Nothing can substitute for it. There simply is no healthy Christian life apart from a diet of the milk and meat of Scripture.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“Evangelism is a natural overflow of the Christian life. Every Christian should be able to talk about what the Lord has done for him or her and what He means to him or her. But evangelism is also a Discipline in that we must discipline ourselves to get into situations where evangelism can occur, that is, we must not just wait for witnessing opportunities to happen.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“If you are a Christian, two people live in your body - you and the Holy Spirit...And the Holy Spirit is not passive within you.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Ten Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health

“Memorizing Scripture strengthens your faith because it repeatedly reinforces the truth, often just when you need to hear it again.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life with Bonus Content

“And when prayer is boring, we don’t feel like praying. And when we don’t feel like praying, it’s hard to make ourselves pray. Even five or six minutes of prayer can feel like an eternity. Our mind wanders half the time. We’ll suddenly come to ourselves and think, “Now where was I? I haven’t been thinking of God for the last several minutes.” And we’ll return to that mental script we’ve repeated countless times. But almost immediately our minds begin to wander again because we’ve said the same old things about the same old things so many times.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Praying the Bible

“Martin Luther expressed God’s expectation of prayer this way: “As it is the business of tailors to make clothes and of cobblers to mend shoes, so it is the business of Christians to pray.”[2]”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“Discipline without direction is drudgery.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“The alternative to discipline is disaster. VANCE HAVNER”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“Open the Bible, start reading it, and pause at every verse and turn it into a prayer. John Piper”
― Donald S. Whitney, Praying the Bible

“The people of God do not serve Him in order to be forgiven but because we are forgiven.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“If people threw away their money as thoughtlessly as they throw away their time, we would think them insane. Yet time is infinitely more precious than money because money can’t buy time.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“Many of the great movements of God can be traced to a small group of people He called together to begin praying.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“From matters as crucial as the death of Jesus, to those as mundane as eating and drinking, the Bible presents the glo ry of God as the ultimate priority and the definitive criterion by which we should evaluate everything.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Simplify Your Spiritual Life: Spiritual Disciplines for the Overwhelmed