Alexander MacLaren > Quotes

“No unwelcome tasks become any the less unwelcome by putting them off till tomorrow. It is only when they are behind us and done, that we begin to find that there is a sweetness to be tasted afterwards, and that the remembrance of unwelcome duties unhesitatingly done is welcome and pleasant. Accomplished, they are full of blessing, and there is a smile on their faces as they leave us. Undone, they stand threatening and disturbing our tranquility, and hindering our communion with God. If there be lying before you any bit of work from which you shrink, go straight up to it, and do it at once. The only way to get rid of it is to do it.”
― Alexander MacLaren

“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. ”
― Alexander MacLaren

“love is the only fire that is hot enough to melt the iron obstinacy of a creatures will”
― Alexander MacLaren

“Seek to cultivate a buoyant joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life.”
― Alexander Maclaren

“Love is the foundation of all obedience.”
― Alexander MacLaren

“Oh, when we are journeying through the murky night and the dark woods of affliction and sorrow, it is something to find here and there a spray broken, or a leafy stem bent down with the tread of His foot and the brush of His hand as He passed; and to remember that the path He trod He has hallowed, and thus to find lingering fragrance and hidden strength in the remembrance of Him as " in all points tempted like as we are," bearing grief for us, bearing grief with us, bearing grief like us.”
― Alexander Maclaren

“God looks on the upright, as has been said; and the upright shall gaze on Him.... That mutual gaze is blessedness. They who looking up behold Jehovah are brave to front all foes and to keep calm hearts in the midst of alarms. Hope burns like a pillar of fire in them when it is gone out in others; and to all the suggestions of their own timidity or of others they have the answer, "In the Lord have I put my trust; how say ye to my soul, Flee? Here I stand; I can do no otherwise. God help me. Amen.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Psalms

“He that has his trust set upon God does not need to dread anything except the weakening or the paralyzing of that trust.”
― Alexander MacLaren

“Christ wrought out His perfect obedience as a man, through temptation, and by suffering.”
― Alexander MacLaren

“The tears of Christ are the pity of God. The gentleness of Jesus is the long-suffering of God. The tenderness of Jesus is the love of God. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.”
― Alexander MacLaren

“Sorrow and loss are meant to prepare us for the vision of God to purge the inward eye that it may see Him.”
― Alexander MacLaren

“The cross had touched his heart and will. That was all. It had changed his whole being. He is a living illustration of Paul’s teaching in this very letter. He is dead with Christ to his old self; he lives with Christ a new life. The gospel can do that. It can and does do so to-day and to us, if we will. Nothing else can; nothing else ever has done it; nothing else ever will. Culture may do much; social reformation may do much; but the radical transformation of the nature is only effected by the “love of God shed abroad in the heart,” and by the new life which we receive through our faith in Christ.”
― Alexander MacLaren, The Expositor's Bible: Colossians and Philemon

“The Passover as a feast is a prophecy of the great Sacrifice, by virtue of whose sprinkled blood we all may be sheltered from the sweep of the divine judgment, and on which we all have to feed if there is to be any life in us. Our propitiation is our food. 'Christ for us' must become 'Christ in us,' received and appropriated by our faith as the strength of our lives. The Christian life is meant to be a joyful feast on the Sacrifice, and communion with God based upon it. We feast on Christ when the mind feeds on Him as truth, when the heart is filled and satisfied with His love, when the conscience clings to Him as its peace, when the will esteems the 'words of His mouth more than' its 'necessary food,' when all desires, hopes, and inward powers draw their supplies from Him, and find their object in His sweet sufficiency. Nor”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture

“Rich or poor, high or low, all men are equal in sin. There are surface differences and degrees, but a deep identity beneath. So on the same principle all souls are of the same value. Here is the true democracy of Christianity. So there is one ransom for all, for the need of all is identical. III.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture

“A soul truly living in the contemplation of the future, and filled with God's promises, will never be eager to insist on its rights, or to stand on its dignity, and will take too accurate a measure of the worth of things temporal to get into a heat about them. The clash of conflicting interests, and the bad blood bred by them, seem infinitely small, when we are up on the height of communion with God. An acre or two more or less of grass land does not look all-important, when our vision of the city which hath foundations is clear. So an elevated calm and 'sweet reasonableness' will mark the man who truly lives by faith, and he will seek after the things that make for peace.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture

“When the bonds which knit society to God are relaxed, selfishness soon becomes furious, and forcibly seizes what it lusts after, regardless of others' rights. Sin saps the very foundations of social life, and makes men into tigers, more destructive to each other than wild beasts. All our grand modern schemes for the reformation of society will fail unless they begin with the reformation of the individual. To walk with God is the true way to make men gentle and pitying.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture

“Noah did not leave the ark, though 'the earth was dry.' God had 'shut him in,' and it must be God who brings him out. We have to take heed of precipitate departure from the place where He has fixed us. Like Israel in the desert, it must be 'at the commandment of the Lord' that we pitch the camp, and at the commandment of the Lord that we journey. Till He speaks we must remain, and as soon as He speaks we must remove. 'God spake unto Noah, saying, Go forth … and Noah went forth.' Thus prompt must be our obedience.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture

“There are so many things that seem doubtful because we do not bring the test of the highest motive to bear on them. Complications would fall away when we only wished to know and be like Christ.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture

“You have nothing to do but to receive the things that are freely given to you of God—the forgiveness, the cleansing, the life, that come from Christ by faith.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Psalms

“The only thorough cure for social evils is individual regeneration.”
― Alexander MacLaren, MacLaren On The Bible: Alexander MacLaren’s Exposition Of Holy Scripture

“Seek to be the man that you are least likely to be, and aim at a comprehensive development of 'all righteousness and goodness and truth.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John

“lives.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John

“Nothing is more common than that a man shall know perfectly well that some possibly trivial habit stands in the way of something that it is his interest or his duty to pursue; but the knowledge lies inoperative in the outermost part of him. It is so in regard to graver things. The majority of the slaves of any vice whatsoever know perfectly well that they ought to give it up, and yet nothing comes of the conviction.”
― Alexander MacLaren, MacLaren's Commentary (Expositions Of Holy Scripture) 32 Books In 1 Volume.: An Expositor's Bible Commentary

“We are plunged into the midst of a scene of things which obviously does not match our capacities. There is a great deal more in every man than can ever find a field of expression, of work, or of satisfaction in anything beneath the stars. And no man that understands, even superficially, his own character, his own requirements, can fail to feel in his sane and quiet moments, when the rush of temptation and the illusions of this fleeting life have lost their grip upon him: 'This is not the place that can bring out all that is in me, or that can yield me all that I desire.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture

“hearts here that love Jesus Christ and keep in unison with Him, and are sympathetic with His desires, will learn to know His will, and will re-echo the music that comes from Him. And if our supreme desire is to know what pleases Jesus Christ, depend upon it the desire will not be in vain, 'If any man wills to do His will he shall know of the doctrine.' Ninety per cent. of all our perplexities as to conduct come from our not having a pure and simple wish to do what is right in His sight, clearly supreme above all others.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John

“God the Eternal Object. To find Him in everything, and everything in Him, is to be at rest.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture

“To-day is given us mainly that we may learn to know God better, and to love Him more, and to serve Him more joyfully.”
― Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John

“Jesus wrought His miracles, not coldly, in order to witness to His mission, but every one of them was… the outcome, of His own sympathetic heart brought into contact with human need. And instead of the miracles of Jesus Christ being cold, logical proofs of His mission, they were all glowing with the earnestness of a loving sympathy, and came from Him at sight of sorrow as naturally as rays beam out from the sun.”
― Alexander MacLaren

“He does not show Himself to us in order merely that we may know, but in order that, knowing, we may do, and, what is more than either knowing or doing, in order that we may be.”
― Alexander MacLaren, The Expositor's Bible: Colossians and Philemon

“Worthiness or unworthiness is to be swept clean out of the field, and I am to be content to be a pauper, to owe everything to what I have done nothing to procure, and to cast myself on the sole, all-sufficient mercy of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.”
― Alexander MacLaren, MacLaren's Commentary (Expositions Of Holy Scripture) 32 Books In 1 Volume.: An Expositor's Bible Commentary