James Stalker > Quotes

“If a man turns his back on Christ when He speaks, the hour will come when he will ask and receive no answer.”
― James Stalker, The Life of Jesus Christ: A Biographical Overview of the Life of Christ

“These are the things that gave [Jesus] such faith and fearlessness in His work. He knew that the call to do it had come from God, and He knew that He was immortal until it was done.

This was what made Him, with all His self-consciousness and originality, the pattern of meekness and submission, for He was forever bringing every thought and wish into obedience to His Father’s will.

This was the secret of the peace and majestic calmness that imparted such a stateliness to His demeanour in the most difficult hours of life. He knew that the worst that could happen to Him was His Father’s will for Him, and that was enough.”
― James Stalker, The Life of Jesus Christ: A Biographical Overview of the Life of Christ

“There is no more critical test of theologies and theologians than the question what message they have to a dying person whose sins are unforgiven. If the salvation which a preacher has to offer is only a course of moral improvement, what can he have to say in such a place?”
― James Stalker

“Pilate had perfected the political art of compromise.”
― James Stalker, The Life of Jesus Christ: A Biographical Overview of the Life of Christ

“If we understood it, the silence of Christ is the most eloquent of all appeals. Can you remember when you used to hear Him—when the words of the Book and the preacher used to move you in church, when the singing awoke aspiration, when the Sabbath was holy ground, when the Spirit of God strove with you? And is that all passed of passing away?”
― James Stalker, The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion

“It is a forgotten truth that the manhood of Jesus was from first to last dependent on the Holy Ghost.

We are apt to imagine that its connection with His divine nature rendered this unnecessary. On the contrary, it made it far more necessary, for in order to be the organ of His divine nature, His human nature had both to be endowed with the highest gifts and constantly sustained in their exercise. We are in the habit of attributing the wisdom and grace of His words, His supernatural knowledge of even the thoughts of men, and the miracles He performed, to His divine nature. But in the Gospels they are constantly attributed to the Holy Ghost.

This does not mean that they were independent of His divine nature, but that in them His human nature was enabled to be the organ of His divine nature by a peculiar gift of the Holy Ghost. This gift was given Him at His baptism.”
― James Stalker, The Life of Jesus Christ: A Biographical Overview of the Life of Christ

“he cut his way out of the jungle of these prepossessions, accepted the equality of all men in Christ, and applied this principle relentlessly in all its issues.”
― James Stalker, The Life of St. Paul

“[Pilate] washed his hands when he should have exerted them.”
― James Stalker, The Life of Jesus Christ: A Biographical Overview of the Life of Christ

“The preaching of Jesus shows how deeply He had drunk the essence of natural beauty and reveled in the changing aspects of the seasons. It was when wandering in these fields as a lad that He gathered the images of beauty that He poured out in His parables and addresses. It was on that hill that He acquired the habit of retreating to the mountaintops to spend the night in solitary prayer. The doctrines of His preaching were not thought out on the spur of the moment – they were poured out in a living stream when the occasion came – but the water had been gathered into the hidden well for many years before. In the fields and on the mountainside, He had thought them out during the years of happy and undisturbed meditation and prayer.”
― James Stalker, The Life of Jesus Christ: A Biographical Overview of the Life of Christ

“Some of those now hearing me will, before this time next year, do things which, if whispered to them now, would call forth the angry retort: Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing? On the other hand, there are those who will, within a year, perform acts of heroic faith and love which they would not now believe though a man should show them unto them. We never know what is in us, or what manner of men we are, till the trial comes.”
― James Stalker, The Four Men