Some New Year Resolutions

Get to know yourself; your sins, your wants and needs; and remind yourself of these when you go to prayer, so that your prayer will have both humility and urgency. When men are wilful strangers to themselves and never look backwards or inwards to see what is amiss or wanting, nor look forward to see the prospect before them, no wonder if their hearts be dead and dull, and if they are as unfit to pray as a sleeping man to work.

Richard Baxter

Read and meditate much on the Bible in private - then you will be the better able to understand when it is being explained in public. The sermon will be of little help to you if you are a stranger to the Bible.

Richard Baxter

I warn everyone who loves his soul to be very jealous as to the preaching he regularly hears, and the place of worship he regularly attends.

He who deliberately settles down under any ministry which is positively unsound is a very unwise man. I will never hesitate to speak my mind on this point. I know well that many think it a shocking thing for a man to forsake his parish Church. I cannot see with the eyes of such people. To hear unscriptural teaching fifty-two Sundays in every year is a serious thing. It is a continual dropping of slow poison into the mind. I think it almost impossible for a man wilfully to submit himself to it, and not take harm.

I see in the New Testament we are plainly told to "prove all things" … I see in the Book of Proverbs that we are commanded to "cease to hear the instruction which causeth to err from the works of knowledge". If these sound words do not justify a man in ceasing to worship at a Church, if positively false doctrine is preached in it, I know not what words can.

J.C. Ryle

Lord! Make me as holy as a pardoned sinner can be.

Rbt. Murray McCheyne

"Lord, speak to me that I may speak,
In living echoes of Thy tone;
As Thou hast sought, so let me seek
Thy erring children lost and lone".

F.R. Havergal