Quotable

God loves broken things and broken people. As Vance Havner wrote, "It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that sheds forth perfume. It is Jacob limping from Jabbok who has power with God and men. It is Peter weeping bitterly who returns to greater power than ever."

William MacDonald, The Forgotten Command: Be Holy, 195

Out of the heart "are the issues of life...." As our thoughts are, so are our affections...our prayers, and all else....God...knows the thoughts and judges them....In what does the difficulty of Christianity lie [but] in keeping of the thoughts in bounds. Without this, all religion is but "bodily exercise." Papists may mumble over their prayers, hypocrites may talk, but this is godliness.

Thomas Goodwin (1600-1680), The Vanity of Thoughts, 28

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne-
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.

James Russell Lowell, 1819-1891