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Because the Lord loves us He chastens and rebukes us. Modern sentimentality has reduced God to a tolerant indulgent grandfatherly being who winks at our transgressions.

Vance Havner

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Vance Havner
Age: 77 †
Born: 1886
Born: February 16
Died: 1963
Died: May 2
Clergyman
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Plainfield
New Jersey
Lord
Rebuke
Christian
Indulgent
Transgression
Sentimentality
Tolerant
Chastens
Reduced
Rebukes
Loves
Winks
Modern
Transgressions

More quotes by Vance Havner

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Too many are not willing to give the Gospel a fair trial. They are too ignorant to speak wisely but not wise enough to speak ignorantly. A man is not a sinner because he is a skeptic he is a skeptic because he is a sinner.
Vance Havner
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Jesus is all we have he is all we need and all we want. We are shipwrecked on God and stranded on omnipotence!
Vance Havner
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We may never be martyrs but we can die to self, to sin, to the world, to our plans and ambitions. That is the significance of baptism we died with Christ and rose to new life.
Vance Havner
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Nothing is needed so much as a holy indignation against sin. It is true that there is not enough love for God, and one sign of it is that there is not enough hatred for sin.
Vance Havner
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When God's people are removed from this earth, you might as well try to dam up Niagara Falls with toothpicks as to stem the flood of lawlessness that will engulf mankind. Thank God for the restraining Spirit today!
Vance Havner
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It is not our business to make the message acceptable, but to make it available. We are not to see that they like it, but that they get it.
Vance Havner
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Christmas is based on an exchange of gifts, the gift of God to man - His unspeakable gift of His Son, and the gift of man to God - when we present our bodies a living sacrifice.
Vance Havner
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If you would try out a preacher, send him to preach to farmers: if he cannot make the grade there, let him reconsider his call - or maybe he needs to be converted.
Vance Havner
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I would say to today's young minister, 'Be not afraid to give much time to solitary walks and meditation'.
Vance Havner
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Let it never be forgotten that, although we may do nothing about the Word we hear, the Word will do something to us. The same sun melts ice and hardens clay, and the Word of God humbles or hardens the human heart.
Vance Havner
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We are suffering today from a species of Christianity as dry as dust, as cold as ice, as pale as a corpse, and as dead as King Tut. We are suffering not from a lack of correct heads but of consumed hearts.
Vance Havner
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People get so used to the dark that they think it is growing brighter.
Vance Havner
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I'm tired of hearing sin called sickness and alcoholism a disease. It is the only disease I know of that we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spread.
Vance Havner
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If the devil cannot keep you from being saved, if next he fails to make you backslide, then he undertakes to keep you just an average Christian. Here he succeeds with most believers.
Vance Havner
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We are so prone to expect to become good Christians by some sudden experience that lifts us all at once to higher ground without the gradual climb. We forget that we are to grow in grace and that normal growth is not a matter of fits and starts.
Vance Havner
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To some Christianity is an argument. To many it is a performance. To a few, it is experience.
Vance Havner
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An old minister explained the smudges on his sermon outlines by saying they were caused by sweat and tears. And without those two marks, a sermon is not a sermon.
Vance Havner
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If you are what you've always been, you are not a Christian. A Christian is a new creation.
Vance Havner
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Abraham did not know where he was going immediately, but he knew where he was going ultimately. He did not know the Whither but he knew the Whom. He believed God, and, being sure of his destiny, he did not worry about his destination.
Vance Havner
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It is one of the ironies of the ministry that the very man who works in God's name is often hardest put to find time for God. The parents of Jesus lost Him at church, and they were not the last ones to lose Him there.
Vance Havner