Quotes from Vance Havner

Our Lord holds the keys to the doors of Christian service. You don't have to chase 'key men' around if you know the Keeper of the keys!

Many people are in a rut and a rut is nothing but a grave - with both ends kicked out.

We have always needed old people to keep things from going too fast and young people to keep them from going too slow. Youth has fire and age has light and we need both.

Sometimes your medicine bottle has on it, 'Shake well before using.' That is what God has to do with some of His people. He has to shake them well before they are ever usable.

The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps — we must step up the stairs.

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.

If they had a social gospel in the days of the prodigal son, somebody would have given him a bed and a sandwich and he never would have gone home.

Civilization today reminds me of an ape with a blowtorch playing in a room full of dynamite. It looks like the monkeys are about to operate the zoo, and the inmates are taking over the asylum.

Many people are in a rut and a rut is nothing but a grave--with both ends kicked out.

The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.

The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself.

Too many church services start at eleven sharp and end at twelve dull.

You haven't lost anything when you know were it is. Death can hide but not divide.

God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.

If you are a Christian, you are not a citizen of this world trying to get to heaven; you are a citizen of heaven making your way through this world.

The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.

A soft and sheltered Christianity, afraid to be lean and lone, unwilling to face the storms and brave the heights, will end up fat and foul in the cages of conformity.

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.

We are not going to move this world by criticism of it nor conformity to it, but by the combustion within it of lives ignited by the Spirit of God.

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.

It is better to wake up five hundred Christians than to convert five hundred sinners, for if five hundred Christians really wake up, they will win more than five hundred sinners.

When the Lord's sheep are a dirty grey, all black sheep are more comfortable.

Worry is like a rocking chair. It will give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere.

I believe in the Church and in loyalty to a local church. I am not in favour of that view of the invisible church that makes one invisible at church on Sunday morning.