Quotes from John R. Rice

When you get saved, you get saved not because you deserve it, but because you simply let God save you and because you confess your own poor sinful state and your inability to save yourself.

God's people should be baptized because God commanded it, not because some church requires it.

If you were enough like God, some one wouldn't like you.

He that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.

God doesn't send His children to Hell either. It's just the Devil's children that God sends to Hell. Why should God look after the Devil's children.

After one is right with God and pleases God, the next most important thing in all the world is to be right with one's own father and mother.

No one can be a good Christian who does not with holy zeal set out to know, delight in, and live by the Word of God!

Prayer is asking; the answer to prayer is receiving.

According to the Bible, a genuine answer to prayer is getting what you ask for.

It is a sad and shocking fact that many religious people are in Hell.

You can never truly enjoy Christmas until you can look up into the Father's face and tell him you have received his Christmas gift.

No matter what a man's past may have been, his future is spotless.

God's people should be baptized because God commanded it, not because some church requires it.

Jesus Himself also said, "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life" (John 3:36). When you trusted Jesus Christ, He saved you. I will pray for you that you will believe God and quit depending on your feelings and emotions. It would be wrong for me to be praying for God to give you the kind of feeling you want. That is not the way we are to know we are saved. We know we are saved because God said it and we have faith to believe it. Faith takes God's Word as true and relies upon it.

If you came to Christ, that was saving faith. Now then He wants you to have faith in His Word for assurance. That is simply to leave the matter with God and believe what He said.

God is ready and waiting to receive sinners who put their heart's trust in Jesus and want to be saved, and to pretend that He requires a long period of mourning and sorrow before He will accept a sinner and save him is contrary to the teaching of the Bible.

In the Sweet By and By," "When We All Get to Heaven," "Oh, Come, Angel Band," the magnificent "Glory Song" sung around the world in the Torrey-Alexander meetings, had their tremendous hold on people, no doubt because of the happy hope they expressed for Heaven. The human heart longs for an assurance of a blessed, immortal place where those made righteous, the forgiven, the blessed are at home with God; when sin, disappointment, human failure, heartache, disease and death are forever ended!

The so-called "social gospel" lays stress upon this life, not on the next. In many quarters it is now regarded as very old-fashioned and passe' to urge people to prepare to die. Social security, better housing, relief for tenant farmers, better living conditions for the poor and the care of underprivileged children—these have occupied so much of the teaching and preaching of these modern days, that preachers have left hungry-hearted people ignorant about Heaven.

This world is only an anteroom of the next. This short life is incidental compared with eternity. This world is not home to the Christian.

Don't think of Heaven as a ghostly, unreal, indefinite state. It is a real place, a place as literal and concrete as the house you sit in today, as physically real as the city where you live.

Remember that in six days Christ made the heavens and earth and all that in them is. "Without him was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:3). If He made so many wonders in six days, then what beauties and marvels He has surely prepared during these 1900 years in which He has been preparing our mansions in the Father's House!

Of all the race of mankind, the only two men that we know definitely went to Heaven without dying were Enoch and Elijah. They were translated while yet alive and physically transferred to Heaven. With chariot and horses of fire, Elijah was carried to Heaven in a whirlwind. Therefore, we know there are at least three beings in Heaven with physical bodies—Jesus, Enoch and Elijah.

Eventually, if enough masses are said and prayers uttered, the soul may pass from purgatory into Heaven. But that is not taught in the Bible. It is based on a doctrine of salvation by works and by the church instead of redemption by the blood of Christ. It is used to extort money from those who hope to shorten the period of suffering of their loved ones that they may the sooner enter Heaven.

Sweet assurance of this truth is given. In Luke 23:39-43 we see how the repenting thief turned to Jesus on the cross beside him and said, "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.