Quotes About Jonathan Edwards

Holiness appeared to me to be of a sweet, pleasant, charming, serene, calm nature; which brought an inexpressible purity, brightness, peacefulness and ravishment to the soul.

Grace is the seed of glory, the dawning of glory in the heart, and therefore grace is the earnest of the future inheritance.

As Jonathan Edwards observed a long time ago, we act on our strongest motive. If our strongest motive, our deepest desire, is to know God, it will generate the discipline that we need to pursue this, because we will want to know God more than anything else. If this is not our strongest motive, we will find ourselves with multiple, alternative, and competing foci. These will inevitably distract us.

If we make a great show of respect and love to God, in the outward actions, while there is no sincerity in the heart, it is but hypocrisy and practical lying unto the Holy One.

Jonathan Edwards, the colonial-era theologian of Massachusetts, said God has called His people to be "distinguishingly happy.

Spiritual delight in God arises chiefly from his beauty and perfection, not from the blessings he gives us.

Nothing sets a person so much out of the devil's reach as humility.

Whether God has decreed all things that ever come to pass or not, all that own the being of a God, own that He knows all things beforehand. Now, it is self-evident that if He knows all things beforehand, He either doth approve of them or doth not approve of them; that is, He either is willing they should be, or He is not willing they should be. But to will that they should be is to decree them (Jonathan Edwards).

There has been a wonderful alteration in my mind, in respect to the doctrine of God's sovereignty.… The doctrine has very often appeared exceeding pleasant, bright and sweet. Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God. JONATHAN EDWARDS

By the grace of God we will never pluck unripe fruit. We will never press people to decision, because we'll lead them to damnation and not salvation.

greatest concern is not for your health, or temporal welfare, but for the good of your soul. Though

The harder the heart is, the more dead is it in sin, and the more unable to exert good affections and acts.

If a sight of Christ's outward glory might give a rational assurance of His divinity, why might not an apprehension of He is spiritual glory do so too?

our Redeemer, who was infinitely the most wonderful example of love that was ever witnessed.

Because if the Will be already inclined, before it exerts its own sovereign power on itself, then its inclination is not wholly owing to itself:

What influences, directs, or determines, the mind or will, to such a conclusion or choice as it does form?

There arises from this sense of divine excellency of things contained in the word of God a conviction of the truth and reality of them; and that either indirectly or directly. First

As for instance, that notion that there is a Christ, and that Christ is holy and gracious, is conveyed to the mind by the word of God: but the sense of the excellency of Christ by reason of that holiness and grace, is nevertheless immediately the work of the Holy Spirit.—I

His aim, in all his investigations, was the discovery and the defence of truth.

But their meeting at the day of judgment will be exceeding diverse, in its manner and circumstance, from any such meetings and interviews as they have one with another in the present state.

God's leaving men to the power of the sin and corruption of the heart is often expressed by God's hardening their hearts: Rom. 9:18 , "Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.

How great therefore may the resemblance be, as to all outward expressions and appearances, between a hypocrite and a true saint!

The Indian languages are extremely barbarous and barren, and very ill fitted for communicating things moral and divine, or even things speculative and abstract.

As there is no true religion where there is nothing else but affection, so there is no true religion where there is no religious affection.