R. A. Torrey

“ And when we are justified we step into His place, the place of perfect acceptance before God, or to use the exact words of Scripture, we "Become the righteousness of God in him." To be justified is more than to be forgiven! Forgiveness is negative, the putting away of sin; Justification is positive, the reckoning of positive and perfect righteousness to the one justified. Jesus Christ is so united to the believer in Him that God reckons our sins to Him. The believer, on the other hand, is so united to Christ that God reckons His righteousness to us. ”

“ Shallow views of sin and of God's holiness and of the glory of Jesus Christ lie at the bottom of weak theories of the doom of the impenitent. When we see Sin in all its hideousness and enormity, the Holiness of God in all its perfection, and the Glory of Jesus Christ in all its infinity, nothing but a doctrine that those who persist in the choice of sin, who love darkness rather than light, and who persist in the rejection of the Son of God, shall endure everlasting anguish, will satisfy the demands of our own moral intuitions. ”

“ Every day of your life you kneel down before God the Father, at least I hope you do, and say, "Heavenly Father, I thank thee for thy great love that led thee to give thy Son to come down to this world and die upon the cross of Calvary in my place." Every day of your life you kneel down and look up into the face of Jesus Christ the Son and say, "Thou blessed Son of God, I thank thee for that great love of thine that led thee to come down to this world in obedience to the Father and die in my place upon the cross of Calvary." ”

“ Without the Bible Doctrine of the Atonement you have no Christianity, but the Devil's substitute for Christianity. Without the Bible Doctrine of the Atonement you have no real gospel, but an utterly false and soul-destroying philosophy. In speaking on the doctrine of the Deity of Christ I said: "If a man really holds to right views concerning the person of Jesus Christ he will sooner or later get right views on every other question, but if he holds a wrong view concerning the person of the Lord Jesus Christ he is pretty sure to go wrong on everything else sooner or later." ”

“ Turn now to Eph. 6:11: "Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil." Here we are taught that, in order "to stand against the wiles of the Devil" we must "Put on the whole armour of God." What that armour is, is found in the verses that immediately follow. This armour, this whole armour, this "panoply of God," is at our disposal. The fact that there is a Devil, that he is a being of such majesty, dignity, cunning, and power, that he is so incessantly plotting our ruin and to undermine our faith, is no reason for fear or discouragement. ”

“ To sum it all up, the Holy Spirit is a Person. Theoretically we probably all believed this before, but do we in our real thought of Him, in our practical attitude toward Him, treat Him as a person? Do we really regard Him as real a person as Jesus Christ is, as loving, as wise, as strong, as worthy of our confidence and love, and surrender as He? A Divine Person always by our side? The Holy Spirit came into this world to be to the disciples of our Lord after our Lord's own departure, and to be to us, what Jesus Christ had been to them during the days of His personal companionship with them. ”

“ If we ever doubted before that there was a Devil, and just such a Devil as the Bible pictures, we can scarcely doubt it now, when we consider the action of the rulers of the earth in this present mad world war. How could beings so intelligent in matters of science and philosophy and economics as the present rulers of Germany are, ever be guilty of plunging the nations of the earth into this mad war? ”

“ The Saviour in whom we believe is God, a Saviour for whom nothing is too hard, a Saviour who can save from the uttermost and save to the uttermost. Oh, how we should rejoice that we have no merely human Saviour, but a Saviour that is absolutely God. On the other hand, how black is the guilt of rejecting such a Saviour as this! Whoever refuses to accept Jesus as his Divine Saviour and Lord is guilty of the enormous sin of rejecting a Saviour Who is God. Many a man thinks he is good because he never stole, or committed murder, or cheated. ”

“ At all events the doctrine of conscious, eternal torment for impenitent men is clearly revealed in the Word of God, and whether we can defend it on philosophical grounds or not, it is our business to believe it; and leave it to the clearer light of eternity to explain what we cannot now understand, realising that God may have many infinitely wise reasons for doing things for which we in our ignorance can see no sufficient reason at all. It is the most ludicrous conceit for beings so limited and foolish as the wisest of men are, to attempt to dogmatise how a God of infinite wisdom must act. ”

“ It is true that we are justified simply upon faith apart from the works of the law, but it must be a real faith, otherwise it does not justify. As some one has put it, "We are justified by faith without works, but we are not justified by a faith that is without works." The faith which God sees and upon which He justifies, leads inevitably to works which men can see. God saw the faith of Abraham the moment Abraham believed, and before there was any opportunity to work, and counted that faith to Abraham for righteousness. ”

“ It teaches us that the Holy Spirit is not a mere blind influence or power, no matter how beneficent, that comes into our hearts and lives, but that He is a Divine Person, loving us with the tenderest love. I wonder how many of us have ever thought much regarding "the love of the Spirit." I wonder how many of us ministers who are here to-day have ever preached a sermon on the love of the Spirit. I wonder how many of you have ever heard a sermon on the love of the Spirit. ”

“ The God of the Bible is to be clearly distinguished not merely from the God of the Pantheists who has no existence separate from His creation, but also from the God of the Deists who has created the world and put into it all the necessary powers of self-government and development and set it going and left it to go of itself. The God of the Bible is a God who is personally and actively present in the affairs of the universe to-day. He sustains, governs, cares for the world He has created, He shapes the whole present history of the world. ”

“ Suppose a man had a wife who was one of the noblest, purest, truest women that ever lived, would her husband's questioning her purity and nobility change the fact? It would not. It would simply make that husband guilty of awful slander, it would simply prove that man to be an outrageous scoundrel. So denying the Deity of Jesus Christ, does not make his Deity any less a fact, but it does make the denier of His Deity guilty of awful, incredible, blasphemous slander. It does prove you who deny His Deity to be——. ”

“ Was He and is He a being worthy of our absolute faith, and supreme love, and our unhesitating obedience, and our whole-hearted worship, just as God the Father is worthy of our absolute faith and supreme love and unhesitating obedience and our whole-hearted worship? Should all men honour Jesus Christ even as they honour God the Father (John 5:23) ? Not merely is He an example that we can wisely follow, or a Master whom we can wisely serve, but is He a God Whom we can rightly worship? ”

“ From these passages we see that there is a progressive work of Sanctification, an increasing in love, an abounding more and more in a godly walk and in pleasing God, a growing in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, a being transformed into the image of our Lord from glory unto glory, each new gaze at Him making us more like Him; a growing up into Christ in all things, until we attain unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. ”

“ Paul's Spirit-given words here read, "Now if Christ be preached that he hath been raised from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? (Mark, not no immortality of the soul, but no resurrection of the dead.) But if there is no resurrection of the dead neither hath Christ been raised: and if Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, your faith also is vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we witness of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up if so be that the dead are not raised. ”

“ To sum up the teaching of all these passages that are so often urged to prove universal salvation, there is nothing in any one of the passages, nor in all of them together, to teach that all men will ultimately be saved, and there is nothing in them to in any way conflict with what we have seen to be the honest meaning of the passages studied above, namely, that the future punishment of sin is absolutely endless. There is not a passage to be found in the Bible that teaches universal salvation, or that all men will ultimately come to repentance and be saved. ”

“ The teaching is inescapable that the Bible contains truth that men never had discovered and never could have discovered if left to themselves, but truth which the Father in great grace has revealed to His children through His servants the prophets and apostles. We see in this the folly, a folly so common in our day, of seeking to test the statements of Scripture by the conclusions of human reasoning, or by the intuitions of the "Christian consciousness." The revelation of God transcends human reasoning, and therefore human reasoning cannot be its test. ”

“ If the vilest murderer or sinner of any kind on earth should come in here this morning and right here now, hearing the gospel of God's grace, should believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, put confidence in Him as his Saviour, and accept Him as such, surrendering to Him and confessing Him as His Lord, the moment he did it every sin he ever committed would be blotted out and his record would be as white in God's sight as that of the purest angel in heaven. God has absolutely nothing that He reckons against the believer in Jesus Christ. ”

“ We cannot settle the question by reasoning as to what such a being as God must do, for how can finite and foolish man judge what an infinitely holy and infinitely wise God would do? Man never appears more foolish than when he tries to reason out what an infinite God must do. All these arguments about hell by reasoning as to what God must, or must not, do are stupid. ”

“ What a picture we have here of the omnipotence and awful majesty of God!
Not only is nature represented as being absolutely subject to God's will and word, but men also are represented as being absolutely subject to His will and word. ”

“ Nothing but the fact that we dread suffering more than we loathe sin, and more than we love the glory of Jesus Christ, makes us repudiate the thought that beings who eternally choose sin should eternally suffer, or that men who despise God's mercy and spurn His Son should be given over to endless anguish. ”

“ It is an utterly foolish and vicious principle of Biblical interpretation that we must interpret every passage of the Bible so that we can readily reconcile it with every other passage. It is this principle of interpretation that gives rise to a one-sided, and therefore untrue, theology. One man, for example, takes the Calvinistic passages in the Bible and believes them and twists and distorts the other passages; that teach the freedom of man, to make them fit with those that teach the sovereignty of God, and he becomes a one-sided Calvinist. ”

“ Hell is incomparably more awful than the war now raging in Europe, and this awful hell of which we have been studying to-night is the destiny of some of you here in this room, unless you soon repent and accept the Lord Jesus Christ. Other appalling facts about hell we will take up next Sunday night, but we have already seen enough to make any true Christian determine to work with all his might to save others from this awful hell. And we have seen enough to make every honest and sensible person here to-night determine to escape this awful hell at any cost. ”

“ Inspiration may appear questionable or even absurd, but any regenerate and Spirit-taught man who ponders the words of the Scripture day by day, and year after year, will become thoroughly and immovably convinced that the wisdom of God is in the very words used as well as in the thought which is expressed in the words. It is a significant and deeply impressive fact that our difficulties with the Bible rapidly disappear as we note the precise language used. ”

“ If not, you are outside of the Kingdom of God and you are bound for an everlasting hell unless you are born again. But if you are not already born again you may be born again to-day, you may be born again before you leave this building, you may be born again right now; for the Word of God says, "As many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." ”

“ They believe that whoever sins must suffer, and that the suffering which sin causes will not be limited to this present life. But, while almost all intelligent people who believe in a future life at all believe that there is some kind of future punishment, there are many that do not believe in a literal hell, that is, in a place of awful and unutterable torment. Is there a hell? Is there a place to which impenitent men and women will go some time after death and suffer agonies far beyond those that any one suffers here on earth? ”

“ The Holy Spirit in other words, is not a mere illumination that comes to your mind and mine whereby our minds are cleared and strengthened to see truth that they would not otherwise discover. The Holy Spirit is a Person who Himself knows the things of God and reveals to us what He Himself knows. ”