Top 100 Richard Baxter Quotes
#1. [T]his is the strongest encouragement to them in sinning; and we have need to lay all our batteries against this bulwark of presumption (361).
Richard Baxter
#2. The devils never had a Savior offered to them, but you have; and do you yet make light of Him?
Richard Baxter
#3. The more they love each other, the more they participate in each other's griefs, and one or the other will be frequently under some sort of suffering.
Richard Baxter
#4. Overvalue not therefore the manner of your own worship, and overvilify not other men's of a different mode.
Richard Baxter
#5. Most (Christians) have an ungrounded trust in Christ, hoping that He will pardon, justify and save them, while the world has their hearts, and they live to the flesh. And this trust they take as justifying faith.
Richard Baxter
#6. If life be long I will be glad, that I may long obey; if short, yet why should I be sad to welcome to endless day?
Richard Baxter
#7. Of all the preaching in the world, I hate that preaching which tends to make the hearers laugh, or to move their minds with tickling levity and affect them as stage plays used to, instead of affecting them with a holy reverence for the name of God.
Richard Baxter
#8. Lothness to displease men, makes us undo them (394).
Richard Baxter
#9. Till men are deeply humbled, they can part with Christ and Salvation for a lust, for a little wordly gain, for that which is less than nothing. But when God hath enlightened their consciences, and broken their hearts, then they would give a world for Christ.
Richard Baxter
#10. To be the people of God without regeneration, is as impossible as to be the children of men without generation.
Richard Baxter
#11. If every work of the day had thus its appointed time, we should be better skilled, both in redeeming time and performing duty (556).
Richard Baxter
#12. Consideration doth, as it were, open the door between the head and the heart: the understanding having received truths, lays them up in the memory now, consideration is the conveyer of theme from thence to the affections (571).
Richard Baxter
#13. Publicans and harlots do sooner come to heaven than Pharisees, because they are sooner convinced of their sin and misery.
Richard Baxter
#14. I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.
Richard Baxter
#15. You will cast away your cards and dice when you find the sweetness of youthful learning.
Richard Baxter
#16. God takes men's hearty desires and will, instead of the deed, where they have not power to fulfill it; but he never took the bare deed instead of the will.
Richard Baxter
#17. Preach to yourselves the sermons which you study, before you preach them to others.
Richard Baxter
#18. What a silly, frail, and forward pieces are the best of men (647)!
Richard Baxter
#19. Till thou hast learned to suffer from a saint a well as from the wicked, and to be abused by the godly as well as the ungodly, never look to live a contented or comfortable life, nor ever think thou has truly learned the art of suffering (383).
Richard Baxter
#20. Keep company with the more cheerful sort of the Godly; there is no mirth like the mirth of believers.
Richard Baxter
#21. A little love has made me willingly study, preach, write, and even suffer ...
Richard Baxter
#22. In a divine commonwealth holiness must have the principal honor and encouragement, and a great difference be made between the precious and the vile.
Richard Baxter
#23. Holiness is nothing else but the habitual and predominant devotion and dedication of soul, and body, and life, and all that we have to God; and esteeming, and loving, and serving, and seeking Him, before all the pleasures and prosperity of the flesh.
Richard Baxter
#24. You are not likely to see any general reformation, till you procure family reformation.
Richard Baxter
#25. Is it not enough that all the world is against us, but we must also be against one another? O happy days of persecution, which drove us together in love, whom the sunshine of liberty and prosperity crumbles into dust by our contentions!
Richard Baxter
#26. Use sin as it will use you; spare it not, for it will not spare you; it is your murderer, and the murderer of the world: use it, therefore, as a murderer should be used. Kill it before it kills you.
Richard Baxter
#27. Believe it, brethren, God looks for more from England, than from most nations in the world; and for more from you that enjoy these helps, than from the dark, untaught congregations of the land (271).
Richard Baxter
#28. Prayer must carry on our work as much as preaching; he preacheth not heartily to his people that will not pray for them.
Richard Baxter
#29. I would desire every divine to beware that he tell not the unsanctified, that whoever hath the least degree of love to God for himself, and not as a means to carnal ends, shall certainly be saved ; for he would certainly deceive many thousand miserable souls that should persuade them of this (670).
Richard Baxter
#31. If any have more of the government of thee than Christ, or if thou hadst rather live after any other laws than his, if it were at thy choice, thou art not his disciple (331).
Richard Baxter
#32. O brethren! It is easier to chide at sin, than to overcome it.
Richard Baxter
#33. Study hard, for the well is deep, and our brains are shallow.
Richard Baxter
#34. You shall find this to be God's usual course: not to give his children the taste of his delights till they begin to sweat in seeking after them.
Richard Baxter
#35. I know necessity may cause the Church to tolerate the weak; but woe to us if we tolerate and indulge our own weakness.
Richard Baxter
#36. If family religion were duly attended to and properly discharged, I think the preaching of the Word would not be the common instrument of conversion.
Richard Baxter
#37. It is true, that men may have Christ whenever they are willing to comply with His terms. But if you are not willing now, how can you think you shall be willing hereafter?
Richard Baxter
#38. He that believeth that he believe, believeth himself and not God (333)[.]
Richard Baxter
#39. That physician is no better than a murderer, that negligently delayeth till his patient be dead or past cure (389).
Richard Baxter
#40. Unity in things Necessary, Liberty in things Unnecessary, and Charity in all.
Richard Baxter
#41. And the best, if not heedfully used, will prove the word. The better and keener the knife is, the sooner and deeper will it cut thy fingers, if thou take not heed (647).
Richard Baxter
#42. Seriousness is the very thing wherein consisteth our sincerity. If thou art not serious, thou art not a Christian (279).
Richard Baxter
#43. Never does sin so reign in the Church or State, as when it has gained reputation,or, at least, is no disgrace to the sinner,nor is a matter od offence to we who behold it.
Richard Baxter
#44. [M]editation is the life of of most other duties; and the view of heaven is the life of meditation (559).
Richard Baxter
#45. Our very business is to teach the great lesson of self-denial and humility to our people, and how unfit is it then that we should be proud ourselves!
Richard Baxter
#46. Keep up a humble sense of your own faults, and that will make you compassionate to others
Richard Baxter
#47. When the world is worth nothing, then heaven is worth something. I leave every Christian to judge by his own experience, whether we do not overlove the world more in prosperity than in adversity (374) [.]
Richard Baxter
#48. Thou art standing all this while at the door of eternity, and death is waiting to open the door, and put thee in(247).
Richard Baxter
#50. It is past all question, and agreed on by all sides, that no religion will save a man who is not serious, sincere, and diligent in it. If thou be of the truest religion in the world, and are not true thyself to that religion, the religion is good, but it is none of thine.
Richard Baxter
#51. When the Son of God comes to rescue us and bring us back to God, He does not find in us the ability to believe.
Richard Baxter
#52. Is it but right that our hearts should be on God, when the heart of God is so much on us.
Richard Baxter
#53. As we should not own our duties further than somewhat of Christ is in them, so should we no further our own hearts ; and as we should delight in the creatures no further than they have reference to Christ and eternity, so should we no further approve of our own hearts (483).
Richard Baxter
#54. You are likely to see no general reformation till you procure family reformation. Some little obscure religion there may be in here and there one; but while it sticks in single persons, and is not promoted by these societies, it doth not prosper, nor promise much for future increase.
Richard Baxter
#55. Sirs, so much as your hearts as is empty of Christ and heaven, let it be filled with shame and sorrow, and not with ease (483).
Richard Baxter
#56. Though selfishness hath defiled the whole man, yet sensual pleasure is the chief part of its interest, and, therefore, by the senses it commonly works; and these are the doors and windows by which iniquity entereth into the soul.
Richard Baxter
#59. A holy and heavenly life is a continual pain to the consciences of sinners around you and continually solicits them to change their course.
Richard Baxter
#60. You little know what you have done, when you have first broke the bounds of modesty; you have set open the door of your fancy to the devil, so that he can, almost at his pleasure ever after, represent the same sinful pleasure to you anew.
Richard Baxter
#61. A man pleaser cannot be true to God, because he is a servant to the enemies of his service; the wind of a man's mouth will drive him about as the chaff, from any duty, and to any sin.
Richard Baxter
#62. Despair of ever being saved, "except thou be born again," or of seeing God "without holiness," or of having part in Christ except thou "love him above father, mother, or thy own life." This kind of despair is one of the first steps to heaven.
Richard Baxter
#63. When I compare my slow and unprofitable life with the frequent and wonderful mercies received, it shames me, it silences me, and leaves me inexcusable.
Richard Baxter
#64. The churchyard is the market place where all things are rated at their true value, and those who are approaching it talk of the world and its vanities with a wisdom unknown before.
Richard Baxter
#65. Anger is the rising up of the heart in passionate displacency against an apprehended evil, which would cross or hinder us of some desired good.
Richard Baxter
#66. Nothing below heaven is worth setting our hearts upon.
Richard Baxter
#67. If you do not see yourselves and all things as living, moving, and having their being in God, you see nothing, whatever you may think you see.
Richard Baxter
#68. The longer you delay, the more your sin gets strength and rooting. If you cannot bend a twig, how will you be able to bend it when it is a tree?
Richard Baxter
#70. Special mercy arouses more gratitude than universal mercy.
Richard Baxter
#71. [O]ur English divines are sounder in it than any in the world, generally: I think because they are more practical, and have had more wounded, tender consciences under cure, and less empty speculation and dispute (336-7).
Richard Baxter
#72. It is as hard a thing to maintain a sound understanding, a tender conscience, a lively, gracious, heavenly spirit, and an upright life in the midst of contention, as to keep your candle lighted in the greatest storms.
Richard Baxter
#73. The falseness of your own hearts, if you look not to them, may undo you(15).
Richard Baxter
#74. The devil hath his gunpowder plots, and mines, which may blow you up before you are aware. Not
Richard Baxter
#75. This is the sanctification of your studies: when they are devoted to God, and when He is the end, the object, and the life of them all.
Richard Baxter
#76. Speak to your people as to men that must be awakened, either here or in hell ...
Richard Baxter
#77. Do not mathematics and all sciences seem full of contradictions and impossibilities to the ignorant, which are all resolved and cleared to those that understand them?
Richard Baxter
#78. Lord, I surrender. I am completely overcome by your love.
Richard Baxter
#80. I like not charity unreasonably large for the exempting of ourselves from the labour of duty: I would not choose such a charitable physician that would make his patients believe that they are in no danger, to save himself the labour of attending them for the cure.
Richard Baxter
#81. If anything keep thy soul out of heaven, which God forbid, there is nothing in the world liker to do it, than thy false hopes of being saved, while thou art yet out of the way to salvation(234). (III.III)
Richard Baxter
#82. [O]ur applications are quicker about our sufferings, than our sins(77)[.]
Richard Baxter
#83. The true knowing, living Christian complains more frequently and more bitterly of the wants and woes within him, than without him(55).
Richard Baxter
#84. I must confess, as the experience of my own soul, that the expectation of loving my friends in heaven principally kindles my love to them while on earth.
Richard Baxter
#85. Thou I cannot so freely say, My heart is with thee, my soul longeth after thee ; yet can I say, I long for such a longing heart (648).
Richard Baxter
#86. The sweetest poison doth often bring the surest death (645).
Richard Baxter
#87. There is a great deal of duty that husband and wife owe to one another, such as to instruct, admonish, pray, watch over one another, and be continual helpers to each other in order to their everlasting happiness; they must also patiently bear with the infirmities of each other.
Richard Baxter
#88. When Christ comes with regenerating grace, he finds no man sitting still, but all posting to eternal ruin, and making haste toward hell; till, by conviction, he first brings them to a stand, and then, by conversion, turn first their hearts, and then their lives, sincerely to himself.
Richard Baxter
#89. If only preaching be necessary, let us have none but preachers. What needs there, then, such a stir about government? But if discipline (in its place) be necessary too, what is it but enmity to men's salvation to exclude it?
Richard Baxter
#90. This life was not intended to be the place of our perfection, but the preparation for it.
Richard Baxter
#91. What we most value, we shall think no pains too great to gain.
Richard Baxter
#92. 'Tis hard preaching a stone into tears, or making a rock to tremble.
Richard Baxter
#93. Above all be much in secret prayer and meditation. By this you will fetch the heavenly fire that must kindle your sacrifice: remember you cannot decline and neglect your duty to your own hurt alone, many will be losers by it as well as you.
Richard Baxter
#94. The ministerial work must be managed purely for God and the salvation of the people, and not for any private ends of our own.
Richard Baxter
#95. If our rest was here, most of God's providences must be useless. Should God lose the glory of his church's miraculous deliverances, and of the fall of his enemies, that men may have their happiness here?
Richard Baxter
#96. Even innocent Adam is liker to forget God in a paradise, than Joseph in a prison, or Job upon a dunghill(376)[.]
Richard Baxter
#97. We are ignorant of things necessary, because we learn things superfluous and unnecessary
Richard Baxter
#98. Remember with whom thou hast to do: what canst thou expect from dust but levity; or from corruption, but defilement(33)?
Richard Baxter
#99. Death is half disarmed when the pleasures and interests of the flesh are first denied.
Richard Baxter
#100. Words and actions are transient things, and being once past, are nothing; but the effect of them on an immortal soul may be endless.
Richard Baxter
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