Top 100 Vance Havner Quotes
#1. I preach on specific sins because people are not convicted by sermons on sin in general. It was when our Lord said to the Samaritan woman, 'Go call thy husband ... ' (John 4:16), that she really faced up to her sinfulness.
Vance Havner
#2. Popularity has slain more prophets of God than persecution ever did.
Vance Havner
#3. 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!
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#4. No man can be a Christian by knowingly and willfully taking Christ on the installment plan, as Savior now, and Lord later.
Vance Havner
#5. It is a matter of whether one wants to get rich or be rich. We can be rich in Christ Jesus or perhaps get rich in Egypt, but we cannot do both.
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#6. I would say to today's young minister, 'Be not afraid to give much time to solitary walks and meditation'.
Vance Havner
#7. It is debatable which is causing us more harm - hot-headed ignorance or cold-hearted intellectualism.
Vance Havner
#8. We justify ourselves when we should judge ourselves. If we learned humility, it might spare us the humiliation.
Vance Havner
#9. Nothing is needed so much as a holy indignation against sin. It is true that there is not enough love for God, and one sign of it is that there is not enough hatred for sin.
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#10. The real test of your Christianity is not how pious you look at the Lord's table on Sunday, but how you act at the breakfast table at home. If it takes two cups of coffee to make you fit to live with, you had better go to the mourner's bench.
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#11. The preacher who jests and jokes with his people all week will soon find that he cannot stand in his pulpit on Sunday with power to reprove, rebuke and exhort. He may be the life of the party but it will be the death of the prophet.
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#12. 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.
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#13. A preacher should have the mind of a scholar, the heart of a child, and the hide of a rhinoceros. His problem is how to toughen his hide without hardening his heart.
Vance Havner
#14. Too many are not willing to give the Gospel a fair trial. They are too ignorant to speak wisely but not wise enough to speak ignorantly. A man is not a sinner because he is a skeptic; he is a skeptic because he is a sinner.
Vance Havner
#15. We must live in all kinds of days, both high days and low days, in simple dependence upon Christ as the branch on the vine. This is the supreme experience
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#16. If you stand on the Word, you do not stand with the world.
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#17. The tragedy of today is that the situation is desperate but the saints are not.
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#18. If we don't come apart; we will come apart.
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#19. A picture of Christ was hung in the back of a pulpit. When the minister rose to speak one Sunday morning, a little boy asked his mother, 'Mother, who is that man who stands so we can't see Jesus?'
Vance Havner
#20. It used to be called the Lord's Day, now it is the weekend and if we group all holidays on weekends the devil will have scored another move against Sunday worship.
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#21. Faith has no value of its own, it has value only as it connects us with Him. It is a trick of Satan to get us occupied with examining our faith instead of resting in the Faithful One.
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#23. If you see a Bible that is falling apart, it probably belongs to someone who isn't!
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#24. We honor God by asking for great things when they are a part of His promise. We dishonor Him and cheat ourselves when we ask for molehills where He has offered mountains.
Vance Havner
#25. We can often do more by doing less. God is not particularly interested in quantity production. That is an American standard, not a Bible standard.
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#26. Real revival does not begin with joyous singing. It begins with conviction and repentance on the part of Christians.
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#27. The detour is always rougher than the main road
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#28. More Bibles are bought and fewer read than any other book.
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#29. One cannot help the evil thoughts that come, but it is the thoughts we cultivate that make the difference between good or evil. We don't have to open the door to the devil and say, "Make yourself at home."
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#30. The first step towards the evangelizing of the world is the christianizing of the church.
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#31. We need to be preaching a dynamic Gospel and living firecracker lives.
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#32. We are fighting the greatest battle of all time with the most untrained army on earth. If strict discipline is necessary in art and athletics, how can we expect to be advanced Christians and stay in kindergarten?
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#33. God has a place and purpose for you, somewhere for you to be and something for you to do. You never will be happy elsewhere, nor can you please God anywhere but there.
Vance Havner
#34. You can't preach it like it is if you don't believe it like it was.
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#35. What we love usually manages to get into our conversation. What is down in the well of the heart will come up in the bucket of the speech.
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#36. Beware of being a religious poseur, trying to live up to a dramatized version of yourself.
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#37. Satan does some of his worst work on exhausted Christians when nerves are frayed and the mind is faint.
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#38. To some Christianity is an argument. To many it is a performance. To a few, it is experience.
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#39. There are no trivial assignments in the work of the Lord.
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#40. Jesus Christ demands more complete allegiance than any dictator who ever lived. The difference is, He has a right to it.
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#41. Satan is not fighting churches; he is joining them. He does more harm by sowing tares than by pulling up wheat. He accomplishes more by imitation than by outright opposition.
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#42. Do not so contemplate eternity that you waste today.
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#43. I suspect that much of our praying to be used is selfish, and underneath it is the sneaking desire to make our mark and be recognized.
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#44. It is one thing to say Jesus is all you want; until He is all you have and you discover He is all you ever needed.
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#45. Some missionaries bound for Africa were laughed at by the boat captain. 'You'll only die over there,' he said. But a missionary replied, 'Captain, we died before we started.'
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#46. Most church members live so far below the standard, you would have to backslide to be in fellowship with them.
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#47. Humility is not thinking meanly of oneself, but rather it means not thinking of oneself at all.
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#48. Plenty of church members are shaky about what they believe, while not many are shaken by what they believe.
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#49. Worse than blind leaders of the blind are bland leaders of the bland.
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#50. An old minister explained the smudges on his sermon outlines by saying they were caused by sweat and tears. And without those two marks, a sermon is not a sermon.
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#51. The gospel is for lifeboats, not showboats, and a man must make up his mind which boat he is going to operate.
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#52. Abraham did not know where he was going immediately, but he knew where he was going ultimately. He did not know the Whither but he knew the Whom. He believed God, and, being sure of his destiny, he did not worry about his destination.
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#53. Revival precedes evangelism. The church must first repent. This is the blind spot in our eye today.
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#54. Doing leads more surely to talking than talking to doing.
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#55. Faith doesn't wait until it understands; in that case it wouldn't be faith.
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#56. The thermometer of a church is its prayer meeting.
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#57. When the Lord's white sheep become dirty gray, all black sheep feel more comfortable.
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#58. We may never be martyrs but we can die to self, to sin, to the world, to our plans and ambitions. That is the significance of baptism; we died with Christ and rose to new life.
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#59. Self, service, substance is the Divine order and nothing counts until we give ourselves.
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#60. The middle of the road is a poor place to walk. It is a poor place to drive. It is a poor place to live.
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#61. God is on the lookout today for a man who will be quiet enough to get a message from Him, brave enough to preach it, and honest enough to live it.
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#62. There is no devil in the first two chapters of the Bible and no devil in the last two chapters. Thank God for a book that disposes of the devil!
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#63. I'm tired of hearing sin called sickness and alcoholism a disease. It is the only disease I know of that we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spread.
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#64. 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.
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#65. Men seek fame and high places only to learn that they were happier in obscurity
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#66. The last word of our Lord to the church was not the Great Commission. The last thing He said to the church was 'Repent.' He said that to five out of seven.
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#67. Nobody in pulpit or pew needs a revival more than a bitter-spirited fundamentalist with his dispensations right and his disposition wrong.
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#68. Where God guides He provides. He is not responsible for expenses not on His schedule. He does not foot the bill when we leave His itinerary.
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#69. When we sin, we are often upset, not because we have grieved the Spirit but because our pride has been injured.
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#70. Some preachers ought to put more fire into their sermons or more sermons into the fire.
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#71. Before we can strengthen believers or win the lost, we must be converted from the self-life to the Christ-life ... "Not I, but Christ."
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#72. One man with a genuine experience with God is worth more than a library full of arguments.
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#73. 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.
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#74. Most of the notable turn out to be the not-able. God's greatest truths still belong to babes.
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#75. Blessed is that Christian who can accept at the start by simple faith that which others reach only through years of questioning and reach it only then because they give up trying to analyze it and decide to accept it.
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#76. We are not to be isolated but insulated, moving in the midst of evil but untouched by it.
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#77. We are challenged these days, but not changed; convicted, but not converted. We hear, but do not; and thereby we deceive ourselves.
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#78. People get so used to the dark that they think it is growing brighter.
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#79. A deep and sober concern to please God is the rarest of rarities.
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#80. Too many are willing to sit at God's table, but not work in his field.
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#81. The devil's not fighting churches today, he's joining churches.
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#82. The man who sets out to live the life worthwhile-to follow his vision and speak his heart-need not look for position, honors, prosperity.
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#84. When Christ possesses the will He keeps it fixed. The trouble comes when we take matters out of His hand and try to handle them ourselves.
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#85. A true preacher is best measured not by how many bouquets have been pinned on him but by how many brickbats have been pitched at him. Prophets have been on the receiving end of mud more than medals.
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#86. Every Christian is a priest, not offering a sacrifice for sins - since that has been done once and for all - but offering his person, praise and possessions.
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#87. If the church would only be the church- if Christians would only be Christians- nothing could halt our onward march.
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#88. 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.
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#89. We are suffering from a believism that never has believed, and a receivism that never has received, and it leads to deceivism.
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#90. We have suffered from the preaching of cheap grace. Grace is free, but it is not cheap. People will take anything that is free, but they are not interested in discipleship. They will take Christ as Savior but not as Lord.
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#91. Taking it easy is often the prelude to backsliding. Comfort precedes collapse.
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#92. Where are the marks of the cross in your life? Are there any points of identification with your Lord? Alas, too many Christians wear medals but carry no scars.
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#93. Men love everything but righteousness and fear everything but God.
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#94. If you are what you've always been, you are not a Christian. A Christian is a new creation.
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#95. Salt seasons, purifies, preserves. But somebody ought to remind us that salt also irritates. Real living Christianity rubs this world the wrong way.
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#96. If the devil cannot keep you from being saved, if next he fails to make you backslide, then he undertakes to keep you just an average Christian. Here he succeeds with most believers.
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#97. Christmas is based on an exchange of gifts, the gift of God to man - His unspeakable gift of His Son, and the gift of man to God - when we present our bodies a living sacrifice.
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#98. Jesus is all we have; he is all we need and all we want. We are shipwrecked on God and stranded on omnipotence!
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#99. The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.
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#100. You haven't lost anything when you know were it is. Death can hide but not divide.
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