Top 100 Havner Quotes
#1. Vance Havner wrote about the soul's need for rest: "If you don't come apart for a while, you will come apart in a while.
John Ortberg
#3. God saved us to make us holy, not happy. Some experiences may not contribute to our happiness, but all can be made to contribute to our holiness. Vance Havner
The destined end of man is not happiness, nor health, but holiness. God's one aim is the production of saints.
Oswald Chambers
#4. Sometimes your medicine bottle has on it, 'Shake well before using.' That is what God has to do with some of His people. He has to shake them well before they are ever usable.
Vance Havner
#5. The detour is always rougher than the main road
Vance Havner
#6. A soft and sheltered Christianity, afraid to be lean and lone, unwilling to face the storms and brave the heights, will end up fat and foul in the cages of conformity.
Vance Havner
#7. 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.
Vance Havner
#8. Do not so contemplate eternity that you waste today.
Vance Havner
#9. 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.
Vance Havner
#10. Jesus Christ demands more complete allegiance than any dictator who ever lived. The difference is, He has a right to it.
Vance Havner
#11. It is not our responsibility to make it acceptable; it is our duty to make it available.
Vance Havner
#12. There are no trivial assignments in the work of the Lord.
Vance Havner
#13. To some Christianity is an argument. To many it is a performance. To a few, it is experience.
Vance Havner
#14. Satan does some of his worst work on exhausted Christians when nerves are frayed and the mind is faint.
Vance Havner
#15. Beware of being a religious poseur, trying to live up to a dramatized version of yourself.
Vance Havner
#16. Revival is simply New Testament Christianity, the saints going back to normal.
Vance Havner
#17. 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.
Vance Havner
#18. You can't preach it like it is if you don't believe it like it was.
Vance Havner
#19. 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
#20. 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?
Vance Havner
#21. We've learned how to lengthen life, but we don't know how to deepen it.
Vance Havner
#22. A preacher who is too big for a little crowd would be too little for a big crowd.
Vance Havner
#23. We need to be preaching a dynamic Gospel and living firecracker lives.
Vance Havner
#24. The first step towards the evangelizing of the world is the christianizing of the church.
Vance Havner
#25. 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."
Vance Havner
#26. More Bibles are bought and fewer read than any other book.
Vance Havner
#27. Faith doesn't wait until it understands; in that case it wouldn't be faith.
Vance Havner
#28. When I pastored a country church, a farmer didn't like the sermons I preached on hell. He said, Preach about the meek and lowly Jesus. I said, That's where I got my information about hell.
Vance Havner
#29. Doing leads more surely to talking than talking to doing.
Vance Havner
#30. If you would try out a preacher, send him to preach to farmers: if he cannot make the grade there, let him reconsider his call - or maybe he needs to be converted.
Vance Havner
#31. Revival precedes evangelism. The church must first repent. This is the blind spot in our eye today.
Vance Havner
#32. 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.
Vance Havner
#33. The gospel is for lifeboats, not showboats, and a man must make up his mind which boat he is going to operate.
Vance Havner
#34. 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.
Vance Havner
#35. Worse than blind leaders of the blind are bland leaders of the bland.
Vance Havner
#36. We are not bearing our crosses every time we have a headache; an aspirin tablet will take care of that. What is meant is the trouble we would not have if we were not Christians.
Vance Havner
#37. Plenty of church members are shaky about what they believe, while not many are shaken by what they believe.
Vance Havner
#38. A revival is the church falling in love with Jesus Christ all over again.
Vance Havner
#39. The only way to meet the modern demon-stration of the powers of darkness is by a demonstration of the power of God.
Vance Havner
#40. 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.
Vance Havner
#41. I'm tied of hearing about temperance instead of abstinence, in order to please the cocktail crowd in church congregations.
Vance Havner
#42. In other days people chose a church on the basis of their doctrinal convictions. Now, lacking doctrinal convictions, they choose for social reasons.
Vance Havner
#43. Humility is not thinking meanly of oneself, but rather it means not thinking of oneself at all.
Vance Havner
#44. God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.
Vance Havner
#45. Most church members live so far below the standard, you would have to backslide to be in fellowship with them.
Vance Havner
#46. Our Lord approved neither idol worship or idle worship but ideal worship in Spirit and truth.
Vance Havner
#47. What our Lord said about cross-bearing and obedience is not in fine type. It is in bold print on the face of the contract.
Vance Havner
#48. There are many who say they want to be victorious Christians, but few are willing to endure the discipline necessary to make one a good solider of Jesus Christ. There is a prize to possess, but before we possess it there is a price to be paid, and few will pay it.
Vance Havner
#49. I can conceive of no greater, more romantic and interesting adventure than to undertake to live like Jesus in this complicated day.
Vance Havner
#50. 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.'
Vance Havner
#51. Too many Christians are stuffing themselves with gospel blessings while millions have never had a taste.
Vance Havner
#52. Because the Lord loves us He chastens and rebukes us. Modern sentimentality has reduced God to a tolerant indulgent grandfatherly being who winks at our transgressions.
Vance Havner
#53. 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
#54. A mortician can make a dead man look better than he ever did when he was alive. So churches like Sardis may appear very much alive when they are dead in the sight of the Lord. God knows the difference.
Vance Havner
#55. 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.
Vance Havner
#56. 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.
Vance Havner
#57. 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.
Vance Havner
#58. One of the greatest errors in the church today is the artificial distinction we have created between accepting Christ as Savior and confessing Him as Lord. We have made two experiences of it, but the New Testament makes them one.
Vance Havner
#59. Adam tried to hide behind the trees in the garden. There is only one tree that can hide us from Him and that is the tree of the cross.
Vance Havner
#60. 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.
Vance Havner
#61. You have not really learned a commandment until you have obeyed it. The Church suffers today from Christians who know volumes more than they practice.
Vance Havner
#62. We justify ourselves when we should judge ourselves. If we learned humility, it might spare us the humiliation.
Vance Havner
#63. There is a trend today that would put a new robe on the prodigal son while he is still feeding hogs. Some would put the ring on his finger while he still in the pigsty. Others would paint the pigsty and advocate bigger and better hog pens.
Vance Havner
#64. It is debatable which is causing us more harm - hot-headed ignorance or cold-hearted intellectualism.
Vance Havner
#65. 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
#66. I would say to today's young minister, 'Be not afraid to give much time to solitary walks and meditation'.
Vance Havner
#67. You always enter God's hospital as a charity patient. You can't pay your way.
Vance Havner
#68. People used to blush when they were ashamed. Now they are ashamed if they blush. Modesty has disappeared and a brazen generation with no fear of God before its eyes mocks at sin. We are so fond of being called tolerant and broadminded that we wink at sin when we ought to weep.
Vance Havner
#69. 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.
Vance Havner
#70. When the Lord's sheep are a dirty grey, all black sheep are more
comfortable.
Vance Havner
#71. We need to take down our "Do not disturb" signs ... snap out of our stupor and come out of our coma and awake from our apathy.
Vance Havner
#72. Christ is most concerned with the direction in which you habitually are going and not with a spasmodic eruption either good or bad.
Vance Havner
#73. No man can be a Christian by knowingly and willfully taking Christ on the installment plan, as Savior now, and Lord later.
Vance Havner
#74. 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!
Vance Havner
#75. Popularity has slain more prophets of God than persecution ever did.
Vance Havner
#76. 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
#77. 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.
Vance Havner
#78. Real revival does not begin with joyous singing. It begins with conviction and repentance on the part of Christians.
Vance Havner
#79. The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself.
Vance Havner
#80. 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.
Vance Havner
#81. There is great need today for the New Testament prophet who speaks to edification, exhortation, and comfort, a strengthening, stirring and soothing ministry.
Vance Havner
#82. 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
#83. If you see a Bible that is falling apart, it probably belongs to someone who isn't!
Vance Havner
#84. Today I am one day nearer Home than ever before.
Vance Havner
#85. Our efficiency without God's sufficiency is only a deficiency.
Vance Havner
#86. I would just as soon listen to a gangster lecture on honesty as watch Hollywood portray the Bible.
Vance Havner
#87. Civilization today reminds me of an ape with a blowtorch playing in a room full of dynamite. It looks like the monkeys are about to operate the zoo, and the inmates are taking over the asylum.
Vance Havner
#89. We are the salt of the earth, mind you, not the sugar. Our ministry is to truly cleanse and not just to change the taste.
Vance Havner
#90. At the rate America is decaying morally, we shall have to change our national symbol from an eagle to a vulture.
Vance Havner
#91. 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.
Vance Havner
#92. Too many church services start at eleven sharp and end at twelve dull.
Vance Havner
#93. 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
#94. It is not our business to make the message acceptable, but to make it available. We are not to see that they like it, but that they get it.
Vance Havner
#95. If we don't come apart; we will come apart.
Vance Havner
#96. The tragedy of today is that the situation is desperate but the saints are not.
Vance Havner
#97. If you stand on the Word, you do not stand with the world.
Vance Havner
#98. 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
Vance Havner
#99. When we are weakest and most despondent, Jesus is most considerate. When there is a break in our progress or we have a spell of depression, he sees the whole of our lives and in the light of that He is longsuffering with discordant details.
Vance Havner
#100. God knows His own. It is well that He does, for sometimes it would be difficult for us to determine who are His!
Vance Havner
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
