Vance Havner

“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.”

“Doing leads more surely to talking than talking to doing.”

“The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs.”

“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.”

“You haven't lost anything when you know were it is. Death can hide but not divide.”

“Many people are in a rut and a rut is nothing but a grave - with both ends kicked out.”

“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.”

“The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself.”

“Too many church services start at eleven sharp and end at twelve dull.”

“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.”

“It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish.”

“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.”

“The temple of truth has never suffered so much from woodpeckers on the outside as from termites within.”

“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.”

“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.”