1.  Lord Jesus Christ:  “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”    (John 14:6)
  2.  Apostle Paul:  “My brothers, I am a Pharisee, descended from Pharisees. I stand on trial because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead.” (Acts 23:6)
  3.  Moses: “…What does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and to love Him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul…” (Deut. 10:12)
  4.  Job: “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.”  (Job 28:28)
  5. Yahweh, Almighty God: declaring His name to Moses: “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”
  6. Clement of Rome (1st Century disciple; see Phil 4:3):  “Let him who has love in Christ keep the commandments of Christ. Who can describe the [blessed] bond of the love of God? What man is able to tell the excellence of its beauty, as it ought to be told? The height to which love exalts is unspeakable. Love unites us to God. Love covers a multitude of sins. Love bears all things, is long-suffering in all things.”
  7. Justin Martyr (1st Century): “Let it be understood that those who are not found living as He taught are not Christian-even though they profess with the lips the teaching of Christ.”
  8. Polycarp (1st century bishop): After being asked again to deny Christ before or be burned at the stake, he said, “86 years have i served Him, and He has never done me injury; how then can i now blaspheme my King and Savior?”
  9. Tertullian (2nd century early church father; Defense or Apology to ‘the guardians of Roman empire…; chap. 50): “For quite recently, when you condemned a Christian woman to the beastly lust of men instead of an actual wild beast, you confessed that a stain upon chastity is accounted more heinous with us than any torture of any death.  Yet no cruelty of yours, though each were to exceed the last in its exquisite refinement, profits you in the least; but forms rather an attraction to our sect.  We spring up in greater numbers as often as we are mowed down by you: the blood of the Christians is the seed of the Church (a source of new life)…”
  10. Tertullian: We Christians “offer up prayers… assemble to read our sacred writings… on the monthly day, if each likes, each puts in a small donation; but only if it be his pleasure, and only if he be able… all is voluntary… gifts… to support poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined to the house; such, too, as have suffered… or shut up in the prisons, for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God’s Church…  One in mind and soul, we do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another.  All things are common among us but our wives…”
  11. Irenaeus of Lyons (2nd century church father): “We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith.”
  12. Irenaeus (2nd century church father): “Suppose there arise a dispute relative to some important question among us, should we not have recourse to the most ancient Churches with which the apostles held constant conversation, and learn from them what is certain and clear in regard to the present question? For how should it be if the apostles themselves had not left us writings? Would it not be necessary, in that case, to follow the course of the tradition which they handed down to those to whom they did commit the Churches?”
  13. Martin Luther (16th century Reformer; On Prayer): “To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing…”
  14. Martin Luther; On Scripture: “The Bible is alive, its speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me.”
  15. John Calvin (16th century Reformer): “The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life.  It cannot be grasped by reason and memory only, but it is fully understood when it possesses the whole soul and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart.”
  16. John Knox (16th century Reformer): “The Scriptures of God are my only foundation and substance in all matters of weight and importance.”  “As the world is weary of me so am i of it.”
  17. John Knox:  “Prayer is an earnest and familiar talking with God, to whom we declare all our miseries, whose support and help we implore and desire in our adversities, and whom we laud and praise for our benefits received. So that prayer contains the exposition of our sorrows, the desire of God’s defense, and the praising of His magnificent name, as the Psalms of David clearly do teach.”
  18. William Wilberforce (19th Century; from ‘Practical View of… Christianity…’): “…the grand radical defect in the practical system of these nominal Christians, is their forgetfulness of all the peculiar doctrines of the Religion which they profess—the corruption of human nature—the atonement of the Saviour—and the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit. Here then we come again to the grand distinction between the Religion of Christ and that of the bulk of nominal Christians in the present day.”
  19. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (killed in jail by Nazis weeks before WWII ended; from The Cost of Discipleship): “…Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: ‘Ye were bought at a price’, and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God… Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate… Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods.”
  20. Leonard Ravenhill (Why Revival Tarries – 1958): “…Ah! brother preachers, we love the old saints, missionaries, martyrs, reformers: our Luthers, Bunyans, Wesleys, Asburys, etc.  We will write their biographies, reverence their memories, frame their epitaphs, and build their cenotaphs.  We will do anything except imitate them.  We cherish the last drop of their blood, but watch the first drop of our own!”
  21. Apostle Paul (martyred c.65 AD): “Imitate me, just as i imitate Christ (1 Cor. 11:1; 4:16 – ‘i exhort you, be imitators of me’).”
  22. Jesus the Son of God: “Anyone who loves their life (in this world) will (destroy) lose it, and whoever hates their life in this world  will keep it for eternal life (John 12:25).” “Whoever wants to be My disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever wants to save their life (soul) will lose it, but whoever loses their life for My sake will find it.  What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?  For the Son of Man is going to come in His Father’s glory with His angels, and then He will reward each person according to what they have done (Matt. 16:24-27).”
  23.  Watchman Nee (imprisoned for the Faith until his death in 1972): “The life of faith can be called the life of the will since faith is impervious to how one feels but chooses through volition to obey God’s mind.   …May the things of this world so lose their power over us that we do not in the slightest wish to be ‘worldly’; nay we even delight in not remaining ‘in the world’.”   “Any attempt to follow Him without denying the self is the root of all failures (The Spiritual Man).”
  24. George Muller: (founded orphanages) “I live in the spirit of prayer. I pray as I walk about, when I lie down and when I rise up. And the answers are always coming. Thousands and tens of thousands of times have my prayers been answered. When once I am persuaded that a thing is right and for the glory of God, I go on praying for it until the answer comes.” (An Hour With George Müller, The Man of Faith to Whom God Gave Millions).
  25. Corrie ten Boom: (Holocaust survivor): “Even as the angry vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him….Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness….And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on his. When He tells us to love our enemies; He gives along with the command, the love itself.”
  26. Charles Finney (1792-1875): “‘Prove all things: hold fast that which is good (1Thes. 5:21).’ This text… requires us to know the reason of our faith and practice… this command is given to all; not merely to ministers… It requires each one to know the reasons of their faith.  The great mass of mankind don’t love to think closely.  They would prefer to do almost anything else.  They are like school-boys who shun the labor of study… (Holiness of Christians in the Present Life – Sermon/Lecture).”
  27. Anjeze Bojaxhlu (Mother Teresa; ‘Missionaries of Charity;’ died 1997): “Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.”  “I do not pray for success, I ask for faithfulness.”
  28.  G. Campbell Morgan: “The supreme thing is worship.  The attitude of worship is the attitude of a subject bent before the King… The fundamental thought is that of prostration, of bowing down.”  “The man who preaches the cross must be a crucified man.”
  29. Smith Wigglesworth (1859-1947): “The reason the world is not seeing Jesus is that Christian people are not filled with Jesus. They are satisfied with attending meetings weekly, reading the Bible occasionally, and praying sometimes. It is an awful thing for me to see people who profess to be Christians lifeless, powerless, and in a place where their lives are so parallel to unbelievers’ lives that it is difficult to tell which place they are in, whether in the flesh or in the Spirit.”
  30. Smith Wigglesworth: “There is a great destructive force that comes upon us when we start comparing ourselves in the flesh with what we could be spiritually. We should never compare what we are with what we could be, because we will always be down on ourselves when we do this. Just look to Jesus and what He is. As long as we look to Jesus we will go toward Him. When we look at our inferiority we will go toward it.”
  31. Billy Graham (2014): “God keeps his promises, and this is why we can be sure that the return of Christ is near …Scripture tells us that there will be signs pointing toward the return of the Lord. I believe all these signs are evident today.”
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