Joseph Parker Quotes
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When children ask you questions about gray hairs, and wrinkles in the face, and sighs that have no words, and smiles too bright to be carved upon the radiant face by the hands of hypocrisy--when they ask you about kneeling at the altar, speaking into the vacant air, and uttering words to an unseen and in an invisible Presence--when they interrogate you about your great psalms, and hymns, and anthem-bursts of thankfulness, what is your reply to these? Do not be ashamed of the history. Keep steadily along the line of fact. Say what happened to you, and magnify God in the hearing of the inquirer.
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The truly religious man does everything as if everything depends on himself, and then leaves everything as if everything depended on God.
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Speak to the suffering, and you will never lack an audience. There is a broken heart in every crowd.
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Goodness is a perpetual quantity, all penetrating, all searching, impartial, noble, a comfort in distress, a refuge to the weak, a tower and a defense to all who wish to be right and to do right.
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After reading the doctrines of Plato, Socrates or Aristotle, we feel the specific difference between their words and Christ's is the difference between an inquiry and a revelation.
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Humans need Jesus Christ as a necessity and not as a luxury. You may be pleased to have flowers, but you must have bread. . . . Jesus is not a phenomenon, He is bread: Christ is not a curiosity, He is water. As surely as we cannot live without bread, we cannot live truly without Christ: If we know not Christ we are not living, our movement is a mechanical flutter, our pulse is but the stirring of an animal life.
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No true manhood can be trained by a merely intellectual process. You cannot train men by the intellect alone; you must train them by the heart.
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Sin is a clenched fist and a blow in the face of God.
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Only Christ could have conceived Christ.
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When science advances religion goes along with it; science builds the altar at which religion prays.
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True preaching is the sweating of blood.
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Giving up on life is easier than going through the hard times to find the good.
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The first step in understanding the sex industry is to understand the customers, the johns. ... These men have already violated moral standards - and they know it. Talking about right and wrong aren't compelling arguments for them. They are criminals who have chosen to break the law and hurt people, many of them young people.
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It is right for you, young men, to enrich yourselves with the spoils of all pure literature; but he who would make a favorite of a bad book, simply because it contains a few beautiful passages, might as well caress the hand of an assassin because of the jewelry which sparkles on his fingers.
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Never throw mud. You may miss the mark, and you'll have dirty hands.
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Have no fear for the unsettlement or the disturbance of the Kingdom of heaven. It began in eternity, it will go on through everlasting; there is no panic in the divine personality. God is peace, God gives peace, God gives rest.
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The man whose little sermon is ‘repent’ sets himself against his age, and will for the time being be battered mercilessly by the age whose moral tone he challenges. There is but one end for such a man—‘off with his head!’ You had better not try to preach repentance until you have pledged your head to heaven
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Everywhere I find the signature, the autograph of God, and he will never deny his own handwriting. God has set his tabernacle in the dewdrop as surely as in the sun. No man can any more create the smallest flower than he could create the greatest world.
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The dew waits for no voice to call it to the sun.
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Joseph Parker
- Born: April 9, 1830
- Died: November 28, 1902
- Occupation: English Congregational minister