Top 90 Alexander MacLaren Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “In heaven after ages of ages of growing glory, we shall have to say, as each new wave of the shoreless, sunlit sea bears us onward, It doth not yet appear what we shall be.”

— Alexander MacLaren

52. “The Gospel is not a mere message of deliverance, but a canon of conduct; it is not a theology to be accepted, but it is ethics to be lived. It is not to be believed only, but it is to be taken into life as a guide.”

— Alexander MacLaren

53. “God keeps giving Himself as long as we bring that into which He can pour Himself. And when we stop bringing, He stops giving.”

— Alexander MacLaren

54. “The vision of the Divine presence ever takes the form which our circumstances most require.”

— Alexander MacLaren

55. “We believe that the history of the world is but the history of His influence and that the center of the whole universe is the cross of Calvary.”

— Alexander MacLaren

56. “If you want to live in this world, doing the duty of life, knowing the blessings of it, doing your work heartily, and yet not absorbed by it, remember that the one power whereby you can so act is, that all shall be consecrated to Christ, and done for His sake.”

— Alexander MacLaren

57. “A picture without sky has no glory. This present, unless we see gleaming beyond it the eternal calm of the heavens, above the tossing tree tops with withering leaves, and the smoky chimneys, is a poor thing for our eyes to gaze at, or our hearts to love, or our hands to toil on.”

— Alexander MacLaren

58. “In such a world as this, with such hearts as ours, weakness is wickedness in the long run. Whoever lets himself be shaped and guided by any thing lower than an inflexible will, fixed in obedience to God, will in the end be shaped into a deformity, and guided to wreck and ruin.”

— Alexander MacLaren

59. “The grace of God, says Luther, “is like a flying summer shower.” It has fallen upon more than one land, and passed on. Judea had it, and lies barren and dry. These Asiatic coasts had it, and flung it away.”

— Alexander MacLaren

60. “Life should be a constant vision of God’s presence. Here is our defense against being led away by the gauds and shows of earth’s vulgar attractions.”

— Alexander MacLaren

61. “Ah, there is nothing more beautiful than the difference between the thought about sinful creatures which is natural to a holy being, and the thought about sinful creatures which is natural to a self-righteous being. The one is all contempt; the other, all pity.”

— Alexander MacLaren

62. “Surely Scripture is right when it makes the sin of sins that unbelief, which is at bottom nothing else than a refusal to take the cup of salvation. Surely no sharper grief can be inflicted upon the Spirit of God than when we leave His gifts neglected and unappropriated.”

— Alexander MacLaren

63. “You must cast yourself on God’s gospel with all your weight, without any hanging back, without any doubt, without even the shadow of a suspicion that it will give.”

— Alexander MacLaren

64. “Given a man full of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed in one grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has been driven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred into unwearied energy.”

— Alexander MacLaren

65. “He that has his trust set upon God does not need to dread anything except the weakening or the paralyzing of that trust.”

— Alexander MacLaren

66. “No man loveth God except the man who has first learned that God loves him.”

— Alexander MacLaren

67. “A living man must have a living God, or his soul will perish in the midst of earthly plenty, and will thirst and die whilst the water of earthly delights is running all around him. We are made to need persons not things.”

— Alexander MacLaren

68. “We must have Christ in our hearts, that He may shine forth from our lives.”

— Alexander MacLaren

69. “Let us learn how the love of Christ, received into the heart, triumphs gradually but surely over all sin, transforms character, turning even its weakness into strength, and so, from the depths of transgression and the very gates of hell, raises men to God.”

— Alexander MacLaren

70. “Nothing but Christian faith gives to the furthest future the solidity and definiteness which it must have if it is to be a breakwater for us against the fluctuating sea of present cares and thoughts.”

— Alexander MacLaren

71. “We are only asking you to give to Christ that which you give to others, to transfer the old emotions, the blessed emotions, the exercise of which makes gladness in the life here below, to transfer them to Him, and to rest safe in the Lord. Faith is trust.”

— Alexander MacLaren

72. “That which of all things unfits man for the reception of Christ as a Savior, is not gross profligacy and outward, vehement transgression, but it is self-complacency, fatal self-righteousness and self-sufficiency.”

— Alexander MacLaren

73. “God looks on the upright, as has been said; and the upright shall gaze on Him... That mutual gaze is blessedness. They who looking up behold Jehovah are brave to front all foes and to keep calm hearts in the midst of alarms. Hope burns like a pillar of fire in them when it is gone out in others; and to all the suggestions of their own timidity or of others they have the answer, “In the Lord have I put my trust; how say ye to my soul, Flee? Here I stand; I can do no otherwise. God help me. Amen.”

— Alexander MacLaren

74. “If our faith in God is not the veriest sham, it demands, and will produce, the abandonment sometimes, the subordination always, of eternal helps and material good.”

— Alexander MacLaren

75. “Christ’s voice sounds now for each of us in loving invitation; and dead in sin and hardness of heart though we be, we can listen and live. Christ Himself, my brother, sows the seed now. Do you take care that it falls not on, but in, your souls.”

— Alexander MacLaren

76. “Unbelief is criminal because it is a moral act, an act of the whole nature.-Belief or unbelief is a test of a man’s whole spiritual condition, because it is the whole being, affections, will, conscience, as well as the understanding, which are concerned in it.”

— Alexander MacLaren

77. “Grieve not the Christ of God, who redeems us; and remember that we grieve Him most when we will not let Him pour His love upon us, but turn a sullen, unresponsive unbelief towards His pleading grace, as some glacier shuts out the sunshine from the mountain-side with its thick-ribbed ice.”

— Alexander MacLaren

78. “Faith refers to Christ. Holiness depends on faith. Heaven depends on holiness.”

— Alexander MacLaren

79. “Unless we are wedded to Jesus Christ by the simple act of trust in His mercy and His power, Christ is nothing to us.”

— Alexander MacLaren

80. “Trust yourselves, my brethren, to the immortal love and perfect work of the Divine Saviour, and by His dear might your days will advance by peaceful stages, whereof each gathers up and carries forward the blessings of all that went before, to a death which shall be a birth.”

— Alexander MacLaren

81. “Turn your confidence and your fears alike into prayer.”

— Alexander MacLaren

82. “My child, wilt thou not at this time cry unto me, ‘Abba, Father?’”

— Alexander MacLaren

83. “The message of love can never come into a human soul, and pass away from it unreceived, without leaving that spirit worse, with all its lowest characteristics strengthened, and all its best ones depressed, by the fact of rejection.”

— Alexander MacLaren

84. “I am satisfied, for I awake in Thy likeness.”

— Alexander MacLaren

85. “The never-ceasing boom of the great ocean as it breaks on the beach, drowns all smaller sounds.”

— Alexander MacLaren

86. “Be sure that your soul is never so intensely alive as when in the deepest abnegation it waits hushed before God .”

— Alexander MacLaren

87. “All that this world knows of living lies in giving – and more giving; He that keeps, be sure he loses -Friendship grows by what it uses.”

— Alexander MacLaren

88. “Christ by His intercession is able to save thee beyond the horizon and largest compass of thy thoughts, even to the utmost. In danger Christ lashes us to Himself, as Alpine guides do when there is perilous ice to get over.”

— Alexander MacLaren

89. “Let me always remember that it is not the amount of religious knowledge which I have, but the amount which I use, that determines my religious position and character.”

— Alexander MacLaren

90. “The true confidence which is faith in Christ, and the true diffidence which is utter distrust of myself – are identical.”

— Alexander MacLaren

91. “If you would know Christ at all, you must go to Him as a sinful man, or you are shut out from Him altogether.”

— Alexander MacLaren