Top 90 Richard Sibbes Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “God takes a safe course with His children, that they may not be condemned with the world, He permits the world to condemn them, that they may not love the world, the world hates them...”

— Richard Sibbes

52. “Where Christ’s Spirit is, it will bring men from their altitudes and excellencies, and make them to stoop to serve the church, and account it an honour to be an instrument to do good.”

— Richard Sibbes

53. “God’s truth always agrees with itself.”

— Richard Sibbes

54. “Proud men are the devil’s pipes, and flatterers the musicians to blow these pipes.”

— Richard Sibbes

55. “Nothing is so certain as that which is certain after doubts. Shaking settles and roots.”

— Richard Sibbes

56. “God will have the body partake with the soul-as in matters of grief, so in matters of joy; the lanthorn shines in the light of the candle within.”

— Richard Sibbes

57. “When blindness and boldness, ignorance and arrogance, weakness and willfulness, meet together in men, it renders them odious to God, burdensome in society, dangerous in their counsels, disturbers of better purposes, intractable and incapable of better direction, miserable in the issue. Where Christ shows his gracious power in weakness, he does it by letting men understand themselves so far as to breed humility, and magnify God’s love to such as they are.”

— Richard Sibbes

58. “Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified prepare the soul for glory.”

— Richard Sibbes

59. “It is evident that our conversion is sound when we loathe and hate sin from the heart.”

— Richard Sibbes

60. “In all their jollity in this world, the wicked are but as a book fairly bound, which when it is opened is full of nothing but tragedies. So when the book of their consciences shall be once opened, there is nothing to be read but lamentations and woes.”

— Richard Sibbes

61. “Better to be in trouble with Christ, than in peace without him.”

— Richard Sibbes

62. “God has decreed it so, that where tenderness of heart is, there mercy shall follow...”

— Richard Sibbes

63. “Physicians, though they put their patients to much pain, will not destroy their nature, but will raise it up by degrees. Surgeons will pierce and cut but not mutilate. A mother who has a sick and self-willed child will not cast it away for this reason. And shall there be more mercy in the stream than there is in the spring? Shall we think there is more mercy in ourselves than in God, who plants the feeling of mercy in us?”

— Richard Sibbes

64. “We cannot say this or that trouble will not befall, yet we may, by the help of the Spirit, say, Nothing that does befall will make me do that which is unworthy of a Christian.”

— Richard Sibbes

65. “The eye being a tender part, and soonest hurt, how watchful is man by nature over that, that it take no hurt. So the heart, being a tender thing, let us preserve it by all watchfulness to keep blows from off it. It is a terrible thing to keep a wound of some great sin upon the conscience, for it makes a way for a new breach; because when the conscience once begins to be hardened with some great sin, then there is no stop, but we run on to commit sin with all greediness. 9.”

— Richard Sibbes

66. “Think what great love Christ has showed unto us, and how little we have deserved, and this will make our hearts to melt and be as pliable as wax before the sun.”

— Richard Sibbes

67. “We must neither bind where God looseth, nor loose where God bindeth, nor open where God shutteth, nor shut where God openeth; the right use of the keys is always successful.”

— Richard Sibbes

68. “It cannot but cheer the heart of the spouse, to consider, in all her infirmities and miseries she is subject to, that she hath a husband of a kind disposition, that knows how to give the honour of mild usage to the weaker vessel, that will be so far from rejecting her, because she is weak, that he will pity her the more. And as he is kind at all times, so especially when it is most seasonable; he will speak to her heart, ‘especially in the wilderness,’ Hos. ii. 24.”

— Richard Sibbes

69. “The whole conduct of a Christian is nothing else but knowledge reduced to will, affection and practice.”

— Richard Sibbes

70. “The wronged side is always the safest.”

— Richard Sibbes

71. “Every creature thinks itself best in its own element, that is the place it thrives in, and enjoys its happiness in; now Christ is the element of a Christian.”

— Richard Sibbes

72. “For where God intends to do any good, he first works in them a gracious disposition: after which he looks upon his own work as upon a lovely object, and so doth give them other blessings. God crowns grace with grace. By.”

— Richard Sibbes

73. “Here see the opposite disposition between the holy nature of Christ, and the impure nature of man. Man for a little smoke will quench the light; Christ ever we see cherisheth even the least beginnings. How bare he with the many imperfections of his poor disciples. If he did sharply check them, it was in love, and that they might shine the brighter. Can we have a better pattern to follow than this of him by whom we hope to be saved?”

— Richard Sibbes

74. “What do the Scriptures speak but Christ’s love and tender care over those that are humbled?”

— Richard Sibbes

75. “Faith, whereby especially Christ rules, sets the soul so high that it looks down on all other things as far below, as having represented to it, by the Spirit of Christ, riches, honor, beauty and pleasures of a higher nature.”

— Richard Sibbes

76. “It is love in duties that God regards, more than duties themselves.”

— Richard Sibbes

77. “See here, for our comfort, a sweet agreement of all three persons: the Father giveth a commission to Christ; the Spirit furnisheth and sanctifieth to it; Christ himself executeth the office of a Mediator. Our redemption is founded upon the joint agreement of all three persons of the Trinity.”

— Richard Sibbes

78. “God can pick sense out of a confused prayer. These desires cry louder in his ears than your sins.”

— Richard Sibbes

79. “Some think it strength of grace to endure nothing in the weaker, whereas the strongest are readiest to bear with the infirmities of the weak.”

— Richard Sibbes

80. “All light that is not spiritual, because it wanteth the strength of sanctifying grace, yieldeth to every little temptation, especially when it is fitted and suited to personal inclinations. This is the reason why Christians that have light little for quantity, but yet heavenly for quality, hold out, when men of larger apprehensions sink.”

— Richard Sibbes

81. “What a support to our faith is this, that God the Father, the party offended by our sins, is so well pleased with the work of redemption! And what a comfort is this, that, seeing God’s love rests on Christ, as well pleased in him, we may gather that he is as well pleased with us, if we be in Christ!”

— Richard Sibbes

82. “Are you dejected? here is comfort; are you sinful? here is righteousness; are you led away with present contentments? here you have honours, and pleasures, and all in Christ Jesus.”

— Richard Sibbes

83. “Does God take care of beasts, and not of his more noble creature? And therefore we ought to judge charitably of the complaints of God’s people which are wrung from them in such cases. Job had the esteem with God of a patient man, notwithstanding those passionate complaints.”

— Richard Sibbes

84. “That age of the church which was most fertile in subtle questions was most barren in religion; for it makes people think religion to be only a matter of cleverness, in tying and untying of knots.”

— Richard Sibbes

85. “It were a good strife amongst Christians, one to labour to give no offence, and the other to labour to take none. The best men are severe to themselves, tender over others.”

— Richard Sibbes

86. “It should be the art of Christians to present death as a passage to a better life, to labour to bring our souls into such a condition, as to think death not to be a death to us, but the death of itself. Death dies when I die, and I begin to live when I die. It is a sweet passage to life. We never live till we die.”

— Richard Sibbes

87. “The heroic deeds of those great worthies do not comfort the church so much as their falls and bruises do.”

— Richard Sibbes

88. “Live desired in the world, and die lamented.”

— Richard Sibbes

89. “A little spiritual light is of strength enough to answer strong objections of flesh and blood, and to look through all earthly allurements and opposing hindrances, presenting them as far inferior to those heavenly objects it eyeth.”

— Richard Sibbes

90. “Never fear to go to God, since we have such a Mediator with him, who is not only our friend but our brother and husband.”

— Richard Sibbes

91. “From our own strength we cannot bear the least trouble, but by the Spirit’s assistance we can bear the greatest.”

— Richard Sibbes

92. “Despair is a high point of atheism, it takes away God and Christ both at once. Judas, in betraying our Saviour, was an occasion of his death as man, but in despairing he did what lay in him to take away his life as God.”

— Richard Sibbes

93. “Nothing is so certain as that which is certain after doubts. Nil tam certum quam quod ex dubio certum. Shaking settles and roots.”

— Richard Sibbes

94. “God often delights to take advantage of our averseness, that he may manifest his work the more clearly, and that all the glory of the work may be his, as all the strength is his.”

— Richard Sibbes

95. “If those also of the younger sort would ask of themselves, why God should not have the flower and marrow of their age? And why they should give their strength to the devil?”

— Richard Sibbes

96. “Christ as a new conqueror changes the fundamental laws of the old Adam and establishes a government of his own.”

— Richard Sibbes