Richard Baxter Quotes

Every one goes astray, but the least imprudent are they who repent the soonest.

Now the Bible tells us that we are all by nature, sinners, that we are slaves to sin and Satan, and that unless we are converted, or born again, we must be miserable forever.

If a man dreams that he has committed a sin before which the sun hid his face, it is often safe to conjecture that, in sheer forgetfulness, he wore a red tie, or brown boots with evening dress.

Tamar, thy daughter-in-law, hath played the harlot; and moreover, behold, she is with child by whoredom. And Judah said, Bring her forth, and let her be burned.

Everybody has done something that we wish we didn't say or do and wish we could take it back.

You've committed no sins, just mistakes.

Jesus never met a disease he could not cure, a birth defect he could not reverse, a demon he could not exorcise. But he did meet skeptics he could not convince and sinners he could not convert. Forgiveness of sins requires an act of will on the receiver's part, and some who heard Jesus' strongest words about grace and forgiveness turned away unrepentant.

Men are born to sin…What does matter most, is not that we err, it is that we do benefit from our mistakes, that we are capable of sincere repentance, of genuine contrition.

To create guilt, all that you need is a very simple thing: start calling mistakes, errors - sins. They are simply mistakes, human. Now, if somebody commits a mistake in mathematics - two plus two, and he concludes it makes five - you don't say he has committed a sin. He is unalert, he is not paying attention to what he is doing. He is unprepared, he has not done his homework. He is certainly committing a mistake, but a mistake is not a sin. It can be corrected. A mistake does not make him feel guilty. At the most it makes him feel foolish.

Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time.

I have sinned terribly, and I do not know what punishment awaits me.

For it was thy sin, and the sin of all the world, that lay upon our Redeemer, and his sacrifice and satisfaction is sufficient for all, and the fruits of it are offered to one as well as another, but it is true that it was never the intent of his mind to pardon and save any that would not by faith and repentance be converted.

The solution to staying on the right side of the fine line between using and abusing grace is repentance. The road to repentance is godly sorrow (2 Corinthians 7:10). Godly sorrow is developed when we focus on the true nature of sin as an offense against God rather than something that makes us feel guilty.

When Jesus stepped into the waters of the Jordan and was baptized by John the Baptist, he did so not because he was in need of repentance, or conversion: he did it to be among people who need forgiveness, among us sinners, and to take upon himself the burden of our sins.

I had a little sorrow, Born of a little sin.

Give me my sin again.

When we make mistakes they call it evil

It's not a problem that we're sinners; it's a problem that we aren't ashamed of our sin and don't seek forgiveness.

Made plenty of mistakes along the way - all of which I am truly sorry.

When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned.

I see no sin in a kiss. I only see sin in the condemnation

After an error you need not only to remove the causes but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an 'undoing' is required.

Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.

If you can sin and not weep over it, you are an heir of Hell. If you can go into sin, and afterwards feel satisfied to have done so, you are on the road to destruction. If there are no prickings of conscience, no inward torments, no bleeding wounds; if you have no throbs and heavings of a bosom that cannot rest; if your soul never feels filled with wormwood and gall when you know you have done evil, you are no child of God.

If there be a man before me who says that the wrath of God is too heavy a punishment for his little sin, I ask him, if the sin be little, why does he not give it up?