Horace Bushnell (April 14, 1802 – February 17, 1876) was an American Congregational minister and theologian.
It is the grandeur of Christ's character which constitutes the chief power of His ministry, not His miracles or teachings apart from His character. The greatest triumph of the Gospel is Christ Himself--a human body become the organ of the Divine nature, and revealing, under the conditions of an earthly life, the glory of God.
When has the world seen a phenomenon like this? a lonely uninstructed youth, coming from amid the moral darkness of Galilee, even more distinct from His age, and from every thing around Him, than a Plato would be rising up in some wild tribe in Oregon, assuming thus a position at the head of the world and maintaining it, for eighteen centuries, by the pure self-evidence of His life and doctrine.
Take your duty, and be strong in it, as God will make you strong. The harder it is, the stronger in fact you will be. Understand, also, that the great question here is, not what you will get, but what you will become. The greatest wealth you can ever get will be in yourself. Take your burdens and troubles and losses and wrongs, if come they must and will, as your opportunity, knowing that God has girded you for greater things than these.
Trust in God for great things. With your five loaves and two fishes He will show you a way to feed thousands.
Christ is redemption only as He actually redeems and delivers our nature from sin. If He is not the law and spring of a new spirit of life, He is nothing. "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God," as many, no more.
Habits are to the soul what the veins and arteries are to the blood, the courses in which it moves
It is only Christianity, the great bond of love and duty to God, that makes any existence valuable or even tolerable.
Nature has no promise for society, least of all, any remedy for sin.
God listens for nothing so tenderly, as when His children help each other by their testimonies to His goodness and the way in which He has brought them deliverance.
As long as we abide in Christ, our action is from Him, not from our own corrupt and broken nature.
It is not necessary for all men to be great in action. The greatest and sublimest power is often simple patience.
Faith is the act of trust by which one being, a sinner, commits himself to another being, a Saviour.
My own experience is that the Bible is dull when I am dull. When I am really alive, and set in upon the text with a tidal pressure of living affinities, it opens, it multiplies discoveries, and reveals depths even faster than I can note them. The worldly spirit shuts the Bible; the Spirit of God makes it a fire, flaming out all meanings and glorious truths.
Be an observer of providence; for God is showing you ever, by the way in which He leads you, whither He means to lead. Study your trials, your talents, the world's wants, and stand ready to serve God now, in whatever He brings to your hand.
Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency of sin.
Christ does not dress up a moral picture, and ask you to observe its beauty. He only tells you how to live; and the most beautiful characters the world has ever seen, have been those who received and lived these precepts without once conceiving their beauty.
Take your burdens, and troubles, and losses, and wrongs, if come they must and will, as your opportunities, knowing that God has girded you for greater things than these.
Every man's life is a plan of God.
We are to work after no set fashion of high endeavor; but to walk with Jesus, performing, as it were, a ministry on foot, that we may stop at the humblest matter, and prove our fidelity there.
Nothing is necessary for you in maintaining a Christian life, but just to stay by the helm, and put yourself where the power is. Come unto God, unite yourself to God, and the doing power you have is infinite.