Matthew Henry Quotes

As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their "right" place.

Women were created from the rib of man to be beside him, not from his head to top him, nor from his feet to be trampled by him, but from under his arm to be protected by him, near to his heart to be loved by him.

Extraordinary afflictions are not always the punishment of extraordinary sins, but sometimes the trial of extraordinary graces.

The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.

Eve was not taken out of Adam's head to top him, neither out of his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by him, and near his heart to be loved by him.

Be careful if you make a women cry, because God counts her tears. The woman came out of a man’s ribs. Not from his feet to be walked on, not from his head to be superior, but from his side to be equal, under the arm to be protected, and next to the heart to be loved.

Peace is such a precious jewel that I would give anything for it but truth.

The fear of God reigning in the heart is the beauty of the soul.

It is easy to be religious when religion is in fashion; but it is an evidence of strong faith and resolution to swim against a stream to heaven, and to appear for God when no one else appears for Him.

The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preserve its purity.

No man will say, "There is no God" 'till he is so hardened in sin that it has become his interest that there should be none to call him to account.

A modest dress is a very good thing, if it be the genuine indication of a humble heart, and is to instruct; but it is a bad thing if it be the hypocritical disguise of a proud ambitious heart, and is to deceive. Let men be really as good as they seem to be, but not seem to be better than really they are.

Men cannot expect to do ill and fare well, but to find that done to them which they did to others.

When God intends great mercy for his people, he first of all sets them praying.

It ought to be the business of every day to prepare for our final day (attributed to Matthew Henry)

We must believe that He is able to do what He will, wise to do what is best, and good, according to His promise, to do what is best for us, if we love Him, and serve Him.

The beauty of holiness is that which the grave, that consumes all other beauty, cannot touch, or do any damage to.

As if men did not die fast enough, they are ingenious at finding out ways to destroy one another.

Take Jesus for your king, and by baptism swear allegiance to him; take him for your prophet, and hear him; take him for your priest, to make atonement for you.

Cast not away your confidence because God defers his performances. That which does not come in your time, will be hastened in his time, which is always the more convenient season. God will work when he pleases, how he pleases, and by what means he pleases. He is not bound to keep our time, but he will perform his work, honor our faith, and reward them that diligently seek him.

The true Christian hero will appear in the cause of Christ, not only when it is prevailing, but when it seems to be declining; (he) will be on the right side, though it be not the rising side.

After a storm comes a calm.

To wait on God is to live a life of desire towards him, delight in him, dependence on him, and devotedness to him.

The Christian religion is the religion of sinners, of such as have sinned, and in whom sin in some measure still dwells. The Christian life is a life of continued repentance, humiliation for and mortification of sin, of continual faith in, thankfulness for, and love to the Redeemer, and hopeful joyful expectation of a day of glorious redemption, in which the believer shall be fully and finally acquitted, and sin abolished for ever.

If you take a book into your hands, be it 'God's book, or any other useful good book,' rely on God to make it profitable to you. Do not waste time reading unprofitable books. When you read, do so not out of vain curiosity but with love for God's kingdom, compassion for human beings, and the intent to turn what you learn into prayers and praises.

The anger of a meek man is like fire struck out of steel, hard to be got out, and when it is, soon gone.

Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of people in order to be noticed by them. (Matthew 6:1) Lucy doesn't have a note for that, but I think it means you should do what's right because it's right, not because you want people to see and praise you for it.

Ah, fish, there is no fare Quite like a flounder! They surely will not miss A piece or two from stacks of sole like this; I'll steal a few, but leave the lion's share. Look! the lamplight on the lane is pretty They're back from walking out on Dover Beach. I think I'll hide and spare myselpf the speech, For we are in a world untouched by pity Where ignorant humans curse the kitty." (From Dover Sole)

For us to err, with the Bible in our hands, is the effect of pride, sloth, and carelessness.

Let no man go beyond or defraud his brother, for, though it be hidden from man, it will be found that God is the avenger of all such.

Jonathon Matthew Pulmer you are not the boss of me. Now go prance your butt into your car and stop acting like King Henry VIII. The world does not revolve around you.” -Kylie

The glory of God is his own end, and it should be ours in all that we do.

It is a great happiness to be under the influence of the Holy Ghost.

Even when God is coming towards his people in ways of mercy, he sometimes takes such methods as that they may think themselves but ill treated.

When our heads are fullest of care, and our hands of business, yet we must not forget our religion, nor suffer ourselves to be indisposed for acts of devotion.

The way to forget our miseries, is to remember the God of our mercies.

Man's extremity is God's opportunity of helping and saving.

When I cannot feel the faith of assurance, I live by the fact of God’s faithfulness. Matthew Henry

Matthew Henry, the Puritan preacher and Bible commentator, made this statement after a thief stole his money: “Let me be thankful first because I was never robbed before; second, although they took my purse, they did not take my life; third, because, although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.

There may be idols in the heart, where there are none in the sanctuary.

If we have, through grace, an interest in Him who is the Fountain, we may rejoice in him when the streams of temporal mercies are dried up.

We should take notice of that in others which is good, to their praise, that by so doing we may lay engagements upon them to abound therein more and more.

When the sins of a people reach up to heaven, the wrath of God will reach down to the earth.

No sooner was the wound given than the remedy was provided and revealed.

Though Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, yet not from the command of it,

God's time to help is when things are at the worst; and Providence verifies the paradox, The worse the better.

So, Jessamine,” said Lucie. “Can ghosts lie?” “Certainly not!” Jessamine looked shifty. “Ghosts are completely honest. I keep telling you, it was mice who knocked your silver mirror behind the desk and broke it.” “It appears clear that if ghosts are liars, they are terrible liars,” said James. Matthew sighed. “It is very strange to see you conversing with the invisible.” “Humph,” said Jessamine. She wobbled a bit and firmed up, her outlines clearing as she drifted down toward the floor. Shadowhunters, having the Sight, could generally see ghosts who wanted to be seen, but Lucie knew it was an effort for Jessamine to make herself visible to all eyes. “Oh!” said Cordelia. “It’s very nice to meet you, Jessamine. Lucie speaks of you often.” Jessamine beamed. “You are a very attractive ghost,” said Matthew, tapping his ringed fingers against his chest. “I do hope Lucie and James have mentioned as much.” “They have not,” Jessamine noted. “Very remiss,” said Matthew, his eyes sparkling. “You are not at all like Henry,” said Jessamine, eyeing Matthew speculatively. “He was forever setting things on fire, and not a compliment to be heard.” “Jessamine,” Lucie said. “This is important! Do tell us, can ghosts lie? Not you, of course, my dear.” “Ghosts can lie,” Jessamine conceded.

God’s work must be done, in every thing, according to his own will. His institutions neither need nor admit men’s inventions to make them either more beautiful or more likely to answer the intention of them. 'Add thou not unto his words.' God is pleased with willing worship, but not with will-worship.

The word of God directs us in our work and way, and a dark place indeed the world would be without it. The commandment is a lamp kept burning with the oil of the Spirit, as a light to direct us in the choice of our way, and the steps we take in that way.

He that is in haste may contract much guilt in a little time. What we say or do unadvisedly when we are hot, we must unsay or undo again when we are cool, or do worse.

When we begin to fret and be uneasy, we ought to consider that God hears all our murmurings, though silent, and only the murmurings of the heart.

Your heart? Sweetie, you’ve got too much heart. Do yourself a favor and let it shrivel. Read some Henry Miller. Some Ayn Rand. Some Deepak Chopra. That’ll shitten your outlook.

Jesus Christ in his person is God manifest in the flesh, he is light of light, the true Shechinah.

Come, Lord Jesus, put an end to this state of sin, sorrow, and temptation;

Gratior est pulchro veniens de corpore virtus—Virtue appears peculiarly graceful when associated with beauty.

All the disciples and followers of the Lord Jesus must be nonconformists to this world.

such is the corruption of nature that the bad are much more likely to debauch the good than the good to reform the bad.

God gives us of the good things of this life, not only for necessity, but for delight, that we may not only serve him, but serve him cheerfully.

Events are not determined by the wheel of fortune, which is blind, but by the wheels of Providence, which are full of eyes

Marriage is not an invention of men, but a divine institution, and

None so deaf as those that will not hear. None so blind as those that will not see.” —Matthew Henry

Note, The devil, though he is an enemy to all saints, is a conquered enemy. The Captain of our salvation has defeated and disarmed him; we have nothing to do but to pursue the victory.

Personal and relative duties must be done in obedience to his commands, with due aim at pleasing and honouring him, from principles of holy love and fear of him. But there is an express and direct duty also that we owe to God, namely, belief and acknowledgement of his being and perfections, paying him internal and external worship and homage - loving, fearing, and trusting in Him - depending on Him, and devoting ourselves to Him - observing all those religious duties and ordinances that He has appointed - praying to Him, praising Him, and meditating on His word and works.

It is easy to be religious when religion is in fashion; but it is an evidence of strong faith and resolution to swim against a stream to heaven, and to appear for God when no one else appears for him:

It seems that God is clearly calling His people everywhere to prayer, and as Matthew Henry said generations ago, “Whenever God is preparing to do something great in the earth, He first sets His people a-praying!

The noted Bible commentator Matthew Henry wrote: “She was not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.” Paul wrote that “the woman is the glory of man” (1 Cor. 11:7 NIV), for if man is the head (1 Cor. 11:1–16; Eph. 5:22–33), then woman is the crown that honors the head.

If the leprosy of sin have seized the head, if the judgment be corrupted, and wicked principles which countenance and support wicked practices, be embraced, it is an utter uncleanness, from which few are ever cleansed.

Matthew Henry said, "When God intends great mercy for His people, He sets them apraying." Indeed, when God wants anything accomplished in His Kingdom, He moves men to pray. God is always the initiator. All effectual prayer was moving in the heart of God before ever it began to move in the heart of man. What Kepler said as he unlocked the secrets of the heavens, could well be said by the man who prays in the Spirit: "O God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee.

So St Matthew, St Mark, St Luke, and St John, penned their Gospels for the use of the Church, the one supplying often what another omits, but yet none pretending to give an exhaustive or perfect account of all that Jesus Christ said and did, for if this had been attempted, St John tells us, “the whole world would not have contained the books that would be written” about it.

I’m reminded that, often, God allows us to wrestle for long periods of time as we reach out for him. At one of the most painful times of his life, Jesus prayed three times without any noticeable response from God (Matthew 26:39–44). It is as if God is helping us to truly own our pleas, wishes, and desires—to want them deeply, from the heart, rather than casually or offhandedly.

God, and she was changed. As commentator Matthew Henry eloquently described this scene, “Those who, through grace, are brought to experience the delights of communion with God will say that the one-half was not told them of the pleasures of Wisdom’s ways.”26

All those who rejoice in the success of the church's enemies will share with them in their downfall; and those who have most indulged themselves in pride and pleasure are the least able to bear calamities; their sorrows will be as excessive as their pleasure and jollity were before.

I also came to see that I should not worry about tomorrow, next week, next year, or next century. The more willing I was to look honestly at what I was thinking and saying and doing now, the more easily I would come into touch with the movement of God's Spirit in me, leading me to the future. God is a God of the present and reveals to those who are willing to listen carefully to the moment in which they live the steps they are to take toward the future. "Do not worry about tomorrow," Jesus says, "tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own" (Matthew 6:34).

All obedience begins in the affections, and nothing in religion is done right, that is not done there first.

One way or other, God will give redress to the injured, who in a humble silence commit their cause to him;

If the blood of Christ be sprinkled upon our consciences, it will be our protection from the wrath of God, the curse of the law, and the damnation of hell, Rom. 8:1.

It is a thing to be regretted (and prevented, if possible) that a whole nation should be ruined for the pride and obstinacy of its princes,

Those that name the name of Christ, but do not depart from iniquity, as that name binds them to do, name it in vain; their worship is vain

the more we see of God's glory in his works the more we shall desire to see.

The treasures of wisdom are hidden not from us, but for us, in Christ.

God will always have a church on earth; but he never said it should be infallible, or perfectly pure from corruption on this side heaven.

so bad a thing is it to invade God's property, and so cautious should we be to abstain from all appearances of this evil.

Holy love to God is the fire by which all our offerings must be made; else they are not of a sweet savour to God.

God's servants must think nothing below them but sin.

Christ will fold up this world as a garment not to be abused any longer, not to be any longer so used as it has been.

for those that would be kept from any sin must be careful to avoid all temptations to it, and every thing that looks towards it or leads to it.

All the benefit of our religious services is lost if we do not improve them, and conduct ourselves aright afterwards.

Christianity is the salt of the earth.

Guilty consciences are apt to take good providences in a bad sense,

Children should be directed and encouraged to ask their parents questions concerning the things of God, a practice which would be perhaps of all others the most profitable way of catechising;

Taking this “servant” attitude of thankfulness in all of life’s circumstances will help you react as old Matthew Henry did when he was mugged. He wrote in his diary, “Let me be thankful first because I was never robbed before; second, although they took my purse, they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.

The workman made it, therefore it is not God. To represent an infinite Spirit by an image, and the great Creator by the image of a creature, is the greatest affront we can put upon God and the greatest cheat we can put upon ourselves. As

her recommendation—Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, freshly annotated; Alice Munro’s Open Secrets; Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man; Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love; Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy—and the sight of each made her sigh.

No delights can be agreeable nor satisfying to a soul but those that God himself has provided and appointed for it; no true paradise, but of God’s planting. The light of our own fires, and the sparks of our own kindling, will soon leave us in the dark,

If old people be found in the way of righteousness, their age will be their honour. Old age, as such, is honourable, and commands respect (Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, Lev. 19:32); but, if it be found in the way of wickedness, its honour is forfeited, its crown profaned and laid in the dust, Isa. 65:20. Old people therefore, if they would preserve their honour, must still hold fast their integrity, and then their gray hairs are indeed a crown to them; they are worthy of double honour. Grace is the glory of old age.

How can we embrace poverty as a way to God when everyone around us wants to become rich? Poverty has many forms. We have to ask ourselves: 'What is my poverty?' Is it lack of money, lack of emotional stability, lack of a loving partner, lack of security, lack of safety, lack of self-confidence? Each human being has a place of poverty. That’s the place where God wants to dwell! 'How blessed are the poor,' Jesus says (Matthew 5:3). This means that our blessing is hidden in our poverty. We are so inclined to cover up our poverty and ignore it that we often miss the opportunity to discover God, who dwells in it. Let’s dare to see our poverty as the land where our treasure is hidden.

We are apt to show our trouble too much to ourselves, aggravating it, and poring upon it, which does us no service, whereas by showing it to God we might cast the care upon him who careth for us, and thereby ease ourselves. Nor should we allow of any complaint to ourselves or others which we cannot with due decency and sincerity of devotion make to God, and stand to before him.

Recognition that even the Bible presents an idealized David - and that the Bible is the only written source of information we have about David’s life - has led some scholars in the past few decades to claim that David never existed at all. They argue that the biblical David is not the idealization of a real historical figure, but is rather an invention out of whole cloth, a projection into the past by later kings who wanted to legitimate their lineage and status and who created a legendary founding figure against whom to compare themselves. Yet this is akin to claiming that England’s Henry V never existed if we had no source of information other than Shakespeare’s idealized good king. To a certain extent, these scholars have bought the spin of the Bible just as fully as those who, like Matthew Henry, call David a saint. It is, in fact, the very existence of the biblical spin that argues in favor of David’s existence. There is no need to spin a story that has no basis in reality. If the fundamental aim of spin is to say “it may seem that the event happened one way, but it really happened another way,” then there has to have been an actual event in the first place.

Who is America named after? Not the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant. Ameryk was the chief investor in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot—the English name of the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. He moved to London from Genoa in 1484 and was authorized by King Henry VII to search for unknown lands to the west. On his little ship Matthew, Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497 and became the first recorded European to set foot on American soil, predating Vespucci by two years. Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him. There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year: “…on Saint John the Baptist’s day [June 24], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the Mathew,” which clearly suggests this is what happened. Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents. This is the first use of the term America to refer to the new continent. The earliest surviving map to use the name is Martin Waldseemüller’s great map of the world of 1507, but it only applied to South America. In his notes Waldseemüller makes the assumption that the name is derived from a Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, because Vespucci had discovered and mapped the South American coast from 1500 to 1502. This suggests he didn’t know for sure and was trying to account for a name he had seen on other maps, possibly Cabot’s. The only place where the name “America” was known and used was Bristol—not somewhere the France-based Waldseemüller was likely to visit. Significantly, he replaced “America” with “Terra Incognita” in his world map of 1513. Vespucci never reached North America. All the early maps and trade were British. Nor did he ever use the name of America for his discovery. There’s a good reason for this. New countries or continents were never named after a person’s first name, but always after the second (as in Tasmania, Van Diemen’s Land, or the Cook Islands). America would have become Vespucci Land (or Vespuccia) if the Italian explorer had consciously given his name to it.

Japan is obsessed with French pastry. Yes, I know everyone who has access to French pastry is obsessed with it, but in Tokyo they've taken it another level. When a patissier becomes sufficiently famous in Paris, they open a shop in Tokyo; the department store food halls feature Pierre Herme, Henri Charpentier, and Sadaharu Aoki, who was born in Tokyo but became famous for his Japanese-influenced pastries in Paris before opening shops in his hometown. And don't forget the famous Mister Donut, which I just made up. Our favorite French pastry shop is run by a Japanese chef, Terai Norihiko, who studied in France and Belgium and opened a small shop called Aigre-Douce, in the Mejiro neighborhood. Aigre-Douce is a pastry museum, the kind of place where everything looks too beautiful to eat. On her first couple of visits, Iris chose a gooey caramel brownie concoction, but she and Laurie soon sparred over the affections of Wallace, a round two-layer cake with lime cream atop chocolate, separated by a paper-thin square chocolate wafer. "Wallace is a one-woman man," said Laurie. Iris giggled in the way eight-year-olds do at anything that smacks of romance. We never figured out why they named a cake Wallace. I blame IKEA. I've always been more interested in chocolate than fruit desserts, but for some reason, perhaps because it was summer and the fruit desserts looked so good and I was not quite myself the whole month, I gravitated toward the blackberry and raspberry items, like a cup of raspberry puree with chantilly cream and a layer of sponge cake.