Thomas Boston Quotes

“The law discovers the disease, and the gospel the physician.”

“Affliction doth not rise out of the dust or come to men by chance; but it is the Lord that sends it, and we should own and reverence His hand in it.”

“Faith is the soul going out of itself for all its wants.”

“Free grace will fix those, whom free will shook down into a gulph of misery.”

“Good education is not regeneration. Education may chain up men's lusts, but cannot change their hearts.”

“Let the mantle of worldly enjoyments hang loose about you, that it may be easily dropped when death comes to carry you into another world.”

“Go where thou wilt, thou canst not go out of thy Father's ground.”

“Saving faith is the faith of God's elect; the special gift of God to them, wrought in them by his Spirit.”

“Call it no more free-will, but slavish lust; free to evil, but free from good, till regenerating grace loosens the bands of wickedness.”

“For as the sun darts its beams upon a dunghill, and yet is no way defiled by it; so God decrees the permission of sin, yet is not the author of sin.”

“Call on Me in the day of trouble. I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me. The whole life of a Christian is a praying, waiting life.”

“As the light depends on the sun, or the shadow on the body that casts it, so we also depend on God; without Him, we can do nothing.”

“Trials wean us from this world and prompt us to look to the happiness of the next world.”

“So do men oftentimes find their greatest cross where they expected their greatest comfort.”

“The truth is, the crook in the lot is the great engine of Providence for making men appear in their true colours, discovering both their ill and their good.”

“The natural man cannot but resist the Lord's offering to help him; yet that resistance is infallibly overcome in the elect, by converting grace.”

“If a man be new-born, he will desire the sincere milk of the word.”

“God will hold sinners with one hand over the pit of hell, while He torments them with the other.”

“The gospel casts out a rope to hale sinners to land; but the sinner has no hands to lay hold on it; his very faith must be wrought in him by the Spirit.”

“Many a lash in the dark doth conscience give the wicked.”

“No work nor deed of ours whatsoever, no not faith itself, can be the condition of the covenant of grace properly so called; but only Christ's fulfilling all righteousness.”

“A man shall as soon force fruit out of a branch broken off from the tree and withered, as work righteousness without believing in, and uniting with Christ.”

“As fish in the water love deep places and wells and are most frequently found there, so wicked men have a great love to carnal security and have no will to strive against the stream.”

“Persuade yourselves, that the faith of the gospel is beyond the power of nature; that there is a necessity of a power from on high to bring you to believe.”

“There is no true believing or trusting to the report of the gospel, but what is the effect of the working of a divine power on the soul for that end.”

“God hath decreed the end, so He hath decreed the means that are proper for attaining that end; so that these two must not be separated.”

“As the child cannot be active in his own generation, so a man cannot be active in his own regeneration.”

“But in the work of redemption all His perfections and excellencies shine forth in their greatest glory.”

“A righteous man may make a righteous work, but no work of an unrighteous man can make him righteous. Now we become righteous only by faith, through the righteousness of Christ imputed to us.”

“They that would keep themselves pure must have their bodies in subjection, and that may require, in some cases, a holy violence.”