Monday, January 16, 2012

From Hummingbird to Turkey Buzzard

Billy Sunday was a remarkable man who told it the way it was. Following are a few of his aphorisms that helped change people’s lives. Of course in today’s politically correct atmosphere where we dare not hurt an ant’s feelings, these would not be appropriate.

*Live so that when the final summons comes you will leave something more behind you than an epitaph on a tombstone or an obituary in a newspaper.

*You can find anything in the average church today, from a humming bird to a turkey buzzard.

*The Lord is not compelled to use theologians. He can take snakes, sticks or anything else, and use them for the advancement of his cause.

*The Lord may have to pile a coffin on your back before he can get you to bend it.

*Don't throw away your ticket when the train goes into a tunnel. It will come out the other side.

*The safest pilot is not the fellow that wears the biggest hat, but the man who knows the channels.

*The Church gives the people what they need; the theater gives them what they want.

*Death-bed repentance is burning the candle of life in the service of the devil, and then blowing the smoke into the face of God.

*Your reputation is what people say about you. Your character is what God and your [spouse] know about you.

*When your heart is breaking you don't want the dancing master or saloon-keeper. No, you want the preacher.

*Don't you know that every bad [person] in a community strengthens the devil's mortgage?

*Pilate washed his hands. If he had washed his old black heart he would have been all right.

*It takes a big [person] to see other people succeed without raising a howl.

*It's everybody's business how you live.

*Bring your repentance down to a spot-cash basis.

*If you took no more care of yourself physically than spiritually, you'd be just as dried up physically as you are spiritually.

*We place too much reliance upon preaching and upon singing, and too little on the living of those who sit in the pews.

*The carpet in front of the mirrors of some of you people is worn threadbare, while at the side of your bed where you should kneel in prayer it is as good as the day you put it down.

*Some persons think they have to look like a hedgehog to be pious.

*Look into the preaching Jesus did and you will find it was aimed straight at the big sinners on the front seats.

*If you live wrong you can't die right.

*"You are weighed in the balance"--but not by Bradstreet's or Dun's--you are weighed in God's balance.

*A revival gives the Church a little digitalis instead of an opiate.

*Some sermons instead of being a bugle call for service, are nothing more than showers of spiritual cocaine.

*Theology bears the same relation to Christianity that botany does to flowers.

*Morality isn't the light; it is only the polish on the candlestick.

*Some homes need a hickory switch a good deal more than they do a piano.

*Churches don't need new members half so much as they need the old bunch made over.

*God's work is too often side-tracked, while social, business and domestic arrangements are thundering through on the main line.

*A lot of people, from the way they live, make you think they've got a ticket to heaven on a Pullman parlor car and have ordered the porter to wake 'em up when they get there. But they get side-tracked almost before they've started.

*I believe that a long step toward public morality will have been taken when sins are called by their right names.

*The bars of the Church are so low that any old hog with two or three suits of clothes and a bank roll can crawl through.

*You will not have power until there is nothing questionable in your life.

*You can't measure manhood with a tape line around the biceps.

*The social life is the reflex of the home life.

*There are some so-called Christian homes today with books on the shelves of the library that have no more business there than a rattler crawling about on the floor, or poison within the child's reach.

*Home is the place we love the best and grumble the most.

*To train a boy in the way he should go you must go that way yourself.

*The man who lives for himself alone will be the sole mourner at his own funeral.

*The devil often grinds the axe with which God hews.

*A pup barks more than an old dog.

*Character needs no epitaph. You can bury the man, but character will beat the hearse back from the graveyard and it will travel up and down the streets while you are under the sod. It will bless or blight long after your name is forgotten.

*Some people pray like a jack-rabbit eating cabbage.

*If you put a polecat in the parlor you know which will change first--the polecat or the parlor?

*Your religion is in your will, not your handkerchief.

*If every black cloud had a cyclone in it, the world would have been blown into tooth-picks long ago.

*No man has any business to be in a bad business.

*The seventh commandment is not: "Thou shalt not commit affinity."

*A saloon-keeper and a good mother don't pull on the same rope.

*The presumptive husband should be able to show more than the price of a marriage license.

*Nobody can read the Bible thoughtfully, and not be impressed with the way it upholds the manhood of man. More chapters in the Bible are devoted to portraying the manhood of Caleb than to the creation of the world.

*Home is on a level with the women; the town is on a level with the homes.

*Bob Ingersoll wasn't the first to find out that Moses made mistakes. God knew about it long before Ingersoll was born.

*All that God has ever done to save this old world, has been done through men and women of flesh and blood like ourselves.

*Going to church doesn't make a man a Christian, any more than going to a garage makes him an automobile.

*If we people were able to have panes of glass over our hearts, some of us would want stained glass, wouldn't we?

*To see some people, you would think that the essential orthodox Christianity is to have a face so long they could eat oatmeal out of the end of a gas pipe.

*God likes a little humor, as evidenced by the fact that he made the monkey, the parrot--and some of you people.

*Wouldn't this city be a great place to live in if some people would die, get converted, or move away?

*I don't believe that God wants any man to be a hermit. Jesus Christ did not wear a hair shirt and sleep upon a bed of spikes. He went among the people and preached the Gospel.

*If you only believe things that you can understand you must be an awful ignoramus.

*There is more power in a mother's hand than in a king's scepter.

*Jesus Christ came among the common people. Abraham Lincoln said that God must have loved the common people: he made so many of them.

*Yank some of the groans out of your prayers, and shove in some shouts.

*The Bible says forgive your debtors; the world says "sue them for their dough."

*If you want milk and honey on your bread, then you'll have to go into the land where there are giants.

*Man was a fool in the Garden of Eden, and he has taken a good many new degrees since.

*What have you given the world it never possessed before you came?

No comments:

Post a Comment