Sermon quotes on
the New Year
Karl Barth
On this night we ask for one thing only: that you collect our scattered thoughts, getting rid of the confused and defiant thoughts that may distract us, and thus enable us to concentrate on your limitless generosity to us.
A Prayer for the New Year
Phillips Brooks
The only way to get rid of your past is to make a future out of it. God will waste nothing.
Oswald Chambers
Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.
G.K. Chesterton
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.
Maltbie Davenport
Good habits are not made on birthdays, nor Christian character at the New Year. The workshop of character is everyday life. The uneventful and commonplace hour is where the battle is lost or won.
Charles Dickens
The New Year, the New Year. Everywhere during the New Year! The Old Year was already looked upon as dead; and its effects were selling cheap, like some drowned mariner’s aboardship. Its patterns were Last Year’s, and going at a sacrifice, before its breath was gone. Its treasures were mere dirt, beside the riches of its unborn successor!”
The Chimes (Illustrated by Maclise, Doyle, Leech and Stanfield)
Charles Dickens
So may the New Year be a happy one to you, happy to many more whose happiness depends on you! So may each year be happier than the last, and not the meanest of our brethren or sisterhood debarred their rightful share, in what our Great Creator formed them to enjoy.
The Chimes (Illustrated by Maclise, Doyle, Leech and Stanfield)
Jim Elliot
Wherever you are, be all there. Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God.
T.S. Eliot
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
Poem: “Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1943), 42.
Jack Hyles
What we do today is more important than what we plan to do in the future.
Woodrow Kroll
Our quitting point is God’s beginning point.
Martin Luther
Glory to God in highest heaven,
Who unto man His Son hath given;
While angels sing with tender mirth,
A glad new year to all the earth.
Alexander MacLaren
Being in Christ, it is safe to forget the past; it is possible to be sure of the future; it is possible to be diligent in the present.
Thomas Manton
Great resolutions are always vain, unless joined with the consideration of our own weakness. The people of God have promised much, but always it is with the concurrence of Christ. The apostle saith, Phil. 4:12, ‘I can,’ or will ‘do all things,’ but it is ‘through Christ.’”
R.C. Sproul
Faith…involves trusting in the future promises of God and waiting for their fulfillment.
Charles Spurgeon
“I wish, my brothers and sisters, that during this year you may live nearer to Christ than you have ever done before. Depend upon it, it is when we think much of Christ that we think little of ourselves, little of our troubles, and little of the doubts and fears that surround us.”
Rick Warren
God specializes in giving people a fresh start.
Warren Wiersbe
Nothing paralyzes our lives like the attitude that things can never change. We need to remind ourselves that God can change things. Outlook determines outcome. If we see only the problems, we will be defeated; but if we see the possibilities in the problems, we can have victory.
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Consider checking out our illustrations page for the New Year.