Sermon quotes on eternity
Augustine of Hippo
They, then, who are destined to die, need not be careful to inquire what death they are to die, but into what place death will usher them.
Augustine of Hippo
A man may lose the good things of this life against his will; but if he loses the eternal blessings, he does so with his own consent.
Addison D. Bevere
The Tyndale Bible Dictionary adds that Saints “are the people of the coming age.” In other words, a saint is someone who brings a future reality into the present. They transcend the problems and limitations of the temporal by embracing and partnering with the eternal. They
Saints: Becoming More Than “Christians,” Revell, 2020. Source Material from Walter A. Elwell and Philip W. Comfort, eds., Tyndale Bible Dictionary, Tyndale Reference Library (Wheaton: Tyndale, 2001), 1151.
John Bunyan
Christ is the desire of nations, the joy of angels, the delight of the Father. What solace then must that soul be filled with, that has the possession of Him to all eternity!
Henry Drummond
We know but little now about the conditions of the life that is to come. But what is certain is that Love must last. God, the Eternal God, is Love. Covet, therefore, that everlasting gift.
Henry Drummond
God, the Eternal God, is Love. Covet therefore that everlasting gift, that one thing which it is certain is going to stand, that one coinage which will be current in the universe when all other coinages of all the nations of the world shall be useless and unhonored.
Thomas Fuller
It is best to be with those in time, that we hope to be with in eternity.
Seamus Heaney
The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
Abraham Heschel
The Sabbath arrives in the world,
scattering a song in the silence of the night:
eternity utters a day.
Thomas Á Kempis
Let temporal things serve your use, but the eternal be the object of your desire.
Thomas Á Kempis
Influence never dies; every act, emotion, look and word makes influence tell for good or evil, happiness or woe, through the long future of eternity.
C.S. Lewis
Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God’s eyes; that is, in our deepest reality.
A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003, p.80.
F.B. Meyer
God has set Eternity in our heart, and man’s infinite capacity cannot be filled or satisfied with the things of time and sense.
Our Daily Walk. Christianity Today, Vol. 33, no. 8.
Edvard Munch (For Contrast)
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
Dorothy L. Sayers
It is precisely because of the eternity outside time that everything in time becomes valuable and important and meaningful. Therefore, Christianity … makes it of urgent importance that everything we do here (whether individually or as a society) should be rightly related to what we eternally are. “Eternal life” is the sole sanction for the values of this life.
Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul. Christianity Today, Vol. 41, no. 1.
R.C. Sproul
The day of one’s birth is a good day for the believer, but the day of death is the greatest day that a Christian can ever experience in this world because that is the day he goes home, the day he walks across the threshold, the day he enters the Father’s house.
Surprised by Suffering: The Role of Pain and Death in The Christian Life
R.C. Sproul
Right now counts forever.
John Starke
Here is a spiritual peculiarity to explore: that eternity is what we crave, and the first thing our disillusioned brains think to do is cram it into the hours of the working week.
Taken from The Possibility of Prayer: Finding Stillness with God in a Restless World by John Starke Copyright (c) 2020 by John Starke. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Henry David Thoreau
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
John Tillotson
He who provides for this life but takes not care for eternity is wise for a moment but a fool forever.
A.W. Tozer
Eternity won’t be long enough to learn all that God is or praise Him for all that He has done.
Rick Warren
Just as the nine months you spent in your mother’s womb were not an end in themselves but preparation for life, so this life is preparation for the next.
Isaac Watts
I believe the promises of God enough to venture an eternity on them.
John Wesley
The sea is an excellent figure of the fullness of God, and that of the blessed Spirit. For as the rivers all return into the sea; so the bodies, the souls, and the good works of the righteous, return into God, to live there in his eternal repose.
Steven Wright
I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
Peter Toon
When Christians discuss the life of Jesus, they usually are thinking of the period from his birth in Bethlehem to his resurrection from the dead following the crucifixion at Calvary. This life lasted about thirty-three years and is described – with special emphasis on the last three years – in the four Gospels. There is, however, a further heavenly life of Jesus, beginning with the Ascension, which will last forever.
Blaise Pascal
Our imagination so powerfully magnifies time, by continual reflections upon it, and so diminishes eternity . . . for want of reflection, that we make a nothing of eternity and an eternity of nothing. . . . This is a dangerous game.
C.S. Lewis
Hope is one of the Theological virtues. A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking. But it’s one of the great things a Christian is meant to do. If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were those who thought the most of the next. And it is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one.