If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.
Self-Righteousness
Dwight L Moody
I have noticed that people are satisfied when you preach about the sins of the patriarchs, but they don’t like it when you touch upon the sins of today.
William Perkins
Despise not thy neighbour, but think thyself as bad a sinner, and that the like defects may befall thee. If thou canst not excuse his doing, excuse his intent which may be good; or if the deed be evil, think it was done of ignorance; if thou canst no way excuse him, think some great temptation befell him, and that thou shouldst be worse if the like temptation befell thee; and give God thanks that the like as yet hath not befallen thee. Despise not a man being a sinner, for though he be evil to-day, he may turn tomorrow.
Augustine
If you believe in the Gospel what you like, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.
Dwight L Moody
Now the question is, “Shall we have a great and mighty harvest, or shall we go on discussing our differences?”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I have found, in my own spiritual life, that the more rules I lay down for myself, the more sins I commit. The habit of regular morning and evening prayer is one which is indispensable to a believer’s life, but the prescribing of the length of prayer, and the constrained remembrance of so many persons and subjects, may gender unto bondage, and strangle prayer rather than assist it.
Deidre Bobgan
The way pride works in remorse is through a distorted self-righteousness which must pay for its own sin or which must exonerate the self through putting the blame elsewhere…Remorse may lead to despair or else back into the victim response of blame, but repentance leads to life. Judas died in remorse, but Peter was restored through repentance.
William Law
For he that does not look to the Spirit of God for all goodness and virtue must therefore look to some other source for some goodness and virtue. Yet whether one looks to his own religious self, learned in scripture doctrines, or to Satan, his religion is equally an abomination to God.
C. S. Lewis
When I first became a Christian, about fourteen years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and wouldn’t go to the churches and Gospel Halls;…. I disliked very much their hymns which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren’t fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit.
Author Unknown
Jesus came into the world to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.