Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow QUOTES

1 " unforgiving spirit is not only Satan’s widest door into our hearts, but it is the strongest imitation and warmest welcome. St. Paul not only urges a spirit of forgiveness as a bar to the devil’s ingress, but hastens to close the door by his own readiness to forgive even in advance. “To whom ye forgive anything, I forgive also; for if I forgave anything, to whom I forgave it, for your sakes forgave I it in the person of Christ. Lest Satan should get an advantage of us; for we are not ignorant of his devices.” A lofty spirit, ready and compliant with the spirit of forgiveness, free from all bitterness, revenge or retaliation, has freed itself from the conditions which invite Satan, and has effectually locked and barred his entrance. The readiest way to keep Satan out is to keep the spirit of forgiveness in. The devil is never deeper in hell nor farther removed from us than when we can pray, “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

2 " Washington, Ga, July 1, 1912: Pray more and more; keep at the four a.m. hour. God will be for it; the devil against it. Press on, you can’t pray too much, you may pray too little. The devil will compromise with you to pray as the common standard, on going to bed, and a little prayer in the monring. Hell will be full if we don’t do better for God than that. Pray, pray, pray, pray always, rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

3 " God is revealed not by argument but by work. We learn what He is from what He does. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

4 " The Bible is a revelation, not a philosophy nor a poem, not a science. It reveals things and persons as they are, living and acting outside the range of earthly vision or natural discovery. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

5 " Men don’t believe in a devil now, As their fathers used to do; They’ve forced the door of the broadest creed To let his majesty through; There isn’t a print of his cloven foot; Or a fiery dart from his bow, To be found in earth or air to-day, For the world has voted so. But who is mixing the fatal draft That palsies heart and brain, And loads the earth of each passing year With ten hundred thousand slain? Who blights the bloom of the land to-day With the fiery breath of hell, If the devil isn’t and never was? Won’t somebody rise and tell? –Alfred J. Hough. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

6 " We are apt to think that Satan is most powerful in crowded thoroughfares. It is a mistake. I believe the temptations of life are always most dangerous in the wilderness. I have been struck with that fact in Bible history. It is not in their most public moments that the great men of the past have fallen; it has been in their quiet hours. Moses never stumbled when he stood before Pharaoh, or while he was flying from Pharaoh; it was when he got into the desert that his patience began to fail. David never stumbled while he was fighting his way through imposing armies; it was when the fight was over, when he was resting quietly under his own vine and fig tree that he put forth his hand to steal. The sorest temptations are not those spoken but those echoed. It is easier to lay aside your besetting sin amid a cloud of witnesses than in the solitude of your own room. The sin that besets you is never so besetting as when you are alone. –George Matheson. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

7 " A spiritual character can work through agencies or directly on the spirit. He infuses thoughts makes suggestions and does it so deftly that we do not know their paternity. He tempted Eve to take the forbidden fruit. He put it into David’s mind to number Israel, thereby provoking the wrath of God. He influenced Ananias and Sapphira to lie to God. Peter’s yielding to presumption was at his instance. Judas’ betrayal was from the same baneful source. The temptation of Christ was a typical and masterpiece of his business in seeking to seduce our Lord from God, showing his power to array agencies and pleas, and to back these by all forms of sanctity and persuasiveness. He is blasphemous, arrogant and presumptuous. He slanders God to men and infuses into men hard thoughts of God. He intensifies their enmity and inflames their prejudice against Him. He leads them to deny His existence and to traduce His character, thereby destroying the foundations of faith and all true worship. He does all he can by insinuation and charges to blacken saintly character and lower God’s estimate of the good. He is the vilest of calumniators, the most malignant and artful of slanderers. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

8 " The world is one of the enemies which must be fought and conquered on the way to heaven. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

9 " To save the world and ignore the individual is not only Utopian, but every way damaging. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

10 " The great power and malignity of Satan is seen in that among the most distressing cases were those who were not noted for great sins, but the young and comparative innocent ones were the victims of his dread power. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

11 " He is always at church before the preacher is in the pulpit or a member in the pew, to hinder the sower, to impoverish the soil, or to blast the seed, that is, when courage and faith are in the pulpit, and zeal and prayer in the pew. But if dead orthodoxy or live heterodoxy are in the pulpit, he then puts in his time elsewhere at some point of danger. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

12 " Nothing advances Satan’s work with more skilful and readier hands than to be ignorant of Satan and his ways. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

13 " To escape his snare, we must not only have a strong faith in the fact that Satan is, but also must have a most intimate knowledge of him and of his plans and many-sided ways. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

14 " That is the devil’s main business—to materialize, earthlyize religion, to get man to live for bread alone, to make earth bigger than heaven. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

15 " The devil was created good, doubtless very good. His purity, as well as exaltation, were sources of congratulation, wonderment and praise in heaven. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

16 " The devil is a positive character. He wears disguises, but his ends are single and lie in only one direction, double-faced but never double-minded, never undecided, never vague nor feeble in his purposes or ends. No irresolution, nor hesitant depression nor aimless action spring from him. The devil has character if not horns, for character is often harder and sharper than horns. Character is felt. We feel the devil. He orders things, controls things. He is a great manager. He manages bad men, often good men and bad angels. Indirect, sinister, low and worldly, is the devil as a manager. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

17 " No more fatal or deadly symptom can be seen in a church than this transference of its strength from spiritual to material forces, from the Holy Ghost to the world. The power of God in the Church is the measure of its strength and is the estimate which God puts on it, and not the estimate the world puts on it. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

18 " True strength lies in the vital godliness of the people. The aggregate of the personal holiness of the members of each church is the only true measure of strength. Any other test offends God, dishonours Christ, grieves the Holy Spirit, and degrades religion. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

19 " When collecting money, building churches, and statistical columns are to stand as evidences of real church prosperity, then the world has a strong lodgment, and Satan has gained his end. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

20 " according to the Revised Version, that petition of conflict, peril, warning, and safety is, “Deliver us from the Evil One.” Evil is comparatively harmless, feeble and inert without the presence of its mighty inspirer. Deliverance from the devil is deliverance from the many evils of which he is the source and inspiration. "

― E.M. Bounds , Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow