Top 106 Quotes & Sayings by E. Stanley Jones

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American theologian E. Stanley Jones.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
E. Stanley Jones

Eli Stanley Jones (1884–1973) was an American Methodist Christian missionary, theologian, and author. He is remembered chiefly for his interreligious lectures to the educated classes in India, thousands of which were held across the Indian subcontinent during the first decades of the 20th century. He is sometimes considered the "Billy Graham of India." His seminal work, The Christ of the Indian Road (ISBN 0-687-06377-9), sold more than a million copies worldwide after its publication in 1925. As of 2018, three million copies of his books have been sold. He is the founder of the Christian Ashram movement. In 1938, Time called Jones "the world's greatest Christian missionary."

You cease to move into yourself, away from others. You give up your antagonism. You begin to move toward others in love. God moved toward you in gracious, outgoing love, and you move toward others in that same outgoing love.
When we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code, but a character.
Prayer is aligning ourselves with the purposes of God. — © E. Stanley Jones
Prayer is aligning ourselves with the purposes of God.
Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence.
Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: Prayer is co-operation with God. It is the purest exercise of the faculties God has given us - an exercise that links these faculties with the Maker to work out the intentions He had in mind in their creation.
The action carries a sense of incompleteness and frustration, but not of guilt. Victorious living does not mean perfect living in the sense of living without flaw, but it does mean adequate living, and that can be consistent with many mistakes.
Character is supreme in life, hence Jesus stood supreme in the supreme thing - so supreme that, when we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code but a character.
Prayer is commitment. We don't merely co-operate with God with certain things held back within. We, the total person, co-operate. This means that co-operation equals committment.
Victorious living does not mean freedom from temptation, nor does it mean freedom from mistakes.
At the cross God wrapped his heart in flesh and blood and let it be nailed to the cross for our redemption.
Prayer means that the total you is praying. Your whole being reaches out to God, and God reaches down to you.
God, to redeem us at the deepest portion of our nature - the urge to love and be loved - must reveal His nature in an incredible and impossible way. He must reveal it at a cross.
Some have said that the power of a Redeemer would depend upon two things: first, upon the richness of the self that was given; and second, upon the depths of the giving. Friend and foe alike are agreed on the question of the character of Jesus Christ.
Being born in a Christian home does not make you a Christian. — © E. Stanley Jones
Being born in a Christian home does not make you a Christian.
Whatever our creed, we stand with admiration before the sublime character of Jesus.
In conversion you are not attached primarily to an order, nor to an institution, nor a movement, nor a set of beliefs, nor a code of action - you are attached primarily to a Person, and secondarily to these other things.
If the Holy Spirit can take over the subconscious with our consent and cooperation, then we have almighty Power working at the basis of our lives, then we can do anything we ought to do, go anywhere we ought to go, and be anything we ought to be.
We grow small trying to be great.
When the depths are upheld by the Holy Spirit, then the reaction is Christian.
In the ordinary church, it is suppressed by respectability, by a desire to appear better than we really are.
Life is supplied with a basic adequacy.
We are personalities in the making, limited, and grappling with things too high for us. Obviously we, at very best, will make many mistakes, but these mistakes need not be sins.
Our intentions may be very good, but, because the intelligence is limited, the action may turn out to be a mistake - a mistake, but not necessarily a sin, for sin comes out of a wrong intention.
The conscious mind determines the actions, the unconscious mind determines the reactions; and the reactions are just as important as the actions.
Here he tells us that the new birth is first of all 'not of blood'. You don't get it through the blood stream, through heredity. Your parents can give you much, but they cannot give you this.
To pass from estrangement from God to be a son of God is the basic fact of conversion. That altered relationship with God gives you an altered relationship with yourself, with your brother man, with nature, with the universe.
Prayer is commission. Out of the quietness with God, power is generated that turns the spiritual machinery of the world. When you pray, you begin to feel the sense of being sent, that the divine compulsion is upon you.
Grace is free, but when once you take it, you are bound forever to the Giver and bound to catch the spirit of the Giver.
The one supreme business of life is to find God's plan for your life and live it
Your capacity to say "No" determines your capacity to say "Yes" to greater things.
Everybody who belongs to Christ belongs to everybody who belongs to Christ
If you don't make up your mind, your unmade mind will unmake you.
Prayer is surrender--surr ender to the will of God and cooperation with that will. If I throw out a boathook from the boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God.
While love takes on itself impossible tasks, yet it finds that love lightens all loads. It is the same burden that wings are to a bird, that sails are to a ship. Nothing is hard if done for love's sweet sake. The yoke of love is easy; the yoke of duty is hard. There is all the difference in the world between being drawn by love and being driven by duty. The task may be the same, but love makes everything light, and duty makes everything drudgery.
When we talk about what we believe we divide. When we talk about who we believe in we unite.
Jesus will meet me today in the person of someone in need-I must not miss him.
The love of God invades me, the peace of God pervades me, the will of God persuades me, and I am wholly His.
If you don't surrender to Christ, you surrender to chaos. — © E. Stanley Jones
If you don't surrender to Christ, you surrender to chaos.
Worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil.
When we say we begin with God, we begin with our idea of God, and our idea of God is not God. Instead, we ought to begin with God’s idea of God, and God’s idea of God is Christ
A Rattlesnake, if Cornered will become so angry it will bite itself. That is exactly what the harboring of hate and resentment against others is -- a biting of oneself. We think we are harming others in holding these spites and hates, but the deeper harm is to ourselves.
You don't grow old. You get old by not growing.
Surrender the thing you fear into the hands of God. Turn it right over to God and ask Him to solve it with you. Fear is keeping things in your own hands; faith is turning them over into the hands of God.
If you don't surrender to God, don't think you don't surrender. Everybody surrenders -- to something.
To talk with God, no breath is lost. Talk on! To walk with God, no strength is lost. Walk on! To wait on God, no time is lost. Wait on!
The purpose of religion is not so much to get us into heaven, or to keep us out of hell, but to put a little bit of heaven into us, and take the hell out of us. This has always been the greatest responsibility of religion.
The BIBLE redirects my will, cleanses my emotions, enlightens my mind, and quickens my total being
The Indian is making an amazing discovery, namely that Christianity and Jesus are not the same - that they may have Jesus without the system that has been built up around Him in the West.
Whatever we focus on determines what we become. — © E. Stanley Jones
Whatever we focus on determines what we become.
Very often when I haven't faith in my faith, I have to have faith in His faith. He makes me believe in myself and my possibilities, when I simply can't. I have to rise to His faith in me.
There are two ways to be rich - one in the abundance of your possessions and the other in the fewness of your wants.
The early Christians did not say, in dismay, 'Look what the world has come to,' but, in delight, 'Look what has come to the world!”
When prayer fades out, power fades out. We are as spiritual as we are prayerful; no more, no less.
The only thing you believe in is the thing you believe in enough to practice. Your creed is your deed.
When Satan attacks you, command him in the Name of Jesus to bend his neck. On the back of it you'll find there's a nail scarred foot print!
Don't wait for some miracle to be performed on you from without, lifting you above your fears and doubts and self-centeredness. You help God from within by turning in outgoing love to others, and miraculously your fears and doubts and self-centeredness will vanish. The miracle starts within, not from without.
Abundant living means abundant giving.
When man listens, God speaks; when man obeys, God acts; when man prays, God empowers.
An individual gospel without a social gospel is a soul without a body and a social gospel without an individual gospel is a body without a soul. One is a ghost, the other a corpse.
The God I find in Christ is a God who overcomes evil with good, hate by love, and the world by a cross.
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