An industrious sinner I much prefer to a lazy saint.
Guilt simply says that you are a sinner. And the feeling of shame simply shows you that you need not be a sinner, that you are meant to be a saint. If you are a sinner it is only because of your unconsciousness; you are not a sinner because the society follows a certain morality and you are not following it.
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
I wish people wouldn't think of me as a saint - unless they agree with the definition of a saint that a saint's a sinner who goes on trying.
I've been a sinner and a saint. If you've been a saint all your life, it's pretty easy to sleep at night. If you've been a sinner, you're just as comfortable in it.
Whenever anybody called Nelson Mandela a saint, he would say: "If by saint you mean a sinner who is trying to be better, then I'm a saint."
You cannot make a sinner into a saint by killing him. He who does not live as a saint here will never live as a saint hereafter.
Faith from, its essential nature implies the fallen state of man, while it recognizes the principles of the covenant of grace. It is itself the condition of that covenant. It is a grace which is alike distinguished from the love of angels and the faith of devils. It is peculiar to the returning sinner. None but a lost sinner needs it; none but a humbled sinner relishes it.
I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.
I've been a sinner and a saint. If you've been a saint all your life, it's pretty easy to sleep at night. If you've been a sinner, you're just as comfortable in it. I've walked both sides of the fence, and there are times I can't sleep and I wake the engineer up and get it out of me. But it usually doesn't pour all the way out. I have to come back and have the conversation that you usually try not to have with yourself. That's how it gets resolved.
'You are no saint,' says the devil. Well, if I am not, I am a sinner, and Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Sink or swim, I go to Him; other hope, I have none.
The sinner is at the heart of Christianity. No one is as competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. No one, except a saint.
Concluding a short series on sin: It is appalling to think of a power so strong that it can annihilate with the irresistible force of its grinding heel; but it is inspiring to consider an Almightiness that transforms the works of evil into the hand-maidens of righteousness and converts the sinner into the saint. And it is this latter power which eternal Love possesses and exhibits. He persistently dwells in the sinner until the sinner wakes up in His likeness and is satisfied with it.
The mark of a saint is not perfection, but consecration. A saint is not a person without faults, but a man who has given himself without reserve to God.