Richard Sibbes Quotes

       Richard Sibbes
       1577-1635
      
       Richard Sibbes was an English theologian. He is known as a Biblical exegete, and as a representative, with William Perkins and John Preston, of what has been called "main-line" Puritanism.
      
       He attended St John's College, Cambridge from 1595. He was lecturer at Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge, from 1610 or 1611 to 1615 or 1616. It is erroneously held by 18th and 19th century scholars that Sibbes was deprived of his various academic posts on account of his Puritanism. In fact he was never deprived of any of his posts, due to his ingenuity of the system.
      
       He was then preacher at Gray's Inn, London, from 1617, returning to Cambridge as Master of Catherine Hall in 1626, without giving up the London position.
      
       He was the author of several devotional works expressing intense religious feeling -- The Saint's Cordial (1629), The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax (1631, exegesis of Isaiah 42:3), The Soules Conflict (1635), etc.

Poverty and affliction take away the fuel that feeds pride.     Topics: Affliction, Pride     Source: A Puritan Golden Treasury The winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified prepare the soul for glory.     Topics: Affliction If Christ has once possessed the affections, there is no dispossessing of him again. A fire in the heart overcomes all fires without.     Topics: Assurance It is atheism to pray and not wait on hope.     Topics: Atheism The tenets of [the Christian life] seem paradoxes to carnal men; as first, that a Christian is the only freeman, and other men are slaves; that he is the only rich man, though never so poor in the world; that he is the only beautiful man, though outwardly never so deformed; that he is the only happy man in the midst of all his miseries.     Topics: Carnality It is a destructive addition to add anything to Christ.     Topics: Christ     Source: A Puritan Golden Treasury Confession is verbal humiliation.     Topics: Confession     Source: A Puritan Golden Treasury Death is only a grim porter to let us into a stately palace.     Topics: Death This is a life of faith, for God will try the truth of our faith, so that the world may see that God has such servants as will depend upon His bare word.     Topics: Faith Faith, whereby especially Christ rules, sets the soul so high that it looks down on all other things as far below, as having represented to it, by the Spirit of Christ, riches, honor, beauty and pleasures of a higher nature.     Topics: Faith There are no men more careful of the use of means than those that are surest of a good issue and conclusion, for the one stirs up diligence in the other. Assurance of the end stirs up diligence in the means. For the soul of a believing Christian knows that God has decreed both.     Topics: Finances, Diligence     Source: A Puritan Golden Treasury If believers decay in their first love, or in some other grace, yet another grace may grow and increase, such as humility, their brokenheartedness; they sometimes seem not to grow in the branches when they may grow at the root; upon a check grace breaks out more; as we say, after a hard winter there usually follows a glorious spring.     Topics: Grace