Vance Havner

Sometimes your medicine bottle has on it, Shake well before using. That is what God has to do with some of His people. He has to shake them well before they are ever usable.

— Vance Havner

I'm tired of hearing sin called sickness and alcoholism a disease. It is the only disease I know of that we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spread.

— Vance Havner

I'm tied of hearing about temperance instead of abstinence, in order to please the cocktail crowd in church congregations.

— Vance Havner

Too many church services start at eleven sharp and end at twelve dull.

— Vance Havner

It is one of the ironies of the ministry that the very man who works in God's name is often hardest put to find time for God. The parents of Jesus lost Him at church, and they were not the last ones to lose Him there.

— Vance Havner

Many people are in a rut and a rut is nothing but a grave--with both ends kicked out.

— Vance Havner

The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.

— Vance Havner

It's about time we quit playing church in these services that start at eleven o clock sharp and end at twelve o clock dull.

— Vance Havner

Civilization today reminds me of an ape with a blowtorch playing in a room full of dynamite. It looks like the monkeys are about to operate the zoo, and the inmates are taking over the asylum.

— Vance Havner

You haven't lost anything when you know were it is. Death can hide but not divide.

— Vance Havner

The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself.

— Vance Havner

If they had a social gospel in the days of the prodigal son, somebody would have given him a bed and a sandwich and he never would have gone home.

— Vance Havner

When I pastored a country church, a farmer didn't like the sermons I preached on hell. He said, Preach about the meek and lowly Jesus. I said, That's where I got my information about hell.

— Vance Havner

If we don't come apart; we will come apart.

— Vance Havner