Faith & Spirit Quote by Vance Havner

Havner turns a pharmacy instruction into a theology of disturbance, and the move is sneakily effective: it demystifies suffering without making it sentimental. "Shake well before using" is the language of the ordinary world, the kind you glance at and forget. By importing it into the divine, he reframes hardship as preparation rather than punishment. The bottle isn’t cursed; it’s being made functional. The jab is also pastoral: if you feel rattled, maybe you’re not abandoned - you’re in process.

The intent is corrective, aimed at comfortable believers who equate faith with stability. Havner’s verb choice matters. God doesn’t "guide" or "nudge" here; He "has to shake". It implies resistance, sediment, stubbornness - the human tendency to settle into a thick layer of habit and self-satisfaction. Shaking is violent but purposeful: it mixes what’s separated, redistributes what’s sunk, makes the contents consistent. In other words, the spiritual life, in Havner’s view, is not self-improvement by quiet degrees; it’s reconstitution.

Subtext: usefulness is the moral scoreboard. You’re not being refined for your own inner glow, but to serve, to act, to be deployed. That pragmatic emphasis fits Havner’s mid-20th-century evangelical context, where revivalist preaching often framed trials as God’s discipline and the church’s complacency as the real sickness. The line carries comfort and threat at once: comfort, because chaos can be meaningful; threat, because God’s agenda overrides your preference for calm.