Quotes from Haddon W. Robinson

You will invest your life in something, or you will throw it away on nothing.

For preachers, clarity is a moral matter. It is not merely a question of rhetoric, but a matter of life and death.

Badgers know where their strength lies. Do you?

Bad ideas offer explanations of experience that do not reflect reality. They read into life what is not there. Often we embrace invalid ideas because they have not been clearly stated and therefore cannot be evaluated. In our culture, influenced as it is by mass media, we are bombarded by ridiculous concepts that are deliberately left vague so we will act without thinking.

While the letters in the New Testament make a fundamental contribution to Christian theology, they constitute only one of many literary forms found in the Bible.

Thinking is difficult, but it stands as our essential work. Make no mistake about the difficulty of the task. It is often slow, discouraging, overwhelming. But when God calls us to preach, he calls us to love him with our minds. God deserves that kind of love and so do the people to whom we minister.

As you can see, the homiletical idea is simply the biblical truth applied to life.

No man is better for knowing that God so loved the world of men that He gave His only begotten Son to die for their redemption. In hell there are millions who know that. Theological truth is useless until it is obeyed.

Holiness without love is not God's kind of holiness. And love without holiness is not God's kind of love. Our prophetic priestly function of speaking to God's people requires us to identify with the people, to have a passion for their salvation, and to have a compassion that will cause us even to suffer for their sake.

An effective introduction should accomplish three objectives. It gets attention, it surfaces a need, and it orients the audience to the body of the sermon. I tried to do that. (You can judge whether I was successful.)

Expository preaching is the communication of a biblical concept, derived from and transmitted through a historical, grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit first applies to the personality and experience of the preacher, then through the preacher, applies to the hearers.

Poorly prepared conclusions that wander about looking for an exit line leave a congregation looking toward the exit.

More thought is demanded but more accomplished if we set them up: "Written boldly into the Bible is this phrase . . ." "Paul felt keenly that . . ." "This is what Charles Dickens was trying to tell us when he observed . . ." "You can see the significance of those words embedded in verse 10 . . .

While it takes three years or more to get through seminary, it can take you ten years to get over it.

Be clear! Be clear! Be clear!" Clarity does not come easily. When we train to be expositors, we probably spend three or four years in seminary. While that training prepares us to be theologians, it sometimes gets in our way as communicators. Theological jargon, abstract thinking, or scholars' questions become part of the intellectual baggage that hinders preachers from speaking clearly to ordinary men and women.

people need to be reminded as much as they need to be informed.

There is something else to remember: each point should be a declarative sentence, not a question. Questions do not show relationships because they are not ideas. The points in your outline should answer questions, not raise them.

The purpose behind each individual sermon is to secure some moral action. We need to know what that action is.

The purpose behind all doctrine is to secure moral action.

Christians are Christ's body, the organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside, you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them.

Every sermon should have a theme, and that theme should be the theme of the portion of Scripture on which it is based.

I have a conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as a crystal.

Restatement is like marching in place. It does not have forward movement, but it is part of the parade. It is saying the same thing in different words.

Your goal is to wash the minds of your people in the Word so that Christ is formed in them. That's biblical preaching.