Quotes About Preaching

If there is a disease in the preaching that I hear most often, it's not that what the minister says is wrong. It's that it is just too small.

The first is that learning to preach is difficult, and the difficulty is not greatly relieved by having a skilled instructor or by the discovery that one seems to be naturally a "good talker.

Preaching is the concerted engagement of one's faculties of body, mind, and spirit.

No one can increase the volume in the pulpit to such a level as to muffle the echo of lost convictions.

Without the sharing of personal experience, prophetic preaching is impossible.

preaching means more than handing over a tradition; it is rather the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in the community

There is a wide difference between preaching doctrine and preaching Christ.

Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty. Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale. Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal. Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness. Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation. Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway.

Traveling around the world and preaching for over 70 years did not give much time for reflection.

The last thing I thought I would be doing is traveling the country and traveling the world preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, but God had a plan and nobody is more surprised than me. A lot of people who knew me before have been equally surprised over the years.

Smartass Disciple: Master, you keep preaching the truth. They don't listen.Master of Stupidity: Oh that's not bad. That attitude keeps us in the business.

The church is the real thing when it is not consumed with the assertion of power in culture, but it is driven by service to others. The word ministry translates the Greek word diakonia, which means service. The church must be about serving others. When a church can lay claim to all three criteria, namely, preaching of the Word, being true to its confession, and focusing on serving, then it's a church worth going to. And then it's a church full of sermons worth listening to.

If Mephistopheles climbed up the pulpit and read the Gospel, could anyone be inspired by this prayer?" huffed a newspaper of Germany's outflanked liberals.

There's three different kinds of Christian," said Cash. "There's preaching Christians, church-playing Christians, and then there's practicing Christian. I'm trying very hard to be a practicing Christian.

I've always felt like there are certain politicians that wear their religion on their sleeve in a way that you almost feel is disingenuous. I think that your faith has to be first personal. I struggle with those people that preach something and go back behind closed doors and live differently.

The holy book he'd spent so much of his life preaching from had one cruel flaw: it was not very good at offering encouragement or hope to those who weren't religious.

And what's more, they spend their time preaching love of country. How can you love a country where you're forbidden to work? I can tell you I don't feel any love for my homeland. Is that bad of me?

Nevertheless, to question authority is not, in principle, to attack it, although authority always assumes that this is the case since authority must repeatedly establish its right to rule; and if this is done by force, then it turns out that it was a tyranny all along. Good heavens, I can't believe I am preaching this to an audience of Irishmen! Just think about it: a quarter of an hour of rational thinking and an Englishman turns into an Irishman.

Preach comfort to the rich and you will grow fat; preach hell to the poor and you will starve with them. [p. 319 of 465, chapter 20]

I want to host a religious show. I'm sure nobody will be wanting the 11 o'clock spot on Sunday morning. I think we should really get some of our own preachers and preach that gay is good. And we'd have a great choir.

Remember that to these worlds and these beings and these ages we are to be the messengers of the grace and wisdom and glory of God. In that view the future loses its sense of dread, and one looks on to the new opportunities for art, and music, and poetry, and above all perchance of preaching, that are coming to the ransomed ones when the discipline of time is merged into the fitness of eternity, with reverent and holy desire.

They reported briefly to those around Peter all that they had been commanded. After these things, Jesus himself commissioned them to take the message from the east to the west—the holy and imperishable preaching of eternal salvation. Amen.

If we can't take Christ to them by preaching, we'll take Christ to them by living.

When we face real people with eternal souls balanced between heaven and hell, the nobility of preaching both awes us and makes us more aware of our inadequacies (cf. 1 Cor. 2:3).