Quotes About Sermon

Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.

Sometimes I go back and listen to the very first day I went to church. I listen to that sermon all the time, because that was the sermon that was life changing for me.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.… We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Opium is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon.

Our task in worship is to prepare ourselves spiritually to hear the Spirit speak, sometimes despite the music and preaching.

When you go to church, if the pastor at some point doesn't make you laugh, he probably ain't gonna make you join.

After I'd preached a message on Sunday night, I'd print it up.

the sermon, that most flexible of art forms. Take the form of the sermon and make it your own. Whether you are standing behind a pulpit, in a lecture hall, or in a field, nothing can stop you from speaking the truth according to your life and conscience. The hearts of the people are thirsty for new hope and new revelation.

In practice, I suggest that it is the liturgy that is to enact the settled coherence of church faith, and the sermon that provides the "alien" witness of the text, which rubs against the liturgic coherence.118 There can, in my judgment, be no final resolution of the tension between the systemizing task of theology and the disruptive work of biblical interpretation. It is the ongoing interaction between the two that is the work of interpretation.

When we preach on hell, we might at least do it with tears in our eyes.

What seems to be the problem?" Book continued. His warm baritone voice was so mellow and reasonable, you could easily imagine yourself sitting up and paying attention as he delivered a sermon in church, and not just that but enjoying it.

In a sermon on a text from Proverbs—"adversity kills only where there is a weakness to be killed"—one of the North's leading clergymen expressed this new mood of grim resolution.

The minister, who took his ecumenical and—some felt—slightly impersonal remarks from Saint Paul's sermon on Love from First Corinthians, talked for about half an hour. ("Didn't you feel that was a very inappropriate text?" said Julian, who had a pagan's gloomy view of death coupled with a horror of the non-specific.)

Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.

Do you ever think about the fact that Jesus never said a mumbling word? You may have heard that phrase before, but how much have you ever thought about it?

The Sermon on the Mount is a very nice piece about being good, but most of the Bible is a very revengeful, childish, brutal God.

You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for anybody's damn sermon,

Proper methods of interpretation must form the backbone of the sermon. The preacher is first an exegete of Scripture before he is an expositor of Scripture.

A beautiful homily, a genuine sermon, must begin with the first proclamation, with the proclamation of salvation. There is nothing more solid, deep and sure than this proclamation.

Muhammad preached his farewell sermon to the Muslim community. He reminded them to deal justly with one another, to treat women kindly, and to abandon the blood feuds and vendettas inspired by the spirit of jahiliyyah. Muslim must never fight against Muslim.

The kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.

The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus.

No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician.

Man makes up his mind he will preach, and he preaches.