Quotes About Sermon

But the danger is obvious: those who take this approach more often than not end up denying the potency of the Sermon and sometimes simply turn elsewhere—to Galatians and Romans and Ephesians—for their Christian ethical instruction. What many such readings of the Sermon really want is Paul, and since they can't find Paul in the Sermon, they reinterpret the Sermon and give us Paul instead.

There is something about the Sermon on the Mount that makes Christians nervous, and in particular it makes Protestants nervous, especially those whose theology's first foot is a special understanding of grace.

These common approaches fail the words of Jesus because in the Sermon Jesus calls his followers to do what he teaches. Those who don't do what he says, in fact, are condemned as foolish.

In other words, in Jesus' demand to live righteously, which runs through the Sermon, we see an Ethic from Above, from Below, and from Beyond—but it is an ethic his followers are to perform. The best way to preach the Sermon is to preach what it is: a demand on the disciple.

The Sermon on the Mount crystallizes what Jesus gave to his disciples as the new way of life, the kingdom way of life in a world surrounded by the power brokers of empire.

The Sermon on the Mount is the moral portrait of Jesus' own people. Because this portrait doesn't square with the church, this Sermon turns from instruction to indictment. To those ends—both instruction and indictment—this commentary has been written with the simple goal that God will use this book to lead us to become in real life the portrait Jesus sketched in the Sermon.

Yet we cannot fail to observe that the Golden Rule of 7:12 officially closes the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon and summarizes the essence of the Sermon.

Lay people learn hermeneutics from their pastors' preaching. Whether we like it or not, they learn how to interpret Scripture from how we handle Scripture in the pulpit. So what do we teach listeners about hermeneutics when Jesus makes a surprise appearance in a sermon from Proverbs?

Tom counted the pages of the sermon; after church he always knew how many pages there had been, but he seldom knew anything else about the discourse.

The Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching—all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and preforeordestination, and I don't know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.

This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound up with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians that it took the first prize. This composition was considered to be the very finest effort of the evening. The mayor of the village, in delivering the prize to the author of it, made a warm speech in which he said that it was by far the most eloquent thing he had ever listened to, and that Daniel Webster himself might well be proud of it.

It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than a doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action. It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love. As

A heart-memory is better than a mere head-memory. Better to carry away a little of the love of Christ in our souls, than if we were able to repeat every word of every sermon we ever heard.

Finally, on June 22, 1750, the Council, convened to advise on the matter, recommended, by a vote of 10 to 9, the minority protesting, that the pastoral relations should be dissolved. The concurrent sentiment of the church was expressed by the overwhelming vote of about 200 to 20 of the male members. The next Sunday but one Edwards preached his Farewell Sermon.

This prominence of the kingdom also orients the reader to understand that the macarisms and other wisdom being offered by the Sage Jesus in the Sermon are more than generalized, universal, human wisdom. Rather, these references to the kingdom of heaven set Jesus's teaching into the context of the Jewish story of God's reign and particularly the Jewish expectation of its eschatological consummation,53 its coming from heaven to earth.

Tomorrow is Sunday. I wonder if I shall hear a sermon?

Gandhi was not a Christian, but he lived in a community that endeavored to live by the teachings set forth in the Sermon on the Mount. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

First of all, a sermon can never grasp the center, but can only itself be grasped by it, by Christ. And then Christ becomes flesh as much in the word of the pietists as in that of the clerics or of the religious socialists, and these empirical connections actually pose difficulties for preaching that are absolute, not merely relative.

people would flock to the churches to mingle, to hear a sermon from a talented popular orator, and to enjoy the latest artwork. Religious ceremonies of the era were anything but brief. A mass, especially a papal one, could last for hours.

A good example is the best sermon.

What do you think it did to Galen's reputation," replied Father Schneider, "when the Allies dropped copies of his sermon together with their bombs?

When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part.

Time, like a preacher in the days of the Puritans, turned the hour-glass on his high pulpit, the church belfry.

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible.