Preaching Quotes

I would have every minister of the gospel address his audience with the zeal of a friend with the generous energy of a father and with the exuberant affection of a mother.

Samuel Johnson

Some plague the people with too long sermons for the faculty of listening is a tender thing and soon becomes weary and satiated.

Martin Luther

I have taught you my dear flock for above thirty years how to live and I will show you in a very short time how to die.

George Sandys

Sermons in stones and good in every thing.

William Shakespeare

Preach the word be instant in season out of season reprove rebuke exhort with all long suffering and doctrine.

Anonymous

The minister's brain is often die "poor-box" of the church.

Henry B. Whipple

The Christian ministry is the worst of all trades but the best of all professions.

John Newton

Do as we say and not as we do.

Giovanni Boccaccio

Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit and not give the bread of life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would have every minister of the gospel address his audience with the zeal of a friend with the generous energy of a father and with the exuberant affection of a mother.

François Fénelon

The test of a preacher is that his congregation goes away saying not What a lovely sermon but I will do something!

St. Francis de Sales

But in his duty prompt at every call He watch'd and wept he pray'd and felt for all.

Oliver Goldsmith

Sir a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well: but you are surprised to find it done at all.

Samuel Johnson

Some plague the people with too long sermons for the faculty of listening is a tender thing and soon becomes weary and satiated.

Martin Luther

I have taught you my dear flock for above thirty years how to live and I will show you in a very short time how to die.

George Sandys

Sermons in stones and good in every thing.

William Shakespeare

Preach the word be instant in season out of season reprove rebuke exhort with all long suffering and doctrine.

Anonymous

The minister's brain is often die "poor-box" of the church.

Henry B. Whipple

The Christian ministry is the worst of all trades but the best of all professions.

John Newton

Do as we say and not as we do.

Giovanni Boccaccio

Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit and not give the bread of life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Even those who know better, such as the King, nurse strange ideas about me as a prophet. They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know everything.

Geraldine Brooks

The gospel of miracle that we preach promotes death and encourages corruption.

Sunday Adelaja

When we overemphasise miracles, we compromise the gospel we were asked to preach.

Sunday Adelaja

When we overemphasise miracles, we think we are preaching but we are emphasizing on the wrong thing.

Sunday Adelaja

There is more evil than good when we preach the miracle centered gospel instead of the kingdom gospel.

Sunday Adelaja

The churches are preaching miracles and not gospel of the kingdom.

Sunday Adelaja

When we preach gospel of miracles instead of gospel of the kingdom, we are subverting gospel of the kingdom.

Sunday Adelaja

When a poor soul is somewhat awakened by the terrors of the Lord, then the poor creature, being born under the covenant of works, flies directly to a covenant of works again. And as Adam and Eve hid themselves… and sewed fig leaves… so the poor sinner, when awakened, flies to his duties and to his performances, to hide himself from God, and goes to patch up a righteousness of his own. Says he, I will be mighty good now–I will reform–I will do all I can; and then certainly Jesus Christ will have mercy on me.

George Whitefield

Before you get a beautiful feet, you must first of all get it dirty.That is what Christ did. He went to the souls out there and ministered to their needs. Let the church leave their comfort zones(air condition auditoriums) to the souls out there. when the church get its feet dirty, Christ will make it beautiful by washing it.

WISDOM KWASHIE MENSAH (WKM)

Whenever a day comes when I can stand and preach God's Word without an agony of anxiety lest the people will not accept Christ; whenever a day comes when I can see men and women coming down the aisles without joy in my heart, I'll quit preaching.

Billy Sunday

Anything we are preaching to people is what they become

Sunday Adelaja

The book-learned preacher who carries the badge of authority, is by no means religious.

Abhijit Naskar

While you were busy trying to prove God stands behind you, God was before me lighting the trail, so he could lead us both.

Shannon L. Alder

The high ground of Christ & Him crucified must be claimed in our preaching. Any other footing is a slippery slope that inevitably descends downward into vain rhetoric and mere words. To the contrary, every pulpit must present a towering vision of the unique person and saving work of Jesus Christ. All preaching must point to His sin-bearing, substitutionary death for sinners. All exposition must lift up this Sacrificial Lamb who became a sin-bearing Substitute for all who believe. Every message must exalt this Christ, who was raised from the dead, exalted to the right hand of God the Father, and entrusted with all authority in heaven and earth.

Steven J. Lawson

So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

My understanding from the Word of God is that I am supposed to preach for the maturation of the believer with a view that lost people are there.

Matt Chandler

Edwards’s God was glorious, full of beauty, and seemingly uninterested in making people feel insecure. Edwards was a mystic, a man who didn’t simply write or preach about God, he experienced him.

Matthew Paul Turner

The more spiritual successes that Edwards experienced, the more he seemed to intentionally infuse his sermons with language deemed to move a person’s emotional center—their souls—to spiritually and physically respond.

Matthew Paul Turner

It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it.

Geraldine Brooks

Ye know, doan't ye, what it feels like when ye burn yer hand in takin' a cake out of the oven or wi'a match when ye're lightin' one of they godless cigarettes? Ay. It stings wi' a fearful pain, doan't it? And ye run away to clap a bit o' butter on it to take the pain away. Ah, but' (an impressive pause) 'there'll be no butter in hell!

Stella Gibbons

Theology without proclamation is empty, proclamation without theology is blind.

Gerhard Ebeling

No language about God will ever be fully adequate to the burning mystery which it signifies.

Elizabeth Johnston

Any true definition of preaching must say that that man is there to deliver the message of God, a message from God to those people. If you prefer the language of Paul, he is 'an ambassador for Christ'. That is what he is. He has been sent, he is a commissioned person, and he is standing there as the mouthpiece of God and of Christ to address these people. In other words he is not there merely to talk to them, he is not there to entertain them. He is there - and I want to emphasize this - to do something to those people; he is there to produce results of various kinds, he is there to influence people. He is not merely to influence a part of them; he is not only to influence their minds, not only their emotions, or merely to bring pressure to bear upon their wills and to induce them to some kind of activity. He is there to deal with the whole person; and his preaching is meant to affect the whole person at the very centre of life. Preaching should make such a difference to a man who is listening that he is never the same again. Preaching, in other words, is a transaction between the preacher and the listener. It does something for the soul of man, for the whole of the person, the entire man; it deals with him in a vital and radical mannerI remember a remark made to me a few years back about some studies of mine on “The Sermon on the Mount.” I had deliberately published them in sermonic form. There were many who advised me not to do that on the grounds that people no longer like sermons. The days for sermons, I was told, were past, and I was pressed to turn my sermons into essays and to give them a different form. I was most interested therefore when this man to whom I was talking, and he is a very well-known Christian layman in Britain, said, "I like these studies of yours on “The Sermon on the Mount” because they speak to me.” Then he went on to say, “I have been recommended many books by learned preachers and professors but,” he said, “what I feel about those books is that it always seems to be professors writing to professors; they do not speak to me. But,” he said, “your stuff speaks to me.” Now he was an able man, and a man in a prominent position, but that is how he put it. I think there is a great deal of truth in this. He felt that so much that he had been recommended to read was very learned and very clever and scholarly, but as he put it, it was “professors writing to professors.” This is, I believe, is a most important point for us to bear in mind when we read sermons. I have referred already to the danger of giving the literary style too much prominence. I remember reading an article in a literary journal some five or six years ago which I thought was most illuminating because the writer was making the selfsame point in his own field. His case was that the trouble today is that far too often instead of getting true literature we tend to get “reviewers writing books for reviewers.” These men review one another's books, with the result that when they write, what they have in their mind too often is the reviewer and not the reading public to whom the book should be addressed, at any rate in the first instance. The same thing tends to happen in connection with preaching. This ruins preaching, which should always be a transaction between preacher and listener with something vital and living taking place. It is not the mere imparting of knowledge, there is something much bigger involved. The total person is engaged on both sides; and if we fail to realize this our preaching will be a failure.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Authentic gospel preaching always engages people with eternal issues.

Colin S. Smith

To preach Christ is to feed the soul, to justify it, to set it free, and to save it, if it believes the preaching.

Martin Luther

Whether or not an utterance can be called law depends on how it is heard, not on how it is meant. Law is defined by its effect rather than its intention, and its chief effect is accusation the intimation of a less-than.

William McDavid

We see that the law was not reveal to us to put a notion into our heads that we could become righteous by it, but to teach us that we are completely unable to fulfill the law. Then we will know what a sweet message-what a glorious doctrine-the gospel is and move receive it with exuberant joy.

C.F.W. Walther

Here is where most preachers make their mistake. They are afraid that by preaching the gospel to clearly, it will be their fault if people ask them to send. They imagine that the gospel is food for the Carnel-minded. True enough, too many of the gospel does not become the smell of death and death but that is not the fault of the Gospel. That happens only because men do not except-do not believe-the Gospel. Faith is not merely thinking, "I believe." Your whole heart must be seized by the gospel and come to rest in it. When that happens, you were transformed cannot help but love and serve God.

C.F.W. Walther

Galatians 3:11-12...a precious text! A person becomes righteous in the sight of God by faith alone. What conclusion can we draw from this? The law cannot make any person righteous because it has nothing to say about justifying and saving faith. That information is found only in the Gospel. In other words, the law has nothing to say about grace..

C.F.W. Walther

When we concentrate on preaching what people WANT to hear we will only succeed in exciting their flash and depressing their spirit.

Olabisi Obideyi

Then said a teacher , speak to us of teaching . And he said :The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple among his followers gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.The astronomer may spaeak to you of his understanding of space , but he cannot give you his understanding.The musician may sing to you of the rythem which is in all space , but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rythem nor the voice that echoes it .And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure , but he cannot conduct you thither .For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man .

Kahlil Gibran

It does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely for men to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; because, although these may tend, as well as preaching, to give a good doctrinal or speculative understanding of the word of God, yet they have not an equal tendency to impress them on men's hearts and affections. God hath appointed a particular and lively application of his word, in the preaching of it, as a fit means to affect sinners with the importance of religion, their own misery, the necessity of a remedy, and the glory and sufficiency of a remedy provided; to stir up the pure minds of the saints, quicken their affections by often bringing the great things of religion in their remembrance, and setting them in their proper colours, though they know them, and have been fully instructed in them already.

Jonathan Edwards

Martin Luther called the church building the “Mundhaus” (lit. “mouth house” or "speech house”) because he believed that the Graeco-Roman “pagan lecture” of the sophist entertainers who took over the Catholic church should be the focus of “the service”. Sermons might have been helpful in the later Middle Ages when even many Catholic priests couldn't read. However, modern research has repeatedly proven that lecturing is the worst possible way to educate others because it’s so boring. Might traditional, so-called-inspired preaching still be the best way to communicate God’s Word?” ~ © gfp '42™

Gary Patton

A preacher shouldn't preach just to make you feel good. Then it's about the money not about the teach. He should preach the truth because the truth shall set you free.

Alcurtis Turner

Here is where most preachers make their mistake. They are afraid that by preaching the gospel too clearly, it will be their fault if people lapse into sin. They imagine that the gospel is food for the carnal-minded. True enough, to many the gospel does become the smell of death unto death, but that is not the fault of the Gospel. That happens only because men do not accept -do not believe-the Gospel. Faith is not merely thinking, "I believe." Your whole heart must be seized by the gospel and come to rest in it. When that happens, you are transformed and cannot help but love and serve God.

C.F.W. Walther

The church that emphasises on miracles are indirectly preaching that merit does not mater.

Sunday Adelaja

1 2 Next

Preaching Quotes

Related Topics