Quotes about Sermon

They will understand a familiar speech, who hear a sermon as if it were nonsense, and they have far greater help for the application of it to themselves. And withal you will hear their objections, and know where it is that Satan hath most advantage over them, and what it is that stands up against the truth; and so may be able to shew them their errors, confute their objections, and more effectually convince them.

No one who is not a Christian in spirit can perform the Christian act; and the Sermon on the Mount is not a code of rules to be mechanically followed; it is the description of the life which any man will spontaneously lead when once the Spirit of Christ has taken complete possession of his heart.

I get one hour, really 25 minutes in a sermon on a weekend, to combat all the hours of the week that people are told you are what you have through billboards, commercials, and sitcoms, and so forth.

The measure of a sermon is not whether it affirms what you already believe. A sermon is not a product to be consumed and then evaluated according to how good it was or whether it was pleasing or enjoyable.

If a sermon can be resolved in the time it took to deliver it, then it missed something central to what a sermon even is, which is connected with what the Eucharist is.

Preach 90% Law and 10% grace.

A sure way to have someone crushed by their doubt is to preach a sermon on how to remove your doubt.

When I am angry I can pray well and preach well.

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.

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.