Quotes about Sermons

Giving preachers advice on how to prepare sermons is a little like telling them what "their drink" should be at Starbucks.

A church without sermons will soon have a shrivelled mind, then a wayward heart, next an unquiet soul, and finally misdirected strength. A church without sacraments will find its strength cut off, its soul undernourished, its heart prey to conflicting emotions, and its mind engaged in increasingly irrelevant intellectual games.

If I were king of Christianity, after limiting church services to forty-five minutes and sermons to ten, as well as outlawing church "share time" altogether, I would proclaim a kingdom-wide decree that, at least for a while until we get it, "believe" should be stricken from all of our Bibles and replaced with trust.

Study the Speakers, Not the Sermons

I hunted all through the four Gospels trying to find one of Christ's funeral sermons, but I couldn't find any. I found He broke up every funeral He ever attended! Death couldn't exist where He was.

Forgiveness, we discover, is always harder than the sermons make it out to be

That backsliding generally first begins with neglect of private prayer. Bibles read without prayer; sermons heard without prayer; marriages contracted without prayer; journeys undertaken without prayer; residences chosen without prayer.

Gratitude is the praise we offer God: for teachers kind, benefactors never to be forgotten, for all who have advantaged me, by writings, sermons, converse, prayers, examples, for all these and all others which I know, which I know not, open, hidden, remembered, and forgotten.

Still, he never felt that the sermons he wrote at the cottage were good. By the time he got back to Washington to preach them, they no longer excited him. They seemed cold, lifeless. This was probably because Peter's best sermons rose out of the soil of emotion in his own heart. That emotion had to be a present, valid reality. He could not conjure it up.

The minister who keeps back hell from his people in his sermons is neither a faithful nor a charitable man.

Surely if men's hearts were right, short sermons would be enough.

Christians possess a shallow understanding of the gospel as a result of years of hearing short "gospel presentations" tacked onto the ends of sermons. Still others who know the message of Christ find themselves feeling awkward and incapable of sharing the good news clearly with family and friends. Taking steps to be sure we know the gospel with some clarity and depth, then, is necessary.