MY #1 FAVORITE QUOTE ON PREACHING PLUS MANY MORE
MY #1 FAVORITE QUOTE ON PREACHING
“A man who first tried to guess 'what the public wants,' and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave.”
--C.S. Lewis
MANY OTHER FAVORITE QUOTES OF MINE ON PREACHING
“Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.”
--The Apostle Paul
“I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.”
--Richard Baxter
“I have never once feared the devil, but I tremble every time I enter the pulpit.”
--John Knox
“Preaching improves me. When I begin to speak, weariness disappears; when I begin to teach, fatigue too disappears. Thus neither sickness itself nor indeed any other obstacle is able to separate me from your love… For just as you are hungry to listen to me, so too I am hungry to preach to you.”
--John Chrysostom [Golden Tongue]
“I go out to preach with two propositions in mind. First, everyone ought to give his life to Christ. Second, whether or not anyone gives Christ his life, I will give Him mine.”
--Jonathan Edwards
“If you preach the gospel in all aspects with the exception of the issues which deal specifically with your time, you are not preaching the gospel at all.”
--Martin Luther
“The word does not live unless the unction is upon the preacher. Preacher, with all thy getting – get unction. Victory is not won in the pulpit by firing intellectual bullets or wisecracks, but in the prayer closet; it is won or lost before the preacher’s foot enters the pulpit. Unction is like dynamite. Unction comes not by the medium of the bishop’s hands, neither does it mildew when the preacher is cast into prison. Unction will pierce and percolate; it will sweeten and soften. When the hammer of logic and the fire of human zeal fail to open the stony heart, unction will succeed.”
--Leonard Ravenhill
“Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin, and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on Earth.”
--John Wesley
“The Word of God can take care of itself, and will do so if we preach it, and cease defending it… Let the pure gospel go forth in all its lion-like majesty, and it will soon clear its own way and ease itself of its adversaries.”
--Charles Spurgeon
“We have all heard the story of the man who preached so well and lived so badly, that when he was in the pulpit everybody said he ought never to come out again, and when he was out of it they all declared he never ought to enter it again.”
--Charles Spurgeon
“Application is the whole ballgame. It’s not something you tack on to your preaching at the end. It is the sermon.”
--Rick Warren
“If you are not preaching repentance in your message you're not preaching. No matter what we cover it has got to come back to change your mind, because your mind controls your life."
--Rick Warren
“Preaching is an art, and in this, as in all other arts, the bad performers far outnumber the good.”
--Aldous Huxley
“If I ever wrote a book on preaching, it would contain three words: Preach the Word. Get rid of all the other stuff that gets you sidetracked; preach the Word.”
--Charles R. Swindoll.
"I’m not a great preacher, and I don’t claim to be a great preacher… I’m an ordinary preacher, just communicating the Gospel in the best way I know how."
--Billy Graham
“Fruitful expository preaching demands great effort. Since nothing is as important as the Word, no energy expended by anyone in any other field should even equal the effort of an expositor seeking to “rightly divide the Word.”
--John F. MacArthur Jr.
“Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire.”
--John F. MacArthur Jr.
“There's a way to preach the Bible unbiblically...You can use the Bible as the springboard for all kinds of ideas, can't you? Look around in here and find something that fits your fancy and then launch a rocket off it. People say, 'That was amazing, wasn't it? Remarkable what he got out of that.' Well of course it is because he put it in before he got it out.”
--Alistair Begg
“It should be illegal for a Christian communicator to bore an audience with the transforming message of Christ.”
--Dave Stone
“Cartooning is preaching. And I think we have a right to do some preaching. I hate shallow humor. I hate shallow religious humor, I hate shallow sports humor, I hate shallowness of any kind.”
--Charles M. Schulz“Be clear! Be clear! Be clear!...Theological jargon, abstract thinking, or scholars’ questions become part of the intellectual baggage that hinders preachers from speaking clearly to ordinary men and women… For preachers, clarity is a moral matter. It is not merely a question of rhetoric, but a matter of life and death.”
--Haddon W. Robinson,