Quotes about Preaching

If there is a disease in the preaching that I hear most often, it's not that what the minister says is wrong. It's that it is just too small.

The first is that learning to preach is difficult, and the difficulty is not greatly relieved by having a skilled instructor or by the discovery that one seems to be naturally a "good talker.

Preaching is the concerted engagement of one's faculties of body, mind, and spirit.

No one can increase the volume in the pulpit to such a level as to muffle the echo of lost convictions.

Without the sharing of personal experience, prophetic preaching is impossible.

Preaching means more than handing over a tradition; it is rather the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in the community.

There is a wide difference between preaching doctrine and preaching Christ.

Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty. Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale. Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal. Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness. Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation. Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway.

Traveling around the world and preaching for over 70 years did not give much time for reflection.

Many a modern preacher is far less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is with his popularity with his congregation. A want of intellectual backbone makes him straddle the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense. Bending the knee to the mob rather than God would probably make them scruple at ever playing the role of John the Baptist before a modern Herod. The acids of modernity are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy.

But Paul, in his preaching of the Gospel, is a debtor to deliver the word not to Barbarians only, but also to Greeks, and not only to the unwise, who would easily agree with him, but also to the wise.

To be Biblically balanced is to let our theology and preaching be proportioned by the Bible's radically disproportionate focus on God's saving love for sinners seen and accomplished in the crucified and risen Christ.