Quotes about Preaching

The domestication of God is a curse on preaching in our day. We need to recover reality and the language of majesty and holiness and awe and glory: "Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?" (Exod. 15:11).

May the pulpits of the land ring with exposition of the Word of God and exultation in the God of the Word.

So the question we need to ask today is this: if the teaching in our church was limited to the songs that we sing, how well taught would we be? How well would we know God? We should make it our aim not only to preach the whole counsel of God but to sing it, as well.

Let's not overlook that eating the Lord's Supper with God's people is a kind of preaching that is also meant to feed the joy of Christ's people. "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes" (1 Cor. 11:26). The death and resurrection of Christ are being

Preaching is one thing—and it is crucial. But hearing is another thing—and it is just as crucial.

Dullness of hearing" is hearing without faith and without the moral fruit of faith. It's hearing the Bible or the preaching of the Bible the way you hear the freeway noise on I-94, or the way you hear Muzak in the dentist's office or the way you hear recorded warnings at the airport that this is a smoke-free facility. You do but you don't. You have grown dull to the sound. It does not awaken or produce anything.

But it's different with pastors-not totally different, but different. The heart is the instrument of our vocation. Charles Spurgeon said, "Ours is more than mental work-it is heart work, the labor of our inmost soul." When a pastor's heart is breaking, therefore, he must labor with a broken instrument. Preaching is the pastor's main work, and preaching is heart work, not just mental work.

Sin's outcome is eternal misery. What infinite ugliness then must be the ugliness of sin. This is the constant subject of preaching, for this is what we must ever overcome. It is more serious than Satan and sickness and insanity. None of those can damn a soul. Only sin can damn. This we must defeat in preaching, or all is in vain. Flippancy in and around our preaching communicates to people that sin is not as serious as the Bible says it is.

Perseverance Here is a key to great earnestness in preaching. If you really believe that "[those who endure] to the end will be saved" (Mark 13:13), and that not only the first act of faith but all subsequent, acts of persevering faith are sustained by the Spirit through the Word of God, then virtually every sermon is a "salvation sermon," and the souls of the saints are being saved every Sunday.

So in a phrase, preaching is expository exultation. In conclusion, then, the reason that preaching is so essential to the corporate worship of the church is that it is uniquely suited to feed both understanding and feeling. It is uniquely suited to waken seeing God and savoring God. God has ordained that the Word of God come in a form that teaches the mind and reaches the heart.

Week after week, I was permitted to stand up in special clothes and talk while everyone else sat quietly and listened. Week after week, they heard the gospel filtered through my sensibilities. On Sunday mornings they sang the hymns I had chosen, and on Wednesday evenings they engaged the topics I had picked.

In the first century A.D., members of the growing Church in Corinth were enthusiastic about the gospel. Almost all were recent converts to the Church. Many were attracted to it through the preaching of the Apostle Paul and others.