Preaching

October 19, 2014

Mean conversions, expect them, and prepare for them. Resolve that your hearers shall either yield to your Lord or be without excuse, and that this shall be the immediate result of the sermon now in hand. Do not let the Christians around you wonder when souls are saved, but urge them to believe in the undiminished power of the glad tidings, and teach them to marvel if no saving result follows the delivery of the testimony of Jesus. Do not permit sinners to hear sermons as a matter of course, or allow them to play with the edged tools of Scripture as if they were mere toys; but again and again remind them that every true gospel sermon leaves them worse if it does not make them better. Their unbelief is a daily, hourly sin; never let them infer from your teaching that they are to be pitied for continuing to make God a liar by rejecting his Son.
– Charles Spurgeon –
from: Lectures to My Students

October 2, 2014

Preaching is God’s great institution for the planting and maturing of spiritual life. When properly executed, its benefits are untold. When wrongly executed, no evil can exceed its damaging results.

– EM Bounds –

October 1, 2014

Despite the atrociousness of it, Satan really does have “little cause to fear most preaching.” Most preaching in the modern church is completely devoid of unction. Pastors are too busy playing golf or racquetball to bother spending time on their knees.

– A. Reavis –

September 29, 2014

Out of 100 people, one will read the Bible; the other 99 will read the Christian!

– DL Moody –

September 28, 2014

It was said of the Moravians, “Their passion for souls was only surpassed by their passion for the Lamb of God.”

September 16, 2014

Unction comes to the preacher not in the study but in the closet. It is heaven’s distillation in answer to prayer. It is the sweetest exhalation of the Holy Spirit. It impregnates, suffuses, softens, percolates, cuts, and soothes. It carries the Word like dynamite, like salt, like sugar; makes the Word a soother, an arranger, a revealer, a searcher; makes the hearer a culprit or a saint, makes him weep like a child and live like a giant; opens his heart…as gently, yet as strongly as the spring opens the leaves.

– EM Bounds –

August 24, 2014

When a prophet is accepted and deified, his message is lost. The prophet is only useful so long as he is stoned as a public nuisance calling us to repentance, disturbing our comfortable routines, breaking our respectable idols, shattering our sacred conventions.

– AG Gardiner –

July 20, 2014

God is revealing Himself all around us … So then, point to the glory of God; acknowledge the glory of God! Don’t say, “Look at that sunset; it is majestic.” Say, “Look at the glory of God revealed in this sunset; He is majestic!” Don’t talk about creation like you’re an atheist, Christian. Talk about creation like it’s revealing the glory of God. Point people to what God is already doing around us … God has given us ample opportunity in creation around us to point people to His glory.

– David Platt –