from: Lectures to My Students
October 19, 2014
from: Lectures to My Students
Let me never become a slave to crowds.
– AW Tozer –
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 –
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 –
Out of 100 people, one will read the Bible; the other 99 will read the Christian!
– DL Moody –
It was said of the Moravians, “Their passion for souls was only surpassed by their passion for the Lamb of God.”
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 –
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 –
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 –