Some delicious quotes from Preaching by Calvin Miller:

Preaching is an art in which a studied, professional sinner tells the less studied sinners how they ought to believe, behave, and serve.

Preaching cannot afford to opt for being cute when it ought to be visceral.

Many preachers below the Mason-Dixon Line still yell a lot, which often accomplishes little more than to clothe weak sermons with volume.

No reasonable book on the subject of preaching can begin with what is said. The force of preaching must begin with who’s saying it.

The world is too sick to be healed by a preacher’s congenial placebos. Merely to build a big hospital is a lame dodge for practicing real medicine.

The world comes to church looking precisely for a sense of significance, and we who preach tell them week by week that God loves them. It’s a truth we tell to give them that sense of significance for which they sought us. But it is a truth that can only be told by those who sense that the preacher also loves them. There is not the slightest chance that they will get hold of the first truth, unless they feel the second.

Only the truly otherworldly have earned the right to speak of the other world.

The preacher is not an answer man. Preachers are God-lovers.

Great preachers are positive purveyors of the wonder of God.

God has a word for us, not an opinion. The kingdom of God is not a discussion club. The church doesn’t gather on Sunday to invite opinion. It gathers to hear the Bible—the Word of God—the wisdom of ancient saints and martyrs comes down to the current calendar after a march of centuries.

Doctrines are the high-voltage center of the faith. Doctrines are the faith.

Sermons that are only about the practical things of this world are often too bound by this world to help them. And this world is too weak to heal what is wrong with most people’s lives.

The best of sermons have never been a belch of information or piety. Good homiletics are wellness reports that take seriously the cure of souls.

The noblest of prophets should feel before they advise.

Preaching Christ is the purpose and intent of the sermon and comes from a preacher whose life is captive to the momentary presence of Christ.

The best preached sermons don’t try to write the Bible on the lives of their hearers, they write their hearers into the Bible.

The pastor who doesn’t care for people has missed the heart of God.

Sermons grow robust in the soul of the listening servant. The best prophets listen before they preach—they reason before they rage.

All application comes to rest on the hearer as one basic conundrum. Shall I be the lord of my life or shall I have a Lord for my life?

Surrender is the only option when God is the only subject.

Propositions give you the information you need to build a life on, and stories motivate you to want to build such a life.

Pain itself does not make us preach well, but it builds a sensitivity that does make our particular emotional experience speak to that of the whole. Only weathered wood makes singing violins.

Where there is real preaching, the sermon is always reminding the flock that the church doesn’t just get together to be told how to live more morally but to remind itself that the church is on a mission.

For those who preach, the most important question for the preacher is not “What shall I say in this sermon?” but “What do I want to happen?”

Douglas Adams:

“Isn’t it enough to see that the garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Andrew Wilson:

Douglas Adams called himself a radical atheist, and this was his way of saying that belief in a creator was unnecessary. If you come across a beautiful garden, then the right response is to appreciate its beauty for its own sake, rather than inventing all sorts of mythical creatures and pretending they live there. That, he argued, is what people do when they believe in God. They encounter a world that is very beautiful, filled with incredibly complex and magnificent creatures, and what they should do is appreciate it for what it is.

But instead, they invent fairies – gods – to hide all over it, in the branches of the trees and under the toadstools, and then they worship these gods, when they should be focusing on the beauty. This, Douglas Adams was saying, is ridiculous. Why not just admire the garden.

You have to be careful with parables, though. They can backfire. Here’s what it made me think: of course a beautiful garden would not make me believe in fairies (which is probably why no sane adult in the world believes in fairies). But it might make me believe in a gardener. Wouldn’t you think? A beautiful garden might well make me believe that someone of intelligence and skill – in other words, some sort of mind - had given their time to planting, ordering and cultivating this particular patch of land, so that it became a beautiful garden rather than a tumbledown scrubland.

That’s the whole point. When we find matter in an unsorted, unproductive mess, we don’t tend to imagine that intelligent beings are responsible. Left to their own devices, things in nature tend to get more disordered: gardens grow weeds, snowmen melt, bedrooms become messy, bicycles rust, and so on. So when we find an ugly piece of land where the grass is overgrown and the flowers are dying, we generally conclude that nobody’s been looking after it. There is no mind supervising the matter.

Beautiful gardens, on the other hand, are a different story. They display such order and beauty that we immediately see a mind behind the matter. Nobody in their right mind walks through the gardens at Versailles and thinks they just happened to come about that way; we all know that a very skilled and intelligent gardener has been hard at work, trimming borders and arranging flowers, probably over many years. The Versailles gardens don’t make you believe in fairies, but if you saw them and said you didn’t believe in gardeners, you’d be laughed off the stage.

Perhaps it’s the same with the earth. If you came across a place that had bucked the trend towards disorder, a place where total chaos had turned into astonishing order and beauty, rather than the other way around – where, for instance, you started with a Bang and ended up with a brain – you might think that some mind, some sort of gardener was behind it all. Maybe Douglas Adams spoke better than he knew.

- Andrew Wilson,  If God Then What: Wondering Aloud About Truth, Origins & Redemption, 67-9.

Check out my interview with Andrew here.

A powerful poem about the dangers of fighting our brethren…

“Hold the line!” the captains call,
“We must not budge an inch!
For onward comes a righteous brawl,
For which we’ve dug this trench!
The muddy field will scattered be
With bodies of our foes!
The bloody yield emphatically,
Will glory as it grows!”

Thus through the age their minions war,
For this their sacred thought,
To follow those who’ve gone before -
Traditions deeply bought.
They know the truth which they defend,
But do they know their foes?
For when in shame this war shall end,
They’ll see their vicious blows,
Had never struck the enemy,
But only allies dear,
This war is far from Heavenly,
And founded in mans’ fear.

- Johnathan Schofield

C. S. Lewis believed we short-circuit the joy of memory when we try to recreate the past:

I am beginning to feel that we need a preliminary act of submission not only towards possible future afflictions but also towards possible future blessings.

I know it sounds fantastic; but think it over. It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean?

On every level of our life—in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience—we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison.

But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we’re still looking for the old one. And of course we don’t get that.

You can’t, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time. But what you do get can be in its own way as good.

His counsel is to enjoy memories as memories:

Many religious people lament that the first fervours of their conversion have died away. They think—sometimes rightly, but not, I believe, always—that their sins account for this. They may even try by pitiful efforts of will to revive what now seem to have been the golden days.

But were those fervours—the operative word is those—ever intended to last? It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore.

And how should the Infinite repeat Himself? All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them once.

And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments in the past, which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are content to accept them for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing. “Unless a seed die…”

- from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”  - A.W. Tozer

“To know God is to be transformed, and thus to be introduced to a life that could not otherwise be experienced.” - D. A. Carson

“Talk about God can become dreary and lackluster if God isn’t in you.” - Billy Graham

“If you once love Him, you will study to please Him.” - John Newton 

“A little knowledge of God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge about Him.” - J. I. Packer

“A test of your love for God is to examine your love for others.” - Henry Blackaby

“The Saving Knowledge of God is not the result of the human search for him, or of building up logical inferences to him from the natural order, still less of erecting such access to him through experience, but of his self-disclosure to us in his Son and through his Word.” - David Wells

- quotes from The Gospel Project - The God Who Is (Summer 2013)

“Without the Spirit we can neither love God nor keep His commandments.” - Augustine

“It is the Spirit that sheds the love of God abroad in their hearts, and the love of all mankind; thereby purifying their hearts from the love of the world, from the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life. It is by Him they are delivered from anger and pride, from all vile and inordinate affections.” - John Wesley

“The Holy Spirit illuminates the minds of people, makes us yearn for God, and takes spiritual truth and makes it understandable to us.” - Billy Graham

Who is the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God and is called the third person in the Trinity. Is the Holy Spirit divine? Yes, the Holy Spirit is God. - John Broadus

“The Spirit is the first power we practically experience, but the last power we come to understand.” – Oswald Chambers

“Though the Holy Spirit is God, equal in essence to the Father and the Son, yet his role is consistently to defer honor, to seek to bring about the glory of another.” - Bruce Ware

“The church becomes irrelevant when it becomes purely a human creation. We are not all we were made to be when everything in our lives and churches can be explained apart from the work and presence of the Spirit of God.” – Francis Chan

“Expand Thy wings, celestial Dove, brood o’er our nature’s night; on our disordered spirits move, and let there now be light.” - Charles Wesley

“There is no use in running before you are sent; there is no use in attempting to do God’s work without God’s power. A man working without this unction, a man working without this anointing, a man working without the Holy Ghost upon him, is losing time after all.” – D.L. Moody

“The Christian’s life in all its aspects—intellectual and ethical, devotional and relational, upsurging in worship and outgoing in witness—is supernatural; only the Spirit can initiate and sustain it. So apart from him, not only will there be no lively believers and no lively congregations, there will be no believers and no congregations at all.” – J. I. Packer

“Trying to do the Lord’s work in your own strength is the most confusing, exhausting, and tedious of all work. But when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, then the ministry of Jesus just flows out of you.” - Corrie Ten Boom

- quotes from The Gospel Project – The God Who Is (Summer 2013)

Rosaria Butterfield:

I think that churches would be places of greater intimacy and growth in Christ if people stopped lying about what we need, what we fear, where we fail, and how we sin.

I think that many of us have a hard time believing the God we believe in, when the going gets tough.

And I suspect that instead of seeking counsel and direction from those stronger in the Lord, we retreat into our isolation and shame and let the sin wash over us, defeating us again. Or maybe we muscle through on our pride.

Do we really believe that the word of God is a double-edge sword, cutting between the spirit and the soul?

Or do we use the word of God as a cue card to commandeer only our external behavior?

- from The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

It is not possible, wonderful Lord,
to express in human speech
the depths of our gratitude to God
for the preciousness of the hope
we have in our Lord Jesus,
the Conqueror of death, of the grave, of hell;
the Victor who stands mighty to save.

O Lord,
our lives, our hearts, our souls flow to You.
May God give us strength
and length of days to praise You;
then in the eternity to come,
to share in the angels’ song
and the saints’ paean of love and gratitude,
oh what God has done for us!

- W. A. Criswell

Dale Ahlquist:

Dogma is a frightening word these days. People run from it.

Those of us who take our religion seriously, that is, who actually believe our beliefs, are usually told that we need to do away with dogma, which is divisive, and be “inclusive” and “tolerant” so that we can all get along.

But the problem is that “inclusiveness” and “tolerance” are dogmas.

It is not dogma that divides people. It is dogma that brings people together. The ultimate common bond is truth. That is why it is worth arguing about.

People talk nowadays of getting rid of dogmas and all agreeing like brethren. But upon what can they agree except upon a common dogma?

If you agree you must agree on some statement, if it is only that a cat has four legs. If the dogmas in front of you are false get rid of them; but do not say that you are getting rid of dogmas. Say you are getting rid of lies. If the dogmas are true, what can you do but try to get men to agree with them?

“The dislike of defined dogmas”, says Chesterton, “really means a preference for unexamined dogmas.”

The people who cling to the dogma of tolerance of course do not know that they are dogmatic. And as a matter of fact, their dogma is a bit mushy and vague. But their basic belief is that because there are exceptions, then there are no rules.

However, the presence of exceptions, even the allowance of exceptions, is not an argument for tolerance; it is an argument for the rule. And everywhere we look, we can see that the exception proves the rule.

- from The Complete Thinker: The Marvelous Mind of G.K. Chesterton

Jesus’ uniqueness was completely unselfconscious. He didn’t need to draw attention to it. It was a fact so obvious to him that it didn’t need emphasizing. It was implied rather than asserted.

• Everyone else was a lost sheep; he had come as the Good Shepherd to seek and to save them.
• Everyone else was sick with the disease of sin; he was the doctor who had come to heal them.
• Everyone else was trapped in the darkness of sin and ignorance; he was the light of the world.
• Everyone else was a sinner; he was born to be their Saviour and would die for the forgiveness of their sins.
• Everyone else was hungry; he was the bread of life.
• Everyone else was dead in wrongdoing and sin; he could be their life now and their resurrection in the future.

All these metaphors express the moral uniqueness of which he was clearly conscious…

It is this paradox which is so amazing, this combination of the self-centredness of his teaching and the unself-centredness of his behaviour.

• In thought he put himself first; in deed last.
• He exhibited both the greatest self-esteem and the greatest self-sacrifice.
• He knew himself to be the Lord of all, but he became their servant.
• He said that he would one day come to judge the world, but he washed the feet of his friends.

This utter disregard of self in the service of God and man is what the Bible calls love. There is no self-interest in love. The essence of love is self-sacrifice. Even the worst of us is adorned by an occasional flash of such nobility, but the life of Jesus radiated it with a never-fading incandescent glow. Jesus was sinless because he was selfless. Such selflessness is love. And God is love.

- John Stott, Basic Christianity (IVP Classics)