Sermons Quotes

No greater blessing could come to our land today than a revival of the spirit of religion. I doubt if there is any problem in the world today -- social, political, or economic -- that would not find happy solution if approached in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.

And when we would make much of that which cannot matter much to thee, forgive us -a frequent part of the prayer that opened sermons.

I will tell you what this people need, with regard to preaching; you need, figuratively, to have it rain pitchforks, tines downwards, from this pulpit, Sunday after Sunday. Instead of the smooth, beautiful, sweet, still, silk-velvet-lipped preaching, you should have sermons like peals of thunder, and perhaps we then can get the scales from our eyes.

Journalism is an immense power, that threatens soon to supersede sermons, lectures, and books.

A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul.

To say to a rich man: You are poor! is to tell the Archbishop of Granada that his sermons are worthless.

Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.

Our great object of glorifying God is to be mainly achieved by the winning of souls Do not close a single sermon without addressing the ungodly.

Listen to the sermon preached to you by the flowers, the trees, the shrubs, the sky, and the whole world. Notice how they preach to you a sermon full of love, of praise of God, and how they invite you to glorify the sublimity of that sovereign Artist who has given them being.

The Holy Ghost is certainly the best preacher in the world, and the words of Scripture the best sermons.

You get up and you preach a sermon and people walk away thinking what a great guy - and that's a failure as a pastor. Our job is to proclaim Christ.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Preachers are not sermon makers, but men makers and saint makers, and he only is well-trained for this business who has made himself a man and a saint. It is not great talents nor great learning nor great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God - men always preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives out of it. These can mold a generation for God.

Every man is a priest, even involuntarily; his conduct is an unspoken sermon, which is forever preaching to others.

What gets me back to church, I think, is thinking maybe this time that question "Is it true?" will be answered, not just in terms of somebody saying, "Yes, it's true," but something will happen in a sermon or maybe shuffling up to the Eucharist, or in the old lady who's sitting beside me with a Bible - maybe something will happen which will show me that it's true. So I go back thinking, maybe this time I'll be lucky.

Buddha is said to have given a "silent sermon" once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it. After a while, one of those present, a monk called Mahakasyapa, began to smile. He is said to have been the only one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile (that is to say, realization) was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and much later became the origin of Zen.

The Sermon on the Mount commands me to lay up for myself treasures, not upon earth, but in Heaven. My hopes of a future life are all founded upon the Gospel of Christ.

It would be difficult to determine whether the age is growing better or worse; for I think our plays are growing like sermons, and our sermons like plays.

Every discouraging sermon is a wicked sermon... There could hardly be a more un-Christian way of living than to go about in such a way as to depress and to discourage other people.

St. Peter announced the glad tidings of the Gospel to the people on the day of Pentecost, and converted, by the first Christian sermon, ever preached, three thousand - which formed the primitive Church.

Company culture is a religion, not a sermon.

Gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator, misogyny, violence, materialism and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by most Americans. Indeed, gangsta rap's in-your-face style may do more to force America to confront crucial social problems than a million sermons or political speeches.

I never sleep in comfort save when I am hearing a sermon or praying to God.

Unfortunately many scientists see themselves too much as priests whose job it is to preach moralistic sermons to people. This is another legacy of the 1968 generation, which I happen to belong to myself. In fact, it would be better if we just presented the facts and scenarios dispassionately - and then society can decide for itself what it wants to do to influence climate change.

The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.

I would rather smoke one cigar than hear two sermons.

Some plague the people with too long sermons; for the faculty of listening is a tender thing, and soon becomes weary and satiated.

I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works ... I mean real good works ... not holy day keeping, sermon-hearing ... or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity.

Many people conceive of religion as something apart from everyday affairs of the world. They think of it in terms of ceremony or ritual or sermons and often it strikes them as being dull or not particularly interesting. Religion may be described in many ways. I like to think of it as a medicine, a healing medicine for the mind.

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

If the Church is not Making Disciples, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.

The kind of sermon which is likely to break the hearer's heart is that which first has broken the preacher's heart, and the sermon which is likely to reach the heart of the hearer is the one which has come straight from the heart of the preacher.

The very dogs that sullenly bay the moon from farm-yards in these nights excite more heroism in our breasts than all the civil exhortations or war sermons of the age.

None may wholly escape the good of Nature, however imperfectly exposed to her blessings. The minister will not preach a perfectly flat and sedimentary sermon after climbing a snowy peak; and the fair play and tremendous impartiality of Nature, so tellingly displayed, will surely affect the after pleadings of the lawyer. Fresh air at least will get into everybody, and the cares of mere business will be quenched like the fires of a sinking ship.

Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?

What I try to do is narrow the sermon series down to one big question. In this case the question is: What happens when grace happens? I knew I wanted to preach about grace. I just felt as if it was time for our church to be refreshed and see the beauty of God's grace - the uniqueness of the Christian grace as compared to the teachings of other world religions on forgiveness.

A glass of wine often makes me a better man than hearing a sermon.

Matthew is the only gospel that uses the Sermon on the Mount, for example, because that's the new Moses making a new interpretation of the law on a new mountain. So then you begin to put all these things together, and I don't know how you can make sense out of that book if you don't know the Jewish background.

Many do not recognize the fact as they ought, that Satan has got men fast asleep in sin and that it is his great device to keep them so. He does not care what we do if he can do that. We may sing songs about the sweet by and by, preach sermons and say prayers until doomsday, and he will never concern himself about us, if we don't wake anybody up. But if we awake the sleeping sinner he will gnash on us with his teeth. This is our work - to wake people up.

Knowledge about God is of two kinds, direct and indirect. Indirectly we can read scriptures, listen to sermons, consult authorities, and from these sources build a reasonable case that God exists. But such a God transmits no love to Earth. Therefore nothing substitutes for gyana, which is direct knowledge of the divine. Instead of having thoughts about God, you share God's own thoughts. Her thoughts can only be about Herself.

My objection to the church isn't that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too - think of how many are arrested for selling fake stock, for seducing 14-year-old girls in orphanages under their care, for arson, for murder. An it isn't so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires - though a lot of churches are that, too. My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.

In a sermon entitled “God's Providence,” C. H. Spurgeon said, “Napoleon once heard it said, that man proposes and God disposes. 'Ah,' said Napoleon, 'but I propose and dispose too.' How do you think he proposed and disposed? He proposed to go and take Russia; he proposed to make all Europe his. He proposed to destroy that power, and how did he come back again? How had he disposed it? He came back solitary and alone, his mighty army perished and wasted, having well-nigh eaten and devoured one another through hunger. Man proposes and God disposes.

I think I could do better in my approach to application. I think I could do better in preaching practical sermons.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, sermons and soda water the day after.

The man whose little sermon is ‘repent’ sets himself against his age, and will for the time being be battered mercilessly by the age whose moral tone he challenges. There is but one end for such a man—‘off with his head!’ You had better not try to preach repentance until you have pledged your head to heaven

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

The enemy uses all his power to lead the Christian, and above all the minister, to neglect prayer. He knows that however admirable the sermon may be, however attractive the service, however faithful the pastoral visitation, none of these things can damage him or his kingdom if prayer is neglected.

Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.

The most intelligent hearers are those who enjoy most heartily the simplest preaching. It is not they who clamor for superlatively intellectual or aesthetic sermons. Daniel Webster used to complain of some of the preaching to which he listened. "In the house of God" he wanted to meditate "upon the simple varieties, and the undoubted facts of religion;" not upon mysteries and abstractions.