Words matter. These are the best Sermon Quotes from famous people such as Vance Havner, Jay Parini, Charles Lindbergh, Isaac Mayer Wise, Malcolm Boyd, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself.
What I’m trying to argue, as passionately as I can, is that the Jesus story isn’t worth dying for, it’s worth living for. Jesus presents a third way, a way of being in the worth that embraces the Sermon on the Mount, with its challenge to violence and greed.
We must learn from the sermons of Christ, the wisdom of Laotzu, the teachings of Buddha.
Never preach a sermon without a text from the Bible, a text containing the theme which you can elaborate. The text is the best proof in support of your argument. A sermon without a text is an argument without a proof.
I feel that I communicate best when I am not deliberately being linear. Along this same line, I feel some of the best sermons I’ve ever heard were in the theatre rather than the pulpit – as, for example, in the Theatre of the Absurd.
My father was a no-nonsense, dedicated, and focused minister, and there was usually a sermon he needed to prepare for or a Scripture he needed to study, and that always came first.
A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only comfort the afflicted, it also must afflict the comfortable.
Had I become a priest, the sermons would’ve been electric!
American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.
In my neighborhood, everyone had an opinion on the local cantor. You didn’t go to a synagogue to listen to the rabbi’s sermon. You went to listen to the cantor. It was like a concert.
Because we employ no professional preachers, it means that every sermon or lesson in church is given by a regular member – women and men, children and grandparents.
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the sermon on the mount.
The Golden Rule is to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ Allegedly, America is a Christian country. This means that Christian America is following Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in a masochistic way.
No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
In the real world, I see conservatives volunteering at adoption agencies, at churches, at bake sales and the local American Legion Post while the only charity a progressive sends is a smug sermon on fair share and what fairness is.
The game is not won by a pep talk on Saturday. It’s won by preparation of your club from Monday until game time. If they’re not ready on Saturday, you’re not going to get them ready by trying to inspire them with a dog-eat-dog sermon on that day.
I used to tell people when I preached at a church, ‘If you want a great sermon, be a great audience.’
Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don’t get to think, you only get to receive information.
Being a pastor’s kid comes with a lot of pressure and scrutiny. A lot of my dad’s sermons were about respect. It was a beautiful way to be taught about love and two people being equal.
I never heard a Christian sermon preached in a church.
With the requests of some he complied, and has published a discourse, delivered before the Society for recovering drowned persons, which may be justly pronounced one of the most beautiful and interesting sermons in the English language.
I used to hang out with grandfather all the time because he used to pick me up from school sometimes, or drive me to my mother’s, so I’d be with my grandfather a lot. I used to watch him write his sermons.
I contend that it’s impossible to read the Sermon on the Mount and not come out against capital punishment.
Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life. It takes twenty years to make a sermon because it takes twenty years to make the man. The true sermon is a thing of life. The sermon grows because the man grows.
The Sermon on the Mount is a very nice piece about being good, but most of the Bible is a very revengeful, childish, brutal God.
The message of Jesus is summed up partly in the Sermon on the Mount, and partly when he begins his ministry and quotes the passage from Isaiah: ‘I have come to set free the prisoners and restore sight to the blind.’ And certainly, his mission is also to bring hope. It was to heal people, to befriend the outcast.
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.
I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.
The false black preacher is only too happy to reinforce the idea of the white man as scapegoat. His sermons make the congregation angrier and more bitter. And the angrier they become, the easier it is for the minister to control them.
I think quite a bit of organized religion has become big business. Jesus Christ never sold the word of God. He never gave a sermon and then said, ‘For $8.99, you can buy the CD.’
This fanaticism is what feeds terrorism. And this is precisely why Muslims must play an active role in opposing hate sermons and incitement to terrorism and extremism in their mosques.
The sight of a drunkard is a better sermon against that vice than the best that was ever preached on that subject.
One of the things, one of the things that really got to me was the thing in Houston where you had the government, the mayor actually, trying to get the sermons of ministers. When the government tries to invade the church to enforce its own opinion on marriage, that’s when it’s time to resist.
Agnosticism has nothing to impart. Its sermons are the exhortations of one who convinces you he stands on nothing and urges you to stand there too.
TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance.
In a jazz atmosphere, the audience members were so quiet and respectful of the musicians that you felt you were almost part of a meeting at a church or a temple, where everyone was completely in tune with the sermon and what the whole event was about.
The journey that ‘In Praise of Slowness’ has made since publication shows how far this message resonates. The book has been translated into more than 30 languages. It appears on reading lists from business schools to yoga retreats. Rabbis, priests and imams have quoted from it in their sermons.
I went to a Presbyterian college, you know, I was in… all the way, and so I remember doing my first sermon when I was 17, I was in high school. It wasn’t a full twenty-five minute sermon, but for like ten minutes I got up and they let me do that, and it was on faith.
One thing that helps to stretch me is to listen to other preacher’s sermons. Every year, I will listen to at least ten other preachers, both to hear God speak to me, and also to evaluate their preaching to see what I can learn and how I can improve my own preaching.
When sermons start where people live – their questions, struggles, and concerns – and then offer a timely and helpful word from the Scriptures, people are more interested in hearing what else the Scriptures have to say.
A good sermon should be like a woman’s skirt: short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the essentials.
I write all my sermons.
The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance.
You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.
The flowery style is not unsuitable to public speeches or addresses, which amount only to compliment. The lighter beauties are in their place when there is nothing more solid to say; but the flowery style ought to be banished from a pleading, a sermon, or a didactic work.
