Quotes about Preaching

Many a modern preacher is far less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is with his popularity with his congregation. A want of intellectual backbone makes him straddle the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense. Bending the knee to the mob rather than God would probably make them scruple at ever playing the role of John the Baptist before a modern Herod. The acids of modernity are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy.

But Paul, in his preaching of the Gospel, is a debtor to deliver the word not to Barbarians only, but also to Greeks, and not only to the unwise, who would easily agree with him, but also to the wise.

To be Biblically balanced is to let our theology and preaching be proportioned by the Bible's radically disproportionate focus on God's saving love for sinners seen and accomplished in the crucified and risen Christ.

I have never once feared the devil, but I tremble every time I enter the pulpit.

In some of the best worship songs we bring our praises to God - yet at the same time also end up preaching to ourselves.

In the preaching of the kingdom, law and gospel come together. The coming of the kingdom is the coming of a King to enforce his law on a disobedient world, that is, to enforce his covenant against covenant-breakers. But the King who comes is full of love and forgiveness. So his coming is good news, gospel, not only because he judges the wicked, but because he brings redemption, forgiveness, and reward to his redeemed people.

The substitution of so-called "practical" preaching for the doctrinal exposition which it has supplanted is the root cause of many of the evil maladies which now afflict the church of God. The reason why there is so little depth, so little intelligence, so little grasp of the fundamental verities of Christianity, is because so few believers have been established in the faith, through hearing expounded and through their own personal study of the doctrines of grace.

If I preach the law to the unsaved, showing its spirituality and the breadth of its requirements, pressing upon them the justice of its demands, proving they are under its righteous condemnation, and all of this with the object of driving them out of themselves to Christ, then I make a right and legitimate service of the law. I "use it lawfully" (1 Tim. 1:8) and do not pit it against the gospel.

it annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don't like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it. In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I

The revealed Word awakened me, but it was the preached Word that saved me, and I must ever attach peculiar value to the hearing of the truth, for by it I received the joy and peace in which my soul delights.

I believe that the preaching of the living word of God is something that Africa hungers for.

The words of the Bible, and the Bible alone, should be heard from the pulpit.