The church is not a dormitory for sleepers, it is an institution for workers; it is not a rest camp, it is a front line trench.
Interpretation
The church should be an active place for people to work and serve, rather than a passive space for rest and complacency.
This quote by Billy Sunday emphasizes the idea that the church's primary role is to engage and mobilize people in service and action. Rather than being a comfortable place for individuals to simply rest or hide from the challenges of life, the church is portrayed as a battleground where believers should actively participate in their faith and contribute to meaningful work in the community.
In practice
In a sermon about community service, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of active faith.
Whenever a day comes when I can stand and preach God's Word without an agony of anxiety lest the people will not accept Christ; whenever a day comes when I can see men and women coming down the aisles without joy in my heart, I'll quit preaching.
Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.
The saloon is a liar. It promises good cheer and sends sorrow.
I don't believe there are devils enough in hell to pull a boy out of the arms of a godly mother.
The trouble with many men is that they have got just enough religion to make them miserable. If there is not joy in religion, you have got a leak in your religion.
The backslider likes the preaching that wouldn't hit the side of a house, while the real disciple is delighted when the truth brings him to his knees.
What a magical thing is the bed, and what a vulnerable, innocent creature is the sleeping human - the human who never looks more truthful or pitiful or benign; the curled-up, childlike dreaming soul who has for a few hours become an angel adrift.
Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.
An intellectual inferiority of the masses would manifest itself most evidently in their aiming at the abolition of the system in which they themselves are supreme and are served by the elite of the most talented men.
I emphasize in it [my Orientalism] accortdingly that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other.
Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life.
I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
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