I'm so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.
John Gresham MachenRead
Vastly more important than all questions with regard to methods of preaching is the root question as to what it is that shall be preached.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The essence of preaching lies not in the methods used but in the core message being conveyed.
John Gresham Machen emphasizes that the heart of effective preaching is the substance of the message rather than the techniques employed in delivering it. This assertion encourages a focus on the truth and significance of what is being communicated, suggesting that the content is paramount in any form of teaching or preaching.
Themes
PreachingMessageContentImportanceMethods
In practice
Example use cases
In a sermon discussing the importance of faith, you could cite this quote to highlight the need for a strong core message.
More from John Gresham Machen
All quotes βFaith is indeed intellectual; it involves an apprehension of certain things as facts; and vain is the modern effort to divorce faith from knowledge. But although faith is intellectual, it is not only intellectual. You cannot have faith without having knowledge; but you will not have faith if you have only knowledge.
John Gresham MachenRead
What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anything has been done to save me, will you not tell me the facts?
John Gresham MachenRead
The more we know of God, the more unreservedly we will trust him; the greater our progress in theology, the simpler and more child-like will be our faith
John Gresham MachenRead
I see with greater and greater clearness that consistent Christianity is the easiest Christianity to defend
John Gresham MachenRead
Christ died"--that is history; "Christ died for our sins"--that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity.
John Gresham MachenRead
Similar quotes
In the long term the most important question for a company is not what you are but what you are becoming.
Gary HamelRead
Strife and Confusion joined the fight, along with cruel Death, who seized one wounded man while still alive and then another man without a wound, while pulling the feet of one more corpse out from the fight. The clothes Death wore around her shoulders were dyed red with human blood.
HomerRead
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.
D. H. LawrenceRead
If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.
Daniel DennettRead
Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.
William Butler YeatsRead
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means.
Clarence DarrowRead