Quotes on Sermons

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.

No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to "spiritual" subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.

It is not the number of books you read; nor the variety of sermons which you hear; nor the amount of religious conversation in which you mix: but it is the frequency and the earnestness with which you meditate on these things, till the truth which may be in them becomes your own, and part of your own being, that ensures your spiritual growth.

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible.

No man ever yet thought whether he was preaching well without weakening his sermon.

We can be walking witnesses and standing sermons to which objective onlookers can say a quiet amen.

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the sermon on the mount.

Let us be very careful that we never exalt any minister, or sermon, or book, or friend above the Word of God.

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

And although I see few results, future missionaries will see conversions following every sermon. May they not forget the pioneers who worked in the thick gloom with few rays to cheer, except such as flow from faith in the precious promises of God's Word.

People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.

I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day; I'd rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way.

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

A Christian is a walking sermon. They preach far more than a minister does, for they preach all week long.

Jesus is apt to come, into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable moments. Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon, not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but...at supper time, or walking along a road...He never approached from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and the questions that real life asks.

Every sermon must contain a certain shot of heresy.

Saying is one thing and doing is another; we are to consider the sermon and the preacher distinctly and apart.

The Sermon on the Mount is not a set of principles to be obeyed apart from identification with Jesus Christ. The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is getting his way with us.

And I don't have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It's almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.

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.