A wise pastor once told me we tend to overestimate what one sermon will do but underestimate what 10 years of faithful preaching will do. When our people are confronted again and again with the message of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection for the salvation of sinners, we can trust that God will use it to open blind eyes, unstop deaf ears, bring dead hearts to life, and transform his people from one degree of glory to another.
Preaching
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The preacher must also be sure that he preaches Christ very simply. He must break up his big words and long sentences, and pray against the temptation to use them. It is usually the short, dagger-like sentence that does the work best. A true servant of Christ must never try to let the people see how well he can preach; he must never go out of his way to drag a pretty piece of poetry in his sermon, nor to introduce some fine quotations from the classics. He must employ a simple, homely style, or such a style as God has given him and he must preach Christ so plainly that his listeners cannot only understand him, but that they cannot misunderstand him even if they try to do so.
Oswald J. Smith
God can accomplish more through one message in the fulness of the Spirit than through hundreds given in the energy of the flesh.
Arthur Wallis
Apostolic preaching is not marked by its beautiful diction, or literary polish, or cleverness of expression, but operates “in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”
Pete Greig
C. H. Spurgeon, perhaps the greatest preacher of the late-nineteenth century, who spoke to more than ten million people and led the largest independent church in the world at that time, attributed the fruitfulness of his entire ministry to what he called his ‘Boiler Rooms’. These were prayer rooms—often located in the basement of the building in which Spurgeon was speaking—where people would pray as he preached. Like Moses interceding with his hands held aloft by Aaron and Hur, while Joshua overcame the Amalekite armies in the valley below, Spurgeon’s prayer warriors won countless spiritual battles in those boiler rooms while the great preacher fought the earthly battle for souls from the pulpit above.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Dear boy, I should like you to preach, but it is best that you pray. Many a preacher has proved a castaway, but never one person who had truly learned to pray.
(to his 12 year old son – Charles)
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
I would say that a “dull preacher” is a contradiction in terms; if he is dull he is not a preacher. He may stand in a pulpit and talk, but he is certainly not a preacher.
Frederick Buechner
If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I heard one say the other day that a certain preacher had no more gifts for the ministry than an oyster, and in my own judgment this was a slander on the oyster, for that worthy bivalve shows great discretion in his openings, and knows when to close. If some men were sentenced to hear their own sermons, it would be a righteous judgement upon them, and they would soon cry out with Cain, “My punishment is greater than I can bear.”
Matthew Henry
Those who teach by their doctrine must teach by their life, or else they pull down with one hand what they build up with the other.