Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
I never heard a Christian sermon preached in a church.
You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips.
No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
A bad sermon is like a car wreck - everyone slows down to see what happened.
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the sermon on the mount.
American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.
I've never preached one sermon on money, on just finances. I want to stay away from it.
The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself.
I used to tell people when I preached at a church, 'If you want a great sermon, be a great audience.'
Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think, you only get to receive information.
I do think that a minister who can preach a sermon without addressing sinners does not know how to preach.
I contend that it's impossible to read the Sermon on the Mount and not come out against capital punishment.
The sight of a drunkard is a better sermon against that vice than the best that was ever preached on that subject.
A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only comfort the afflicted, it also must afflict the comfortable.
The best sermon is preached by the minister who has a sermon to preach and not by the man who has to preach a sermon.
A good sermon should be like a woman's skirt: short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the essentials.
It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher.
The Sermon on the Mount is a very nice piece about being good, but most of the Bible is a very revengeful, childish, brutal God.
Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.
You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.
You get up and you preach a sermon and people walk away thinking what a great guy - and that's a failure as a pastor. Our job is to proclaim Christ.
Preaching is effective as long as the preacher expects something to happen-not because of the sermon, not even because of the preacher, but because of God.
I do not believe there is a problem in this country or the world today which could not be settled if approached through the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.
No politician has ever yet been able to rule his country, nor has any country ever yet been able to face the world, upon the principles of the Sermon on the Mount.
Usually in church, when the congregation is overcome by the Holy Spirit for a moment, the people will interrupt the sermon to yell their praises, and dance for joy.
Because we employ no professional preachers, it means that every sermon or lesson in church is given by a regular member - women and men, children and grandparents.
Sometimes I go back and listen to the very first day I went to church. I listen to that sermon all the time, because that was the sermon that was life changing for me.
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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.
TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance.
I think quite a bit of organized religion has become big business. Jesus Christ never sold the word of God. He never gave a sermon and then said, 'For $8.99, you can buy the CD.'
A beautiful homily, a genuine sermon, must begin with the first proclamation, with the proclamation of salvation. There is nothing more solid, deep and sure than this proclamation.
My father was a no-nonsense, dedicated, and focused minister, and there was usually a sermon he needed to prepare for or a Scripture he needed to study, and that always came first.
Honestly, I would think I would go way back to Biblical times and be one of the guys who saw Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. It would be so cool to see what he was really like in person.
It was not enough to come and listen to a great sermon or message every Sunday morning and be confined to those four walls and those four corners. You had to get out and do something.
In my neighborhood, everyone had an opinion on the local cantor. You didn't go to a synagogue to listen to the rabbi's sermon. You went to listen to the cantor. It was like a concert.
I daily disconnect and read a good book or listen to a good sermon or call a friend or my mom and talk on the phone with my feet up. I also take baths with bath salts that I make myself.
But alas, they are all sadly deficient, because they leave us under the domination of political and religious prejudices; and they are as inefficient as the sleepy dose of an ordinary sermon.
I get one hour, really 25 minutes in a sermon on a weekend, to combat all the hours of the week that people are told you are what you have through billboards, commercials, and sitcoms, and so forth.
St. Peter announced the glad tidings of the Gospel to the people on the day of Pentecost, and converted, by the first Christian sermon, ever preached, three thousand - which formed the primitive Church.
The Golden Rule is to 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' Allegedly, America is a Christian country. This means that Christian America is following Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in a masochistic way.
Never preach a sermon without a text from the Bible, a text containing the theme which you can elaborate. The text is the best proof in support of your argument. A sermon without a text is an argument without a proof.
The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.
We shall never understand the ethical system taught by Jesus unless we realize that he was a Jew, not only by birth, but that he lived and taught as a Jew; the Sermon on the Mount was addressed to his distracted fellow nationals.
In the real world, I see conservatives volunteering at adoption agencies, at churches, at bake sales and the local American Legion Post while the only charity a progressive sends is a smug sermon on fair share and what fairness is.
I've talked with friends about this: when you write about yourself, that's what people connect to. When you write a sermon or a lesson, that may not reach people. I've learned a lot from people who have been writing about themselves.
Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life. It takes twenty years to make a sermon because it takes twenty years to make the man. The true sermon is a thing of life. The sermon grows because the man grows.
