Top 100 Quotes About Sermons
#1. This fanaticism is what feeds terrorism. And this is precisely why Muslims must play an active role in opposing hate sermons and incitement to terrorism and extremism in their mosques.
Otto Schily
#2. Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.
Henry Ward Beecher
#3. The very dogs that sullenly bay the moon from farm-yards in these nights excite more heroism in our breasts than all the civil exhortations or war sermons of the age.
Henry David Thoreau
#4. Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself.
Brian D. McLaren
#5. The Buke of Ye Chess used the game as the basis for a series of sermons on morality. Neither book illustrates play or player improvement, but uses the chessboard and pieces to 'allegorize a political community whose citizens contribute to the common good'2.
Laura Caine Ramsey
#6. 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.
Wendell Berry
#7. I also like some of Joel Osteen's work. I think he's now doing a book about one of my favorite sermons of his, "The Power of 'I Am.' " I just love that sermon.
Oprah Winfrey
#9. Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclaimed in sermons and speeches which echo throughout society, are assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged; and none of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their misdeeds.
Herbert Spencer
#10. The best lessons, the best sermons are those that are lived.
Yolanda King
#11. We use the Heidelberg Catechism in our worship. Sometimes we read it responsively. Other times I'll work it into my communion liturgy. I'll quote it in my sermons from time to time. I've seen the Catechism used effectively as Sunday school material.
Kevin DeYoung
#12. To say to a rich man: You are poor! is to tell the Archbishop of Granada that his sermons are worthless.
Honore De Balzac
#13. I'll leave a note to the rector of the cathedral and remind him that a woman gave him birth. Something for him to think about the next time he gives one of his sermons. I'm writing all this down.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#14. There were games and activities as well as sermons, because, as he pointed out regularly, most of Jesus's preaching happened outside, and that meant there was more to Christianity than church.
Stephen King
#16. To regard the excesses of the passions as maladies has so salutary an effect that this idea renders all moral sermons useless.
Pierre-Claude-Victor Boiste
#17. I could write shorter sermons but when I get started I'm too lazy to stop
Abraham Lincoln
#18. Elizabeth squirmed on the hard wooden bench, and tried to ignore both her sore backside and her rumbling stomach. Why did the minister's sermons last so long? And why did the talk of sin always give her such a hearty appetite?
Anya Seton
#19. In nearly all cases, if the people complain of the length of our sermons it is because we fail to interest them personally in what we have to say.
Charles Grandison Finney
#20. I think the man who could often quarrel with Fanny," said Edmund affectionately, "must be beyond the reach of any sermons.
Jane Austen
#21. Anytime our sermons become confessional, they become more powerful.
Calvin Miller
#22. Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews's Sermons?
Charles Lamb
#23. True love requires action. We can speak of love all day long, we can write notes or poems that proclaim it, sing songs that praise it, and preach sermons that encourage it but until we manifest that love in action, our words are nothing but sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#24. The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples - that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.
Mark Twain
#25. If you want to defend torture, well then go ahead. But please spare me any sermons about the law ever again.
Chris Hayes
#26. One can be an orthodox Church in every way: great structure, good theology, excellent sermons and teaching, lots of giving; but if the Great commission is not taught and obeyed, it is a heretical church.
John Willis Zumwalt
#27. I have spent half of my life listening to someone else talk about God. Because of this history, I've developed something of an immunity to sermons.
Jen Hatmaker
#28. Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine," he went on, "preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?
Aldous Huxley
#30. In a digital age, blogs are often more authoritative than sermons.
Michael S. Horton
#31. I don't like to hear cut and dried sermons. No - when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
Abraham Lincoln
#32. But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
Barack Obama
#33. Journalism is an immense power, that threatens soon to supersede sermons, lectures, and books.
Theodore Tilton
#34. It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#35. One of the things, one of the things that really got to me was the thing in Houston where you had the government, the mayor actually, trying to get the sermons of ministers. When the government tries to invade the church to enforce its own opinion on marriage, that's when it's time to resist.
Rand Paul
#36. Most of my sermons are inspirational, and I believe people need that encouragement.
Max Lucado
#37. Long works are too often like long sermons which end in fatigue.
Francis Grierson
#38. The longest way round is the shortest way home.
(Quoting Alexander MacLaren, The Wearied Christ and Other Sermons)
C.S. Lewis
#39. Kid's don't care how many sermons you preach to them. The only sermon they'll hear is how you live your life in front of them.
Bruce Van Horn
#41. It is an unsufferable blasphemy to reject the public ministry or to say that people can become holy without sermons and Church. This involves a destruction of the Church and rebellion against ecclesiastical order; such upheavals must be warded off and punished like all other revolts.
Martin Luther
#42. In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.
Stephen Leacock
#43. We can be walking witnesses and standing sermons to which objective onlookers can say a quiet amen.
Neal A. Maxwell
#44. A man got up [after one of Huxley's 'sermons'] and said 'they had never heard anything like that in Norwich before'. Never 'did Science seem so vast and mere creeds so little'.
Adrian Desmond
#45. There was the torture of sermons, and that not a slight one, for I was very fond of them.
Teresa Of Avila
#46. I must return to the mountains-to Yosemite. I am told that the winter storms there will not be easily borne, but I am bewitched, enchanted, and tomorrow I must start for the great temple to listen to the winter songs and sermons preached and sung only there.
John Muir
#47. Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.
John Muir
#48. If the truth were known, many sermons are prepared and preached with more regard for the sermon than the souls of the hearers.
George Frederick Pentecost
#49. If the Church is not Making Disciples, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.
C.S. Lewis
#50. Spurgeon used his wit to provoke laughter in private and in public. He said in one of his sermons, "If by a laugh I can make men see the folly of an error better than in any other way, they shall laugh.
Randy Alcorn
#51. I can't jump into other people's shoes, I can only speak for me. My songs are pretty much sermons put to music.
Mike Willis
#52. The world does not need sermons; it needs a message. You can go to seminary and learn how to preach sermons, but you will have to go to God to get messages.
Oswald J. Smith
#53. His eyes widened. "You didn't go back to town, did you?"
"No. I went to church."
"Ah, well. That explains it," he blurted. "I mean ... well ... Two hours of sermons is enough to dim anyone's sparkle.
Laura Bickle
#54. Don't you know, priests, why our sermons do not touch the people's heart? Because we do not preach to the eyes, only to the ears.
Antonio Vieira
#55. his sermons go on so long that some of the time you feel like begging, "Take me now, Jesus," 'bout halfway through 'em.
Christopher Paul Curtis
#56. Gratitude is the praise we offer God: for teachers kind, benefactors never to be forgotten, for all who have advantaged me, by writings, sermons, converse, prayers, examples, for all these and all others which I know, which I know not, open, hidden, remembered, and forgotten.
Lancelot Andrewes
#57. Albert Durer, the famous painter, used to say he had no pleasure in pictures that were painted with many colors, but in those which were painted with a choice simplicity. So it is with me as to sermons.
Martin Luther
#58. I remember the first sermon I ever preached. I had four sermons. I preached them, all four in ten minutes. And that was the beginning, in a place called Bostwick, Florida, in northern Florida, in a little tiny church, and on a cold night, about 40 people. And I was so nervous.
Billy Graham
#59. During my life I have heard many sermons on the Resurrection. I can recite the events of that first Easter Sunday. I have marked in my scriptures passages regarding the Resurrection.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#61. Our generation may be able to listen to sermons in a Joseph Campbellish way, treating Bible stories as instructional myths pointing to a deeper communal reality - that is, if we haven't replaced them with Star Wars myths or their equivalent - but don't ask us to believe with our heart and soul.
Gudjon Bergmann
#62. If we want revivals, we must revive our reverence for the Word of God. If we want conversions, we must put more of God's Word into our sermons.8 His gospel preaching was grounded
Steven J. Lawson
#63. The mark of the true hero is that the most heroic of his deeds is done in secret. We never hear of it. And yet somehow, my friends, we know. - Father Tyler's Collected Sermons, FROM THE ARVATH ARCHIVE
Erika Johansen
#64. The tragedy is that we have too many dead men in the pulpits giving out too many dead sermons to too many dead people.
Leonard Ravenhill
#66. Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
John Burroughs
#67. And when we would make much of that which cannot matter much to thee, forgive us -a frequent part of the prayer that opened sermons.
John E. Hines
#68. The stupid texts of the Bible - from which, be the talents of the preacher what they may, only stupid sermons can be preached.
Thomas Paine
#70. There is no law that sermons shall be the preacher's own, but there is an eternal law against all manner of humbug. Pardon the word.
George MacDonald
#71. Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labor equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal super-abundance.
Arthur Helps
#72. These sermons of Jesus Christ are meant for your will and your conscience, not for your head. If you dispute these verses from the Sermon on the Mount with your head, you will dull the appeal to your heart.
Oswald Chambers
#73. I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity
Sinclair Lewis
#74. Most sermons sound to me like commercials - but I can't make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.
Mignon McLaughlin
#75. Some preachers ought to put more fire into their sermons or more sermons into the fire.
Vance Havner
#77. You could put all of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's angry sermons on to one loop. You could put that loop up on the big screen at Radio City Music Hall and let it play there 24 hours a day, seven days a week and Barack Obama will still emerge as the next president of the United States.
Gary David Goldberg
#78. All my books come out of sermons, and I'm really a pastor who writes rather than a writer who pastors.
Max Lucado
#79. Give me a hidden eddy
a residence free from dust and noise
paths of newly trampled grass
clouds above for neighbors
birds to help me sing
no one asking for sermons
springtime for this Saha tree
nowadays lasts how many years
Han-shan
#80. The pious farmer, who ne'er misses pray'rs, With patience suffers unexpected rain; He blesses Heav'n for what its bounty spares, And sees, resign'd, a crop of blighted grain. But, spite of sermons, farmers would blaspheme, If a star fell to set their thatch on flame.
Mary Wortley Montagu
#81. Let us use texts of Scripture as fuel for our heart's fire, they are live coals; let us attend sermons, but above all, let us be much alone with Jesus.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#82. We cannot be satisfied with illustrative sermons, great music, and friendly services. We have been called to see the powers of darkness destroyed and our ruined cities restored.
Kris Vallotton
#83. The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.
Donald Barthelme
#84. If we do not commend the Gospel to people by our holy walk and conversation, we shall not win them to Christ. Some little act of kindness will perhaps do more to influence them than any number of long sermons.
Dwight L. Moody
#85. Haven't my past sermons taught you anything?"
"Yes," Emilie threw at him, "that you pray for those who are close to God, and those who aren't, who need Him, you toss away like garbage.
Ann Rinaldi
#86. I want to see religious instruction and sermons held in German in the mosques. The ideal, in my view, would be for imams to be trained in Germany and to speak our language, just as the Roman Catholic Church now holds mass in German and gave up Latin long ago.
Wolfgang Schauble
#87. [God] speaks from heaven through the Bible, His written Word. This is why I use the phrase "the Bible says." I would not have the authority to say what I do in sermons unless it was based upon the Word of God.
Billy Graham
#88. After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could.
Theodore Bikel
#89. Some plague the people with too long sermons; for the faculty of listening is a tender thing, and soon becomes weary and satiated.
Martin Luther
#90. The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance.
David Novak
#92. But like the crusaders, who in the name of piety had carried out that dreadful massacre in Jerusalem, there were many citizens who failed to hear in those penitential sermons a call to mend their ways, and instead learnt to hate all those who didn't share their faith.
E.H. Gombrich
#93. I think that to have known one good, old man-one man, who, through the chances and mischances of a long life, has carried his heart in his hand, like a palm-branch, waving all discords into peace-helps our faith in God, in ourselves, and in each other more than many sermons
George William Curtis
#94. With the requests of some he complied, and has published a discourse, delivered before the Society for recovering drowned persons, which may be justly pronounced one of the most beautiful and interesting sermons in the English language.
John Strachan
#95. After five or six weeks of listening to his sermons on healing and renewing, Edgers felt healed and renewed - especially after the caravan of supplies arrived from Idumea - and stopped attending. When the crisis was gone, so was the need to feel the Creator.
Trish Mercer
#96. One thing that helps to stretch me is to listen to other preacher's sermons. Every year, I will listen to at least ten other preachers, both to hear God speak to me, and also to evaluate their preaching to see what I can learn and how I can improve my own preaching.
Adam Hamilton
#97. Content not yourselves with being in a state of grace, but be also careful that your graces are kept in vigorous and lively exercise, and that you preach to yourselves the sermons which you study, before you preach them to others. If
Richard Baxter
#98. One of the greatest sermons ever pronounced on missionary work is this simple thought attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi: 'Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary, use words.' Opportunities to do so are all around us. Do not miss them by waiting too long on the road to Damascus.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#99. Examples draw where precept fails, and sermons are less read than tales.
Matt Prior
#100. The most effective sermons are those which make opposers of the Gospel bite their lips and gnash their teeth.
Charles Spurgeon
