Are you still “all in” on the preaching of God’s Word. Not just “a talk.” Not just “a conversation.” But kerusso, that is to herald (proclaim); to preach (announce) a message publicly and with conviction (persuasion). I am, and more importantly the Head of the local church, Jesus, is.

Here are some quotes that I have been curating and others have shared over the past few months on the subject of preaching to encourage my fellow heralds of God’s Word:

  1. “You never know the ripple that will touch the shore of eternity when you drop that stone of grace into somebody’s heart.” ~Adrian Rogers
  2. “A desire to preach without a burden to study is a desire to perform.” ~H.B. Charles
  3. “To be effective the preacher’s message must be alive; it must alarm, arouse, challenge; it must be God’s present voice to a particular people.” ~A.W. Tozer
  4. “The sermon is not your reflections on how to negotiate life. The sermon rather is our fundamental speech act as Christians through which we learn the grammar of the faith.” ~Stanley Hauerwas
  5. “In the end, preaching has two basic objects in view: the Word and the human listener. It is not enough to just harvest the wheat; it must be prepared in some edible form or it can’t nourish and delight. Sound preaching arises out of two loves—love of the Word of God and love of people—and from them both a desire to show people God’s glorious grace.” ~Tim Keller
  6. “The preaching that this world needs most is sermons in shoes that are walking with Jesus Christ.” ~D.L. Moody
  7. “Preaching is stepping on the snake.” ~David Hansen
  8. “I preach as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.” ~Richard Baxter
  9. “You don’t need massive platforms, radical ideas, and revolutionary fervor to accomplish great things for God. Do the ordinary things: Serve in a local church, Stand on the truth, Share the gospel, Love people. God uses “ordinary” people to turn the world upside down.” ~Dustin Benge
  10. “We preach to men as if they were conscious they were dying sinners, they are not; they are having a good time.” ~Oswald Chambers
  11. “Using the Bible when you preach is not equal to preaching the Bible.” ~David Green
  12. “A preacher should never try to compete with predecessors or devise ways to erase the memory of other ministers known and loved by the parishioners.” ~Fred Craddock
  13. “If a postal worker doesn’t pick and choose what mail he thinks you prefer, than a preacher shouldn’t either.” ~Unknown
  14. “The expository preacher opens the Bible before God’s people and dares to say, ‘I will explain to you what this passage means.’” ~Bryan Chapell
  15. “No reason exists why the preaching of the gospel should be a miserable operation either to the speaker or to the hearer. Pleasantly profitable let all our sermons be. A house must not have thick walls without openings, neither must a discourse be all made up of solid slabs of doctrine without a window of comparison or a lattice of poetry; if so, our hearers will gradually forsake us, and prefer to stay at home and read their favorite authors whose lively tropes and vivid images afford more pleasure to their minds.” ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon
  16. “The pulpit does not determine a preacher’s Holy Spirit filling but it does have a way of revealing it.” ~Cory Knopf
  17. “The bell in the steeple may be well hung, fairly fashioned, and of soundest metal, but it is dumb until the ringer makes it speak. And . . . the preacher has no voice of quickening for the dead in sin, or of comfort for living saints unless the divine Spirit gives him a gracious pull, and begs him speak with power. Hence the need of prayer for both preacher and hearers.” John F. MacArthur Jr.
  18. “Preaching is speaking and teaching with the intent to persuade from a point of authority.” ~Bill Rice III
  19. “A sermon is not really about how you ‘did’ as a communicator; it’s about God’s interaction with his people.” ~Carey Nieuwhof
  20. “Give us some men who know the truth! And who will declare the truth! And will stand with Athanasius and Polycarp and Calvin and Luther and Whitefield and Edwards-and who will declare from the housetops that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation!” ~Steve Lawson
  21. “If I knew the Lord was coming in 3 years, I would spend 2 of them studying and 1 preaching.” ~Donald Gray Barnhouse
  22. “There is simply nothing else like the act of preaching. The whole of it from prayerful preparation to the proclamation event is a stunning grace from God.” ~Philip Nation
  23. “It (imagination) is also very important in preaching. Cultivate your imagination guided by the creativity that is in the text of Scripture. There is more there than we often see.” ~David C. Allen
  24. ““A sermon is a place to wake people up to realities they have assented to with the mind but have not grasped with the heart.” ~Tim Keller
  25. “Pastor, if you want to love neighbor, address the culture, and change the world — stand in a pulpit, open the Word of God, and faithfully preach Christ crucified.” ~Dustin Benge
  26. “What is the chief end of preaching? I like to think it is this. It is to give men and women a sense of God and His presence.” ~D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
  27. “Other men may preach the gospel better than I, but no man can preach a better gospel.” ~George Whitefield
  28. “The one great preacher in history, I would contend, is the Church. And the first business of the individual preacher is to enable the Church to preach.” ~P. T. Forsyth
  29. “If people leave worship saying, ‘What an amazing preacher!’ we have failed. Instead we must long for them to say, ‘What a great God, and what a privilege it is to meet him in his Word, as we have just done.’ A good teacher clears the way, declares the way, and then gets out of the way. ~Allistar Begg
  30. “The final evaluation of a sermon will be at the end of the age, not the end of the service.” ~Jon Stone
  31. “Let the sun stop shining, and we will preach in darkness. Let the waves stop their ebb and flow, and still our voice shall preach the gospel. Let the world stop its revolutions, let the planets stay their motion; we will still preach the gospel.” ~Charles Haddon Spurgeon

As a listener and as a leader, don’t give up on preaching. Don’t pivot to a “more palatable” but less powerful medium of ministry. It does NOT have to be a charismatic blend of demonstrative windsucking and glass-shattering yells, but preaching continues to be God’s enduring way to reveal not only His truth but His heart your church and community.

The following video, captioned as “Foreground: Church fads over the past 50+ years/Background: Faithful, Old-School Preachers of the Gospel” says it all:

1 Co 1:18-21 “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.”

Photo by Mitchell Leach on Unsplash