In one sense all believers are preachers. We are all called to proclaim the good news of the gospel to others. So whether from the pulpit, or over the fence with your neighbour, we need to be clearly and passionately sharing with others the good news of what Christ has done for sinners. Here then are 55 inspiring quotes by 27 authors on the importance and necessity of preaching that you need to hear.
Anon
“Some preachers are like bad photographs – underdeveloped and overexposed.”
Donald Gray Barnhouse
“If I knew the Lord was coming in three years, I would spend two of them studying and one preaching.”
Richard Baxter
“Preach to yourselves the sermons which you study, before you preach them to others.”
“I preach as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.”
E. M. Bounds
“A prepared heart is much better than a prepared sermon. A prepared heart will make a prepared sermon.”
“It is easier to fill the head than it is to prepare the heart. It is easier to make a brain sermon than a heart sermon.”
“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.”
“It is not great talents or great learning or great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God – men always preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives out of it. These men mould a generation for God.”
“The men who have most fully illustrated Christ in their character, and have most powerfully affected the world for Him, have been men who have spent so much time with God as to make it a notable feature in their lives.”
G. K. Chesterton
“If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.”
Michael Green
“This is the age of the sermonette, and sermonettes make Christianettes.”
Vance Havner
“The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself.”
“There was a time when ministers spoke forthrightly and named things. We don’t name anything anymore. Finney had a sermon on How to Preach so as to Convert Nobody. He said ‘preach on sin but never mention any of the sins of your congregation – that will do it’.”
“The task of the preacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
“Some preachers ought to put more fire into their sermons, or more sermons into the fire.”
John Henry Jowett
“Preaching that costs nothing accomplishes nothing.”
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
“What is the chief end of preaching? It is to give men and women a sense of God and his presence.”
“Do you know the message of this gospel? Do you know why Paul gloried in it? It is because he had come to see that God had got a plan for this miserable, wretched, failing sinful world. And it is a plan that he had planned before the very foundation of the world itself. I know of nothing so wonderful in the whole world today. That is why I do not preach topical sermons, I have something to tell you that is worth listening to!”
“I am profoundly convinced that the greatest need of the Church today is a return to expository preaching.”
Tim Keller
“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.”
Martin Luther
“Always preach in such a way that if the people listening do not come to hate their sin, they will instead hate you.”
“What mortal has ever discovered or fathomed the truth that the three persons in the eternal divine essence are one God; that the second person, the Son of God, was obliged to become man, born of a virgin; and that no way of life could be opened for us, save through his crucifixion? Such truth never would have been heard nor preached, would never in all eternity have been published, learned and believed, had not God himself revealed it.”
Albert Mohler
“Expository preaching is central, irreducible, and nonnegotiable to the Bible’s mission of authentic worship that pleases God.”
D. L. Moody
“The preaching that this world needs most is sermons in shoes that are walking with Jesus Christ.”
“I’d rather be able to pray than to be a great preacher. Jesus Christ never taught his disciples how to preach, but only how to pray.”
“I cannot preach on hell unless I preach with tears.”
John Newton
“My grand point in preaching is to break the hard heart, and to heal the broken one.”
Raymond Ortlund
“Every time you hear the Word of God preached, you come away from that exposure to his truth either a little closer to God or a little further away from God, either more softened toward God or more hardened toward God. But you are never just the same.”
John Owen
“A sermon is not made with an eye upon the sermon, but with both eyes upon the people and all the heart upon God.”
J. I. Packer
“Doctrinal preaching certainly bores the hypocrites; but it is only doctrinal preaching that will save Christ’s sheep. The preacher’s job is to proclaim the faith, not to provide entertainment for unbelievers–in other words, to feed the sheep rather than amuse the goats.”
John Piper
“Preaching is not conversation. Preaching is not discussion. Preaching is not casual talk about religious things. Preaching is not simply teaching. Preaching is the heralding of a message permeated by the sense of God’s greatness and majesty and holiness.”
“A thousand sorrows prepares a man to preach.”
“That is my longing for our day—and for you. That God would raise up thousands of broken-hearted, Bible-saturated preachers who are dominated by a sense of the greatness and the majesty and the holiness of God, revealed in the gospel of Christ crucified and risen and reigning with absolute authority over every nation and every army and every false religion and every terrorist and every tsunami and every cancer cell, and every galaxy in the universe.”
Leonard Ravenhill
“A popular evangelist reaches your emotions. A true prophet reaches your conscience.”
Francis Schaeffer
“If He’s really there and if He’s a holy God, do you seriously think that God does not care that a country like our own has turned from him? There is only one kind of preaching that will do in a generation like ours – preaching which includes the preaching of the judgment of God.”
Charles Spurgeon
“A burning heart will soon find for itself a flaming tongue.”
“Everywhere there is apathy. Nobody cares whether that which is preached is true or false. A sermon is a sermon whatever the subject; only, the shorter it is the better.”
“If you cannot preach at home because your practice runs counter to your preaching, do not preach at all—for a man has no right to talk and instruct others if he cannot, at least in some measure, live out what he teaches!”
“The true minister of Christ knows that the true value of a sermon must lie, not in its fashion and manner, but in the truth which it contains.”
“The sermon which does not lead to Christ, or of which Jesus Christ is not the top and the bottom, is a sort of sermon that will make the devils in hell laugh, but make the angels of God weep.”
“If we had to preach to thousands year after year, and never rescued but one soul, that one soul would be a full reward for all our labour, for a soul is of countless price.”
“Remember, you are not sent to whiten tombs, but to open them, and this is a work which no man can perform unless, like the Lord Jesus at the grave of Lazarus, he groans in spirit; and even then he is powerless apart from the Holy Ghost.”
John Stott
“We are called to the sacred task of Biblical exposition and are commissioned to proclaim what God has said, not what human beings want to hear. Thus, we have no liberty to scratch the itch of our listeners or to pander to their likings.”
A. W. Tozer
“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.”
“I have preached myself off of every Bible Conference platform in the country!”
“We should set our hearts to study theology. We should preach it from our pulpits, sing it in our hymns, teach it to our children and make it the subject of conversation when we meet with Christian friends.”
“No preacher has any right to die of old age if hard work will kill him.”
Paul Washer
“Now do you know why that little gospel you preach has no power? Because it is no gospel! Get to the gospel. Spend your life on your knees. Get away from the teachings of unscriptural men. Study the cross!”
“I used to tell young preachers, in order to preach you’ve got to have the power of God on your life. Now I tell them, in order to tie your shoes you’ve got to have the power of God on your life. Avoid trivial pursuits. You are a child of God, destined for glory, and called to do great things in His Name.”
John Wesley
“Before I preach love, mercy, and grace, I must preach sin, law, and judgement.”
“Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin, and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on earth.”
George Whitefield
“It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher.”
“The reason why congregations have been so dead is because dead men preach to them.”
Douglas Wilson
“The task of the modern preacher is not to make Jesus acceptable to sinners.”
Some goodies there esp Wesley and Whitfield.
Toser’s “I have preached myself off of every Bible Conference platform in the country!” is a classic, and dear to my heart, for a prophet is not acceptable in his own country.
The second sermon that I was to ever deliver was sprung on me at short notice while a kid at a high school Crusader Camp . Moonta Mines Methodist Church S Aust.
The advice I was given was, “Just tell them about Jesus”. That has set me up for life.
Some goodies there esp Wesley and Whitfield.
Toser’s “I have preached myself off of every Bible Conference platform in the country!” is a classic, and dear to my heart, for a prophet is not acceptable in his own country.
The second sermon that I was to ever deliver was sprung on me at short notice while a kid at a high school Crusader Camp . Moonta Mines Methodist Church S Aust.
The advice I was given was, “Just tell them about Jesus”. That has set me up for life.
Many thanks Bruce.