Sermons Quotes - Page 18

• ...full of God's thoughts, a place of peace and safety amid the most exalted grandeur and enthusiastic action, a new song, a place of beginnings abounding in first lessons of life, mountain building, eternal, invincible, unbreakable order; with sermons in stone, storms, trees, flowers, and animals brimful with humanity.

  John Muir

  Song, Life Lesson, Flower

  John Muir (2006). “Our National Parks”, p.78, Cosimo, Inc.

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• An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse -- and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.

  Sam Harris

  Christian, Sunday, Average

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• People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Beautiful, Dog, Names

  W. Somerset Maugham (2009). “The Moon and Sixpence”, p.264, The Floating Press

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• Calpurnia evidently remembered a rainy Sunday when we were both fatherless and teacherless. Let to its own devices, the class tied Eunice Ann Simpson to a chair and placed her in the furnace room. We forgot her, trooped upstairs to church, and were listening quietly to the sermon when a dreadful banging issued from the radiator pipes, persisting until someone investigated and brought forth Eunice Ann saying she didn't want to play Shadrach any more - Jem Finch said she wouldn't get burnt if she had enough faith, but it was hot down there.

  Harper Lee

  Sunday, Play, Class

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• For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. "Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Christian, Jesus, Blessed

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• Many wise and true sermons are preached us everyday by unconscious ministers in street, school, office, or home; even a fair table may become a pulpit, if it can offer the good and helpful words which are never out of season.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Wise, Home, School

  Louisa May Alcott (2015). “The Complete Little Women Series: Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, Jo's Boys: The Beloved Classics of American Literature: The coming-of-age series based on the author’s own childhood experiences with her three sisters”, p.293, e-artnow

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• If a preacher is not first preaching to himself, better that he falls on the steps of the pulpit and breaks his neck than preaches that sermon.

  John Calvin

  Fall, Firsts, Steps

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• Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to 'content' is like praying in swear words. End of Sermon. Back to business.

  John Perry Barlow

  Art, Praying, Holy

  "The Next Economy Of Ideas". www.wired.com. October 01, 2000.

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• A sermon wept over is more acceptable with God than one gloried over.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Acceptable

  Charles Haddon Spurgeon (2015). “The Book of Leviticus: Gospel Sermons”, p.252, Lulu Press, Inc

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• We realized that there's a great need in many churches to use the power of the media...There are a lot of different ways to preach. You can preach by praising. You can preach by preaching sermons. You can preach by just giving someone food when they're hungry. There are people who will never darken a church door but they will come to see a play.

  Patricia Mauceri

  Media, Play, Doors

  Source: www.beliefnet.com

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• A sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one - and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it's a difficult form - is because it's so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith.

  Marilynne Robinson

  People, Listening, Assuming

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Since Moses was in Egypt land, Gods people have been struggling for justice while singing freedom songs. Theology can be clarifying. A good sermon has its place. But nothing is more essential for the life of faith in a community than liturgy that invites us to sing the freedom songs that are sung around the throne of God. Brother Ken Sehested is a song leader in that great cloud of witnesses. Receive his words as gift-and keep singing.

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

  Song, Brother, Struggle

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• 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

  Religious, Latin, Long Ago

  "SPIEGEL Interview with Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble: 'We Have No Relationship to our Diverse Muslim Society'". Interview with Jan Fleischhauer and Holger Stark, www.spiegel.de. September 20, 2006.

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• My objection to the church isn't that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too - think of how many are arrested for selling fake stock, for seducing 14-year-old girls in orphanages under their care, for arson, for murder. An it isn't so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires - though a lot of churches are that, too. My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Girl, Teaching, School

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• 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.

  Joshua Harris

  Jobs, Thinking, People

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• 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.

  Frederick Scott Oliver

  Country, Political, Principles

  Frederick Scott Oliver (1934). “Politics and politicians”

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• Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.

  Philip Yancey

  Land, Safety, Grace

  Philip Yancey (2008). “The Jesus I Never Knew”, p.105, Zondervan

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• Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification; and as without this, without holiness, no man shall see God, though he pore whole nights upon his Bible; so without that, without humility, no man shall hear God speak to his soul, though he hear three two-hour sermons every day.

  John Donne

  Humility, Night, Men

  John Donne (1839). “The Works of John Donne: With a Memoir of His Life”, p.149

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• In a 'wheat and tares' world, how unusually blessed faithful members are to have the precious and constant gift of the Holy Ghost with reminders of what is right and of the covenants we have made. 'For behold, ... the Holy Ghost ... will show unto you all things what ye should do.' (2 Ne. 32:5.) Whatever the decibels of decadence, these need not overwhelm the still, small voice! Some of the best sermons we will ever hear will be thus prompted from the pulpit of memory—to an audience of one!

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Memories, Blessed, Voice

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• The Holy Ghost is certainly the best preacher in the world, and the words of Scripture the best sermons.

  Jeremy Taylor

  World, Scripture, Ghost

  Jeremy Taylor, Charles Page Eden, Reginald Heber, Alexander Taylor (1856). “The Whole Works of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor ...: The rule and exercises of holy living and dying”, p.165

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• Nothing is more powerful than the black church experience. A good choir and a good sermon in the black church, it's pretty hard not to be move and be transported.

  Barack Obama

  Powerful, Moving, Black

  Interview with Cathleen Falsani, www.beliefnet.com. March 27, 2004.

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• For the first time I understood the dogma of eternal pain... For the first time my imagination grasped the height and depth of the Christian horror. Then I said: "It is a lie, and I hate your religion. If it is true, I hate your God." From that day I have had no fear, no doubt. For me, on that day, the flames of hell were quenched. From that day I have passionately hated every orthodox creed. That Sermon did some good.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Christian, Religious, Pain

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• I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Education, Hate, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.109, Delphi Classics

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• 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

  Dog, War, Moon

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.29, Xist Publishing

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• The kind of sermon which is likely to break the hearer's heart is that which first has broken the preacher's heart, and the sermon which is likely to reach the heart of the hearer is the one which has come straight from the heart of the preacher.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Heart, Broken, Firsts

  Charles Spurgeon (1989). “The Soul Winner”, p.101, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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