Theology That Bites Back
“Always have the topic if your sermon in your mind as long as possible before you begin your preparation. Whatever else is hasty and extemporaneous, let it not be your decision as to what you will preach about.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 121
“Care not for your sermon, but for your truth, and for your people; and subjects will spring up on every side of you and the chances to preach upon them will be all too few . . . If you have anything to say, and say it bravely and simply, men will come to hear you.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 119
“Never tolerate any idea of the dignity of a sermon which will keep you from saying anything in it which you ought to say, or which your people ought to hear. It is the same folly as making your chair so fine that you dare not sit down in it.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 118
“I can conceive of but two things which should cause the preacher any difficulty in regard to the abundance of subjects for his preaching. The first is the sterility of his own mind, the second is a stilted and unnatural idea of what the sermon he is going to write must be.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 117
Sermon Video Introduction: We begin the second cycle of prophetic ministry from the great prophet Micah. Remember that he ministered over the course of forty years or so, and yet was able to ...
“We are fit for no other life. There can be nothing more modest than that. It is not pride when the beech-tree refuses to copy the oak. He knows his limitations. The only chance of any healthy life for him is to be ads full a beech-tree as he can. Apply all that, and out of sheer modesty refuse to try to be any kind of preacher which God did not make you to be.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 114
“Never let men feel that you and your gospel would be satisfied with mere decency, with the putting down of all vicious life that left the vicious character still strong behind.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 110
“So cordially put the spiritual processes of which you preach within the judgment of all men who know a good life from a bad one. And in the second place strike at the symptom always for the sake of the disease.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 109
“I believe no powerful pulpit ever held aloof from the moral life of the community it lived in, as the practice of many preachers, and the theory of some, would make our pulpit separate itself and confine its message to what are falsely discriminated as spiritual things.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 108
Sermon Video Introduction: One of the reasons we have trouble dealing realistically with evil in this world is that we have drawn mental cartoons of the evil beforehand. When someone says “tyranny,” ...
