“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
“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
“Worshiping God is not a means to another end. Worshiping God is the highest calling that any human being has, or that the entire human race has. It requires no other justification. Whatever we do, it should drive us to this great end. Whatever you do, it should culminate here, in the glorification of God. There is great wisdom in the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism here. This is our chief end”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. ix
“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
“What is this structure for? When the structure is a church, the answer should obviously be that it was built to glorify God. But even this has to be connected to subordinate functions. A church building glorifies God in the architecture itself, but also in how it houses the singing acoustically, and whether it is obvious that the preaching occupies a central place, and so forth”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. v.
“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
“Culture is the spiritual state of the people externalized.”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 97
“Notice that Paul says that Cretans are a particular way, but notice also that he tells Titus to rebuke them sharply so that they can learn how to be different. In other words, he is not fatalistic about it. Cultures can grow in virtue, and cultures can also be corrupted in vice.”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 83
“A society is an organic body, and like other bodies, it can have a disease that is well contained by the immune system, and it can also have a disease that has overwhelmed the immune system. In other words, societies can have AIDS.”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 82
“Only I beg you to remember in what different ways sermons may all be messages of the Lord. Let it save you from the monotonous narrowness of one eternally repeated sermon. And, what is far more important, let it keep you from ever daring to say with cruel flippancy of some brother who brings his message to another door of humanity from you, that he ‘does not preach Christ.’”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 107
“We have to remember that we are a fallen race and that we sin downhill. We compromise downhill. We grow less disciplined downhill. It is not hard to go downhill.”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 81