“We need to remember that money will do what money always wants to do.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 4
Preach Like Your Own Self
“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
Copycatting
“One danger is the obvious one of calling it cultural engagement when we are just drifting along with whatever it is the world is dishing up.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. x
Lay Up Before You Lay Out
“The principle is that you should take up the hard task of counting your shekels before undertaking the relatively easy task of spending them.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 2
Changing the Focus
“Our evangelism is not an attempt to helicopter victims out of a disaster area, but rather is the work of rebuilding a disaster area.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. x
Hosing Down the Pigs
“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
The Sum of All
“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
Which Is Estrangement from God
“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
Remember the Point
“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.
The Word Touches Down
“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