“One of the reasons why property rights (which are actually human rights) are under assault in our day is that we have refused to acknowledge that God owns absolutely everything”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 23
In the Public Eye
“If you tell a friend who asked about it that your brother in Christ installed your kitchen cabinets upside down, that is not gossip. People who do not want public evaluation of the quality of their work are people who have no business being in business. They should just buy a shovel and dig where they are told to”
Ploductivity, p. 16
Or Fifty
“He who cannot write anything well cannot write a sermon well, although we often think he can. To him who has no literary skill all subjects are alike. If you cannot swim, it matters not whether there be twenty or forty feet of water.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 126
Acceptable Worship
“Now it is not a sin to worship in a fieldhouse, any more than it is a sin to worship in the catacombs. The Spirit of God is located where His people gather. The worship we offer here is perfect, because we offer it in the name of Jesus.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 22
A Capital Idea
“Never draw out of a text a meaning which you know is not there. If your text has not your truth in it, find some other text which has. If you can find no text for it in the Bible, then preach on something else.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 125
Burning Daylight
“Work has consequences. Laziness also has consequences, because God gave us the ultimate ‘gold standard’ called time, and everyone has exactly the same amount of it. It is a resource the government cannot print . . . Laziness is a destroyer. But how can it be, when it didn’t touch anything, when it didn’t consume anything? The problem is that it did consume something—it burned a lot of daylight”
Ploductivity, p. 14
High and Low
“Truly exalted Christian architecture must be both exalted and humble.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 20
The Impossibility of Mute Architecture
“Architecture speaks. It is not possible for human beings to live in architectural silence. Because we always want to keep the rain off, we are always speaking.”
Let the Stones Cry Out, p. 19
The Goodness of Work
“One of the first things we must recognize is that work does not exist in the world because of the Fall. Work got a lot more difficult because of our sin, and do labor under the ramifications of a curse. But God gave the cultural mandate to mankind, a mandate which involved an enormous amount of work, before the entrance of sin.”
Ploductivity, p. 13
No Trifling With the Text
“Only, as one rule that has no exceptions, let your use of texts be real. Never make them mean what they do not mean. In the name of taste and reverence alike, let there be no twists and puns, no dealing with the Word of God as it would be insulting to deal with the word of any friend”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 124