“Martin Malloy was right about the impact that his story would have. The flag story was already hot, and this took the whole thing up to a high summer afternoon on Mercury’s bright side, that being the side closest to the sun.”
Because the River of Exposition Has White Water
“Because it takes courage to deal with certain issues, I recommend systematic exposition, working steadily through a book of the Bible or a section of a book, verse by verse or paragraph by paragraph. This approach forces us to discuss passages that we might otherwise overlook, or even deliberately avoid.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 92
Taking Its Sweet Time
“The remaining twenty minutes crawled by like rapidly cooling magma.”
So Make the Choice Prior to Ordination
“Preachers, like prophets, believe they bring a word from God, and are not free to change it. Therefore all preachers have at various times to choose between truth with unpopularity and falsehood with popularity.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 90
Clueless
“The next morning, while brushing her perfect white teeth, the truth revealed by her manifest and palpable relief over the whole thing came crashing in on her, and so she sat down and acknowledged to herself what was in fact the case. She was a goner. And he was clueless. High-minded. An office full of thick books. Accreditation visits. Scholarly articles. All of that. Stupid man. Dear stupid, stupid man.”
Heralds, Not Hacks
“People-pleasers and time-fillers never make good preachers. We are . . . appointed to proclaim what God has said, not what people want to hear.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 87
An Actual Handicap
“For Maria was a beauty. And she had decided some years before that there was quite possibly an inverse relationship between feminine beauty and feminine happiness. When she first came to Choctaw Valley, it had taken her almost a year to make any friends at all. Most of the boys were terrified of her, and those who weren’t scared of her were terrified of what the other girls would do if they even talked to her. And needless to say, the girls were usually pretty sullen around her, although in a sweet southern way. All they ever wanted to do whenever they were with her was go to the restroom to check their makeup.”
If the Sermon is Water, the Word in the Man is the Well
“True preaching is never a superficial activity; it wells up out of the depths.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 86
Admittedly . . .
“Maria Barancho had been a fixture at Choctaw Valley for some years now, but she was an odd-out sort of fixture. She was a black-haired, brown-eyed Italian in the midst of a bunch of pale Celts who, for some reason, liked to think of themselves as Anglo-Saxons. This is like a German confusing himself with a Frenchman, but the history is admittedly complicated.”
An Acquired Taste
“He was a sturdy young man—a fellow that people usually considered good looking, eventually and somewhat reluctantly, after they had gotten over their first shock. Trevor was an acquired taste.”