“It is very important that we determine what the text meant when it was first spoken or written. E.D. Hirsch is right to emphasize that ‘a text means what its author meant.’”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 55
Like Dew on the Roses
“What a tangle! Pastoral snarls are like the mercies of God—they are new every morning.”
Which Limits Personal Anecdotes
“And all of us have to preach on death before we have died.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 54
Helps Them Keep Well
“Robert walked out of the 7-Eleven with an order of cheese pump nachos, a hot dog, and a couple of packets of those chocolate thingies with a half-life of seventy-five years”
And With a Look of Stern Admonition
“The best sermons we ever preach to others are those we have first preached to ourselves.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 54
In Big Letters on the Heel
“Because the lead attorney in that firm—Joe Shattuck, Esq.—spoke with a thick Mississippi accent, this always put urban sophisticates off their guard. Shattuck had made a lot of money that way . . . Not that they knew it at the time, but Shattuck had pulled all their shirts up over their heads and rolled all their socks down, creating a little black wool bead around the tops of their expensive Italian shoes. Shattuck, for his part, during a weekly lunch with his partners at a local catfish emporium, was fairly expressive in how he explained what had happened: ‘Those boys couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.’”
Like a Duck on a Placid Pond, Paddling Furiously Below
“Good preachers prepare conscientiously. They study the text, try to explain it clearly, look for examples and apply it to their listeners’ situation. Their sermons may look effortless, yet behind each sermons lies a lifetime of discipline and hard work.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 52
What They Call Good Television
“With that, Radavic swiveled his head and looked straight at Rourke with what he thought was a steely, gray-eyed gaze, like in those TV legal-office drama shows, at an especially tense moment when one of the handsome actors rivets another handsome actor with an unshakeable and hardened resolve and says, ‘Dammit, Trevor, this is our job!’”
Until Everyone Sees It
“The ultimate obstacle to study is, frankly, laziness. Was it Ralph Waldo Emerson who said that people are as lazy as they dare to be? It is true. And we pastors can be as guilty as anyone else because our work is usually unsupervised. We have few set tasks and no set times to do them, and are left to organize our own schedules. So it is possible for us to fritter our days away until our lives sink into indiscipline and laziness becomes painfully obvious to others”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 50.
Some Have Two
“‘Those there that do have brains—and of those there are more than a few—are running a game that would make a cardinal’s mistress envious’
Bradford raised one eyebrow slightly. Cardinals had mistresses?”