“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?”
But Blue Highlighters are the Best
“Every reader of books develops his own practice of marking, underlining or note-taking”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 48
But Obvious When You Think About It
“A certain kind of life always goes back to high school, a fact often overlooked by otherwise insightful biographers. Grown-up life is just a continuation of high school, a fact overlooked by everyone else.”
Know the Congregation
“The best preachers are always diligent pastors, who know their congregations and the people of their area.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 45
Gearing Up for the Attempt
“Prosecutor Radavic leaned forward, squeaking his chair with authoritative mien. His long fingers were splayed, hands together, fingertip to fingertip, as though a spider were sideways on a mirror, doing push-ups in an agitated manner. His hair, just a tad longer than it really ought to have been, was slicked back on each side, giving the appearance of an attempted comb-over without actually going for it.”
Sermons Grow in Fallow Ground
“The best teachers remain students all their lives.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 40
At Least Three
“The customer was just frustrated with his deteriorating motor skills, but I think the way he smelled had something to do with that—he smelled like living downwind of three Kentucky bourbon plants.”
Homiletic Hide and Seek
“To withdraw from the world into the Bible (escapism) or from the Bible into the world (conformity) will be fatal to our preaching.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 40