Tag: Preaching the Word

“Those who cannot bear to be reproved had better look for another school-master than God. There are many who will not stand it: ‘What! is this the way to teach? Ho! we want to be won by sweetness.’ ‘You do? Then go and teach God his lessons!’”

Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 14

“Teaching on its own is not sufficient, for we are cold and indifferent to God’s truth We need to be pierced. The preacher has to use vehemence, so that we may know that this is not a game.”

Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 12

“The watchwords for preachers must be submission and obedience . . . he shows by what he does that he is not intruding himself at his own will and that he is not mixing in anything of his own dreams, but that he has and holds the pure truth of God” (Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 11)

“But, Cochlaeus asks, how can we be convinced that Scripture ‘flows from God’ unless we have recourse to the Church’s decree saying that this is so? Calvin brushes this aside as the typical academic question of a man without experience of faith. You might as well ask how one learns to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from sour.”

Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 3

“In recommending a program of general reading for preachers, I will not be asking for a recrudescence of what Reinhold Niebuhr called ‘pretty sermons.’ Niebuhr appears to have had in mind not just poetry-laden sermons, or florid sermons, but any sermons of highly refined rhetoric. Niebuhr said he wanted to keep his sermons ‘rough,’ instead, ‘just to escape the temptation of degenerating into an elocutionist.’”

Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. 5

“He might end up pondering with his congregation that kindness and laughter in a home are generationally as contagious as abuse, and that they provide acoustics in which the gospel of grace will sound plausible and resonant, even to the children of preachers.”

Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. 2

“Poets are like preachers: they study how to say a lot in few words.”

Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. xii

“The preacher who reads widely has a chance to become wise.”

Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. xi

“Like the faithful farmer Robert Frost describes, resourceful preachers are always out to ‘clean the pasture spring’.”

Cornelius Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. ix

Luther “said that the ultimate test of a good preacher is whether he is prepared to face ridicule and to lose his life, his wealth and his good name because of his preaching.”

Luther as quoted in Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 108