“When God speaks, he acts. His word does more than explain his action; it is active in itself. God achieves his purposes by his word (Is. 55:11).”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 19
Permanent Word
“Grasping the truth that God still speaks through what he has spoken protects us from two opposite errors. The first is the belief that God’s voice is silent today. The second is the belief that what God is saying today has little or nothing to do with Scripture. The truth is that God speaks through what he spoke”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 19
No Museum Piece
“On the contrary, [Scripture] is a living word to living people from the living God, a contemporary message for each generation”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 18
Not an Exercise in Wish Fulfillment
“We study each text as it is instead of as we might wish it to be”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 18
Avoiding Homiletical Strip Mining
“Once we are convinced that the literary form of the Bible is important, we who preach it should look at it even more closely. We are not just miners extracting ore and leaving the landscape desolate.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 17
Making It Concrete
“Scripture aims to get the reader to share an experience, not just to grasp ideas. This may seem obvious, but many preachers need to be reminded of it for they treat the Bible as a mere storehouse of ideas.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 17
Two Sides
“If we are to be true to what the Bible says about itself, we must recognize both the human and the divine authorship. Yet we must not allow either the divine or the human factor to take away from the other. Divine inspiration did not override the human authorship. Human authorship did not override the divine inspiration. The Bible is equally God’s words and human words.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 16
We Preach Not Ourselves
“Our responsibility as preachers is not primarily to give our twenty-first-century testimony to Jesus, but rather to relay to our listeners God’s own authoritative witness to Christ through the eyewitness accounts of the apostles.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 15
The Headwaters of Every Sermon
“This is the foundation on which all Christian preaching rests. How would we dare to speak if God had not spoken? By ourselves we have nothing to say.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 14
Evangelism as Hide & Seek
“God is not secretive. He delights to make himself known. Just as it is the nature of light to shine, so it is the nature of God to reveal himself. The chief reason why people do not know God is not because he hides from them but because they hide from him. Every preacher needs to take encouragement from the fact that God is light and longs to shine his light into the listener’s darkness (2 Cor. 4:4-6).”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 13