Theology That Bites Back
“Much of our preaching is like delivering lectures upon medicine to sick people. The lecture is true. The lecture is interesting . . . But still the fact remains that the lecture is not medicine, and that to give the medicine, not to deliver the lecture, is the preacher’s duty.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 102
“What I plead for is, that in all your desire to create good sermons you should think no sermon good that does not do its work.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 95
“There is nothing worse for a preacher than to come to think that, he must preach down to people; that they cannot take the very best he has to give. He grows to despise his own sermons, and the people quickly learn to sympathize with their minister”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 94
“A sermon exists in and for its purpose. That purpose is the persuading and moving of men’s souls . . . It is always aimed at men”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 92
“Ordinarily, reading sermons is like listening to an echo. The words there, but the personal intonation is gone out of them and there is an unreality about it all . . . In general it is true that the sermon which is good to preach is poor to read and the sermon which is good to read is poor to preach.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 91
“Never allow yourself to feel equal to your work”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 88
“Take, for instance, the matter of preaching old sermons. It is not good. A new sermon, fresh from the brain, has always a life in it which an old sermon, though better in itself, must lack . . . the main objection which the people have to the preaching of old sermons is in the impression that it gives them of unfaithfulness and idleness”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 86
“The man is not doing his best . . . he writes his sermons on Saturday nights. That last I could the crowning disgrace of a man’s ministry. It is dishonest. It is giving but the last flicker of the week as it sinks in its socket, to those who, simply to talk about it as a bargain, have paid for the full light burning at its brightest. And yet men boast of it. They tell you in how short time they write their sermons, and when you hear them preach you only wonder that it took so long”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, pp. 84-85
“Fasten yourself to the center of your ministry; not to some point on the circumference. The circumference must move when the center moves”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 82
“The bringing of truth, of Christ the Truth, to man, of the whole Christ to the whole man, you can think of no work larger in its idea than that.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 80
