Whatever a preacher hopes to bring forth in the heart of
people must first come forth in the heart of the
preacher.
"Get your texts from God—your
thoughts, your words, from God. It is not great talents
God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A
holy minister is an awful weapon in the hands of a holy
God! A word spoken by you when your conscience is
clear, and your heart full of God's Spirit, is worth ten
thousands words spoken in unbelief and sin." (Andrew
Murray McCheyne)
"The tragedy of this
late hour is that we have too many dead men in the
pulpits giving out too many dead sermons to too many
dead people. Oh! the horror of it. There is a strange
thing that I have seen 'under the sun,' even in the
fundamentalist circles; it is preaching without
unction." (Leonard Ravenhill)
“If Jesus had
preached the same message that ministers preach today,
He would never have been crucified.” (Leonard Ravenhill)
A preacher should never
try to make a congregation laugh unless he can also make
them cry.
Preachers who try to act
like stand-up comedians should sit down and let someone
else preach. Preaching is a matter of life or death—eternal
life or eternal death.
●
"A quaint
preacher in the 17th century said about [the Lord's high
priestly prayer in] John 17, 'It is the greatest prayer
that was ever offered on earth, and it followed the
greatest sermon that was ever preached on earth.'
"There
was a great man living in Germany in the 17th century
called Stein (the leader in many ways of the great
Pietist Movement that was practiced by the Moravian
Brethren and others) who said [that John 17 was so
sacred] that he dared not preach on it, and there have
been others [in the past] who have agreed with him."
(Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Saved in Eternity)
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