“The preaching of the Bible is a supernatural event that prepares eternal souls for the Day of Judgement. Sound preaching matters eternally. Do not lose heart, brother preacher! God is using your faithful labors. Keep on preaching until you see your Savior face-to-face!”
“The expositor must understand and hold to the inseparability of the Spirit and the Word, that they are like breath and speech to each other. This means that you must hold the conviction that when the Word is authentically ministered, the Spirit ministers. The Word and Spirit do not have separate ministries but are one.”
“…the preacher is not simply to convey information; still less is he there to entertain. His task is far too serious for either of these: he is exposing a current reality (the human tendency to seek to be right with God through self-righteousness) and creating a new reality (where we are clothed with the crucified Christ’s righteousness). Thus, he is to show people that all their righteousness is as filthy rags and as reliable a leaning post as a spider’s web; and that, counterintuitive and countercultural as it may be, true righteousness, mercy, and grace are to be found in the filthy and broken corpse of a man condemned as a criminal to hang on a cross. This is the preaching of law and gospel, and it carries with it transformative power.”
“The problem for the preacher who rightly aims at relevance is that the more the preaching moves in the direction of the hearer’s interests, the greater is the danger of the preaching being irrelevant. It is the unique distinctiveness of the gospel which makes the difference in people’s lives. But if the preaching has become so “relevant” that it differs little from the kind of discussion that fills the weary hours of the talk shows, questions people may legitimately ask are: Why should we bother with this message called the gospel, which seems to be little more than a religious version of talk-show babble? Why go to the trouble of being religious with all its attendant restrictions if all I get in the end is the same kind of help for my problems that I can garner from other sources without the tiresome restrictions in which religion seems to specialize?”
Stuart Briscoe Fresh Air in the Pulpit Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994 pp55-37
“You might as well expect to raise the dead by whispering in their ears, as hope to save souls by preaching to them, if it were not for the agency of the Holy Spirit.”
C H Spurgeon From sermon preached on Ezekiel 36:27, preached on May 8, 1859 New Park Street Pulpit, Volume 5
“It was said of Philip Henry that he did not shoot the arrow of the Word over the heads of his audience in affected rhetoric, nor under their feet by homely expressions, but to their hearts in close and lively application.”
F B Meyer Expository Preaching: Plans and Methods New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1910 p35
“The task of the preacher, therefore, is to take the Bible and to do two things in every sermon: destroy self-righteousness and point hearers toward the alien, external righteousness of Christ.”
Carl R. Trueman, Luther on the Christian Life: Cross and Freedom
“Guilting Christians into obedience is as effective as shaming children into eating their dinner. This way they will a) need you to force them at every single meal, b) start to hate the food that is good for them. It’s much better to wisely stir up their appetite so that they themselves will long for the food they need. So as preachers let’s focus on stirring up people’s appetites for the Word of God and their hunger for righteousness rather than guilting them into obedience.”
Adam Urban (from personal correspondence with Adam, a Polish Pastor)