Browsing Topic Best Sermons Quotes

Your religion is what you do when the sermon is over.

I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works … I mean real good works … not holy day keeping, sermon-hearing … or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity.

The deeds you do may be the only sermon some persons will hear today

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

Every sermon must contain a certain shot of heresy.

The great question is, can war be outlawed from the world? If so, it would mark the greatest advance in civilization since the Sermon on the Mount.

One can understand nothing of Christ without the mystery of the Trinity, nothing of the Church without faith in the divinity and humanity of Christ, nothing of the sacraments without the bridal mystery between Christian life without Christian faith. Thus, the present sermons revolve around the same center–the inexhaustible mystery of the one indivisible faith.

Judas heard all Christ’s sermons.

Nothing is more powerful than the black church experience. A good choir and a good sermon in the black church, it’s pretty hard not to be move and be transported.

The enemy uses all his power to lead the Christian, and above all the minister, to neglect prayer. He knows that however admirable the sermon may be, however attractive the service, however faithful the pastoral visitation, none of these things can damage him or his kingdom if prayer is neglected.

Many do not recognize the fact as they ought, that Satan has got men fast asleep in sin and that it is his great device to keep them so. He does not care what we do if he can do that. We may sing songs about the sweet by and by, preach sermons and say prayers until doomsday, and he will never concern himself about us, if we don’t wake anybody up. But if we awake the sleeping sinner he will gnash on us with his teeth. This is our work – to wake people up.

When I stand up to talk, people listen to me; they will follow what I have to say. Is it any power of mine? Of course not. St. Paul says, ‘What have you that you have not received and you who have received, why do you glory as if you had not?’ But the secret of my power is that I have never in fifty-five years missed spending an hour in the presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. That’s where the power comes from. That’s where sermons are born. That’s where every good thought is conceived.

The ten commandments and the sermon on the mount contain my religion.

I know just as well what to teach this people and just what to say to them and what to do in order to bring them into the celestial kingdom…I have never yet preached a sermon and sent it out to the children of men, that they may not call Scripture. Let me have the privilege of correcting a sermon, and it is as good Scripture as they deserve. The people have the oracles of God continually.

Agnosticism has nothing to impart. Its sermons are the exhortations of one who convinces you he stands on nothing and urges you to stand there too.

Any sermon that is not birthed in prayer is not a message from God no matter how learned the preacher.

A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only comfort the afflicted, it also must afflict the comfortable.

The sermon begins in the parking lot.

Henry Ward Beecher, so the story goes, was once asked by a young preacher how he could keep his congregation wide awake and attentive during his sermons. Beecher replied that he always had a man watch for sleepers, with instructions, as soon as he saw anyone start nodding or dozing, to hasten to the pulpit and wake up the preacher. Aren’t you and I usually less sensible? Would we not be inclined to have the watcher wake up not ourselves but the fellows caught sleeping? In other words, aren’t we disposed always to blame others?

I will tell you what this people need, with regard to preaching; you need, figuratively, to have it rain pitchforks, tines downwards, from this pulpit, Sunday after Sunday. Instead of the smooth, beautiful, sweet, still, silk-velvet-lipped preaching, you should have sermons like peals of thunder, and perhaps we then can get the scales from our eyes.

In my neighborhood, everyone had an opinion on the local cantor. You didn’t go to a synagogue to listen to the rabbi’s sermon. You went to listen to the cantor. It was like a concert.

Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself.

Great sermon helped me to reflect on scape goats, forgiveness, revenge and the messiness of community. .. where I referenced this sermon. Thanks! Keep preaching the damn Gospel!

Prayer is the preface to the book of Christian living; the text of the new life sermon; the girding on of the armor for battle; the pilgrim’s preparation for his journey. It must be supplemented by action or it amounts to nothing.

In the real world, I see conservatives volunteering at adoption agencies, at churches, at bake sales and the local American Legion Post while the only charity a progressive sends is a smug sermon on fair share and what fairness is.

One cannot seperate truth from actions…Physically inevitable or not, truth stands above all things. It is independant of who has the best army, who can deliver the longest sermons, or even who has the most priests. It can be pushed down, but it will always surface. Truth is the one thing you can never intimidate.

If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount.

Don’t you know, priests, why our sermons do not touch the people’s heart? Because we do not preach to the eyes, only to the ears.

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

Sometimes I have experienced God in extraordinary ways – in dramatic surprises or soul-expanding insights or unexplainable mystical encounters. More often, I have felt God’s reality in the simple encouragement of a friend, in the gentle inspiration of a sermon, or in the familiar ritual of the Eucharist and I’d be less than honest if I didn’t also say that at times, I’ve found myself in the spiritual doldrums, cast adrift, wondering if the wind would ever blow again.

What do our clergy lose by reading their sermons? They lose preaching, the preaching of the voice in many cases, the preaching of the eye almost always.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.

It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.

My father was a no-nonsense, dedicated, and focused minister, and there was usually a sermon he needed to prepare for or a Scripture he needed to study, and that always came first.

And I don’t have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It’s almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.