ministry effectiveness Quotes

An ill life will effectually drown the voice of the most eloquent ministry.

I know perfectly well that, wherever I go and preach, there are many better preachers ... than I am; all that I can say about it is that the Lord uses me.

I have known some good men who have been so addicted to their study, that they have thought the last day of the week sufficient to prepare for their ministry, though they employ all the rest of the week in other studies. But your business is to trade with your spiritual abilities. ... A man may preach a very good sermon, who is otherwise himself; but he will never make a good minister of Jesus Christ, whose mind and heart are not always in the work. Spiritual gifts will require continual ruminating on the things of the Gospel in our minds.

A ministry doesn't have to be perfect for God to use and bless it.

If you engage with the Holy spirit because you want to merely be effective in ministry, then you're developing professional intimacyand what do we call people who are intimate as a profession?

Three enemies that will weaken your ministry over time: Self-indulgence, bitterness, and carelessness. Strong people discipline their desires, restrain their reactions, and keep their commitments.

When pastors don't have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success - models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture.

I think I could do better in my approach to application. I think I could do better in preaching practical sermons.

If you're living a yielded life, and if you have the preaching and teaching gift, and you're yielding that to God on a continual basis, that's one of the signs that you're in the right place doing the right thing for the right reasons. If you're doing something in the kingdom, and you rarely feel that, that's a red flag. Something needs to be looked at. Are you using the right gift? Are you using it in the right way? For the right reasons? At the right time? In the right context? If I didn't feel it consistently, that would be quite troubling to me.

Without extended, concentrated prayer, the ministry of the Word withers. And when the ministry of the Word declines, faith (Rom. 10:17; Gal. 3:2, 5) and holiness (John 17:17) decline. Activity may continue, but life and power and fruitfulness fade away. Therefore, whatever opposes prayer opposes the whole work of ministry.

Do not suppose, dearest Sir, that I am so short-sighted as to destroy my life by English preaching, or any other preaching. St. Paul did much good by his preaching, but how much more by his writings.

I'm not sure ministry can ever have the urgency it requires if it is not aware of evil, both externally and internally.

A church will never grow beyond its capacity to meet needs.

One of the side effects of losing intimacy with God is that at some point we stop doing ministry out of imagination and we begin doing it out of memory.

We must always speak of the efficacy of the ministry in such a manner that the entire praise of the work may be reserved for God alone.

Every preacher who does not make prayer a mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a factor in God's work and is powerless to project God's cause in this world.

The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever athirst for God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose eye is single to God, and in whom by the power of God's Spirit the flesh and the world have been crucified, and his ministry is like the generous flood of a life-giving river.

I think vision is highly overrated today. I think what really blesses a ministry is, if you want the power of God in your life, its humility and integrity. I'll take a person who's humble and has integrity over a person who has vision any day. A lot of people have vision just based on ego, but it's in that dependence upon God that we get His vision and develop more trust in Him.