Sermon Impact Quotes

If we had more hell in the pulpit, we would have less hell in the pew.

One preacher turned me on, another turned me off.

I felt that it was deeply moving and profound, and of course everybody was like, "Oh, the president [Barack Obama] can sing!" Maybe a little off key! I actually think that the sermon reinforced the very nature of the grace that the victims' families had shown to the world.

There was a time when ministers spoke forthrightly and named things. We don't name anything anymore. Finney had a sermon on How to Preach so as to Convert Nobody. He said 'Preach on sin but never mention any of the sins of your congregation - that will do it.'

When preaching is done right, it can change lives. When it's done badly, my failure goes beyond the merely human.

The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus.

But alas, they are all sadly deficient, because they leave us under the domination of political and religious prejudices; and they are as inefficient as the sleepy dose of an ordinary sermon.

I am growing more and more aware that all too often we preachers aim at nothing and hit it.

Every discouraging sermon is a wicked sermon... There could hardly be a more un-Christian way of living than to go about in such a way as to depress and to discourage other people.

A sermon often does a man most good when it makes him most angry. Those people who walk down the aisles and say, "I will never hear that man again," very often have an arrow rankling in their breast.

The most effective sermons are those which make opposers of the Gospel bite their lips and gnash their teeth.

Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.