Top 50 Preaching Quotes
1. The task of the preacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. – Vance Havner
2. You preached well,” said a friend to John Bunyan one morning. “You are too late,” said honest John, “The devil told me that before I left the pulpit. – Charles Spurgeon
3. I cannot preach on hell unless I preach with tears. – Dwight L. Moody
4. The reason why congregations have been so dead is because they have dead men preaching to them. How can dead men beget living children? – George Whitefield
5. Many a preacher misses the mark because, though he knows books, he does not know men. – James Stalker
6. Preaching is the moral conscience of a nation. – Jack Hyles
7. It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher. – George Whitefield
8. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by old-fashioned preaching. – Jack Hyles
9. If you want to be popular, preach happiness. If you want to be unpopular, preach holiness.- Vance Havner
10. I believe I never was more acceptable to my Master than when I was standing to teach those hearers in the open fields now preach to ten times more people than I would if I had been confined to the churches. – George Whitefield
11. Genius is not essential to good preaching, but a live man is. – Austin Phelps
12. Many men affect to despise fear, and in preaching resent any appeal to it; but not to fear when there is occasion is as great a weakness as to fear unduly without reason. God implanted fear in the soul as truly as He implanted hope or courage. – James H. Aughey
13. But what is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive? – William Booth
14. My grand point in preaching is to break the hard heart, and to heal the broken one. – John Newton
15. Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not whether they be clergymen or laymen, they alone will shake the gates of Hell and set up the kingdom of Heaven upon Earth. – John Wesley
16. A popular evangelist reaches your emotions. A true prophet reaches your conscience. – Leonard Ravenhill
17. God has ordained that our preaching become deeper and more winsome as we are broken, humbled, and made low and desperately dependent on grace by the trials of our lives. – John Piper
18. I have never once feared the devil, but I tremble every time I enter the pulpit. – John Knox
19. Other men may preach the gospel better than I, but no man can preach a better gospel. – George Whitefield
20. To love to preach is one thing to love those to whom we preach, quite another. – Richard Cecil
21. Only once did God choose a completely sinless preacher. – Alexander Whyte
22. A minister, without boldness, is like a smooth file, a knife without an edge, a sentinel that is afraid to let off his gun. If men will be bold in sin, ministers must be bold to reprove. – William Gurnall
23. Christ never preached any funeral sermons. – Dwight L. Moody
24. If Jesus preached the same message minister’s preach today, He would have never been crucified. – Leonard Ravenhill
25. One reason why women are forbidden to preach the gospel, is, that they would persuade without argument and reprove without giving offence. – John Newton
26. The preaching of Christ is the whip that flogs the devil. The preaching of Christ is the thunderbolt, the sound of which makes all hell shake. – Charles Spurgeon
27. When intimidated by who’s sitting in the audience, we should remember the King of Kings is also here, and it’s his message. – Chuck Swindoll
28. The three essentials for great preaching are: truth, clarity, and passion. – G. Campbell Morgan
29. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear, and your heart full of God’s Spirit, is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin. – Robert Murray McCheyne
30. The preacher who will proclaim this glorious truth and magnify the cleansing power of the blood of Christ will find that his message of full deliverance touches life at every point. He is doing a disservice to his hearers and is dishonoring his God if he substitutes any other theme. – Duncan Campbell
31. I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men. – Richard Baxter
32. I can forgive a man for a bad sermon, I can forgive the preacher almost anything if he gives me a sense of God, if he gives me something for my soul, if he gives me the sense that, though he is inadequate himself, he is handling something which is very great and very glorious, if he gives me some dim glimpse of the majesty and the glory of God, the love of Christ my Savior, and the magnificence of the Gospel. If he does that I am his debtor, and I am profoundly grateful to him. – Martyn Lloyd-Jones
33. Christ in you, on the grounds of redemption this is the Gospel! To preach anything less than this must inevitably produce “Evan-jellyfish” folk with no spiritual vertebrae, whose faith does not “behave!” – Major Ian Thomas
34. You cannot preach conviction of sin unless you have suffered it. You cannot preach repentance unless you have practiced it. You cannot preach faith unless you have exercised it. True preaching is artesian; it wells up from the great depths of the soul. If Christ has not made a well within us, there will be no outflow from us.
– Charles Spurgeon
35.Once the necessity and the fruitfulness of the method is recognized, however, no worthy workman in the Word can refuse the effort it requires. He is called as a scribe of the kingdom to bring forth treasures new and old, and any labor that issues in a fuller preaching of Christ has its reward. – Edmund Clowney
36. Preach from the rights of God rather than the needs of man. – Winkie Pratney
37. The sermon which does not lead to Christ, or of which Jesus Christ is not the top and the bottom, is a sort of sermon that will make the devils in hell laugh, but make the angels of God weep. – Charles Spurgeon
38. I want to assist churches and to assist pastors in training pastors. But, after fourteen years of service in this capacity, I am absolutely certain that the finest theological seminary on earth is absolutely incompetent at replicating the actual life of a Gospel congregation. I want to train a generation of pastors who will train pastors, and I want to help them in that task. – Albert Mohler
39. Whatever subject I preach, I do not stop until I reach the Savior, the Lord Jesus, for in Him are all things. – Charles Spurgeon
40. No sort of defense is needed for preaching outdoors, but it would take a very strong argument to prove that a man who has never preached beyond the walls of his meetinghouse has done his duty. A defense is required for services within buildings rather than for worship outside of them. – William Booth
41. Study universal holiness of life. Your whole usefulness depends on this, for your sermons last but an hour or two: your life preaches all week. If Satan can only make a covetous minister a lover of praise, of pleasure, of good eating, he has ruined your ministry. Give yourself to prayer, and get your texts, your thoughts, your words, from God. – Robert Murray McCheyne
42. I am an old-fashioned preacher of the old-time religion, that has warmed this cold world’s heart for two thousand years. – Billy Sunday
43. Word and worship belong indissolubly to each other. All worship is an intelligent and loving response to the revelation of God, because it is the adoration of His name. Therefore, acceptable worship is impossible without preaching. For preaching is making known the name of the Lord, and worship is praising the name of the Lord made known. – John Stott
44. Humility is a virtue all preach, none practice, and yet everybody is content to hear. The master thinks it good doctrine for his servant, the laity for the clergy, and the clergy for the laity. – John Selden
45. Hundreds of men are hoarse from continual speaking, and are wearied out with running here and running there. If things slow down, we evolve yet another type of meeting. And when this new and added wheel is spinning merrily with all the other wheels, there may be no spiritual outcome whatsoever, but there is a wind blowing in our faces; and we hot and sticky engineers have a comfortable feeling that something is going on. – A.J. Gossip
46. Now they always accuse me of carrying around a sledge hammer with which to pound the church members. Yes sir, I do pound them, every time I come down, I knock one of the halfway fellows out of the doorway, and every time I knock one out I get a sinner in. – Mordecai Ham
47. I would have every minister of the Gospel address his audience with the zeal of a friend, with the generous energy of a father, and with the exuberant affection of a mother. – Francois Fenelon
48. Lord, help me to preach today as if it were the last sermon I would ever preach. – Jack Hyles
49. The great truths of revelation are neither able to preach nor defend themselves. They must have soldier preachers who proclaim and defend them. They have never conquered as silent force; they have never won as a reserve corps. – E.M. Bounds
50. If we don’t stir up people, move people, we have failed. If you can preach Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night, and no one is stirred to go out and do what God says, you haven’t done much. – Lee Roberson