You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Preaching' category.
“When I was a young man, I heard D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones comment that he would not go across the street to hear himself preach. Now that I am close to the age he was when I heard him, I am beginning to understand. It is rare for me to finish a sermon without feeling somewhere between slightly discouraged and moderately depressed that I have not preached with more unction, that I have not articulated these glorious truths more powerfully and with greater insight, and so forth. But I cannot allow that to drive me to despair; rather, it must drive me to a greater grasp of the simple and profound truth that we preach and visit and serve under the gospel of grace, and God accepts us because of his Son. I must learn to accept myself not because of my putative successes but because of the merits of God’s Son. The ministry is so open-ended that one never feels that all possible work has been done, or done as well as one might like. There are always more people to visit, more studying to be done, more preparations to do. What Christians must do, what Christian leaders must do, is constantly remember that we serve our God and Maker and Redeemer under the gospel of grace. Dad’s diaries show he understood this truth in theory, and sometimes exulted in it (as when he was reading from Machen’s What is Faith?), but quite frankly, his sense of failure sometimes blinded him to the glory of gospel freedom.”
D. A. Carson, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 92-3.
“At the end of his fuel, hopelessly lost in bad weather but still searching for the Hawaiian Islands, Ulm had sent out his last and typically laconic message: ‘We are now landing in the sea. Please come and pick us out.’ Tragically – despite a massive air and sea search – they were not found.”
Charles Ulm and his crew of two others were flying from San Francisco to Honolulu in the 1930s; Gordon Taylor, The Sky Beyond (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 60, n.
“. . . he knows better than anyone else in baseball how to manage the space between a player’s ears.”
This was said of Cubs manager Dusty Baker; Buzz Bissinger, Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 23.
“. . . as Plato says, the written word is only a poor faint shadow of real conversation, in which, among people who know each other well, the merest suggestion explains a train of thought which the most elaborate written explanation leaves obscure, lifeless and formal.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 130; writing to his father, dated 18 June, 1915, and citing Phaedrus, 278a.
“It was important for us to identify the MINI customer, since MINI’s appeal is not limited to a demographic boundary. Instead, MINI customers have similar psychographic qualities – what we call the ‘MINI mindset,’ and our marketing had to be relevant to all of them. The youngest MINI buyer is 15 and the oldest one 97!”
Jack Pitney, Vice President, Marketing, BMW of North America, www.bmwboard.com.
“The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
“Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles. — I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud.
“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.
“Exactly so.” said Alice.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least — at least I mean what I say — that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see!’”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like!’”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe!’”
“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped . . .”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ch. 7.
“Pentheus: What do I look like? Have I not the pose of Ino? Or Agave, yes, my own mother Agave?
The Stranger: When I look at you I seem to see their very selves. But here’s one of your tresses out of place. It is not as I fixed it, under your snood.
Pentheus: I must have dislodged it inside, while I was tossing my locks up and down in bacchic ecstasy.
The Stranger: I will arrange it again, I am your maid. Come, hold your head up.
Pentheus: There, you dress it. I depend on you.
The Stranger: Your girdle has come undone. And the tucks of your dress are all uneven at the ankles.
Pentheus: I think so too, at least by the right foot. The rest hangs straight enough, by the left.”
The Stranger (Gk: literally, a non-blood relation), primping King Pentheus of Thebes, who thinks he is being prepared to ‘attack’ the worshippers of Bacchus (of whom one is his mom) who are reveling in the woods, clearly, and humorously, he is not in his right mind; Euripides (485-406 BC), The Bacchants (Translation by Moses Hadas and John McLean), lines 331ff.
“. . . theological theories are like detectives’ theories in whodunits; they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of ‘mystery stories’ is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain).”
Reflecting negatively on our tendency to expect our theological models to erase mystery; J. I. Packer, “What did the cross achieve: The logic of penal substitution,” Lecture delivered at Tyndale House, Cambridge, 17 July, 1973.
