#sermon

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. ↗

— Theodore Parker

#atheism #barack-obama #justice #martin-luther-king-jr #morality

I don't like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#chapel #church #god #preacher #preaching

I contend that it's impossible to read the Sermon on the Mount and not come out against capital punishment. ↗

— Tony Campolo

#capital #capital punishment #come #contend #i

A good sermon should be like a woman's skirt: short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the essentials. ↗

— Ronald Knox

#cover #enough #essentials #good #interest

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. ↗

— Adam Weishaupt

#because #deficient #domination #dose #inefficient

In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast of mind had some of its origin in our pit, which had much the character of a Protestant Hell. I was probably the most entranced listener to a sermon the Reverend Andrew Bowyer preached about Gehenna, the hateful valley outside the walls of Jerusalem, where outcasts lived, and where their flickering fires, seen from the city walls, may have given rise to the idea of a hell of perpetual burning. He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason then why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since. ↗

— Robertson Davies

#religion #sermons #business

If thou dost continually draw thine impulse, thy life, the whole of thy being from the Holy Spirit, without whom thou canst do nothing; and if thou dost live in close communion with Christ, there will be no fear of thy having a dry heart. He who lives without prayer—he who lives with little prayer—he who seldom reads the Word—he who seldom looks up to heaven for a fresh influence from on high—he will be the man whose heart will become dry and barren; but he who calls in secret on his God—who spends much time in holy retirement—who delights to meditate on the words of the Most High—whose soul is given up to Christ—who delights in his fullness, rejoices in his all-sufficiency, prays for his second coming, and delights in the thought of his glorious advent—such a man, I say, must have an overflowing heart; and as his heart is, such will his life be. It will be a full life; it will be a life that will speak from the sepulcher, and wake the echoes of the future. "Keep thine heart with all diligence," and entreat the Holy Spirit to keep it full; for, otherwise, the issues of thy life will be feeble, shallow, and superficial; and thou mayest as well not have lived at all. ↗

— Charles H. Spurgeon

#life

Grace makes us inwardly RIGHT so we walk outwardly UPRIGHT ↗

— John Paul Warren

#christian #church #faith #gospel #grace

Our hope is that the Lord will intervene in our lives, but if not, we will discover whether our faith is real, or only something we hold onto when it appears to be working for our benefit. ↗

— John Bytheway

#faith

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. ↗

— Alan Watts

#act #being #beings #changing #delivered