#sermons

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

When the congregation becomes the norm by which sermons are measured, a minister has put a mortgage on his soul. ↗

— Ralph W. Sockman

#congregation #his #measured #minister #mortgage

I feel that I communicate best when I am not deliberately being linear. Along this same line, I feel some of the best sermons I've ever heard were in the theatre rather than the pulpit - as, for example, in the Theatre of the Absurd. ↗

— Malcolm Boyd

#along #am #being #best #communicate

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral. ↗

— John Burroughs

#easier #get #moral #more #out

One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons. ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#act #better #hundred #obedience #one act

The whole Bible is the story of men and women trying to get back to God, to overcome that sin with sacrifices, good works, sermons, prophesy, witnessing, giving all kinds of things. It never worked. ↗

— Keith Miller

#bible #get #giving #god #good

Despite the damaging effects of mounting criticism, we saw some lovely examples of the triumph of the human spirit. Al’s greatest trouble was accustoming his people to the concept that each had been given at least one gift of the Holy Spirit to be used for ministry in the community. It seemed to be foreign to them. For those who actually experimented with expressing what was locked inside there was delight and fulfillment. ↗

— David R. Mains

#christian-ministry #christian-sermons #experience

I write all my sermons. ↗

— Joel Osteen

#i write #sermons #write

Judas heard all Christ's sermons. ↗

— Thomas Goodwin

#heard #judas #sermons

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