Giving Blood Quotes

“We don’t preach the Scriptures; we let the Scriptures preach through us as they point to Christ.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“Christians have become passive spectators in worship rather than active participants. By and large, we come to church to “watch the show” rather than to engage and participate.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“If you’ve never bled, you have no material for preaching. If when you’re finished preaching you’re not finished, spent, wiped out — if you haven’t “given blood” — you haven’t really preached.9”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“Twenty-first-century people hear and learn differently than most churches communicate.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“Preaching is the primary means whereby the miracle of Cana continues, as Jesus turns our life from water — tasteless, colorless, odorless — into homemade vintage wine, known for its vibrant flavor, vivid sparkle, and alluring aroma.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“Bleed with us.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“It is not the preacher’s role to help the Scriptures come alive. The Scriptures are already alive. If they are not alive in our life, it’s not a problem with the Scriptures — it’s a problem with us.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“Jesus was best known as a master of metaphor, a legendary storyteller, and a powerful healer who communicated in signs, images, and gestures. Therefore, to understand Jesus and the Scriptures, we need to train ourselves and others not to exegete more words but to exegete images.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“If sign and image are central to the New Testament, then it has to be read as a kind of narrative poetry. In the Scripture, we encounter types and symbols and emblems of transfiguration, and that is how the early Church, which created the New Testament, understood its own creation.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“Of the three traditional ways of making a living — mud, blood, and grease — preaching involves all three: the mud pies of creativity, the blood bank of living in the Word, and the grease pit of hard work and dirty hands.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

“Haddon Robinson once said, “I have come closer to being bored out of the Christian faith than being reasoned out of it. I think we underestimate the deadly gas of boredom. It is not only the death of communication, but the death of life and hope.”
― Leonard Sweet, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching