On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons Quotes

“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks,” is immensely more forcible than to say in general that they will convert their weapons of war into implements of agriculture.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“Eloquence is so speaking as not merely to convince the judgment, kindle the imagination, and move the feelings, but to give a powerful impulse to the will.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“After all our preparation, general and special, for the conduct of public worship and for preaching, our dependence for real success is on the Spirit of God. And where one preaches the gospel, in reliance on God’s blessing, he never preaches in vain. The sermon meant for the unconverted may greatly benefit believers, and vice versa. Without the slightest manifest result at present, a sermon may be heard from long afterwards; perhaps only in eternity. And the most wretched failure, seeming utterly useless, may benefit the preacher himself, and through him, all who afterwards hear him. Thus we partially see how it is that God’s Word always does good, always prospers in the thing whereto he sent it.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“Periods, or sentences nearly approaching to periods, have certainly, when other things are equal, the advantage in point of Energy. An unexpected continuation of a sentence which the reader had supposed to be concluded, especially if, in reading aloud, he had, under that supposition, dropped his voice, is apt to produce a sensation in the mind of being disagreeably balked: analogous to the unpleasant jar which is felt, when in ascending or descending stairs, we meet with a step more than we had expected; and if this be often repeated, as in a very loose sentence, a kind of weary impatience results from the uncertainty when the sentence is to close.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“A certain grand-looking obscurity is often pleasing to some hearers and readers, who suppose that it shows vast learning, or great originality, or immense profundity. To treat subjects in this fashion is no new thing. Quintilian says it was not new in his day, for that he found mention in Livy of a teacher who used to direct his pupils to darken the idea. He adds a witticism of some one whose hearers complained that they did not understand, and who replied, “So much the better; I did not even understand it myself,” and elsewhere speaks of men who think themselves talented because it requires talent to understand them.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“It was once very common, and thought to be very appropriate, for a minister to quote much Latin and Greek in his sermons. Even Wesley’s sermons abound in such quotations, though he preached mainly to the common people. It is a sign of improved taste that this is no longer the practice.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“expository preaching is a difficult task. It requires much close study of Scripture in general, and much special study of the particular passage to be treated. To make a discourse which shall be explanatory and yet truly oratorical, bearing a rich mass of details but not burdened with them, full of Scripture and abounding in practical applications, to bring even dull, uninformed, and unspiritual minds into interested and profitable contact with an extended portion of the Bible — of course this must be difficult.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“But not to dwell further upon this opinion, it is proper earnestly to insist that one great reason why many ministers find expository preaching difficult is, that they have not been sufficiently accustomed to study the Bible.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“We have a great multiplication of commentaries, and an immense amount of more or less real study of the Scriptures in Sunday Schools, we have many more ministers than formerly who know something of the original languages, but there is reason to fear that the close, thoughtful, lovingly patient study of the Bible is less common among the ministry now than it once was.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“What is worse, sometimes the preacher becomes conscious that he has failed to accomplish the object of his discourse, or to awaken the degree of interest he ought to have excited, and he struggles on in the vain endeavor to compensate the fault, until at last he is forced to terminate further from his object than when his conclusion began.” Most of all is it unwise to give indication that one is about to conclude, and then start again, or keep dragging on.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“When objections are discussed, they should be stated in full force. This is simply just, and is also obviously good policy. “Express it precisely as you believe it to be in the hearer’s mind, so that, listening to your exposition of it, he may say to himself, ‘That is exactly my objection; that is precisely my difficulty, and I should wish very much to hear how the preacher will clear it up.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“Men frequently complain that they do not understand what it really is to believe, and preachers are constantly laboring to explain. But the complaint is in many cases a mere excuse for rejection or delay, and the real difficulty is in all cases a lack of disposition to believe. Elaborate explanations do not lessen this indisposition, do but strengthen the supposed excuse, and may even embarrass the anxious inquirer with the notion that there is something very mysterious about faith, when it is in fact so simple as not to admit of being explained. Our main duty is to tell the people what to believe, and why they should believe it.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“And we must constantly beware lest we fall into the habit of reading the Bible only as a perfunctory matter, a professional duty. In the spirit of personal devoutness, with a desire for personal benefit, and with the constant prayer that God would bless us in learning and in teaching, let us study the Bible, that we may “both save ourselves, and them that hear us.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“In this respect inexperienced and comparatively uncultivated young preachers are often greatly deceived. Their early sermons are made with ease. Ardent, zealous, excited, they find that thought springs spontaneous in the mind, and feeling flows like a torrent. They imagine that it will always be easy to find something to say which will interest themselves and their hearers. But they are like men who have inherited a fortune in cash, and who spend their principal as if it were but income. Rejoicing in his facility of speech, the young preacher is not aware that he is drawing upon all that he has thought, felt, and seen, all that he has read and heard, since his childhood. And not a few go on for some months or years, consuming all their store, and evoking all that their minds are so constituted as readily to produce, and presently begin to wonder and lament that they find it so much harder than formerly to make a sermon.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“In our restless nation and agitated times, in these days of somewhat bustling religious activity, there has come to be too little of real doctrinal preaching.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“When circumstances determine the subject to be treated, and we have to look for a text, one can almost always be found which will have some real, though it be a general relation to the subject. If there be rare cases in which it is otherwise, it will then be better to have no text than one with which the subject has only a fanciful or forced connection.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“Now the things which ought most to be thought of by the preacher, are piety and knowledge, and the blessing of God. Skill, however valuable, is far less important than these; and there is danger that rhetorical studies will cause men to forget that such is the case.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

“Augustine says, Veritas pateat, veritas placeat, veritas moveat, “Make the truth plain, make it pleasing, make it moving.”
― John Albert Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons