J. Gary Millar > Quotes

“The key to preaching, then, is to make the message of the text obvious. Help people to see it and feel it. Help people to understand the text. Paul is talking about what I would call ‘expository preaching’, in which the message of the text is the message of the sermon.”
― Gary Millar, Saving Eutychus: How to preach God's word and keep people awake

“I could be wrong, but I strongly suspect that preachers are praying less today too. They (we) are certainly talking less about prayer than, say, 20 years ago. And while it’s true that there has been a significant resurgence of biblical preaching, I’m not sure this has been accompanied by a resurgence in praying—and especially not prayer about preaching. Gradually,”
― J. Gary Millar, Saving Eutychus: How to preach God's word and keep people awake

“Peter makes it really clear for us that once we realize who Jesus is and what he has done, once we realize that the world has changed, then choosing to please other people rather than God is just plain stupid. Now that’s a hard one for us—because most of us are, at some level, people-pleasers. We want to keep the people we care about happy. So we’ll tell them what they want to hear. We’ll do what they want us to do. At times, we’ll even be the people they want us to be. Why? Because like children, we have slipped into living to please our friends, rather than pleasing God. So what are we to do? We need to ask God to work the fact that Jesus Christ is Lord and that salvation is found in him alone a little deeper into our heads and hearts.”
― J. Gary Millar, Saving Eutychus: How to preach God's word and keep people awake

“One of the most frustrating things about teaching the Bible regularly is that we have to start from scratch every time. Every Monday (unless you are very organized) there’s another blank sheet and the gnawing fear that in six days’ time you will have nothing to say (or that what you do have won’t be worth saying). I don’t think that feeling ever goes away. But that’s probably no bad thing. In fact, that’s almost certainly the way God has set it up—because he knows that in our weakness, he is strong (2 Cor 12:9). Application”
― J. Gary Millar, Saving Eutychus: How to preach God's word and keep people awake

“It’s important to notice that for Peter and John this wasn’t a particularly admirable quality. It isn’t that they have such courage, or such devotion, or such strength that they can choose to follow God. For them, it was the only option that made any sense at all.”
― J. Gary Millar, Saving Eutychus: How to preach God's word and keep people awake

“Everything had changed. For Jesus had come. Jesus is Lord. Jesus is at work in our world. Salvation belongs to him. Obeying him is the only thing that makes sense. This is reality. This is the truth.”
― J. Gary Millar, Saving Eutychus: How to preach God's word and keep people awake

“All religions are not the same—or to put it another way, Christianity and all other world faiths are contradictory and incompatible. Either Christianity is true, or it isn’t. That’s why you can’t be a Christian Buddhist. That’s like saying you are a vegan who likes nothing better than a bacon sandwich.”
― J. Gary Millar, Saving Eutychus: How to preach God's word and keep people awake

“To make easy things seem hard is easy, but to make hard things easy is the office of a great preacher”.”
― Gary Millar, Saving Eutychus: How to preach God's word and keep people awake