Laura Nelson

“Joseph Ruggles Wilson reminds us how unique is each preacher’s challenge: In other words, preaching is not an imitative exercise. Every preacher is to regard himself as an original exhibitor and enforcer of the terms of human salvation; a channel of gracious speech, markedly different from every other.    . . . Turn it which way we will, the conclusion is always before us, the preacher’s preaching is just another form of himself; i.e., if he does his own thinking; exhibits no emotions that he does not actually feel; and presents divine truth, not as a bundle of opinions which orthodoxy has agreed upon, but as so much vital blood that has been made to course in his veins, and therefore takes the form of his own Christian life. It is these live men whom God supremely calls; men who have eaten the word, as a prophet did, and into whom it has passed to become a perpetual throb in their hearts; so that when it comes forth again, it will proceed upon its errand, bearing the warmth of their innermost experiences; those experiences wherein are traced the musings which continued until they could find vent only in fire; the fire that burns quickly into other souls, melts where it burns, and remoulds where it melts.25”
― Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon

“Iraq and Syria were the bases for two great transnational churches deemed heretical by the Catholic and Orthodox—namely, the Nestorians and Jacobites.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“Our own relationship with Christ teaches us that we must treat people with compassion as well as confront them with the authority of the Word. As we need a stern hand in some moments and a loving embrace at others, so too do the people we face from the pulpit. The soul made sensitive by the recognition of its own sin, the awareness of God’s sovereignty, and the miracle of the Savior’s love is the one best suited to guide the tongue in the sanctuary as well as in the circumstances of life. Consistently aggressive or combative preachers ill disguise the spiritually resistant recesses of their own hearts.”
― Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon

“Our accepted chronology of the ancient church is wrong: ancient Semitic Christianity dies out not in the fourth century, but in the fourteenth.8”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died