Matthew McConnell’s Reviews > Preaching and Preachers > Status Update

“The best of checking any tendency to pride [in a preacher]—pride in your preaching or in anything else that you may do or may be—is to read on Sunday nights the biography of some great saint. It does not matter which, or to which century or branch of the Church he belonged as long as he was a saint…. That is the antidote; bring yourself down.”

“A sermon is meant to be a proclamation of the truth of God as mediated through the preacher. People do not want to listen to a string of quotations of what other people have thought and said. They have come to listen to you; you are the man of God, you have been called to the ministry, you have been ordained; and they want to hear this great truth as it comes through you, through the whole of your being.”

“Heretics are generally people who have got hold of an idea from a particular statement which they have misinterpreted, and have then allowed it to run away with them, instead of checking it with other portions of Scripture.”

“We all tend to forget this; you can be so interested in great theological and intellectual and philosophical problem that you tend to forget that you are going to die.”

“The chief fault of the young preacher is to preach to the people as we would like them to be, instead of as they are.”

“What then is the chief thing [of preaching]? The chief thing is the love of God, the love of souls, a knowledge of the Truth, and the Holy Spirit within you. These are the things that make the preacher.”