“What is the chief end of preaching? … To give men and women a sense of God and His presence… . I can forgive a man for a bad sermon, I can forgive the preacher almost anything if he gives me a sense of God, if he gives me something for my soul, if he gives me the sense that, though he is inadequate himself, he is handling something which is very great and very glorious, if he gives me some dim glimpse of the majesty and the glory of God, the love of Christ my Saviour, and the magnificence of the Gospel. If he does that I am his debtor, and I am profoundly grateful to him. Preaching is the most amazing, and the most thrilling activity that one can ever be engaged in, because of all that it holds out for all of us in the present, and because of the glorious endless possibilities in an eternal future.”

“Among the many excellent gifts with which God has adorned the human race, it is a singular privilege that he deigns to consecrate to himself the mouths and tongues of men in order that his voice may resound in them.”

“We come together in the name of the Lord. It is not to hear merry songs, to be fed with wind, that is, with a vain and unprofitable curiosity, but to receive spiritual nourishment. For God will have nothing preached in his name but that which will profit and edify.”

“I did nothing. The Word did it all.”

“Every sermon should last just as long as the preacher needs in which to deliver his soul…though every sermon should ‘seem like twenty minutes’, even if it is actually longer.”

“Those who write compose their thoughts more successfully than those who do not; they commit fewer of what I inelegantly call “sentence farts,” in which one begins a sentence, partway through realizes that it cannot be successfully completed, and therefore begins again.”

“The average American adult reads fewer than nine books annually, and spends seventeen times as much time watching television as reading (including all reading - magazines, newspapers, etc)…in two decades alone, from 1982 to 2002, there was a 10 percent decline in literary reading among adults in the United States.”