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" Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face.Hello, you who made the morningand spread it over the fieldsand into the faces of the tulipsand the nodding morning glories,and into the windows of, even, themiserable and the crotchety – best preacher that ever was,dear star, that just happensto be where you are in the universeto keep us from ever-darkness,to ease us with warm touching,to hold us in the great hands of light –good morning, good morning, good morning.Watch, now, how I start the dayin happiness, in kindness. "
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" I have often thought, during these conferences, about the comment that Maurice Maignan, one of the first companions of Ozanam, made after a retreat: " One thought strikes me. All the means of sanctification which the preacher proposes and develops require a strong soul...I will not profit from exercises designed for strong souls. O my God, show me the exercises designed for feeble souls. Would the saints have forgotten or disdained them? Yet even if the saints did not think of these poor souls, who are nevertheless most numerous, You, Lord, my mercy, have not abandoned them. You Yourself, Good Master, have burdened Yourself with them. I know that better than anyone. I am one of those souls, and I bless You for having revealed to the weak and the little ones what You do not always accord to the valiant and the strong. "
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" It's easy to get thousands of people to come to your Church. Easy. Just have good entertainment. And so you go to worship services and you're entertained by music, the lights, the action...you're entertained. The preacher comes out, he has lots of funny stories or heart-rending stories and you'll live contented. You live satisfied emotionally.
I'm for numbers, I'm for reaching people for Christ. But when you become numbers-driven, then everything in the worship service is aimed at that. If you have numbers, you have to have big Churches. If you have big Churches, you gotta have big debts. So you have to get people to come, you gotta entertain them, and cause them to be emotionally satisfied. So, we're back into this man-centeredness that has destroyed worship service in the 20th century. "
― Dr. Joe Morecraft
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" I do not know you, my friends, not individually, most of you, but this is the wonderful thing about the work of a preacher, he does not need to know his congregation. Do you know why? Because I know the most important thing about every single one of you, and that is that each of you is a vile sinner. I do not care who you are, because all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. I do not care what particular form your sin takes. There is a great deal of attention paid to that today. The preacher is not interested in that. I do not want a catalogue of your sins. I do not care what your sins are. They can be very respectable or they can be heinous, vile, foul, filthy. It does not matter, thank God. But what I have authority to tell you is this. Though you may be the vilest man or woman ever known, and though you may until this moment have lived your life in the gutters and the brothels of sin in every shape and form, I say this to you: be it known unto you that through this man, this Lord Jesus Christ, is preached unto you the forgiveness of sin. And by him all who believe, you included, are at this very moment justified entirely and completely from everything you have ever done— if you believe that this is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and that he died there on the cross, for your sins and to bear your punishment. If you believe that, and thank him for it, and rely utterly only upon him and what he has done, I tell you, in the name of God, all your sins are blotted out completely, as if you had never sinned in your life, and his righteousness is put on you and God sees you perfect in his Son. That is the message of the cross, that is Christian preaching, that it is our Lord who saves us, by dying on the cross, and that nothing else can save us, but that that can save whosoever believeth in him. "
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
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" The author of the hymn 'Amazing Grace', John Newton, who once was a slave ship captain, and who became a Christian preacher and an enemy of the slave trade, once said: 'I have reason to praise [God] for my trials, for, most probably, I should have been ruined without them.' The author of The Gulag Archipelago , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered for twenty years in the hellish prison camps he describes in that book, wrote: 'Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.' This does not mean that Newton would have chosen to go through his trials, or that Solzhenitsyn in any way enjoyed the terrible suffering of his imprisonment. But it means that in retrospect they can see that God used those difficulties to bless them in the long run. "
― Eric Metaxas , Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life