“Once I have found it (the main expositional idea), I write it out in a complete sentence because it is crucial that the main idea of the passage be clear in my own mind. Subsequent development of the text hinges on it. This becomes the target I aim for in the exposition. It is also the primary message I want my people to retain after they hear the sermon. So it is crucial that the proposition be carefully thought through and clearly stated. Everything else in the sermon builds to support, elucidate, convict and confront the hearer with the main truth. This means every expository sermon is a unit with one main theme or topic, rather than a rambling through verse after verse.”

John MacArthur

Rediscovering Expository Preaching

Dallas: Word, 1992   pp219-220

“Get inside the Bible and ask God to enable you to get it inside you.  I have a friend who is 95 and whose mind is absolutely stored with poetry. He tells me that he has never deliberately learned a poem in his life, but that he loves poetry so much and has read the same poems so many times that the text of them has become rooted in his mind.  Follow his example as far as the Bible is concerned.”

Geoffrey Grogan

“If you want to be popular, preach happiness. If you want to be unpopular, preach holiness.”

Vance Havner

“If you want to be popular, preach happiness. If you want to be unpopular, preach holiness.”

Vance Havner

“To preach Christianity meant primarily to preach the Resurrection…The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts. The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the ‘gospel’ or good news which the Christians brought.”
 
C S Lewis 
Miracles: A Preliminary Study
New York: HarperOne, 2001  p234

“Always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this – always obey such an impulse. Where does it come from? It is the work of the Holy Spirit; it is a part of the meaning of ‘Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure’ (Phil 2:12-13). This often leads to some of the most remarkable experiences in the life of the minister. So never resist, never postpone it, never push it aside because you are busy. Give yourself to it, yield to it; and you will find not only that you have not been wasting time with respect to the matter with which you are dealing but that actually it has helped you greatly in that respect. You will experience an ease and a facility in understanding what you were reading, in thinking, in ordering matter for a sermon, in writing, in everything which is quite astonishing. Such a call to prayer must never be regarded as a distraction; always respond to it immediately, and thank God if it happens to you frequently.”

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Preaching and Preachers

Zondervan, 1972   p. 170-171