51 Quotes on Preaching and Leadership That Will Give You Courage

Sometimes, all you need is to read some words that speak to your situation, to your calling. Words that give you a new frame to see things through or a different angle to think about things from. That’s what I hope this article is for you. A place that you can go for encouragement as you keep walking faithfully as a pastor.

Our work boils down to preaching and leadership. So below you will find quotes on preaching and quotes on leadership.

Preaching Quotes

1. Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not whether they be clergymen or laymen, they alone will shake the gates of Hell and set up the kingdom of Heaven upon Earth. – John Wesley
2. Many a preacher misses the mark because, though he knows books, he does not know men. – James Stalker
3. I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men. – Richard Baxter
4. A popular evangelist reaches your emotions. A true prophet reaches your conscience. – Leonard Ravenhill
5. The backslider likes the preaching that wouldn’t hit the side of a house, while the real disciple is delighted when the truth brings him to his knees. – Billy Sunday
6. There’s a way to preach the Bible unbiblically…You can use the Bible as the springboard for all kinds of ideas, can’t you? Look around in here and find something that fits your fancy and then launch a rocket off it. People say, ‘That was amazing, wasn’t it? Remarkable what he got out of that.’ Well of course it is because he put it in before he got it out. – Alistair Begg
7. The sermon which does not lead to Christ, or of which Jesus Christ is not the top and the bottom, is a sort of sermon that will make the devils in hell laugh, but make the angels of God weep. – Charles Spurgeon
8. A minister, without boldness, is like a smooth file, a knife without an edge, a sentinel that is afraid to let off his gun. If men will be bold in sin, ministers must be bold to reprove. – William Gurnall
9. Only once did God choose a completely sinless preacher. – Alexander Whyte
10. People have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don’t know is that they are the actors on the stage; he (the preacher) is merely the prompter standing in the wings, reminding them of their lost lines. – Søren Kierkegaard
11. What is the chief end of preaching? I like to think it is this: It is to give men and women a sense of God and His presence. – Martin Lloyd-Jones
12. Preaching is teaching with a tear in the eye. – Jack Hyles
13. The preaching of Christ is the whip that flogs the devil. The preaching of Christ is the thunderbolt, the sound of which makes all hell shake. – Charles Spurgeon
14. God has ordained that our preaching become deeper and more winsome as we are broken, humbled, and made low and desperately dependent on grace by the trials of our lives. – John Piper
15. The task of the preacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. – Vance Havner
16. To be effective the preacher’s message must be alive; it must alarm, arouse, challenge; it must be God’s present voice to a particular people. – AW Tozer
17. Becoming a great preacher, like becoming a great artist, requires a life commitment. – Calvin Miller
18. It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher. – George Whitefield
19. The preacher must be a serious man; he must never give the impression that preaching is something light or superficial or trivial. – Martin Lloyd-Jones
20. A sermon is not made with an eye upon the sermon, but with both eyes upon the people and all the heart upon God. – John Owen
21. I cannot preach on hell unless I preach with tears. – Dwight L. Moody
22. Lord, help me to preach today as if it were the last sermon I would ever preach. – Jack Hyles
23. A preacher must be both soldier and shepherd. He must nourish, defend, and teach he must have teeth in his mouth, and be able to bite and fight. – Martin Luther
24. A preacher should have the mind of a scholar, the heart of a child, and the hide of a rhinoceros. His problem is how to toughen his hide without hardening his heart. – Curtis C. Thomas
25. The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever athirst for God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose eye is single to God, and in whom by the power of God’s Spirit the flesh and the world have been crucified, and his ministry is like the generous flood of a life-giving river. – EM Bounds

Leadership Quotes

1. Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders. – Tom Peters
2. What you do has far greater impact than what you say. – Stephen Covey
3. We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations. – Chuck Swindoll
4. A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be. – Rosalynn Carter
5. A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. – John C. Maxwell
6. Never when in authority rebuke any one in anger, but only when anger has passed away; and so shall the rebuke bring forth good fruit. – Teresa of Avila
7. The authority by which the Christian leader leads is not power but love, not force but example, not coercion but reasoned persuasion. Leaders have power, but power is safe only in the hands of those who humble themselves to serve. – John Stott
8. God ultimately raises up leaders for one primary reason: His glory. He shows His power in our weakness. He demonstrates His wisdom in our folly. We are all like a turtle on a fence post. If you walk by a fence post and see a turtle on top of it, then you know someone came by and put it there. In the same way, God gives leadership according to His good pleasure. – Matt Chandler
9. We desperately need seers who can see through the mist- Christian leaders with prophetic vision.  Unless they come soon it will be too late for this generation.  And if they do come we will no doubt crucify a few of them in the name of our worldly orthodoxy. – AW Tozer
10. It takes more than a busy church, a friendly church, or even an evangelical church to impact a community for Christ. It must be a church ablaze, led by leaders who are ablaze for God. – Wesley Duewel
11.  It is better to make a thousand failures than to be too cowardly to ever undertake anything. – Clovis G. Chappell
12. I think the responsibility of leadership in the church is not to do slick meetings and not to figure out how to get 5,000 people through a facility in a weekend. It is to produce a people like Jesus. Let’s be a people who are actually producing something on the ground that could totally annihilate the enemy in our city. That’s our job! – Graham Cooke
13. The first order of things to be changed is me, the leader. After I consider how hard it is to change myself, then I will understand the challenge of trying to change others. This is the ultimate test of leadership. – John Maxwell
14. No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it. – Andrew Carnegie
15. You cannot antagonize and influence at the same time. – John Knox
16. One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency. – Arnold Glasow
17. A leader is a person you will follow to a place you would not go by yourself. – Joel Barker
18. Average leaders raise the bar on themselves; good leaders raise the bar for others; great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar. – Orrin Woodward
19. Leadership is an action, not a position. – Donald McGannon
20. Whatever you are, be a good one. – Abraham Lincoln
21. The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant. – Max DePree
22. My own definition of leadership is this: The capacity and the will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character which inspires confidence. – General Montgomery
23. Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm. – Publilius Syrus
24. The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly. – Jim Rohn
25. Walk into a room like God called you to be there.
26. Before you can take the hill, you must know which hill to take.

Level Up Your Preaching

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