30 sayings from Catalyst 2023

My father-in-law gathered these thirty sayings at Catalyst this week

1. “It is not enough for anyone to claim that this thing is right and that that is wrong. That is only one person’s personal opinion. If you want everyone to believe it then you must seek a peg to hang that opinion on that is higher than your head. So, what happens is that we make our idols gods and we bow before them and worship them. We define ourselves by these idols that we ourselves have made.”
2. “There are three difficult people in every congregation, and whenever one dies there are still three.”
3. “There was an Ulster soldier who was converted by a personal Christian worker the first time he heard the gospel. When he retired from the army he applied for the post of the guardian of the Tomb of the Resurrection in Jerusalem. Once when our speaker was there he heard guardian speak and afterward an earnest Roman Catholic woman from Ulster approached him. She asked why there was no mention of Mary at the tomb of the resurrection. He answered her, ‘She did not die for our sins.’”
4. “Dignity is an essential quality of a minister.”
5. “A woman enters an elevator and all the others in the lift can smell her perfume - except herself. A man enters the elevator and he has obviously been outside to smoke a cigarette and everyone in the lift can smell tobacco. What our fragrance is is bound to be sensed by the people around us. That unique odour is what they are going to smell, but we will be the last to savour it.”
6. “One of the most dangerous consequences of a ministerial vocation is that people identify what you are with what God is.”
7. “All the best books that describe the work of the minister begin with a chapter describing ‘the man himself.’ These years books and talks have emerged giving some new methodology of the work of the minister every decade, usually chosen because it works! The contemporary emphasis is on the man, what he is in himself.”
8. “If a stranger comes into a congregation and finally he should ask, ‘Tell me what is a Christian?’ then someone should be able to point out to him one of the elders and say ‘living like that man.’”
9. “The secret of the Christian ministry is humility, humility and humility.”
10. “The description of the church as ‘the family of God’ is not a metaphor. It is what a church is!”
11. “The bottom line of what a minister is is this, that he is a man who devotes himself to eminent piety!”
12. “On the desk of the pastor Robert Murray M’Cheyne a letter was found after his premature decease. When it was opened the letter contained a note of thanks from someone who had heard his preaching the previous week, thanking him not just for what he had said but how he said it.”
13. “You can read in certain shops the notice, ‘If we don’t have it then you are better off without it.’ So it is that if God rejects our request for something then we can be sure that we are on our way to getting something better.”
14. “People wonder why they are not enjoying green pastures and still waters. It is because they have left the paths of righteousness.”
15. “Luther said, ‘The devil is God’s devil.’ So also the valley through which we are walking is God’s valley.”
16. “Being with a dying Christian in the last days of his life and seeing him utterly unafraid to die – that is the greatest of all places to be.”
17. “Some weeds will grow anywhere, and a pulpit is a shockingly bad place for the weed of pride.”
18. “If you have never experienced being maximized as you preach God’s Word then it would seem that you have never had a divine call to the ministry.”
19. “There are occasions when I get to the door at the end of a worship service and I discover I cannot remember the names of the men and women who pass me saying good-bye because the preaching has taken so much out of me.”
20. “A variety of terms are used to describe what sermonizing is all about, not just one thing. There is proclamation, telling people good news, teaching, encouraging and exhortation.”
21. “Preaching involves (1) a reasoned proclamation of (2) the truth of Scripture, so that (3) the message of the Bible is made clear, (4) as is appropriate to the hearers, (5) its multi-relevant character being displayed, and (6) applied to their lives, all of which is (7) ultimately done by Christ the true preacher. This latter part is the final mark of true preaching, that Christ himself is speaking.”
22. “Jonathan Edwards sought ‘to raise the affections of my hearers as high as I can, those affections being moved by the truth,’ and that was exactly John Owen’s motive in preaching too. The Lord Jesus is saying to them, ‘Give me your heart.’”
23. “When you start in a new pulpit it does not come easily or quickly learning how much the people can bear.”
24. “Richard Baxter fell out with practically everyone in his pursuit of church unity.”
25. “Never in the history of evangelicalism has so much energy been devoted as in our day in instructing men in how to preach.”
26. “One great danger in certain seminaries involves the cloning of preachers to a certain model, and the result is that all the graduates sound the same. Their sermons are predictable, each one equally dull. They are like David when he tried on Saul’s armour. The student had been wired to do what the people teaching him have told them. The independent student has forfeited his own personality to fit into the seminary mold. Or men can even clone themselves by aping someone whose preaching they admire.”
27. “Jesus’ enemies hated him because he ate and drank with people who had done bad things.”
28. “The ‘goodness’ and ‘mercy’ that follow us sheep in Psalm 23 are often compared to sheepdogs. But the metaphor is better understood as pointing to God constantly pursuing us, keeping us from wandering and bringing us back to the flock in the green pastures.”
29. “‘All God’s giants have been weak men,’ said Hudson Taylor. In their weakness God was their evident strength.”
30. “If you have no place for theology in your life then you are denying the fact that you are created by God and living in his creation. You cannot do biblical theology without doing systematic theology. John Calvin became a theologian to become a better pastor. All true theology is Trinitarian and not Christocentric.”

(One extra - “The greatest trial outside of hell is to live without temptations.”)