Exposition Quotes

“The first morning I really sat and watched him it was a Tuesday. I know that because Tuesday is trash day for our neighborhood. Unlike me, he leaves gathering up his trash for the morning of pickup instead of doing it the night before. My alarm went off at 6 AM and I went in to start the coffee maker, and as I went about selecting a bit of fruit from the bowl on my kitchen table I looked out the window. It was just a casual glance, and the human eye is attracted to movement.”
― Benjamin R. Smith, Sketches: An Erotic Collection

“I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.”
― Catherine Lowell, The Madwoman Upstairs

“Everything bad in the Old Testament (and there's a lot) is there to point out our sin, while everything good in the Old Testament is there to point us to our Savior.”
― Martin Luther

“The bad preacher takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out into the traditional language of Christianity. The core of his thought is merely contemporary; only the superficies is traditional. But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear modern dress.”
― C.S. Lewis

“We have to grow into Scripture, like a young boy inheriting his older brother's clothes and flopping around in them, but he gradually builds out and grows up. Perhaps it's a measure of our maturity when parts of Scripture that we found odd or even repellent suddenly come up in a new light. Our sense is overtaken by a sense of the whole thing, wide, multicolored, and unspeakably powerful.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events,”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“My sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness can be adapted to almost any occasion, joyful, or, as in the present case, distressing. [All sigh.] I have preached it at harvest celebrations, christenings, confirmations, on days of humiliation and festal days.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Our small group is committed to getting the biblical text under our skin.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“New freedoms surface old habits. I haven't left sin behind, only discovered a new medium for my treachery. My real trouble as a writer isn't trying to mean the words that I write. It's living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Only 8000 different words appear in the Hebrew Bible, compared to the 20,000 or more that the average adult needs to know in most languages.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“No language about God will ever be fully adequate to the burning mystery which it signifies.”
― Elizabeth Johnston

“All our time spent making lists would be better spent painting, or writing, Or singing, or learning to speak stories. Sometimes I feel as though the Church has a kind of pity for Scripture, Always having to come behind it and explain everything, put everything into actionable steps, acronyms and hidden secrets, as though the original writers, and for that matter the Holy Spirit Who worked in the lives of the original writers, were a bunch of you literate hillbillies. I think the methodology God used to explain His Truth is quite superior. My life is a story, more than a list. I don't feel that a list could ever explain the complexity of all this beauty.”
― Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What

“Descriptions all fall flat and tame unless the Holy Ghost fills them with life and power”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version

“The more loftily we see Christ enthroned, and the more lowly we are when bowing before the foot of the throne, the more truly shall we be prepared to act our part towards Him.”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version

“Even those who know better, such as the King, nurse strange ideas about me as a prophet. They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know everything.”
― Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord

“First rule of exposition: Less is more.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“Whenever pastors assume people in their congregation know certain things, they miss opportunities to teach. If a pastor makes assumptions year after year, then a whole generation has never heard [that truth] for the first time. If we assume too much, we communicate too little.”
― Andy Stanley

“If we are to use the Bible effectively, then we must use it the way God wrote it – in narrative form. Our team rejects the notion that the Bible is simply an encyclopedia of disconnected Bible verses. God's Word is less like a cookbook and more like a novel.”
― James MacDonald, Christ-Centered Biblical Counseling: Changing Lives with God's Changeless Truth

“A continual diet of the Word satisfies, and it builds an appetite for more.”
― James MacDonald, Christ-Centered Biblical Counseling: Changing Lives with God's Changeless Truth

“The Scriptures were written with built-in tension between texts and its resultant theology.”
― James MacDonald, Christ-Centered Biblical Counseling: Changing Lives with God's Changeless Truth

“While the Bible is to be applied to the times, it is not to be subservient to the times. Thus unity across economic, cultural, and ethnic lines should be proclaimed not because it is the latest fad but rather because it is the clear teaching of the eternal Word of God.”
― James Cone

“Vladimir Nabokov, contemning readers who "identified" with characters in fiction, remarked that the best readers identify with the artist.”
― Joseph Epstein

“It is not true that some doctors are only for the initiated. There is NOTHING in Scripture which is ashamed of the light.”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students

“A most elaborate theory may be constructed by a devout mind.”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students

“Adams was in a hurry and ordered his horse drawn carriage to wait for him in front of his house. The horses were spooked before he got in the carriage, and the carriage was destroyed in an accident. Pondering what could have happened to him , Adams retreated to Psalm 20's injunctions against trusting in chariots and horses.”
― Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life

“Our religion was the religion of a Book. Man must be educated on Earth for Heaven. John Quincy Adams”
― Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life

“often finds a more interesting story behind the conventional one. Martin Luther's supposedly revolutionary resistance to indulgences took place in a German state where they were sold. Even more intriguing, they weren't sold because the ruling authorities there get a brisk business in holy relics – which Luther left alone.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“Like the boy who drives his little Indian pigs to the fold, whose obstinacy impels them divers ways, and thus obliges him first to apply to one and then to another till he can succeed in penning them all, so are we obliged to play the same game with the personages of our story.”
― Alessandro Manzoni, The Bethrothed

“That afternoon was tranquil at Fort Robinson, everyone in the barracks went their separate ways. Alexa had classes, Blue had ship handling, Jack was helping in the mess hall, Sam had leadership class, and of course, I had therapy.”
― Jaya Robinson, The Butterfly Effect