City Church of Richmond Sermons

“At last he gasped: ‘Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

— J.R.R. Tolkein

“Jesus says there is nothing broken that won’t be mended, nothing sick that won’t be healed, nothing dead that won’t live again. Because God is making everything sad come untrue.”

— Sally Lloyd Jones

“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back–in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

— Frederick Buechner

“Oh, Master, make me chaste and celibate—but not yet!”

— St. Augustine

“Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”

— John Donne

“A glutton is one who raids the icebox for a cure for spiritual malnutrition.”

— Frederick Buechner

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”

— Matthew 5:8

“It is not only prayer that gives God glory, but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring...To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives Him glory, too. To lift up the hands in prayer gives god glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a sloppail, give Him glory too. He is so great that all things give Him glory if you mean they should.”

— Gerard Manly Hopkins

“Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else be as unsuccessful as you are.”

— Frederich Buechner

“He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart he had become a dragon himself.”

— C.S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader

“The real black, diabolical Pride, comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you. Of course, it is very right and often our duty, not to care what people think of us, if we do so for the right reason; namely, because we care so incomparably more what God thinks. But the Proud man has a different reason for not caring.”

— C.S. Lewis

“Once his public ministry had begun, Jesus had nowhere to rest his head, and Mary had nowhere to rest her heart. And now it had come to this, she pondered in her broken heart, in her heart that by its breaking was made whole. That is the way it is with discipleship. The way of the cross is the way of broken hearts.”

— Richard Neuhaus

“I tell you the truth, a man may not make himself king; only the blessing of him who holds the kingship can elevate a man to that high place. For sovereignty is a sacred trust that may not be bartered or sold; still less may it be stolen or taken by force.”

— Stephen Lawhead, The Paradise War

“Man desires to be more than man, to rule his world for himself”

— Sophocles