Word: sermonic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...might well remember a Thanksgiving Day sermon Dr. Coffin preached ten years ago. Americans, he said, were always "self-reliant, not to say cocky," but only "penitent, pardoned and therefore truly humble Americans" would do any good in the world. It was a favorite theme of his: "Selfsufficiency is the very essence of sin ... What a lot of rubbish has been written about being masters of our fate and captains of our soul! We have not realized that in threescore years and ten, man does not pass much beyond the kindergarten stage . . . Let a man be aware that...
...usual, had quoted out of context from newspaper clippings to prove the charge. This habit of Joe's reminded Ervin of the North Carolina preacher who about 75 years ago deplored the local women's custom of wearing their hair in topknots. One Sunday he preached a sermon on the text: "Top (K)Not Come Down." At the end an irate woman-with a topknot-protested that no such text could be found in the Bible. Whereupon the preacher opened the Scriptures to Matthew 24:17 and read: "Let him which is on the house top not come...
...most important thing he did at Wheaton was to court his future wife, Ruth McCue Bell, a pretty, vivacious China missionary's daughter (Emily Cavanaugh had in the meantime married her Harvard man). Said he in a recent sermon: "I tell you ... the first time I kissed [my wife], I don't know whether she had any emotion, but I sure did. And when you fall in love with Jesus, you are. going to feel it ... Now if I had married all the girls ... I wanted to marry, the Lord only knows where I would have been tonight...
Before he begins his sermon, he asks the audience to join him in a short prayer. Then he plunges right into his text. During the sermon, he picks up the Bible again and again, swinging it, slamming it. almost literally hurling it at the Devil. Graham has abandoned his early hyperbole in favor of a strictly scriptural message, brought down to earth in everyday language. He has also weeded out the kind of literalness that once led him to deliver drawing-board specifications for heaven, which, he assured his audience (apparently relying on Revelations 21:16), "is 1,600 miles...
...Billy Graham Evangelistic Association). The Grahams do their best to keep their four children-Virginia, 9; Anne, 6; Ruth, 3; and William Franklin III, 2-from "hamming it up" for the tourists, who sometimes come in busloads to stare at the house. Virginia is currently trying to learn the Sermon on the Mount by heart, has been promised a bike and $25 if she gets it down pat by Christmas. "I don't think she's going to make it," laughs her father...