The Word of God is a Sword, and Prayer is the instruction manual.

“Read [the Bible] with the prayer that the Holy Spirit’s grace will help you understand it” (J. C. Ryle, Thoughts for Young Men, 57).

“‘In the beginning God.’ The first four words of the Bible are more than an introduction to the creation story or to the book of Genesis They supply the key to which opens our understanding to the Bible as a whole. They tell us that the religion of the Bible is a religion of the initiative of God” (John R. W. Stott, Basic Christianity, 11).

“[W]e ought to give our attention to the sermons in Acts as models for preaching today . . . the preaching of the apostles in Acts is nothing less than the preaching of the risen Christ himself” (Roger Wagner, Tongues Aflame, 22).

Alister McGrath discusses Martin Luther’s thoughts about the relationship between God’s word and the nature of the church.

Neither an episcopally ordained ministry, nor an institutional continuity with the apostolic church, are therefore necessary to safeguard the existence of the church, whereas the preaching of the gospel is essential to the identity of the church. ‘Where the word is, there is faith; and where faith is, there is the true church.’ The visible church is constituted by the preaching of the Word of God: no human assembly may claim to be the ‘church of God’ unless it is founded on this gospel. It is more important to the preach the same gospel as the apostles than to be a member of an institution which is historically derived from them (Christian Theology: An Introduction, 382).

 Hence, preaching was at the top of the to-do lists of the Reformers, e.g., in The Necessity of Reforming the Church, John Calvin said “no man is a true pastor of the Church who does not perform the office of teaching. . . . no man can claim for himself the office of bishop or pastor who does not feed his flock with the word of the Lord.”

“God’s people cannot be without God’s word.”
           – Martin Luther

“The task of the Holy Spirit is to lead into God’s truth: without that Spirit, truth remains elusive” (Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 231).

“Through the Holy Spirit comes our restoration to paradise, our ascension into the kingdom of heaven, our return to the adoption of sons, our liberty to call God our Father, our being made partakers of the grace of Christ, our being called children of light, our sharing in eternal glory, and, in a word, our being brought into a state of all “fulness of blessing” [Romans 15:29], both in this world and in the world to come, of all the good gifts that are in store for us, by promise hereof, through faith, beholding the reflection of their grace as though they were already present, we await the full enjoyment” (Saint Basil the Great, De Spirtu Sancto, XV. 36.)

“The great thing about being Reformed is that there is no passage of Scripture I have to hide from.”
     – R.C. Sproul, Jr. quoting David Chilton in TABLETALK (January, 1999).

“When Paul said he preached Christ, he meant it” (Separated Unto the Gospel: The Mission and Work of the Free Presbyterian Church of North America, 22).