Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935)
Former professional baseball player-turned urban evangelist. Follow this daily blog that chronicles the life and ministry of revivalist preacher William Ashley "Billy" Sunday (1862-1935)
‘I believe in the Bible, the book of God,’ he cried, ‘because it has delivered the goods, express prepaid, since the beginning of the world. When the consensus of opinion of the latest scholarship says one thing and the word of God says another, the consensus of opinion of the latest scholarship can go to hell!’
Lebanon (PA) Daily News. Wed, Jan 06, 1915 ·Page 10
You’ve got to work in harmony with God, or you can’t eat a potato. Try to plant your crop in the winter time.
A revival is the return of the church from her backsliding. Judgment must begin in the House of God.
There is as much sense in talking of a worldly Christian as there is in talking about a heavenly devil.
What would you say of the members of a fire company who kept playing cards and gossiping instead of answering the alarm.
We have so many denominations now that it gives a man brain fever to keep track of them. Somebody gets a new idea of truth, founds a new sect, and takes refuge under the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. There is as much need of more denominations as there is for a cat with more tails.
The average preacher stakes his claim on Jupiter and talks on—God knows what, I don’t.
The slaves would not be free men today if men had not gone on the firing line for $13 a month.
An Iowa preacher asked me: “Why don’t you preach the way I do?” “If I did,” I told him, “I wouldn’t be worth any more than you are.”
Some preachers would rather have people go to hell than preach anything except their sixteenth century religion. My mother used to wear hoops, but she doesn’t now, because there’s a different style.
Too many people windjam with their lips, but they don’t deliver the goods.
No wonder children of today grow up like asses’ colts!
You allow your daughters to go around with fellows whose character
would make a black mark on a piece of tar paper.
If you are not living to stir the devil, then you are a cipher and a
nonentity.
The church hasn’t smelled gunpowder for 150 years. It would do her
good. When she has grown rich, she has become independent of God
Almighty.
Some people think the more they look like a hedgehog the more pious
they are. They’d get to heaven a great deal quicker if they went to the
barber and dentist more often.
If you can’t own an automobile, take a trolley ride for a nickel. Ain’t it
fierce?
If some of you devils were to go a whole day without cussing your wife,
she’d think you were sick and send for the doctor, although she’d rather
send for the undertaker.
If there is any one person in this world that I despise with every atom
of my being, it is the weasel-eyed, lantern-jawed, knock-kneed, stiff-necked,
cadaverous, crooked-nosed, old neighborhood gossip, who can see more
through a keyhole seven blocks away than a decent woman could through
an open door right at her elbow.
The Tribune-Republican. Wed, Mar 04, 1914 ·Page 10
The South Bend Tribune. Wed, Apr 30, 1913 ·Page 14
FEW HOME RUNS BY BILLY
“You always get what you’re looking for in this world.”
“Gossips have tongues so long that they can sit in the parlor and lick skillets in the kitchen.”
“Lots of people join church for the same motive that a man blows a safe, for what they can get out of it.”
“If I should start with a wagon load of Bibles to-day and offer one to every person I met, who would quote for me 10 verses of scripture and tell me where they were in the Bible I would have a big bunch of the books left when I got to New York.”
“The ordinances of the church don’t save anybody.”
“I don’t believe that half the people in the churches of South Bend have been converted.”
“I thank God for the mutts in this world that hate me.”
“I have more good, true, loyal friends and more loyal enemies than any man that ever came to South Bend.”
“Some of you people go to church on Sunday morning; go to a ball game in the afternoon; and keep a case of beer in your cellar that the booze man slips in while your neighbors are away.”
“Some ministers say that I am too sensational. Well, I would be anything to save souls.”
“Every denomination today has a clique that bosses the minister.”
“Some people carry all their piety in their collar, plug hat and their cane.”
“If there is any one in the world that I pity it is the pastor of the average church.”
“You ring the church bell on Sunday morning, put a duffer up to a little stunt and all the time the old world is going straight to hell so fast that it is breaking the speed limit.”
“You back the church of God in on a siding, lock the switch, and let hell come rushing down the main line.”
“The man who seduces a girl should be shot and if I was on the jury in his trial he would never get away unless the ants should carry him through the keyhole.”
“I have as much respect for the man who knocks revivals as I would have if he should spit in the face of Jesus Christ.”
“One reason why the world doesn’t join the church is because the church has joined the world.”
“I have as much respect for the man who knocks revivals as I would have if he should spit in the face of Jesus Christ.”
“You come up here and prove the things that are said about me and I will go to the penitentiary. But if you come up here and can’t prove them you go to the penitentiary.”
“If you want to elevate people then have got to live better than they do. Away with this 20th century doctrine of living as they do.”
“The difference between a grave and a rut is that a grave is a little deeper. There are two gangs in every church, the ruts and the anti-ruts.”
“I despise men who trim their sails to catch the passing breeze of popularity.”
“A boy can throw stones and break a window, but it takes a skilled mechanic to make one. Any fool can sneer at a revival—and you’re a fool if you do.”
“You might as well expect a mummy to bear children, and the children of hell to sing hymns, as to expect an awakening that doesn’t begin in the church.”
“The measure of preparedness determines your success.”
“Half the members of almost any church could die and the church not lose any of its spiritual force.”
“We are going daffy over culture clubs. The world doesn’t need informing, but reforming.”
“The less brains a man has the greater trouble he exercises to show what he has got.”
“You can not scald a hog in ice water.”
The South Bend Tribune. Wed, Apr 30, 1913 ·Page 14
CAUGHT ON THE FLY
The God-forsaken dance in the schools is—I’ll knock hell out of that here. And you taxpayers have to go down and pay the bill for immorality. It’s an outrage.
Faith is a mightier force than dynamite.
You can’t hurt the Bible any more than you can stop an ocean’s wave by blowing against it with a tin whistle.
This tabernacle represents God and Christianity.
We depend too little on God and too much on the soup kitchen. There are more full stomachs than bended knees in the church.
There’s no use to go after a skunk with cologne water.
Some of us are so slightly acquainted with God that we are afraid to trust Him.
Faith takes God at His word without an IF.
When you have done your best you can trust God with the consequences.
You can pass the buck to God any time you want to if you have done your part.
God will damn any church that will run a dance.
If you want to see a dead town wake up, do something out of the ordinary.
A preacher that can’t preach as though he had authority from God, is no success. He just jimmied his way into the pulpit or had a pull somewhere.
If some preachers would talk plain to sinners in the front pews, how soon the old ice house would thaw out.
If Bible results are expected then Bible preaching must be given to the people.
There is constant disappointment in the preacher who tries to shoot bear with bird shot.
A knowledge of the Bible without education is better than education without the Bible.
The man that God sends is always the right man.
The preacher who is afraid to speak the truth is as weak as Samson was with his hair cut.
When God calls a man to preach he expects him to be as natural as when he sneezes or snores.
A safe and sane ministry is a good deal like a horse—well, one that any woman can drive.
Eternity writes no wrinkles on the brow of time.
There are some people who laugh at other people’s misfortunes. There are a few fools like that in the world.
They haven’t got through shouting up there yet since Moody swept through the gates.
Nobody ever goes to hell that he isn’t warned by God.
I am not discounting the value of education. It draws out virtues and attractions that do not appear otherwise. Education alone can not make character. Education alone can not save a soul.
I am a Christian because God said so. God’s word is the last word. I know I am a Christian.
I am not an infidel because I am not a fool.
I can’t understand your indifference to God’s love.
No rattlesnake will crawl over a rope.
Hell must be an awful place if God Almighty loved us enough to give His Son to keep us out of there.
I don’t think any man does the right thing by his family if he does not prepare for his wife and her little brood after he’s gone. I carry thousands of dollars worth of insurance.
If you are not willing to serve God, you are a God-forsaken, black-hearted ingrate and you are a fool.
Salvation belongs to God and God states the terms by which you may have it.
If you want to come to God you must come through faith in Jesus Christ.
I challenge you Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Christians, United Brethren, to show me that I don’t preach the truth. I hurl it into your teeth.
God never taught me to beat a retreat.
Some fellows will go fishing and stand in the water up to their waists all day, and watch the bobber and never get a bite and say they are having a good time. But if the preacher happens to trespass five minutes over time on Sunday morning those same birds will pull their watches and begin to fidget.
It’s a waste of time to pray to the wrong God.
If you want God’s purity in Richmond, build up the broken down altars.
What we need in the church is less pie and more piety.
You can’t wait three weeks, Richmond, Ind., to get your crop.
Before you can pray right, you’ve got to do right.
O Richmond, God’s warriors have first got to be His worshippers.
Some people are married to the church or the choir or the organ.
The stone that’s in the foundation of a building is more important than the flag staff on the roof, although the stone is not so much in evidence.
TIME FOR SLANG SAYS SUNDAY
Evangelist Explains Why He Uses Language of Streets In His Sermons
“Richmond ministers are dead right when they declare that if they said in their own pulpits some of the things I say in mine, it would sound ridiculous,” Billy Sunday admitted yesterday.
“There is a time and a place for all things,” continued Sunday. “Staid old church people, reared in Sunday schools, prayer meetings and churches and familiar with elegant phraseology, do not need to have things told them in the plain language of the street in order to comprehend them. Richmond ministers preach to about the same crowd every Sunday and they understand them perfectly.
Short Over Heads.
“But I speak to multitudes whose fathers never darken a church door. If I put them to the usual pulpit terms it would be clouds over their heads. Some of my hearers never went to school, never received church training. Their vocabulary is often limited to 500 words—many of them idioms of the street and slang, and some of them bordering on cuss words. Now I do not use cuss words, but I use the slang or phrase of the street that I know they will understand and respond to—and they do.
“I saw a man seated in front of me in the tabernacle whose dress and appearance showed he was a sport. He was plainly no church-goer. When I said in my sermon, ‘Don’t pass the buck!’ his face lighted up immediately. He was all smiles and he quickly got the idea I was trying to convey. Had I used highfalutin terms they would have been wasted on him.
Never So.
“When Lincoln used the word ‘sugar coated’ in one of his messages, Secretary of State Seward said he would never do—it was not refined enough.
“All right, you put in a better word,” Lincoln told Seward. Next day Seward came back and said he couldn’t find a better word, and ‘sugar-coated’ remained in the message.
Lincoln said there never would come a time when the American people would not know what ‘sugar-coated’ meant.
The apostle said: ‘By their works ye shall know them’—and when I put it: ‘Show me! I’m from Missouri,’ the man of the street not used to going to church gets the idea in a jiffy.”
Cited in: The Richmond Item. Sun, May 07, 1922 ·Page 6
SUNDAY Says—
I think one of the curses of the church today is putting unconverted men and women into the church.
Some say, “I don’t like his mannerisms.” It’s none of your business. If God likes it what’s it to you then? None, is it? Not at all—no, sir!
Women go daffy over pictures, men don’t much. Women listen to music and say, “Oh, it is divine.” Men listen and say, “That is punk.”
Men need the church a darn sight more than the church needs the men. They all need one another.
The main trouble in the church today is not in the pews. It is up in the pulpit.
I repeat it, there is more Christian faith in the pews today than in the pulpit. I am just the boy that will tell you, too.
If you don’t believe in God, don’t stay in the pulpit.
There is about as much connection between some men and Jesus Christ as there is between a man with a wooden leg and the rest of his body a fellow.
Tell me why a man will be true to business, true to lodge, true to his wife, and yet he will be false to Jesus Christ.
You can’t beat the devil sister, he has been preying this old world for 6,000 years, he never has rheumatism, appendicitis or peritonites. If you get to playing tag with the devil in his door yard he will hit you on the back and say, “tag you are it.” You can’t put it over on him.
Some church members have the hoof and mouth disease, they round the neighborhood and windjam about their neighbors and talk about them.
No draft has ever been made from an honest heart on the bank window of heaven that God Almighty ever has refused to honor.
There is no one I so despise and abhor as a contemptible snake in the grass, an untrue man or an untrue woman.
You have got to have more claims on heaven than the fact that your mother is there.
I am ashamed to say there are some men whose honor hangs like meat in a butcher shop and you can buy it for so much a pound, so much a head, but thank God, they are in the minority.
What is wrong for a woman to do is wrong for man to do, and the crying need of America today is the single standard for men and women.
There are some that want a little boost in the world and they will win out.
What is hard to gain can be easily lost.
The devil puts every obstacle in the way of man or woman that wants to return to God. But the road to hell seems to have been greased for the occasion.
Palladium-Item. Thu, Apr 27, 1922 ·Page 5
The Morning Call/ Thu, May 20, 1915 · Page 13
BILLY SUNDAYISMS
If there is no resurrection from the dead God is a liar and we are all liars.
You will go to hell just as fast from Broadway as from the Bowery and from Fifth avenue as from Pell street or Mott street or Mulberry street.
I expect to live long enough to stand by the grave of Christian Science.
It is impossible for any man to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ without committing moral suicide.
Jesus Christ was bigger than the Sabbath.
When the devil gets cornered he begins to whine.
I have more respect for the devil than for some people I’ve met.
Unitarianism is stoning Him today. They deny His divinity.
I’m not afraid of those new religions. Whatever is of man will fall. Whatever is of God will prevail.
I’d rather be a doorkeeper in the house of God than dwell in the tents of sin.
God looks upon a sinner as the government looked upon a rebel in the civil war.
The sinner is a rebel with God’s government.
God Almighty looks through the fig leaves behind which you must hide yourself.
Christ struck this old world with such a thud that He didn’t come up for three days.
I don’t see any surcease from sorrow until the coming of Jesus Christ.
The doctrine of universal salvation crawled out of the pit of hell.
You cannot argue against sin.
Midnight on earth is mid-day in hell.
Faith in Christ is the only way the door is going to fly open for you in this old world.
Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935) 