Daily Inspiration Quote by John Hines

Preaching, John Hines suggests, lives or dies on expectation. Not charisma. Not craft. Not even the finely honed architecture of a sermon. The engine is a kind of holy suspense: the preacher steps into the pulpit believing that something will actually occur in the room, and that the agency behind it is God, not the human performance.

Hines is doing two things at once. He’s taking a quiet swing at preacher-as-celebrity, the temptation to treat the sermon as a personal TED Talk with better lighting. At the same time, he’s warning against the opposite modern drift: sermons delivered like book reports, careful, correct, and internally resigned to nothing changing. The line “expects something to happen” is a subtle indictment of professionalized religion, where competence can replace faith and where the congregation becomes an audience grading a product.

The subtext is pastoral and disciplinary. Expectation isn’t hype; it’s humility with nerve. Hines relocates responsibility: the preacher prepares, shows up, speaks plainly, but refuses to confuse means with power. That keeps preaching from becoming manipulation (“I moved you”) or despair (“Nothing ever moves anyone”). It also preserves the congregation’s dignity. If transformation is God’s work, listeners aren’t targets to be managed; they’re participants in an encounter that can’t be manufactured.

Contextually, Hines wrote from a 20th-century American church wrestling with mass media, institutional trust, and the rise of personality-driven ministry. His sentence is a reset button: less performance, more expectancy, and a sharper awareness of who’s supposed to be acting.