by Darryl on March 2, 2009
A great article by Ed Stetzer and Jason Hayes on preaching to the younger unchurched:
Directly connected to the younger unchurched’s aversion to simplistic preaching is their aversion to “tidy” preaching. The Church has somehow forgotten that life is not always about having a neat, pat answer…
This means that the moralizing of our preaching past is out like the 80s. Our preaching should encompass more than do’s and don’ts. It should reach to the why and the how behind our proclamation. Great preaching requires mining truth down to its deepest core and assigning it to resonate within the hearts of our listeners. As a result, our preaching must go beyond appeals to behavior modification, beyond pithy platitudes on being happy and living well. Our preaching must wrestle with the meat and marrow of human existence, because this is what young adults are already doing. Otherwise it is like tossing a fortune cookie to a man starving in the desert.
by Darryl on February 12, 2009
An article by Lee Eclov:
A third way we fog God’s glory is by not showing how he stands behind texts that are not explicitly about him. When I see a play I like, I’m invariably curious about the playwright. What of her is written into this story? What prompted him to give such a powerful speech to that character? Many Bible passages don’t have explicit statements about the attributes of God, but there is no text that doesn’t reveal something wondrous of God. We don’t do the text justice if we don’t help people see God standing in the wings.
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by Darryl on February 8, 2009
Found this story recently. It’s a sobering warning:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer studied for a year in New York City. He visited a number of churches there, and this is what he concluded: “One may hear sermons in New York upon almost any subject; one only is never handled, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, of the cross, of sin and forgiveness.”
Hope that’s not true of us.
by Darryl on February 5, 2009
I’ve heard a lot of sermons in the past 10 years or so that make me want to get up and walk out. They’re secular, psychological, self-help sermons. Friendly, but of no use. They didn’t make you straighten up. They didn’t give you anything hard. … At some point and in some way, a sermon has to direct people toward the death of Christ and the campaign that God has waged over the centuries to get our attention. (Garrison Keillor, Leadership, Vol. 6, no. 3)
by Darryl on January 26, 2009
J.D. Greear on preaching Scripture focused on Christ rather than on us:
The Bible was not primarily intended to explain to us what we should do for God, but to point us to what God was doing for us in Christ.
Take the popular Old Testament story of David and Goliath. The teaching usually goes like this: “Like David, we have giants in our lives. Through the power of God, we can knock them down like David did!” The main point of the David narrative, however, was not simply the ability of one man to defeat in this life every giant that comes against him, but that David a young Jew, hated by his brothers, who went out and defeated a giant who had completely immobilized Israel, and through his victory all of Israel was saved, even though they didn’t lift a finger to help him! Then all Israel shared in his victory. In this way, David was pointing us to Jesus. Because Jesus, the “greater David,” has conquered the “giant” of our separation from God, we don’t have to worry as much about other so-called giants, like cancer or vocational failure. Through Jesus’ work, no longer does death really defeat us or personal failure devestate our sense of personal worth!
…Postmoderns have lost the centrality of God in the universe and replaced it with the centrality of themselves. It is the preaching of the Gospel which reverses that. It is only when we teach people to trade their self-centered story for the story of God that we can truly be “preaching the Word.” Preaching the Gospel means to teach people to put Jesus back in the center of the universe where He belongs and to trust what He has done and can do on our behalf.What we should be exposing from the Bible is the Gospel!
Excellent post.
by Darryl on January 15, 2009
A good reminder from Biblical Preaching:
Based on the nature of Scripture, I think it is vital that we grasp the necessity of theocentric interpretation, and consequently, preaching. Kent Edwards, in a journal article, stated:
The point of a biblical story is always a theological point. We learn something about God and how to live in response to him when we understand a biblical story. The narrative literature of the Bible is concretized theology. (J.Kent Edwards, JEHS 7:1, 10)
How true that is! Even if you were to study Esther, the story in the Bible where God is textually absent, it doesn’t take long to recognize that God is very much present as the hero of the story! Let’s be sure we don’t study Bible passages, stories in particular, and merely derive little lessons for life. We can leave that with Aesop’s Fables. Let’s be sure we grapple with the theological point of every story, the intersection between God and humanity. God’s Word is all relevant and useful, so our preaching should likewise be relevant and useful to life. But we also center our preaching on God, because the Bible is centered on Him!
by Darryl on November 4, 2008
One of the best little articles I've ever read on preaching is found in The Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching. The title of the article is "The Danger of Practical Preaching: Why People Need More than the Bottom Line." The author, Lee Eclov, writes:
The Bible spends much more time on shaping the spiritual mind than commanding particular behavior. We need far more training in the ways of grace, of spiritual perceptions, and of what God is really like than we do on how to communicate with our spouse. Understanding the glory of Christ is far more practical than our listeners imagine. Properly preached, every sermon based on a passage of Scripture is fundamentally practical. Every author of Scripture wrote to effect change in God's people. It is our job as preachers to find the persuasive logic of that author and put that clearly and persuasively before our people through biblical exposition.
by Darryl on October 15, 2008
If you are interested in God-centered preaching, you may be interested in this article at 9 Marks:
A common question that church planters face is "How can you develop a God-centered church when most of the people attending aren't mature believers?" Assuming that you're not trying to fill your seats only with believers who are already mature, you're going to face this question. How do you create a God-centered culture?
The post expands on five suggestions:
- Prayer
- Set an example of God-centeredness
- Preach the Word of God
- Patience
- Confidence
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by Darryl on October 6, 2008
David Powlison contrasts the therapeutic gospel with the once-for-all gospel in this very helpful essay, and asks:
Which gospel will you live? Which gospel will you preach? Which needs will you awaken and address in others? Which Christ will be your people’s Christ? Will it be the christette who massages felt need? Or the Christ who turns the world upside down and makes all things new?
The entire article is well worth reading.
by Darryl on October 1, 2008
This is written about Christian fiction, but it applies to preaching as well. L.B. Graham writes:
Christianity is not about moralism, and Christian fiction shouldn’t be either. Christianity revolves, not around good behavior, but around God’s mercy shown to man in the death and resurrection of Christ. However, even though we know this to be theologically true, I think we struggle to remember this as we go about our daily lives…
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