Category Archives: Preaching

Ten Ways the Holy Spirit Is at Work in Preaching

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Ten Ways the Holy Spirit Is at Work in Preaching

Holy Spirit Stained Glass

In his book, Spirit-Led Preaching: The Holy Spirit’s Role in Sermon Preparation and Delivery, Dr. Greg Heisler includes a helpful list of ways the Holy Spirit is at work in preaching (p. 4).

  1. The Spirit’s inspiration of the biblical text
  2. The conversion of the preacher to faith in Jesus Christ
  3. The call of the preacher to preach the Word
  4. The character of the preacher to live the Word
  5. The illumination of the preacher’s heart and mind in study
  6. The empowerment of the preacher in proclaiming the Word
  7. The testimony to Jesus Christ as Lord and mediator
  8. The opening of the hearts of those who hear and receive the Word
  9. The application of the Word of God to the listeners’ lives
  10. The production of lasting fruit displayed in the lives of Spirit-filled believers

Every point on this list is a great reminder that the power of preaching does not reside in the preacher himself, but in the Holy Spirit working through the preached Word.  Both humbling and helpful.

Dr. Heisler is slotted as the plenary speaker at the upcoming annual meeting of the Evangelical Homiletics Society.

 

Excited About Upcoming Sermon Series on Jonah

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Jonah Series logo Excited About Upcoming Sermon Series on Jonah

Jonah: Lessons in How Not to Obey God—that’s the descriptor for my new Sunday morning sermon series.

Over and over again Jonah gets things wrong.  He’s a test case in how not to listen to God. I saw where John MacArthur went so far as to preach a sermon about Jonah titled, “The Worst Missionary.”  It’s amazing that God uses Jonah at all (there’s a lesson for us somewhere in there).

Here’s my preaching plan for Jonah over the course of the next four Sunday mornings:

  1. “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over” (Jonah 1:1-16)
  2. “From Worst to First” (Jonah 1:17-2:10)
  3. “The God of Second Chances” (Jonah 3:1-10)
  4. “Pity for a City” (Jonah 4:1-11)

Hopefully we’ll figure out a way to start recording the sermon audio at my new church. Then I’ll make sure to post it here on the blog so all four of you regular readers can give it a listen. icon wink Excited About Upcoming Sermon Series on Jonah

[P.S. I Found the whale graphic at simpledeskstops.com]

 

Sermon Notes and Audio from Zephaniah Sermon

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I preached a sermon titled, “God’s Photo Album: Pictures of God’s Story from the Book of Zephaniah,” this past weekend at Parkland Baptist Church in Louisville, KY.  I had a number of church members approach me after each of the morning services and express that mine was the first sermon they had ever heard out of Zephaniah.  Though it was the first time I preached from Zephaniah, it was not the first time that I ever heard a sermon out of the minor prophet (see this sermon, this one, this one too, and ESPECIALLY this one).

I thought I would share my sermon notes and the sermon audio.

I usually prepare my sermons by hand using a metal pen (so I can’t chew it!) and a legal pad.  Later in the week I develop a hybrid outline/manuscript in a word processor on my computer.

Here are the handwritten notes I took during during the week (and yes, I always doodle on my sermon notes).  Click thumbnails to enlarge.

Here are the typed notes I preached from using the GoodReader app on my iPad.

And here’s the sermon audio.  Click “PLAY” and wait several seconds and the audio should kick in.

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Enjoy.

The Alpha and Omega of Expository Preaching

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Alpha Omega 300x284 The Alpha and Omega of Expository Preaching

Steve Lawson is an excellent quoter.  Read any of his books and you’ll find wonderful gems like this one from Merrill Unger on expository preaching:

No matter what the length of the portion explained may be, if it is handled in such a way that its real and essential meaning as it existed in the mind of the particular Biblical writer and in the light of the over-all context of Scripture is made plain and applied to the present-day needs of the hearers, it may properly be said to be expository preaching.  It is emphatically not preaching about the Bible, but preaching the Bible.  ’What saith the Lord’ is the alpha and the omega of expository preaching.  It begins in the Bible and ends in the Bible and all that intervenes springs from the Bible.*

*The quote is included in Lawson’s, Famine in the Land: A Passionate Call for Expository Preaching (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2003), 97.  Lawson provides the endnote: Merrill F.  Unger, “Expository Preaching,” Bibliotecha Sacra 111 (October-December 1954): 333-334.

John MacArthur and the Cost of Being a Servant of the Word of God

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In discussing a preacher’s commitment to the truth of God, Peter Adam offers this insightful and moving quotation from John MacArthur:

Fling him into his office. Tear the “Office” sign from the door and nail on the sign, “Study.” Take him off the mailing list. Lock him up with his books and his typewriter and his Bible. Slam him down on his knees before texts and broken hearts and the flock of lives of a superficial flock and a holy God.

Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities who knows about God. Throw him into the ring to box with God until he learns how short his arms are. Engage him to wrestle with God all the night through. And let him come out only when he’s bruised and beaten into being a blessing.

Shut his mouth forever spouting remarks, and stop his tongue forever tripping lightly over every nonessential. Require him to have something to say before he dares break the silence. Bend his knees in the lonesome valley.

Burn his eyes with weary study. Wreck his emotional poise with worry for God. And make him exchange his pious stance for a humble walk with God and man. Make him spend and be spent for the glory of God. Rip out his telephone. Burn up his ecclesiastical success sheets.

Put water in his gas tank. Give him a Bible and tie him to the pulpit. And make him preach the Word of the living God!

Test him. Quiz him. Examine him. Humiliate him for his ignorance of things divine. Shame him for his good comprehension of finances, batting averages, and political in-fighting. Laugh at his frustrated effort to play psychiatrist. Form a choir and raise a chant and haunt him with it night and day-”Sir, we would see Jesus.”

When at long last he dares assay the pulpit, ask him if he has a word from God. If he does not, then dismiss him. Tell him you can read the morning paper and digest the television commentaries, and think through the day’s superficial problems, and manage the community’s weary drives, and bless the sordid baked potatoes and green beans, ad infinitum, better than he can.

Command him not to come back until he’s read and reread, written and rewritten, until he can stand up, worn and forlorn, and say, “Thus saith the Lord.”

Break him across the board of his ill-gotten popularity. Smack him hard with his own prestige. Corner him with questions about God. Cover him with demands for celestial wisdom. And give him no escape until he’s back against the wall of the Word.

And sit down before him and listen to the only word he has left-God’s Word. Let him be totally ignorant of the down-street gossip, but give him a chapter and order him to walk around it, camp on it, sup with it, and come at last to speak it backward and forward, until all he says about it rings with the truth of eternity.

And when he’s burned out by the flaming Word, when he’s consumed at last by the fiery grace blazing through him, and when he’s privileged to translate the truth of God to man, finally transferred from earth to heaven, then bear him away gently and blow a muted trumpet and lay him down softly. Place a two-edged sword in his coffin, and raise the tomb triumphant. For he was a brave soldier of the Word. And ere he died, he had become a man of God.*

*Quoted in Peter Adam’s, Speaking God’s Words: A Practical Theology of Preaching (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 1996), 161-162.  Taken from John MacArthur’s, Rediscovering Expository Preaching: Balancing the Science and Art of Biblical Exposition (Nashville: W Publishing Group, 1992), 348.

What Does the Preacher Have to Say?

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“What does the preacher have to say that the psychologist, politician, stock broker, or social commentator has not already said with more passion and insight than most pastors can muster even on Easter Sunday? The credibility of the church’s proclamation will not be restored by acquiring new communication skills or devising better sermonic forms, as helpful as these may be. The answer is a preacher in whom the Word of God burns as a fire in his bones, one who must speak because he cannot keep silent, one who preaches with fierce humility yet also with unstinted audacity in the certain knowledge that God Himself is speaking in the faithful proclamation of His Word. Or, as Second Helvetic Confession (1566) put it even more succinctly: “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” This is the burden of doctrinal preaching.”

—Timothy George, “Doctrinal Preaching,” in the Handbook of Contemporary Preaching, edited by Michael Duduit (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1993), 93-102.

On Karl Barth’s View of the Bible and the Sermon

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In his book, The Sermon as God’s Word: Theologies for Preaching, Robert W. Duke “examines a variety of theologies in order to show how the preacher’s choice and development of a text is shaped by the assumptions of which he or she may not consciously be aware” (11).

In the first chapter Duke considers the theology and preaching of neo-orthodoxy’s champion, Karl Barth.  Duke writes one particular paragraph that is chock-full of important Barthian concepts and buzz-words.  Having studied Barth a fair amount over the last five months, I could not help but to nod in happy agreement as I read the following:

This strange book—this Bible—was for Barth a testimony to God’s dealings with people.  It is not essentially a record of our quest for God, but rather of God’s quest, in the person of Jesus Christ, for us.  Nowhere else are we told of this movement of God toward us.  Nor can God’s self-revelation be charted by human reason or discerned from any experience of culture, poetry, or science.  God is wholly other than our thoughts.   To become involved with the Bible is to enter into a strange new world.  Barth never tired of creating images out of his experience.  He writes that our situation is like that of a wayfarer who journeys through life “absorbed in his own thoughts and desires,” with eyes fixed ahead on the bend in the road—the curve that appears to be the goal sought.  This is a familiar world, with all its sights and sounds soothing to the ears, and the traveler retains this sense of well-being until a crisis arises.  But occasionally there occurs a foreign word, a sermon that moves him, excites him, and disturbs this ordered life.  The bend in the road ahead reveals not a continuation of the way he has been traveling, but a strange new land, “distance undreamed of, a vista he does not see, a place he does not know, the beyond!  This new land, shall we seek it? . . . To bring me to this point, to this sign of God’s highway, . . . to the end of what is earthly, and so to the beginning of things divine, just this is the aim of every thought and word of the Bible” (18).

The paragraph is Duke’s, but the quotations within it come from one of Barth’s sermons as recorded in Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Come Holy Spirit: Sermons, 196-197.