According to World Magazine journalist Gene Edward Veith, “Sometimes recognizing a problem requires finding the right words to name it. Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton have coined a phrase that describes perfectly the dominant American religion: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
A Pastor’s Sunday Morning Routine
I sit at my desk gazing at the glowing screen of my laptop computer looking over the notes I’ve developed over the previous week. I rehearse the sermon in my mind imagining the inflection of voice I will employ in my delivery, making visual markups to my notes – highlighting certain illustrations, changing font color and size, being sure that the page number has been added to the top center header of my notes (When I do not get the page number on the notes, inevitably I will drop my notes and only discover they are out of order in the middle of the sermon).
Notes from the Road
I have just returned from a week in North Carolina with Curtis Pixler and the Union Baptist Church. We had a great revival! About Tuesday night it seemed that God began to break hearts and call people to repentance. Publicly and privately people were confessing their sin and distance from God. It was a beautiful thing to see. One man who was called upon to pray over the offering began to confess sins and ask God, his family and his Church to forgive him. What a humbling thing that was to hear.
The Adventure of Discipleship
This Sunday we will be studying what I am calling, “The Adventure of Discipleship”. The text basically is a selected narration of Jesus’ first encounters with the twelve disciples. It seems to me, when you merge the accounts of John together with the Synoptic Gospels (Mat. Mar. Luk.) that the official call of the twelve came later. But in our text we get an idea of what initially drew the disciples to Christ. We also get a first hand account of how Jesus fulfilled his on great commission.
Preaching The Gospel of John
Last Sunday we began studying through John’s Gospel. Click here to listen to the first sermon of that series on John 1:1-6.
It is so interesting me to to observe how various guys divide a book of the bible into “preachable” sections. Typically, you want to follow the argument of the writer without loosing the attention of your audience. John’s weaving in and out of story and narration makes preaching straight through difficult for a western audience. For example in the first Chapter he begins in verse 6 telling about John the Baptist – notice how John weaves in and out of the storyline (BOLD = the narrative about John the Baptist; plain text indented = theological commentary on John’s message)
