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).
Whatever happened to Thanksgiving?
For the first time that I remember I saw Christmas trees going up beside the Halloween costumes in some local retail stores. Wasn’t there another holiday in there somewhere? Whatever happened to Thanksgiving? Have we allowed a troubled economy to hijack our gratitude? Have we as Christians forgotten that anything short of Hell is grace? Have we forgotten that the only thing we contributed to our salvation is the sin that God so graciously forgives (Luther)?
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)
Is Jesus Relevant?
Several years ago I heard Jerry Vines say that, “the job of the Pastor was not to answer the questions that people are asking, but to answer the questions that they should be asking.” Today I received a survey of Pastors that chronicled the issues that the people in their congregation were dealing with. Top three on the list were as follows…
