This year has solidified for me three simple but central convictions about preaching. I’ve carried these convictions around for a while, and they have been said many times by many people, but they have become more clearly and firmly pressed on my heart in the course of preaching through Exodus this year. For me, good […]
Do you ever feel like you are “giving a sermon” instead of “preaching a sermon?” The first feels like pushing a sermon off the pulpit and hoping it crawls to people. The latter, though, feels like a fire rising from the pulpit, in which you invite people to huddle around. Do you know what I […]
What to do when the text before you will wound the people who will sit and stand to listen to you? You know it will provoke pain in those of tender consciences. You are sure it will touch the raw nerves of the recently grieved and provoke the ire in the permafrost of resentment that […]
The writer Dorothy Parker famously said ‘I hate writing. I like having written.’ I wonder if many of secretly feel like that about preaching. Do you love preaching, as a calling, but find parts of it terrifying or exhausting? When I was a full-time minister, preaching most weeks to – or with, really, as I think of it […]
Over the years I’ve heard hundreds of sermons – some good, some not so good, and some even on their way to becoming great. But the one thing which distresses me is listening to a ‘gutless’ sermon. What do I mean? A ‘gutless’ sermon is one that is calculated in every turn, precise in every detail, […]
Spirituality might well be a frequent topic of conversation today – but when it comes to the preacher, it is one of the hardest issues to master. How significant is the state of the preacher’s walk with God when it comes to measuring the impact of their sermons? This issue isn’t discussed much because it […]
We are all familiar, no doubt, with the well worn adage that there are ‘many sermons in search of a text’. This expresses the idea that many sermons are well constructed, have well chosen illustrations, apt applications, and well crafted affective impact – but they lack any explicit exposition of a biblical text. It is […]
Nearly two years ago I was reading a book by John Wright, Telling God’s Story. One of the book’s valuable observations is that as preachers we tend towards comic rather than tragic sermons. This has nothing to do with being funny or not, but is rather the tendency to resolve our sermons on good notes rather […]
