There is a huge difference between answering a question hypothetically, and answering it in reality. Take Peter Drucker’s famous clarifying question: ‘What is my single greatest contribution to this organisation?’ I think most Pastors answer that in terms of broad, but good, generalities. I’ve done that too: since I believe that our concern is with
So you’ve done the sentence flow and worked over the passage, and come up with the theme of the passage, and its aim. You take a fresh page, and you’ve identified the theme and aim of the sermon. Yes? Let me ask you a question that troubles me about my sermons – given the wide
The only time I’ve been booed by an audience, was when I was explaining to a large crowd the story of Jesus wrapping a towel round his waist and washing his disciples’ feet. The crowd, mostly Muslim, thought this was an action quite unbecoming the dignity of a prophet. That’s a critical insight into the
I’m delighted to to announce that my next book will be out in the summer. IVP will be publishing it, under the title: ‘Cutting to the Heart: Applying the Bible in Preaching and Teaching.’ The basic argument is that God uses his Word to change us to be like Jesus, and when we preach we should
I’m reading a book about preaching at the moment, and it’s helpful in all sorts of ways. But I’m not going to tell you you which book because I want to criticise it – not for its substance, but for an irritating stylistic tic, which is so common in preaching that most of us who
It happened last Sunday, but it had happened many times before – five minutes into the sermon, and someone had disconnected, glazed over and was gently heading into a doze. Five minutes! How do you react when that happens? (At least, I assume it happens to other people and it’s not just me? Yes?) I’ve
Imagine the crowd at the back of the church, after a clear, simple, evangelistic talk. There’s all the difference in the world between a person who says, ‘I understand that Jesus died for sinners,’ and the one who says, ‘I understand that Jesus died for me.’ What do you want people to say as the
Last week was one of those weeks. A blur of days, coming off the back of a hectic church weekend away, and in which I had planned to squeeze a couple of conferences (a two-day and a three-day), an hour-long lecture on something I hadn’t thought much about, and various meetings and evening events. By
Readers from outside the UK need a quick briefing: at his party’s recent party political conference, the leader of the Opposition, Ed Milliband, gave the traditional keynote speech at the climax. As is his custom, Milliband spoke freely, without visible notes or an autocue, for over an hour. He clearly had prepared, because his notes
Every preacher is a communicator, and every good preacher thinks hard about that part of the work. We think about difficult concepts, and how to make them clear, about whether minor grammatical issues are actually ideas on which a whole argument turns – and so on. We know that
This is a Saturday blog post: on a Saturday if I’m preaching, I’m too preoccupied with tomorrow to write a lot, and every preacher is too preoccupied to read a lot. So, it’s just two words. The two words that swirl round my head as I stare at the material I’m preaching on tomorrow. Two
2 Timothy spoke with awful new force as I preached on it recently and it helped me to understand more of the terrible challenge facing our sisters and brothers in northern Iraq. If there are any left. The image over this post, if it is unknown to you, is the letter N, an abbreviation for ‘Nasara/Nazarene’, now
It was probably the most formative piece of feedback to a sermon I have ever received. I don’t remember what I had preached on, but I know I thought it was pretty average, and I wasn’t happy with it. Straight afterwards a friend came up to me and asked me how I thought it had
The preacher was accomplished and confident; he held the concentration of the crowd, and he certainly had my attention. Although not for the reasons he would have wanted. He had taken one of the stories about Jesus, and explained it from the perspectives of the different characters involved, which is not necessarily a bad tool
TED is a phenomenon. There are now thousands of short talks by world experts available on the TED website, and because so many of them are captivating and memorable, people are asking ‘How can I speak as persuasively as a TED speaker’? And ‘How can I preach like a TED speaker?’ Because if you see
My normal practice is to preach through a book of the Bible. The speed we’ll take it at will depend on various factors, but handling a text this way means I’m not in the driving seat. God is. My agendas are put aside, and stuff comes up as people are exposed to God’s logic and
Yesterday I had the same experience, twice, in different settings. With a bible open in front of me, I looked at a passage I thought I knew really well, and realised that there was a sequence of words (that is, a verse) that I had hardly registered but now hit me between the eyes. I
Last week was one of those ho-hum weeks in the life of a sermon, where there’s only one prayer to pray, and I prayed it with increasing urgency. I did everything I should have done: sentence flow diagram (both Greek and English), translation comparisons, close observations, lots of observations, and the commentaries consulted. I
a) is that true? b) does that matter? Two thoughts strike the average preacher, and can irritate us until we work out how they are related. The first is, no matter how long we preach for, people will always ask us to preach shorter sermons. (if people don’t say this to your face, you can
It’s shocking to consider that when I accept invitations to speak, preach or write, I am doing so for nothing more trivial than a desire to be seen.
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