Each Sunday Iām giving out handouts for the sermon, rather than just leaving an empty box (āFor your sermon notesā) on the church notice sheet.Ā Why go to all the extra cost and effort? Here are my ten reasons: As a preacher: 1. It forces me to a point of clarity all the way through
I’d had more than enough of being an itinerant preacher. For the past dozen years or so I’ve been free of Sunday pastoral responsibilities (I’ve had family responsibilities, of course), and so I’ve tracked round the place helping out friends who were on their own and needed a visitor to say the same things in
One of the strange things that happened to me, when I moved back into church-based ministry, was the experience of preaching the same sermon, repeatedly. Ā I’d had it before, but Iād forgotten what itās like. IĀ donāt mean that thing where you need to preach at short notice, dig up a golden oldie, and pray it
I was chatting to a younger minister, a few years out of seminary, but still getting the hang of things. He was also getting tired, and especially tired in the area of preaching. I donāt mean he was becoming bored or disillusioned. Ā Itās just that heād been hanging around a bunch of people (myself included)
Thereās a curious, clarifying moment that happens. Ā Itās impossible to engineer, but without it preaching feels lifeless, by rote. And itās not something that happens in the moment, during the preaching itself. Ā It happens days earlier, in the study. I find it goes like this: Iāve dug deep into the text, and done all my
You cannot read my mind. You might misunderstand me, mishear me, hear what you prefer to hear, or hear what you’ve think I’ve said. So I must speak with unmistakable clarity. I cannot read your mind. I can guess, follow false trails, be preoccupied with my own ideas, or be thinking of what I’m going
A ministry apprentice once asked me a really sharp question. After meeting a number of pastors, all of whom paid particular attention to preaching, he asked, “Are all preachers introverts?” It’s a good question because it seems so counterintuitive at first. The last person he had met was well-known, with a large church and an
The easy way to plan your sermon series is to open your Bible, mark up your main section divisions, and go with those. But that’s letting someone else plan your series for you. So here’s what you can do instead. First, get to know the book well enough that you get a feel for its
“And today, we have a guest preacher….” ….you’ve probably had weeks where you wished you could say that on Sunday. And you’ve a speaking suspicion that your church has Sundays where they wished you could say it too. Over the years I’ve come to admire a wide range of preachers, some well known and many
We had a really encouraging and enthusiastic afternoon with Matt Chandler. Here are my top takeaways:- Parents – We need to keep articulating the gospel, otherwise our kids will believe that either legalism or licence is the way to go. The gospel must NOT be assumed Otherwise we, and they, will continually want to get
Well, that was interesting. My piece on introverts and preaching generated more hits than any other piece on this blog. What does that tell us? That lots of introverts use the web. Nothing to see here, move along please. Or, that lots of us find ourselves caught in the odd place of being happy in
So, sitting with a group of pastors, we were discussing how we can improve as preachers. The generally agreed first thought is that we are not in the best position to assess our own preaching: our sinful selfishness and blindness mean that we are either too harsh or too lenient on ourselves. What to do?
I don’t think anyone became a Christian that night, and it’s not that surprising. The passage Ā was unusual, certainly, and I doubt if more than a handful of people there were familiar with it. But that shouldn’t really have been an issue because a good biblical theology would have been able to travel from there
I nearly drowned this week. Ā Not physically, but mentally. I’d started work on a talk, and pulled four commentaries off the shelves.Ā A couple of hours after I started using the first one I realised that I’d hardly begun. Ā This commentary was B-I-G, with well over a hundred pages on my passage. Should I spend all
As Christmas comes round and carol services appearing the diary, Iām always reminded of one particular conversation, and of the reasons Iām a preacher, and a passionate evangelist. The church I was brought up was always packed for its Christmas services, and it did them well. There was a big choir, properly trained, and it
Here’s a free gift to help you develop as a preacher, or to help you help others. Compare two preachers I heard recently. One had been to college and the other hadn’t, but that wasn’t what we noticed. One was more confident than the other, one gave us too much information while the other weighed
I think the shortest time I ever had to prepare a talk, was around five minutes. It was all down to a blissfully simple misunderstanding. A friend was arranging an evening on world mission, with a variety of speakers from around the country, key folk from local churches, and a number of mission agencies. Quite
Out of the best of motives, at the end of my evangelistic talk, I invited the young people who prayed the prayer of commitment, to raise their hands as they did so.Ā I wanted them to make some definite movement to show that they had given their lives to Christ. Why?Ā To encourage them. But
There are several prayers that I regularly pray as a preacher. 1. Lord, show them what you have shown me. Ā Paul told Timothy to ‘Reflect on what I am saying and the Lord will give you insight’ (2 Tim. 2:7) Ā A sermon is always the product of hard reflection, thinking and study, but there’s the
Thom Rainer has been conducting some surveys (here) about how long pastors spend preparing sermons in an average week. They’ve covered a few famous preachers (Piper, Dever, Driscoll, MacArthur etc), and quite a swathe of the rest of us. The findings are fascinating. The big headline is that most of us (70%) spend about 10-12
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