This week has given me the preacher’s headache: a really, really difficult passage. One of those ones where the commentaries delight in saying, ‘This is one of the most problematic texts in the canon’. One where you start to wonder if you will have anything useful to say come Sunday, or if anyone will notice
“Cutting to the Heart’ now available in both paperback and ebook form. Publisher’s Description On the Day of Pentecost, when the apostle Peter addressed the crowd, the people were ‘cut to the heart’ and asked how they should respond to what they had just heard (Acts 2:37). According to the letter to the Hebrews, ‘the
We’ve all done it. You may be drafting one for Sunday. I certainly am. But why do we preach three-point sermons? Sometimes it’s because the text drives us that way. I think that’s what’s happening for me this week – there really is no way to chunk the passage other than to divide it into
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
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
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
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
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. I’d had it before, but I’d forgotten what it’s like. I don’t mean that thing where you need to preach at short notice, dig up a golden oldie, and pray it
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
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
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
I don’t think anyone became a Christian that night, and it’s not that surprising. The passage 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
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
It was one of the foundational insights of the Reformers – the priesthood of all believers. No more priestly caste, because we confess our sins to “The Reverend One-Another” They even did away with the very word. ‘Presbyter’, or ‘elder’ was preferred, and the anchor point of their work was teaching. But because we are
Because, as someone said today, it’s like doing open-heart surgery, on yourself, without an anaesthetic, in public. Or at least it should be. Think it through: What’s the opposite of each part of that description? How does this Sunday’s sermon shape up? H/t. Trevor Johnston, from the mission society, Crosslinks.
As I’ve thought about the books I’ve read over the past year, one stands out as being remarkable for its depth and relevance. It has a shrewd understanding of what it means to be a Christian and a church living increasingly on the edge of society. And its author understands the temptations we face, whether
One time, I decided to cook a surprise meal for my family. I cook for them fairly often, so Dad in the kitchen wasn’t the surprise. The key is, because it was to be a surprise, I didn’t check that I was doing the right meal. Steak was in the fridge – lots of it,
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