Wednesday, August 25, 2010

preach with a definite action in mind

A friend of mine sent me this quote from W. A. Criswell:

“Preaching is for a holy and heavenly purpose: to win the lost, to edify the saints, and to move a whole community and city and nation God-ward. Every time the preacher stands up to preach, he ought to have before him some definite thing he prays the congregation will do.


Saturday, August 7, 2010

The benefit of being a preacher is that you get to eat before dinner.

Think about it...there you go. You get what I'm saying now. Preachers get to taste the food before it's served.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

how you know you understand it

Such a great principle for preachers:

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein

i was afraid of the text

I was talking to a friend today, sharing my hesitancy to preach a pretty challenging message from a particular text of Scripture. The problem is that I originally thought the sermon was going to be about one thing, which would have been a pretty comfortable message for me to preach; but as I sat with the text for a while, I realized that its application was a bit more "in your face."

So I shared my anxiety with him and his response (via text) convicted me to the core and then immediately filled my heart with faith. He said:
Your objective is faithfulness to the text and to find the application that is coming out of it...Don't strip the word of its power.
Wow. Wow. Wow.

Immediately, I realized that my focus was in the wrong place. I realized that my heart was being gripped by "the fear of man" (Prov. 29:25).

My job is to lay the text out as clearly as possible, trusting God with the results.

So here's a lesson learned: God's transforming power is unleashed as preachers are faithful to say whatever the text says.