I think you might find some of these questions helpful to review before preaching or teaching. am-i-ready-to-preach.pdf Continue reading Am I Ready?

I thought I might jot down some interesting quotes from a book on preaching I reviewed a while back, “The Big Idea of Biblical Preaching.” “Sermons…are not addressed ‘to whom it may concern;’ they are delivered to men and women sitting at a certain time of day, usually on Sunday in a building with a zip code…’” (p.26) “While people are laughing, crying and identifying with real-life stories in drama and music, they are adopting values that contribute to a declining cultural morality. In other words, it is the stories and ideas taught by stories that influence people more often … Continue reading What’s the Big Idea?

It is amazing how quickly we can take a good thing and turn it into a bad thing. Like perhaps, take someone saying they submit to Scripture. It doesn’t get much better than that. I meet a person who says they believe what the Bible says wholeheartedly and want to put it into practice and I want to stand up and cheer. At the same time, saying you submit to Scripture and actually submitting to Scripture are two different things. And you know while submission to Scripture is a great thing, saying you submit to Scripture when in fact you … Continue reading On or Under the Bible?

I’ve sometimes heard preachers minimize the importance of application in sermons. I think part of the reason has to do with the fact that there some preachers who focus their entire message on the contemporary significance of a passage and actually end up missing the actual point of the passage. It’s like they take the passage out of the equation actually. They just give ten tips with Bible verses on top. You can see how you would be tempted to react to preaching like that by minimizing application and actually focusing on what the author was saying to his original … Continue reading Application

John Stott, Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today 1.    Expository preaching is Christian preaching. It is not a style of preaching as much as a philosophy of preaching. “…if by an ‘expository’ sermon is meant a verse by verse explanation of a lengthy passage of Scritpure, then indeed it is only one possible way of preaching, but this would be a misuse of the word.  Properly speaking, ‘exposition’ has a much broader meaning.  It refers to the content of the sermon (biblical truth) rather than its style (a running commentary). To expound Scripture is to bring out of … Continue reading What is Expository Preaching?