Posts Tagged ‘Preaching’

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Three Ingredients for Faithful Preaching

Faithful preaching has three primary ingredients. Creativity and homiletical polish are helpful, but the key ingredients of faithful preaching are preset and established by God. The three ingredients touch on who is qualified to preach, why one should preach, and what one should preach. Read more

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Four Ways My Preaching Has Evolved and How Yours Should Too

Though for years I’ve been trying, I’m now resigned to the fact I’ll never forget my first sermon. It was the summer of 1996, and I had been invited to preach at a women’s halfway house. I spent the week frantically trying to create a sermon. Having no assistance from others, and even less expertise, a sense of desperation came over me. I jotted down all the preacher jargon I knew, my favorite Bible verses, a few life observations, a couple of college basketball illustrations, and my personal testimony. I learned the hard way: such a menagerie does not a good sermon make. Read more

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Five Rules for Sermon Illustrations

Have you ever heard a sermon illustration that did more harm than good? I have. In fact, just recently I heard a sermon illustration that was an absolute train wreck. It sent God’s people on an unhelpful diversion, had nothing to do with the passage, and compromised the sermon’s final, concluding thrust. In other words, it was a disaster, and the results were debilitating to the sermon. Read more

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On Preaching and the Public Invitation System

Several years ago, I preached a series of renewal services at Rosedale Baptist Church in Abingdon, VA. Commonly referred to as a “revival,” or, in previous generations, a “protracted meeting,” each service carried a specifically evangelistic emphasis. I prayed the Lord would be pleased to honor the preaching of His Word, call many to faith in Christ, and produce spiritual fruit that remains. Read more

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The Church Triumphant (Matthew 16:13-20)

We consider this morning, one of the great passages in all of the Bible, Matthew chapter 16. For those of us in ministry and for those of us pursuing ministry, it is a passage that we are familiar with. But it is a passage that, in my mind, is paradigmatic for ministry. It is a passage that is a mountain peak in the new testament, and one that those of us in ministry should come back to again and again and again. It rightly situates our minds about what the church is, and what Jesus has promised to do through it and on its behalf. Read more