preaching on Mental Illness

The Lord calls us to examine the wounds of the Risen One and to see there the depth of his love for us. Let us therefore approach the throne of God in confidence as we pray for the people of God in Ch...

Your Inner Life Matters While I have long recognized the significance of a pastor’s inner life, I hadn’t pondered the relationship between our inner life and the act of preaching until recently. Our ...

In grad school, although I was studying to become a clinical psychologist, I started working at a Baptist church. I discovered then that I loved to preach . . . until one weekend when the sermon wasn’...

Dwight Lyman, better known as D.L. Moody was a renowned evangelist, publisher, and preacher during the late 19th century. On one occasion, he was invited to guest preach at a local church. Soon after ...

A sermon that just informs the mind can give people things to do after they go home, but a sermon that moves the heart from loving career or acclaim or one’s own independence to loving God and his Son...

‘For my own way of expressing myself almost always disappoints me… I am saddened that my tongue cannot live up to my heart.’

I weathered even the worst sermons pretty well. They had the great virtue of causing my mind to wander. Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have though of during bad sermons.

Preaching Angle: Wheat and Weeds Grow Even in the Church God’s good creation grows food for all living creatures. God made the Earth, God made all the plants, and God made all the humans and animals ...

That little vertical bar on the white screen at the beginning of the blank line just keeps blinking. It flashes over and over. Is it mocking you , or is the late hour finally getting to you?  Chance...

HOMILETICS, n. The science of adapting sermons to the spiritual needs, capacities and conditions of the congregation.

It looks so easy. Prewrite. Draft. Revise. Edit. Publish. Substitute “Preach” for “Publish” and you’ve adapted it to sermons. Just five steps and you’re done. The problem is that, even though we taugh...

Diane Ackerman was talking about life, but I think it applies to preaching when she wrote, “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived to the length of it. I want to have liv...

I’m not sure that I could have articulated the ground rules for the search for resilience the way I understand them today, but I must have intuited them nevertheless. Some of the basic ideas were thes...

While sexual sin, financial scandals, and toxic work environments hurt pastoral credibility, a more subtle, and probably more common danger is carelessness with the truth. Intellectual integrity matte...

Unless those who proclaim the Gospel acknowledge honestly that darkness . . . they might as well save their breath for all the lasting difference their proclaiming will make to anybody.

It is a mistake to think that faithful believers in our time are not profoundly shaped by the narratives of modernity. We certainly are, and so when you unveil these narratives and interact with them ...

You may think of quotes as a great thing to add a little gravity, insight, or humor to your sermons. And they are! But have you considered Lent quotes as a jumping-off point for sermon ideas? We pick...

Preaching Commentary Preaching Angle: Preach the Word, Rest in God’s Work Maybe I tend to focus on the negative, but when I read the parable of the soils, I tend to focus on the soils that struggle...

August 2018 Recently I had the opportunity to preach at a church located in a residential neighborhood in a large U.S. city.   I actually preached two weeks in a row, both on the same topic, both in t...

God’s strength is made perfect in weakness. The weaker I became, the more powerful became the preaching.

There once was a popular shaman in India whom people would seek out for advice. People would stand in line for hours, waiting to hear the choices they should make in their lives or the changes that wo...

It is difficult (maybe impossible) to write about self-righteousness without being self-righteous. [Editor’s Note: One might argue the same about preaching!]

Joining the Story “We read to know that we are not alone” (Anthony Hopkins as C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands ). That’s also why we listen to sermons. Someone once told me that in every sermon they hope ...

It must be pointed out to the preacher, if he is to cause his people profit and not to embarrass himself with vain joy and presumption, that preaching is a spiritual exercise rather than a vocal one. ...

For many of us, silence is something we try to avoid, both in conversations and in preaching. But as Richard John Neuhaus aptly describes in his time watching Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his sermo...

Donald Grey Barnhouse, former pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, tells the story of his revered professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, Robert Dick Wilson, a renowned scholar of...

The Scottish pastor Ian MacLaren (1850–1907), renowned for his stories set in rural Scotland, was once asked near the end of his career what he would have done differently. His response was both simpl...

Like Joseph, some have experienced preparation for ministry as a result of undeserved incarceration. John Sung, though not as well known as some of his contemporaries, was one of the great revivalists...

A Game of "Who's the Best Preacher?" What is preached matters far more than how it is preached or who preaches it. In Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, he addresses a troubl...

A Game of "Who's the Best Preacher?" What is preached matters far more than how it is preached or who preaches it. In Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, he addresses a troubl...