preaching on Teachers

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...

God of Grace and God of Glory–rich in love and mercy, all powerful and everywhere present: We come to You at Your bidding, trusting in Your faithful compassion and not in our fruitless efforts to do w...

I preached myself, the scholars came and praised me. I preached Christ, the sinners came and thanked me.

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...

How Will We Preach and Teach from Proverbs? Reading, let alone preaching, from The Book of Proverbs comes with its challenges. Sometimes those sayings can seem just plain obvious and not much help ...

A Musical Compilation over the Decades of Our Lives Regardless of the medium that delivered the tunes to us: radio, jukebox, record player, 8 track, cassette tape, CD, Mp3, iTunes, Pandora, or Spoti...

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...

The Power (and Peril) of Words One time, I lied to the elders. (That’s another story except to say that they were blinded by trust.) It wasn’t a big lie—I said I’d done something I hadn’t—but I reali...

300 10-Minute Devotions For the past six years I’ve been a volunteer chaplain at Haywood Pathways Center , a Christian residential program for people working to turn their lives around from addict...

Something I’ve noticed over time is that, while we Protestants try to live “ sola scriptura (by scripture alone) ,” a large number of traditions have crept into our theology and praxis over time. One ...

The Master & His Workshop I remember first walking into my friend Andrew’s new workshop, housed in a colonial-style barn and situated on an expansive wooded acreage on the Eastern Seaboard. Thin...

“Teaching is no joke, sonny! … Comforting truths, they call it! Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards. Besides, you’ve no right to call that sort of thing comfort. Might a...

How do you choose what to preach on any given Sunday? Are you a… Lectionary Preacher ? Occasional use of the lectionary, select seasonal use of the lectionary, or full-throttle every Sunday and any...

People have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don't know is that they are the actors on the stage; he (the preacher) is ...

Jim Rayburn, the founder of Young Life, a nationwide youth ministry, used to say, “It’s a sin to bore a kid with the gospel.” But what about adults? Is it okay to bore grownups with the gospel? I ask ...

Does the Gospel I preach and teach have a natural tendency to cause people who hear it to become full-time students of Jesus? Would those who believe it become his apprentices as a natural “next step”...

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 (the soil too close to...

One Sunday morning in a more traditional worship service, a rather verbose minister stepped up to the pulpit and announced to the congregation, "I've been told that I'll be moving on to l...

A 4-Part Series on Sermon Writing Imagine what you would have thought on the first day of class if your professor told you that you would have to write an original theological paper every week that h...

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...

We pray, dear God, for our spiritual leaders. Increase in them the charism of faith that they might preach the Word of God with boldness. Increase in them the charism of wisdom that they might gui...

Introduction This message is primarily directed to my friends for whom the word “lectionary” sounds like a disease. I, too, once shared your visceral shudder when someone uttered the phrase “lectiona...

Preachers are not salesmen, for they have nothing to sell. They are bearers of Good News.

Kate's Crisis: Values vs. Church One damp afternoon during the fall of 2016 I was sharing a pastoral conversation with Kate, a professional artist in her late 20s. Over years of meals and convers...

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...

I came to believe that my job was not to receive and critique a sermon but to dig into it, to seize its power, to participate with its message, and to steal its fruit.

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 ...

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 ...

What your guest preacher needs to know to be successful ‘Tis the season for guest preachers isn’t it? Especially as we head into the Fourth of July. I had the great opportunity to preach for a congr...

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 ...