preaching on Understanding

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...

Building anticipation into one's preaching simply calls for one basic understanding of the task of the pulpit: the goal is not to get something said but to get something heard.

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 Special Kind of Story Most Christians have some idea of what a parable is. Ask an adult Sunday school class and you might hear: “It’s a story!” Another might chime in, “with a moral message!” Mer...

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...

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...

As in buying real estate, three principles are crucial to understanding a person’s words: location, location, and location. We cannot make sense of what someone says unless we understand the context i...

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...

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...

For most of us “seasoned preachers,” when we come to the conclusion that we need a sermon illustration, our minds instantly think “story.” Many preachers use the words interchangeably, but as we will ...

Easter after Resurrection Sunday One of the challenges of the Christian calendar for pastors is that we often put so much energy into Holy Week, that by the time we reach Easter Sunday , and parti...

Ancient lens? What can we learn from the historical context? Context and Tone Paul was writing from prison to a Christian community that he didn’t establish. Rather, it was his co-laborer, Epaphr...

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...

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...

Believe the incredible truth that the Beloved has chosen for his dwelling place the core of your own being because that is the single most beautiful place in all of creation.

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...

Our people probably already know 90 percent of any biblical instruction we plan to give them. The reason they are not yet obeying biblical truth is not because they don't know it but because they ...

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...

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...

Introduction Easter stands out from every other day. It’s time to celebrate and to reflect: how will you “preach the resurrection” and proclaim the new life we have in Jesus Christ? How do we invite ...

Famed pastor and educator A. T. Pierson (1837–1911) lamented his own human inadequacies in communicating to his congregation the depth and levels of the “unsearchable riches of Christ:” “Unsearchabl...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

Only with “gentleness and reverence” will people be able to see, verify, and be persuaded to respond to what we have to say.

I’ve been reading Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What . Miller took this point to an even further extreme. In his book, he tells a story about one occasion when he was speaking to a class at...

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 ...

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...

Your life is in the pulpit with you Fred Craddock said, “Not everything that’s in the Bible is in the Bible .” That’s why we have, among other things, commentaries . The most helpful ones throw o...