“I have no problem with starting where people are. Here’s what you’re thinking about. Here’s what you’re worried about. But I very quickly want to get to the biblical narrative, because we’re called to bring them into God’s story, not to show them how God fits into theirs.”
“There are people who I listen to that would not have the same preaching style I do, but they are just incredible.”
“In our kind of Western context, we have a lot of preachers who only see themselves as defenders of orthodoxy…And when I’m preaching, there are moments that I have to do the defender of orthodoxy thing and I want to be faithful to do that when it’s necessary…Usually when I climb up into that pulpit, metaphorically speaking, what I am thinking about is I’m thinking about preaching as a missionary.”
“If I’m preaching 52 weeks a year, I would want probably 40 of those just to be classic working our way through text exegesis.”
“One of the weaknesses, I think, in starting in Genesis 1 your first day as a pastor and then for the next however many years is, I don’t want people to only hear the Gospel of John one time, 17 years into my ministry.”
“I have a team of people, elders, other leaders here that we get together about every three months and we try to project about six months out.”
“One of the great things about having time in your sermon preparation is once you put something on your radar screen, your mind starts to collect stuff.”
“Two weeks before I preach the message, I’m going to spend a lot of time in that chapter and in that text.”
“I use members of the congregation where I would actually ask them to read along with me and say, ‘What do you feel like is in this text for our church?’ And I’ve just found that the questions people bring to a text are different based on where they are in life.”
“That’s part of what it means to be the body of Christ, is that we all see and sense different things about Jesus that we bring to worship, bring to church service.”
“People have bandwidth to really have one thing that is major. So I will have sermons with multiple points, but there’s always one major driving point.”
“For a lot of us, it’s like we preach in this echo chamber and we’re only good at reaching one kind of person because that’s all we know how to preach to.”
“After the first service, we do sort of a post mortem. You know, what didn’t come out right? What was not funny? What did I miss? An obvious application. Where do I need to tighten up, shorten, lengthen and expand?”
“One of the things we’ve got to do is not have other preacher envy. How God made you is not how he made them…figure out what works for you.”
Mentioned in the Show
1 Corinthians
John 4
Proverbs 15:22
2 Timothy 4:1-2
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Augustine
“Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today” by John R.W. Stott
Charles Spurgeon
Erwin Lutzer
“Evangelism in the Early Church” by Michael Green
H.B. Charles
John Chrysostom
R. Kent Hughes
Tim Keller
