fundamentalism by blunt instrument
My morning sermon this Sunday (8/14) was based on an outline I found in a footnote to William R. Newell’s commentary on Romans 4.14. The footnote was so profound that I thought it shouldn’t lie dormant in the commentary but be fleshed out in a whole sermon.
I thought I’d share the entire footnote with you as well. I’d encourage the preachers in the audience to steal it too. It is well worth preaching.
… is sweet to the soul.
So says Pr 13.19a. I wonder if we take that out of context, considering the parallel phrase in Pr 13.19b, but…
But I just finished a massive amount of re-coding our Thru the Bible html index project.
Between August of 2005 and April of 2007 we took our church through a marathon chronological Bible reading and preaching project. We read the same passages together, worked through study guides, and preached messages covering the material we were reading each week.
I created Thru the Bible 1.0 with just the Old Testament index. It was kind of clunky looking, basically really really old-fashioned HTML, back eons ago when the web was young (and ugly). This index contained only our written material.
Tonight I finally finished the re-write of the whole project, OT, Intertestamental period, and NT. It looks much better than the earlier effort, although I am not sure it reaches the level of what the geeks call “Web 2.0”. Anyway, it looks a lot better than the first version.
And it contains all the audio files.
I plan to burn these on DVDs, and will make them available to anyone who asks for the cost of postage. (These will be on basic cheap DVDs, if you want a “100 year” DVD, it will cost $5 plus postage.)
I still have to double check all my links, but praise the Lord, all the coding is done.
Now its time to go to bed. How many late nights has this been?
UPDATE: DVDs now available!
I love computers. I am self-taught on this subject, but am fairly conversant with how they work. When a techno-geek starts “talking techie to me”, I can usually follow a good bit of the conversation.
But, alas, there is a point where the tech can lose me. I’m not that computer literate after all.
In any technical field, be it the arcane nuances of computer networking or the intricacies of the hypostatic union, those ‘in the know’ find themselves afflicted with their own jargon – terms that mean much to the speaker, but almost nothing to the hearer.
If you would be an effective communicator, what to do?
I want to pick up on something I said in my last post. I was observing the influence of much admired and frequently listened to preachers on those who admire and listen to them. Here is a bit of what I said:
The preachers you listen to influence your own preaching. … I have spent hours listening to Mark Minnick. Mark was my Pulpit Speech teacher. I have intentionally tried to imitate his methods and something of his style. As I began listening to the Trinity messages this summer though (and most of them were Chuck Phelps), I caught myself a few times in the pulpit saying things in a way that sounded to me like the way Chuck would say it. I think Chuck has a certain cadence to his preaching that is a bit unique among preachers, and I was unconsciously (or semi-consciously) picking up on that.
Chuck himself mentioned this tendency among preacher boys in one of the messages I listened to today. He said that those who sat under Tom Malone often mimicked some of his habits as did those who sat under Dr Bob Sr. Of course, I have observed this with other admired preachers as well. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing!
But it does mean preachers need to be careful who they admire, who they listen to, and who influences them. I think that subject is probably worth another post at some point.
The influence of one preacher on another is all well and good if the admired and followed preacher is a fully faithful member of the clergy. You may pick up mannerisms – that is one thing. But much more you should pick up philosophy, methodology, zeal, and ministry patterns. And you will, if you make a study of a particular preacher or preachers.
That means you must choose your models very, very carefully. Some young men today are making extremely unwise choices in this regard.
I am on my way to the Western Canada Baptist Fellowship annual meeting, this year featuring the preaching of Mark Minnick. The meeting will be held in Calgary, AB, Thursday-Saturday (although I have to beat it out of town on Saturday to make it home for our own services).
On the way, I am going to spend a day with my parents in my quirky and beloved Alberta home town. I say quirky because my love for this town is mostly nostalgic. There is nothing special about the town per se, but there are excellent memories to be had on almost every street of the little burg… and it is on the prairies where you can see the sky. What more could one ask out of a home town?
I had intended to get an early ferry and make it home before I rested my weary head, but certain family responsibilities meant I had to catch a noon ferry. So here I am, twelve hours after disembarking, still a couple of hours from home, and ready to sack out. But before I do, a few comments on preaching…
When driving alone, I love nothing better than listening to sermons. With modern technology I do this with a PDA and an auxiliary plug in my CD player. In my twelve hours on the road, I managed to listen to 15 and a half sermons today! Kind of a soul-food pig-out session!
and blogging about them out of doors, with the sounds of my family enjoying themselves and me obsessively reading the latest in the unending fundi-neo wars…
A friend of mine asked me to listen to two messages preached recently by two men of similar age and relatively similar standing in the world. So my son and I listened to them on the way to camp. Here is our take:
One wonders what kind of impact these differences will have on the Christian church in the next few years.
~~~
I’ve also noticed another preacher taking potshots at this space. I’ll not name the preacher, or where it was done, but it is typical of the individual involved. May God help him.
I am not going to link to outside commentaries on this one, though references abound, particularly in some quarters. My subject is the negative rap placed on ‘revivalism’ and ‘decisionism’ by some. And of course, I’d like to take a contrarian position.
First, let me acknowledge that I oppose the “I prayed a prayer” approach to assurance. A great deal of damage has been done by giving people the misconception that if they say the right words to God, they will magically be born again.
Salvation isn’t a matter of getting the words right in your prayer!
Salvation isn’t a matter of getting the words right in your prayer! It isn’t a matter of crying the appropriate number of tears, walking an aisle, being baptized, or any other such matter of external activity.
Salvation is a matter of living faith in the work of Jesus Christ on the cross.
Now, is salvation a one-time decision, or not? What does it mean to be born again? And is it right for Christian ministers to call for a decision for Christ?
Have you noticed the mini-trend to call sermons ‘talks’? I am noticing this within a certain segment of Christianity, seemingly conservative. Isn’t the term a little disconcerting?
Does it matter?
It seems to me that it does, but then…
“The gospel of Jesus Christ is not popular with the natural man. He is against it. So that if you find the natural, unregenerate man praising either the preacher or his message then, I say, you had better examine that preaching and that preacher very carefully.”[1]
[1] D. M. Lloyd-Jones, Romans: The Gospel of God, p. 264.
One of my life-long interests is space exploration. I wrote papers on it in junior and senior high school. I avidly followed the news of space exploration as a teenager. I remember lying in bed at kids camp, listening to the radio broadcast of “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” The day was July 20, 1969 and I was 12 years old. The sounds of that crackly radio and the silence in my cabin at camp come back to me whenever I think about it.
One of the best ways I’ve found to feed my interest in space exploration is to subscribe to the NASA website with BlogLines. You can tap into it here. I don’t read every article in its entirety, but I scan all the headlines and read a good many of them. (There are often excellent sermon illustrations to be found as well.)
This week, something new came back to us from space.
The latest audio from the GBCvic
Comments