Thursday Theological Threads

If you preach a theologically sound sermon, but it doesn’t relate with the reality of life then it won’t connect. My friend Nadia feels that she has to use illustrations from her life, otherwise it won’t be genuine. Nadia may be one of the best living preachers, but I’m not her. Maybe its my introversion, but I’m not always comfortable talking about myself.   Five years ago, I met with Bob Moon—one of the most genuine pastors I’ve ever known. Bob was kind enough to sit down with me and have a long talk about sermon preparation. One of the things he said was, “When you tell a story from the pulpit, never make yourself the hero of your own story.” Stories are important; they connect us and ideas. The illustrations in sermons do not always have to be from our lives—they can come from anywhere we hear the truth: movies, music, plays, TV shows. I’m going to use this blog to share some of the stories and illustrations that have made their way into my sermons. The following one is from Pe...

Do you remember a class having an assigned reading list? The church has one, it’s called the lectionary. Lectionaries pre-date Christianity. Judaism used lectionaries, or assigned readings from Scripture. These readings do have certain purposes—to help us make sense of Scripture by going through highlights of the Old Testament, the gospels, and the letters. During the Reformation, many protestant reformers stopped using the lectionary and started preaching through books of the Bible. If you start reading sermons from the Reformation era they are long—because most people don’t realize that John Calvin and Martin Luther were preaching every day—so those sermons were usually preached over a series of days. When you hear people talking about the church seasons—Advent, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Ordinary Time—the readings will often focus on uniquely redemptive aspects of the life of Jesus. Where’s how this works, in the Old Testament reading, there will be a promise and in the Gospel reading...