“I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt? . . . What would Jesus Christ have preached if he’d taken a poll in Israel? . . . It isn’t polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It’s right and wrong.” — President Harry S. Truman (Truman, David McCullough, 914-915)
Category: Preaching (Page 8 of 12)
“Walter Wilson, a medical doctor and pastor/teacher in Kansas City, worked hard and wrote much to help preachers on this subject. In a series of lectures that he delivered in Chicago many years ago, he astonished the group by stating that one hour of abandoned preaching was equal to eight hours at the executive desk and twelve to fourteen hours of manual labor. As a doctor he sustained these statistics with tests that he conducted on preachers of all ages and sizes. His text for that series of lectures was taken from those words in the Gospels, where Jesus declared, ‘I perceive that virtue has gone out of me‘ (Luke 8:46, KJV, emphasis ours).” (Stephen F. Olford, Anointed Expository Preaching, p.56)
“When the Author of the Scriptures is released afresh on God’s people He delights to make His words clear to them as He wrote them. Clarity should be the goal of every preacher and every sermon. Clarity is different than relevance. I don’t aim to make the Bible relevant. It is already more relevant than I could ever make it. The Bible is the most relevant book in the world, because it has been written by the timeless, unchanging God. No teacher makes the Bible relevant. His highest aim is to clearly expose its relevance to those who are listening. That resulting clarity regarding relevance leads to changed lives. The people walked away from Ezra’s preaching and lived differently ‘because they now understood the words that had been made known to them’ (Neh. 8:12b). ” (Revival in the Rubble, p.167)
“Our authority comes from the text of Scripture, but it must be delivered under the empowering of the Holy Spirit to be biblical preaching. So, in once sense, there is experience necessary for authority in preaching–the experience of God the Holy Spirit pulling the preacher through the knot-hole of divine truth in Scripture and then pouring that truth of holy Scripture through the clean vessel of the preacher. Our every experience must be governed by the text of Scripture, and our every proclamation of the text of Scripture must be empowered by the Holy Spirit. When these two elements come together as we step into the pulpit the apostle Peter’s words come true: ‘Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God’ (1 Pet. 4:10-11a).” (Embracing Authority, p.157)
“I define expository preaching as that form of proclamation which, in reliance upon the Holy Spirit, arises from and is delivered through a study of the grammatical, syntactical, literary, historical, contextual, theological and cultural elements of a given biblical text and seeks to convey the abiding and authoritative principles that are inherent in that text and were primary in the original author’s intention in such a way that the enduring relevance of the Scriptures are made plain for the contemporary listener.” (Embracing Authority, pp.166-167)