Recently I went against my instincts and walked into an Abercrombie and Fitch in Charleston because I was told they had polo shirts on sale and I needed a couple. As I walked to the clearance section, I was reminded why I had not been in an Abercrombie in so long. The images were nearly …
How long should a sermon be? I write this because after our Easter service and my 15 minute sermon, many folks in our congregation commented that they thought I was just getting started when I gave the invitation. One lady even stopped me and said, “Great sermon, but just one thing…it was too short.” Honestly, …
“We have the text, we believe, as a gracious gift of a God determined not to leave us to our own devices. What happened on Easter, namely, Jesus coming back to us, refusing to leave us alone, intruding among us, is what happens each Sunday in the reading and preaching of the text. Scripture, read …
I spoke with my old strength coach, Jimmy Anderson on the phone yesterday and we talked about lifting, life, and faith. He is a great friend and mentor to me. Jimmy took time to encourage me to strengthen every aspect of my life and shared how he had begun to see some parallels between building …
I am a preacher. I love to preach and listen to preaching, but I also know that I need constantly to be getting better at preaching. As a result, I regularly submit myself to scrutiny over my preaching and take advice and criticism from trusted sources (my wife and our other two pastors, Luke and …
“In order to maintain attention, avoid being too long. An old preacher used to say to a young man who preached an hour, — “My dear friend, I do not care what else you preach about, but I wish you would always preach about forty minutes.” We ought seldom to go much beyond that — …
Tim Challies reminds us to tend to our own families before we seek the approval of others. What if all the blog readers are impressed but my wife is entirely unimpressed? There are many pastors who are loved all around the world but who have earned very little respect in their own church. There are …
Robbed Hell – C.A.S.T. Pearls Presents from Canon Wired on Vimeo.
“Jokes don’t really have a place in sermons. To tell a joke that is obviously set down in a sermon without any relationship to the thrust of the sermon, is to risk trivialization of the sermon. Yet when the gospel, laid next to the human condition, produces humor, then I think it’s fine to let …
“I must make clear in my preaching that I preach what I have been told to preach. I serve the text, not those who listen. I must thereby help my listeners recover the adventure of being those who are baptized to listen to the text, those who bear the burden and the blessing of bending …