Friends, Jesus saves. Believe it. Preach it. Pray it. Share it.

I’m preaching my guts out at Garden City, banking on the truth that Jesus makes dead people come alive and that Jesus builds his church.

Garden City Church is ten weeks old, and Jesus is on the move. And Sameer is a fifteen days saved, and he’s begun writing about it on his own blog. Click here to read Sameer’s story in his own words. Below is the lead in:

I attended Garden City three weeks ago as a guest with my childhood friend John. It was an ordinary day and I wasn’t expecting much. During the sermon, I heard the gospel for the first time. My legs were trembling, and my heart was sweating. I felt Jesus for the first time.

Photo: Michael Ziegler

Join us this Sunday at 4pm.

John Koessler reminds us that preaching is nothing less than raising the dead. This book makes me want to preach! Folly, Grace, and Power will give you fresh courage to preach your guts out through the power that Jesus supplies.

When I enjoy a great meal I say, “that hit the spot.” Good preaching should hit the spot.

Preaching isn’t only about preaching a biblical text or preaching the gospel from that text. When you preach you should always have a spot in mind–a target. As you study your text, also study your people and your culture. Pay attention to the tension points your text exposes in your own heart, in your church, and in your culture. A spot emerges. Focus your sermon, focus the gospel, on hitting that tension spot.

You want your hearers coming away from your sermon saying, “that hit the spot.” They don’t say this because you’ve told them exactly what they want to hear and now they’re full and satisfied. They say this because you’ve shown them how Scripture, how Jesus, is the only way to resolve the tension spots of pain, desire, guilt, fear, hope, etc. that mark our lives and culture.

I think, again, that it is essential to the preacher’s success that he should thoroughly enjoy his work. I mean in the actual doing of it, and not only in its idea. No man to whom the details of his task are repulsive can do his task well constantly, however full he may be of its spirit. He may make one bold dash at it and carry it over his disgusts, but he cannot work on at it year after year, day after day. Therefore, count it not merely a perfectly legitimate pleasure, count it an essential element of your power, if you can feel a simple delight in what you have to do as a minister, in the fervor of writing, in the glow of speaking, in standing before men and moving them, in contact with the young. The more thoroughly you enjoy it, the better you will do it all.

This is true of all preaching. Its highest joy is in the great ambition that is set before it. , the glorifying of the Lord and saving of the souls of men. No other joy on earth compares with that. The ministry that does not feel that joy is dead. But in behind that highest joy, beating in humble unison with it, as the healthy body thrills in sympathy with the deep thoughts and pure desires of the mind and soul, the best ministers have always been conscious of another pleasure which belonged to the very doing of the work itself. As we read the lives of all the most effective preachers of the past, or as we meet the men who are powerful preachers of the Word today, we feel how certainly and  how deeply the very exercise of their ministry delights them. -Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching.

Justin Buzzard from WestGate Church on Vimeo.

I’ve always said, you know, that I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize. I don’t respect that at all. If you believe that there’s a heaven and hell, and people could be going to hell, or not getting eternal life or whatever, and you think that, well it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially akward…How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? If I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that a truck was coming at you and you didn’t believe it, and that truck was bearing down on you, there’s a certain point where I tackle you. And this is more important than that.

HT. Baptist Press

Instead, we ought to act our way towards a feeling, trusting that healthy emotions will follow healthy belief and action.

There is no more important arena for exercising this action-precedes-feelings order than in the talking/preaching you do to yourself and others.

The great John Wesley wrestled with this dynamic at a crucial juncture in his ministry. Wesley had come to believe the biblical gospel, to believe the staggering good news of justification by faith alone. This was the gospel he was preaching to himself and to the crowds. His brain believed this gospel, but he wasn’t feeling it and so he doubted whether it would be authentic of him to continue preaching the gospel while lacking the accompanying emotions of joy and feelings of freedom. Fortunately, John Wesley had a friend who gave him a single sentence of counsel that set him free. Below is their historic conversation.

John Wesley: “I see it clearly with my head but I do not feel it, and I had better stop preaching it until I feel it.”

Peter Bohler: “Do not stop preaching it, but go on preaching it until you do feel it.”

Peter Bohler’s ancient counsel to Wesley is my counsel to you, especially when it comes to the discipline of preaching the gospel to yourself and to others.

DO NOT STOP PREACHING IT, BUT GO ON PREACHING IT UNTIL YOU DO FEEL IT!

Today, don’t feel yourself towards an action, act your way towards a feeling. Don’t wait for the joy in order to act, go get the joy! Preach more gospel to yourself. Speak more gospel to others. Do not stop preaching it, but go on preaching it until you do feel it.

I tell the story in this sermon I preached last week at CityLife Church in Boston: Believe the Blessing, Then Go Change the World (Genesis 32:22-31).

Here is a basic rule of thumb. The more people are hurting – the more intense their emotions whatever the emotion might be (fear, shame, anger, despair) – the less they will be able to hear. I might think that I am offering words of life, and the words might actually be good and true words, but by the time I get to the seventh word, most people are hearing “blah, blah, blah.” Yes, there are some outstanding teachers of Scripture who can bring truth to hurting and stuck people in such a way that hearers are on the edge of their seats for . . . minutes at a time. Rapt. But none of us should assume that we are one of those people. This is why I have to say, at least once a week, “ugh, I’m sorry, I have been talking too much. Now I am going to try to just be quiet and listen.” Or, even better, to limit the word count – “I’m talking too much; your turn.” Six words.

Let me give a brief defense. I am not trying to demean the use of words. God speaks to us with words. I am certainly not opting for a near-wordless ministry. And I am not suggesting that we have very little to say. No, all the words of Scripture are good words, and there are lots of them. What I am arguing for are words designed for the person who is struggling and packaged in a way that makes them easy to hear and—this is important—easy to remember.

An effective communicator can take a complex subject, such as a person, and simplify that subject in such a way that there is no loss of meaning. Preachers are exhorted to be able to summarize their sermons in a sentence, and not a run-on sentence. Writers submit their manuscripts to publishers with a synopsis of their book in a sentence. If they can’t do it, they won’t be published.

Read the whole thing.

The great gospel imperatives to holiness are ever rooted in indicatives of grace that are able to sustain the weight of those imperatives. The Apostles do not make the mistake that’s often made in Christian ministry. [For the Apostles] the indicatives are more powerful than the imperatives in gospel preaching. So often in our preaching our indicatives are not strong enough, great enough, holy enough, or gracious enough to sustain the power of the imperatives. And so our teaching on holiness becomes a whip or a rod to beat our people’s backs because we’ve looked at the New Testament and that’s all we ourselves have seen.

We’ve seen our own failure and we’ve seen the imperatives to holiness and we’ve lost sight of the great indicatives of the gospel that sustain those imperatives. Woven into the warp and woof of the New Testament’s exposition of what it means for us to be holy is the great groundwork that the self-existent, thrice holy, Triune God has — in Himself, by Himself and for Himself — committed Himself and all three Persons of His being to bringing about the holiness of His own people. This is the Father’s purpose, the Son’s purchase and the Spirit’s ministry. – Sinclair Ferguson

HT: Of First Importance

When I was 21 I started preaching once a month at The Santa Barbara Rescue Mission. I didn’t know how to preach and I wanted to learn (I preached my first sermon at age 16 without a clue of what I was doing).

Thursday nights 100 or more homeless people filled the pews to listen to me preach my mediocre sermons. After the sermon we ate dinner together.

I had just graduated from college. I worked as a waiter, served as a home group leader and youth leader in my church (where I preached regularly to the youth), and lived in an apartment with two of my college buddies and my younger brother.

I used spare time to work on my sermons for the Rescue Mission. I didn’t have a method. I generally picked a text or two, studied the text, then wrote down a bunch of stuff to say.

One Thursday afternoon I went for a walk with my pastor. He asked me what my sermon was about for later that night. Four minutes into trying to explain what my sermon was about, my pastor interrupted me and said:

SAY IT IN A SENTENCE!

He said I wasn’t ready to preach until I could state what my sermon was about in one clear sentence. That piece of advice transformed my preaching (more on that in this interview).

I immediately drove home and re-worked my sermon for that night. I worked on the message until I could “say it in a sentence.” I went from being a scattered communicator to a clear communicator.

This advice isn’t just for preachers. Today I came across this statement from Academy Award winning playwright, Paddy Chayefsky:

As soon as I figure out the theme of my play, I type it out in a single sentence and Scotch-tape it to the front of my typewriter.  After that, nothing goes onto the page that isn’t on-theme.

That’s good advice. Everybody who talks or writes should listen to it. Preachers, teachers, parents, plumbers, entrepreneurs, managers, etc., say it in a sentence!

Question: How have you seen the value of “saying it in a sentence”?

This is a guest post by my good friend, Toby Kurth, pastor of Christ Church in San Francisco. I asked Toby to post the diagram he created for his current sermon series and to explain the series.

This bookmark encapsulates our fall sermon series, “Covenant: The Story of God and Man.” We are using this series to help our people better understand what the Bible, as a whole, teaches about who God is, who we are, and why it matters. We are combining traditional elements of covenant theology with a simple narrative of redemptive history. We are not after just knowing more about the Bible, but are focusing, in particular, on taking hold of our identity in Christ. What we lost in Adam, we recover in Christ. Despite sin and rebellion, God continued to pursue humanity, culminating in the person and work of Christ. All of Scripture details God’s unfolding plan of redemption. Everything points to Christ. Everything we read in our Bibles fits somewhere into this amazing plan.

We are taking fourteen sermons to unpack the series. The sermon headings are listed below. The diagram above can be downloaded as a bookmark.

1. GOD
2. Man

3. Fall
4. Noah
5. Abraham
6. Moses

7. David
8. Israel
9. Exile
10. New Covenant
11. New Man
12. Fulfillment
13. Signs
14. Restoration

Preaching is a huge commitment. So why would anyone want to bear such a burden? Why put yourself through weekly agony with the potential for public humiliation? Any preacher knows the answer: because speaking as God’s representative, an agent of change and salvation, is the greatest and highest privilege in the world. Whatever study it may demand, whatever sacrifice it may require, whatever effort it may entail is eclipsed and forgotten in the sight of lives touched by God and changed by the gospel.

-Hershael York