Resources on Preaching
On Sunday morning, Lord willing, I shall complete a three month series in 1 Thessalonians. Like many other preachers, my favorite book of the Bible is the one I am preaching. This letter of Paul is no exception. Calvin, Simeon, and Stott were particularly helpful advisors as I worked through the text, and I put their books back on my shelves with thanksgiving for each man’s piety, skill, and wisdom. When in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, the apostle writes: “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” we obtain insight into how Paul the pastor prayed for his congregation.…
Read MoreTomorrow evening at First Presbyterian Church Yazoo City I begin a series of sermons on the Psalms. One of the highlights of preparing to preach Psalm 1 is returning to an old and trusted friend, William S. Plumer’s Psalms: A Critical and Expository Commentary with Doctrinal and Practical Remarks. His exposition is faithful to the text, and his doctrinal and practical remarks are full of the pastoral wisdom that makes for solid sermon applications. Since I purchased this book in the early 1990s, it has been my “go to” commentary on Psalms. Nuggets from this week’s reading: “The sum of [Psalm 1] is that the just and he alone is blessed.” “However tried and afflicted, every servant of God has vast treasures of good things in…
Read More1843 was a momentous year in Presbyterian history. The founders of the Free Church of Scotland abandoned homes, incomes, and church buildings to uphold the spiritual independence of Christ’s church. Their courage captured the attention of the evangelical world, and bequeathed stirring testimonies of faith and fortitude to subsequent generations of Bible-believing Presbyterians. Author Sandy Finlayson skillfully sketches the lives of ten of these leaders in Unity & Diversity: The Founders of the Free Church of Scotland. Bound together by love of the gospel, a high view of the authority of God’s word, confessional fidelity, and missionary outreach, these men nevertheless held a variety of opinions on controversial issues of the day: church union with other Presbyterian denominations, Roman Catholic emancipation, the evangelistic campaigns of Dwight L.…
Read MoreA friend reminds me that homiletics is a physician-heal-thyself enterprise, so my critiques of student sermons are restrained. But not as restrained as those offered by “a sexton at whose church theological students frequently did the preaching. He always had three stock answers when they asked with anxious curiosity how they had done. If they had done well he would reply, ‘The Lord has been gracious’; if moderately well, ‘The text is difficult; and if badly, ‘The hymns were well chosen.’” [1] My criticisms are more direct, but not so much as those offered by Professor James Benjamin Green, who began teaching at Columbia Seminary in 1921. After one student’s sermon, he offered this analysis: “There were three problems with this sermon:…
Read More“Ministers must pray much, if they would be successful . . . Many good sermons are lost for lack of much prayer in study.” – Robert Traill in The Westminster Directory of Public Worship. Discussed by Mark Dever and Sinclair Ferguson (Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Heritage, 2008), 33.
Read MoreThirty-five years ago I finished college and began preaching full-time. For a year, I served as student pastor of Wales Presbyterian Church in Tennessee, a congregation in the old Southern Presbyterian Church (PCUS). Almost everything I owned fit into my 1970 Chevrolet Impala and off I went to preach the gospel. In addition to a King James Bible, my preaching Bible at the time, I took three valuable books. One was was actually a booklet, the outlines and notes from John Stott’s expositions on Romans delivered at the 1979 Urbana Missions Conference. The first-time I heard Stott preach, I determined to follow his pulpit example best I could. A model expositor – clear, persuasive, and, above all, faithful to the text – he preached Christ and him crucified. At…
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