90 second preaching survey

I am writing a book on what we can learn from good preachers and communicators.

I hope to include an online resource as part of the Wycliffe Hall School of Preaching with observations on some of the best preachers today.

Could you take a moment to answer these two simple questions? (use the comment tag below)

I’ll let you know the results in due course!
Simon

 

1.  Who is your most favourite living preacher(s) to listen to?

 

 

 

2.  Can you name what it is that they do that makes you listen?

 

 

Is my greatest need the thing I least want?

My greatest need is the thing I least want

This statement is true is it not?  It explains why the good news of the offer of new life in Christ is the very thing I am so reluctant to accept.

 Let me expand:  “my heart is restless until it finds its rest in God” (to paraphrase Augustine).  God has put “eternity in my heart” (Eccl 3:11).   

 If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.   (The Timeless Writings of C.S. Lewis: The Pilgrim’s Regress, Christian Reflections, & God in the Dock)

 But, following in the line of Adam, I would rather determine my own destiny, live my life my way, without reference to God, as the master of my own fate.

 I am a dissatisfied soul who refuses to seek the only true solace:

• I am restless.  Jesus says: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matt 11:28);
• I full of guilt.  Jesus says “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matt 11:29-30)
• I want life.  Jesus says “I have come that you might have life and life to the full” (John 10:10).  It is as Jesus said to the Pharisees in his day:  You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me.  But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life. (John 5:39-40)

 If it is true for non-Christians that their greatest need is the thing which they least want, this is also true for my experience as a believer.  This is the conundrum of why I know the good but don’t do it.  I am living contradiction. 

  I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good .  For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God — through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Rom 7:21-25)

 Dick Lucas once said in a sermon: ‘The pew cannot control the pulpit.  We cannot deliver “demand led” preaching because no one demands the Gospel’.  These are profoundly pertinent words.

 Of course there is a demand-led kind of preaching, but it won’t do your soul any good The same was true in Paul’s day.  For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers. 2 Tim 4:3.

 So, it would seem to me there are two prayers which Gospel minded people might want to pray:

1. Lord, so immerse me in your word that I think your thoughts and know your mind.  May your agenda, your message, your life-giving Gospel be what emanates from my lips, not the wants and desires of a restless entertainment oriented audience.
2. Lord, help me to want what I most need.  Change my desires so that the attractiveness of the glory of God is my greatest desire, and incite a holy appetite for you in my deepest being.

 Perhaps, with these thoughts in mind, my greatest desires will end up matching my greatest needs, and I will want what a need most.

The Financial Crisis (Part two)

Wycliffe Hall was very fortunate to be able to welcome Lord Brian Griffiths, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, to deliver a lecture on a Christian response to the current financial crisis to our students this week.

His perspective on the causes of this crisis are a combination three things:  excessive public borrowing with the ratio of debt to household income now standing at about 150%;  Banks turning into lending shops, the lack of relationship between lender and borrower, and failures to check people’s ability to pay; and, thirdly, the failures of world governments to regulate what is going on in investment banks.

The most interesting bits of his lecture were his three implications arising out of his Christian convictions.  Regrettably time was short, so these were little more than snapshots:

a.  Throughout Scripture debt is viewed as something that is problematic; e.g. laws about the land, debts and usury in the Pentateuch as well as the perspective of Proverbs 22:7 “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender”

b.  The cycles of economic life (upturn, downturn, boom, recession) need to be interpreted in the light the cyclical flow of the Sabbath, the jubilee provisions etc.  A good example is the Millennium commitments to the forgiveness of debts.  It is even more important that as we go into recession we hold to these commitments.

c.  Jesus says: You cannot serve God and Mammon (Mammon being the personification and deification of money).  Greed is not good – in fact, greed is the cause of excessive worry (according to Jesus in Matthew 6:24ff.).

As the financial crisis continues to deepen, it is good to be reminded of our commitment to care for the poor (and not renege on this as we feel the pinch) and the challenge to ensure that we love the Lord as our highest and best love, not the things of this world.

Wouldn’t it be good if Christian leaders faithfully teach the Kingdom standards set out in the Bible and help God’s people live wisely in testing times?

On being ‘contemporary’ and ‘biblical’ by John Stott

“Imagine if you will, a flat territory that is deeply cut by a ravine or a canyon.  On the one side of the ravine is the biblical world, and on the other side is the modern world.  Between these two territories lies a deep gulf – two thousands years of changing culture.  Evangelical people like me live in the biblical world, on one wide of the divide.  We believe the Bible, meditate on the Bible, and love the Bible.  We are essentially biblical people.  But we are not so comfortable in the modern world, on the other side of the divide.  If like me you’re senescent, if not senile, the you probably feel threatened by the modern world.

Much modern preaching emanates from the biblical world.  Indeed, we wouldn’t dream of preaching from anywhere but the Bible.  But somehow this preaching goes up in the air but fails to land on the other side of the divide.  Our preaching is biblical but not contemporary.

Those who think themselves as liberal often make the opposite mistake.  They live in the modern world.  People listen to them because they seem to resonate with modernity, or post-modernity.  They are not chocked or threatened but the culture of the modern world – they have built in shock absorbers.  They read modern poetry, modern philosophy, modern psychology, modern science; they are moving with the times.  But in reality they have jettisoned biblical revelation.  They may be contemporary, but they are decidedly un-biblical.  Their preaching lands squarely in contemporary reality, but where it comes from, heaven along knows!  It does not come out of Scriptures.

… Evangelicals are biblical, but not contemporary, while liberals are contemporary but not biblical, and almost nobody is building bridges and relating the biblical text to the modern context.

{We need ‘double listening’} Listening to the voice of God in Scripture, and listening to the voices of the modern world, with all their cries of anger, pain and despair…

(From ‘Preach the Word’ (Edited by Greg Haslam) chapter by John Stott entitled “The Paradoxes of Preaching”, by John Stott)