INTRODUCTION:We begin this story with the birth and dedication of Samuel. As with many of God’s great men, Samuel’s birth was remarkable. God loves the pattern of death and resurrection, and He also loves the pattern of barrenness followed by fruitfulness. We can see the same truth in how He makes the wilderness become a …
A Real Sham
“Competent fiction writers understand the human predicament well. As a result, their fiction has the feel of fact — of reality, while our fact — our reality — often has the feel of poor fiction” (Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, p. 25).
A Double Bind
“There are in fact preachers who fall into these two camps. Paul Scherer once described them: The one knows what to say but doesn’t know how to say it, and the other knows how to say it but has nothing to say” (Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, p. 17).
Fluid or Static?
“I shall prefer to speak of the continuity or the movement of a sermon, rather than of its outline” (Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, p. 14).
Knots Untied
“Likewise, a sermon is a plot (premeditated by the preacher) which has as its key ingredient a sensed discrepancy, a homiletical bind. Something is ‘up in the air’ — an issue not resolved . . . Preaching is story telling. A sermon is a narrative art form” (Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, p. 12).
Sermons Built From Legos
“I used to feel guilty about the sermon which seemed to have its own demands and desires . . . Of course I was violating the rules of sermon making — for many years before I had been taught the engineering science of sermon construction! To change the metaphor, I had been taught sermonic architecture …
Introduction and Background: Samuel 1
INTRODUCTION:The book of Samuel is the repository of some truly great Bible stories. But more than this, it represents the tale of three very complex characters—Samuel, Saul, and David. And behind it all, we see the promises and mercies of the steadfast God. One of the central things we will learn is the ways of …
Determining What It is You are Doing Up There
“For example, most books on preaching operate on the common assumption that sermonic organization evolves out of the logic of content . . . Truth is, to continue our example, a sermon is not a doctrinal lecture. It is an event-in-time, a narrative art form more akin to a play or novel in shape than …
You Can’t Always Say Everything
“Every good sermon is heresy when judged for all the important truths left untreated” (Fred Craddock, found in Eugene Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, p. xiv).
For Then Am I Strong
“A man must recognize the significance of his inabilities . . . A major step toward experiencing the power of God necessitates a thorough-going recognition of our lack of it . . . the preacher must recognize, and even revel in, his own human inabilities” (Azurdia, Spirit Empowered Preaching, p. 143)