“The power consists in the action of the speaker’s soul on the soul of the hearer” (Fish, Power in the Pulpit, p. 12).
Getting Into the Pulpit, and Letting Fly
Sermons should not be “addressed to nobody, owned by nobody, and if an hundred people were to read it, not one of them would think himself concerned in its contents . . . [a sermon’s sentences should be] “pounded together until they crack, and where figure, trope, allegory, metaphor, antithesis, interrogation, anecdote — anything that …
Putting On the Jesus Coat
INTRODUCTION:Adam was created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). After the disastrous fall into sin, mankind retained the image of God (Gen. 9:6), but it was barely recognizable, lying now in ruins. The purpose of Christ coming was to re-establish mankind in the second Adam, and to renew the image of God in us. …
And That, At Least, Is Plain
“A man who cannot make things plain is not qualified to fill a pulpit” (Fish, Power in the Pulpit, p. 7).
A Noble Task
“It is much easier to be unintelligible than intelligible. ‘Ah, my brethren,’ said Archbishop Usher, ‘how much learning it takes to make things plain'” (Fish, Power in the Pulpit, p. 7).
Remembering the Whole Point
“And it is undoubtedly a chief defect in the sermons even of evangelical pulpits, that there is not enough of Christ in them . . . Flavel was right: ‘The excellency of a sermon lies in the plainest discoveries and liveliest applications of Jesus Christ'” (Fish, Power in the Pulpit, p. 6).
Because Some Scholars Are Stuck, Right Up to the Axle
“Some scholars are so fearful of leap-frogging the original meaning [of the OT] that they never get past it” (Murray, How Sermons Work, p. 43).
Don’t Be That Preacher
“Dropping buckets into empty wells,And growing old in drawing nothing up” (William Cowper, as quoted in Fish, Power in the Pulpit, p. 5)
The Remarkable Inner Man
INTRODUCTION:In this chapter, human language almost collapses—even though it is inspired human language—under the weight of glory that God has prepared for His children. We see this at the beginning of the chapter, where Paul starts with “I, Paul” in the nominative, and he never gets to a verb that goes with that beginning. This …
So Preach the Gospel
“Human philosophy, the wisdom of the world, has never converted a soul” (Fish, Power in the Pulpit, p. 3).