“For we give the impression that he who spoke centuries ago is silent today; and that the only word we can hear from him comes out of a book, a faint echo from the distant past, smelling strongly of the mould of libraries. But no, this is not at all what we believe. Scripture is …
Said and Done
“Other preachers are entirely faithful in their exposition of God’s Word, yet remain dull and academic because they have forgotten that the heart of the Bible is not what God has said, but what he has done for our salvation through Jesus Christ” (Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 100).
Straight Foundations
“The kind of God we believe in determines the kind of sermons we preach” (Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 93).
Pulpit Honesty
“The essential secret is not mastering certain techniques but being mastered by certain convictions” (Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 92).
Saul and the Serpent
INTRODUCTION:Saul functions in this story as the last of Israel’s judges. He has been anointed as a king, and acclaimed as one, but he has not yet been made a king. This fact alone means that at the beginning of his reign, there is faithfulness to the theocratic ideal. And, at the very beginning of …
Failure to Communicate
“The anti-authority mood makes people unwilling to listen, addiction of television makes them unable to do so, and the contemporary atmosphere of doubt makes many preachers both unwilling and unable to speak. Thus there is paralysis at both ends, in the speaking and in the hearing. A dumb preacher with a deaf congregation presents a …
An Important Point of Grammar
“Too many sermons are written ‘in the imperative mode’, whereas the religion of the Bible ‘is written largely in the revealing language of the indicative mode’ . . . The power of the religion of the Bible is to be found in its affirmations” (Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 57)
Pulpit Words
“Common usage of pulpit words reflects this distortion. ‘To preach’ has come to mean ‘to give advice in an offensive, tedious or obtrusive manner’, while to be ‘sermonic’ is to inflict on someone a patronizing harangue” (Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 52).
Because the Old Sermons Weren’t Pink Wine Coolers
“Even ‘sermon-tasting’, a reprehensible kind of ecclesiastical pub-crawling, which involved erratic churchgoing merely with a view to sampling and subsequently comparing the eminent preachers of the day, has gone out of vogue” (John Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 50).
The Basic Recovery
“It stands to reason that every recovery of confidence in the Word of God, and so in a living God who spoke and speaks, however this truth may be defined, is bound to result in a recovery of preaching. This must be why so many great preachers have belonged to the reformed tradition” (Stott, Between …