INTRODUCTION: On Ascension Sunday, we mark the glorious coronation of the Lord Jesus. After His resurrection, He established to His disciples that He was in fact alive forever, and then He ascended into the heavens. When He did this, He was received by the Ancient of Days, and was given universal authority over all the …
Suspicion and Bitterness in the Ministry
“Nor is suspicion merely a source of disquietude, it is a moral evil, and injures the character of the man who harbours it. Suspicion . . . creates . . . in ministers bitterness; such bitterness as in spirit dissolves all the ties of the pastoral relation, eating like a corrosive acid into the very …
Introduction to Amos
The series will be interrupted almost right away because next Sunday is Ascension and the Sunday after that is Pentecost. But yesterday I began a series through the book of Amos, which will resume after Pentecost.
Don’t Let Gossips Drive the Ministry
“Every church, and, for the matter of that, every village and family, is plagued with certain Mrs. Grundys, who drink tea and talk vitriol . . . There are also certain persons who are never so happy as when they are ‘grieved to the heart’ to have to tell the minister that Mr. A. is …
The Roar of God: Amos I
INTRODUCTION: As God gives us the grace, we will now begin to work our way through the prophecy of Amos. Apart from what is revealed in his writing here, we know nothing about the man. Among the minor prophets, he occupies the vanguard in this period of Israel’s history, even though he is placed third …
Love More Than Books
“Many preachers are utterly ignorant as to how the bulk of the people are living; they are at home among books, but quite at sea among men . . . Read men as well as books, and love men rather than opinions, or you will be inanimate preachers” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. …
Real Ambition
The message this last Lord’s Day was on ambition.
Preaching in the Graveyard
“Remember, you are not sent to whiten tombs, but to open them” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 314).
Lost Fire
“There is, no doubt, such a thing as feeding the brain at the expense of the heart, and many a man in his aspirations to be literary has rather qualified himself to write reviews than to preach sermons. A quaint evangelist was wont to say that Christ hung crucified beneath Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. It …
So Spit on Your Hands, and Throw Your Necktie Over Your Shoulder
“If we are not zealous, neither will they be. It is not in the order of nature that rivers should run uphill, and it does not often happen that zeal rises from the pew to the pulpit” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 306).