Theology That Bites Back
“I can conceive of but two things which should cause the preacher any difficulty in regard to the abundance of subjects for his preaching. The first is the sterility of his own mind, the second is a stilted and unnatural idea of what the sermon he is going to write must be.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 117
Sermon Video Introduction: We begin the second cycle of prophetic ministry from the great prophet Micah. Remember that he ministered over the course of forty years or so, and yet was able to ...
“We are fit for no other life. There can be nothing more modest than that. It is not pride when the beech-tree refuses to copy the oak. He knows his limitations. The only chance of any healthy life for him is to be ads full a beech-tree as he can. Apply all that, and out of sheer modesty refuse to try to be any kind of preacher which God did not make you to be.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 114
“Never let men feel that you and your gospel would be satisfied with mere decency, with the putting down of all vicious life that left the vicious character still strong behind.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 110
“So cordially put the spiritual processes of which you preach within the judgment of all men who know a good life from a bad one. And in the second place strike at the symptom always for the sake of the disease.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 109
“I believe no powerful pulpit ever held aloof from the moral life of the community it lived in, as the practice of many preachers, and the theory of some, would make our pulpit separate itself and confine its message to what are falsely discriminated as spiritual things.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 108
Sermon Video Introduction: One of the reasons we have trouble dealing realistically with evil in this world is that we have drawn mental cartoons of the evil beforehand. When someone says “tyranny,” ...
“Only I beg you to remember in what different ways sermons may all be messages of the Lord. Let it save you from the monotonous narrowness of one eternally repeated sermon. And, what is far more important, let it keep you from ever daring to say with cruel flippancy of some brother who brings his message to another door of humanity from you, that he ‘does not preach Christ.’”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 107
“The preaching which is wholly exposition men are apt to find dull and pointless. It is heat lightning that quivers over many topics but strikes nowhere”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 104
Sermon Video Introduction: We have now come to the conclusion of the first cycle of Micah’s prophecy. Here we find a brief word of consolation, which, given what has come before, stands out ...
