Witticisms from the Congregation

This last Sunday, I started a series of messages through the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The previous Lord’s Day I concluded a long series of messages on marriage (39 sermons), which one young wag in the congregation told me should be entitled the “forty stripes save one” series. And this Sunday I had to spend some time sorting through the chronological issues that are tangled up with the books we are undertaking. Because of this, I was laying out the reasons for adopting a short chronology for Ezra and Nehemiah, as opposed to the standard view in the commentaries, which is a long chronology. But all the mentioning of the commentaries in the sermon led one elderly gentleman to give me a copy of a fantastic quote, attributed to a shrewd country preacher. “This here Bible sure throws a lot of light on those there commentaries.”