Theology That Bites Back
“Grasping the truth that God still speaks through what he has spoken protects us from two opposite errors. The first is the belief that God’s voice is silent today. The second is the belief that what God is saying today has little or nothing to do with Scripture. The truth is that God speaks through what he spoke”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 19
“They were within walking distance of a number of upscale eateries and had no trouble picking out a little bistro with espresso and ferns, the kind of place that served exotic little art sandwiches with bark still in the bread”
“On the contrary, [Scripture] is a living word to living people from the living God, a contemporary message for each generation”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 18
“She wasn’t really going to church anywhere, but she remained a contemporary evangelical to the back teeth. She had lost her faith while still managing to hang on to all the platitudes.”
“We study each text as it is instead of as we might wish it to be”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 18
“Johnny’s eyes were round, like a couple of trash can lids, only a different color.”
“Once we are convinced that the literary form of the Bible is important, we who preach it should look at it even more closely. We are not just miners extracting ore and leaving the landscape desolate.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 17
“He could also tell that Johnny was not really a highly trained logician, and would simply go as he was directed, as long as the suggested direction did not conflict with the tangled bundle of platitudes, loosely tied with string, that made up his worldview.”
“Scripture aims to get the reader to share an experience, not just to grasp ideas. This may seem obvious, but many preachers need to be reminded of it for they treat the Bible as a mere storehouse of ideas.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 17
“The point of these stories had been pressed home to him to him by the kind of preachers who rolled up their shirtsleeves, threw their necktie over the right shoulder, and hopped around while they preached. Many Americans have complained of too many hellfire and damnation sermons in their past, but Bradford was one of the 112 individuals in our generation who had actually heard one. He was thirteen at the time and was a pretty good boy for five days afterward. So Bradford was thoroughly conversant on the Achan thing.”
