“This is the foundation on which all Christian preaching rests. How would we dare to speak if God had not spoken? By ourselves we have nothing to say.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 14
Those Darn Back Rubs
“Every month or so the stress of youth ministry—dealing with the kids and all their issues—would get to Johnny and so he would head on over to Brandy’s apartment to have her give him a neck rub, followed by her specialty back rub. But somehow her giving him a back rub always turned into him giving her a front rub, and then they would fall again. That was actually how their relationship started, which is to say, through those darn back rubs. It was her senior year in high school, and she was in Johnny’s youth group, which was a combination Bible study and daisy-chain back-rub circle. At the end of that year, they all had a good working knowledge of the gospel of Mark and significantly improved blood flow in the delts.”
Evangelism as Hide & Seek
“God is not secretive. He delights to make himself known. Just as it is the nature of light to shine, so it is the nature of God to reveal himself. The chief reason why people do not know God is not because he hides from them but because they hide from him. Every preacher needs to take encouragement from the fact that God is light and longs to shine his light into the listener’s darkness (2 Cor. 4:4-6).”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 13
So Many Hidden Premises
“But Johnny still agonized over such things—what size earring would the apostle Paul have worn if his mission had been to the skateboarding and pants-droopy youth of today? Not an easy question to answer.”
Which Should be Obvious
“The kind of God we believe in determines the kind of sermons we preach.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 13
Which is a Problem
“That was just one problem with ministering to the youth of today—riding the waves of cool and contemporary youth ministry was like surfing the big ones, and with one false move, there you were with sand in your trunks.”
The Secret
“The secret of preaching is not mastering certain techniques but being mastered by certain convictions”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 12
The Voice of Modest Experience
“Rourke had delivered at least three babies in the back seats of cars and taxi cabs, and thought he was qualified to assert that there was nothing whatever that was natural about it. It was the craziest thing in the world. Women were the kind of people that people came out of, for crying out loud, and he thought it was the kind of thing best monitored by world-class doctors and sophisticated electronic gear, maintained closely by teams of nurses with graduate degrees in astrophysics. But that was just his opinion.”
Starting in This Sanctuary
“Our greatest need, as the Reformers kept insisting, is the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Christians believe that the living God is the Lord of history. We should ask him to push back back the forces of unbelief and thank him for what he is doing already around the world.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 11
Angst as Disinfectant
“He had not managed to see Robert P. Warner—who was still asleep, exhausted as he was from a late night of blogging about the loneliness of urban angst as recorded by French filmmakers, subtitling their angst like crazy, although the existential anguish was redeemed and ameliorated somewhat by plenty of full French frontal nudity, which he felt translated well without the subtitles, as least for him—but Peaborne had obtained a brief audience with Mystic Union.”