"To Him be glory forever": 2 Corinthians

Showing posts with label 2 Corinthians. Show all posts

Sunday, September 11, 2016

My attempt to answer a friend's question…

Image result for what should i preach about

"Hey Friend... suggestions for a sermon for pulpit supply in a Presbyterian church... this may be one week or a few..... they have an interim pastor coming the end of October..."

Sermon suggestions? Do you mean such as what text, or what topic? I'm assuming that is what you are after, so here goes.

For the most part I believe that the text preached drives the sermon, so for me the big question is deciding the text. As I study it, and pray, (and it's always best to proceed in the opposite order, i.e. prayer first!) then I take the sermon in the direction I believe God is leading it to lead through the text. I did a "series" (I have a bit of a distaste for the 'series' concept) last year where I had a topic first, or rather a question, and then found and explained pieces of scripture that answered the question.

So you are preaching once, and possibly a bit more, for the same congregation, but what to preach? Using the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) is one option. If the Presbyterians you are preaching to are of the PCUSA persuasion this may be where their sermons frequently come from. When I began I used the RCL for nearly a year as the primary place to select my texts from.

Each week the RCL has readings from the OT, Psalms, Gospel and somewhere else in the NT. Prayerfully consider the readings and see if one of them seems to be the thing to bring to the particular congregation. Sometimes two readings can fit well together. I have some issues with the RCL, but since you are preaching just once, or maybe a few Sunday's for one group, that is a conversation for another day.

It may be that you are personally using a devotional book or following a Bible reading plan. In that case there may be a text in your reading that strikes you as something to explore and develop more fully as a sermon.

If you are preaching someplace that is glued to the liturgical calendar then it may be that your sermon is developed in conjunction with an event on the calendar. In that case the RCL should be the source of your text. On the other hand today I preached from Mark 1:1-11, where Jesus rides into Jerusalem. Traditionally it is a Palm Sunday text but I am preaching my way through the Gospel of Mark, leaving Mark for only rare occasions, such as Advent, Christmas, Palm Sunday and Easter. I rarely get feedback on my preaching but on the way out today one man told me that the message was just what he needed to hear, so I was glad to have stayed with that text today, despite its traditional placement.

If you are preaching one week, and maybe a few more, you could also do a "series" around a character of the Bible, such as Moses or Peter, taking snapshots of a few periods of the person's life. If you did that I would take a NT character, rather than preaching several times in a row from the OT to a congregation that isn’t your own flock.

Whatever you do you have to, in some way, get the Good News of Jesus in front of the congregation. In every sermon, whatever your text, without exception, in some way, Christ has to be lifted up and shown to make a difference. This is much easier said than done.

Another way of looking at this is that the Christian church is not some kind of social club. It is not one of many different but equally valuable organizations. Jesus is the way and the truth and the life. Or as Paul wrote to the church at Corinth:

"For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."

People who already embrace the Good News have to be comforted, encouraged, reminded and strengthened as they hear it again.

And those who are presently on the outside need to see that everyone, without exception, is a sinner in the presence of God. They need to see that there is no other hope for sinners outside of Jesus. And lastly, that there is no one who is too far gone to be beyond the saving touch of Jesus.

Some people may say that people who have an evangelical approach to the Gospel place too great of an emphasis on the cross. I say that if you are going to stand in the pulpit and not bring the core of the Gospel then you might as well be talking to a Rotary club, or the Jaycees, or what have you.

Hope this is helpful. Any more questions? Ask away! And in your preparation and preaching may all the glory be to God!

Addendum: The picture is Charles Spurgeon, the Prince of Preachers. Spurgeon felt that perhaps the hardest part of preaching was choosing a text, something he worked on throughout the week. He began his actual sermon preparation at 6 PM on Saturday evening, staying at the task until he felt he had sufficiently prepared for Sunday morning. This method should only be used by the most gifted of preachers!

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Our Only Hope

The world is a beautiful place. Here on the reservation natural beauty is all around us, and a short drive in any direction will take us to another place of beauty, one that will be very different from here near town, but glorious in its own way.

And while natural beauty is so abundant we all also know that everyday life can, and often is, quite hard. We have responsibilities and obligations to fulfill. We may be living or working with people that we have a hard time getting along with. We may be struggling with illness, or someone close to our heart may be wrestling with addictions. The stress of life can be hard and there are times when our best day is one in which we somehow make it to bedtime, where we can get a few hours of respite as we sleep before beginning all over again the next day.

The apostle Paul knew quite a bit of hardship in his life. In writing to the church at Corinth he felt that he needed them to understand what he was going through, saying:

"For we do not want you to be ignorant brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death."

Paul and his companions felt that the weight of their hardship was so severe that they were on the verge of death. But he goes on to show us what he learned in that trial, adding these words:

"But that was to make us not rely on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again."

Paul had learned to rely on God, and it was God in whom he placed his hope. And Paul can hope in God because it is God "who raises the dead." More specifically I believe that Paul is referring to the resurrection of Jesus when he writes to Corinth, for it is in Jesus, and Jesus alone, in whom we can truly have hope.

Paul speaks of earthly peril, but he also points towards the eternal pain of separation from God for all who refuse the saving work of Jesus. It is in the Easter moment, the death-and-resurrection of Jesus, where God clearly shows the lengths He will go to in order to give hope to all who come, in faith, to Him.

May you live in the hope of Easter, the hope of eternal life with Jesus, as your faithful Savior and Lord. This is true hope, and it is truly our only hope.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Thanksgiving

I was thinking about thanksgiving and wondering if that word was used in the Bible. It is used twelve times, including these words that Paul writes in his second letter to the church at Corinth:

"You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God."

One way that we could read this verse is with the expectation that God will give us everything we desire, so that we could then share some of our blessings with others, and then give our thanks to God. That reading would be only partly correct.

Our error would be in reading "You will be enriched in every way" too literally, thinking that we could go through life without any kind of hardship or disappointment. The truth is that sometimes it is through hardship and disappointment that we come to understand unexpected ways in which God's hand has been present as rich blessing in our lives.

As the season of autumn deepens and Thanksgiving approaches I have been remembering some of the things I have to be thankful for this year. Those things are many. Some are fairly minor and others are things that have given me memories I will treasure for years.

But everything hasn't been perfect this year. There have been some disappointments, and times of hardship. The hardest thing that my family and I have dealt with this year has been the passing of our granddaughter, Raelyn. But as I think about the sudden loss of Raelyn I am also able to see the hand of God present with our family, a hand that brings peace and comfort that never fails.

Our loss wasn't the kind of situation where we could see God's comfort immediately, but when we did see it we also saw that it was always present. There was never a moment where it was absent or lost, as if for a moment God forgot to do what He was supposed to do. Even in the hardest times of our lives, God is always doing exactly what His word teaches over and over that He does.

Things such as these: He never stops being good. He never stops being holy. He never stops saving sinners. And as one of the saved, He never stops being the one to whom my thanksgiving should always be given to.

May this season of Thanksgiving be one in where you see the ways God has been present to you this year, and may He receive your thanks and praise.

Friday, March 6, 2015

To Thine Own Self be True

I used to belong to a Facebook group organized around issues of ministry. The people in the group shared prayer requests. They told stories about situations in their congregation and occasionally asked for guidance with those situations. And they shared blog posts and news items of interest.

I don’t know how many members the group had when I joined nearly three years ago but it had grown to somewhere over 7,000 today. A wide range of theological perspectives were represented, nearly all of which grew somewhere on the Christian tree. And it would be safe to say that if the various theologies were arranged on a Bell curve that the tradition I am a part of, and where I place myself within that tradition, would be between 1 and 2 standard deviations from the mean. One consequence of my understanding of my theological location within the group was that I learned to pick-and-choose what I posted and what conversations I took part in. Suffice to say that some conversations could become either quite heated (in a generally respectful way) or just generate so many comments that it was impractical, and nearly impossible, for me to participate in those discussions in a way that was fair to all involved. So for many threads I would read the initial post, perhaps follow the discussion, but only infrequently join in.

All of which is to set the stage for this event. Person A posted a brief video of Person B, without making comment on the video and just asking for people's thoughts. Myself, Person C, watched the video and offered a two-part response. Part one was my own brief understanding of the issue of the video, followed by my belief of the logical destination of Person B's thoughts would lead. Enter Person D, who instead of engaging my response, jumped all over me.

So I started to write a response. This particular person and I have disagreed before and my initial response was to go back to the issue. I'm not trying to be heroic in describing myself. It was the issue I was more concerned about than the attack. But as I worked on phrasing my response it occurred to me that I was spending time, perhaps too much time, on something that really wasn't very important. I have never studied Shakespeare but the quote of his, "To thine own self be true", started playing in my head. At first I heard it in regard to responding to Person D. But then I heard it differently, as some other familiar words went through my head:

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come."

Who is the self I should be true to? The self that quickly responds when provoked by confrontation, be it large or small? The self that can hardly help but to point out theological error in a diverse group of fairly highly educated people? Or perhaps the self who is a new creation in Christ? The self where the old has passed away and the new has come?

That didn't take much time to figure out.

Christ has claimed me as his own, and he is at work shaping me, and all who call on him in faith, to be more and more in his image, which means being less and less like the person I was before faith.

So deleted the response I was writing to Person D, and deleted myself from the group.

"To thine own self be true?" Yes, but only so far as that self is being shaped in the image of my Savior and Lord.