As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“A pastor isn’t responsible only to teach Scripture but also to help his people learn how to read the Bible for themselves. Matt Smethurst and Ligon Duncan share how pastors can encourage their congregations to engage deeply with God’s Word, meditate on how the Lord has revealed himself, and approach Scripture with obedience and joy.” - TGC
“1. Humility: How I Learned I Really Wasn’t God’s Gift to the Church.…2. Rookie Preacher: Why My Early Sermons Should Be Destroyed. …. 3. Fundamentalism with a Capital “F”: Being Mean and Leaving the Gospel Out at the Same Time.… 4. In a Hurry: How I Messed Up My Church by Pushing Change Too Quickly.” - Chuck Lawless
“Scripture calls believers to respect church leadership, but it never asks Christians to turn off discernment, ignore conscience, or outsource their faith entirely. When following a pastor is misunderstood, it can quietly damage both leaders and congregations.” C.Leaders
“Every generation of preachers faces subtle pressure to soften their message, to impress rather than instruct, or to build a following instead of building up their congregations. However, the pulpit is not a platform for self-promotion; it is the “sacred desk” for the exposition of Christ’s Word.” - Mere Orthodoxy
In my last two blogposts (which can be found here and here), I walked the reader through the process of becoming familiar with the preaching text to the point where you should have a solid grasp upon what the preaching text says, although you still might not be sure how to preach it or organize the sermon.
“I want to make a case from Scripture for why we should understand that these three terms refer to the same office. My argument moves along three steps.” - 9 Marks
In my last post, I walked through my method for becoming more familiar with the biblical text through the process of reading, translating, and diagramming. Although at this point much progress has been made, there is still more work to do before we can confidently say we know the main idea of the text. Up to this point the study has been with the Bible alone—no commentaries should have been used thus far.
Whether you call it the “main idea,” “big idea,” “propositional statement,” or something else, we are going to be looking at how to make sure you preach the main idea of a section of Scripture so that you are not preaching about an ancillary idea or worse, force your own idea upon the passage. In this post I will be walking through a process I have developed for myself. To help myself with this, I have made a worksheet. In a previous post, I shared it on this blog.
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances.”
(As You Like It 2.7.139-141)
“In just the three years since ChatGPT launched, it’s estimated that there are nearly 800 million monthly active users. Google Maps took around 7 years to reach that milestone, and ChatGPT is now just one of many popular AI chatbots.” - CToday
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