Musings on Spiritual Matters

There is nothing fancy about this book on preaching.  But this does not mean it is not an excellent text on preaching.  As the book notes, it is serious about preaching the text, but realizes the need to bridge the times to create a relevant message for the church today.  It provides a good model for preaching with three words, happened, happens, and happening.  This process helps the preacher to move from the text to the testimony of the gospel.  One of the best aspects of the book is the practical advice that it provides.  It talks about how to set up the text reading.  It talks about the need to move shifts of paragraphs, and not focus on the details as much.  It is probably one of the most practical preaching books out there.  Another strong element is the section on application.  It talks a lot about how to do this properly.  In one section, it mentions dealing with people rejecting the message because of various reasons.  One is not buying the solution, so the minister has to make a case for why the gospel will work in whatever case the minister is teaching on.  There is also excellent advice on introductions for sermons.  This book is really a “huge how to manual” on preaching.  It mostly deals with all of the elements of a sermon.  Mostly it will help the preacher to expand his tool box.  Too often ministers are not trained in a variety of methods, and only have one or two ways to illustrate, apply, conclude, or open a sermon.  After reading this book, you will have a lot more tools at your disposal.  This is one of the best, and detailed texts I have read on preaching for a while, and I would recommend this to students in school, and young and old preachers.

Related posts:

1. Read “Preaching Biblical Wisdom in a Self-Help Society”
2. Review of “The Integrity of Biblical Narrative”
3. Review of “Preaching Jesus”
4. Review of “Strategic Preaching”
5. Tired of the Invitation

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This entry was posted by Matthew on Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 at 11:58 am and is filed under Church News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.