Tag: Church

On Choosing a Sermon Series

How do you decide which book of the bible to preach through?

1. Well balanced diet:

Have you only been preaching through Paul’s letters, or the Gospels or the Psalms? What about OT Narrative, or the Minor Prophets, or Wisdom Lit, or Apocalyptic? Switching between genres and testaments helps to teach “the whole counsel of God”(Acts 20:27)

2. Maturity

What are the most obvious areas your church needs to grow in? Are they fixated on the present, then OT prophets or Revelation could lift their eyes up. Is there a lack of understanding about how the church should operate, especially the pastor’s relationship to the congregation? The Pastoral Epistles is the goto. If general biblical illiteracy is a problem, try preaching through the large OT narratives of Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch. And of course, it is always good to preach about the life of our Lord Jesus in the Gospels.

3. Calendar:

Churches operate on an annual calendar, even if they don’t follow the historic Christian calendar with its mushroomed number of saints’ days. You need to decide if you are going to have an open-ended series that pauses for Christmas and Easter. You can have a series that runs for a season (spring, summer, winter). You may want to have a short series then a long one. Estimating how many sermons match the number of Sundays available can give you a rough idea of how the series fits into your church calendar. Or you can ditch the calendar and keep your congregation guessing if you like.

4. Ability:

Few young men have the ability to sustain a long series like D.M. Lloyd-Jones. By long I mean a series that goes through a large book of the Bible at a slow, lingering pace. What ends up happening is that each single verse sermon becomes a springboard to talk about other things. However, when this is repeated, usually a sense of the context of a book of the bible is lost. We have to remember that New Testament epistles were letters read aloud in a single sitting. So the ability of a young preacher (or older one) may not match the skill needed to sustain the attention of the congregation in a granular study. Or the young preacher may easily distort the message of a whole book of the bible by granular proof-texting. Of course, if a preacher can engage in such epic sermon series, the congregation may be richly blessed. But there are many pastors whose own hubris assumed that they could “do like MLJ” and not get off track.

5. Challenge:

It is good to challenge yourself to try to preach difficult books of the bible. You shouldn’t do this as self-indulgence out of intellectual curiosity. But thinking about the souls of your people, ask yourself if they would be fed and equipped by a more challenging study like the book of Hebrews or the book of Job. Often, congregants are excited to have a sermon series preached on books of the bible that they have struggled to understand. So challenging yourself as a preacher and the congregation as listeners can be very fruitful.

6. Desire:

At the heart of the matter, the preacher should recognize what their soul needs. Does your soul need confrontation, encouragement, examples, instruction or application? Knowing what you want and what you think you need goes a long way to determining what you will preach. In other words, it is the question, “What is God teaching you?” You will find that if God has been teaching you from his Word, what you preach from that Word learned in your study will become remarkably relevant to your hearers. In this way, the Word is “living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb 4:12). This will be true for you and them too.

A Brief Questionnaire for Potential Elders

  1. Do you have any differences with the church’s doctrinal statement?
  2. Do you have any differences with the church’s constitution? (i.e. how the church is structured and governed)
  3. Is there anything you are aware of that would prevent you from becoming an elder some day at our church?
  4. Do you see yourself as compatible with the church’s  pastoral emphasis, associations and overall tone?
  5. Other hot topics:
    • Views on creation, age of the earth, Adam
    • Views on the Millenium
    • Cessationism, Continuationism
    • Sabbath/Lord’s Day
    • Complementarianism
    • Other?
  6. How do you view yourself according to the qualifications of 1 Timothy 3:1-7, Titus 1:5-9?
  7. How do you think others would view you regarding these qualifications? Your wife? Your peers in the church? The elders in the church?

3 Secrets of A Saint’s Prayers

What is Prayer? It may be a simple question. But in our society there are some very different notions of what ‘prayer’ is. Consider these contrasts:

Is prayer asking?  Or is it being consumed into the Deity?

Is prayer honest cognitive speech to God? Or is it mindfulness, being in the present, being at peace?

Is prayer the speech of a child to a parent, simple, desperate, and sincere. Or Is prayer a secret language known only by the sophisticated?

 

Theologian David Wells says that our culture is like an India, being ruled by a Sweden. What he means is that our cultural elites are against spirituality, while the mass of people are flooded with spiritualities.


Into such a confusing context, the church of Jesus Christ offers clarity to the most important, yet often misunderstood spiritual practices. The practice of prayer.

When the Apostle Paul (or Saint Paul if you like) thinks about connecting with Christians in Rome that he hasn’t met, he shares with them the most accessible point of Christian fellowship.

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He prays for them.

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In his letter to the church at Rome, he shares with them 3 ways that he has been praying for them:

 

First, he gives thanks to God for them [Romans 1.8]. Paul is grateful for this church. But he isn’t just happy that they are around. He acknowledges the source of this church, and the source of the benefits and blessings that this church provides— He thanks God, through Jesus Christ. You see, the gospel is always close by in Paul’s thinking. He is not just generically happy. He is thankful to God, praying because he has access to the Father through the death and resurrection of the Son— Paul’ Saviour.  Paul’s gospel is always the channel of Paul’s prayer.

 

What is he thankful for? He is thankful for their reputation as being a church characterized by faith. Imagine that. A church is famous for their faith.

 

What is faith? My sons told me I should use a definition of faith that we found in the comic book, Luther, the Graphic Novel.

“Faith is the living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a man could stake his life on it a thousand times” – Martin Luther according to the comic book.

I checked the reference. The definition comes from Luther’s Preface to his commentary on Romans.

 

So Paul is thankful for the Roman church’s faith: “their living, daring confidence in God’s grace”

The Roman congregation was in the center of the Roman Empire, surrounded by the debauchery of the city known as The Great Prostitute.

 

That local church in Rome was famous for their faith.  That is a good reason for Paul to give thanks to God.

 

Second,  Paul interceded for them. Paul prayed to God, for their benefit. And he did this a lot. At every instance of his regular prayers, he always prayed for the Roman church. He never stopped praying for them.

For God is my witness,whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers,[Romans 1.9-10]

 

‘Without ceasing’ is not the sense of a vague, undefined, mystical state that you remain in. It is the idea of regular, habitual prayer. Prayers that are set aside, not extemporaneous. Prayers that are planned, regularly, not just the emergency ones.

 

And at every regular time of prayer, Paul never stopped praying for the Roman Church. This shows how important prayer was for Paul’s missionary role.

 

Third, Paul  shared with the Romans the content of what his repeated request to God was. He requested that “somehow by God’s will I may now at last succeed in coming to you” [Romans 1.10].  Paul did not have a specific guarantee that he would get to Rome. But he did know that he would preach the gospel before kings (Acts 9). He would speak to King Agrippa (Acts 26) , before being sent to Rome and presumably appearing before Caesar himself.

 

Paul always presented his desires to God, so that if God answered his prayer, his desires would be met in God’s way.

 

So Paul’s Gospel is the channel of his prayers.

Paul’s Gospel is the motivation  for his prayers

Paul’s Gospel is the goal of his prayers.

 

Do you know this gospel?

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Do you know this ‘good news’ of the summons to believe in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the only Saviour from the coming wrath— this Saviour who delivers to eternal life?