Jojo Agot

Fresh Preaching

Bruce Mawhinney on sermon preparation:

What use will it be to learn the principles of fresh preaching if you never have time to use them? Knowing what to do and not having the time to do it will only add to your discouragement. You must break that vicious circle. Right now you are spending too much time doing many good things and not enough time doing the one best thing that you’ve been called to do. Remember the first step to fresh preaching is making the commitment to do whatever it takes to get there…

Most of us started out in the ministry with the fear that we’d run out of things to say after the first seven minutes of a 25-minute message. You probably studied and prepared harder and longer for the sermon during those early years than you ever have since… Continue reading Fresh Preaching

Confession

I love the eloquence of this prayer for humility and confession. Taken from the order of the Mass as the Church at Strasbourg now celebrates it:

Make your confession to God the Lord, for He is good, and His mercy is everlasting. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and Thou forgavest the inquity of my sin. And I, poor sinner, confess before God the Almighty, that I have sinned grievously through the transgression of His Law; that I have done much that I should not have done, and have left undone much that I should have done, through unbelief and distrust towards God; and that I am lacking in love towards my fellow-ministers and to-wards my neighbours.

God knoweth how great is my guilt, and I repent, O God, be gracious unto me, a poor sinner; and be merciful, for my sins are many. This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to”save sinners, of whom I am the chief. Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief, and grant me salvation. Amen.

Excerpted from William D. Maxwell’s An Outline of Christian Worship- Its Development and Forms

Unsanctified Affliction

It is only when affliction leads to this discipline of the Word that it becomes a blessing; the lack of this heart-cleansing through the Word is the reason why affliction is so often unsanctified.

—Andrew Murray

Intellectual Christianity

Charles Malik on why evangelicals should not disregard the intellectual side of Christianity:

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting […] evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy.

Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does the evangelical mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode in the great universities of Europe and America that stamp our entire civilization with their spirit and ideas? For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.

Pierced With Many Sorrows

city lights

Christians lose nothing when they lose temporal things. Because honestly speaking, what did they lose? Their faith? Their godliness? The possessions of the hidden man of the heart, which in the sight of God are of great price? Did they lose these?

For these are the wealth of Christians, to whom the wealthy apostle said, “Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment, let us be therewith content. But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil; which, while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” 1 Tim. 6: 6-10.

Source: Augustine of Hippo, City of God

For Pastors and Ministers

Thomas Watson on the uniqueness of the calling of pastors and gospel ministers:

God has cut out the minister his work which is proper for him and does not belong to any other. ‘Give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine … give thyself wholly to them’, or, as it is in the Greek, ‘Be thou wholly in them’ (1 Timothy 4, 13-15).

This charge is peculiar to the minister and does not concern any other. It is not spoken to the tradesman that he should give himself wholly to doctrine and exhortation. No, let him look to his shop. It is not spoken to the ploughman that he should give himself wholly to preaching. No, let him give himself to his plough.

It is the minister’s charge. The apostle speaks to Timothy and, in him, to the rest who had the hands of the presbytery laid on them. And ‘Study to shew thyself approved …, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth’ (2 Timothy 2:15).

This is spoken peculiarly to the minister. Everyone that can read the word aright cannot divide the word aright. So that the work of the ministry does not lie in common; it is a select, peculiar work. As none might touch the ark but the priests, none may touch this temple-office but such as are called to it.”