1. God does not take us out of a world of evils of various kinds, but He does stand beside us and accompany us, as a shepherd accompanies his sheep, through valleys of shadows of all kinds.
  2. God’s goal in all this is that His call to repentance impacts our lives by turning us to find peace and joy in Christ.
  3. New normals are always sneaking up on us. Preachers ignore them to their peril and the peril of our hearers.
  4. Twenty-first century North American believers face challenges unique in the history of God’s people, for we have an abundance of the material gifts of God unparalleled in human history.
  5. Those who occupy the pulpit will always be sensitive to various kinds of reactions, expected and unexpected, and eager for the feedback that helps evaluate whether the words from the pulpit have achieved their intended goal.
  6. The gift of new life through His death and resurrection, creates Christ’s children, all of whom are being sent with beautiful feet and beautiful tongue and lips to serve as the Lord’s hitmen and midwives.
  7. The Easter season is designed to cultivate our resurrection thinking throughout the year. When God looks at us each day, He sees us through the lens of Christ’s resurrection. We should look at our lives the same way.
  8. The devil is to be taken seriously, but we should also not give him more credit or more power than he has after being defanged by Christ’s resurrection.
  9. God has placed preachers of His Word in the frontlines of His combat against Satan and all his minions that is fought out on the battlefields of the individual lives of believers.
  10. Above all, pastors must aim their preaching at the people God has placed in the care of the pastor rather than airing pious ideas that did not speak to their situations.
  11. Our words of proclamation from the pulpit not only bring repentance and comfort, enacting in our hearers an exchange of sinful identity for the identity of God’s child, but also the motivation and fuel for loving others.
  12. Reconciliation with God affirms the worth of our persons, and it banishes the inhibitions and fears, as well as the resentments and desire for revenge, which create gulches between us and those around us.
Loading...

No More Post

No more pages to load