See all 7 Discoveries HERE.1. POSITIVE IS THE NEW BLACK
2. ASK ONE QUESTION, OR EXPLORE ONE ISSUE
3. MAKE YOUR POINTS ACTUAL POINTS
4. WE NEED TO OPEN DOORS, NOT CLOSE THEM
When a preacher attempts to fully answers the question (if that is possible), or wraps up the issue neatly, he sits down with a sense of completion. But the Christian life is yet to be completed. Our job is not to close doors, but to open them. It is possible to defend certain truths and doctrines so that we are left in no doubt of their truth, but with no next steps.
For example, don't close the door to the Resurrection, by 'proving it'. Open that door. Show us why the Resurrection cracks open every part of our lives. Swing open the door so that I am left with new and righteous things to think and feel and do after hearing you preach.
Show us that God has for more for us than we dare ask or imagine.
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Pic on Flickr by Criggchef.
3 comments:
Amen! Preach it brother...
Thanks Justin. This one by far looks like the hardest and most work to implement.
"Our job is not to close doors, but to open them"
or, I wonder whether, over the course of many years of the kind of preaching you are advocating, we (preachers) should be walking through new (open) doors with our congregation.
Sometimes this will be doors we deliberately and purposefully open through our preaching, at other times it will be the door opened by a specific event in our local congregation or community... I remember having to substantially re-write a sermon one Saturday night after a man was killed a couple of blocks from the church in a road-rage incident one Saturday afternoon. It was all over the media, and it brought to the surface a whole lot of "local" issues as well.
That Sunday morning as I stood to preach I remember feeling nervous about what lay beyond this open door, but that we as Christ's community in Glebe had to step through it regardless,
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