knowing nothing

but Jesus Christ
and him crucified

is not simply about
the words i speak,
that they be of him,
for him, to him;

but also, for his sake,
knowing the pain,
the rejection, the
temptations,
the soul-bruising
of life in a fallen
and contrary world,
among broken people,
with heart rending
for lost souls
in need of hearing
and seeing

Jesus the Messiah.

who could assume
such a task
lightly?

Best of the best

Yup, here you go.

Theological lurv

Cribbed from CT.

advice that preachers can learn from?

An economist writes about writing.

not demands, but desires

The Holy Spirit uses a man with converting power when the people see in that man not demands of them but desires for them.

Raymond C Ortlund, from this series of addresses on preaching:

Power In Preaching: Decide
Power In Preaching: Desire
Power In Preaching: Delight

A preacher learns from Alistair Cooke

There are so many ways in which one might learn from the late Alistair Cooke but, whilst reading his piece of the recently-deceased (when the Letter was written) Duke Ellington, the following occured to me:

i. The authority with which he seemed to speak came, at least in part, from his personal knowledge on the people & places he was referring to. Commenting on the Duke's funeral service, he compares the sound of the huge congregation rising to its feet to "the several million bats whooshing out of the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico at the first blush of dawn". Within a few short paragraphs he is referring to obscure American towns such as Four Forks, Arkansas and New Iberia, Louisiana with easy recall. He had been there. He had heard the bats and tasted the obscurity. There is no substitute for personal knowledge. And it shows as a person speaks.

ii. His words were carefully chosen for the time in which he lived and the audience to which he was speaking. They would not all remain appropriate today. For example, in this letter he refers many times to Negroes; I'm sure that as his letters continued and as times changed he went on rather to refer to the same people as 'Blacks'.

iii. He was clearly fallible in his judgements and not without a degree of self-interest and self-promotion in what he said and how he said it. As sons of Adam do.