Preaching Daily - May 22

 

Today's Word for Pastors...

Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise--the fruit of lips that confess his name.
Hebrews 13:15

Today's Preaching Insight...

The Relevance of Preaching from Daniel

Our current contemporary culture brings new challenges to our Christian faith with each passing day. Daniel was a young man who grew up in a culture of traditional family values. Then he unexpectedly found himself in a culture that was foreign to everything he had known. His value system, his truth claims, his moral compass was challenged repeatedly at every turn. His world evolved into a world of pluralism and paganism.

Daniel could have blamed his challenging circumstances on societal ills, the court system of his day, the government, the media, the educational system or any number of a myriad of other places where Christians in our contemporary culture point fingers of accusation today. However, Daniel seems to step out of the Scripture and into our modern culture to show us some principles that will enable us not only to exist in our culture, but also to engage it and even thrive in it as well.

Like Daniel, we too find ourselves in a world that has passed from a Judeo-Christian culture to one which in many ways has become an anti-Judeo-Christian one. He has left us a book in the Old Testament that bears his name which is filled with contemporary applications that enable us to put into practice some time-honored biblical principles for addressing our contemporary world.

Can we really expect to change a crumbling culture around us?

(To read the entire article, "Don't Give In!" by O.S. Hawkins at Preaching.com, click here)

Today's Extra...

Optimism
By J. Michael Shannon

There is an old "Far Side" comic that illustrates the power of perspective. As with many of Gary Larson's comics, it contains animals that behave like people. There is a family of dogs deep in an underground fallout shelter, while there is a nuclear holocaust on the surface. One of the dogs says, "Well, we must face a new reality. No more carefree days of chasing squirrels, running through the park, or howling at the moon. On the other hand, no more, ‘Fetch the stick, boy, fetch the stick.'"

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