Preaching Daily - December 1

Today's Word for Pastors...

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
1 Peter 2:9

Today's Preaching Insight...

The Incredible Message

Speaking to a renewal conference some time ago, former Asbury Seminary President Maxie D. Dunnam said, "An incredible message has been entrusted to us, a powerfully compelling message of an earth-shattering, world-changing, person-transforming fact. At the heart of it is Jesus, His incarnation, life, teaching, death and resurrection." 

"People within and outside the church are starving spiritually. Within the church they ask for bread and are given stones. Witnesses abound. Persons in pain and sadness share stories of their long endurance in one of our mainline congregations, but they could take it no longer. Their pastors not only disregarded, they denigrated the authority of God's word. So the person sought another congregation where Scripture was honored and preached . . . They were starving for the Word.

"People outside the church are starving as well. They are starving because the church has betrayed her first love, has become so ideologically bound that she is spiritually barren. Committed to theological pluralism and making diversity redemptive within itself, we are diverted from the core dynamic of the Christian faith: what Christ can do for persons and for society.

"Redemptive, transforming power is in the Cross of Jesus - His sacrificial death for our sins. … The fire is there to burn up the filthiness, decadence and destructiveness of sin and unrighteousness. The energy and fire are there in the fact that God became incarnate, walked the earth, died, rose again and turned evil's seemingly supreme triumph in its most crushing, irrevocable defeat."  (The Layman Online, October 31, 2002)

Today's Extra...

Guilt

The minister arose to address his congregation. "There is a certain man among us today who is flirting with another man's wife. Unless he puts ten dollars in the collection box, his name will be read from the pulpit."

When the collection plate came in, there were 19 ten dollar bills, and a five dollar bill with this note attached: "Other five on payday."

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