Skeptics Welcome. Really.

 

I love the book of Luke. I love it. Right now I am studying and writing on it. Recently, Matt Chandler began a series on the it and I listened to the first message tonight. Great stuff. He mentioned that Luke was a skeptic and had followed everything about Jesus (eyewitnesses and writings) and he himself sought answers. Apparently Village  Church will be in the book for a year and a half. Here is a small excerpt towards the end of the sermon:

Anyway, in the end if religion had a motto, it would say this, “I obey, therefore, I’m accepted.” That’s it. That’s religion. Whatever belief system you want to get into, that’s it, but that’s not the teachings of Jesus. Religion says, “Morality and religious observance are means of salvation,” but that is not the message of Jesus. Religion says, “We’ve got it right and everyone else be damned,” and Jesus says, “You love the Muslim, you serve the Muslim and if necessary, you die for him. You love the Jew, you serve the Jew and if necessary, you die for them. You love the Hindu, you give up your food for the Hindu, you open your home to the Hindu, you sacrifice your own life for the Hindu.” Jesus says, “Love your enemies. Don’t just love your friends. How easy is it to love your friends? Even killers do that.” I mean, this is a crazy man here. The stuff he teaches, it is not religious in nature in any way historically as religion had been defined. The teachings of Jesus go contrary, now not necessarily what Evangelicals teach and do but the teachings of Jesus – they’re very, very different. 

- Matt Chandler in “Skeptics Welcome”

Keller in Preaching Today

One Minute One-on-One
An Interview with Timothy Keller

Preaching Today: Could you tell us a bit about your planning process for preaching?

Tim Keller: Every June I flesh out all of my sermon topics, titles, and texts for the coming year, and then I send them off to my music director and other associate preachers. During vacation and study time in the summer, I read books on the themes I’ll be treating in the sermons during the coming year. At the end of the summer, my reading leads me to revise the list of topics and texts, and then we are good to go!

Tell us about your weekly preparation process.

Ten days before the Sunday I will preach a given sermon, I spend three hours doing basic exegesis and outlining. The Friday morning before I preach the sermon, I spend five hours writing a first draft of the sermon. On Saturday morning I spend four hours writing a second draft. That Saturday night I spend another two to three hours writing a third draft. With each draft I shorten and streamline the message. I then get up very early on Sunday morning and spend two hours reading it through several times, essentially memorizing all the basic points and sub-points.

I pastor a large church and have a large staff, so I give special prominence to preparing the sermon. I give it 15–18 hours a week. I would not advise younger ministers to spend that much time on sermon preparation, however. The main way to become a good preacher is to preach a lot and to spend tons of time in people work. That’s how you become something more than a Bible commentator; you become a flesh–and–blood preacher. When I was without a large staff, I spent 6–8 hours in sermon preparation.

Which tools do you find most helpful in the preparation process?

I use BibleWorks software and lots of commentaries.

What advice can you offer to other preachers?

Preaching should be biblical, clear for the mind, practical for the will, vivid for the heart, warm, forceful, and Christocentric. You should always preach Christ and the gospel from every text!

How do you generate sermon ideas?

It’s a great mistake to pit pastoral care and leadership against preaching preparation. Many of my preaching ideas come to me as I am talking to, exhorting, counseling, evangelizing, and shepherding people. It is only through working with people that you become the preacher you need to be—someone who knows sin, how the heart works, what people’s struggles are, and so on. To some degree, pastoral care and leadership are sermon preparation! They prepare the preacher and not just the sermon.

Finally, what devotional material do you use for your personal growth?

I use a version of M’Cheyne’s reading calendar, reading the Bible in its entirety every year. I also follow the traditional daily office, and I read and pray all the Psalms every month. I use older versions of the Book of Common Prayer for many of my prayers.

Favorite Messages: “A Christian’s Happiness”

In 2007, Preaching Today’s theme is “My All-Time Favorite Message,” and various preachers have given us the sermon they value most. We will feature one “favorite” sermon each issue. We hope that, as you listen to these special messages, you are strengthened in both your walk with Christ and your preaching ministry.

This month’s featured favorite is “A Christian’s Happiness” from Timothy Keller.

Timothy Keller is founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church (PCA) in New York City, New York. Redeemer’s vision is “to spread the gospel—first through ourselves and then through the city, by word, deed, and community—and to bring about personal changes, social healing, and cultural renewal through a movement of churches and ministries that change New York City, and through it, the world. Crucial to this vision is the Church Planting Center that Redeemer founded to establish orthodox but vibrant churches throughout New York City.”

Alongside his ministry at Redeemer, Keller also serves as adjunct professor of practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is a contributing author for The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World (Crossway Books, 2007).

[Copied from HERE]

Love

“When we see man for what he is, the wrath of God for what it is, and the cross for what it is, then and only then do we see love for what it is.”

- Leon Morris

What has your Jesus ever done for anyone?

 

There is a small group of us who meet for prayer in a shop near here before it opens each day. And once a week we meet there to share half of all we have from the preceding week’s work. We call that meal the Lord’s Supper because we believe that all creation belongs to the Lord and that we must share the Lord’s food equally among us. We hold ourselves as equal in the sight of the Lord, Jew and Greek, slave and free, female and male, poor and rich. Food is the material basis of life and life belongs to God. We share what is not our own – that is the Lord’s type of meal, the Lord’s type of supper. So, I invite you. Come and see if God is not already making a more just world right under the very noses and against the very plans of Rome. If you do not see it, keave, but if you do see it, stay. And, by the way, we have small groups like the one here in every city of the Roman Empire. It is not just how many we are, but how everywhere we are. And whenever one of you turns from Caesar, who crucified Jesus, to God, who raised Jesus, you participate in the justification of the world. It is a choice between the divine Caesar and the divine Jesus. It is a choice between divinity incarnate as violent power or divinity incarnate as distributive justice (or, as we call it, agape). Come to the sardine seller’s shop the day after tomorrow to see and decide for yourselves.

- in Excavating Jesus, p. 264.

Why I Benefit from Keller . . . continually

 

I look at this simple statement and I realize the gospel and the kingdom are bigger than me and bigger than any single church. I am filled with passion and vision with a desire to be a part of the Spirit’s work -  not stagnant spirituality in a church simply being a church.

An Atheist Comments on Megachurch and Community

Doctors, When Can I Fire You?

(Me in ICU in Flagler hospital after surgery. You can see all the iodine on my chest.)

Well these past 5-6 months have been up and down as to my health – both physical and spiritual. At times I have realized God has me going through all of this for his purposes, though recently I laughed at a line in the movie As Good As it Gets. You can see the whole scene here, thanks to YouTube. At other times, and recently it has been most of the time, I have felt far from God. I think I am starting to get better and I find I still have the same God-forsaken condition I have had since March. After a week in the hospital and surgery I only can pray that we are looking at the beginning of the end of this illness.

I have listened to many sermons by Tim Keller and have been encouraged by the gospel. Last night I was thinking about the cross and how Jesus not only experienced alienation from God, but how he suffered through suffocating and the pain from an exploding heart under the agonizing wrath of God. At times I have had difficulty breathing and deep pain in my chest, but thanks to God there will one day be a new world where all suffering will be over. But more than my future hope, I know that because Jesus went through hell on the cross I don’t have to experience hell on earth.

Here is a portion of Tim Keller’s sermon from Galatians 5, “How to Change“

What does “keep in step with the Spirit” mean? It says the Spirit, we said last week, yearns, see? Look up here at verse 17. “The sinful nature desires (and that’s a word for over-desires, lusts) what is contrary to the Spirit.” But the Spirit lusts too, it says. What does the Spirit lust for? The Spirit’s in love with Jesus. The Spirit’s got Jesus pinned up all over his room. The Spirit looks at Jesus and I know I’m getting close. This is the kind of language of the Bible. We are the bride, he is the bridegroom. And the Spirit is the best man. The Spirit is also the maid of honor. The Spirit is the person who has brought us together. And the Spirit’s always saying, “Look how beautiful he is.” The Spirit is always looking and seeing the beauty of Jesus Christ and saying, “The whole reason you don’t have self-control, the whole reason you don’t have love, the whole reason you’re worried – you don’t see how beautiful Christ is. You just don’t see it.”

Out October 1st

A new Bible will be out October 1st for those interested – The Apologetics Study Bible. It will have contributors such as Chuck Colson, Al Mohler, Ravi Zacharias, J.P. Moreland, and Phil Johnson, to name a few.

God Has Hands and Feet

 

We will never stop talking about the poor because Jesus never stopped talking about the poor. His first sermon is his home town is “I have been anointed to preach good news to the poor.” His foundational sermon in Matthew 5 begins, “Blessed are the poor.” When he talks about his return and judgment he frames it in terms of who is thirsty, who is hungry, who is naked, who is lonely in prison. For Jesus, he never stops talking about the poor. We will never stop talking about the poor – not because we want to weigh people down, but because the gospel is a message that frees us to be the hands and feet of the divine in the world.

- Rob Bell

Neither Left Nor Right, Republican Nor Democrat

 

 

[…] Christians must realize that there is a difference between being a cobelligerent and an ally. At times we will seem to be saying exactly the same thing as those without a Christian base are saying. If there is social injustice, say there is social injustice. If we need order, say we need order. In these cases, and at these specific points, we would be cobelligerents. But we must not align ourselves as though we are in any camp built on a non-Christian base. We are an ally of no such camp. The church of the Lord Jesus Christ is different – totally different; it rests on the absolutes given to us in scripture.

- Francis Schaeffer in The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century