“Your job as a pastor is to deliver truth and to help your people see why it matters today. Some of them are bleeding and don’t know it. Some are browsing the gift shop while the building burns. Once they see that, they listen.” - C.Leaders
“Deepak Reju helps pastors counsel their people when there is no passage of Scripture that explicitly addresses a particular question or issue.
“Every generation of preachers faces subtle pressure to soften their message, to impress rather than instruct, or to build a following instead of building up their congregations. However, the pulpit is not a platform for self-promotion; it is the “sacred desk” for the exposition of Christ’s Word.” - Mere Orthodoxy
“Conceptualize and preach your expositional sermon like it is a screw, not a nail. A screw has a single main point, but it also has an edge all the way around. This ridge, sharp as it is, is not to be avoided in favor of the point; rather, it is the means of getting to the main point.” - 9 Marks
“Priests and people had turned worship into a racket (in more ways than one). And both leaders and laymen were culpable. As it turns out, there is nothing new under the sun.” - BJU Seminary
“Faulty Assumptions…Assumption #1: I should start with me and my questions….Assumption #2: The Bible is (primarily) a collection of principles….Assumption #3: The goal of reading the Bible is improving my life.” - TGC
The Fundamentals of Sanctification - Don Johnson
“It’s here that an interpretive principle for narrative passages guides us. Sometimes stated as ‘description is not prescription,’ this principle explains that a biblical narrative’s presence doesn’t necessarily imply approval of its contents.” - TGC
No teacher of the Bible wants to be ineffective. The vast majority do teaching work because they love the Scriptures, care about people, and want to be part of God’s work of growing fellow believers into “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (ESV, Eph. 4:13). They love to see people discover, learn, and improve.
Still, though their hearts are in the right place, many teachers rightly sense that their teaching isn’t as good as it could be. Application problems are a likely cause, for two reasons: First, students who have truly experienced a new birth (1 Pet. 1:3, 23) value good application more than anything else. Second, teachers are commonly not trained to understand and develop sound and effective applications.
The result is that several application problems are easy to find in churches of fundamentalist heritage.
“I think his inability/refusal to read good solid Christian books is a symptom of a much greater problem. And it’s why I’m immediately concerned for someone who, in an uber-spiritual tone, tells me they only read the Bible.” Bible-Only Man
