Preacher: Lead the Congregation into the Presence of God

It is something of a truism that seminaries are not great at teaching preaching. 

Thinking does vary on this: some believe that preachers cannot be taught, simply improved; others that you can take someone who cannot preach and make him a preacher.  What is certain is that any student who simply relies on the preaching experience he has in the seminary classroom will be inadequately prepared for the preaching ministry.   Seminary preaching needs to be supplemented with experience in the local church, at the old folks home etc.

Yet there is another thing that is not done well at seminary, something which is rarely noticed and which is consequently something of a dying art: pulpit prayer.

In fact, pulpit prayer should be a vital part of the worship service.  It is at those moments that the pastor has the task of leading the people into the very presence of God.  This is an awe inspiring task, not to be undertaken lightly.  Such leading should be clear, suffused with biblical allusions and shaped by biblical thought patterns.  It should be built on the foundation of a solid grasp of the mediation of Christ and should reflect that in its content. 

Often Protestants concentrate so much on the sermon or the singing as the contact point between God and the congregation that we forget the importance of prayer.  Yet corporate prayer is surely a means of grace (Shorter Catechism 88) and it thus requires that those leading worship pay as much attention to what they say in their prayers as they do to their sermons.  The congregation should come away from the service believing that they have met with a holy and gracious God; and public prayer is a key element of that.  Keep Reading >>>

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Keep the Presence of God

On vacation, I kept a copy of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons on my bedside table as a way of going to sleep with a God-centered mind. One of those sermons was called “Keeping the Presence of God.” It was preached on a colony-wide fast day in April 1742. The second wave of the First Great Awakening had crested in the vicinity, and Edwards was seeing both the good and bad fallout of revival. He saw spiritual dangers lurking everywhere. In the next year, as he preached his famous series on the religious affections, he would become the most careful analyst and student of human hearts that had been wakened in the revival. What he saw in those hearts was mixed.

 So in this sermon, “Keeping the Presence of God,” his aim was to stir up awakened Christians to be vigilant that their exuberance not become pride. He exhorted them to give themselves to watchfulness and prayer so as to remain broken, humble, and happy in the good work of God in their lives.

Oh, how different is the path of Christian maturity pointed out by Edwards f rom the path most Christians walk today. There is a kind of cavalier attitude toward our security today. There is little trembling, little vigilance, earnestness, caution, and watchfulness over our souls. There is a kind of casual, slack, careless attitude toward the possibilit y that we might make shipwreck of our faith and fail to lay hold on eternal life. We have the notion that security is a kind of mechanical, automatic thing. We prayed once to receive Jesus. We are safe and there is no place for “working out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). That is not what Edwards saw in the Bible.   Keep Reading  >>>

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Jesus Calling

"One night I found myself leaving the warmth of our cozy chalet to walk alone in the snowy mountains. I went into a deeply wooded area, feeling vulnerable and awed by cold, moonlit beauty. The air was crisp and dry, piercing to inhale. Suddenly I felt as if a warm mist enveloped me. I became aware of a lovely Presence, and my involuntary response was to whisper, ‘Sweet Jesus .’ This utterance was totally uncharacteristic of me, and I was shocked to hear myself speaking so tenderly to Jesus. As I pondered this brief communication, I realized it was the response of a converted heart; at that moment I knew I belonged to Him. This was far more than the intellectual answers for which I’d been searching. This was a relationship with the Creator of the universe." Read the whole review HERE