shepherding the shepherd
from PreachingToday.com
‘For the Sabbath Day’
Sabbath/Sunday is our God-given day for head-clearing. Pastors often carve out personal Sabbath times away from the holy hubbub of our Sunday morning work, but we also need those Sunday services together with our brothers and sisters for our own souls’ sake.
Awe
Our challenge is to preach on such texts so that people not only understand them, but their eyes go wide and their hearts leap. Preachers serve as God’s advance awe team.
The Hard Part of Service
There is only one good thing that humans can do that Almighty God cannot: obey. But obeying God does not come naturally to any human being, not even Jesus.
So… So Human
It’s a wonder to read that Jesus took on humanity when we ourselves, blessed with humanness since birth, are so reluctant to own it. Pastors especially seem bent on being superhuman at least part of the time, lifting more than we were intended to carry, working well past exhaustion, and trying to serve never-ending cups of cold water from a bone-dry well.
‘Taking the Very Nature of a Servant’
The Son of God discerned what so often escapes us—that for the sake of love, we can give up our rights and privileges without losing our identity. We don’t become less; we become better.
Check Under the Carpet
In 1998 I arrived at a deeply damaged congregation. I’ll spare you the details, but they were defeated and demoralized. So much had gone wrong that I wondered if there was some kind of deep-set sin in the congregation, something spiritually toxic buried under the carpet.