If
you live in the text eventually it will grip you to the place where it becomes
like a banked fire, just waiting for the bellows of the Holy Spirit to be placed
on it, to set it aflame to warm the minds and hearts of the people. If it happens
to us it then can happen through us, so the text must become very real to us.
Then
I think we've got to have Richard Baxter's
rule, AI preach as a dying man to
dying men, as if never to preach again. So every sermon ought to be preached with vigor as if we will never have another
chance. That kind of enthusiasm and passion is what is needed in the church
in America today B
and all over the world, for that matter. I call it preaching with passion, and
that kind of preaching is an understanding, an appreciation and an acceptance
of the passion of Christ, the suffering of Christ for us, and then an identification
with the suffering of human beings, so that we really feel what is going on
inside of people. We want to bring the two together in an enthusiastic, heartfelt
but intellectually healthy presentation.
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__________________________
Lloyd
John Ogilvie is retired from his post as Chaplain of the United States Senate,
and now has a ministry of speaking and writing based from his home in Los Angeles,
CA.
It's
been my practice — even though I might preach totally extemporaneously — to
write out that sermon in full. One day it'll be an article, a chapter in a book.
But, the most important thing was that when I had finished writing that out,
closer to preaching time, I'd go through it with prayerful review and there
I would eliminate all the bad symmetries, bad language, bad theology, bad exegesis,
too many repetitions of a given word, and all that sort of stuff. Second, prayerful
relationship of that message to my own heart — prayerfully reviewing. I believe
in the glorious truth of John 1 that preaching is not redemptive unless it's
incarnational. It cannot be incarnational without the Holy Spirit overshadowing
it all. That must relate to me. I am not going to preach to others what I haven't
preached to myself. So it has to come through incarnationally Then lastly, prayer.
The manuscript is pushed aside and I go through it and say, "Lord, here's
what I've got."
I don't memorize. I memorize conceptually but I do not memorize in words verse
by verse. I ask "Lord, are you pleased with this?" Until I got through
that with a sense of conviction and the favor of God in my own spirit, I'd go
back over it until I'm totally released to preach that message. Now in between
all that, I had breaks for wider reading. At one time in New York, I read 6
books a week. and kept that up pretty accurately, along with magazines, journals,
and that kind of thing. I'm talking about studying, now. I'm not talking about
committees and I'm not talking about seeing staff — I'm talking about study
itself.