Too quickly we can dive into other people's outlines, commentaries, funny stories, and powerful anecdotes. Instead, we must give time to listen ourselves. Read the passage out loud to yourself. Get inside its story and its message. There are no quick fixes and no short cuts. You need to love scripture and live in it. The less other secular people are convinced, the more you need to be.

Before last Easter I preached a series on Mark 14. When it came to the intertwined story of the trial of Jesus and denial of Peter (Mark 14:53-72), I had lived with this powerful contrast for several days before I preached it. How Jesus says who He is, and Peter denies who he is -- Jesus' friend. You can picture it. I called my sermon "Two faces." After I preached it a young father came out with his sons and said with such intensity: "I've got it. I don't want to be a Peter. I want to be a friend of Jesus."

2) Be serious about culture change.

1 Corinthians 9:19-23 reveals how the apostle Paul faced the cross-cultural challenge in his changing world. He identified with various groups, becoming all things to all men. You could interpret part of that today not only in terms of those who are in the church and outside the church, but those who are Boomers (born and raised in the 1940's to 60's), Generation X (born 1961-81) and Millennials (born since 1981). John Stott calls preachers to "double listening" -- listening to God's Word and listening to God's world.

I introduce students in my course on preaching principles to several new words. They include paradigm shifts, modernity, postmodernity, and communication shifts. Paradigms are frameworks, models, patterns by which we see and understand the world. When Columbus discovered the new world the paradigm of flat earth thinking shifted to round earth thinking. The two most recent paradigms are termed modernity and postmodernity. Modernity was birthed by the Renaissance with supremacy given to human reason, and was crowned in the eighteenth century Enlightenment culture. Its patron the philosopher Descartes said: "I think therefore I am." Modernity meant a rational coherence with a set of principles by which to understand the world. It was optimistic, believing in the progress of science and technology, and it gave an automatic place in society for the church to offer its set of principles by which to understand the world.

Postmodernity is an ugly word to describe what seems to be happening at the end of the twentieth and beginning of twenty-first centuries. As Walter Truett Anderson puts it: "Postmodern is a makeshift word we use until we have decided what to name the baby." There has been a new surge of spirituality at the same time as a collapse of rational coherence. Now the slogan is "Truth is what you make it." "Anything can be true for anyone." A suspicion has arisen about authoritative answers and absolute truths. The new creed is: "I feel, therefore I am." Instead of the modernist attack "Christianity is not true," the postmodern criticism is "Christians are claiming to have the only truth --how arrogant."