Category Archives: Web Links

The Taste of Honey

“But book-reading is never less than a discipline, and discipline requires self-discipline, and self-discipline is never easy. If we are honest both about the delights of reading and the discomforts of reading, I think we can better help our friends discover that books offer life-altering use and life-giving delight, knowledge and pleasure, truth and joy, light and heat.”

Reading as Discipline

“This does not mean that our appetites are not in need of some, or even great, disciplining, but the goal of all discipline is not restraint but freedom. The trained appetite is free to gain the most pleasure—and use—from the best books.”

In the latest Mars Hill Audio Journal, Ken Myers has a fascinating interview with Charles Mathewes about his book The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times. Sounds like a helpful read for anyone engaged in issues of Christ and culture, church and state, and the like. To whet your appetite: according to Mathewes, Madison – precisely as a good Presbyterian – wanted the American republic to be “eschatologically disappointing.”

New audio from Nelson Kloosterman: Turning the Church Inside Out (scroll down to the bottom of the page). Looks like great stuff!

A Sense of Owingness, R. J. Snell:

“One mark of our cultural abnormality is how strange it seems to think of freedom as marked by self-restraint, loyalty, fidelity, reverence, piety, or responsibility. We tend to think that freedom is the absence of responsibility.”

The Haimish Line, by David Brooks

“Whole neighborhoods can exist on either side of the Haimish Line. Alan Ehrenhalt once wrote a great book called “The Lost City,” about the old densely packed Chicago neighborhoods where kids ran from home to home, where people hung out on their stoops. When the people in those neighborhoods made more money, they moved out to more thinly spaced suburbs with bigger homes where they were much less likely to know their neighbors.”

The contents of this page have been moved to the new resources page entitled “Gospel and Law.”

My friend Rick wants me to blog this sort of thing more often, so here we go. From David Murray on learning to preach extemporaneously:

And listen to these strong words from Dabney:

Reading a manuscript to the people can never, with any justice, be termed preaching…. In the delivery of the sermon there can be no exception in favor of the mere reader. How can he whose eyes are fixed upon the paper before him, who performs the mechanical task of reciting the very words inscribed upon it, have the inflections, the emphasis, the look, the gesture, the flexibility, the fire, or oratorical actions? Mere reading, then, should be sternly banished from the pulpit, except in those rare cases in which the didactic purpose supersedes the rhetorical, and exact verbal accuracy is more essential than eloquence.

Shedd argued that young preachers should from the very beginning of their ministries preach at least one extemporaneous sermon every week. By this he did not mean preaching without study or preparation – quite the opposite. Extemporaneous sermons require more preparation in many ways. What he meant was reducing your sermon to a one-page of skeleton outline, and becoming so familiar with it, that referring to it during the act of preaching is minimized. Then, throughout your ministry, try to reduce the size of the skeleton, and dependence on it, more and more. Let the ideas be pre-arranged but leave exact expression of them to the moment of preaching.

Shedd gives these requirements for extemporaneous preaching:

• A heart glowing and beating with evangelical affections
• A methodical intellect – to organize the sermon material into a clear and logical structure
• The power of amplification – or the ability to expand upon a theme
• A precise and accurate mode of expression
• Patient and persevering practice

To these we might add, prayerful dependence upon the Holy Spirit for each and all of these requirements.

From: http://headhearthand.posterous.com/preaching-without-notes-1

And then some steps toward preaching without notes:

http://headhearthand.org/blog/2010/09/08/preaching-without-notes-2/

A concise overview of Mormonism, from Kevin DeYoung.