The Supremacy of God in Preaching
If you were to ask me which Christian figure has been most influential in my Christian walk, from finding joy in God to fighting sin with faith, my immediate response would be "John Piper." Having become an occasional preacher at my home church in the past year, I can now say without hesitation that the selfsame John Piper is far and away the most influential homiletician in my own preaching. That's not to say I inflect and gesticulate like him; it does mean that I attempt to place God's great glory and grace front and center everytime I preach.
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The Archer and the Arrow: Preaching the Very Words of God, by Phillip Jensen and Paul Grimmond, is framed around what the authors describe as the preacher's mission statement: "My aim is to preach the gospel by prayerfully expounding the Bible to the people God has given me to love." They break this statement into its component parts and expound it over the course of several chapters. This takes them from the theoretical to the practical, from the purpose of preaching a sermon to the actual delivery of it.
Following the success of Lies Women Believe, author Nancy Leigh DeMoss joined forces with Dannah Gresh, author of And The Bride Wore White and co-founder of Pure Freedom, a ministry equipping men and women of all ages to a vibrant life of purity, to create Lies Young Women Believe and the Truth that Sets Them Free (LYWB).
Leading up to the 500th anniversary of Calvin's birth, multiple Christian authors and publishers pre-emptively joined the festivities by releasing Calvin-related titles having to do with Calvin's influence on everything from capitalism and commerce to church governance. Naturally, someone was bound to weigh in on Calvin's use of the Hebrew and Greek languages. John Currid, a professor of Old Testament at RTS Jackson, did so, and his contribution to the long conversation on Calvin is both worthwhile and enjoyable.
Traveling evangelists are quietly disappearing. I've listed some reasons for the decline, but I believe there may still be a future for vocational evangelism. Clayton King is the type of evangelist I hope we see more of in the coming years. His evangelistic ministry is church-based and Christ-centered. Though he is young, he is already mentoring those coming up behind him.
Both the subject matter and the author made me jump on the chance to request a review copy of this book. Dr. Donald A. Carson, research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, is a delight to read or listen to. And I always enjoy studying the doctrine of Scripture (not to be confused with Scriptural doctrine). The title reminded me of Sproul's Knowing Scripture, and I thought that perhaps this would be similar, but I was wrong.
I tend to look at titles such as Our Great God and Saviour and wonder what more could be said. Who can number the books that deal with the nature and character of God? And there are new ones published every year. Truly, "Of making many books [of this type] there is no end." It seems that after decades of ministry, Eric J. Alexander would write something more original. But these thoughts only reveal that ridiculous combination of ignorance and arrogance that so often plagues me. At the same time, Alexander's choice of subject matter, and the way he handles it, reveals a depth of maturity and humility that only decades of seeking and learning about God could produce.
Missionaries, like the rest of us, live the cycles of day-to-day life: waking, eating, working, sleeping, etc. The life of a foreign missionary is dedicated to seeing the gospel progress in the lives of those among whom the missionary lives and works. Sometimes a lifetime isn't long enough to see measurable results; sometimes the setbacks seem to outnumber the advances. Ryan Murphy's second book, Winter Spring Summer Fall: Living and Lasting in Missions, chronicles recent seasons in his family's missionary endeavor in and around Rift Valley Academy near Kijabe, Kenya.
The Marriage Bed is a helpful little book from Ray Rhodes, who has also written several titles dealing with family worship. This book[let], weighing in at just 32 pages, is a biblical guide to sexual intimacy. Responding to the inevitable critique that this topic has been covered enough times, Rhodes offers four defenses for writing about it once more:
