You Need To Take Care of Yourself We have been looking at how to preach in a pandemic in these posts. This is the eleventh post in this series, and here is the link to the first in case you want to catch up. In this essay we are going to explore a […]
God Does Not Over Promise and Under Deliver People in a pandemic may experience a testing of their faith. They need to know that God does not over promise and under deliver to us. That’s the theme of this post, one in a series on how to preach in a pandemic. Carl Sewell made a […]
Love Wins The Day One of the big lessons we can learn from church history in regard to preaching during a pandemic is simply this: love wins the day as we care about other people. We’ve been looking at how to preach during a pandemic in these posts, exploring various aspects of sermons during such […]
He Will Hold Me Fast He will hold me fast is the title of an old hymn, copyrighted in 1906 by Charles Alexander, music director for Evangelist R.A. Torrey. The music was composed by Robert Harkness, a pianist who took words provided by singer Ada Habershon, and the song became a hit in the crusade meetings. If […]
Proclaiming Hope for Hopeless People We have been looking at how to preach in a pandemic. Here’s the first in the series of posts. In this post we will consider that proclaiming hope for hopeless people as they face the trauma of this time is a key to effective preaching. One Small Push Recently, I […]
A Crisis of Faith One of the people I came to appreciate in my life is named Brennan Manning. His best-known book is Ragamuffin Gospel, in which he makes the point that we all appear as ragamuffins before God. In other words, we are powerfully stained with sin, but God’s grace reaches out to his anyway. […]
If God Loves Me Why? If God loves me why can’t I get my locker open? That’s the title of a book that was published many years ago, but the title has stuck with me. It brings up the practical and repeating question of Why? When things go terribly wrong in life, the question […]
A Theology of Suffering I’m continuing a series of posts on how to preach in a pandemic. The first of these posts is here. During World War II all of Europe went through great suffering as a result of the war. Christians found that their faith helped them develop a theology of suffering that reflected […]
When It Seems That God Doesn’t Care In the last post we saw that people need a sense of security, that God is in control, during a pandemic. But what about when it seems that God doesn’t care about my pain? Beyond security, however, people need a sense that God cares about them, that he […]
The Need for Security in a Pandemic In the last post we began looking at how to preach in a pandemic. Today we look at this fact: there is a need for security in a pandemic for most people. Let me explain. Why Conservative Churches Are Growing In the early 1970’s a sociologist named Dean […]