Author: Tim Challies

There are few habits that are easier to establish and few habits that are easier to foster than the habit of critiquing the Sunday sermon. There are also few habits that require less skill, that demand less character, and that bring less benefit. But it’s so easy to do, isn’t it? It’s easy to do because we listen to a fallible man attempt to explain an infallible Word, a finite man explain the riches of an infinite God. We listen to a man attempt to apply Scripture to circumstances we have experienced while he has not. We listen to a man who may have substantially less knowledge of the Bible or of doctrine than we do. And perhaps all week long we listen to the preaching of men of exceptional talent before, on Sunday, listening to the preaching of a man of merely average talent. (After all, by definition the average one of us attends an average church led by an average pastor.) Though critiquing the sermon is easy to do, it requires no great skill and no substantial Christian character. It requires dedicated effort to prepare a sermon, but no effort to criticize one. It takes substantial skill to preach a sermon, but no skill to critique one. There is a massive disparity between what it takes to prepare and deliver a sermon and what it takes to pick one apart. Three or four days of laboring over Scripture and commentaries and many hours of prayerful pleading can be dismissed with a single word.…See AlsoTo the Young Man Who Has Been Asked To Preach for the First TimeSermons Are Not For LikingHow To Listen To An (Expository?) Sermon

We often make the mistake of thinking that more money would bring more happiness. We know in our minds that money brings as many cares as it does freedoms and that the wealthy are no happier than the merely comfortable. Yet we still believe that we would be more satisfied if we only had more wealth. De Witt Talmage beautifully counters that notion in this brief excerpt of a sermon from long ago by explaining that both poverty and riches are a matter of the heart.  There are millions of people who on departing this life will have nothing to leave but a good name and life insurance, whose illumined faces are [proof] of illumined souls. They wish everybody well. When the fire bell rings they do not go to the window at midnight to see if it is their store that is on fire, for they never owned a store; and when the September equinox is abroad they do not worry lest their ships founder in a gale, for they never owned a ship; and when the nominations are made for high political office they are not fearful that their name will be overlooked, for they never applied for office. When the children of that family assemble in the sitting room of the old homestead to hear the father’s will read, they are not fearful of being cut off with a million and a half dollars, for the old man never owned anything more than the farm of seventy-five acres, which yielded only enough…See AlsoA La Carte (June 27)Free Stuff FridaysHeart Cries to Heaven