Prospectus & Preaching

OK, now you’ll see that I have upped the amount of time I must write for to 15 minutes.  This will be the highest I will go for this exercise. It was the originally suggested amount of time to be done after getting used to doing this for 10 minute periods.

I did have several topics come to mind as I was contemplating doing this exercise but now many of them have disappeared. So I’ll just start with what’s up there (in my brain) and see where it takes me. I was able to add four pages to my prospectus today, which is good, because I did not add any pages since last Thursday – leaves me at 28 pages and I think I’m supposed to be at 35 pages. I’m going to try to add some more tonight, since Brian traded guard nights with me. I was expecting to spend some time up late tonight anyway, so instead of being down at church, I’ll be here at the confuser adding to my prospectus, or reading books to get more info.

The lady that wrote the book about finishing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day, said in what I was reading today, that most students working on dissertations read too much, and get too much information. I can see her point, because your supposed to end up with writing, but I think right now, I probably have not read enough to really write what I need to. I probably have the tendency to read too much about my particular points in my outline. I think I may have added too much about ancient education to the review of the literature because I read so much on it. Hopefully, it doesn’t have to be cut down too much.

Someone asked that I give more thoughts about preaching in a comment to my Preaching and Teaching post: I was at a very large, well-known Baptist church in the area last night and, WOW, I have never heard such horrible preaching. Maybe I shouldn’t say never, but if I have, it’s been a long time. The message was supposed to be about the will of God and the lust of the flesh. Most of it was about the will of God and most of that came from nowhere in the Bible. It was hardly even a motivational speech. What made it worse, was the terrible twisting of Scriptures. The preacher did yell a lot and threaten that if you didn’t follow him, you would be in big trouble (because you’re not in the will of God). He also said the way to follow the Spirit of God is to follow someone who is following the Spirit of God. I wondered, “Where does that end?” I’m not against pastoral authority or example, but when does someone begin to follow the Spirit of God for himself? He also said (this is a classic) that he had more mercy than God did! I don’t know if the over 2,000 present there caught that, but it was a shocker to me. I didn’t think anyone could come close to the amount of mercy God has shown. Well, the preaching, to me, was very shallow — no teaching, except falsehoods, and lots of yelling, threatening and persuasion. So I guess I would say that preaching must have teaching in it to be preaching. Just repeating ourselves loudly won’t “cut it.” As a preacher, I can only stand on the authority of the Word of God. Just because I’m in the pulpit doesn’t give me more or any autonomous authority. My authority comes from the Word of God, therefore, I must speak/preach from it. If there is no teaching of the facts of the Word, how can I make claims and application? I cannot. Anyway, my friend and I decided that we must return sometime in the future for the entertainment factor if nothing else, and also I would add, for the challenge to always Preach the WORD, not just always to PREACH.