Wrestling With a Text

I spend chunks of time on Tuesday and Wednesday on sermon preparation, working through the passage so that by Thursday I can write the sermon itself. I need to give my outline to our secretary on Friday morning, so I plan my week to work accordingly.

Tomorrow I'm going to go into the office and remove all the inserts from the bulletins and replace them with new ones. Why? No, not because I seriously need counseling, but because the sermon has changed. This happens rarely, but it happened today. I spent 6-7 hours trying to wrestle a sermon into submission. I suplexed it, gave it a flying elbow, tried for a leg drop, and went for the power slam, but it wiggled out every time.

For some reason this one is a hard one. I'm in the early stages of what will probably be a longer series on Romans. I'm preaching from a great text on Sunday (1:16-17). I think I understand the concepts Paul presents, but putting them into a communicable form has been hard. I'm not sure why.

We live in a day when doctrine means little to even some in ministry, let alone the average person who will listen to our sermons. That means that phenomenal and foundational concepts like justification and imputation need to be explained in such a way that is both understandable and accurate.

In addition, our typical evangelical gospel presentation (TEGP) of "just invite Jesus to take over your life" is light years away from faith in the finished work of Christ for the forgiveness of sins. And you know what, it ain't just another way of saying the same thing no matter who says it.

I'm still not settled on my final draft. On Saturdays I usually tweak and prep my powerpoint slides. Tomorrow is going to be more than tweaking. But this passage is about important stuff and it is too key for my dear people not to understand. So if you're a reader passing by today, pray that God enables me. I don't believe in ripping off someone else's presentation - for moral and pragmatic reasons. If things are true to form, this one will marinate overnight and I'll wake up with an "AHA!" moment.

Thanks to Jon Trainer for including a link to some resources on justification in his blog today that I discovered right at a time when I needed a brain prod. As John Calvin would have said, "What luck!!"