Preaching And Professing

Testifies to the presence of God as both our post-earthly hope and our present-world existence. / These thought-provoking sermons by Ralph Wood, a layman who has taught religion and literature for many years, seek to till new soil in the fertile field of Christian faith and life. They draw on a wide range of reading not only in Christian theology but also in both classical and contemporary literature and culture. And they also mine Wood s own professorial and personal experience in dealing with both the old and the young amid "the chances and changes of life." / Wood squarely engages the American "culture of death" by wrestling with such vexing questions as sexuality and marriage, war and peace, abortion, racial injustice, and abuse of the elderly. By grounding his homilies in specific times, places, and quandaries, Wood demonstrates that Christianity remains a vigorous set of doctrines and morals precisely as preaching and ethics give shape to our worship and living in the here and now. Focusing not so much on our "getting to heaven," Wood's Preaching and Professing shows concretely how the gospel "gets heaven into us."

With its relentless insistence that there is no reality beyond that which we construct, postmodern thought questions the presuppositions of many disciplines, including homiletics. Offering a lively description of the postmodern worldview and its implications for Christian faith, Confessing Jesus Christ by David Lose teaches preachers how to rise to the challenges posed by our postmodern world. Few if any books on preaching offer such a comprehensive investigation of postmodern thought or yield such a wealth of insights for relevant Christian proclamation. Significantly, Lose sees postmodernism not primarily as an obstacle to the church but as an opportunity for it to stand once again on faith alone rather than on attempts to prove the faith. According to Lose, preaching that seeks to be both faithful to the Christian tradition and responsive to our pluralistic, postmodern context is best understood as the public practice of confessing faith in Jesus Christ. He explores the practical implications of a confessional homiletic for preaching and also provides concrete methods for preparing sermons that meaningfully bridge biblical texts and contemporary congregations.

THERE are two extremes in religion, equally false and equally fatal. And there are two classes of hypocrites that occupy these two extremes. The first class make religion consist altogether in the belief of certain abstract doctrines, or what they call faith, and lay little or no stress on good works. The other class make religion to consist altogether in good works, (I mean dead works,) and lay little or no stress on faith in Jesus Christ, but hope for salvation by their own deeds. The Jews belonged generally to the last mentioned class. Their religious teachers taught them that they would be saved by obedience to the ceremonial law. And therefore, when Paul began to preach, he seems to have attacked more especially this error of the Jews. He was determined to carry the main question, that men are justified by faith in Jesus Christ, in opposition to the doctrine of the Scribes and Pharisees, that salvation is by obedience to law. And he pressed this point so earnestly, in his preaching and in his epistles, that he carried it, and settled the faith of the church in the great doctrine of justification by faith. And then certain individuals in the church laid hold of this doctrine and carried it to the opposite extreme, and maintained that men are saved by faith altogether, irrespective of works of any kind. They overlooked the plain principle, that genuine faith always results in good works, and is itself a good work. -Charles G. Finney GET MORE BOOKS AT REVIVALPRESS.NET

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God is radically dedicated to our ongoing growth in spiritual maturity and holiness. This is both glorious and terrifying. It is glorious because the Lord of heaven and earth is for us. But it is terrifying because we are idolaters. This means that when God brings greater redemption into our lives he also brings a death sentence to our fallen desires. In love, God will do whatever it takes - even tearing us to shreds if necessary - to replace our feeble pleasures with lasting desire for himself. Sadly, in our culture two false responses to suffering have become deeply embedded in the Church: deadly dualism and shallow stoicism. Each can effectively hijack God's good purpose in suffering. Torn to Heal equips us to understand and reject these false and self-defeating approaches to suffering, and to embrace God's good purpose in our trials.