Clarity Is King.
Most the preachers I know work very hard at the craft God has called them to. They labor hour after hour, week after week, in order to faithfully feed the people God has entrusted to them.
This means...
They work hard to humbly exegete each text.
They dispense an immense amount of effort into every word.
They carefully craft nearly every sentence.
They give much thought to the illustrations they use.
They want the gospel to be front and center every time they climb into the pulpit.
Despite the hard work, there is one common shortcoming I see in a lot of preaching, including my own. It's a shortcoming that I believe separates the sub-par sermons from the good ones.
How To Have A Confrontational Conversation
I don’t love confrontational conversations. When I have one coming down the chute it occupies a huge sum of mind-share. I worry about it going poorly. I worry about being misunderstood. I worry about my heart being unclear. I worry about hurting the person.
In short, I’m not a fan of conflict. I actually don’t know any sane person who is. Regardless of my discomfort, conflict remains a part of relationship in a fallen world. If you’re going to relate with someone, a time will come when you have to confront them about something. It may be something they said or did that hurt you. It may be a blind spot in their lives that is a problem. The context will change, but the inevitability of conflict will not.
Confronting someone is not easy and should not be taken lightly. It can easily go south if not taken seriously and prepared for properly. One redeeming factor in my discomfort with confrontation is that I’ve developed a process for confrontation that I've found helpful. If you have one of these uncomfortable but important conversations in your future, here’s how I have a confrontational conversation:
The Lost Art Of Listening
Listening is a lost art. We love to talk, tweet, and tell everyone what we think about everything, but if you’re like me, you find listening difficult.
3 Keys to Consistent Prayer
One of my goals for this year has been to pursue growth in my prayer life. To do so, I have been reading, studying, and most importantly, praying. By God's grace I am seeing growth and have found these three things to be crucial to the consistent increase of fervent prayer.
3 Church Planting Essentials
Only God can cause growth and I believe God is sovereign over both the means (particular strategies) and the end (growth). I don't believe that any strategy is a magic formula for numeric growth, and if that's what you're looking for you should revisit your motives and reconsider your readiness to plant a church. We plant the gospel, not a strategy. A strategy is merely the means by which we plant the gospel in our various neighborhoods, communities, and cities.
As we labor to this end, I believe these three essentials are necessary for all church plants regardless of context (hence the term, essential). The way you work them out and what they look like may be dictated by your context, but the necessity of them remains. Here are the three essential means God has used to grow Redemption these past 3 years: