The words “must,” “ought,” and “should” just make me tired—but seeing love and grace in action makes me want to move. It’s the same way with preaching!

Otherwise Thinking

Preaching the Good News…

Image …as Good News

For a variety of reasons, we often fail to communicate any motivating “good news” in our sermons. From my experience, there are several reasons for this.

Sometimes we cave in to the culture’s pejorative definition of “preach” – thus the need to sound “preachy.” We load sermons with hard or soft imperatives: “we must,” “we should,” or “let us,” and “we are called to….” When this happens, I am reminded of the hospital nurse, using the “nurse’s ‘we’”: “we need to take our medicine now,” “let’s sit up now and eat some lunch.”

At other times, we worry that the congregation is not doing all that it could do to support our exciting vision for church growth or social justice. We feel compelled to nag at our congregations for their failings.

At other times, we lose sight of the redemptive good news…

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  1. i like your views on this Dave however some of the churches i was involved in early on and the experiences i had with em in terms to preaching gave me an idea that preaching today and the people that do this relevently in churches want to be seen by the people of the congragation they are preaching to and or they want a feel good sensation to themselves. Thanks for the post Dave and feel free to email me at the address above thanks once again.

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