Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Sermons

In my roaming around the internet for lo! these several years, I have, at times, strayed out of the Southern Baptist fields and found things. One of the things I have found is advice on how to evaluate a sermon. So below are two different methods.

First from a Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod pastor comes his three step evaluation criteria. Apply the steps in this order:

  1. Is Jesus mentioned?
  2. Is Jesus the subject or the object of the verbs?
  3. What are the verbs?

The point is that the content of the sermon should be that the Gospel is what Jesus did, not what we do.

The second, one-step, criterion comes from a Methodist bishop. His is probably logically equivalent to the Lutheran's, but is a great deal more succinct. It goes like this:

  • Did Jesus have to die for this to make any kind of sense?

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