Tuesday is for Preaching
You attended worship last Sunday. Perhaps you led worship last Sunday. In either case, you heard or gave a message from the word of God. Either you or someone else, spent between 10-25 hours the week previous, studying a text, praying over a text. brooding over a text, asking God for insight about a text, constructing an outline of a text and writing a message so that the people of God could hear that text for what it really is, not the word of a man but the words of God (1 Thess. 2;13).
Question: Did you beat a path to the cross? Did you/they do what Jesus did on the Emmaus road (cf. Luke 24:13-35)? Did you/they do what Philip did on the road that goes from Jerusalem to Gaza (cf. Acts 8:26-40)?
Did you do what Spurgeon made it his practice to do? Taking his clue from these two passages, Luke 24:27, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself,” and Acts 8:35, “Beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus,” Spurgeon said his practice was to make a beeline to the cross.
Is that what you heard on Sunday? Is that what you did on Sunday? Based on what you preached from whatever text you preached, would a non-believer in the gospel know the great news of the gospel clearly enough to hear God calling them to repent and believe in the gospel?
Was the gospel clear and complete? Was it presented in a logical and sequential pattern? Was it recognizable as a call to repent and believe? Was it held out to your hearers, believers and non-believers alike as their only hope and the ground of all their joys in this life and the next?
I am convinced that whether I am preaching to the lost or teaching disciples, the message must contain the words of Jesus in Mark 1:14-15 Jesus came to Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, (15) and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”
It is the constant message of the day to each of us. Repent and believe! Or, Love and obey! (John 14:15)
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