Don’t Utilize Extensive Vocabulary when You can Use Simple Words
A little consideration of the hearers will go a long way to making sermons more understandable. Are many of your hearers from a different culture to you? Then keep your vocabulary as simple as possible and try to avoid idioms. Are there likely to be those with little to no Bible knowledge? Then don’t use obscure illustrations from the Bible with no explanation. Is there a difficult word in the Bible text itself? Take time to explain it in simple words.
Too many sermons are more complicated than they need to be. Like any specialty, the Christian world has its own special vocabulary. Words like holy, justification and glorification do turn up in the Bible, yet they rarely if ever turn up in everyday conversation. On top of this, there are all kinds of theological terms used to describe Biblical concepts that are rich and meaningful if you know what they mean, like Trinity and ordo salutis and transcendence. Yet the majority of people in our churches listening to sermons don’t know or use these words. Anyone whose task it is to explain the word of God to others needs to think carefully about the words they use lest they are misunderstood.
Think about Jesus in his teaching. He used the common language and common illustrations that everyone would understand. Sure, they might not have understood what he meant, but the words were clear. Likewise, when Paul spoke to the Athenians who were educated but not experienced in the Jewish Scriptures, he spoke plainly. He explained God’s sovereignty and aseity without using those words. It is more than possible to explain difficult concepts in simple words.
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The Death of Football—and Common Sense, Sanity, and Reality
What is wrong with these people? Their brainwashing and indoctrination is now fully complete. They cannot think straight and they no longer know the difference between reality and fantasyland. And they write and say all this crapolla with a perfectly straight face! This really is the end of Australia and the West.
In an article I just penned hours ago I spoke of the passing of an era. I discussed the funeral of Queen Elizabeth and noted how we may not see similar things again. The old order of faith, tradition, loyalty and responsibility is being replaced with a new order of unbelief, novelty, rebellion and selfishness.
And these are but symptoms of a bigger malaise: the slow but steady erosion of Christianity in the West and the rise of secular humanism in all its forms. As God and faith go, we see a rise in madness, immorality and lunacy. And we see this nowhere more clearly in the giant behemoth of transgenderism.
We seem to be watching in real time the rise of a zombie apocalypse where most of our elites and leaders have abandoned all reason, all logic, and all sanity as they cheerily embrace the moonbat ideology of the trans revolutionaries.
And these folks are now fully in control of the media, of entertainment, of politics, of culture, and of education. They are pushing this insanity on the rest of us hapless peons. Of interest, what shot Jordan Peterson into the social spotlight stratosphere was his stance on this issue.
He refused to bow down and worship at the altar of mass delusion and infantile temper tantrums. And so many of the rest of us feel the same way. Recently a friend was discussing all this and I said in reply, “While using a preferred name may not be too problematic, using a preferred pronoun is. That means I have to lie, and support someone in their delusion.”
People are never helped when we share in their lies, their confusion, and their mental meltdowns. As one meme making the rounds states, “I won’t use someone’s pronouns for the same reason I won’t talk to a schizophrenic’s imaginary friend.”
These people need help and counsel desperately. But they do NOT need affirmation, celebration, and promotion. Yet that is what we find everywhere, certainly in the brainless lamestream media. Consider the latest case of this idiocy. An important event for the Australian Football League is its annual awards night, the Brownlows.
Here top athletes are honoured while their partners get to showcase their frocks and hairdos. Since the team I like happens to be in the Grand Final this weekend, I turned it on, and almost spilled my dinner. A former footballer has over the past few years decided that he is now a she, and all the media meatheads are more than happy to play along with this nonsense.
It was utterly embarrassing to behold. I refer to Dean Laidley who has grown his hair and likes to wear dresses. No one questions this. No one challenges this. Instead, everyone just happily goes along with it, joining in with this mass delusion.
As I was watching all this transpire, I mentioned it on the social media, saying that I am sick of hearing supposedly intelligent adults calling a bloke a sheila. And I said that I am just waiting for some fool to ask him who did his hair and who designed his dress. And sure enough this actually happened! Good grief!
We know the mainstream media has long ago fully embraced the entire list of PC woke agenda items, including the trans madness, but this was utterly gross to behold. It appears it is now a requirement to get a lobotomy before landing a job in the media.
And within minutes you found headlines like this: “Danielle Laidley, partner Donna Leckie stun on Brownlow Medal red carpet,” along with this: “AFL legend Danielle Laidley has stepped out on the Brownlow Medal red carpet for the first time in years, stunning guests in a white gown.”
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Thinking Biblically About Grief
Three precious promises as I’ve grieved over the last few months: God loves me unconditionally despite my doubts and lack of peace. God’s ways are higher than mine. Isaiah 55:8-9 tells us that “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” I know God is close to those who have a broken heart. “The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit” (Psalm 34:18).
A few months ago, one of my best friends moved away, and I was plunged into some of the deepest grief I have ever experienced. It sent me spiraling into a season of depression and provoked one of the deepest questionings of my Christian faith. At times, I cried out to God, pleading for an answer that would give me the peace and closure I needed to move on. At other times, I was filled with pride and arrogance, demanding an answer from God and refusing to trust Him again until I got one.
In the following paragraphs, I am going to be very open about my struggles because I believe that is what the church needs. For too long, we have kept inside what we should be sharing. In Galatians 6:2, Paul commands us to “bear one another’s burdens.” Most relationships in the church barely scratch the surface, either because we are too afraid to share with others or because we don’t know how to respond. My hope is that this article will help both those who are grieving and those who want to minister to others.
As I wrestled with my feelings, naturally I looked for others who had experienced something similar. I stumbled across C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed one day and decided to give it a read. I have read several of C.S. Lewis’ works in the past, most of which are either allegories or apologetics. A Grief Observed was very different, almost like a deeply personal journal that was not intended for public reading. Originally published under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk, Lewis wrote A Grief Observed after his dear wife Joy died of cancer. They were married for only four years before she passed away.
Now, I have certainly not experienced the death of my friend. Nonetheless, there is still incredible grief from his absence. Growing up as an only child, I always wanted a brother. The Lord most definitely filled that desire through my friend. For the past four years, we spent nearly every day together. And through my friend, I repeatedly experienced the unconditional love of God as he forgave me when I was wrong and saw past all my many faults. And now, suddenly, he is gone. I am thankful that we still have the ability to communicate and visit each other. But the fact is that my friend no longer lives close by, and things will never be the same. That void is often overwhelming.
As I read A Grief Observed, I found myself identifying with many of the feelings this giant of the faith experienced so many decades ago. At the start, Lewis addresses God’s apparent silence in our grief:
But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?
Thankfully, these are only thoughts that crossed Lewis’ mind and not anything he actually came to believe. I know such thoughts have crossed my mind during the last few months, and I’m sure they have crossed yours as well during a time of grief. Later, Lewis acknowledges that grief is one of God’s methods to test our faith, to show us who or what our trust is really in:
God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards.
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The Bible Tells Us the Rest of the Story about Who We Are
Once I recognized the truth of the Bible and how it truly explained reality, it was only a matter of time until I came to understand who Jesus was and what he did. And once I knew that and came to recognize the seriousness of my own sin, the truth of the Bible meant I could trust Jesus to deal with my sin and bring me back into right relationship with God.
I’m listening to Francis Schaeffer’s book The God Who is There, which I’m really enjoying. In the book, he gives one particular illustration about the truth of the Bible which I wanted to share, because it encapsulates my own experience as I was first reading the Bible, and explains what started me on the road that eventually led to me becoming a Christian.
In addressing how we don’t arrive at faith in the God of the Bible solely by reason, but not also without reason, Schaeffer has the reader imagine finding a bunch of fragments of the pages of a book – perhaps the top inch of each page of a whole book, or something similar. If we had the top inch of each page, what we could read wouldn’t be enough for us to understand the whole story of the book, or even really to make sense of it – but it would be enough to give us some idea of what the book was about, and tell us something of the characters, etc. This, Schaeffer argues, is like what we can see and know about ourselves from looking at ourselves and the world we live in – we know a great deal, but we don’t understand the whole story, the whole picture, and can’t fully make sense of life.
Now, imagine having that set of page fragments, and then finding the remaining portion of all of the pages from the book somewhere, perhaps in the attic. By taking the newly discovered set of page fragments and placing them together with the pages you already have, you would be able to complete the book. It would be easy to tell that the remaining portions match the fragments, because taken together they complete the story. And once the story is completed, you could read the whole story and finally make sense of the whole book.
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