I thought that Robert M'Cheyne preached like skill 5, so I enjoyed reading your
perspective on his preaching style. I find it interesting how we each see different
interpretations in the text. According to McDill, when bridging the text to sermon
"The concept revealed in the text must be carried safely across the chasm of
language, culture, and history so that it may be heard again today in its intended
meaning."1 After reading about M'Cheyne, I felt he fit this skill because "he said
the sweetness of the Spirit’s ministry is its focus on regeneration and
sanctification. It is the Spirit who is God’s agent unto conversion, who works
through the preached Word to bring peace to sinners, and who brings the new
birth."2 M'Cheyne was able to preach God's Word to his generation in a way that
spoke the truth while resonating in their time period. He was able to bridge the
gap in his sermon between the text and his audience, allowing the Holy Spirit to
use his preached Word to bring sinners to Christ. I enjoyed reading about
M'Cheyne because I felt a small connection to him. He enjoyed visiting with
parishioners where he could share a word about God and prayer. I am currently
involved in a minister that visits shut-ins. We visit, talk, and pray together. I love
spending time with people in their homes, I feel that you can show people Jesus
through the actions of meeting people where they are. I enjoyed your post and
thought you did a great job. f I think many preachers forget the last part. I love to
be involved in a church that has a mission of some kind. And I like their sermons
to use these missions to demonstrate how to take Christ’s words out of the
church. It does not matter the size of the mission. It could be holding a food
drive for a month, or raising money for a shelter, or doing odd jobs for the elderly
or shut-ins.
f f f f f f f f f I also like the way the older preachers from our book loved the Bible so
much and read it over and over. This allowed them to really know what the Bible
said, and what it meant in its original form. This way the pastor can speak to
their audience and the audience will understand the sermon because the pastor
has done so much work beforehand. I like it when a preacher preaches on a
subject, or verse, or passage that I know quite well, and I learn a new way of
thinking about it.First, while I enjoyed your post and your understanding of McDill
yet, this was not the purpose of the post. We were to choose preachers that
McDill wrote about and identify the Skill that they best exemplified. f Second, It is
hard to read when there is one giant block of text. f Many of the posts split up
each preacher and identified their skill. I did enjoy reading the post and look
forward to reading others in the future. Your post clearly stated how you thought
McDill and the writers had similarities. It is so important that preachers continue to see
the word of God as unfathomable and each of these preachers and McDill realize that
importance. Too many pastors and churches take God's word out of context and preach
from their feelings and not truth. You said, "This philosophy of having a solid theological
and homiletical approach when delivering the message would bring the message more
to life as far as substance goes. This would also create more things for preachers to
bring out in the text which would also help sharpen their skill when it came to sermon
preparation." This proves that what we believe the bible says plays a huge role in how
we preach the word. McDill talks about the importance of what we say to our
congregation and that is why it is so important to make sure we preach what the Bible
says and not what we think it says or what we want it to say.
