Spokes

Now that I am a licensed preacher in the Presbyterian Church in America (half way to ordination, oh yeah!), I've had a few opportunities to prepare sermons for different congregations. Most recently, while traveling through California on a support raising trip, I was invited to preach at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Bakersfield, CA. It was a blast to be there, and it was wonderful to be able to meet face to face with many of the people throughout California who have been such an encouragement to us over these last few years. The challenging responsibility of all preaching is to ground each topic in the core of the gospel without getting distracted and tangled up in all the other overlapping concepts, truths, reflections, profundities, etc.. It is like trying to follow a single spoke of a bicycle wheel from the rim all the way to the hub without getting your vision caught up on all the others; to choose a single concept and trace out its roots simply and clearly down to the heart of the gospel in such a way that, so far from being crossed, confused, and wrapped up in the adjacent and overlapping concepts, the single thought actually elucidates the connected ideas, as well as the greater structure they form, all the more.

All that to say, one of the things I am learning right now is that truth of the statement that the hardest part of crafting a sermon is deciding what NOT to preach. The beauty of Scripture is that this is a REALLY hard challenge.

- Drew

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