Preaching to a Post-Everything World Quotes

“Every human being begins at the beginning, as his fathers did, with the same difficulties and pleasures, the same temptations, the same problems of good and evil, the same inward conflict, the same need to learn how to live, the same need to ask what life means.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“God is there and he is not silent. Divine voice whispers, cries out, sings. The divinity that once walked on Eden’s ground in the cool of the day now muddies his feet in the swamps of our making.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Biblical preaching must address three important questions: (1) What kinds of people in our community do we exclude from sitting with us and hearing our sermons (Mark 2:16)? (2) What life situations must people overcome before we allow them to hear our sermons (John 4:17)? (3) What geographical environments do we exclude from our preaching (John 8:48)?”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“we want to expand Chapell’s FCF to more explicitly account for the global contexts. This means that we must fit the FCF for unchurched and in-between cultural contexts as well. The expanded definition for this homiletic tool looks like this: The Fallen Condition Focus (FCF) is the mutual human condition that contemporary believers or nonbelievers share with those to or about whom the text was written that requires the grace of the passage for God’s people to glorify and enjoy him or for those who resist God to properly regard him and to be reconciled to him.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Often the cynic is wise toward reality but a simpleton toward redemption. The cynic offers thick and nuanced description of the swamps and the Challenger Deep but has little more than trite or formulaic expressions for beauty. Preachers must learn to describe something more than sin if they hope to preach redemption for the bogs of a post-everything world. To say rightly but solely that sin and misery saturate reality is to flirt with simplism.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“But what if differences are made by remembering where we’d be without God and then ministering to others out of that knowledge? What if preaching requires something prior to homiletics?”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“grace leads us to reflect Christ’s holiness, but grace also motivates and enables us to reflect his mercy for the poor, his care for his creation, his zeal for justice, his delight in beauty, his love of the unlovely, his dignifying all kinds of work that apply his gifts, his treasuring of chastity outside marriage, his blessing of fidelity in marriage, his tenderness toward “the least of these,” and his love for the lost who have not yet found their home in him.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“To preach biblically means much more than to preach the truth of the Bible accurately. It also means to present that truth the way the biblical writers and speakers presented it.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“When one uses thoughts, dreams, or memories to make life work apart from God, imagination has become idolatrous.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“The Christian sees in the glories of nature not merely the effect of God’s hand, but its presence; not only God’s work, but God working. He not only created that landscape of field, wood, and orchard which I see from my window, but he upholds it, he gives it its existence, he causes every change, at every moment—at every moment there is a coming forth of his attributes into action.9”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Like those preachers who have gone before us, we too are called to preach the unseen things of Christ in the midst of the rival interpretations of philosophical challenges (Acts 17:18). We are neither the first nor the last to preach amid climates of philosophical doubts; we too preach the unseen things of Christ in the midst of the rival interpretations of world religions (Acts 14:12–13; 28:1–11). We are neither the first nor the last to preach in climates with multiple deities and faith practices; we too preach the unseen things of Christ in the midst of the rival interpretations of secular and political thought (Acts 25:19). We are neither the first nor the last to preach amid government activity and secular assumptions; we too preach the unseen things of Christ amid the tangible acts of injustice and the senseless acts of random tragedy (Luke 13:1–5). Ours is not the first generation to preach amid terror and pain.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“It is difficult to imagine, for example, how one can say that the preaching of the prophets and apostles was successful. Many of them were persecuted or killed because of their sermons.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Biblical preaching must address three important questions: (1) What kinds of people in our community do we exclude from sitting with us and hearing our sermons (Mark 2:16)? (2) What life situations must people overcome before we allow them to hear our sermons (John 4:17)? (3) What geographical environments do we exclude from our preaching (John 8:48)? Church membership and the way to heaven are exclusive by nature. Access to hearing God’s Word preached is made exclusive by human choice.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Paul always loved his own people. He never hides this fact.6 But Christ called him to be an apostle to the Gentiles. Imagine the jokes that Peter, James, John, and Paul no longer laughed at.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“the prayer of many of us is that God would raise up a generation of expository evangelists; preachers who understand biblical exposition in missional terms; preachers whose hearts burst with love for sinners; preachers who no longer dismiss biblical exposition when they think of engaging culture; preachers who no longer expound the Bible with disregard for the unchurched people around them.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“some might say to the preacher. “Do you really believe that a few words from an outdated book can change anything? What are words when weapons, money, and power are mounted against you?” But the preacher doesn’t stop, and neither do we. Like those who have gone before us, our voices are ordinary, our intellects are limited, and our personal capacities to stop the madness are minimal. But the physician has come! Preachers of future generations will need to learn this from us too. We will say to them, “The tomb is empty!” This is historical fact. Christ is risen! And the gospel we speak for our generation is nothing less than the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16).”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“When someone hears a biblical sermon, they are meant to declare with the beavers from Narnia, “They say Aslan is on the move.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Identify those areas of reality that a preacher does not talk about and you will discover those spheres of reality that people are daily trying to navigate without the light of God’s Word.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“We use the word fall only because something once stood. We use the word ruin only because something good and beautiful once existed. These broken but remaining reflections of God’s image in persons are what Edith Schaeffer called our “leftover beauty.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Beauty is what is attractive about God; beauty is what enraptures the eyes of the heart as it gazes on Christ by faith through the mediation of the Word.”5”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“This substantial healing engages the four basic spheres of reality—God, people, place, and self. Schaeffer observes: “First of all, man is separated from God; second, he is separated from himself (thus the psychological problems of life); third, he is separated from other men (thus the sociological problems of life); fourth, he is separated from nature (thus the problems of living in this world—for example, the ecological problems). All these need healing.”4”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Jesus is Lord not only of the church but of the world, not only in the religious life but all life.”13”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Often the cynic is wise toward reality but a simpleton toward redemption.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Preachers will have to acknowledge that they do not have all of the answers, that there are some things we can only handle by prayer and fasting (Mark 9: 29) even if this means that we do not look as powerful or successful.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Many of us are being forced to remember that one can be inconsistent in doctrine (like many of us), mistaken in some things (like all of us), and yet truly following Jesus one step at a time. Sanctification is a process.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Preaching reality and redemption will confront us with our own story. My original question returns: Could I now reach who I once was? This question begs another: Who was I once?”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“A basic guide for application offers this equation: The intention of the text The human condition of the text The human situation of the text The divine provisions of the text Like conditions, situations, and provisions + Responding to the intention of the text in our world _______________________________________________ Near application”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Moralism explains why preachers are sometimes frustrated. We preach a message; we tell people to be good; we explain how to be good. Then the next week they are caught doing something bad. We don’t understand how someone can be told what to do and still do the wrong thing—unless we take a look at our own life and acknowledge that we too are like this. We too need the vine in order to do the good we hear.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Once preachers start to identify the Context of Reality for a biblical passage, our unspoken expository bans become apparent. By an expository ban I refer to those aspects of reality that we tend to avoid or that are culturally forbidden to mention from the pulpit. Sexuality, emotions, famines, joys, tsunamis, celebrations, dreams, promotions, murders, crime victims, cancer survivors, and injustice are part of everyday life, but we avoid them.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“When preachers seek to identify the under-the-sun features of a biblical text, they are looking for the Context of Reality (COR). By the Context of Reality, I mean the mutual life environment that contemporary believers and unbelievers share in common with those to or about whom the biblical text was written that teaches us about the nature of reality. Locating the COR says to people, “This is what life is like.” The primary question a preacher asks when seeking to identify the COR of a biblical passage is: What under-the-sun features does this text reveal that my listeners share in common with those to (or about whom) the text was written?”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture