In a recent article for Pastors.com, Brandon Cox talked about a particular sermon that fell flat \u2013 and why: \u201cOn a recent Sunday, I kind of bombed. Most of the congregation probably couldn\u2019t tell; partly because they\u2019re so stinkin\u2019 nice, but I knew driving home I had missed the mark.<\/p>\n
My message that\u00a0Sunday was a tough one. My goal was to explain how Jesus perfectly fulfills the responsibilities of our high priest before God \u2013 how He grants us access to God\u2019s presence, offers Himself as a payment for our sin, and prays on our behalf before the Father.<\/p>\n
I started by mentioning the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer and then plunged into Jesus\u2019 priestly prayer offered in the 17th chapter of John. And that\u2019s where I think I missed some marks. For example . . .<\/p>\n
I was trying to cover too much ground \u2013 to preach a lengthy passage filled with details in a single sermon forced me to skip over a lot of content that was not only good, but which probably raised some good, powerful questions in the minds of my listeners.<\/p>\n
John 17 can easily be broken into multiple parts. Jesus first prays for himself, then for his 11\u00a0remaining disciples, and then for all believers who will ever follow him in the future. The chapter should probably have been used as a three-part message series. Or, I should have used a different, shorter passage altogether for a single message, perhaps from Hebrews 7 where Jesus\u2019 priesthood is explained a little more succinctly.<\/p>\n
I think I probably left the congregation with a vague familiarity with Jesus\u2019 prayer rather than an intimate awareness of its depth.<\/p>\n
I brought out of the first portion of the passage that Jesus was asking God to use the \u201chour\u201d in which he would be crucified and raised from the dead to bring glory to himself. I could have turned my attention, then, to\u00a0your<\/em> crucial hour of decision. But I failed to make that jump.<\/p>\n In the second part of the prayer, Jesus asks the Father to sanctify his disciples through his truth, his Word. He mentions \u201cthe world\u201d 19\u00a0times in the chapter and asks God to protect us. I spent time in a bit of a rant about the problem with dividing sacred from secular and how we really ought to be sacred in the middle of the secular. It\u2019s an okay point to make, but it\u2019s not what my particular congregation really struggles with. I should have, instead, talked about the kinds of threats that come to our spiritual growth from the culture, and how we can root our lives in God\u2019s Word as a primary defense.<\/p>\n And in the third part of the prayer, Jesus asks the Father to keep all future believers unified in love. Again, I ranted a little about how this isn\u2019t really a call to non-denominationalism or to institutional unity, but rather to a spiritual kinship shared by all believers around the world. It would have been a great opportunity to explore the specific ways we can show love for one another within the Body of Christ. But again, I failed to make that jump.\u201d (Read the full article, including a third reason)<\/p>\n In a recent article for Pastors.com, Brandon Cox talked about a particular sermon that fell flat \u2013 and why: \u201cOn a recent Sunday, I kind of bombed. Most of the congregation probably couldn\u2019t tell; partly because they\u2019re so stinkin\u2019 nice, but I knew driving home I had missed the mark. My message that\u00a0Sunday was a … Continue reading “When the Sermon Flops”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}