A Booklet Recommendation: Listen Up!
Posted by Matt McAlvey on
Hi Friends,
This past Sunday I spent some time during our study in Mark 1:35-45 helping us to lay the foundation for how to think about the place of preaching during our Sunday gatherings. If you weren’t able to join us you can watch or listen to the sermon and get caught up to speed on things. I used a lengthy quote from Christopher Ash’s booklet, Listen Up! A Practical Guide to Listening to Sermons and have also provided it here for you:
“When the Bible is faithfully opened up, we are to listen to the preacher’s voice as the voice of God Himself. The preacher stands in the great tradition of prophets and apostles who spoke the word of God. Unlike them, the Christian preacher cannot offer new or fresh ideas to add to the Bible. But like them, there is a borrowed authority to speak what God wants spoken…We will not instinctively hear preaching as the voice of God. Our natural reaction is to take it simply as the voice of people. One of the wonderful things the Spirit of God does is to open our ears so that we receive it not just as the voice of people, but as the voice of God. We need to pray for Him to do this in us.”
This little booklet (only 31 pages long!) is packed with really helpful material and is one that you could probably read with your morning cup of coffee. In it, Christopher offers seven ingredients for healthy sermon listening:
- Expect God to speak
- Admit God knows better than you
- Check the preacher says what the passage says
- Hear the sermon in church
- Be there week by week
- Do what the Bible says
- Do what the Bible says today - and rejoice!
Here’s a link for it on Amazon. Happy reading!
Matt