Найти книгу: "Preaching Hebrews"

Hebrews is a powerful meditation on the gospel. It is a sixty-minute sermon delivered to a worshiping congregation. The spiraling impact of theological exposition and pastoral exhortation is impressive. Hebrews weans us away from our preoccupation with the start of the Christian life and focuses our attention on the perseverance of faith. Life is not a sprint; it's a marathon. Faithfulness to the end affirms faith from the beginning. If we let the word of God have its way with us, Hebrews will deepen our faith in Christ and strengthen our faithfulness. Like Jesus in the Gospels, Hebrews sees the fundamental difference between apostasy and faithfulness as the difference between a religion about God and a Christ-centered relationship with God. Any form of Christianity that competes like other religions for the attention of its adherents through its rituals, practices, pastors, traditions, and sacred spaces, has fallen back into an obsolete and worldly strategy. The pastor calls for a decisive end to religion, even the best religion ever conceived. The flow of reasoned argument for Christ and against religion, along with the pulsating emotional intensity of ultimate issues laid bare, and heart-felt warnings against complacency and unbelief, deliver a powerful and timely message.

“Does the preacher now impress us as a ‘legate of the skies’? To many he is a pathetic figure, an anachronism, a stage-joke—an inoffensive little person jostled by the crowd, and wearing the expression of a startled rabbit. With one hand he holds a circular hat on a bewildered head and with the other desperately clutches an umbrella. The crowd pushes him from the sidewalk; the traffic shoots him back into the crowd. Some curse him; a few laugh; most are unaware of his existence.” (George Buttrick, Lyman Beecher Lectures, 1931).   Whether we need preaching has been asked for hundreds of years, long before an age of media saturation from streaming 24-hour news, entertainment, politics, and sports. This question hounded George Buttrick, one of the most profound preachers of the twentieth century and often compared with Billy Graham. Buttrick offers a compelling answer to the question, but his answer remained hidden for 40 years until now.   In George Buttrick’s Guide to Preaching the Gospel , we learn why the world needs competent preachers, what the preacher must preach about, and how the preacher goes about creating the sermon with daily discipline and several practiced skills, including research, charting, outlining, writing, and performance.  These writings have never been published before and were found by his grandchildren after his death. A brief biography of Buttrick introduces this master orator and professor to reader who do not know his work.