You go back to the caves, you’ll see the cave dwellers painting their stories on the walls of the caves.
All through the OT, the people of God are called to “remember” and tell the Story of deliverance.
In your family, there is a story that needs to be told.
In the African American tradition, we are well aware of story telling because we had to pass on our history through the oral tradition.
The preacher pulls you into the Story in a fresh way.
Samuel DeWitt Parker, The Sound of the Trumpet.
Five Types of Preachers
1. The Comfort Dispenser. The Tylenol to get rid of the pain. But, we need more.
2. The Scholar. The one who wants to be known by how smart they are. They have a cemetery degree and like to use $5 words. If you would have went up like you came down, you would have came up like you went down.
3. The Social Prophet. Every Sunday they provide commentary on the social deterioration. We need the watchman on the wall.
4. The Bible Repository. Knowing the Book is necessary, but knowing the God of the Bible is more important.
5. The Preacher Who Embodies All Of These. They Hybrid. We need all of these in the right balance, at the right moment, with the right understanding of the Scripture, with the power of the right Spirit.
Keep a sermon in your pocket and a sermon in your heart.
Karl Barth, “When you prepare a sermon, you have to have the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.”
Now, you have to a Bible in one hand and an iphone in the other.
A hand in God’s Word and the finger on the pulse of society.
Jesus was so cool he would be talking about you and you didn’t even know He was talking about you until you realized, “Hey, he’s talking about me.”
We have to blow the dust of the text, so people can see, “This is my Story!” Jesus did this primarily through story and parables.
Where do we find many of these today? Facebook, YouTube, Movies, Songs, and Twitter.
Put the people in the movie. Jesus stories were a portal for people to walk through. You got to get people so in the story, so build up the character in the story, break down their life, so people can find themselves in that character.
You got to have a twist. What’s the twist. Inevitable, in a good story there is a twist. A common thread in every sermon with a twist that takes them back to the Gospel, every time. Everything means something in the Text. Nothing is wasted. Moses staff is not wasted. When Jesus was writing in the dirt. Nothing is wasted. Bring the twist, waste nothing, surprise them when the ordinary takes on extraordinary meaning.
You got to have Redemption in your story. I don’t need a horror. I can read the paper if I want horror. I need something at the end that shows me the Hope of Redemption. Hope is a dangerous thing. Shawshank…he got out spoonful by spoonful. He crawled through 200 yards of sewage to get to his freedom. He need a spoonful of redemption, he go through 200 feet of garbage to get to where we are free.
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