Paul Chappell has had a tremendous influence on this generation of preachers and ministers.  He is a gifted preacher, a successful pastor, a dynamic administrator, an influential voice, and a prolific author.  When I set out to write Preaching 101, I wanted someone to write the...

On January 4, 2017, I began an expositional study through the book of Ephesians during our midweek Bible study entitled “We are His.” I have preached through many books of the Bible during my ministry, but this was the first time I systematically and sequentially went through...

When Jesus overcame the reptilian temptations in the desert, He did so with a precise and powerful unleashing of Scripture. Where Adam failed in every conceivable way in perfect paradise, Jesus rose victorious in the most inhospitable environments imaginable.  Though Jesus had the ability to...

Growing up as a child in the 1980’s, I remember when the Jenny Craig weight loss plan first began to spread throughout the nation.  Originally started in Melbourne, Australia, the craze made its way to the United States with vehement force.  Her brand of weight loss flooded...

Just as a building needs an entrance, a symphony needs a prelude, and a book needs a preface, even so the sermon outline needs some basic introductory elements.  Without a proper introduction, the sermon will come off as a stranger to the congregational bystanders.  Though it happens from...

On a scale from one to ten, how joyful are you?  I would like for you to really give an answer.  Go ahead; assign a numerical value to the question.  Ponder it for a few moments.  Make an honest assessment of the joy in your life, and place the number somewhere in your heart.

I...

“That’s not what I meant.” Have you ever heard someone make that statement? Somewhere along the line their thoughts, their ideas, their intent was misconstrued so that others grossly misunderstood what was being said. It can be dangerous, you know. One misplaced word in a text...

The most compelling, heart-stirring messages are those which bring to light the truth of God’s Word in the heart of the hearer. This is the primary task of the expositor: To take biblical truth and communicate it in such a way that the congregation has a clear understanding of the meaning of...

Solomon said, “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counselors there is safety” (Proverbs 11:14). In his wisdom and experience, the king understood the importance of receiving good instruction.  Much of what Solomon penned down in the Proverbs was an...

The Word of God is comprised of nothing less than…well, words.  The words we read on the pages of Scripture provide the eternal truths needed for this life and the one to come.  Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that the expositor correctly and exhaustively deal with the...

Preaching is technical business.  Like an excavator who searches for treasure, the expositor of Scripture must have the right tools, the right knowledge, the right methods, and the right location.  He doesn’t flippantly and superficially wing his message.  He must be a...

Like any laborer who is worthy of his hire, the preacher of God’s Word must endeavor to maximize his gifts and abilities within the vocation of his calling.  One of the ways the expositor of truth can improve his skill set is to digest good reading material about preaching. Granted,...

A sermon outline is simply the structure of a particular passage of Scripture designed in an organized fashion to help communicate more smoothly the exposition of the text. Plain and simple.  Just because someone has an impressive outline doesn’t mean the outline is expositionally...

Expository preaching, in its purest form, simply means to say what God has already said. Arriving to that truth is the process of exegesis, hermeneutics, and homiletics. To the average church attender, those terms mean very little, but to the Bible preacher, those words bring weighty...

Hermeneutics was, by far, my favorite subject in seminary. The art and science of biblical interpretation not only inspired me to be a greater expositor of God’s Word, but perhaps more personally, gave me a desire to approach the text with moral, spiritual, and ethical character.  When...

Before I itemize the benefit and blessings of attending the Sunday night worship service, allow me to make some preliminary statements.

• First, the traditional worship hours that we have in our churches cannot be considered as scriptural mandates. No one can honestly or biblically claim that the...

In his book, Heartbeats of the Holy, Keith Knauss tells the story of a farmer who went to hear John Fletcher (a devout preacher who greatly influenced the ministry of John Wesley).  As the old farmer set out to hear Fletcher at a local revival service in town, he passed by his neighbor who...

With all the time-constraints that engulf the ministry, the preacher of God’s Word must be a good steward of his sermon preparation. If he is not, he will feel the crunch come Sunday. One of the reasons we have such powerless, anemic, insipid preaching in the pulpit is because we have such...

Trials create a deep and profound need for wisdom.  Whatever adverse circumstance you face, there is, more than likely, a desire for answers, a need for direction, a longing for resolution.  Have you ever met someone going through a difficult season only to say things like, “I just...

“Fiery trials,” said Spurgeon, “make golden Christians.”  Perhaps this is what Job had in mind when he pronounced, “But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold” (Job 23:10).  Fire authenticates, it refines, it...

In his book, Understanding Leadership, Tom Marshall contends, “Perceive something as a threat and you will experience fear, even if there is, in fact, no danger at all.  Perceive something as humorous and you will want to laugh, even if the experience is painful.”...

Job 14:1 states, “Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble.” In short, life is the quickest of quandaries. A year, a decade, a century, and it’s gone.  Life is a gift, be sure, but it requires guts, grit, and a lot of grace to get through it. ...

According to Webster’s dictionary, the definition of the word Cannibal is as follows: a person who eats the flesh of human beings or an animal that eats its own kind.* “Eating your own kind” may seem like a good survival strategy in dire circumstances, but over the long haul, such...

In his book, Paths to Power, A.W. Tozer commented on the spiritual condition of the church, “To any casual observer of the religious scene today, two things will at once be evident: one, that there is very little sense of sin among the unsaved, and two, that the average professed Christian...

The preacher of God’s Word spends much of his time in preparation for the preaching hour. He studies, he prays, he searches, he digs out, he anticipates, he practices, he meditates, he even dreams about the moment when Sunday comes and he mounts the pulpit with the Bible in his hand. But on...