{"id":133,"date":"2007-03-13T19:01:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-13T19:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/?p=133"},"modified":"2007-03-13T19:01:00","modified_gmt":"2007-03-13T19:01:00","slug":"how-do-you-know-youve-heard-christian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/13\/how-do-you-know-youve-heard-christian\/","title":{"rendered":"How Do You Know You&#8217;ve Heard a Christian Sermon?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the radio program <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kfuo.org\/ie_main.htm\">Issues, Etc.<\/a>, the host occasionally plays a sermon and analyzes it using the following criteria:<\/p>\n<ul><\/p>\n<li>How often does the sermon mention Christ?<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Is Christ the subject of the verbs?<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>If it mentions Christ, and He&#8217;s the subject of the verbs, what are those verbs?<\/li>\n<p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In a Christian sermon, Christ should be <i>mentioned<\/i>!  This seems like a no-brainer, and it&#8217;s supported by John 15:26:  &#8220;When the Spirit comes,&#8230;He will testify about Me.&#8221;  So, Spirit-led preaching will testify about Christ.<\/p>\n<p>And Christ should be the subject of the verbs.  As they say on Issues, Etc., this is more than just grammar!  Christ came, suffered, died and rose.  It is He who seeks us, chooses us (John 15:16), and saves us from sin.  He didn&#8217;t come to rescue us from being stressed out, or to make us feel good about ourselves, or to guilt us into doing good works.  That&#8217;s what we have Oprah for.  If a sermon neglects Christ&#8217;s work, it is not truly a Christian sermon, even if it&#8217;s preached by a Christian in a Christian church.<\/p>\n<p>Lately I&#8217;ve been listening to sermons with these questions in mind, and it&#8217;s very eye-opening.  So with all that in mind, I thought I&#8217;d share <b><a href=\"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/misc\/jonathanfisk_sermon.mp3\">this sermon<\/a><\/b>, from a recent episode of Issues, Etc., which I think is good.  It&#8217;s by Pastor Jonathan Fisk, of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Perryville, New Jersey.  If you like it, you might also like <b><a href=\"http:\/\/allwashedup.blogspot.com\/\">his website<\/a><\/b>.<\/p>\n<p>A final thought: I really don&#8217;t want to be hypercritical about this.  I just think if a sermon focusses on Christ and what He has done for us, people might repent and be saved.  If it focusses on some wordly problem (say, how busy we are, and that we need time to ourselves once in a while), that won&#8217;t fix the real problem of sin in my life, which is what I most desperately need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the radio program Issues, Etc., the host occasionally plays a sermon and analyzes it using the following criteria: How often does the sermon mention Christ? Is Christ the subject of the verbs? If it mentions Christ, and He&#8217;s the subject of the verbs, what are those verbs? In a Christian sermon, Christ should be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}