The Barnabas Blog

The New Year, 2018, has brought along its share of nostalgia, hope, and a bit of retrospect as to how far down the road I have come.   Some of the looking back could be due to a pretty significant health event that I endured this past July although thankfully I have made a near full recovery.   Even though I spent a number of years working in the medical field and was constantly made aware of the fleeting nature of life in others, it was brought home to me in a far more serious way when I was on the other end of a surgeon’s care.   Perhaps another reason that 2018 is a significant time for me is because it is the year that thirty years ago, I along with my wife were compelled to make a decision that entirely changed the direction of our lives.   In 1988, I attended my first Because of the Times, which is a minister’s conference hosted by the Pentecostals of Alexandria and led by Senior Pastor Anthony Mangun.  

I have long grown accustomed to the understanding that very few people really understand what is involved in truly good preaching.   Not motivational, encouraging, self-help ‘grab yourself by the bootstraps’ and just do it preaching but heart-felt, Scripturally-driven, Holy-Spirit anointed preaching.   It is this kind of preaching that not only will the preacher know that he has been on fire for God but the hearers of that message will realize that it is far more than just a time block that has been filled with religious routine.   But the challenge from getting to from a simple biblical text to that point of powerfully speaking for God has a lot of hindrances, snares, and traps that every preacher will at some point find in his sermon preparation.   Because I have now been preaching for almost thirty years, I find one of those ways that I can improve is to read books about preaching.  

I am always in the hunt for books that will help me to become a better expositor.   The longer that I preach the more convinced that I become that the best method for preaching is simple verse by verse preaching.   The matter of going through the Bible and allowing the power of God’s Word to speak for itself.   It requires discipline, attention, and time but the dividends that are repaid to the preacher cannot even be added up in this life.   However, to be an effective expositor especially if you do not have a seminary training in original languages will necessitate ways that will help you to overcome this.   I am one of those preachers who did not have a real deep exposure to original Greek in fact I only had one year of it and no Hebrew at all.   Admittedly there are times that I sorely wish that I would have had the necessary training in the original languages.   That is why good books (tools) are so crucial for our preparation to preach.  ...

My appreciation for the Puritans seems to grow every year.  A couple of things moved me toward my interaction with the Puritans; one was a person and the other was book.  The person was a retired pastor, Ernie Jolley, and the other was a book that he gave to me.  It was written by Ralph Turnbull, The Minister’s Opportunities , which had a chapter about the priority of study and another on the minister’s library.  In those chapters, Turnbull really stressed finding out who the Puritans were and to begin to read after them.  I took Brother Jolley’s advice and started reading his recommendation of William Gurnall’s massive work, The Christian in Complete Armor , and I took a chance at what Ralph Turnbull recommended with Thomas Brooks’ Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices . 

Recently I have spent a bit of time revisiting the Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.   One of the things that Bunyan seems to stress during the story is the need for friendship and fellowship along the way to the Celestial City.   Two of the more constant companions that Christian kept with him were two men, Faithful and Hopeful.   The way is difficult but through the avenue of friendship, Christian and his companions find the way to be much easier.   For more than ten years, I have been friends with Ben Weeks , pastor of Truth Harbor in Lake Park , Georgia which is just outside of Valdosta, Georgia.   He is a Christian gentleman of the finest sort and he has a renowned preaching ministry that has been widely received in all sorts of national and international venues—conferences, camp meetings, marriage retreats, and pastoral anniversaries.   For the last decade we have met at various times in Thomasville, Georgia, which is about half-way between Dothan...

Over the last several posts, I have tried to analyze some of the characters of Pilgrim’s Progress that was written by John Bunyan in 1678.  We have visited with Ignorance , Evangelist , Mr. Worldly Wiseman , Valiant for Truth , and Mr. Fearing .  These travelers will be ones that we meet along the way in our trek toward the Celestial City.  Bunyan’s observations of people in the 17 th century still hold true for much of what we see in our times as well.  You can see for yourself that these people along the way very much fit into the category of Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poem about being a lifter or a leaner.  A lifter is someone who makes deposits of encouragement and hope into your life.  A leaner is one who great withdrawals and they will do so until you are literally sapped of emotional and spiritual strength.  Great Heart falls into the category of a man who was not just a lifter, he was a very heavy lifter.  He fills the role of a pastor wh...

To revisit Pilgrim’sProgress over the last couple of weeks has been a wonderful experience.  In one of the previous posts, I mentioned that I had originally been introduced to this fine book by Pastor John Harrell in Bridge City, Texas.  For years in Bridge City, the church has been shepherded by Brother Harrell’s preaching and praying and woven all through those years were numerous illustrations that he would pull from this book and masterfully use them in his sermons.  If you have never read Pilgrim’s Progress , my question is this:  What doth hinder thee?  Perhaps that is a humorous way to express it but in all seriousness, the book opens up the mind an awareness that human behavior is no different in the 1600’s than it is in 2017.