RootsRain

Continuing the tradition, and providing links (as many as I can) to a host of good material, here’s the list of sermons I listened to during my commute in 2009.

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T. David Gordon had terminal, stage 3, colorectal cancer and decided it was now or never for him to write the book that had been brewing in his mind for the past 30 years. So his book sounds a lot like a prophet with nothing left to lose. And his topic? The shipwreck that is conservative, evangelical preaching. The cause of this shipwreck: preachers are consuming types of media which deaden their minds toward understanding texts. And this has resulted in two tragedies: preaching that’s done quite distant from the actual words of the text (poor exegesis) and preaching that rarely holds up Christ as the object of our faith, hope, and love.

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Okay, sure, the title’s a bit intimidating. But even if you’re not a preacher, and have no aims to do expositional preaching, I think this is an amazing sermon to listen to. (I’ve listened to it at least 5 times.) This message was preached two years ago at Together for the Gospel 2006 and it absolutely shook the conference (as testified to by the other speakers’ comments, comments from my friends who were at the conference, and bloggers who were covering the conference). Piper lays out his burden for exultant, expositional preaching from pastors who earnestly sense the weight of the glory of God.

I’ve posted some good quotes below. But when you read Piper, you have to read it slowly and with gripping emphasis on the key words. This is a man who is very serious about what he’s saying.

Packer said upon hearing Martin Lloyd-Jones: “I had never heard such preaching.” And that is why today people say such foolish and minimizing things about preaching: they have never heard it… Packer said, ‘It came to me with the force of electric shock, bringing more of a sense of God than any other man I had ever known.’

John Piper

God did not ordain the cross of Christ or create the Lake of Fire in order to communicate the insignificance of belittling His glory. The death of the Son of God and the damnation of unrepentant human beings are the loudest shouts conceivable that God is infinitely holy, that sin is infinitely offensive, that wrath is infinitely just, and that grace is infinitely precious, and that the brief little life that you and I live and that everybody in our churches lives, will issue very quickly into everlasting joy or everlasting pain. This has got to grip us! There is a weight to this office. Where, brothers, is this weight going to be felt if not from you? Veggie Tales? Not in a million years! Radio? Television? Discussion groups? Emergent conversations? If not from you, in this pulpit, where?! God planned for His Son to be crucified and for Hell to be terrible so that we would have the clearest witnesses possible to what is at stake when we preach. What gives preaching its seriousness is that the mantle of preaching is soaked in the blood of Jesus and singed with the fires of Hell.

John Piper

The MP3 begins with an introduction of John Piper by C.J. Mahaney.

I’m also posting a clip of some comments made in the panel discussion after Piper’s message because I found them very insightful and encouraging.