Preaching in the Spirit by Dennis F. Kinlaw

Author:Dennis F. Kinlaw [Kinlaw, Dennis F.]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Warner Press Inc.
Published: 2015-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

Now that my ladder’s gone,

I must lie down where all ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop

of my heart.

Modern man may reject the notion of a world above but he still finds himself talking about “ladders.”

Letting The Unbeliever Draw His Own Conclusions

Ifyou invite an unbeliever to think about his situation and talk about it, out of his own mouth you will hear a confirmation of biblical truth. Earlier in the twentieth century, E. Stanley Jones wrote a book entitled, Is the Kingdom of God Realism? The thrust of it was, “I am a Christian because my cells tell me that is the way I am made to live.” Anyone who listens to the gospel long enough and candidly enough will understand what Jones meant. We are made by our Creator for the Kingdom of God.

In preaching we ought to remember that when we preach biblical truth something inside our listener will say, “That’s right.” Something within bears witness against him. There sat my sociologist friend saying, “You tricked me:’ when he knew that he bore witness against himself. When we stand before God in the Judgment, there will not be a single soul in the world with an excuse; and many there will say, “How under the sun did I miss it?” Life itself will bear witness against us. We have this advantage in preaching the gospel: The external witness of God’s created world confirms what we say.

I was sitting one day at a wrought-iron table for a luncheon at a very lovely home in Florida, next to a swimming pool. There were four of us at the little table, including Sally, the daughter of the family we were visiting. Sally was a mother in her thirties. As the conversation progressed, I began to suspect that Sally was a Christian. I knew that her parents had not been Christians long, so I asked, ‘“Sally, how did you get into this family?” (I didn’t mention which family I was talking about, but she knew instantly.)

She looked up and said,”It wasn’t easy. You see, my father was an alcoholic, a Thursday-night-to-Sunday-noon alcoholic. But between Monday morning and Thursday afternoon, he made enough money that we lived very well.

“He was occasionally religious,” she explained. “He’d go to church once in a while. I always figured he went because of his guilt. But with my mother it was another story. She was a pagan. She never had any guilt, so she never went to church, and as a result I never went to church.

“Here in the South everybody is a Southern Baptist, and Southern Baptists won’t leave you alone,” Sally chuckled. “My husband and I carefully instructed our children that if anybody asked them what their religion was, they were to reply, ‘We’re Jews.’ I knew that would keep those Southern Baptists off our backs. (After I became Christian, I had to teach our children they were not Jews.) I think back to some of the conversations my mother and I had before we became Christians, and they were so nearly blasphemous that I shudder to recall them.

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