Verse By Verse Bible Exposition

July 9, 2022 is a date that will forever stick in my mind. It is the day my sister called me to tell me that our mother’s heart had stopped and that she had just been rushed to the hospital. It was a shock to us all. She died at 97 ¾ years old (she counted her years in fractions at that age) a few days later. February 7th is another such day. It is the day my father died many years ago after having a short illness for only few weeks. He was only 48 years old. He had been perfectly healthy up to that point. This happens to people all the time. It happens every day. It happens all around the world. We do not see it coming. Sometimes people just die unexpectedly for either known or unknown causes. Sometimes death is expected and we know it is coming soon. I used to be a hospice chaplain. I saw a lot of expected deaths. Sometimes there are accidents and incidents that kill people. Those are always a shock to our system. It is a fact of life. People die. No one gets out of this world al

Many years ago, we were attending a church in Maryland. We had just moved back to the east coast from the Midwest. In the Midwest we saw a church that has struggled for over 50 years and had declined from 600 in attendance to down to under 100 people on Sunday morning. We preached and prayed for God to help this church in a city of 25,000 people. We saw God save dozens of souls over those 6 years. We saw dozens get baptized and added to the church. Attendance grew to almost 200 people on Sunday morning. We had many ethnicities and many languages every service. Several new churches were planted and God was honored. Back to Maryland. It is very ethnically diverse and needs the gospel dearly as every state in the union does. The church we went to help in these areas had been around for a while. I personally knew a couple of pastors who had been there in years past. We were only there for a few months. The focus of the church was on behaviors not on the gospel. The pastor had been a pers

As I listen to a lot of modern preaching in churches of the current day I hear a similar theme through most churches of every denomination. I hear preaching about behaviors. I recently heard a sermon titled “How to Be a Five Star Christian!” It was not from a single passage of Scripture but created from many passages. The theme and the entire sermon was man made. It was completely invented by the preacher with a bunch of Bible verses used to try and support his thoughts. They were not God’s thoughts. They were the preacher’s thoughts. God never taught us how to be a five star Christian. He took a piece of this and a piece of that and put it together in his own way to say what he wanted to say. I wanted to walk out in the first 10 minutes but it would have been upsetting in the service with a very small congregation. He spent the first 15 minutes of his 45 minutes talking about funerals. By his own admission his speaking about funerals had absolutely nothing to do with his “sermon.” H

I heard a preacher say that recently. “God gave me this sermon for you today!” To which I say “No He didn’t!” How did I know that? Because the sermon was not an exegetical, expository delivery of a passage of Holy Scripture. It was what the preacher wanted to say, from the preacher’s design, with 99% of only the preacher’s words and with the preacher’s conclusions. He said what he wanted to say not what God wanted him to say. Even if he used God’s Word he always adds his words to it or changes it to say what he wants it to say. He is presenting his ideas, in his way. When a preacher says this, he is guilty of manipulating the people and extorting them to believe what he wants them to believe. After all if it is message directly from God how can you disagree with it without disagreeing with God Himself. You have nothing to check it with. You have no way of finding out whether or not it is honest, accurate and correct. It is totally subjective based on what the preacher wants to say.