Phill Sacre

Tag: preach

  • Sermon: 2 Thessalonians 1 – Persecution and God’s righteous judgement

    This morning I preached a sermon on 2 Thessalonians 1. At college this term I’ve been learning about Homiletics, and as part of the assessment for that I had to deliver a sermon – which involved doing lots of diagrams as part of the preparation process (it’s Chris Green’s 12-step process for doing sermons).

    To be honest, I found the 12-step process quite hard: it didn’t really gel naturally with how I would ordinarily like to prepare a sermon. Some of it was useful, but some was a bit of a struggle! – so when I delivered the sermon this morning, I felt like I wasn’t completely sure if it was any good or not. Not because I think I said anything wrong, but just because it had been prepared in a different way and as such it felt a bit … unnatural.

    Anyway, it seemed to go down relatively well, I had a couple of positive comments afterwards! Anyway, if you’d like to have a read of it to tell me what you think, you can download it in PDF form. Feel free to leave comments afterwards, although please be nice!

  • Sermon: Matthew 3:13-4:11 – “A New Israel and a New Adam”

    Tonight I preached a sermon at my placement church on Matthew 3:13-4:11. I don’t know whether it was recorded, I don’t know whether they have the facility to record there, so I’ve decided to upload the sermon as a PDF: you can download it below. That’s an approximation of what I said, by the way – I decided to preach from notes rather than a full script this time. (It seems to be working as well, my memory seems to be improving in that respect. It seems that you actually have to practice to improve your communication skills, who’d have thought it…)

    Matt 3v13-4v11 SermonDownload

    I had some positive comments on it after the service, so that was positive. I felt a bit more nervous about preaching there than I have done previously, probably because I didn’t really know people so well. When I was preaching at Fordham I did at least know most of the people in the congregation. Still, preaching to a group of people who I don’t know is something I will need to get used to, so it’s not bad to have some experience in that respect.

    Next week I’m preaching in chapel – it’s only a “Monday Meditation” (where basically the goal is to do as little talking as possible and get everyone to meditate while saying ‘Ommmm…’) but it’s still a pretty daunting prospect preaching to a bunch of people who are all studying theology and  training to work in Christian ministry. People who have, for the most part, probably got more experience and learning under their belt than I have. Still, hey ho, experience is experience.

    Hope you enjoy the sermon, if you read it. Let me know what you think.