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Preaching about God’s wrath often makes people angry. They claim that they want nothing to do with “a God like that.” So how do you preach on this subject when it’s right in front of you in the text? I had this challenge last Sunday when I preached on Ephesians 2:1-10. Verse 3 describes sinners as “objects of wrath” (literally, “children of wrath.”).

Another great article from our sister site, Leadership. Check it out and feel free to come on back to the PT Blog to share your reflections.

Let me share a great exercise for preachers. I recently stumbled across it while preparing a five-year ministry plan for the church I serve.

I’m always on the lookout for a good story or image to use in my preaching. But once I find something in TIME, in The Chicago Tribune, in a great biography, or in my own experiences, the challenge is how to store it so that I can find it later. I finally discovered a simple method which really works!

Yesterday I sent you off to part one of a two-part article by John Ortberg called "Speaking from My Holy of Holies" (remember: part two comes out tomorrow afternoon on PT.com). Today I think I'll guide you to another great article by Ortberg that's featured on the Leadership journal site. This one concerns the sometimes agonizing, always rewarding discipline of birthing a sermon.

At this rate our motto for the PT Blog should be "All Ortberg, All the Time."

If I could direct you one place today, it would be here.

Read it slowly. Read it carefully. Read it humbly. Oh - and make sure you read Part Two (coming out this Friday afternoon).

Ortberg has some deep, meaningful thoughts to offer you as a preacher and, most importantly, as a simple follower of Christ.

How much life should you get out of a sermon? When is it appropriate to preach it again to the same congregation? How much change should you make when you preach it to another congregation? I’ve thought about these questions during my sermon preparation this week. I’m currently preaching through Ephesians, and I still have my notes and manuscripts from a series I did on this epistle eight years ago in another church. Let me share what I’ve learned about recycling sermons.

Karl Marx got it all wrong when he said, “Religion is the opium of the people.” The truth is, “Sports is the opium of the people.” Or, perhaps, the truth is, “Sports is the religion of the people.” Now I’m not going to knock sports. After all, I live, eat, and breathe baseball! My great-grandfather’s cousin was Christy Mathewson, the hall-of-fame pitcher for the New York Giants. But how do you preach to people who are more captivated by A-Rod and LeBron and Tiger than by God?

The Acadia, a Navy ship retired from service in 1994 after 13 years worth of trips around the world, now rests in Pearl Harbor. Officials had planned to use the old ship for scrap metal or as a location for special military training. Local community groups in Hawaii have their own set of plans. They want to turn the Acadia into a homeless shelter.

Last week, a friend commented: “Sometimes, preachers need to break away from their sermon series or from the Bible book through which they’re preaching and just share from their hearts.” Hmm. This sounds like good advice. But I’m convinced that it contains a fatal flaw.

Clark Cothern, a regular contributor to our weekly batch of illustrations, shared this short, but intriguing story. Take a moment to read it, and I'd like to offer just a few words on the other side:

Would you consider yourself successful if you had written a novel a year for 52 straight years? Would you feel successful if you had written shelves of books on mythology, biography, folklore, theology, and travel? One man did all of the above—and in only one lifetime. I kid you not! This one man wrote 85 books in his 89 years on Earth. And get this: the same man even once rescued a young girl from drowning!

But I doubt seriously that you know his name.

Today I’d like to share some ‘food for thought.’ Perhaps it will provide fare for a future sermon. Most importantly, I hope it will provide fare for your own soul. Preachers dare not neglect their souls! My thoughts stem from my recent re-reading of “The Weight of Glory,” an essay by C. S. Lewis.

From a Garrison Keillor podcast of “The News from Lake Wobegon”:

[At] the Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church, they’ve been concerned about low attendance on Sunday mornings. They had about 20 people there this last Sunday, setting new low records.

When you have only 20 people in that sanctuary, the sermon does start to seem rather personal. Makes people uneasy and even fewer people show up.

Courtesy of David Neff, editor of Christianity Today magazine

If you've been rummaging around in the blog in the last few days, you've maybe noticed a few changes we've made to the left sidebar panel of links. We've recently updated all of the key sections that guide you to a few helpful resources, whether PT-related or elsewhere in the mysterious, vast world of the Internet.

Sermons which convict, compel, inspire, and challenge God’s people find their center in God. To preach God-centered sermons, look first for the “vision of God.” I discussed this in my previous post. Once you identify the aspect of God’s character which serves as the focal point of the text, then observe the “depravity factor.” Haddon Robinson refers to this as the “human factor,” while Bryan Chapell calls it the “fallen-condition focus” (FCF). Robinson explains this concept in his second edition of Biblical Preaching: