One of our few advantages as preachers in these postmodern times is that we preach the person of Jesus. Just about everyone respects Jesus, though we might differ as to the nature of his person. Many people find it easier to accept the gospel portrait of Jesus as legend than as historical fact. Influenced by the naturalistic worldview we are so accustomed to, it becomes difficult to accept the idea that Jesus was actually who he said he was. Yet, as C.S. Lewis famously put it, Jesus is either a demon, a madman, a liar, ... or God.

Preachers looking to help their listeners to a deepened confidence in the Lordship of Jesus would be well advised to consider Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy’s Lord or Legend? Boyd, senior pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Eddy, professor of biblical and theological studies at Bethel University, didn’t come to their convictions easily. “Faith has not always come easily for us,” they admit. Yet they have helpfully come to the thesis that “if one remains genuinely open tot he historical possibility that the Gospels’ portrait of Jesus is generally reliable – that is, if one doesn’t assume at the start that the story can’t be reliable – one will find many compelling reasons for concluding that this portrait of Jesus is the most historically probable understanding available.”

Applying proven tests of historical reliability, the authors show why the gospel presentation could not have been historicized fiction. Those tests are…

1. Do we possess copies of the work that are reasonably close to the original?

2. Did the author intend to report reliable history?

3. Were the authors of the gospels in a position to write reliable history?

4. To what degree does the author’s bias compromise the document’s reliability?

5. Does the document include incidental details or casual information?

6. Does the document include self-damaging details?

7. Is the document internally consistent?

8. Does the document contain inherently implausible events?

9. Does literary evidence corroborate the claims made by the document?

10. Does archeological evidence corroborate the document?

The authors offer credible scholarship in a way that is highly accessible and compelling. At 183 pages, the book is not at all difficult to read. I can imagine preachers building a sermon or bible class serious around the contents of this book.

Personally, I found the author’s conclusion entirely convincing and compelling: “The point of this book,” they write, “has been to persuade readers that choosing to have faith in Jesus, and therefore to live one’s life submitted to him as Lord, is the option that is most consistent with the historical evidence and the alternative that makes sense out of, and itself fulfills, the deepest longings of the human heart (154).”

A week or so ago, I mentioned Pam MacRae’s piece on “how woman hear the sermon” in The Moody Handbook of Preaching. I thought that her thoughts deserved a little more reflection in this space.

I have long written and taught about the value of investing sermon time developing “the problem.” By that I have meant that preachers ought to utilize “the listener’s voice” to identify with the listener’s struggle to embrace the big idea of the sermon. We can’t always be telling people what they ought to know, believe, and do. We ought to spend some of our time appreciating the struggle that such things involve. Doing this doesn’t undermine our preaching – it deepens it.

What I hadn’t thought enough about is how such an approach might be received by the more than half of the congregation that is female. According to MacRae, women are particularly interested in this use of their own voice in preaching. There may, in fact, be a gender difference on this point. Given that most preachers are male, this aspect of the sermon might be even more important than I had thought. Let me quote MacRae at some length…

“Women typically have deep emotional waters and want to be understood. In the classic scenario, a woman wants to talk about a problem she is facing with her husband, only to get his quick response telling her how she should fix it. Her frustration and irritation shoots through the roof. She wanted him to listen to her and understand how she was feeling. He thought the best way to be helpful was to tell her how to fix it.”

“Generally, it is enough for her to feel heard and understood, which is of great value to her. She may eventually want help, but what she really wants is to feel validated in her experience, and then perhaps hear something soothing and comforting.

“Tannen notes that men are sometimes confused by the various ways women use conversation to be intimate with others. One of these ways she calls ‘troubles talk.’ She says, ‘For women, talking about troubles is the essence of connection. I tell you my troubles, you tell me your troubles, and we’re close. Men, however, hear troubles talk as a request for advice, so they respond with a solution.’”

“Conversations with the pastor give a woman information about the level of understanding he has for women in general. Does he offer quick solutions, answers or comments? Or, does he really listen to her? When a man offers an off-the-cuff solution, a woman may feel he is trying to diminish or dismiss her problem. He is communicating that he does not get her. This does not build trust and can profoundly affect how a woman hears the pastor in the pulpit.”

It is an exciting Christmas in the Anderson household. My oldest daughter Kelsey just got engaged! She and Matt Fast, a youth pastor from Nanaimo, will be married sometime in the late 2009 or perhaps the spring of 2010. We are proud of our daughter and her choices. As the family gathers we anticipate a great time of blessing together over the next several days.

If you know our family and are interested in a full gallery of photos from this past year (including last night’s excitement), go to Kent’s Photo Gallery.

God’s grace be on you and yours in the days to come. May God bless you richly during this Christmas and New Years season.

This past year saw the release of a fine handbook on preaching published by Moody Press. The Moody Handbook of Preaching is a comprehensive compilation of articles on preaching written mostly by faculty and alumni of Moody Bible Institute and edited by John Koessler. As one might expect from a Moody publication, the book champions a classic expositional approach to preaching from a conservative evangelical perspective.

The book is built around four sections. Part One is about the forming of a “philosophy of preaching,” featuring articles by Koessler, Winfred Neely, Joseph Stowell, and George Sweeting, among others. This section offers the expected rationale for preaching, with a couple of helpful surprises. The article by Pam McRae on “How Women Hear the Sermon” was particularly helpful. A woman “may eventually want help,” she writes, “but what she really wants is to feel validated in her experience and then perhaps hear something soothing and comforting (p. 100).” Dan Green’s piece on “preparing yourself spiritually for the message,” was also of value.

The second section focuses on the “mining” of the text. Here we find hermeneutical guidance from a genre perspective. The section focuses specifically on historical narrative, didactic literature, the poetic books, and the prophets. I was particularly pleased to find a chapter on the use of Hebrew in sermon preparation by Andrew Schmutzer and another on “the use and abuse of Greek in preaching” by Gerald Peterman.

The third section had to do with illustration. That Moody would dedicate a quarter of the book to this subject might say something about their understanding of sermon form, but it also is a nod to the image-hungry nature of contemporary life. There is a good chapter by William Torgeson on storytelling, a helpful chapter on the use of technology by Paul Butler, a piece by Kelli Worrall on drama and the sermon, and a particularly helpful article on the use of film in preaching by Michael Orr. This section alone is worth the price of the book.

The final section focuses on the development of methodology. I was pleased to see that the authors were able to champion some creativity in sermon form without compromising their fundamental commitment to exegesis. Winfred Neely, for example, picks up on David Buttrick’s homiletic of “moves,” while Michael Milco challenges the preacher to exegete the audience, though it isn’t clear whether Milco understands his debt to Fred Craddock for this principle. It’s a good moment for homiletics when Moody people can encounter people like Buttrick without rancor or compromise. The final chapter by James Coakley and David Woodall on the use of Bible Software in the exegesis of a text is an example of the practical nature of this handbook’s offerings.

Kudos to Koessler and to Moody for providing a resource with this kind of breadth and practicality.

Effective preachers require effective tools. As far as I am concerned, there is no more effective tool than Accordance Bible software. Biblical preaching derives from the text of Scripture and there is no more efficient means of studying the text of Scripture than by utilizing a comprehensive Bible software package. You simply cannot find a better product for the purpose than Accordance.

Accordance was first developed in 1994, a time when computer technology was still new to many of us. Accordance was a leader then and it continues to lead the field today. This was the first program to offer features such as graphical searching, statistical analysis of search results, diagramming, and instant parsing. Accordance was the first to offer grammatically tagged versions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Mishna, the Aramaic Targums, and the Pseudepigrapha. Granted, most preachers don’t have cause to parse the Dead Sea Scrolls as part of their daily work, but such things show something of the scope and quality of the product. It’s nice to know you have that kind of horsepower under the hood for those rare times you need it.

Accordance is designed for the Mac and available for PC by means of emulation software. As a product which originated with Mac, it brings the intuitive, user-friendly features that Mac is known for and that Mac users are accustomed to. With Accordance, what you see is what you get. The page prints the way it looks upon the screen. Navigation is sensible so that controls and features are available where you expect to find them. It just works. Accordance was designed to encourage economy of effort and ease of use. You won’t waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to use the product.

With Accordance the Bible is central, which is a great thing from the perspective of a preacher. When you launch the software, the first thing you see is a window that features the entire text of the Bible. Consequently, the Bible serves as the hub around which one’s study will revolve. It is that focus on the Bible that makes the product so productive for a preacher’s work.

How might a preacher actually utilize Accordance? I start by opening my chosen texts in various versions, including the original Greek or Hebrew. Each text is opened in a parallel window so that I can easily compare all versions at once. Significant words are instantly parsed in a separate window. I might choose, further, to select a particular part of the text and open the parsing window or the syntax window in order to see the grammatical structure of the text. I may even choose to create a graphic sentence diagram of the section utilizing the program’s intuitive diagramming tools.

Having read the text, I may choose to select particular words or passages to investigate further. An array of dictionaries, lexicons, and commentaries are just a click away. Place name encyclopedias are available with photography, maps, and timelines. Maps in Accordance are three dimensional which means that the student can easily appreciate the terrain, which can be particularly helpful when trying to understand some of those Old Testament historical books.

Of course all of these things are available in print to some degree, but storing and searching your treasured books in print is very time-consuming, and not always entirely satisfying in terms of the actual results. Of course, storing up books in print is also very expensive. A software program like Accordance will set you back a few dollars, but one has to compare that expense with the costs involved in purchasing, storing, and inevitably moving a comparable stack of books. This is to say nothing of the monetary value of one’s time spent in searching.

A “starter” copy of Accordance which includes a few basic English Bible study tools sells for $49. “Premier” levels featuring an extensive package of scholarly tools sell for $319. Most preachers will find a package that suits their needs somewhere in between those two figures. If that sounds expensive, I note that a copy of Keil and Delitzsch’s Commentary on the Old Testament is currently listed on Amazon for more than $800 not counting shipping costs. Of course K&D looks more impressive on your shelf, but a copy of Accordance featuring numerous such commentaries and tools comes at a fraction of the price.

We preachers love the Bible. Accordance will feed your affection for the Scriptures, resulting in a deeper understanding of the Word and a more powerful preaching of it.

Accordance is produced by Oak Tree Software. An extensive and helpful website can be found at accordancebible.com. Go there to read expert reviews, to view the video tutorial, and to download a free trial of the software.