Subscribers have the opportunity to participate in discussion forums, post sermons and offer helpful critique to others. Archived feature articles will also be available to subscribers.
A six-month free subscription is available through a key that can be found on the CD bundled with Kent Anderson's Choosing to Preach. >>
This is the definitive textbook on contemporary expository preaching. Currently it is used in more than 150 Bible colleges and seminaries as a primary text for beginning preachers. Robinson’s famous question "What’s the Big Idea?" has become the fundamental issue for thousands of preachers in their effort to understand the primary intention of a given text for contemporary audiences. Exercises at the end of each chapter enhance the practicality of the book. Written in 1980, the book was ahead of its time. A recent rewrite has insured that it continues to serve as an essential primer on preaching the Word of God faithfully and powerfully in these times. Hey, that many seminaries can’t be wrong!
Excerpt: Those who hear you do not understand what you are saying unless they can answer the basic questions: What is the preacher talking about today? What is he saying about what he is talking about? Yet Sunday after Sunday men and women leave church unable to state the preacher’s basic idea because the preacher has not bothered to state it himself. When people depart in a fog, they do so at their peril. Thinking is difficult, but it stands as the essential work of the preacher. Let there be no mistake about the nature of the task. It is often slow, discouraging, overwhelming, but when God calls people to preach, He calls them to love Him with their minds. God deserves that kind of love and so do the people to whom we minister. On a cold, gloomy morning a preacher worked on his sermon from breakfast until noon with little to show for his labor. Impatiently he laid down his pen and looked disconsolately out the window, feeling sorry for himself because his sermons came so slowly. Then there flashed into his mind a thought that had profound effect on his later ministry: your fellow Christians will spend far more time on this sermon than you will. They will come from a hundred homes. They will travel a thousand miles in the aggregate to be in the service. They will spend three hundred hours participating in the worship and listening to what you have to say. Don’t complain about the hours you are spending in preparation and the agony you experience. The people deserve all you can give them. (pages 46)