The Monday Morning Pastor’s “Hangover”

Posted on by under D. Martin Lloyd-Jones

Pastor, as you reflect on yesterday’s sermon and ministry, don’t beat yourself up because you didn’t say what you wanted, or because you said something you shouldn’t have said (or in the wrong tone), or because your sermon didn’t do the text and its subject justice. God can take the five loaves and two fishes of your sermon and multiply it in ways you can never imagine. You aren’t the only one who feels poorly about your sermon. I feel that way too. Listen to the words of one of the greatest expositors of the 20th century:

“I can say quite honestly that I would not cross the road to listen to myself preaching.”

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers, p. 4

 

Wanting God for His Blessings and Not Himself

Posted on by under Jonathan Edwards

If men’s affection to God is founded first on His profitableness to them, their affection begins at the wrong end; they regard God only for the utmost limit of the stream of divine good, where it touches them and reaches their interest, and have no respect to that infinite glory of God’s nature which is the original good, and the true foundation of all good, the first foundation of all true love.

Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections, p. 168-169