Effective First-Person Biblical Preaching Book Excerpt

Pastor Dr. J Kent Edwards

There is a sense in which a biblical sermon is like a cell phone call. In a biblical text, God is placing a call. He has a message he wants to communicate to his church. In order for the cell phone call to make it to its intended recipients, however, it must be successfully passed through a series of repeater stations. Preachers are like cell phone repeater stations. Our purpose is to pass on God's message to its intended recipients without altering the message in any way. We are only successful when God's voice is passed on to God's people without any distortion of any kind. ...

I do not preach first-person sermons in an effort to be cute or trendy. Nor am I overwhelmed by a desire to be relevant to our narrative-saturated culture. The primary reason I preach narrative passages of Scripture in a narrative style is to be faithful to the biblical text. I want to say what God said in the biblical text, and only what God said in the biblical text. I cannot be faithful to the meaning of the original text without being homiletically respectful of its genre.

The best way to preach the Bible's narrative literature is by using a narrative homiletical form. First-person sermons are a legitimate narrative homiletical form. When you learn how to preach this type of sermon, you learn how to preach the stories of Scripture with great accuracy. You will also discover that just about everybody enjoys listening to them and that in the midst of their good time, your congregation is learning a tremendous amount of Bible. (20-21)

Read more about Dr. Edwards' Effective First-Person Biblical Preaching Book.

Purchase Dr. Edwards' Effective First-Person Biblical Preaching Book. (Zondervan, 2005.)