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>> This morning when we talked, I was talking about planning preaching. And I would like to spend some time on the nitty gritty of that, but there just wasn't the opportunity in the limited time context which we have in the chapel.

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And I thought that some of you might be interested in how one can develop need-centered preaching and transparency in preaching in planning in more tangible terms. Let me just tell you the way that I have done this.

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It's kind of evolved across the years. I plan my preaching six months in advance. And I have found that I'm able to do this, but not much longer than this. I also find that I have to leave a lot of blank spots in the six months,

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because things change, your own attitude, you become aware of needs that are more immediate, so you've got to be able to shift things around. I call it playing homiletic solitaire. When I become sensitive to a need,

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feel led of God to a particular text in terms of a need, I always put that on a four by six card. I usually put the, I give it a working title. The more outlandish the title, the better,

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because that mnemonically can be more easily retained. And I memorize these titles, and the texts are with them. I do the exegesis on the reverse side of the card to make sure that what I'm thinking about is in fact faithful to the text.

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And then I just keep those cards and I just rearrange them. That's what I mean when I talk about the solitaire. I rearrange them into a six month's order, and I make changes in the cards as I go along.

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Now because I have those titles memorized, when I go places, meet people, watch television shows, see films, read books, become involved in counseling situations, what have you, incidents occur. And I think, gee, that'll just fit right into that sermon,

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tell tale tears or something like that. I write that down on that four by six card. Then by the time I get to the place where I'm preaching the sermon, there are always many more things on the card than I ever would be able to use.

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Your problem then is you have too much material, not too little. Of course, a lot of it has become cold along the way. It sounded good at the moment, but it doesn't sound good anymore. And so you jettison that.

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Then what I do with those cards, I bring in members of my college staff. There are a number of college students who work with me, and also members of our religious activities committee. If you were in a church, this would be members of your session or what have you.

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And I put these cards down before them and I talk about these various things. And I ask them what things they think would meet the particular needs of the congregation. I get their counsel and their advice as to what they think is speaking to

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the needs of our students and what they think would perhaps not be quite as appropriate. And I allow them then to feed into me their reaction to what I've been thinking about.

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And then after I do that, I have the list finally made up and I mimeograph that list. And I distribute it to all of our student aides and to our religion teachers.

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When I was in the pastorate, I distributed it to elders, deacons, all teachers in the church school. Everybody knew then what I would be preaching on weeks in advance and knew the general outline of the sermon and the thrust and

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the congregational need toward which the message was directed. And this enabled them to reinforce this through their classes or through their pastoral ministry as elders or whatever the case may be. Another thing you have to be aware of, of course, when you do this,

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is you have to build into your planning a certain amount of reinforcement. It's no good. Attitudes have a tendency to revert to the status quo very quickly. And you might preach a sermon on one aspect of the faith.

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And if you think that's your sermon on prayer for this half a year and you won't come back at it till six months later, you're gonna make a very bad mistake. You must reinforce that.

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And therefore, preaching requires not just a smorgasbord, but a diet. That's the main reason that I plan, well, there's two reasons why I plan six months in advance. The first is I'm an extremely lazy person.

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And I find that I can do a better job if I have this material accumulating. If I come up to a week and have to confront doing a sermon cold from the very beginning, the very thought petrifies me with fear. And it makes it much easier to do it.

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But the second reason is it allows me to plan that reinforcement. It allows me to say, for example, this year on our campus, we're talking about unity. We have a lot of discord on our campus this year.

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And I've got that built in again and again and again from all kinds of different perspectives and angles throughout the course of my preaching to our student body. And that reinforcement, I think, is very effective. And I can only do that kind of reinforcement when I plan things out

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a long time in advance. These then are some of the nitty gritties, I think, of planning, preaching, and advance. And I just thought I would share those to give you some idea of how I tried to

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actualize this need-centered transparency that I was talking about as being foundational in planning. That's all I wanted to say. Is there anything that any of you would like to say?

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By way of question or comment or criticisms or debates? Somebody with their mouth full. Yeah. Would you speak a little more to the issue of transparency in preaching?

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I think that to a certain degree, the model for all preachers ought to be Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus didn't hesitate to climb up a tree and thus admit to everybody that he felt crowded out. I feel that by virtue of our profession, we are crowded out of a lot of things.

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You know the old three sexes, men, women, and preachers idea. And the only way, it seems to me, you can bridge that gap is by climbing a tree and saying, "Yoo-hoo, everybody. Here I am.

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And I have the same temptations as you are and the same difficulties," and so on. And share your victories and your defeats. I do not mean, and I want to draw a heavy line here, I do not mean that the pulpit is supposed to become a kind of a therapist's couch for the preacher.

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I'm not talking about the so-called relational theology that you hear so much about today. As far as I'm concerned, that's gone too far. It goes in the right direction, but I feel that it has gone too far.

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What I am saying, and I plan to get into this in great detail tomorrow, I'm going to preach tomorrow rather than lecture. And the comradeship Christ commands is my theme. And what I'm talking about there is I think we are to bear one another's

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burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. And you can't bear something you don't know about. Bearing implies sharing. And now you have the outline of the sermon, so you can skip that.

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But I really think it involves the courage to be vulnerable. I think that's very biblical, and I'll hope to illustrate that tomorrow. And it becomes easier as you do it, and you can't do it all the time. And you can't always do it in the same ways.

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It manifests itself in a lot of different ways. This last Sunday evening, for example, I was preaching on unity. The theme was all one body we. And the text, the words from the 17th chapter of John,

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that they all might be perfectly one as the revised standard version has it. And I felt led to share with the assembled students the loneliness that I feel when they are not there. And I talked about how I come up sometimes to the chapel on a summer evening

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when the campus is very dark and quiet. We have a very beautiful Gothic chapel. And I sit down in it, and I don't think about the great heroes of the faith removed from me in time and also in spiritual maturity.

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I think about them. And in thinking about them, I realized that many of our hopes and dreams and visions are the same. And that I pray with them and am forgiven with them and go out and

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sin again with them and then pray and am forgiven again and then sin again. And as I sit there, there's a kind of oneness that I feel with them so that the very chapel itself becomes an expression of that. And that summer evening place of shadow and darkness and

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a building that leaps from a floor to an exalted ceiling, it becomes alive. So that the pillars become the brawny trunks of our Christian athletes. And the walls are made up with the sweet flesh of our boys and girls. And I sometimes see the faces of some of the kids laughing at me out of the windows.

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And the great arches that hold the ceiling are the joined hands of our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. And my lonely heart that misses them and sometimes cries about it, jumps all the way up to the ceiling and sees scribbled up there all the prayers and

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the hopes and the musings that were hoped and prayed and mused in that room. And you discover when you're up there that the very building itself is still building and sometimes the building goes forth in pain. And sometimes in darkness and sometimes in light and

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sometimes to the sound of rolling thunderous singing. And sometimes to the sound of laughter. And if you're very, very quiet, you can hear even the hammerings of those who have gone on to the kingdom eternal and are still building the church.

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And Peter's words come to us that we are to be built like living stones into the house of the faith. Now, that's just a quotation from the sermon. And it's fresh in my mind.

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It was a way of talking to the kids about my loneliness for them, my love for them. I was revealing my own need in this, you see. Yet I was talking about the unity of the body of Christ. So you can come at it, you don't have to come right out and

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say that you're lonely, you can do it in other ways. And I think transparency can be revealed illustratively through a lot of different things besides personal experience. Any other comments?

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Yes, sir. >> Speak about how we should be able to tell our congregation that we are likewise tempted as they are tempted and be able to relate to them. Say that we are likewise vulnerable.

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How much should you, where should you draw the limits as to hanging up your dirty laundry? >> How much dirty laundry should you hang out? >> Yeah, where do you draw the limits?

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>> Well, we are to confess our sins to one another. Yet it is always seemed to me, and I learned this from Bonhoeffer in his life together, that there are certain people who have the grace of being able to hear confession and become agents of forgiveness.

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And there are other people who do not have that grace. They are not so gifted. And therefore, I think we must be very careful that in our sharing, we do not offend or turn other people away.

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I think that that can be done. I'm not suggesting that we, I think that everybody has to have at least somebody to whom they tell everything. There must be some person who can act as father confessor.

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I feel this is absolutely crucial. And but I'm not so sure that you need more than one, let alone a whole congregation. And I will confess that there are times when I've gotten in trouble over this in

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very serious misjudgments. I am a bachelor, not because I want to be, but because I am. And it's always been a strange thing to me that all of my brothers in the clergy who get into sexual problems or

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marital difficulties always come and tell me about it. And I've often thought that's because they think that because I'm not married, I don't know anything about sex or have any interest in it, so I can hear all this with total objectivity.

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>> [LAUGH] >> I really, I think that's the only motivation that could possibly be theirs. Well, I related that in a sermon once, and then I went on to say, and

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the strange part of it is, is that I have great sexual temptations, and they're especially heavy for me because I am single, a virgin, pure and undefiled. And that came as a great, not that I was a virgin, but that I would share that, came as a great shock to some of the people in our church.

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>> [LAUGH] >> And it was really a great burden to them, and I wish now I wouldn't have done it, it took me months to get past that with some of our people. They couldn't bear the thought that I was sexually tempted.

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Now, I thought that I was, I even said it in this humorous way, you know, like I just kind of said it to you, and I really thought that that would get me by, but it didn't. And I misjudged that altogether.

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Of course, sex isn't a special category, it's a different sin from all the others. >> [LAUGH] >> Somehow.

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So I think you have to be careful about it, and I'm not saying, that's why I say you don't make the pulpit into a place of therapy for yourself. But at the same time, I think that we can, the apostle does this, you know, pray for me lest I be a castaway.

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And Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of which I am chief. And things like, he didn't hesitate to give the gift of his vulnerability to other people. >> [INAUDIBLE]

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>> Sir. >> When you're preaching all these needs, how do you guard against the tendency to become a second grade psychologist rather than a pastor? I know that there are a lot of schools, I just don't know that much about it.

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>> Yeah. The question is, I'm repeating these because they're putting this on tape and they can't hear you on the tape. The question is, how, if you make your preaching need centered,

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do you avoid the pitfall of becoming a second class psychologist? Well, one thing of course that you do is you make sure you're a first class psychologist. >> [LAUGH]

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>> I really think that's a major area of reading, or should be a major area of reading in any preaching pastors reading regimen. I'm gonna talk more about reading on Thursday when we'll be talking about

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the art of illustration because of course reading is, I think, the third best source of illustration that there is. But we should be reading the kinds of things that our people do not read. I don't think, this will sound severe and I don't want it to sound that way.

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But I really don't think that you, as professionals or as those preparing to be professionals, should be reading Bruce Larson and Keith Miller. And those guys do a marvelous job.

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I'm not criticizing their work at all. But I don't think that's on the level where you ought to be reading. I mean, Larson and I mentioned those two specifically simply because they are so influenced by Maslow, to whom I alluded this morning.

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Well, you ought to read Maslow, you see. And I think that you ought to be reading a lot of other people too. I think you ought to be reading Carl Rogers and you ought to have a familiarity with Jung's concept of the collective unconscious.

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And you need to know these kinds of things, I think. Not only for your preaching, but just to be able to weed out all the trash that's thrown at you all the time in our media-soaked society. Part of our major responsibility, it seems to me,

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as leaders of the Christian community, is to call people to Christian lifestyle. Well, it's very easy in a society that is as cleverly manipulated as our own to be talked right out of that. And so I think you need to know the psychologies of communication.

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You need to know that Heinz crushes bananas and puts it in the ketchup to make it pour slow, and all that kind of stuff, on television. And understand how subliminal techniques are used in The Exorcist,

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and how every few frames they flashed a bloody death's head on the screen to add an extra jolt of fear to all those who were foolish enough to go to see that thing in the first place. And this kind of thing, I think we need to be aware of those things, and

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how those techniques can be used, and what they do. But there's more than that. You can't, first of all, be a psychologist. A preacher's not supposed to be a psychologist.

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He's supposed to be a preacher, a prophet. And so your main goal must be, and this is the reason I said before, what you do with the passage first is you exegete it to make sure that you know what it says, what the passage really says, and that's what you're faithful to.

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What I do is I always have in front of me a four by six card on which I have the names of 12 people. Now these 12 people are persons selected from the group to whom I'm speaking. On our campus, I'll pick out a few faculty people, a few administrators, and

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a few students. Men and women, upperclassmen, freshies, and I'll put their names down there. Then, everything that I do in terms of sermon planning and sermon writing, I keep looking at those 12 names.

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And I keep thinking to myself, will she understand that? Will he grasp what I am saying? Is this really speaking to where they are? Now in that sense, you see, you're sensitive to them.

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But that doesn't lead you to adulterate the word. That just leads you to become more sensitive to how to convey the word by personifying that congregation instead of just a vast number of people you talk to particularly.

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Now in that sense, I think the firstness of the word leads you away from descending into psychology. Of course, I should also say this. I don't believe the principal function of the pulpit is a didactic one.

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I am criticized often on our own campus for the reason that I use a great amount of emotion in my preaching. And I've heard that criticism all of my ministry and rejected. And I reject it for two reasons.

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It's true, the criticism itself is true. I don't reject the accuracy of the charge. But I do not think that the principal function of preaching is to teach. Any good sermon will teach, of course.

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But the great function of preaching is to move people, to motivate people, to get them to do something. And even a second rate psychologist knows that you motivate more through the emotions than you do through the mind.

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It's an elementary principle of motivation. And so what I'm saying is that I am trying to get people to do something. Also, in the educational context where I am, they're in classrooms all the time where they're being taught.

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And I do not want to turn my pulpit into another classroom. Therefore, I deliberately diverged to make it as different as possible. And the work has been blessed. I think it's been certified by the Holy Spirit and what has been accomplished.

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But now here is another area of where psychology enters in. But I put that under the rubric or in my understanding that what I'm trying to do is get those people to get up and get out of there changed, you see. Which involves this, but you know as well as I do,

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the longest journey in the world is from here to here. And that's where I aim most of my shots, right there. In that sense, I think there's a certain amount of psychology involved. Sir?

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>> Just making that point here, you mentioned not being Bruce Larson or whatever, I mean, when I was a seminary, I was studying my thoughts, a little bit of instruction and work, the learning and the path.

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And I just really feel that it also means Bruce Larson and some of those things, but that's the only thing that gets me from here to here. That's what that's like. And I appreciate the learning and knowledge that I get from it, but

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as far as devotion, I mean, to get it here, I have to read some of the same books I'll be giving to my people. I'm sure that's a very valid comment. The comment was that true, you can read people like Maslow, for

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example, to go back to our same illustration, and that will edify the mind. But when you read Christian communicators like Keith and Bruce, your heart is reached and you are blessed in other ways than this. And I'm sure that's absolutely true.

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I suppose we're just talking about that's the reason they make chocolate and vanilla. I myself just find myself being thrilled by the insights that I will get from reading some of these people, and then running them through the sieve of my

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own experience, and I like to see those things work out in my own life. I always tell people, and I'll be saying this again, everybody ought to read Norman Vincent Peale. The reason you ought to read Norman Vincent Peale is because he has learned

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how to make his own experiences into marvelous illustrative material. His experiences aren't any different from anybody else's, except he always has them with movie stars and the presidents of corporations and things like that. But you become sensitive to the fact that you have conversations just like his,

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only most of us miss them. We go, we breeze right through them and don't understand what's going on. That's one of the reasons why I advocate having your sermon ideas planned out long in advance, then you suddenly realize, by golly,

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that's just what I'm going to be talking about. You see, and I was sharing with Dr. Roselle as I was coming here last night, preaching this sermon on unity last Sunday evening.

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I had made a resolution a long time ago never to say anything about Richard Nixon from the pulpit. That was a personal thing with me. I had met him on several different occasions, was very much impressed with him,

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voted for him twice, and voted for him three times, and was very upset at what happened. It was a very traumatic thing for me. And also, I feel that a great deal has been made of it,

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perhaps beyond what should have been made of it. And so I said that I wouldn't do it. But then this last week, I got involved in a conversation with one of our students who has become schismatic.

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And he advised me that he thought everybody ought to go to the church of their choice, which sounds frightfully American, doesn't it? The church of your choice. I mean, that's in the Constitution, isn't it, or something like that?

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>> [LAUGH] >> And that just led me to think, that prompted me to come out with the fact that the most perfect illustration of a church of your choice that we've had in our century was the White House Church during the Nixon administration.

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That was the church of Mr. Nixon's choice. He chose the preachers. He chose the congregation, invited everybody who went. He chose the choir.

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He chose the music. Some instances, he chose the themes. And all those sermons have been collected in a book, and you read them. And none of the sermons that were preached there ever said anything to him

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that he really needed to hear. It was all his choice. He never had to, Ephesians 5, submit himself to anybody. Well, this experience of this last week prompted that.

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So I'd rather, I guess I'm off the subject now, but I think what I'm essentially saying is, I would rather read the concepts and then weave them through my own experience than I would to read Bruce's experiences or Keith's experiences, although I could tell you some great experiences that I've

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had with Bruce and Keith. So yeah, I'd be willing to do that. Besides that, if you've got a church library, all the people have read those books anyway, so you can't use those illustrations.

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>> [LAUGH] >> Sir? Yes? Were you just waving? I'm sorry.

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I'm sorry. He's playing with his pen. Okay. >> [LAUGH] >> I was interested in your comment

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about the sponsor, the sponsor for our preaching. I was wondering if there still is a place for expository preaching and if not, how can we avoid the other extreme,

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getting into the swamp of gas tank preaching? >> What is gas tank preaching? >> Just getting people through the week. >> Pumping them up until next Sunday, I see.

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The question is, is there a place for expository preaching? Which being translated is, don't you think you were too severe in what you said about expository preaching? >> [LAUGH] >> That was unfair.

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You know, one of the difficulties, this really is a difficult thing, and I say this by way of severe criticism. It's a difficult thing to bring somebody here and give them 25 minutes on four consecutive days and say you want them to give lectures on preaching and

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model preaching in a grand total of 110 minutes. I mean, that's what you've got. It's really a load, and I had to drop a lot of stuff on expository preaching this morning without developing the idea at all.

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Absolutely, there is a place for expository preaching. But I personally think that expository preaching is most effective when it's related to people's needs, but it still can be an exposition. It can be extended exposition.

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And as I will say when I talk about illustration on Thursday, I think that exegesis is the best source of illustrative material. Exegesis is the best source. Life experiences, I think, is the second best source.

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And reading is the third best source for illustrative material, in my opinion. And an exegesis, of course, should be a basic part of any preaching technique, but it especially comes forth in expository preaching. I also find that expository preaching is very good if you have two services.

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Then you can, in a sense, if you want to, I'm not comfortable with that gas tank phrase, but then you can use the gas tank at one time, and you can use the, what do we want to say, nuclear reactor type preaching that lasts for

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30 years the other time, you know? And you can use both, and that gives you an opportunity. My trouble is, you see, and it depends, of course, a great deal on the nature of your congregation.

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Most expository preaching, I think, gets lost in the exposition of that which really isn't where the people are. It's true. It's from God's word.

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And your exposition of it may be absolutely true. And of course, the argument is, and there are many people that say this, you proclaim the word, and then the word will be used by the Holy Spirit in the hearts of your heirs.

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You're not responsible for that, and that's true. That's absolutely true. And if you've done much preaching, I'm sure you've had the experience of getting up and preaching on something, and somebody comes out afterwards, and

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they'll make a comment. They'll say, I really appreciated what you had to say about homosexuality this morning, and you're not aware that you said anything about homos. It never crossed your mind, you know, at all.

00:28:50.960 - 00:29:00.520

Used to be when I was, I used to say to people, and they'd say something like that, I'd say, what was it, what are you referring to? And then they'd tell me, and I'd correct them. I don't do that anymore.

00:29:00.520 - 00:29:10.560

I just say, thank you very much. >> [LAUGH] >> Because I'm convinced that the Holy Spirit uses the words in terms of the person's needs.

00:29:10.560 - 00:29:21.240

And in a sense, I'm arguing against my own position here, but I do it without shame. Because I feel that most of the time, the guilt's on the other side. I think most of the time, we're busy, as I said this morning,

00:29:21.240 - 00:29:35.880

telling them about the Amalekites when they really don't care. And that's the place. And I was overly abrupt this morning, just because I didn't have the time. And I was hoping that I would kick somebody enough that they would get mad

00:29:35.880 - 00:29:43.480

about it and ask a question like that. >> [LAUGH] >> Hi, Scott. >> Can you tell us some of your [INAUDIBLE]

00:29:43.480 - 00:29:58.640

as far as who you're going to [INAUDIBLE] >> Yes. The question is, asked by one of our Grove City alumnus, asked by a Grove City alumnus, who are some of your favorite preachers?

00:29:58.640 - 00:30:23.560

Well, if I go back, if I go back into yesterday, not talking about today yet, I would say that I very much enjoy the sermons of Clarence Edward McCartney. I never can read Clarence Edward McCartney on a text before I preach on it. Because if I do, it'll come out McCartney.

00:30:24.560 - 00:30:40.040

Because he says it so well that once you've read it, everything else you write sounds so poor you don't want anything to do with it. So he has 57 published books of sermons, so he covered just about everything. They're being published by Baker now in paperback, Great Knights of the Bible,

00:30:40.040 - 00:30:51.280

Great Women of the Bible, Strange Texts but Grand Truths. >> [LAUGH] >> He does, he has one on Strange Texts but Grand Truths, where he picks out these very unusual texts and

00:30:51.280 - 00:31:03.000

is absolutely faithful. I don't mean this is an oddball preaching. I mean, he'll come out with texts. He's got one Gehazi's words, a last master for it was borrowed.

00:31:03.000 - 00:31:16.920

>> [LAUGH] >> And that's a great, great sermon. I heard him preach a New Year sermon once on the text, behold Israel is like a she-ass sniffing the wind in her heat.

00:31:16.920 - 00:31:23.880

>> [LAUGH] >> That was a New Year sermon. >> [LAUGH] >> And it was a dandy too,

00:31:23.880 - 00:31:35.200

I'll tell you, really moved me. I mean, it had impact on me and I'm remembering it 30 years after I heard it. 30, 35 years after I heard it. So Clarence Edward McCartney would be one.

00:31:35.200 - 00:31:51.000

I have always read Jonathan Edwards devotionally, usually about a page at a time. >> [LAUGH] >> But I have always found that he,

00:31:51.000 - 00:32:15.440

in his sermons, searches out the dark places in my heart. And I enjoy reading the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, but not almost, almost not as sermons, if you know what I mean, just a bit at a time. The homiletic art, it seems to me, is most exemplified by the man I would call,

00:32:15.440 - 00:32:32.040

insofar as homiletics alone is concerned, just the art, not the message, but the style. Is best exemplified by Harry Emerson Fosdick. I consider him the greatest preacher of the century in terms of homiletic skills. And you really ought to read some of Fosdick's preaching.

00:32:32.040 - 00:32:48.560

If you wanna read a fascinating book for right now, for a time just like this, here's a book, a collection of his sermons, it's entitled, It's a Great Time to Be Alive. Sermons preached during the worst days of the Second World War.

00:32:48.560 - 00:33:07.160

Most people don't know it, but Harry Emerson Fosdick was a pacifist. And held the pulpit of the Riverside Church in New York City during the Second World War as a pacifist. And he preaches sermons when, even during the days when 39 and

00:33:07.160 - 00:33:21.520

40 and when things were really going against us. And he preaches to that time magnificently. Well, as you know, there's a lot of despair and a lot of people throwing up their hands now and everybody thinks it's all down the tubes.

00:33:21.520 - 00:33:37.200

And if you wanna read a man who just faced up to a tragic situation and preach to it, now it's riddled full of theological baloney and it's very, very liberal in its orientation. And he puts down what he calls the fundamentalist,

00:33:37.200 - 00:33:49.840

which by fundamentalist he simply means a conservative. He puts them down just about every second sermon. But still, it's a masterful piece. Now, of sermons of people who are writing sermons today,

00:33:49.840 - 00:33:57.360

of which there aren't very many, there aren't very many books of sermons being preached now. If you'll notice, most of them are reissues. Preaching's having a bad time right now.

00:33:57.360 - 00:34:07.400

It's because of the whole rejection of authority, I think, in part. And because our seminaries don't teach it anymore, or don't, most seminaries don't teach it. I don't know what program they have here, so I better not say anything.

00:34:07.400 - 00:34:18.160

But it's just not a major thing in seminaries anymore. It's kind of a sideline, most schools. And it's showing up. I like the sermons of David H.C.

00:34:18.160 - 00:34:37.360

Reed, who is the pastor of the Madison Avenue Church in New York City. Marvelous exegetical mind, and brings it right to immediate relevance. The best source of illustration in preaching that I know today, the guy that's got the kind of a mind that I would like to have,

00:34:37.360 - 00:34:53.800

is Ernest Campbell, former minister of the Riverside Church. Graduate of Bob Jones and Princeton Seminary, interesting mixture. >> [LAUGH] >> And has had a very great ministry,

00:34:53.800 - 00:35:11.560

left Riverside, and now just travels and preaches. He, in my estimation, is the finest preacher of our day. He's solid theologically, he's relevant socially, he's sound exegetically, he's brilliant illustratively.

00:35:11.560 - 00:35:28.400

He's the guy that I like to listen to the most. And he's not only a preacher's preacher, he's other folks' preacher too. I mean, that's not just a professional thing. I think those would exemplify what I enjoy.

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What time are we to be finished? >> Couple more minutes. >> Couple more minutes. We got time for one more question or comment or objection.

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They're done. So we're done. Thank you very much. >> [APPLAUSE]