Cutting It Straight 2019 is off and running! We off of to and blessed start Tuesday (9/17). The conference kicked-off with a challenging and encouraging message from 1 Samuel 14 by  Breonus Mitchell, who leads the Mt. Gilead Baptist Church in Nashville. General sessions on preaching, worship & arts, and women's ministry followed. Tony Merida model gospel-centered preaching from Romans 8:31-39. Brian Croft talked to pastors and worship leaders about what it means to gather God's people for worship. My wife, Crystal Charles, gave a talk to the ministers' wives and women's ministry leaders. Crystal loves to lead outreach efforts. She...

  Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. – 2 Timothy 2:15   This week (September 17-19, 2019), the Cutting It Straight Expository Preaching Conference will take place at the Shiloh Church in Jacksonville, Florida, while I serve as pastor. The purpose of Cutting It Straight is to train, model, and promote faithful and clear Bible exposition in the preaching and teaching of God’s word. It also seeks to help ministry leaders develop a biblical philosophy of ministry as they do...

Welcome to The On Preaching Podcast, the podcast dedicated to helping you preach faithfully, clearly, and better. In this episode, I want to talk to you about preaching narrative sermons. The vast majority of the Bible is narrative. The drama of redemption is told through the story of people whose lives were invaded by God. If we do not preach narrative texts, we rob our hearers of a key element of the whole counsel of God. How can you preach narrative sermons effectively?  Do your homework. Feel the tension of the text. Teach the story. Build the message around one...

What Defiles a Person?

  Welcome to The On Preaching Podcast, the podcast dedicated to helping you preach faithfully, clearly, and better. This episode is a first. During this episode, I will draw from the "mailbag" to answer questions about sermon preparation and sermon delivery. Over the years, I have learned to preach by three means: (1) Study, (2) practice, (3) and conversation. You can learn a lot about preaching by talking to other preachers about preaching. I hope this episode will serve you in that way. I am not an expert or scholar. But whatever I know about preaching from my decades of...

  Welcome to The On Preaching Podcast, the podcast dedicated to helping you preach faithfully, clearly, and better. Sometimes pastors struggle in preaching because they don’t take their pulpit work seriously. Others struggle in preaching because they struggle alone. But good preaching is a partnership between pastor and congregation, pulpit and pew, the one who preaches and the one who listens. The pastor preaches to help those in the pew. But the congregation can and should help the one in the pulpit, as well. Here are seven ways the pew can helpt the pulpit... Pray for your pastor. Give your...

Trapped by Tradition

  Welcome to The On Preaching Podcast, the podcast dedicated to helping you preach faithfully, clearly, and better. During the 2019 Sing! Worship Music Conference, hosted by Keity and Kristyn Getty in Nashville, I gave a talk about preaching the incarnation. In this episode of the podcast, I want to share some of the principles I gave during that talk. What is the Incarnation of Christ all about? I can answer in four words from John 1:14: "The Word became flesh." The Incarnation of Christ is essential to Christian truth, Christian worship, and Christian living. Here are ten priciples for...

I Will Fear No Evil

  I browsed the exhibit hall at a conference recently. A kindly man at a particular booth struck up a conversation. He even offered me a free book. It was a new book by Alexander Strauch. I was grateful and excited to receive it. (My best friends are people who give me a book I have not read yet.) Asking the name of the generous book-giver, I discovered it was none other than Alexander Straugh himself! I have studied the subject of church leadership since I was a young, new pastor. My studies have been greatly aided by the writings...

  Welcome to The On Preaching Podcast, the podcast dedicated to helping you preach faithfully, clearly, and better. In his episode, I have the privilege of interviewing Alexander Strauch. Alexander Strauch was raised in New Jersey and converted to Christ at a Bible camp in New York State. He received his undergraduate degree from Colorado Christian University and went on to earn his Master’s in Divinity degree from Denver Seminary. Mr. Strauch has served in the leadership and teaching ministry of Littleton Bible Chapel for nearly 50 years. As a gifted Bible teacher and a church elder with extensive practical experience, Mr....

What Happened to Samson?