Proclaimer Blog
Why preachers must think for themselves
Last weekend I had to produce an emergency sermon – a sermon in a hurry, you might say. We wanted a service that was responding to what had happened in Paris and planned a change to our programme. Out went 1 Kings 9 (to be resuscitated at a later date) and in came Luke 13. There’s no typical sermon prep time for me, but it’s rare that a sermon takes less than 8 hours work. And here I was, at 10am on a Saturday morning (a day off), sitting in my office with a blank sheet of paper.
At such times, I confess that I resort to the help of a commentary more than I would normally do so – more extensively and more quickly. I’m not ashamed of that – it’s the nature of ministry that such times sometimes come and I don’t think God is going to hold that against me!
So, here’s the thing. An otherwise excellent little commentary on Luke got things a little wrong. It was Leon Morris in the Tyndale series who points out that the two verb forms of metanoeo = “repent” in Luke 13 are different. One is a present imperative (in v3) and one is an aorist (in v5). I thought I would check. I only know a little Greek [insert standard kebab shop joke here, if you must]. But when I checked, I found that this wasn’t the case – at least, not in NA27 that I was using.
They are both the same – present, active subjunctives. Am I missing something here? Quite possible, and no doubt the emails will come flooding in like a small trickle. But in the circumstances, I believed it wrong to take Leon Morris’ application too far – that both one off and continuous repentance are in view in Jesus’ mind.
Commentaries are a great, great help. Don’t know where I would be without them, in fact. But every preacher still has to think for himself.