Perhaps the most neglected book in the New Testament is the little book of Jude, a postcard really. Yet Bible scholar Tom Schreiner writes that “some of the most beautiful statements about God’s sustaining grace are found in Jude.”

Recently C.J. preached through Jude in a two-part message at Covenant Life Church. The audio is available here:

Jude: Called to Contend: A Postcard from the Past

Called
C.J. Mahaney
Feb 14, 2010
51:42 minutes
Listen or download here.

Contend
C.J. Mahaney
Feb 21, 2010
62:36 minutes
Listen or download here.

The topic of sleep is rarely far from the newsstands. Studies link sleep to everything from academic scores to obesity. A new line of sleep drinks features a shot of melatonin to help you fall asleep (think anti-energy drink). And of course the news is filled with reports of a major pop musician’s sleep problems and of his doctor, who is accused of inducing permanent and irreversible slumber.

Sleep is rarely far from conversation. Probably because sleep is never far removed from our lives.

Roughly speaking, most of us spend about 1/3 of our lives asleep (whereas mothers of small children spend about 1/8 of their lives asleep). The Bible says quite a bit on this topic, probably because sleep is both a good teacher and a revealer of the heart. 

The Bible says:

1. 
Sleep is a daily gift from God (Psalm 127:1–2).

2. Sleep reminds us daily of our need for God (Psalms 3:5, 4:8).

3. Excessive sleep exposes sin and leads to poverty (Proverbs 6:9–11, 20:13).

4. Sleep is sweet when we are walking in wisdom (Proverbs 3:19–24).

5. Falling asleep provides an opportunity to examine our hearts before God (Psalm 4:4).


For more on these points, see C.J.'s sermon "Sanctifying the Ordinary: A Biblical Understanding of Sleep."



This weekend C.J. joined John Piper, John MacArthur, Rick Holland, and Steve Lawson at the Resolved 2009 conference in Palm Springs. About 4,000 young adults gathered for four days to hear ten messages. C.J. preached twice, and both messages are online and available to download.

Who’s Really at Work?
Philippians 2:12-13
June 13, 2009
Resolved 2009; Palm Springs, CA
download MP3 (57.9MB)

The Troubled Soul
Psalm 42
June 15, 2009
Resolved 2009; Palm Springs, CA
download MP3 (63.4MB)

----------------

Photo © 2009, Lukas VanDyke

Audio and PDFs from the 2009 Sovereign Grace Ministries Pastors Conference (April 6-8) are now available for download.

Here is a list of the conference messages:

General Sessions

• The Pastor’s Charge, Part 1 (C.J. Mahaney)
• The Pastor’s Teaching (Jeff Purswell)
• The Pastor’s Mission (Dave Harvey)
• The Pastor’s Legacy (Jared Mellinger)
• The Pastor’s Charge, Part 2 (C.J. Mahaney)

Seminars for Men

• The Pastor and Christian Liberty (Craig Cabaniss)
• The Pastor and College Ministry: Compelling Reasons to Take the Gospel to the Campus (Bill Kittrell)
• The Pastor and His Community: How the Gospel Informs Our Mission beyond the Church (Mark Dever)
• The Pastor and His Older Children: The Possibilities and Perils of Parenting Teens (Bob Kauflin)
• The Pastor and Preaching: How to Start a Sermon, End a Sermon, and Prepare the Middle of a Sermon (Mike Bullmore)
• The Pastor and Small-Group Leaders (Jim Donohue)
• The Pastor and the Counseling Process (Andy Farmer)
• The Pastor and the Priority of Plurality (Dave Harvey)
• The Pastor and the Spirit: An Exposition of 1 Corinthians 12–14 (Jeff Purswell)
• The Pastor and Titus 2 (Aron Osborne)
• The Pastor and Youth Ministry: The Priority of Teaching for Parents and Teens (Steve Whitacre)

Seminars for Women

• The Pastor’s Wife and Culture: What Feminism Has Done to Femininity (Carolyn McCulley)
• The Pastor’s Wife and Ministry Opportunities: Five Great Deals She Won’t Want to Miss (Carolyn Mahaney)

Visit the Pastors Conference page to download the audio recordings and all available PDFs.

Do the gospel and sports connect? If so, how does the gospel shape the way we play, view, and coach sports? These and other questions are answered by C.J. in his sermon “Don’t Waste Your Sports.”

This week Sovereign Grace Ministries released C.J.’s sermon on DVD. And we are giving away some copies.

Here is how to win.

As C.J. points out in his message, athletics provides us many opportunities to cultivate humility (often unexpectedly). Whether it’s having a jumpshot rejected, a big fat swing and a whiff at a waist-level fastball, or accidentally high-fiving someone in the face, few things in life provide more opportunities for humility than athletics.

And now is your opportunity to tell the world about your embarrassing moment lesson in humility. For a free DVD, of course.

Here is the deal: Explain the most humbling moment from your life as an athlete, coach, or parent of an athlete. In 250 words (or less), write a narrative of the experience. Include your first name, last initial, and your hometown in an email and send it to blog AT sovgracemin DOT org.

No, you cannot share someone else’s story.

I’ll pass the entries along to C.J. The best and/or funniest stories will win a free copy of the DVD and the entry will be posted on the blog.

If your entry is chosen and posted on the blog, your first name, last initial, and hometown will appear along with it.

Please email your story by 12:00 noon (EST) on Wednesday, Feb. 11. Winners will be announced later that afternoon.

Please note that reference to the supremacy of the Duke Blue Devils, New York Yankees, or Dallas Cowboys will not help your chances.

For further details on the DVD, video excerpts, and free downloadable application questions, please visit our online store.

C.J.’s Sunday morning message, delivered at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in downtown D.C., is now online:

The Troubled Soul
C.J. Mahaney
Psalm 42
January 18, 2009
Capitol Hill Baptist Church; Washington, D.C.
1:06:33 run time; 11.5MB MP3

Download here.
Listen here:

 

Lakeview Christian Center, the Sovereign Grace church in New Orleans, lost their church building to floods during hurricane Katrina in 2005 (see this video for the details). On Sunday, the church celebrated the grand opening of their new building, with nearly 1,000 in attendance. C.J.’s message from the morning is now online:
 
Deepening Our Delight
C.J. Mahaney
Jeremiah 9:23–24
November 2, 2008
Grand Opening; Lakeview Christian Center; New Orleans, LA
55:32 run time; 25.4MB MP3
 
Download here.
Listen here:
 

The new book Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World, edited by C.J. and coauthored by Craig Cabaniss, Bob Kauflin, Dave Harvey, and Jeff Purswell, was released last month from Crossway. In his foreword, John Piper suggests one way pastors could use the book:

A word to pastors: this book is a gift to you. It will help you help others—by the modeling that’s done here and by the exegetical reflection and by the biblical and cultural insights. I can see whole churches reading this together as the pastor fleshes out the biblical foundations from the pulpit. What a powerful season that would be in the life of the church. (p. 12)

Worldliness was written with pastors and church leaders in mind. If you want to use the book as Dr. Piper proposes, or in some other church or small-group setting, check out the thoughtful discussion questions in the back (see pages 180–187). These questions are designed not only for personal application, but also to help pastors or small-group leaders guide focused and fruitful discussions about the truths in the book.

In addition to purchasing the book (or if you’re not ready to purchase it yet), you can download extended excerpts from the book for free. Download the foreword by Dr. Piper and the opening chapter by C.J. (“Is This Verse in Your Bible?”) as a PDF here. And recently we posted a series of excerpts on modesty, from chapter five (titled “God, My Heart, and Clothes”). Read this entire chapter online here.

C.J.’s message from the 2002 New Attitude Conference, “Do Not Love the World” (1 John 2:15) is another tool for resisting the sin in our fallen world—and in our own hearts. (This conference message eventually grew into the first chapter of Worldliness.) You can watch, listen to, or download the message at C.J.’s sermon archive.

Today we feature more wisdom from Mark Dever in my 2007 interview with him. This time Mark shares details about his personal preparation and delivery of sermons.

----------------------

C.J. Mahaney: Let’s move into the topic of preaching. The first of the “nine marks” is expositional preaching. Talk to us very specifically about your process of preparing a sermon.

Mark Dever: I assume that my mind is in too many ways a stagnant swamp that needs the fresh water of God’s Word constantly being poured in to understand him better, to understand myself better, to understand life better. So I want to give myself to preaching on a certain passage of Scripture. I usually don’t preach because I am looking to talk about a particular problem. This year we are going through Luke’s Gospel, and so I want to work specifically on the passage I am going to be preaching Sunday. I want to read it over and over and note things.

Gordon Fee taught me New Testament exegesis at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and—although I didn’t agree with his feminism or his kenotic Christology—I did love his story about the graduate student in ichthyology. There is a student studying fish at a doctoral level, and a world-class expert tells him to write down everything he sees about the fish and then he leaves. And the guy is kind of disappointed, because he was studying under this great expert. He thought, “Why am I doing this?”

He wrote down a few things. The expert returns about 30 minutes later and says, “This is all you’ve got?”

And the graduate student says, “Yes.” 

He says, “I want you to do this for the next hour.”

And the student says, “An hour? You’re kidding!”

So for an hour the student does it and he starts noting down more things, and seeing more things, and writing them down.

The expert returns an hour later and he says, “All right. This is a pretty good start. Why don’t you do this the rest of the afternoon?”

And the graduate student is thinking, What are you thinking? You are the great expert, I came to learn from you and this is just a fish floating here.

So the student spends the rest of the afternoon doing the same thing. But by the end of the afternoon he realizes he has learned more about fish just by sitting and staring at the fish.

All of that to say: Rather than reading all the commentaries, I spend my first day in sermon preparation just reading and rereading the text and praying about it and noting things I see (any structures or questions that are answered). I find this to be the most fruitful way for me to have my soul freshly engaged by God about his Word.

And I also think of it in the context of where I’ll be preaching it—to this congregation. So I assume my exegesis should be very similar to what other people have done, but I will be looking at it with certain questions in mind from my own life, from the lives of those people in the congregation, and from the congregation as a whole. 

So the most fundamental part of the sermon preparation for me is this reading and rereading of the text.

CJM: Do you do recommend pastors consult commentaries?

MD: Yes, particularly when there are things I’m not sure what to do with—but only after I have completed all this work on the text myself. Otherwise I will just become an echo chamber for somebody’s commentary rather than talking with the commentary, as it were. When I have a text, I will put a question mark by a certain thing that I have a question about in my Word doc. I will write out my question and then I make myself answer it. Then I will type in “Answer” and insert the best answer I could think of at the time (even if it is not a very good one).

Then once I have this in mind, I try to answer all the questions I have about the text. Only then do I feel it’s safe for me to look at a commentary. Hopefully a lot of the things commentators will have thought of are some of the questions I have considered as I have been reading and rereading the text and praying over it. So I am able to have a conversation with the people who have written the commentaries, rather than just let them sort of type on my brain.

CJM: All right. Average number of hours each week devoted to sermon prep?

MD: Thirty to 35.

CJM: How long do you speak on Sundays?

MD: One hour. 

CJM: You work from a manuscript? 

MD: I do, though I don’t generally recommend other people do that. 

CJM: Why?

MD: Manuscripts can just be deadly boring. I don’t want to say there are few people who can use a manuscript well, but it is definitely a minority.

CJM: And you don’t remain restricted by your manuscript, though. That would be the difference.

MD: For whatever reason, I can glance down and pick up several sentences and then talk. So I don’t think it appears that I am reading.

CJM: Not at all, no.

Matt Schmucker: And you often get accused of saying that your best stuff after a sermon is the stuff that wasn’t in the manuscript anyway. We call it off-roading. 

MD: What everybody thanks me for as they walk out at the door usually had nothing to do with my manuscript. 

CJM: You are unique in your preparation process in that you love to have people around you. True?

MD: Well, honestly, there are some parts of preparation when I do prefer to be alone, especially when I am trying to think things through. But I like having people around for me to be able to bounce things off of. Particularly when I go over my application grid and fill it out, I do that with another member of the church.

CJM: Describe that process. Because before you preach a sermon on Sunday, you meet with a member of the church on Saturday to do what? 

MD: They will have been reading over the text of Scripture. We will sit and talk about the Scripture. So they will ask me any questions they have. And that helps me sometimes, because they will have questions—as someone who hasn’t done all this study will have. Sometimes I’m thinking, “Well, you don’t need to explain about the Samaritans. Everybody knows.” They’ll say, “Well, no, actually I don’t know. Who are the Samaritans?”

These things are very helpful as a reality check for the preacher, I think. 

But then we labor in giving our time to application where I have various categories set up, which can change from series to series. But generally for each point of my sermon I try to ask,

• What is this saying to the individual Christian? This is the category I think most evangelical preachers preach from—and only this one. But there are others.
• How does this point to Christ?
• What is this saying that is unique in salvation history that I need to articulate?
• What is this saying to the non-Christian?
• Are there any public implications?
• What is it saying to Capitol Hill Baptist Church? How should we as a church, as a congregation, be challenged, encouraged, or shaped by what we are hearing? 
  

These categories provide me a structured meditation on the text. And it is really helpful for me to have someone else to talk through these categories with.

The book of Proverbs is a unique gift to those in their teenage years. Whether you're a parent or a teen, do you value the wealth of wisdom contained there? In these two messages, C.J. highlights the danger of foolishly “dissing” Lady Wisdom, and the importance of listening to her words.

Two audio recordings from Worthy08, the recent Covenant Life Church parent-youth retreat:

Part 1: The Danger of Dissing Lady Wisdom    
C.J. Mahaney
Proverbs 1:20–33
August 19, 2008
Worthy08 parent-youth retreat; North East, Maryland
52:56 run time; 97.0MB MP3

Download here.
Listen here:


Part 2: The Danger of Dissing Lady Wisdom    
C.J. Mahaney
Proverbs 1:20–33
August 19, 2008
Worthy08 parent-youth retreat; North East, Maryland
46:19 run time; 84.9MB MP3

Download here.
Listen here: