3 point sermons

Abbreviated 3 point sermons I have preached or will preach from a pulpit near you soon!

CPR – Confidence, Purpose, Realism. - a sermon using 1John1 – CPR is that procedure you can learn at first aid classes to save life, John’s message is about Jesus, the Saviour of the world - so, in my sermon I present a spiritual CPR for all who want to choose life, live life and hold out life to others. No prizes for guessing where I go with this – John’s confidence – a clear message; his purpose – fellowship and joy; his realism – sin and stuff. Here’s how my thinking went for this one. I had Confidence and Purpose down as themes for the first four verses. I was then thinking about Message – but it didn’t fit any abbreviation I knew – and it was already a sub-theme of John’s confidence. I started thinking about packaging - CPR came to mind, and I ‘realised’ I could use Realism to cover John’s discussion of sin. Nice work, I think.

PEW – Put others first, Expose deeds of darkness, Worship the 3-in-1 God – a sermon using Eph 5:10-21. I thought this was nicely contextualised – the people were sitting on pews – hence PEW – easy to remember… my girlfriend at the time thought this was a sloppy day’s work on my part – but I was chuffed.

ABC – Attitude, Battle, Curse – sermon on Genesis 4:1-16 – an ABC of Cain – this was the first sermon I preached during a placement on Skye last summer. No idea how I came up with this one – what’s the connection between ABC and Cain? But, there was some really interesting stuff in this sermon – I enjoyed preaching it, even though the subject matter was fairly bleak.

I don’t usually do three point sermons – but I’m beginning to realise that you really do need to package what you preach. The medium is the massage (sic), and all that.