Danny ChaiThe speaker at church yesterday was phenomenal. It was Biblically sound, intellectually stimulating, challenging, and well delivered. All in all, an incredible sermon. I was extremely blessed. I’ll write about what he said later.
But I was deeply disturbed, because afterwards I was talking to someone who essentially said that it was OK. And because (s)he listens to Tim Keller sermon tapes so it’s hard to compare to that.
Seriously, that deeply disturbed me. If something is causing you to not recognize when something is not just good, but very good, in your own church, and you’re not challenged by that, I say there’s something wrong. It can’t be that listening to those tapes is wrong. That doesn’t seem logical, that doing something good can be bad. So it must be the heart.
I don’t know, I just thought that excuse was lame. I mean, I regularly read John Piper’s sermons and they are frequently incredible, but I can still recognize an excellent sermon when I see one, even if it’s “less good”. I don’t know, to not be deeply convicted or challenged by a good sermon just because it doesn’t “compare” to something else is again, very disturbing to me. And in fact, this particular attitude is one that Ralph Neighbor specifically mentions as being a problem in the modern church.
So yeah, I was disturbed.
And as usual, I’m a total hypocrite. Because I certainly have musical standards, which, if not met, interfere with my ability to “worship”. Even with sermons I’m like that. Argh.
But I think I’m getting better. A few times now someone has thought I was more bothered by the praise at KCPC than I actually was. Sometimes I wasn’t bothered at all. If you can call that progress.