How do we do that?

The clipart for today isn’t all that great, but then again, I am not a clipart expert. Are there clipart experts anymore? There certainly were when I first got into computers, especially doing desktop publishing but the world and I were much younger then.

The sermon title is above¹ and I think it could use a bit of explanation. The “that” in the title is the behaviours we are encouraged to “take on” in the book of Ephesians, namely Ephesians 4:25-32. It is a really good list but when I looked at it what I saw were all the bad things in the list. I numbered them in my “preaching Bible”² and came up with twelve. The bad things were paired up with good things so my question is how do we³ do the good things and not the bad ones?

The good news is that there is a way we can do “that” and it is also found in Ephesians, in the next chapter where we are exhorted to be “imitators of God” (Ephesians 5:1 NRSV). The sermon is mostly about how we imitate a God we cannot see. I hope you find value in it somewhere.

“How do we do that?” St. Mark’s Presbyterian (to download, right-click and select “Save Link As . . .”)

Blessings,

1. I’ve been meaning to mention for a while that I got tired of trying to come up with good blog post titles so I simply gave up and used the sermon title. No one called me up to tell me I wasn’t being creative enough so I kept doing it . . . but forgot to mention it. ↩︎
2. Ah yes, my preaching Bible. My partner Hadley gave me a large print Bible more than thirty years ago so I could more easily read aloud from the pulpit. At that time there weren’t that many choices for translations so it is a study Bible with the New International Version, commonly referred to as the NIV. I need to make it clear, the NIV is a tolerable translation, but I don’t like it. It takes liberties with some very important ideas when moving them from Greek to English. The study portion is written by a coterie of conservative scholars whose conclusions I no longer accept. So why do I keep using it? Because a) it was a gift from the best person in my life; b) I have made so many notes and such in it that it is more valuable for the notes than anything else. For example, if I turn to Ephesians 4 I’ll find all twelve of those bad behaviours numbered. ↩︎
3. A word about “we.” If you are so inclined you can almost always substitute my name for the we, adjust the grammar as you like, but while it is a truism that all preachers are preaching to themselves and letting other people listen . . . the use of “I” in sermon titles is often off-putting. ↩︎