Albert Mohler

I'm sorry about this one folks the notes aren't very good, but the message sure was!

The church is starving because of the absence of Biblical meat.

Luke 24:13-32
We are a storied people. Wet use stories to tell anything of significance.
Meta-narrative: the grand story which contains all stories.
We as preachers have got to get away from the pitit-narrative that is, the small stories and move into the meta-narrative.

The story of The Emmaus Road is Jesus imposing the meta-narrative into their pitit-narrative.

Look at the key juxtaposition of what is going on here. These men are sad in the presence of Jesus because they did not recognize him - because they did not comprehend the scriptures.

Like the disciples: one of the great challenges for us as evangelical preachers is people who know a lot but know nothing. Will our own people miss the point? Do they have the scriptures but not understand what they truly mean?

Consider their statement, "didn't our hearts burn within us as he explianed the scriptures?" This is the prayer I [Albert Mohler] Bring into the pulpit. That people's hearts will burn within them as I preach.

The great Meta-Narrative of scripture is contained within the framework of
CREATION
FALL
REDEMPTION
CONSUMMATION

We cannot understand even ourselves without this meta-narrative. Until we encounter the reality that we are CREATED by God. If we take the other major Meta-narrative of "in the beginning nothing exploded into everything" than we are nothing but an accident and therefore life is indeed without meaning.
Neither can we truly understand ourselves without the concept of FALL. We are fallen creatures in a fallen creation.

One day reading the text decided not to wear his glasses and skipped several pages without knowing; and somehow moved from prayer to circumcision without warning. Later, my daughter asked me why I didn't wear my glasses and I Complained that it made me look old. And she said well dad, not wearing them makes you look illiterate.

One of the problems with teaching is that we move from prayer to circumcision without warning. We fail to put that which we are preaching in it's legitimate context.

Too often we just skip around in the OT for stories. And turn them into morality tales, but they are so much more than that. We have got to put those narratives into the covenantal history of Israel in the word of God.

We do the same thing with the parables. We turn them into morality tales when they are about the in breaking of the kingdom. Jesus' hearers didn't have a problem with morality but they still had a problem with his parables. These stories, really upset his audiences enough to want to kill them. They were not about mere morality.

In Matthew 13 Jesus spoke in parables so that people wouldn't understand.

If you read a parable and you are not troubled, you haven't understood it.

LK 16:19 is not less than a parable.
The rich man is the neuvo riche - new money because he has to show it.
Lk 16:20 Lazarus' friend's don't care for him they dump him at the gate of a rich man in vain hope that he'll get anything good, but he doesn't (lk 16:21)
.. (Dr. Mohler walked through the rest of the parable/picture highlighting the theme of the great reversal in vv22-26)
The end lesson is that this is not a mere morality tale.

The point of the parable is the potency of God's word.

Day two of the MBI pastor's conference started out with a bang. Dr. Albert Mohler president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary delivered a bang up message on why we preach. Here are my scrambling notes. They may not be complete or coherent but they are what they are. I'm going to try and separate most of the sessions because it's just too much to put them all in one post. Plus I can spread them out a bit better that way :-)

Deuteronomy 4 serves as the backdrop for our preaching so go read it.
Luke 16 the sufficiency of the word of God.
Preaching and the big story Luke 24 "...didn't or hearts burn within us..."

This whole business of preaching is something that we should understand on a Tuesday morning but there is a crisis of preaching in the evangelical church. How likely are you to hear an explicitly evangelical exposition of the word of God in the pulpit? Unfortunately there are people urging pastors to do anything other than the exposition of the scriptures from the pulpit. People with "itching ears" that don't want to hear the Bible being taught - but will take almost anything else in it's place.

The exposition of the scriptures is easy,you have to be clever to mess it up.

Nehemiah 8 stands as a great example of exegetical preaching. Verse 8 (Neh 8:8) is a short course in homiletics: READ and EXPLAIN.
It's like rinse, lather and repeat on the shampoo bottle. It's simple. There's nothing missing.

But what does it take? Let's look at the guy doing the preaching:
1. EDUCATION

Look at Ezra 7:11 "...learned in the words of the commandments..." he didn't just stand up and open his mouth,

2. PREPARATION