Recording date:
9 August 2009
Recording time:
morning - Artist: Alistair Cowper
- Title: 2 Chronicles 34:14-33, Galatians 3:15-22
- Length: 26:09 minutes (5.99 MB)
- Format: MP3 Mono 22kHz 32Kbps (CBR)
Thanks Paul. These are fair comments and I appreciate you taking the time to respond in such depth. Your comments helped confirm several things I'd been thinking myself and I know I will learn from them. I love you for it!
A :)
Please feel free to comment openly on this sermon. I would value any feedback whatsoever as I fully acknowledge that my method is somewhat lacking and I would really love to improve this whole area of preaching. So be as honest as you can be. I promise to love you in return.
Glory to God
:) A
Hi Alistair,
I wasn't at the service when you preached however I've just listened to your sermon online (3 times) because I noticed that you are inviting comments and I actually do want to help if I can. Remembering how you were when you first started preaching, I have to say that I see (hear) more confidence in your speaking. You are definitely improving and I'm sure will continue to do so especially as you are humble enough to subject your preaching to open criticism.
The main point I want to make is that you have a tendency to try to pack too much into your sermons (I'm thinking of sermons you've preached in the past as well) and because of this, you end up jumping around quite major themes in the Bible without doing any real justice to any of them. In this sermon, your subject was "The relationship between kingship and covenant". This is a big subject to cover in 26 minutes, dealing as you did with both the Old and the New Covenants of God. You did your best but there was no depth to any of it, there couldn't be. After listening to your sermon the first time, I seemed to end up with a jumble of disconnected thoughts in my head and only after listening a further two times was I able to pick up a thread running through them. I personally would have preferred an in-depth, focussed study of just the 20 verses of the Chronicles passage alone.
I have some minor points also (you did say you'd continue to love me!) which are specific to this sermon. (1) You produced two examples to illustrate certain points. The first was of a Bible being exhibited and people being invited to write upon it and the second being a WW1 veteran who recently died and who had been a reluctant soldier. In my opinion, these examples served only to raise separate issues of their own and rather than confirming your own points, actually became unecessary distractions from those points. (2) When referring to God, sometimes you used the word 'God' and sometimes the word 'Yahweh'. I didn't like the inconsistency and it made me wonder if there was some significance to your use of 'Yahweh' that I was unable to undertand. (3) It seemed to me that sometimes you failed to distinguish between Israel and Judah correctly. (4) Much was said about Josiah's fatal battle (which was actually quite interesting) and it was a shame that it wasn't this passage which had been read out prior to the sermon. (5) Finally, I noticed that you say "I think" rather a lot and I felt that this undermined the points you were making. If you omitted those words then I think(!) your preaching would sound more assertive and confident.
Remember that these are only my own thoughts - I've not discussed your sermon or your preaching with anyone. I admire you for getting up and being able to speak from God's Word as I'm pretty sure I could not do the same! Anyway, may God bless you and Sarah and the children as you all look to where God would lead you in the months to come.
Paul