Mar
25
2009
From Mourning Into Dancing
I genuinely hope this doesn’t come across as self-centered or self-serving, but I’m providing here a link to my sermon from last Sunday (March 22) on Psalm 30 which was the first sermon I preached at New City after Coral Ridge voted to support the merger.
The reason I’m passing this sermon on (and I really hope you don’t take this the wrong way) is because I was changed by it in a most God-centered way. Not changed by my preaching, but by God’s truth and the way it shook me this past Sunday. Since this process began over two months ago I have battled mourning and sadness. But through this rich Psalm and the remarkable circumstances of Sunday March 15, God enabled me to get over the hump and as I was preaching this past Sunday I sensed his gladness overpowering my sadness. My desperate mourning turned into a dance of deliverance.
It is clearly a testimony to God doing the preaching when you can listen past the human voice and hear God’s above and beyond it–even in spite of it! I’ve always said that it is glorious good news that sermons are much bigger than preachers when God is doing the preaching.
Preaching is, as John Calvin put it, a “glorious mystery of God’s sweet condecension, consecrating the mouths of fallible and frail men, in order to communicate his infallible truth.” As strange as it sounds for me to say this as the human messenger, I hope God uses the truth of Psalm 30 to rock you the way he used it to rock me–turning my mourning into dancing!