A fresh devotional for the new year.

UPDATE: This post was originally from December 29, 2019. Seems a good time to bump it to the top of the stack.

I really like and frequently recommend these one-year Bible reading plans, as much for their manageable structure as for their probing and thought-provoking devotional commentary. The Spirit at Work starts at Pentecost. The Word at Work starts on the second Sunday of Easter. Now I see there is a new one, Sitometrion, that starts (or started) on Christmas Day. Each of them, with just a bit of adjustment, can be taken up at any time of year. Just jump in on the day (you can ignore the year for the most part), then wrap around when the time comes.

        

A Short Course in Preaching

Subtitle: Daily Reading as the Seedbed of Sermons.

It's looking like I'll be teaching preaching a lot to various constituencies and at various levels in the near and foreseeable future, so I figured it was time to boil down the basics, as I see them, into a "short course in preaching." Includes a "Second Short Course" in the form of a sermon on the Benedictus, and a first English translation of the ten summary paragraphs of Heinrich Bullinger's 1556 Summa, which was itself a summary of his famous sermon series, Decades. The Decades were as important and popular as Calvin's Institutes for several centuries and generations. So imagine having the Institutes boiled down—twice—into seven pages. I have included these paragraphs here as a way of (unofficially) supplementing the Book of Confessions as a tool for dogmatic testing.