‘Be practical!’ ‘Application, application, application!’ In seminary I learned that the key to preaching an effective sermon is practical application. Today, the focus of sermons is usually the audience: ‘What will he or she hear and will it matter to them personally?’ But this, I think, says more about the day in which we live than it does about preaching sermons that actually please God. Reading the sermons of the early church fathers or the Puritan divines or even Jonathan Edwards or Charles Spurgeon, one finds that these sermons – sermons which......

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