Bible Teacher. Pastor.Educator.

Preaching with Excellence!

Family! God has been so kind to me lately!!!! He has been teaching me so much lessons about preaching with excellence. Church was awesome this past Sunday! The response to my preaching was very heartwarming from the people of God. It is so good to be given the chance to preach every Sunday this month at my home church (www.thebridge.church). Preaching great sermons demand that the preacher be a student of the word of God and a student of human beings in his geographical location. Anybody can give a talk but it takes a man of God to be the mouth piece of God. Good preaching takes work but great preaching takes great work.

The preacher must be studious standing on the shoulders of church scholars and theologians across church history begging God for the anointing and wisdom  to precisely communicate the heart of God to the people of God. When I first started serving there, my preaching responsibilities were only twice a month at one of three locations. Preaching is hard work.

But now I am scheduled to preach at one of our three locations every Sunday this month!!!! This happened in July 2020 when God challenged me to practice my sermons out loud at home before preaching them to our church family. I never used to practice my sermons. I felt just memorizing the outline was enough, but recently God has been challenging me to “preach” my sermons out loud before preaching them on Sunday. I resisted at first because it required discipline, patience and humility. God has helped me so much. I believe that practicing my sermons out loud before preaching them has made me an effective speaker. Family! Please pray that I sharpen my speaking skills and that I find a coach to help me with my pronunciation of difficult words.
Evangelist James Owolabi
President Grace for Life International 

Radical Grace Global: Teaching and Preaching Ministry of James Owolabi

Dear Friends and Family,
         I am excited to let you in on something radical that God has been doing in me and through me in the past year. In 2017, I received two invitations to churches, inviting me to serve as a speaker. Both events were well attended and God moved in a mighty way. As 2017 was drawing to a close, I began to receive more invitations to speak outside of Chicago. Below is my current calendar for the first three months of 2018:  

• January 19-22 in Avon, Colorado with Pastor Jason Taber
• February 4th in Chicago, Illinois at North Side Gospel Center with Pastor Bob Anderson
  
• February 25th in Tampa, Florida at Temple Heights Baptist Church with Pastor Clark Allen
• February 26-28 in Vail, Colorado at Vail Christian Academy with Pastor Jason
  
• March 3-5 in Vonore, Tennessee at Vonore Baptist Church with Pastor Jeremy Shaw.
• March 18th in Dallas, Oregon at Salt Creek Baptist Church with Pastor David Curtis.

           Over the past ten years, God has given me unique and amazing opportunities to serve churches, camps, and Christian organizations as a guest speaker.

I have been blessed to serve the body of Christ in Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, the Island of Dominica, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Washington. These opportunities have also complimented my responsibilities as a mission leader with Youth for Christ  and Pastor to teenagers on the southside of Chicago.

Many of you have supported me prayerfully and financially in this endeavor, and have encouraged me to pursue more opportunities to serve the body of Christ as a traveling Bible teacher.

            As God continues to bless my ministry efforts in Chicago, God is leading me to start a nonprofit, which will expand my preaching and teaching ministry beyond North America. Radical Grace Global is the nonprofit that will allow me to serve the body of Christ across the world. Join me in praying that the Lord will lead and guide me in this endeavor.

              Lastly, please let me know of any opportunities that arise among your network of Christian organizations and local churches that might need a guest speaker for a special event. Please continue to pray with me that God will continue to open doors for me to teach the Bible around the world!   Thank you for your prayers and support over the past 10 years!

Respectfully,

Pastor James Owolabi

Preach with a pin, not with a hammer. ......by Scribblepreach..

One point. One single point. So here’s our principle: Preach with a pin, not with a hammer. A pin is a narrow, focused point designed to penetrate through surfaces. A hammer has a wide, flat surface, and its designed to bat around and flatten the outer layers. If we want preaching that penetrates the heart, we must preach with a pin. See what I mean below:

1. A single point forces good editing. If nothing else, preaching a single point is a brilliant help in editing content. The single most important question the preacher can ask himself when creating a final manuscript is: “How does this information contribute to my single homiletical idea?” If the preacher is honest, most of the interesting things we find in exegesis - the stuff that is fascinating, interesting, or relatively relevant – has to be thrown out. We don’t like to do that, because the course of the week digs up so much gold its tempting to put it ALL on display. This is where character comes into play – am I preaching for me, or am I preaching for them? Do I want to show off how much I know, or be funny and entertaining, or do I want to change lives? Lectures delve into details; preaching gets to the point. This is a painful process. At the end of the week, we know so much about the text that we’re often tempted to lump it all into one gigantic, vague “point” of the sermon. Sharpening and defining our point helps us resist this temptation, and limits our preaching to only what people need to hear in order to understand and receive the main point.

2. A single point guides listeners through the sermon. When digging deep into a text, we really do find a lot of great, fascinating information. WE know how it all fits together. But the law of the “curse of knowledge” tells us that we often impose our assumptions on our audience – THEY don’t know how it all fits together. In order to help them follow along, we need a single hook to hang all the points we’re making on. We need a single stake to which the congregation can be drawn back, again and again, so we can say – “See? This is how it all relates.” Even if you don’t give your main point away until the end (inductive preaching – that’s what I prefer), the audience can sense the difference between a focused message and scrambled eggs.

3. A single point makes a better argument. When we lay out several different points in a sermon, we don’t have time to argue well for any of them. When we come up with a boatload of applications, we don’t have time to flesh them out. But when we pick a single point, we have the time we need to make a solid argument for that point, and to flesh out in detail exactly how it looks to live it out.

4. A single point is memorable. Finally, preaching a single point is memorable. A couple of months ago I preached a sermon in which I asked several questions, then answered them. That was fine, but I never heard about it again. The next sermon I preached, I picked one single point, and was amazed at the result. WEEKS later, people were still mentioning that sermon, thinking of specific applications, still chewing on the truth presented that morning. Did I say everything I wanted to say? No. But I said everything I needed to say, and that’s enough. Preaching one point allows us to feed the sheep throughout the week. That is a beautiful, satisfying feeling for any Shepherd.

via scribblepreach.com

The State of the Union and the State of the Pulpit | Ordinary Pastor

1. People are not idiots. We can and should expect them to listen when we have something to say.

2. Persuasive presentations are still effective. Otherwise he would just blog the thing.

3. Preparation actually matters. Whatever you want to say about the POTUS and his teleprompter, guess what? He knew his speech. He had thought it through and had it down.

4. Thoughtful preparation matters. He knew who he was talking to and what he wanted to say.

5. Fear is healthy. Let’s face it, the President has a job to do and an election to win. He doesn’t want to stink it up.

If you are a pastor, keep preaching. And keep expecting people to listen. But, please, please, please, could you make sure that the sermon is actually in you before you give it? Make sure it moves you. Have convictions, be persuasive, get after it. What a shame it would be if the president was more thoughtful, diligent, and committed in his presentation to the people of the country than we are to our congregations before God? What an indictment this is to us who bye the lie that preaching is irrelevant. No, boring is irrelevant. And so is tired, lazy, unprepared, unmoved, wimpy  guys who have nothing to say.

via www.ordinarypastor.com

Maybe I Do Want Topical Preaching? | 9Marks

Yes, thank you, give me Christ-centered sermons. But if Jesus is Lord, shouldn’t that fact affect how I go to work on Monday, and speak to my little girl, and spend my money? What does the gospel have to say to me in all those places? What does the gospel say to me about stress, and retirement, and serving in government, and talking to my friend with a gambling addiction?

It seems to me that your gospel-centered expositional sermons should get to all the stuff that topical preachers preach about, right?  Your preaching should be giving people all that and more. I think you call it sermon “application.” Shouldn’t your applications make expositional sermons topical, so to speak? Shouldn’t they, over time, cover all the topics of people’s lives? Shouldn’t the members in your church feel like they’re not missing anything?

 Okay, okay, I know there’s still a huge difference between your average topical sermon and your average expositional sermon, which is crucial. The Bible doesn’t exist, and church gatherings don’t happen, and sermons aren’t preached, simply to help people like me do this or that better. And a steady diet of topical preaching can make it seem that way—like the point of the whole church exercise is to improve my daily life. When really, the whole point of gathering and listening to preaching is to behold God, and to hear whatever he wants to say. I know that. I know I need his Word exposed, no matter what it says. I know I need to hear all of it, even the parts that seem obscure and irrelevant.

I’m just saying that I need you to show me how those obscure bits are relevant, even if those Hebrew chiasms are as naturally fascinating to you as they are to my Sunday School teacher who doesn’t get out much. I need you to show me how those chiasms help me to trust more, hope more, love more, and what that faith, hope, and love look like in the different areas of my life. Make sense?

Connect the dots for me. How do I get from justification by faith alone to being a manly man who cares well for his aging parents?

Okay, I admit, I don’t really want you to give up the expositional thing. I just want more from you. I want to have my cake and to eat it, too. Call me biblically greedy. I want you to apply your sermon in my life so that I’m learning all the helpful stuff they’re learning over at Topical Tommy’s church.  Okay?

Thanks for listening, Mr. Young Expositional Preacher. For real, I thank God for you, and the fact that you’ve chosen the harder, more faithful path.

via www.9marks.org