tigblogs

timothy samuel - My Blog

A Book of Sermon (A Review of a Book)


Related to country: Nigeria
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Not many articulate heroes of Christ’s Crusade (apologies to Soyinka) do possess the requisite sense of sense to appreciably comprehend the essence of the age-long aphorism that the faintest of ink is better than the best of brains. Utterly oblivious of this, they gallivant from one pulpit to another; from weeks to months and months to years, contentedly sermonising and pontificating extemporaneously. Their messages start and end where they preached – nothing on record!
In another sense, there also abounds many a preacher whose preachments are like badly baked cake. Put differently, their sermons are like the unturned cake which the eternal creator lamentably said Ephraim had become; they cannot endure the test of time. Such sermons are often so bare and ordinary that they cannot be placed on an even keel with the celestial messages preached by the likes of Jonathan Edward (recall the soul-arresting sermon titled Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God ?), D.L Moody, Charles Spurgeon, G. Finney, to mention a few in the long list. The heavenly-inspired messages, scribbled and vocalised by these instruments in the hands of the Author of Being, mended the bad souls of their motley listeners, and till date, any penitent mind who spares time to quaff from the pool of these engaging sermons is assured of seismic experience in the realm of the ethereal.
Similarly, as we examine the bulky book, Divine Messages for Special Seasons, dutifully and painstakingly collated by Rt. Rev. Peter A. Adebiyi, we are presented with two ineluctable facts: one, the informed soldier of Christ aptly understands the immeasurable effects of the written word, hence the felicitous practice of putting pen to paper before delivering his sermons at every notable event in the Christian calendar.
Two, the messages in the book are such that can minister grace to readers at whatever point on their journey to the home beyond. In other words, the various sermons we find in the finely written book did not lose their depth, worth, and efficacy at the point of delivery. Because they are structured on the imperishable words of life that is the Bible, the scholarly man of the Spirit finds it tractable to preserve them in print for the generation of the men and women who did not hear them at the time they were originally delivered. This, for us, serves as a reminder of the incontestable verity that divinely-inspired messages, like the steadfast love and mercies of God, are always new every morning.
The author enlightens readers of the events that necessitated the messages in the book when he says in the acknowledgements page that, ‘This book contains a few simple sermons preached on the different feasts of the church spanning a period of eleven years.’ By inference, we come to the knowledge that the sermons, dwelling on the varied feasts of the church like Easter, Harvest Thanksgiving, Christmas, et cetera, do offer ample opportunity to the growing modern followers of the risen Christ to understand the spiritual essence of the various events they are often eager to garishly celebrate and riotously savour the joys they avail. This is what His Grace means when he asserts that the book ‘is not a theological treatise or a doctrinal argument, but sermons that can be of help to anyone, priests or the laity who sincerely desire to read with an open mind, focusing on the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Emmanuel Lokoja, in his elegant foreword to the book, hints at the educative aspect of the Book of Sermons when he reveals that, ‘the explanations clarify the meaning of some of our ceremonies that have become lost to many uninformed Christians.’
As we course through the sixty-one sermons in Divine Messages for Special Seasons, we notice that such topical issues as the call to genuine repentance, faithfulness to the heavenly call, the fact of Christians being stewards of the resources in their possession, the need to be thankful to the Creator always, the necessity of resolution, uncompromised obedience, the essence and purpose of the festivals observed in the Christendom, the certainty of heaven and the unlimited faithfulness of God, manifest as the leit-motif in the sermons.
For instance, while in Chapter One the preacher explicates harvest as a ‘thanksgiving festival’ in which we unreservedly appreciate God for his limitless goodness, in Chapter Two, he pontificates on the symbolism of the Harvest Thanksgiving; ‘it shows the reality of heaven,’ he submits. Another thing that is prominent in the sermons is their lucidity. The various illustrations, anecdotes, analogies and of course allegories used by the mouthpiece of Christ greatly enhance the messages in no mean measures. The 398-page book contains many quotations from the Bible and many great hymns that will surely make the day of any reader ready to traverse the cosmos of the Divine.
One foregrounded bloomer of this Book of Sermons is the absence of a contents page that can make a cursory view of the titles of the sermons easier. Nonetheless, swots on the narrow path can fatten their spiritual beings with the fertilizers of the sermons.

Tags:
You must be logged in to add tags.

Ademola Adesola's Profile


Latest Posts


NIGERIANS MUST INSIST...
2009 IN THE LIFE OF A...
FYB RITUAL: A...
NYSC IN FICTION:...
GOD’S APPOINTED TIME!

Monthly Archive


April 2009
May 2009
June 2009
July 2009
October 2009
December 2009

Change Language




Tags Archive


article articleonasuu/fgntiff electoralreform fybarticle nationalyouthservicecorps obamasvisit poem/nysc review writing

Filter By Type


Travel
Topics


6279 views
Important Disclaimer