Wednesday, November 23, 2005

The Veggie Tales Gospel

While flipping channels before supper yesterday, I ran across channel 19. Yeah, for those of you who know and those of you that don't, that's the local religion channel. They show primarily Christian stuff--a mixture of Southern Seminary offerings as well as church services and a good deal of Catholic offerings. It's an okay channel--would be better if it was captioned for the Deaf. I don't watch it--I have a policy of not watching religious channels due to the "TBN factor." But this evening was different. They were showing a Southern Seminary chapel service, and I had come in just as Dr. Russell Moore was preaching. And I could understand every word he said, without captions. How providential. Now, say what you want about Russ Moore, but this man can preach. I have never really liked the guy ever since I had him in my very first semester at Southern way back in 1999 (dang I'm getting old), when he was a mere doctoral student and was Dr. Mohler's personal assistant. He came across then as callous, unsympathetic, and just plain mean. You might want to see the below post with my The Doctrines of Grace review to get the terminology I'm gonna use for these types from now on. But I've never been able to shake that impression of him since. But anyway, as I said, this man can preach. And he didn't just preach, he freakin' preached. I loved this message. It gave me quite a few ideas for teaching at the Deaf church, where I've been touching on providence lately (but not explicitly). The subtitle said it all: "The Bones of Joseph, The Kingdom of Christ, and the Story We Tell." He talked about a "Veggie Tales gospel," which unfortunately I came in a little too late to hear how he worked in Veggie Tales, but apparently it is about focusing too much on the little picture instead of the Big Picture of God's plan for ourselves and humanity. He illustrated this by preaching about the patriarch Joseph. How true. We get so focused on our problems, our struggles, our successes and failures that we forget entirely about God's sovereign, providential Will. We forget about God's vision. And we can't preach about God's will because we're too focused on our own will and cannot understand God's will. You know, I never get tired of listening to Russ Moore preach, personal impressions of him notwithstanding. I feel privileged to be in a school with such great preachers as models. Let me see if I can link the audio of the sermon for those of you who are hearing-inclined...aha! Beyond a Veggie Tales Gospel: The Bones of Joseph, the Kingdom of Christ, and the Story We Tell That will play an mp3 on the SBTS website. If you wanna download it, you'll need to go to this page on Southern's website to download it. I really wish there was a downloadable video of this so I could refer to it again, WITH understanding.

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