Backsliding

It's Saturday night.  I have now completed work on the sermon for Sunday--a full 27 hours later than I'm comfortable with.  I had struggled with the text for 12 days.  Worked on creating an actual outline for three days.  I finally had to give in and write a manuscript.  The problem is the difficulty of the concepts.

Romans 3:21-31 is a dense passage in Romans with a number of themes from the whole book coming together and overlapping.  Since my church generally frowns on sermons lasting three hours (17 minutes is par), I opted not to try to be comprehensive with the text. So I chose to take one focus on the text.

What strikes me about it is that "Grace" is generally something we view as very personal and very individual.  "I once was lost"  Grace saved "a wretch like me."  Paul's point seems emphatic that grace emerges from the nature and character of God.  It emerges out of God's righteousness.  This is contrary to some of my embedded theology that always regarded grace as somehow a suspension of God's righteousness.  Grace begins and ends with God and if grace doesn't overwhelm us then we probably haven't understood it.

I gave in because I couldn't convince myself that I was going to be able to say all that clearly without having written the words out at least once.  I'm not claiming that the manuscript I have written is coherent.  I'm just saying, I feared that working from an outline given the complexity of the thoughts I want to convey would have been disastrous.

This tends to be my problem with the prevailing dogma in speech instruction about extemporaneous speaking it over looks the necessity in so many instances to write your thoughts down word for word.  (1) Sometimes people need to write a manuscript in order to get thoughts clear in their own minds--that was the case this week; (2) Sometimes people need to write a manuscript or else risk venturing down too many concepts (chasing rabbits)--a danger with this text; (3) Sometimes people need to write manuscripts so they can carefully choose wording that can will be clear to their audience.