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Nathan Willard Public Sermons

Matthew 20:1-16

I don’t usually offer commentary on the sermons I deliver to churches I serve. But this sermon starts slowly and not particularly well, and there’s a reason for that. Fred Craddock, one of the great preachers and teacher of preachers in the United States, tells us that certain sermons should be preached from notes, certain from manuscripts, and certain from neither. This sermon illustrates the difficulty of preaching without notes when preaching about a sensitive topic. The beginning of the sermon casts about as I tried to find an entree into the meat. My planned openings took some wrong turns and did not engage the audience, and rather than simply moving ahead, I attempted to recover and get people on my same page. This didn’t work. I was so preoccupied with getting into the domestic violence issues delicately that even my fairly weak transition skills failed me. I had considered going back to the manuscript for this sermon, but thought my run-through was sound enough that it was unnecessary. Unfortunately, a couple of bad new examples popped into my head at the last minute, and I went with them. I thought the sermon did go well once I got to the meat and the issues of domestic violence, it just took a long time to get there.

Warning: this sermon contains extended discussion of domestic violence.