The Jollyblogger is a new discovery today to me, last week I preached about preaching and urged us to preach to ourselves. I could have used some of these quotes from the writer who is a reformed preacher himeself.
“The old Puritan preachers used to preach their sermons to themselves before they preached them to their congregation……our greatest problem in life is that we listen to ourselves too much. Instead of listening to ourselves we ought to be talking to ourselves.
Our self tells us we are depressed, so we say Oh, I’m depressed. Our self tells us that we are addicted to a certain kind of sin and we listen and say oh, I must be addicted to this thing. Our self tells us we will never be any different than we already are, and so we believe we can never be any different than we already are.
Our self tells us that Christ died and rose from the grave and that we receive some benefits from it, but we’ll never experience the reality of dying to sin and walking in a new way of life. So, our self says “why bother?” Why struggle against sin when my self tells me that I’ve already lost the fight? That’s the problem – your self tells you that you have lost the fight, but Jesus tells you that you have won. Who do you believe? Are you going to listen to yourself and call Jesus a liar?
We listen to ourselves and we should be talking to ourselves. What do we say to ourselves? We say what the Bible says. We say shut up self, I’m going to talk to you now and you’re going to listen to me as I tell you what the Bible says. “I have died to sin I am not bound by sin, I’m not even bound by that sin that I have just committed for the twenty thousandth time.” “I am risen with Christ, I don’t care what evidence you have to the contrary.” “I am risen with Christ.”
So, we argue ourselves into submission to the Word of God. Now, please understand I am not telling you to argue with yourself using merely human or rational arguments. I am saying that you let the word of God argue your self into submission.
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