Terry Virgo on the authority of Scripture and the vital place of preaching

I am really enjoying this series of videos from Terry Virgo, I encourage you to subscribe to his blog if you haven’t already. In this one, he begins to speak about his very high view of Scripture and preaching. It is prompted by the second of a series of values that have governed his work with churches over the past decades. These values are expressed in the form of the kind of church he is looking to build:

‘A church where regular teaching and preaching of the Bible holds a primary role and where Scripture’s authority is final.’

This value and video reminded me that a while ago I did quite a long series of blog posts on preaching. We can never hear enough about valuing God’s word. Here is an extract of the video to whet your appetite:

“It is important that we are submitting our lives to what God has said. All that we are is a response to what God has said. . The Bible starts with God said, God spoke and then light comes and life comes. The church is God’s creation, and that comes to birth through his word. We can’t improve on hearing the word of God. We live in an day when people want to play down the importance of preaching . . .but the reality of the preached word in the power of the Holy Spirit has a unique skill to penetrate people’s hearts. . . The authority of the Spirit on the preached word makes it relevant whatever the day in which it is begin done. . .The early church devoted themselves to the Apostles teaching. Paul says I taught you day and night, publicly and from house church to house church. He was always preaching. He preached so long that a guy fell out of the window. When he raised him from the dead he preached on till morning. . . You need to know truth in order to be free, and in order to know what is the church of God. . . we adjust ourselves to what the word of God says. Preaching is not just telling the story it should be with powerful impact so that good preaching brings people to decisions, choices, Its an event, its a moment, when you hear good preaching your life is affected you make changes. PReaching shouldn’t be dull it should be relevant, it should be full of truth, it should have application so that I know what I have to do in view of these things.”