I’m a little late getting this sermon posted to the blog. No good excuse…just a week with a few more meetings than normal.
This message is the 5th in the sermon series through which I’m currently leading my congregation: The Church You’ve Always Longed For. Even though the topic of the sermon is “integrity” (a topic about which the scriptures have much to say, both directly and indirectly), I had a tough time putting it together. Primarily, this difficulty grew out of my desire to discuss both personal integrity and corporate integrity…and how the two need to work together in the life of a church. I suspect that a more seasoned preacher would have used separate sermons to deal with these two facets of integrity. But if my preaching tends to have one main weakness, I’d say that it’s falling prey to the temptation to say too much.
The other challenge I faced in preparing this particular message was finding a powerful image or motif upon which I could “hang” the main points I hoped to make. In the end, I settled on using a country song titled “Watchin’ You” by Rodney Atkins. Even though the song fit my purposes well, using it was a bit of a stretch for me. As I confess in the message, I’m not much of a country music fan.
Hopefully, however, this powerful idea of knowing that somebody is “watchin’ you” (and “watchin’ us”) helped us get into the topic of integrity both intellectually and emotionally. You be the judge.
