Today, we have a preaching question for you, Pastor John, as you have worked through entire

books of the Bible as an expositor.

How did you think about the prominence of Christian hedonism in your sermons?

Did you think of every sermon as an opportunity to make a beeline to joy at some point as

Spurgeon said of the cross?

Did you try to make connections to joy thematically, like perhaps in texts that dealt with the

nature of personal faith or that spoke of God's glory, even where joy was not explicitly

mentioned in your primary text?

Or did you just wait until texts explicitly use the joy language to let those sermons

become your opportunity to talk Christian hedonism?

How did you approach this?

That's complicated.

Yes, there are two ways to answer this question.

One is to do a statistical analysis of what I really said in 35 years of messages, and

that would be the most reliable way to answer it.

And of course, it's all there available for anybody who wants to do that, though I can

think of more profitable things to do with your time.

The other way is to ask me what my intentions were, what were my homiletical strategies or

hermeneutical convictions that governed the way I handled texts, and that's what's being

asked, I think, at its not a very reliable way to know because my memory of how I approached

thousands of texts is not very good.

But I will do my best to save what I think today and others can judge whether 30 years

...