Thank you very much. I'd like to begin with the word of prayer if you would

bow with me. Father, would you take these next moments and make them of far more import in the hearts and the lives of these people and in my own then in themselves they might appear worth by gracing them with your

Holy Spirit coming to reveal yourself and to reveal the demeanor with which your

words should be proclaimed to your people and to the world. I pray that you would assist me and the rest of us at this perhaps weary hour of the night to be alert to all that you would say in Jesus name.

Amen.

Well, not too far from here about 250 years ago, Jonathan Edwards preaching sparked a great awakening.

As you know in the churches, he was a great theologian and he was a great man and a great preacher.

We can't copy him, but we can learn a lot about the gravity and gladness of preaching from Jonathan Edwards.

He was a man of extraordinary intensity.

I remember the first time I read his resolutions,

there were 70 of them printed in the little Banner of Truth page.

I've got them all the Xerox now tucked away all over the place,

categorized, and one of them that moved me at the time that he wrote as a young man was

resolved to live with all my might while I live.

He was a man of extraordinary earnestness and intensity and total seriousness in

preaching. Now don't think that's an exaggeration. Total seriousness in

preaching. You will look in vain in the 1200 extant sermons for a joke.

He preached an ordination sermon in 1744 and said to the young man,

if a minister has light without heat and entertains his hearers with learned discourses, without a savor of the power of godliness, or any appearance of fervency or of spirit and zeal for God and the good of souls.

He may gratify itching ears and fill the heads of his people with empty notions, but it will not be very likely to teach

their hearts or save their souls. He had an overwhelming conviction about the reality of heaven and hell.

And it absolutely shaped everything that he did and the demeanor in which he did it and he was much criticized as you know by the

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