I haven’t read a passage from a contemporary author that has made me sit back and say “Yes!” for a awhile, but I ran across this one recently. It is from Michael Horton’s “A Better Way”:
Now we can no longer settle for those sermons in which we were bored or amused with the preachers own wit, wisdom, and autobiography. We are no longer impressed by “practical” sermons whose goal seems to be to win us by ignoring the real drama going on in the text, conforming scripture to the protean flux and plotless vanity that derives from our worldly satisfaction with present arrangements. We cannot be rescripted until we are chained down and addressed by God. “God is in his holy temple: Let all the earth keep silent.” He comes not to offer banal support to our sagging self-confidence or to fix the unpleasantness of our daily existence – in other words, he doesn’t come to fit in with our already established patterns of thought and life. He comes to dash our silly hopes and to expose our felt needs as trivial, in order to give us new ones that are far greater, and then to satisfy those beyond our widest dreams.