nerd alert

my most favorite sermon

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Do you have a favorite sermon?

A favorite sermon series?

Would you like it if your pastor regularly preached sermons that approach an hour in length?

Maybe the normal, healthy responses to those questions would be no, no, and hell no.

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But I am not normal. I’ll let you form your own opinion about whether this is healthy.

But my answers are as follows:

Yes, I do have a favorite sermon. I’m too indecisive to name a favorite song, yet I can conclusively single out one sermon as the absolute best distillation of how I see the world and my faith in Jesus.

I’ve listened to it many times and return to it at least once a year. It sneaks into my writing all the time, whether I give it credit or not. It’s called “The Crocus Flower and the Empty Tomb,” and it’s a sermon preached by my favorite self-professed “Bible nerd,” the biblical scholar Tim Mackie.

It’s from my favorite sermon series, a two years’ long trip through the book of Matthew originally preached at Door of Hope.

Each sermon is 45-55 minutes, and they are pure gold, worth every single second of listening and listening again.

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I could copy and paste Tim Mackie sermon recommendations into Substack for days.

Maybe his most famous (among dorks like me who would call a sermon “famous”) is a sermon called “Compelled,” and it is also brilliant. If you’re a believer, it will give you better language for why. If you’re not, it might make you want to be.

Comments are turned off on the YouTube video, and I’m sure that’s probably because the comments got absolutely ferocious. There’s lots in his “Compelled” message that I imagine would rankle the religious and provoke the theobros to argue.

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But Tim Mackie is decidedly not out here trying to shock people. He’s not in the least motivated by getting a rise from people.

Older episodes from his podcast when it was called “Exploring My Strange Bible” start with this introduction of himself: “I am a card-carrying Bible, history, and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth is utterly amazing and worth following with everything you have.”

The mission statement of The Bible Project, which Tim cofounded, is “We help people experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus.”

Jesus.

It begins and ends with Him. Who He Was, Who He Is. What He did, what He said, what He modeled for us.

And the Bible, from start to finish, is the story that helps us see Him.

And that’s why nerds like me love to study it. Not for its own sake but for Jesus and the love, light, and truth that emanate from Him, His words, His life, death, and resurrection.

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Why am I writing about this this morning?

Well, I was reading my Bible (which I do a couple times a week¹), and I ended up in Matthew 23-25. Which was off-task from my reading plan. But Matthew 25 keeps coming up again and again and again. And maybe I’ll write about that soon.

But for now, I’m still just digging back into it. And on the pages of my journal Bible were copious notes from Tim Mackie sermons, and so here I am again, three different YouTube videos I’ve watched before pulled up in other tabs for me to listen again.

They may each get their own post from me in the coming days.

Sorry, not sorry. I write for myself here, but I love you if you follow along, and I hope something in it might occasionally help you too. Stay tuned. 💛

Do you have a favorite sermon? I know there are other nerds here, right?

If you’ve listened to any of these Tim Mackie sermons or any of his Bible Project resources, what are your thoughts?

What are your favorites I need to check out too?

1. Does that seem like a lot or not enough? I added this parenthetical for the reader who might imagine, as I imagine of someone like Beth Moore or Tim Mackie, that I have an idyllic morning rhythm, the golden “quiet time” we aspired to in our evangelical adolescence, or consistency and self-discipline. Because I don’t. But my less-than-ideal, less-than-perfect, check-boxes-left-unchecked approach to the Word is still transformative, thanks be to God.