• Here’s good and surprising advice from Charles Spurgeon on taking care of your throat; including the comment, “If you wish to improve your throat take a good share of pepper — good Cayenne pepper, and other astringent substances, as much as your stomach can bear.”  (HT: Miscellanies)
  • While we’re in the region of the voice, Brian Croft gives three reasons why, “Whether you are a loud, passionate, energetic preacher, or a thoughtful, warm, conversational one, vocal projection is necessary in every case”; along with a few practical suggestions to develop healthy projection
  • This month’s free download from Christian Audio is Packer’s Knowing God
  • Peter Mead who, incidentally will be my guest on Meet the Boggers on Monday 9th, has run a series this week on Confessions of a Preacher.  As with everything Peter writes, its well  worth a read.
  • Russell Moore has a thought provoking article called The Next Billy Graham Might Be Drunk Right Now.  It’s a powerful reminder of grace and the transforming power of the Gospel (despite the unfortunate reference to Mother Theresa) and closes with these words, “And, be kind to that atheist in front of you on the highway, the one who just shot you an obscene gesture. He might be the one who evangelizes your grandchildren.”
  • Here are two absolutely ‘must reads’.  On The Gospel Coalition Blog, Steve Burchett gives advice on what to do  When your preacher is not John Piper and Eric McKiddie advises preachers on How to Preach Like John Piper Without Sounding Like Him
  • I just had to re-post this quote in full.  Carl Trueman posted it yesterday on the Reformation 21 blog and its a quote from Jim Packer about ‘The Doctor.    “In some way there was in the Doctor’s preaching thunder and lightning that no tape or transcription ever did or could capture — power, I mean, to mediate a realisation of God’s presence…. Nearly forty years on, it still seems to me that all I have ever known about preaching was given me in the winter of 1948-49, when I worshipped at Westminster Chapel with some regularity.  Through the thunder and lightning, I felt and saw as never before the glory of Christ and of his gospel as modern man’s only lifeline and learned by experience why historic Protestantism looks on preaching as the supreme means of grace and of communion with God.  Preaching, thus viewed and valued, was the centre of the Doctor’s life: into it he poured himself unstintingly; for it he pleaded untiringly…. Pulpit dramatics and rhetorical rhapsodies the Doctor despised and never indulged in; his concern was always with the flow of thought, and the emotion he expressed as he talked was simply the outward sign of passionate thinking…. He embodied and expressed ‘the glory’ — the glory of the God, of Christ, of grace, of the gospel, of the Christian ministry, of humanness according to the new creation — more richly than any man I have ever known.  No man can give another a greater gift than a vision of such glory as this.  I am forever in his debt.”(Emphasis mine)  From JIP’s Collected Shorter Writings 4, pp. 84 and 87: