One of the most beneficial things I’ve ever done apart from hearing live sermons preached, is to begin a study of Romans aided by the audio of one of my favorite preachers, who is deceased. After a couple of years I’m about halfway through the book, and I’ve recorded some notes along the way. To have those messages on MP3 is wonderful, because they allow repeat listening in case an important point is missed. It makes for a valuable redemption of my commute time, and I find them particularly helpful during and after exercise. In those sermons I’ve learned valuable church history lessons, critical doctrines of the faith and how they were worked out, exposure of a variety of theological errors, and sharp-minded reasoning that has opened my eyes to the riches of the life of faith as taught by the Reformers.

Why did I start doing that to begin with? It was because I hadn’t been getting this kind of teaching in church, and hadn’t been reading Scripture; I was neither being sharpened, nor a sharpener. In a sense, I was regressing rather than progressing in my Christian life, and I knew that it was up to me to take responsibility to get back on track. My new (at the time) pastor, however, also helped catalyze this process in his sequential preaching of Scripture, something that had not been taking place at my church. Now that he’s gone, and the sequentiality of preaching he established has been interrupted, my study of Romans, aided by the audio sermons, is helping to sustain me in my church’s current pastor-less condition.

I download and listen to sermons preached as far back as the 60′s (Martyn Lloyd Jones, Dick Lucas, etc., so long after it has been preached and forgotten, people are still listening to them, and they may as well be brand new because we never heard most of them before.

But my point is, that in this day and technological age, a preacher should record his sermons and post the audio. From that point on, they could live on forever, and have an unlimited impact much moreso than a blog entry. So if a Preacher has a blog, he should give top priority to posting downloadable mp3 files of his audio sermons and lectures on that blog. It is current open door of opportunity which absolutely must be taken advantage of.

(I preach to the choir with you, but many blogging preachers & theologians still don’t post audio).

They need to remember that those little sanza and Ipod mp3 players have built in microphones and they could be recording their talks very easily if they aren’t already).

Now for a slightly tongue-in-cheek side-comment… Could it not be considered a good Sunday, at least in today’s day and age, if congregants remembered the sermon 3 hours after they heard it? Maybe we (Christians) need to be rebuked for paying more attention to Bit.ly links than to the Word preached.