Willimon on preaching

Thanks to the fellows at Expository Thoughts for making Will Willimon's "Been There, Preached That" available online. Here's a sample:

The Bible doesn’t want to “help people.” It wants to help people in the name of Christ. Christ has a much different notion of our problems than we do. The Bible doesn’t just want to speak to us; it wants to change, convert, and detoxify us.

Each time we let the world set our homiletical agenda, scaling down our speech to that which anybody off the street can hear and understand without conversion or training, we lose the battle before it begins. We concede too much territory to the enemy.

The whole article is not long, and it's well worth reading.