Galen Call's Sermon Library

Galen Call's Sermon Library is a large archive of preaching recorded before a congregation, and it keeps the congregation's business in the frame. That is a large part of its character. One October 1985 recording starts with thanks to Dave for filling in for John, who had spent the previous week at the Shepherds Conference in California. Another service breaks for thirty seconds so people can shake hands and stretch, with a dry aside that anyone whose house is on fire should go call the fire department and then come back. Beneath those seams sits careful, text-first teaching. In an evening study of Acts 13, the preacher notes that Sunday mornings had carried the book through chapter 12, lists what the Holy Spirit does for believers, from regenerating and indwelling to sealing, guiding and empowering, and then names chapter 13 as the dividing point where the narrative leaves Jerusalem for Antioch in Syria and Peter gives way to Paul. The recording titled 'Getting Food to the Hungry' also works in Acts, following Paul's message from the promise to Abraham through David to John the Baptist. A January 1982 sermon brings the same method to 1 Corinthians 15, reading its first eleven verses against people at Corinth who taught that the dead were simply dead. Prophecy is approached as a vocabulary to be learned. A September 1985 service promotes an evening overview, laid out on an overhead chart, of the tribulation, the rapture, the second coming, the millennium, and whether the Antichrist is the beast of Revelation, aimed at newer members unfamiliar with the terms. The preaching also turns outward. On missions, the preacher describes missionaries taken for mere providers of food, medicine or education, or even suspected of working for the CIA, and recalls a pastor friend who was startled by how one mission in Africa treated the people it was meant to serve. On hunger, a sermon speaks plainly about certain Marxist countries where famine becomes a weapon against political opponents and governments forbid food from reaching the starving. Some illustrations are stark. One sermon tells of a man who taught Greek and theology at a West Coast seminary for many years, whose wife's crippling disease eventually required care in a home for disabled adults, and who cried out in a faculty prayer meeting to ask how long a person is expected to bear it. Closing prayers ask for understanding of the text and, in the missions sermon, for readiness to serve as Christ's ambassadors wherever the congregation happens to be. The register is calm and structured, with humor kept to the occasional aside. Titles as different as 'Assurance for Troubled Times', 'The Infinite & The Impossible' and 'What a Missionary Faces' sit side by side. For a first listen, the Acts 13 study shows the method most clearly. The missions and famine sermons show what that method sounds like when it meets the wider world.