Four words for tough times: HAVE FAITH IN GOD ;: Sermons and study guides

By Arthur T Jones

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1885066074
• ISBN13: 9781885066077
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: FOUR-G Publ
• Length: 138 Pages
• Dimensions: 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

That'll preach

Good African-American preaching is a deeply satisfying art form. Just don't go telling Rev. Dr. Art Jones that. For him it's a deadly serious enterprise. This collection of a dozen sermons from Jones' pulpit at Tampa's Bible-Based Fellowship Church shows `black preaching' at its best. Jones is not only deeply bolted into urban, African-American culture and a fluent speaker of its dialect, he is also agile in using his native son identity to challenge what he considers the dysfunctions of his context. For Jones, these are not the stuff of theory and speculation. They are the disease and stupidity that gut a people and orphan its daughters and sons. The author's preaching brings biblical texts to bear on that situation. Like the prophet Jeremiah, one might hear in Jones' cadences the license to `to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.' He is fierce and unbending in order to prepare the land for something better than the self-destruction and compromises with mediocrity that he considers to be endemic there. Jones is a master wordsmith with a passion for the ability of words (God's words, he would surely say) to change real people. Though his homiletical habits somewhat privilege the context into which he preaches, he treats more consciously of the biblical text than is often habitual among African-American pastors of his generation. The result is stirring. Sermons in print are a genre with which this reviewer maintains a begrudging love-hate relationship. So it is not faint praise to recognize that `Four Words' is a page-turner. Jones' sermons beg to be heard rather than read. Yet they are satisfying even in the reading. If Jones' pulpitry invites any criticism, it comes from a theological point of view. One finds here a certain neglect of the central Christian commitment to the cross as the place where divine anger and love encounter human sin and brokenness, with results that are new and productive of ongoing newness for human life, wholeness, and service of God and one's neighbor. Specifically, Jones' sermons align with the wisdom tradition-and to some degree, the prophetic tradition-of biblical literature rather than the New Testament's generative brooding over the death of God's beloved son as a saving and paradigmatic event for those who trust in its efficacy. To be sure, Jones emphasis emerges out of his conviction that biblical patterns for living-in and of themselves-redeem a culture that is sometimes considered to be self-extinguishing when it is not asphyxiated from outside by the conditions to which Black Americans fall heir. And, to be just, these are just twelve sermons out of hundreds that Jones has preached. This deficiency-if that is what it is-could be set right by a publication of sermons in which Jones brings his rhetorical power to bear on the New Testament message of the cross. The sermons collected in Four Words for Tough Times are not just good African-American p