"There is a simple formula for sermon preparation that creates messages that apply and engage whether your parish is rural or urban, young or old, rich or poor, five thousand members or fifty," writes Michael Brown in the preface to Making the Timeless Word Timely. The other part of the task, of course, involves being creative and insightful enough to know how to take the general formula for sermon preparation and make it particular in its impact on a specific congregation. Michael Brown guides the reader though the formula and the skills to employ it with excellence and integrity. He also offers twelve examples of sermons that illustrate the approaches and do indeed "make the timeless Word timely."

Though the title sounds like a promotional campaign for the U.S. Army, that's not its intent. Instead, what is contained in this book are road marks for the journey into a new and stronger sense of what it means to be fully alive. All people are created with inherent purpose, promise, and potential. All are endowed with abilities to do more and be more than we sometimes dare imagine. Herein are sermons intended to help readers and listeners discover their own powers and possibilities, to own them, to cultivate them and to live within them.
The chapters do not form an exhaustive list of human potentials. They do, however, provide an important inventory of what we all were created to become and can become, if we choose.
Chapter titles include:
- You Can Be Articulate -- Based upon Mark 7:31-37
- You Can Be Intelligent -- Based upon 2 Chronicles 1-11
- You Can Be Like Children -- Based upon Mark 10:13-16
- You Can Be Beautiful -- Based upon Hosea 14:1-7
- You Can Be Well Fed -- Based upon 1 Corinthians
- You Can Be Eternal -- Based upon 2 Corinthians
Readers will sense their own calls to be more than they have been thus far and the extraordinary power of One who promises to make the journey with them.
Michael B. Brown has a masters of divinity from Duke Divinity School and a doctor of ministry degree from Drew University Theological School. His previous books include "It Works For Us " and "Ordinary Sins," both from CSS. His work has appeared in the Abingdon Preacher's Annual 1993 and 1994 and in 1990 he received the "Circuit Rider Certificate of Merit" and the "Circuit Rider Sermon-of-the-Year."