The Setting of 10 Shekels and a Shirt

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snyder, and this week we're returning to a sermon preached by a man that I introduced to you last podcast, and in that podcast we talked about Paris Reedhead.

He was a missionary to Africa, a pastor in New York City, and a humanitarian worker.

Reedhead preached this sermon based on Judges 17, and it's entitled, Ten Shekels and a

Shirt. It's been called one of the most influential sermons of the 20th century.

I already introduced you to the preacher, so let me now just kind of talk a little bit about how the sermon came about.

It is unusual. In 1964, Paris Reedhead was invited to preach at the

Bethany Missionary Church, or the Bethany Fellowship, in Bloomington, Minnesota, and it was a deeper life conference, so the emphasis would be on Christians growing, particularly in holiness.

It appears that after attempting to prepare his heart and mind for the conference, he still wasn't sure what he was going to preach when he arrived at the conference the day that he was supposed to speak.

So he said that he was sitting in the church fellowship hall, the dining hall there, and really laboring on, you know, not knowing what he was going to speak on in just a few hours, and the

Lord gave him a clarity, and he took a napkin and he scribbled the notes down on the napkin, and he got up and he went and preached this sermon.

Now after the sermon, he noted that there was no unusual outward response at the time.

It always amazed him in later years to see how God had used this one sermon so powerfully to impact so many people.

So we're going to pick back up with the second half of the sermon, where he really deals with the heart of man -centeredness in evangelicalism and exposes it.