OK, so the title may not be all that exciting but I did record myself teaching Romans 2 yesterday. Finally started a podcast for the Church and added that teaching as the first. You can download the mp3 directly and listen or subscribe to the podcast on this page:

http://www.baptistchurch.jp/teaching.html (Click on the link to Romans 2:1-3:8)

Incidentally, I used an iPod thing that attaches to my iPod and allows it to use the iPod as a voice recorder. The quality was excellent.

The teaching was 1 hour and 20 minutes long. I've got to tell you that this teaching series has about 80% attendance from the men of the Church at 8 am on a Saturday morning. This is a Southern Baptist Church in Okinawa, Japan and I'm working with the Pastor to train men in the Church.

Let me know what you think if you happen to listen to it.

Blessings,

Rich

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Rich
Okinawa, Japan

SoliDeoGloria.com - A Community for Reformed Thought and Discussion
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Rich - I'll listen to the entirety of it later. I just heard the audio quality. Very good.

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Bill Brown
Elder
Grace Baptist Church
Anne Arundel County, Maryland

Deo volente

I'll listen later. You need to be careful teaching Romans - a proper understanding of it may convert them to Calvinism.

Thanks for posting this.

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Chris Latch
Corinth MS
Crossroads church - SBC
Evangelism leader

Rich, you maniac, no wonder the quality is so great, its SEVENTY FOUR MEGABYTES!!!!!!!!!

When I finish downloading it (round about Christmas) I'll listen.

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Jonathan Hunt
1689'er
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom
Cheltenham Evangelical Free Church (Confessionally Based)
Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
-- Thomas Elsworth

Who's bangin' on the trash can in the background?

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Josh Hicks, Chloë's Daddy
Member of TRBC. My Blog
The Puritan Pub (Team Blog)
Board Rules-Signature Requirements-Suggestions?

Hmmm....the restless Arminian natives?

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Ivan Schoen, Pastor
Maranatha Baptist Church
Poplar Grove, Illinois USA
http://maranatha-sbc.org/
Husband to Nancy
Father to Sherril, Sarah, Kathryn
Grandfather to Phillip
Faith is the refusal to panic. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Yeah, you know what though? When my iPod saved the file initially it saved it as a WAV file and was 800 MB! I realized after I converted it to MP3 that I should have used a lower bitrate. I'm also going to figure out how to stream the file.

The Pastor already is. He was liberal coming out of a Baptist college and went to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He said that a majority of the profs are Calvinists and he became utterly convinced. He's also not dispensational if you can believe that.

I listened to myself this AM. Maybe I'm just being critical of myself but I notice a lot of accidental mis-statements that I make and points where I catch myself. It's the way I talk and I wonder if it causes a lot of confusion but a lot of people say they find my teaching very good so it might just be self-loathing. I would appreciate feedback if there are "ticks" that I could work on that I haven't already noticed.

Keep a glass of water close by, if you didn't already have one. I think that your teaching is a welcomed refreshment in an otherwise theological wasteland. I noticed a bit of tripping up in the beginning, but it seemed to clear up pretty quick. All teachers have times like that. From what I've heard thus far,

There isn't a single time that I take the pulpit without fear and trembling. I honestly say to myself, "Who am I to proclaim God's word?" I have butterflies each time I preach. But after a few minutes they usually start flying in formation.

You have them? Like, as in one having a baby? That has to be awkward.

My problem was, in this case, a difficulty in presenting so much information in a short time. It's not always easy to "package".

I'm actually doing quite a bit of teaching right now - teaching through a Book of the Bible each week during Sunday School and then every other week I'm teaching on a Chapter of Romans. I obviously will never teach at the caliber of a scholar but I am reading some really good Commentaries to help me.

I taught on Job this past Sunday so it's always a challenge figuring out how you can condense something so theologically rich into less than an hour. Add to that, I was trying to prepare to teach Romans 2.

What ended up happening in some portions of my teaching on Saturday was that I would read the portion of Scripture and then struggle to remember the salient issues that I wanted to draw out and so I was "reaching" for them. The previous week, in Romans 1, was much easier to condense and express.

I think my greatest "fear" when I teach is taking a large amount of theological material and condensing it to fit a time period without compromising the quality of instruction. I think, like you Bill, I'm fearful of misrepresenting God's Truth and leaving out a piece of information He would have me instruct or distorting information by condensing it.

As I'm sure you know, it's always much better to have too much material than not enough. It's easier to have to leave something out because you're running out of time than it is to have to "pad" in order to fill up the time because you ran out of material.

What's really frustrating is knowing you have to leave something out, but what you've got is so good you hate to leave anything out.

We have a young man in our adult Sunday School class who has just started a 6-part series on Habakkuk. Today was his first day, and he did a really good job - except his voice was hoarse because (as he explained) he's
the coach of his son's 8-and-under soccer team, and yesterday was their first game (he said it was a lot like herding cats).

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Richard T. Zuelch, M.Div
Ruling Elder, OPC (not currently serving)
Westminster Presbyterian Church, CA (OPC)
www.reiterations.wordpress.com
www.foft.wordpress.com

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire and ice - there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. - Frank Zappa (1940-1993)

Any preacher worth his salt will tell you that what is hardest, and what makes for a good sermon, is know what to leave in the study and not put in the sermon. Not how to leave bad stuff out, but good stuff. You can't say everything (or you'll overwhelm people, even if you have 1 and 1/2 hours!) and cutting is key. It is also really hard.

On another note, I converted the file to a 56k 22kHz MP3 file. It is now (still!) 30MB large. But I did not detect any noticeable loss of quality. I wonder what others think (kind of an audio experiment). I have uploaded it to my site (or it will be in 10 minutes), and you can download the 56k file at:

http://www.tulipfaith.com/files/Romans2-20070310.mp3

I think I will also convert it to 32k and see if it keep decent quality. I typically use 32k on my sermons (www.cckpca.org/sermons/

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Fredrick T. Greco
Senior Pastor, Christ Church PCA (Katy, TX)
Christ Church Blog

"The heart is the main thing in true religion...It is the hinge and turning-point in the condition of man's soul. If the heart is alive to God and quickened by the Spirit, the man is a living Christian. If the heart is dead and has not the Spirit, the man is dead before God." (J.C. Ryle)

Thanks Fred for the thoughts and for cutting it down. I think I'll take your version and put it on my server. No sense in wasting bandwidth.

By the way, what program do you use to convert? It's been some time since I've messed with uploading sermons and my tools are quite old. I'm hoping to find a nice freeware app that does the job nicely.

Just finished downloading it. Will have a listen during/after lunch.

74 Megs of Rich Leino. In stereo. Hoo-rah!

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Kevin
Far East
Deacon, Int'l Church

Rich,

The 32kbps version is up as well here. I think it sounds fine, and is only 18.5MB (that is about right for the length of the audio. My personal opinion is that streaming is a waste of time - no one I know sits at their PC to listen unless they have no choice. With podcasts, MP3 players, etc., fast downloads are the way to go.

I use dBpoweramp. I like it a lot. You can download and install all kinds of codecs, even one to convert from Realaudio. The hardest thing to do (surprise! can you say proprietary?) is to convert anything to/from Apple format (remind me again why Microsoft is big brother and somehow Apple is anti-establishment?). dBpoweramp is fast, flexible and free. It also has some small addons (Power Pack) that you can buy. I've used just about everything for converting, including Adobe Audition, and dbpoweramp has the right combination of ease, price and results.

Rich,

I have used Audacity to convert and do some editing on files. It is freeware. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

For free it does a pretty good job.

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Kevin Lewis
Reformed Baptist - LBCF 1689
Covenant Community Church
Orlando, FL
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Cool! Thanks. It's always good to have a fellow techie who's looked into some things.

Good point about streaming but, you're right, it needs to be much smaller!

Blessings,

Rich

What nerve! I can't believe you had the audacity to use that...

(Sorry, I'm corny at heart)

A suggestion: if you go below 32kbps 22kHz mono (which is about 10MB per 45 minutes of audio), I have found you start to get "tin sounding" voices and warbling. I think there is a HUGE dropoff from 32kbps to 24kbps. (that is the main thing I don't like about sermonaudio) I would break the file up into multiple pieces (say three) and have part 1, 2 and 3, each being like 6MB.