Josh Howerton Caught Preaching Same Sermon as Robert Morris?!?!
Big box evangelicalism has become a money making machine, and a lot of these pastors are not really men of God. They are executives. Many of them spend their week managing a huge organization, and when Sunday comes it can look like they are pulling a sermon out of a file cabinet. Josh Howerton and Joby Martin have already been criticized for reading the same fundraising script and for preaching nearly the same material with the same illustrations. Now someone has put part of a Josh Howerton sermon beside part three of Robert Morris's The Blessed Life series from 2023, and long stretches of the two match almost word for word.
In the clips, both men walk through the same points in the same order. God could not accept Cain's offering. God cannot act outside His character. God cannot lie, from Hebrews 6. God cannot change, from Malachi 3:6, "For I am the LORD, I change not." Then both explain the omniscience of God by breaking the word into omni and science. If two preachers happened to say one identical sentence in two different sermons, I wouldn't think anything of it. But this goes on for minutes. This isn't new either. Back in 2022 Howerton answered a plagiarism accusation by saying it came down to four sentences out of a long sermon. What these clips show is far more than four sentences. That is a performance.
Preaching should be born out of a man's walk with God. A preacher ought to get alone with God, get his face in the Bible, pray, and then stand in the pulpit and tell the people what God has done in his heart that week. The apostles said, "But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word" (Acts 6:4). I have preached for years, and I know that studying to preach is hard work. Preaching Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night can consume your life. That is exactly why a man who spends his time on podcasts, press appearances, and managing an empire ends up pulling a script out of a drawer.
But I think this says more about the people in the pews than the man in the pulpit. Jeremiah 5:31 says, "The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so: and what will ye do in the end thereof?" Church people sit under canned sermons and crude illustrations week after week and don't think anything is wrong, because they love being part of a big church. Give me that old time religion. I want the Bible preached to me, I want God to work in my life, and I want to live the true Christian life in a real local church.
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