In a sermon I watched recently, the speaker said that our word "exercise" comes from the Greek word for "authority" -- exousia. The sad truth is that when you know the biblical languages, you can make them say stuff they never meant. The Greeks had a word for this: Hogwash. True, I'd consider such faux pas petty faults, periodic failures if you will. But if we persist in them, we run the risk of undermining people's confidence in the accuracy of our preaching. Got a good seminary education that included the biblical languages? Great. Now get over it. Stop impressing people with your knowledge of Greek. People aren't even faintly interested in the "aorist passive imperative." They want to know two things: This is what the text is saying, and this is what the text is calling us to do.
Random reflections of an incurable infracaninophile