Lee Sang-jun's Preaching Style — Vancouver Memories, the Theology of Reversal, and a Pulpit That Walks Together

Pastor Lee Sang-jun leads 1516 Church, which publishes its Sunday sermons on YouTube (@1516church) in both Korean and English. The texts keep changing — Mark, Genesis, 1 Samuel, Joshua, Acts, 1 Timothy — but a craft repeats across every sermon.

“God Uses Unexpected People” — A Theology of Reversal

If there is a single theological conviction that runs through all twenty-six sermons, it is this: God’s preferred instrument is not the obvious choice. Lee states it most directly in the Joshua 2 sermon on Rahab: “God has unusual taste — not the perfectly qualified, not the impressive, but the ones who look insufficient and thoroughly unlikely.” The same sentence reappears, almost verbatim, in the Acts 16 sermon on Lydia’s city.

The conviction shows up at different stages of the preaching schedule. In the 1 Samuel 1 sermon (late 2024), the principle is framed as “the law of reversal underlying all human life” — Hannah and Peninnah placed in counterpoint. In the 1 Samuel 15 sermon (mid-2025), it is given a formal name: “the seesaw principle.” The congregation repeats it: “God lifts up the humble and brings down the proud — say it after me, the seesaw principle.” By the time 1 Timothy is reached in 2026, the same logic governs the treatment of Paul and Timothy: the admiral Yi Sun-sin stripped of rank and serving as a foot soldier; David fighting Goliath without a title; a mission-organization leader who spent a lifetime as a lay worker so that missionaries could approach him without formality. Across different books, centuries, and characters, the argument is the same.

What makes this more than a recurring illustration is the way it shapes illustration selection throughout. Whatever text Lee is preaching, the supporting examples trend toward figures who were passed over — Rahab, David, Cornelius, the early Saul (humble, self-deprecating), the young Timothy. The theology of reversal is not applied to the text from outside. It appears to be the lens through which Lee reads the whole Bible.

Vancouver as a Theological Reservoir

The most frequently recurring source of illustration in Lee’s preaching is a four-year period he spent in Vancouver, Canada (2005–2009), planting and serving an immigrant Korean congregation. Of the twenty-six sermons analyzed, seven draw on that time. The range is remarkable: the Vancouver stories appear in Mark, Acts, Joshua, an Easter sermon, and 1 Timothy — across the full three years of material.

What varies is not just the story but its function. In the Acts 16 sermon on Paul’s Macedonian call, Lee describes spending four months unable to find a building for the church plant and eventually beginning in a rooftop room. The story enters the sermon as evidence for a claim about how God works: “When God closes this door and closes that door, we tend to misread it as God abandoning us.” The Vancouver experience is not an anecdote that softens the sermon’s opening. It is a data point in a theological argument.

In the 1 Timothy 5 sermon, a different Vancouver scene surfaces. Lee observed that immigrant teenagers whose parents attended the same church were treated with noticeably more respect by church adults than teenagers who had come alone as international students — parentless, unprotected by social ties, more easily dismissed. That pastoral observation becomes his entry into the New Testament’s structural concern for the widowed and unattached (1 Tim 5:3: “Honor widows who are truly widows”).

In the 1 Timothy 4 sermon, Vancouver reappears in the most personal register. “In 2005 when I arrived in Vancouver I was thirty-three by Korean reckoning. People would whisper behind me — such a young pastor.” The story joins two others: being called too young when he took over a campus ministry at forty-three, and again when he planted a church at fifty-one. The three moments become a single narrative that arrives at: “Thirty-three is the age Jesus carried the cross. That is not young. That is the age.”

The pattern is not anecdote-collection. It is more like a single formation experience that has generated enough theological texture to open onto whatever biblical world is being entered.

Three Registers of Illustration

Beyond Vancouver, Lee’s illustrations move across three distinct registers, often within a single sermon.

The first is contemporary Korean daily life. Business card culture — Koreans carrying three different cards for three different self-presentations — becomes the opening illustration for a critique of rank-seeking in 1 Timothy 3. The statistic that church members consult fortune-tellers at roughly the same rate as the general population enters a Mark 10 sermon on fate and human longing. A middle-school student who used coarse language to describe how good a school-cafeteria budaejjigae tasted — “the most extreme vocabulary he had for something wonderful” — arrives mid-sermon in a Mark 11 meditation on the fig tree. These are recognizable surfaces, and they don’t condescend.

The second is Korean history. Yi Sun-sin’s baeguijonggun — stripped of rank, serving as an ordinary foot soldier, still fighting with everything — appears in the 1 Timothy 3 sermon as an image of service that precedes and exceeds title. Uibyeong, volunteer militias who defended Korea with no official commission, appear in the same sermon alongside the admiral. The historical examples carry their weight because they make the New Testament’s point about servanthood land in a world the congregation already knows.

The third is the biblical world itself. This is where Lee’s exposition finds its densest texture. The geography of Caesarea Philippi and why it bore Caesar’s name (Mark 8). The identity of Jericho as one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth and a name meaning “city of the moon” (Joshua 2). Phoenicia’s dominance of Mediterranean trade through the purple dye monopoly (Acts 11). The Roman patria potestas — the near-absolute legal authority of the male householder, extending to his children as property (1 Timothy 5). The Hillel and Shammai schools’ competing readings of the Mosaic divorce provision (Mark 10). The Dead Sea Scrolls and their correspondence rate with the Masoretic text (Mark 12). These are not inserted as background color. They become the frame within which the text’s meaning comes into focus, and the exegetical argument depends on them.

Original Languages as Interpretive Keys — Not Academic Decoration

Twenty-one of the twenty-six sermons examined introduce a Hebrew or Greek word. The method is consistent: state the word, give its root meaning briefly, then move directly into the theological argument the word enables.

In the Genesis 4 sermon, Lee notes that the Hebrew paneh (פָּנֶה) means “face” — so “Cain went out from the presence (paneh) of the LORD” means he moved out of the range where God’s face could see him. The observation goes straight into an argument about what drives a person to flee from God’s gaze. In the 1 Timothy 3 sermon, episkopos (ἐπίσκοπος) — “one who looks from above” — becomes the frame for what overseership actually requires: not positional height but the capacity to take in the whole of a community and attend to its members. In 1 Timothy 4, the distinction between exousia (ἐξουσία — authority arising from one’s very being) and dynamis (δύναμις — explosive, outward power) gives Lee the structure for arguing that the authority of sonship is more fundamental than the power of the Spirit.

When there is no original-language term to introduce, Lee still begins from the text’s word choices. In the Mark 16 sermon, he notes that the disciples at the evening meal were not simply eating but using a word that connotes pleasure and satisfaction — which sets up the observation that the disciples had moved on before the resurrection news reached them, and sharpens the question of how they are received back. The interpretive movement always goes: attend to what the text actually says, then follow what that implies.

Self-Disclosure — A Preacher in Progress

Lee’s sermons include a recurring element of personal disclosure, and it is placed mid-sermon, not as a softening epilogue but woven into the argument.

In the 1 Samuel 2 sermon, he describes watching six movies consecutively on a flight and then running into a congregation member at the gate. “There are no secrets in the world” is not just a proposition from the text — it has just been illustrated by the preacher’s own mild embarrassment. In the 1 Samuel 8 sermon, he describes the structure of his own congregation’s devotional-reading ministry: the elderly women leaders read his submitted commentary first and return it to him with any inappropriate elements removed. “I comply more than ninety-five percent of the time.” The congregation learns something about how their pastor actually operates, and also something about the kind of accountability he has built around himself.

The self-disclosure is not confessional theater. It consistently functions to position the preacher on the same side of the text as the congregation — someone the passage is also addressing, not someone who has already resolved its demands and is now dispensing the results. In 1 Timothy 4, the Vancouver-to-forty-three-to-fifty-one sequence works because Lee is not offering the story as having concluded. He is still, in the present tense, the person about whom people raise the question of whether age qualifies or disqualifies. The illustration lives.

From Proclamation to Shared Discovery

Lee Sang-jun’s sermons don’t leave the congregation as passive listeners. A scene repeats: he offers an interpretive option, asks directly for the congregation’s response, and then builds his argument on top of what comes back.

“Those who think this was accidental, raise your hand — six people. Those who think it was deliberate — about ten.” The congregation’s existing reading has been registered. Now Lee can address it directly. “Amen from only that side of the room? Let’s get both sides involved” — the observation releases something, marks the emotional register of the moment, and keeps the congregation alert to where they are in the argument’s movement.

In the Easter sermon on Mark 16:12-15, Lee enters the disciples’ inability to believe through the language of grief: “When you lose someone you love, the first reaction is this cannot be real.” The congregation is invited to recognize themselves in the disciples’ failure before the argument turns to what it cost Jesus to re-approach those who had disbelieved. The trajectory moves from recognition to warrant for the claim that faith is not self-generated but given again and again by the one who comes back.

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Whatever book he is preaching, the skeleton of Lee Sang-jun’s sermons stays constant. A theology of reversal sets the direction of interpretation; illustrations stack in layers of Vancouver memory, Korean history, and biblical background; a single original-language word opens the argument; the preacher discloses his own experience; and the congregation’s response is drawn in as the sermon walks toward application.

The Didymus research report is designed for exactly the first stage of that process. The historical-cultural background sections — on Roman social structures, Phoenician trade, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the geography of Jericho — are the same material Lee assembles by hand for each sermon. The original-language analysis shows how one word can redirect an interpretive arc. A preacher does not need to use all of it. The task is to find the one background detail that makes this week’s text suddenly three-dimensional for the people sitting in front of them.

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Know a hidden master? If you know an excellent preacher who hasn’t been covered by research or the press but deserves recognition, send us a tip at didymus@didymuslab.com.

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