An Interview with Tullian Tchividjian
Tullian Tchividjian is the Senior Pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian
Church in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. A Florida native, he is a visiting
professor of theology at Reformed Theological Seminary and a grandson of
Billy and Ruth Graham.
How can pastors evaluate their sermons to see
if they're really preaching Jesus + nothing? What kind of litmus test
can we take to make sure we get grace right in our preaching?
Tullian: The litmus test that I use for myself is that
if people walk away from my sermons thinking more about what they need
to do than what Jesus has already done, I’ve failed to preach the
Gospel. The Gospel is the good news that Jesus has done for me what I
could never do for myself. And a lot of preaching these days is “do
more, try harder,” like you said. It’s behavior modification. We come
to church expecting God to give us a to-do list or the preacher to give
us a to-do list. As long as we are given a to-do list, we maintain some
measure of control over our lives. Just tell me what to do.
This message of radical grace, that "it is finished," is difficult for
the human heart, the sinful heart to grasp because we’re so afraid of
control being wrestled out of our hands. So we come to church saying,
“Pastor, my marriage is in trouble…my children are going off the deep
end…my business is failing…I’m coming to you as the expert to tell me
what to do to fix my own life…” And as a result, our lives get worse,
not better, because we’re taking matters into our own hands.
So my job at the end of every sermon—and this is the grid by which I
preach—I preach God’s law, and then I preach God’s Gospel. Both are
good. The law diagnoses my need and shows me that my best is never good
enough. So I’m always trying to help our people realize that they’re a
lot worse than they realize and they’re a lot more incapable than they
think they are. But the good news is that God is more than capable,
that He’s already done everything we need for Him to do. He’s already
secured in Christ everything we long for. So my job at the end of every
sermon is to, in some way, shape, or form, encourage our people by
saying, “Cheer up. You’re a lot worse off than you think you are, but
God’s grace is infinitely larger than you could have ever hoped or
imagined. It is finished.”
And what I’ve discovered is that the people who lean on "it is
finished" most are the ones who end up being the most free and whose
lives change the most. It’s the people who constantly demand to-do
lists and then preachers who capitulate to that demand and give them
to-do lists, those are the people who get worse. I’ve realized, and I’m
only 39 years old, but I’ve realized the more I try to get better, the
worse I get. I’m just realizing I am a narcissist. I think way too
much about how I’m doing, if I’m doing it right, have I confessed every
sin. In other words, I’m thinking much more about me and what I need to
do than Jesus and what He’s already done. And as a result, I’m not
getting better. I’m getting worse.
I’ve come to the realization that when I stop obsessing over my need to
improve, that is improvement. When I stop obsessing narcissistically
over my need to get better, that is what the Bible means by getting
better. That’s why Paul was able to say at the end of his life, “I’m
the worst guy that I know, and the work of grace in my life is that I’m
free to tell you that.” I think the whole notion of what it means to
progress in the Christian life has been radically misunderstood.
Progress in the Christian life is not "I’m getter better and better and
better…" Progress in the Christian life is, "I’m growing in my
realization of just how bad I am and growing in my appreciation of just
how much Jesus has done for me."
Can you give me a quick overview of your preaching prep,
what you do as a method or what that looks like for you during a week?
Tulian: I preach typically through books of the
Bible. I’m usually asking the team of guys around me, “What do you
think our church really needs to hear right now? Where are we? What do
we really need to hear?” Then they’ll help me think through various
books in the Bible that might be relevant for that particular season for
the life of our church. Then I have a research assistant—so let’s say
I’m preaching through Ecclesiastes, and I want to preach a fifteen-week
series on the book of Ecclesiastes. I ask my research assistant to
begin exploring the different resources out there. I give him a list of
books and resources to summarize for me, and then together, we
basically outline the entire series.
Once I have an outline of the entire series (and when I say outline, I
don’t mean I’ve outlined every sermon already; I mean just a broad,
general outline of the main point that I want to get across over this
entire series) then I really go to work in terms of really beginning to
think about what I’m going to say on Sunday. I begin thinking about
that on Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday are really busy days for me, so I
don’t think a whole lot about the sermon on Tuesday and Wednesday. I
do a lot of my sort of “seed” thinking on Monday, and then when Thursday
comes around, I start thinking more in terms of how I’m going to press
the Gospel into people through this passage. I start consulting
different sources, and my research assistant provides me with a weekly
brief, 8-10 pages of things to think through and ways to approach this
passage and preach the Gospel from this passage.
Then on Friday, I spend a couple of hours just putting some thoughts on
paper, coming up with a basic sermon outline. I usually preach
two-point sermons because my goal is to preach law and then Gospel, show
us our need and then show us Christ’s vision specifically in unique
ways. So my sermons are typically two points. I get that outline done
on Friday and jot some thoughts down on paper.
Saturday’s my real workday. I’m pretty much holed up in my home, in my
bedroom for four, five, six hours, depending on the difficulty of the
passage. I basically put everything I want to say on paper. I do not
preach from a manuscript, but I do pretty much write out almost
everything I want to say, and I try to get that on two pages
single-spaced just so that I have a basic idea of where I’m going. It
helps when I’m going to preach it to write it out, and then when that
process is over, I make some sermon notes out of those two pages.
I don’t practice a sermon beforehand. I don’t stand in front of a
mirror and preach it to myself. I just get up on Sunday morning, and I
trust that a lot of what I’m going to say is going to be
extemporaneous. I have a basic idea of where I’m going to go, and I
have thoughts written down, and I have certain sentences and quotes
written out verbatim that I will read, but I also give a lot of room to
the Holy Spirit to guide me and direct me in the moment as I’m looking
into people’s eyes and into people’s faces and gauging how they’re
coming along with me as I’m preaching.
As every preacher knows, our lives revolve around a weekly, public
deadline. You just get into a rhythm. There is no right way to do it
necessarily. I don’t think preachers need to spend 40 hours a week
preparing sermons. I think if you have to spend 40 hours a week
preparing for a passage, you don’t know the passage well enough to
preach it. I’m certainly not championing the idea of just getting up
and winging it either. What I’ve described is a process of preparation,
but realizing that life and interaction with real people helps me
prepare for sermons almost as much as sitting down with a hundred books
like I do and writing things out. So I’ve got to give room for pastoral
ministry to inform what I’m going to say.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
10 Ways to Half-Bake Your Sermon
By Peter Mead
Most preachers would claim to be, and believe they are, biblical preachers. Trouble is, a lot of “biblical preaching” is only half-baked at best. That is, the biblical part is incompletely developed. Let me share some ways preachers only half-use a text:
I was tracking with a message recently and this phase lasted fifteen minutes. But from that point on, the text was never really influencing the message; it was the preacher’s subject of choice that determined the goal and thrust of it all. Shame really, because the comments about the text whetted my appetite, but the message fell so flat.
In teaching I often say that no matter how smart you are, what you can make it say is not as good as what God made it say. In this case I have to modify the saying: no matter how smart you are, what you go on to say instead is not as good as what could have been said if the text were truly preached.
Don’t bounce off the text, leaving it behind in search of your target.
In this series of posts I am offering ten ways that I see preachers half-using a preaching text. The goal isn’t to critique, but to nudge us all to a higher view of the inspired text, a higher level of diligence in studying the text, and therefore a higher level of impact in our preaching of the text. So we’ve already considered using the text as an intro to another message, or failing to see how the details cohere, or preaching a message only nominally tied to the text itself.
I remember a conversation I had with a street preacher years ago. There are some street preachers who do a tremendous work of communicating the gospel to a busy and distracted world. This was not one of them. We got into a discussion about the Bible and I asked him what his view of the Bible was. “Oh, the Bible is like a treasure chest filled with jewels and treasures that we pick up and show to the world!” Problem was, he was plucking phrases without context and shouting random references to washing in blood and becoming white as snow, etc. It didn’t communicate. It regularly offended (in the wrong way).
That street shouter was an extreme example, but let’s not be lesser examples of the same error. Let’s be careful to always present a whole text in its context, rather than plucking the “useful” preaching bits and using, or abusing, them.
Some of these may be errors you always diligently avoid. But there may be one in here that makes you or I reconsider an aspect of our preaching. Actually there may be occasions when we fall into some of these approaches, but feel it is necessary in those circumstances. That is fine, there aren’t as many rules in preaching as people may think. But it is good to step into them aware of the potential weakness of the decision, rather than as a habitual approach.
Much more often there is a flow of thought or plot, a combination of one dominant thought with supporting elements, or whatever. Let’s be careful that we don’t abuse a text by forcing a sermonic grid onto it in an attempt to preach the text. We may be left preaching a bruised and caged specimen.
When you preach a text, preach it. It is inspired. It is useful. It is worth the effort to study it and understand it and preach it. Don’t take the short-cut that may or may not be there to a more familiar, a more “preachable” or a more exciting text.
One of the reasons I use Haddon Robinson’s label of “biblical preaching” for this site, rather than “expository preaching” is because of the baggage people have with the latter term. Some people grew up listening to endless dry Bible lectures, and whenever they questioned its value they were silenced with a war cry for “faithful expository preaching!” Problem is, preaching without emphasizing the relevance to the listeners is not expository preaching, no matter how good a Bible lecture it may be.
We simply can’t abdicate our role as preachers when it comes to applicational relevance and hide behind the notion that this is the work of the Holy Spirit. This is to suggest that I can handle the illumination of the text, but will hand the baton over to the Spirit for application of the text. Sorry, it is both/and. The entire process of preparation and delivery, of explanation and application, is a process in which the Spirit is at work, and so is the preacher. We must apply what we explain.
When we proclaim a text, we look to speak it out to our listeners. Oral communication does not match written communication. We don’t speak in titles, we speak in sentences. Let me encourage you to make your points into full sentences, and why not make them contemporary rather than historical if possible? This will keep us from sounding like we are reading our personal biblical commentary, and listeners are more likely to sense that God’s Word has been proclaimed and they have heard from Him.
Most preachers would claim to be, and believe they are, biblical preachers. Trouble is, a lot of “biblical preaching” is only half-baked at best. That is, the biblical part is incompletely developed. Let me share some ways preachers only half-use a text:
1. Say just enough about the text to introduce what you want to say.
This is a common approach. The text is read at the start of the message or before the message. The preacher gives enough explanatory comments to get things going, then focuses in on what he wants to say rather than what the text itself is really saying. Some do this blatantly with a two or three sentence transition between reading the text and moving on to the message of choice. Others may spend longer and convince more listeners.I was tracking with a message recently and this phase lasted fifteen minutes. But from that point on, the text was never really influencing the message; it was the preacher’s subject of choice that determined the goal and thrust of it all. Shame really, because the comments about the text whetted my appetite, but the message fell so flat.
In teaching I often say that no matter how smart you are, what you can make it say is not as good as what God made it say. In this case I have to modify the saying: no matter how smart you are, what you go on to say instead is not as good as what could have been said if the text were truly preached.
Don’t bounce off the text, leaving it behind in search of your target.
2. Preach from the details, but don’t figure out how they work together to give the main idea.
This is fairly self-explanatory. It is possible to make points from details in the text, but never get to the point of understanding or conveying the thrust of the whole text working together. How do the details cohere?3. Preach a generic message or idea from what could be any text.
We are all capable of preaching abstracted truths and generic messages and tying them to a text with tenuous connections. Don’t preach a good message from a text. Preach the message of the text.In this series of posts I am offering ten ways that I see preachers half-using a preaching text. The goal isn’t to critique, but to nudge us all to a higher view of the inspired text, a higher level of diligence in studying the text, and therefore a higher level of impact in our preaching of the text. So we’ve already considered using the text as an intro to another message, or failing to see how the details cohere, or preaching a message only nominally tied to the text itself.
4. Use the content, but ignore the context.
I use the term use deliberately. Sometimes the content of a passage could feel used because it isn’t understood in light of its context. This could be a certain term or phrase that is plucked out of its setting in a sentence and used to make a point. It could be the whole paragraph or section that is presented without awareness of how it fits in the flow of thought in the book.I remember a conversation I had with a street preacher years ago. There are some street preachers who do a tremendous work of communicating the gospel to a busy and distracted world. This was not one of them. We got into a discussion about the Bible and I asked him what his view of the Bible was. “Oh, the Bible is like a treasure chest filled with jewels and treasures that we pick up and show to the world!” Problem was, he was plucking phrases without context and shouting random references to washing in blood and becoming white as snow, etc. It didn’t communicate. It regularly offended (in the wrong way).
That street shouter was an extreme example, but let’s not be lesser examples of the same error. Let’s be careful to always present a whole text in its context, rather than plucking the “useful” preaching bits and using, or abusing, them.
5. Use the context, but ignore the content.
I suppose this is a less common error, in my experience. But it is possible. I guess this happens more in the gospels. The preacher preaches about the ministry of Jesus in general, but doesn’t present the unique details conveyed by the gospel writer in this particular instance. (Or the preacher may preach the event accurately through harmonizing the gospels, but fail to preach the inspired text of the gospel in question.) Contextually it is possible to say Jesus was doing such and such, but if you’re preaching a particular healing narrative, preach it with good awareness of the detail the writer chose to include.Some of these may be errors you always diligently avoid. But there may be one in here that makes you or I reconsider an aspect of our preaching. Actually there may be occasions when we fall into some of these approaches, but feel it is necessary in those circumstances. That is fine, there aren’t as many rules in preaching as people may think. But it is good to step into them aware of the potential weakness of the decision, rather than as a habitual approach.
6. Impose a sermon structure instead of letting the text’s structure influence your message.
Those who are committed to preaching as a ministry governed by rules and tradition will regularly cross this line. "For it to be a sermon it must have..." tends to lead to imposition of “correct structure” on Bible texts. It is interesting how few texts genuinely offer a standard number of parallel and equally weighted points.Much more often there is a flow of thought or plot, a combination of one dominant thought with supporting elements, or whatever. Let’s be careful that we don’t abuse a text by forcing a sermonic grid onto it in an attempt to preach the text. We may be left preaching a bruised and caged specimen.
7. Preach a preferred cross-reference
I remember listening to a set of lectures on tape (remember tapes?) The cover said they were lectures on the Pastoral Epistles. The labels on the tapes said the same. Actually, the lecturer also kept referring to the Pastoral Epistles too. But the overwhelming sense I got when listening to them was that the lecturer wished he were in Romans. He went there constantly. Maybe he felt he’d missed out when a more senior lecturer got to do the prized epistle.When you preach a text, preach it. It is inspired. It is useful. It is worth the effort to study it and understand it and preach it. Don’t take the short-cut that may or may not be there to a more familiar, a more “preachable” or a more exciting text.
8. Preach a plethora of cross-references.
Every now and then I hear a preacher who seems to be entering the “who can reference the most Bible books in thirty minutes” competition. Please don’t. There are few good reasons to cross-reference, don’t do it otherwise. (See here and here for the two main reasons in my opinion.) Every moment taken in a cross-reference is time not used in preaching your preaching text; if it doesn’t add to the preaching of this text, don’t let your time be stolen.9. Explain it, but don’t apply it.
This is a common error among those who say they are most committed to expository preaching. They will give an in-depth explanation of the preaching passage, sometimes avoiding every item on the list so far. Carefully explained text in context with focus on historical situation, authorial intent, and perhaps some linking into the broader sweep of theological and salvation history. Solid stuff. Then they stop.One of the reasons I use Haddon Robinson’s label of “biblical preaching” for this site, rather than “expository preaching” is because of the baggage people have with the latter term. Some people grew up listening to endless dry Bible lectures, and whenever they questioned its value they were silenced with a war cry for “faithful expository preaching!” Problem is, preaching without emphasizing the relevance to the listeners is not expository preaching, no matter how good a Bible lecture it may be.
We simply can’t abdicate our role as preachers when it comes to applicational relevance and hide behind the notion that this is the work of the Holy Spirit. This is to suggest that I can handle the illumination of the text, but will hand the baton over to the Spirit for application of the text. Sorry, it is both/and. The entire process of preparation and delivery, of explanation and application, is a process in which the Spirit is at work, and so is the preacher. We must apply what we explain.
10. Commentary it, but don’t proclaim it.
This is another one for “expositors” to keep in mind. Either due to a certain approach in training, or as learned behavior from examples observed, too many preachers preach sermon points that are actually commentary titles. “The next point in my sermon is Saul’s Contention!” Uh, no, that is the next subtitle in the commentary you are reading out to us. There is a big difference between biblical commentary and biblical proclamation.When we proclaim a text, we look to speak it out to our listeners. Oral communication does not match written communication. We don’t speak in titles, we speak in sentences. Let me encourage you to make your points into full sentences, and why not make them contemporary rather than historical if possible? This will keep us from sounding like we are reading our personal biblical commentary, and listeners are more likely to sense that God’s Word has been proclaimed and they have heard from Him.
One Thing That Will Make or Break Your Preaching in the 21st Century
By Dr. R. Larry Moyer
Larry Moyer is a veteran evangelist and a frequent speaker in evangelistic outreaches, training seminars, churches and universities around the world. Born with an inherited speech defect, Larry vowed to God as a teenager that if He would allow him to gain control of his speech he would always use his voice to declare the gospel. In 1973, Larry founded EvanTell, where he now serves as President and CEO. He has written several books on evangelism and frequently contributes articles to ministry publications.
No brainer! Evangelistic speaking must be bathed in prayer. We bring Christ to men; only God can bring men to Christ. John 6:44 says, “No one can come to Me, unless the Father who sent Me draws him.”
It also requires careful study of the Scriptures to make sure that we are preaching His thoughts, not ours. Paul told Timothy, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (II Timothy 2:15)
.
There is another item, though, that will also make or break our preaching in the 21st century. Without this item, you will simply be a speaker. With it, you will be a communicator. It is called illustration.
This should not surprise us. Jesus Christ was a master communicator. How often does the New Testament say of Him, “And He spoke to them a parable”? So important are illustrations that three questions are worth answering.
Let’s start with the basic one. Why? The reason is three-fold. People of the 21st century understand the newspaper; they don’t understand the Bible. Therefore the newspaper can be used to illustrate how the Bible fits life where they are living. To say that men’s hearts are filled with greed is one thing; to illustrate that through a statement in the news of a person who having much still wanted more is another. To say, “Christ died for you” is one thing; to illustrate that through one person substituting his life for another is powerful.
A second reason is what it tells the audience about you, the speaker. Illustrations tell them that you not only understand the Bible; you also understand Him and life.
A third reason is that illustrations enliven the audience and get attention. By illustrations, I am referring to quotes, analogies, stories, and statistics. Watch an audience that tends to fall asleep. Now watch what happens if the speaker says something such as, “Let me tell you about something humorous that happened to me the other day...” “I read a touching story two days ago in our local newspaper...” or “You are going to laugh when I tell you the following story.” Heads raise up, eyes open up, ears perk up. People love stories.
With that understood, a second question is of equal importance. How do you get good illustrations? Notice I said “how,” not “where”. Unless the “how” is understood, the “where” rarely matters.
Two things are paramount. One is to never be without a recording device. Some say, “Never say never,” but there is an exception to every rule. By never, I mean never, unless it’s physically impossible as when you’re swimming! Your recording device may be a PDA. Although I have a PDA, my recording device is a 3x5" card; this for me is quicker and simpler. I then transfer the illustration to my computer file.
If you don’t have a recording device, you won’t remember illustrations as they happen. You will only tease yourself that you will. And even if you do, you will forget the details, and it’s the details that make the illustration. Telling me that a middle-aged man entered an office building is rather dull. Telling me that a man in his forties walked in to a five-story office complex in the center of Detroit and took the elevator to the fourth floor pulls me into the story. I begin to visualize the man, the building, and the elevator.
Equally important is to set a goal. Mine is ten a week. I’ll go over it, but not under it. That is why I now have nearly 20,000. What is so comforting about that is that if I’m speaking to the need of a right attitude when going through trials, I have 35 in that area to choose from, not just five.
With these two items in mind—a recording device and a goal—you will need to develop an eye for illustrations. You will be surprised at how many you’ve missed and be amazed at how many you have not filed and how many you can’t remember. But don’t live in the past. Live in the present and the future. Start now!
Now, the final question. Where do you get the illustrations? The answer in most cases is...everywhere! But let’s nail that down.
Reading will always be your single biggest source. Nothing will surpass it. You cannot (and should not) watch enough TV. You will never be able to listen to enough people or entertain enough conversations. But you will consistently have at your fingertips news reports on the Internet, newspapers, new magazines, books, devotional booklets, and a list of advertisements and pamphlets. They focus on politics, family, sports, money, and past and present events.
Listening to messages by people who illustrate is another great source. Good communicators have good illustrations. As you listen, write. Don’t feel like you’re doing wrong by using someone else’s illustrations. Very few speakers use original illustrations. They are borrowed without apology from the sources. Having collected thousands, I seldom hear one I have not already heard.
Illustrations are not a novelty in communicating with people of the 21st century; they are a necessity. More than ever, people think with stories in their heads. Notice something: One speaker speaks for 30 minutes and it seems like 15; another speaks for 15 and it seems like 45. The difference more often than not is whether or not there was an effective use of illustrations. More importantly, the one without the illustrations often brings a message easily forgotten. The one with illustrations brings a message hard to forget. The reason: When the speaker taught a truth, the listener said, “I hear it”; when he used an illustration, the listener said, “I see it.”
Larry Moyer is a veteran evangelist and a frequent speaker in evangelistic outreaches, training seminars, churches and universities around the world. Born with an inherited speech defect, Larry vowed to God as a teenager that if He would allow him to gain control of his speech he would always use his voice to declare the gospel. In 1973, Larry founded EvanTell, where he now serves as President and CEO. He has written several books on evangelism and frequently contributes articles to ministry publications.
No brainer! Evangelistic speaking must be bathed in prayer. We bring Christ to men; only God can bring men to Christ. John 6:44 says, “No one can come to Me, unless the Father who sent Me draws him.”
It also requires careful study of the Scriptures to make sure that we are preaching His thoughts, not ours. Paul told Timothy, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (II Timothy 2:15)
.
There is another item, though, that will also make or break our preaching in the 21st century. Without this item, you will simply be a speaker. With it, you will be a communicator. It is called illustration.
This should not surprise us. Jesus Christ was a master communicator. How often does the New Testament say of Him, “And He spoke to them a parable”? So important are illustrations that three questions are worth answering.
Let’s start with the basic one. Why? The reason is three-fold. People of the 21st century understand the newspaper; they don’t understand the Bible. Therefore the newspaper can be used to illustrate how the Bible fits life where they are living. To say that men’s hearts are filled with greed is one thing; to illustrate that through a statement in the news of a person who having much still wanted more is another. To say, “Christ died for you” is one thing; to illustrate that through one person substituting his life for another is powerful.
A second reason is what it tells the audience about you, the speaker. Illustrations tell them that you not only understand the Bible; you also understand Him and life.
A third reason is that illustrations enliven the audience and get attention. By illustrations, I am referring to quotes, analogies, stories, and statistics. Watch an audience that tends to fall asleep. Now watch what happens if the speaker says something such as, “Let me tell you about something humorous that happened to me the other day...” “I read a touching story two days ago in our local newspaper...” or “You are going to laugh when I tell you the following story.” Heads raise up, eyes open up, ears perk up. People love stories.
With that understood, a second question is of equal importance. How do you get good illustrations? Notice I said “how,” not “where”. Unless the “how” is understood, the “where” rarely matters.
Two things are paramount. One is to never be without a recording device. Some say, “Never say never,” but there is an exception to every rule. By never, I mean never, unless it’s physically impossible as when you’re swimming! Your recording device may be a PDA. Although I have a PDA, my recording device is a 3x5" card; this for me is quicker and simpler. I then transfer the illustration to my computer file.
If you don’t have a recording device, you won’t remember illustrations as they happen. You will only tease yourself that you will. And even if you do, you will forget the details, and it’s the details that make the illustration. Telling me that a middle-aged man entered an office building is rather dull. Telling me that a man in his forties walked in to a five-story office complex in the center of Detroit and took the elevator to the fourth floor pulls me into the story. I begin to visualize the man, the building, and the elevator.
Equally important is to set a goal. Mine is ten a week. I’ll go over it, but not under it. That is why I now have nearly 20,000. What is so comforting about that is that if I’m speaking to the need of a right attitude when going through trials, I have 35 in that area to choose from, not just five.
With these two items in mind—a recording device and a goal—you will need to develop an eye for illustrations. You will be surprised at how many you’ve missed and be amazed at how many you have not filed and how many you can’t remember. But don’t live in the past. Live in the present and the future. Start now!
Now, the final question. Where do you get the illustrations? The answer in most cases is...everywhere! But let’s nail that down.
Reading will always be your single biggest source. Nothing will surpass it. You cannot (and should not) watch enough TV. You will never be able to listen to enough people or entertain enough conversations. But you will consistently have at your fingertips news reports on the Internet, newspapers, new magazines, books, devotional booklets, and a list of advertisements and pamphlets. They focus on politics, family, sports, money, and past and present events.
Listening to messages by people who illustrate is another great source. Good communicators have good illustrations. As you listen, write. Don’t feel like you’re doing wrong by using someone else’s illustrations. Very few speakers use original illustrations. They are borrowed without apology from the sources. Having collected thousands, I seldom hear one I have not already heard.
Illustrations are not a novelty in communicating with people of the 21st century; they are a necessity. More than ever, people think with stories in their heads. Notice something: One speaker speaks for 30 minutes and it seems like 15; another speaks for 15 and it seems like 45. The difference more often than not is whether or not there was an effective use of illustrations. More importantly, the one without the illustrations often brings a message easily forgotten. The one with illustrations brings a message hard to forget. The reason: When the speaker taught a truth, the listener said, “I hear it”; when he used an illustration, the listener said, “I see it.”
7 Ways Twitter Will Improve Your Preaching
By Brandon Cox
Brandon Cox is Lead Pastor of Grace Hills Church, a new church plant in northwest Arkansas. He also serves as Editor and Community Facilitator for Pastors.com and Rick Warren's Pastor's Toolbox and was formerly a Pastor at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. In his spare time, he offers consultation to church leaders about communication, branding, and social media. He and his wife, Angie, live with their two awesome kids in Bentonville, Arkansas.
John Calvin published 22 volumes of commentaries on the Bible and Martin Lloyd-Jones published 9 volumes on Romans alone. What if you could remove all of the non-essential language, antiquated stories, and strip all of that knowledge down to some bite-sized, transportable truths? There is certainly room for argument against such condensation of historic works, but we have to realize that we live in a society inundated with more information in a day than Calvin consumed in a year.
In other words, the ability to be succinct and concise is worth gold when communicating truth in today’s culture. And Twitter helps. The ability to write volumes of words is impressive, but possibly not as impressive as the ability to take a deep and complex theological truth or spiritual application and package it in 140 characters or less.
So Twitter might be looked down upon by plenty of the academic leaders of our age, but men who spent long ours preaching, like John Piper and Rick Warren have utilized the power of Twitter to extend their teach platforms to an entirely new audience in the techno-centric space of Twitter.
Though I’m sure this idea will stir plenty of debate, I want to argue that Twitter can be a powerful tool for improving your preaching, teaching, and public speaking. Why?
You can write Twitter off and you will probably survive. I would not argue that it’s an essential tool for preaching, teaching, and speaking. I would urge you, however, not to write off its potential as a research, collaboration, publicity, and even skill-honing tool.
Brandon Cox is Lead Pastor of Grace Hills Church, a new church plant in northwest Arkansas. He also serves as Editor and Community Facilitator for Pastors.com and Rick Warren's Pastor's Toolbox and was formerly a Pastor at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. In his spare time, he offers consultation to church leaders about communication, branding, and social media. He and his wife, Angie, live with their two awesome kids in Bentonville, Arkansas.
John Calvin published 22 volumes of commentaries on the Bible and Martin Lloyd-Jones published 9 volumes on Romans alone. What if you could remove all of the non-essential language, antiquated stories, and strip all of that knowledge down to some bite-sized, transportable truths? There is certainly room for argument against such condensation of historic works, but we have to realize that we live in a society inundated with more information in a day than Calvin consumed in a year.
In other words, the ability to be succinct and concise is worth gold when communicating truth in today’s culture. And Twitter helps. The ability to write volumes of words is impressive, but possibly not as impressive as the ability to take a deep and complex theological truth or spiritual application and package it in 140 characters or less.
So Twitter might be looked down upon by plenty of the academic leaders of our age, but men who spent long ours preaching, like John Piper and Rick Warren have utilized the power of Twitter to extend their teach platforms to an entirely new audience in the techno-centric space of Twitter.
Though I’m sure this idea will stir plenty of debate, I want to argue that Twitter can be a powerful tool for improving your preaching, teaching, and public speaking. Why?
Twitter Forces Us to Concentrate Our Message
If you take all the water out of fresh-squeezed orange juice, you wind up with concentrate, a far more potent solution. Twitter causes us to remove unnecessary words and reduce a message to its bare minimum. Obviously this can create the problem of lacking context and sub-structure, but it also forces us to consider the reader. In fact, if we don’t consider the reader, we can get in serious trouble. So we have to ask such question as…- How will this be understood with no surrounding context?
- How will this reflect on my own values and beliefs?
- How could these words be mis-applied by a simple misunderstanding?
- Is this valuable enough to be shared in the first place?
Twitter Is a Powerful Collaboration Tool
Can’t find the answer to a question? Ask it on Twitter and you’ll often wind up with a variety of opinions and perspectives. You can use Twitter to crowdsource the refining of ideas. Obviously you shouldn’t rely on the crowd to prepare messages for you, but by all means, allow the crowd to help you brainstorm, refine, and pare down your message to its essential core.Twitter Allows for Immediate Feedback
How will this idea sound on Sunday? How will people react? Throw it out to the Twittersphere and you’ll see whether it sticks or bounces back to hurt you. The feedback can be painful, but helpful.Twitter Is a Tremendous Real Time Research Tool
I doubt you’ll ever use Twitter for exegetical work, but if you’re attempting to gauge culture’s understanding of a concept, measure a trend, or find a relevant application, Twitter can prove to be a powerful culture-search mechanism.Twitter Introduces Us to Better Communicators Than Ourselves
Twitter is not about how you had your eggs prepared this morning. It’s about content, and it provides a lifeline back to sources of learning and inspiration. I’ve discovered numerous great communicators and have allowed them to passively mentor me all by hopping from one Twitter relationship to another.Twitter Expands Our Influence
That is to say, our audience grows as we forge new relationships across social platforms. If you don’t see the potential of Twitter for connectivity, you haven’t hung around long enough to test it out. You’ll ultimately discover new listeners and readers as you build bridges with people you never would have known otherwise.Twitter Extends the Life of Your Message
We often feel, at the end of a message, that we spent many hours preparing for a few moments of communication only to see the remains of that message tossed onto the scrap heep or filed away for posterity’s sake alone. But with Twitter, you have a great platform to scatter the soundbites from a message for a long time to come.You can write Twitter off and you will probably survive. I would not argue that it’s an essential tool for preaching, teaching, and speaking. I would urge you, however, not to write off its potential as a research, collaboration, publicity, and even skill-honing tool.
15 Christmas Preaching Tips
By Peter Mead
Peter Mead is involved in church leadership at an independent Bible church in the UK. He serves as director of Cor Deo—an innovative mentored ministry training program—and has a wider ministry preaching and training preachers. He also blogs often at BiblicalPreaching.net.
1. There’s nothing wrong with familiar passages.
It is tempting to think that we have to be always innovating, always creative, always somewhere surprising. Don’t. Just as children will repeatedly ask for the same bedtime story, and adults will revisit the same movie of choice, so churchgoers are fine with a Christmas message at Christmas. Sometimes in trying to be clever, we simply fail to connect. Don’t hesitate to preach a Matthew or Luke birth narrative!
Peter Mead is involved in church leadership at an independent Bible church in the UK. He serves as director of Cor Deo—an innovative mentored ministry training program—and has a wider ministry preaching and training preachers. He also blogs often at BiblicalPreaching.net.
1. There’s nothing wrong with familiar passages.
It is tempting to think that we have to be always innovating, always creative, always somewhere surprising. Don’t. Just as children will repeatedly ask for the same bedtime story, and adults will revisit the same movie of choice, so churchgoers are fine with a Christmas message at Christmas. Sometimes in trying to be clever, we simply fail to connect. Don’t hesitate to preach a Matthew or Luke birth narrative!
2. Preach the writer's emphasis, not a Christmas card.
Anywhere in the Gospels, it is possible to be drawn from the emphasis of the text to the event itself. If you are preaching Matthew for several weeks, great, preach Matthew. If Luke, preach Luke. Whether it is a series or an individual message, be sure to look closely and see what the writer is emphasizing in each narrative.3. Familiar passages deserve to be offered fresh.
Don’t take my first comment as an excuse to be a stale preacher. There’s no need to simply dust off an old message and give it again without first revisiting it. Whenever we preach God’s Word, we should stand and preach as those who have a fresh passion for what God is communicating there. There’s no excuse for a cold heart or stale content.4. Fresh doesn't have to mean innovative or weird.
Now all this talk of fresh could lead us down a winding path into strange ideas. There is plenty in each text that is very much there, so we don’t need to superimpose our own clever and innovative “five facts about struggling against capitalism from the angel’s visit to Zechariah.” Equally, we don’t have to preach dressed as a sheep in order to offer something fresh.5. Be careful when fresh means disagreeing with tradition.
You may find that looking closely at the text and studying the culture of that time actually causes you to question some stable assumptions (see what I did there?) Was there a stable? Where was Jesus born? When did the Magi arrive? How did the star thing work? Think carefully about throwing a hand grenade into peoples’ traditions. There is a place, and a tone, for correcting errant thinking, but tread carefully.6. There are other ways to preach the narratives themselves.
You don’t have to simply talk your way through the text. Consider the possibility of preaching the emphasis of the text from the perspective of a contemporary character—Anna, Simeon, a shepherd, etc. Consider a bit of “in hindsight” first person preaching—Joseph looking back or Luke having done his research. Remember though, if you have a “manger scene” play with children involved, your going into character may feel like too much of a good thing, even though you will surpass their preparations.7. Why not preach all four Gospel introductions?
We tend to dwell on Matthew or Luke or a blend of the two. Why not introduce people to Matthew’s introduction, then Mark’s (why no birth narrative, where was this all headed anyway, why is Mark 1:1–13 such a stunning intro to his gospel?) Then give them the visitation, prophecy, Mary focused, and children prepared emphasis of Luke’s opening chapters. And who wouldn’t want to preach from John 1:1–18 right before Christmas (or any other time for that matter!) All four are stunning pieces of inspired text!8. There are other New Testament passages that explain the Incarnation and Christ’s mission to the world.
Perhaps it would be helpful to offer some explanation from other parts of the New Testament. What did the preachers of Acts say about why Christ was sent into the world? What about Paul’s explanation of the timing of it all in Galatians 4? There’s plenty on Christmas beyond Matthew and Luke.9. Why not tap into the mine that is Old Testament prophecy?
Where to start? Most people dip into the Old Testament at Christmas to read Isaiah 9:6–7 or Micah 5:2. Why not help people understand the richness of those texts and others like them in their context? What were the Jews waiting for when the first Christmas dawned?10. Perhaps it is worth encountering a Christmas carol and its theology?
Not my typical approach, but people know the carols. Perhaps it would be worth helping people to understand the richness of the second verse of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" biblically?11. The ancient story is always relevant.
It is easy to settle into an ancient storytelling mode and fail to make crystal clear connections to the messy world of today. Christmas is massively relevant because the Incarnation changes everything (that and the Resurrection...two massive moments in history!). Let’s think and pray long and hard about how the messages are going to engage the listeners with a sense of compelling relevance to today. Our world. Our culture. Our lives. Our struggles. Not that the focus is us but because the Incarnation is massively relevant always.12. The ancient story was not a painting.
One of the most effective ways to communicate contemporary relevance for listeners today is to take them beyond a Christmas-card view of the first Christmas. What were the realities facing Mary and Joseph? What kind of a culture did they live in? How would that pregnancy shape their lives? Helping people to get beyond stained glass window views of the first Christmas can resonate deeply with the situations and struggles we face today.13. Offer a contemporary relevance, not just the ancient one.
The reason Jesus came into the world was to go to the cross, back then. It was a once and for all mission. But the Incarnation has burning relevance to our world today. Think and pray through how to convey the fact that Christmas matters now, and not just as a moment to look back on an ancient mission, albeit an important one.14. Tap into the various emotions of Christmas.
I suppose it is easy to slide into nostalgia at Christmas. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, sleigh bells ringing, snow glistening, logs on the fire, gifts by the tree, etc., etc. But what about other related emotions? Missing family members through bereavement or separation. Seasonally affected discouragement disorders that make for a depressing time of year. Difficult childhood memories only exacerbated by the overt nostalgia nudge all around. Christmas is a good time to offer a sensitivity in your preaching that shows you aren’t part of the hyped-up marketing machine.15. Don’t miss the opportunity Christmas preaching offers.
The reason Jesus came into the world was to go to the cross, once for all. It wouldn’t be good to make some sort of contemporary emphasis that loses sight of why Christmas really occurred. Remember that some people will only come to church at Christmas—don’t miss the opportunity to make sense of the season for themBusting Out of Sermon Block
By Haddon Robinson
Taken from Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching, The by CRAIG BRIAN LARSON; HADDON ROBINSON. Copyright © 2005 by Christianity Today International.
Haddon Robinson (ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary; MA, Southern Methodist University; PhD, University of Illinois) is the Harold John Ockenga Distinguished Professor of Preaching at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and he is widely regarded as an expert in the area of preaching.
Preaching well is hard work. We’re expected to be witty, warm, and wise. And then next week, we have to do it again.
The great science fiction writer H. G. Wells reportedly said most people only think once or twice in a lifetime, whereas he had made an international reputation by thinking once or twice a year. Lots of pastors have to think once (or more) a week! More often than we would like to admit, we begin preparing a sermon with the feeling not that we have something to say, but that we have to say something. Only one time in twenty do I start my preparation feeling that this sermon will go well. The creative process is accompanied with a feeling of ambiguity and uncertainty, of trying to make the unknown known.
Like the homemaker whose goal of three nutritious meals a day is complicated by toddlers making messes, demands of a part-time job, overflowing baskets of laundry, and a phone that won’t stop ringing, the multiple demands of pastoral life make fresh thinking and sermon writing even more difficult.
People never die at convenient times. The administrative load preoccupies pastors with scores of details that won’t go away. Emotional weariness from dealing with people problems drains creative energies. And speaking several times weekly outstrips your capacity to assimilate truth fully into your life.
Just as savvy homemakers find resourceful ways to feed their families—a deft combination of ten-minute recipes, healthy snacks, a microwave special, and a few full-course evening feasts—pastors, too, can find ways to keep tasty and balanced spiritual meals on the table.
What Am I Going to Say?
I start the process by focusing on content, not delivery. Approaching a text with the attitude How am I going to get a sermon out of this? pollutes the process. We can end up manipulating the text for the purposes of an outline instead of first trying to observe, interpret, and appreciate the text.
For one message based on the story of Christ’s calming the storm, I began my study assuming my sermon’s main idea would be that we can count on Christ to calm the wind and waves in our lives. But as I studied the text, I realized I couldn’t promise the people they would never sink just because Christ was with them in the storms of life.
This passage has to be seen in its broader context. Jesus has called the disciples and told them about the nature of his kingdom: It will start small but spread wide. In that early stage, everything depended on the men in that boat—Jesus and the disciples. If they go under, the kingdom is gone. The point of the passage is that those who have committed everything to Christ’s cause can know that the kingdom will ultimately triumph because of the power of the King. This is an eternal truth that shifts the emphasis from the personal storms in my life and whether I will sink to the eternal kingdom that will never fail. If I promised that Christ would calm every storm, I would have twisted the text to say what I wanted. Instead I preached what the text taught me.
I have learned to let understanding the text dominate the sermon process early and later let sermonizing dominate. I have more material than I can preach when I first try to understand and interpret a text for its own sake. I ask,
What is the biblical writer doing?
Then I study the context for the flow of thought. (I usually get more preachable insights from context than from studying the grammar and word structure of the original language.) By studying the context, for example, I came up with a major lead for a sermon on 1 Peter 5. “To the elders among you,” writes Peter, “I appeal as a fellow elder, a witness of Christ’s sufferings and one who also will share in the glory to be revealed” (v. 1). In my study, I found the theme of suffering accompanied by glory runs throughout 1 Peter. Whether in marriage, government, family—or church—when we suffer for Christ, we experience the glory of Christ. My sermon therefore pointed to this theme as it applied to leaders in the church.
How Am I Going to Say It?
In this phase, I move to the communication question. How will I get the ideas I’ve uncovered in the passage across to people in a way that interests, informs, motivates, and changes them? Out of all that I could say about this passage, what will I choose to say?
This part of the process can also provide us with something significant to say. Early on I ask, Which of the following tacks is the biblical writer taking here: Is he primarily (a) explaining, (b) proving, or (c) applying?
(a) If the passage majors in explanation, then my sermon will major in teaching. In the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14), the primary purpose of this passage is to teach that the person who sees God as God and humbles himself before him is justified and exalted, and the person who exalts himself before God remains in his sins.
Accordingly, my sermon majors in explanation, not exhortation. I dig beneath the assumptions we have about the Pharisees and tax collectors, helping my listeners get into the minds of these two men. What did they think about themselves? What did others think about them? How would these roles look today? I talked about the nature of the sins of hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and disobedience.
(b) One of the best ways to overcome “sermon block” is to think through What’s hard to believe about this passage? We can underrate the need to prove the truth of a text. Even if there isn’t a skeptical bone in our body, we need to ask, Will those who hear me believe this? Does this conform to my and their experience? If not, why not?
Our experience doesn’t govern the Bible, but we need to explain perceived discrepancies between what the Bible says and our reality. Suppose someone hears a passage, “If two of you on earth agree on anything, it will be done for you.” She wonders, What if I want a blue Cadillac? If I can get two of the elders to agree with me in prayer, is that a done deal? Like most people, she questions, Do I believe that?
In my sermon, I try to be an advocate for that person. She won’t raise her hand and interrupt me, but like most people in the pews today, she listens to sermons with a keen sense of skepticism. The preacher who ignores that is ignoring reality. C. S. Lewis has been popular in recent decades largely because he deals with the “Is this really true?” question. He assumed people needed to be convinced.
(c) Good ideas for preaching also emerge as we apply the Bible’s truths to people’s lives. Sermon ideas ignite when the flint of people’s problems strikes the steel of God’s Word. Sometimes we can’t come up with much to say because our thinking is too steely; it’s all God’s Word, but we don’t link it to specific situations in contemporary life. Other times we come up short because we’re too flinty; we’re people-oriented, but we lack the authoritative content that only Scripture can bring.
But we almost always spark a preaching flame if we strike those two elements together. So part of my preparation is to ask these application questions: What difference does this make? What are the implications for our lives in this text? If someone takes this truth seriously and tries to live it on Monday morning, how will he or she live differently?
Develop a Preaching Calendar
Many pastors set up a plan for what they will preach over the next quarter, half-year, or year. We can take a retreat for several days and ask ourselves what the needs of the congregation are, what subjects we sense God impressing on our hearts, what themes we have an avid interest in.
A preaching calendar doesn’t have to confine us. If some brilliant stroke from God strikes us, we can always change our plans. But it not, when we walk into the study, we have a sense of well-thought-through, well-prayed-through direction. My calendars have been based primarily on expository series through complete books of the Bible (which provides more than enough grist for any mill).
Once a calendar is set, we can set up file folders for each series of sermons, which become repositories for the relevant material we come across in the weeks and months before the sermon is preached. When the time finally comes to begin preparing the sermon, we already have a file of illustrations, quotes, and insights.
Work on Sermons in Ten-Day Cycles
The purpose of a longer cycle is to provide simmer time. On the Thursday ten days prior to the Sunday I will preach, I do my exegetical study. I read the text and think about it till I hit a wall. Then I write down what is holding me up: What words don’t I understand? What issues can’t I solve? What ideas don’t make sense? If you can’t state specifically what your problems are, you won’t get answers.
Thus, ten days before I preach a sermon, I know what I need to be thinking about, which I do while driving the car, taking a shower, or lying awake at night. This also directs my reading. I know where the gaps in my understanding are, and I can more quickly find the answers. I can cull twenty commentaries in an hour if I know the key questions. Often when I sit down to resume study the following Tuesday, the issues in the passage are much clearer. I wonder, What in the world was I so hung up about?
When I preached a sermon on the seven churches of Revelation, I grew curious about the seven cities and how they affected the churches. I did some extra research that added significant insights. If I had been writing this sermon the day or two before preaching, I couldn’t have done that.
My next study time in the cycle is five days later, on Tuesday, when I finish up my exegetical work and organize the sermon. By the end of Tuesday, I want at least to have the sermon’s homiletical skeleton and introduction completed. I may also have begun shaping the main movements.
My final writing installment takes place on Friday. I finish writing and actually have time to rearrange and polish.
Get Double Duty Off Study
Duane Litfin, president of Wheaton College, first introduced me to the idea of preparing two sermons from research on one preaching passage. When he was pastoring in Memphis, if his Sunday morning message primarily explained or proved the truth of a passage, on Sunday night he focused on application. Or, on Sunday night he developed a subtheme of a passage that couldn’t be given justice in the Sunday morning message. In Philippians 2:1-11, for example, he might preach in the morning on Christlike humility and on Sunday night, the doctrine of Christ’s humanity.
Think Visually
Think of words on a spectrum, with abstract words and ideas at the top of the ladder and concrete ideas at the bottom. Scholars climb up the ladder of abstraction; communicators step down to get as close to specifics as possible. When I have an idea without a specific picture in my mind, nothing interesting happens in me. But my mind starts to roll when I have an image.
When I study a text, I ask, What image was in the biblical writer’s mind as he wrote this? If the subject is reconciliation, he didn’t write about some abstract doctrine; he was thinking about enemies who made peace. As I study such a passage, I pose questions that keep me close to real life: What’s it like to have an enemy? Why is it so hard to make peace? I’ll think about countries in the Balkans, where people who have lived together for decades suddenly begin killing each other. What happens when neighbors turn into enemies?
I don’t think about abstract ideas like “parenting.” I think of bouncing a baby on my knee, of getting up in the middle of the night and staggering to a crib of a child who won’t stop crying, and of the feelings of love and anger that go along with all this.
Work on a Sermon Out Loud
My family learned that if they walk by my office and hear me mumbling, I’m working on a sermon. I get in imaginary conversations with people I want the sermon to help:
“Robinson, you say God wants us to love our neighbors, but what do you do when you go to wash their feet and they kick you in the mouth? How many times do you get kicked before you say, ‘Forget it’?”
“You have to get kicked three times,” I’ll continue out loud to myself, “and then you can break his toes. No, I wouldn’t say that. What would I say?”
Working through a sermon aloud helps crystallize our thinking. It also gives us a feel for the flow of thought in the text.
Borrow
God doesn’t give us any points for originality. He gives points for being faithful and clear. To have sitting on our shelves books from the great teachers of the world, people who have spent years of their lives studying a book like Romans, and not use them is to deny the many contributions of Christ’s church. To think that in three hours of exegesis we’re going to match the insights of those who’ve spent years studying a book is a mistake.
But save commentaries for later in the process. If we go to the commentaries too quickly, they frame our thoughts. But once I have read through a passage and know where my difficulties lie, commentators become our teachers.
Observe and Interpret Daily Life
Helmut Thielicke said, “The world is God’s picture book.” We can waste a lot of experiences. There are lessons in every day’s events, in things as mundane as getting stuck in traffic or hearing a joke.
This is especially so when something happens that touches us emotionally, either positively or negatively. Even if I don’t immediately grasp its significance, I write the anecdote down on a 3x5 card and reflect on it. It’s a piece of life that someday will fit some insight, illustration, or sermon.
Reading books and magazines and watching movies and television—even commercials—is another way of observing life. I recently watched the Italian movie Jean de Florette, which begins with a city dweller inheriting a farm, moving to the country, and trying to learn farming from books. Wanting the farm for themselves, some unscrupulous neighbors block a spring that irrigates the farm. The new owner, unaware that he owns spring water, prays for rain. Storm clouds gather, but the rain falls on the other side of the mountain, never watering his land. Eventually the man dies, and the corrupt men buy his farm for next to nothing. There the movie ends.
I turned off the VCR profoundly depressed. I said to my wife, “That’s the way many people see the world. Evil triumphs—The End.” If I ever preach on Ahab stealing Nabal’s vineyard, though, that movie will be part of my introduction.
The questions I ask about ads are, What do they want people to do? And how are they motivating them? Marketers spend millions of research dollars to learn what motivates people. Watching their ads, we see the results of their research.
In one recent ad, a school appealed for new students, stating repeatedly that graduates make more money. The school didn’t promise its classes would make students deeper, better people or open the door to a more fulfilling career. The carrot being dangled was money. In preaching, I can use that ad to raise the question of whether money alone is ultimately going to satisfy.
As another tributary for high-water preaching, I make it a point to converse with people different from me. I’ve learned to make the most of the power of questions: How do you make your living? In your field of work, what are your biggest problems? Who are the successful people in your world? What makes people winners or losers to you? What do you have to worry about? If you could have anything in the world, what would it be?
One of the most meaningful conversations I’ve had recently was with a person who has AIDS. He had been involved in a homosexual relationship with a man with whom he thought he had a “love-bonding relationship.”
“He didn’t tell me he had AIDS,” he said sadly. He described his fears of dying in a few years and his anger that someone he loved had done something that would kill him. He talked about his feelings of regret, of being ostracized, of wanting others to care but not sensing their care, of being sexually frustrated yet at the same time hating sex for its drawing power. “I couldn’t do to another human being what that man did to me,” he said.
Through all of this, he had become a Christian. Talking with him helped me better understand people in such situations. Such conversations feed my soul and add richness to preaching.
Soul Attention
The more full our souls, the more we can preach without running dry. Of the many spiritual disciplines that enlarge spirit, mind, and soul, we need to find the ones that benefit us the most.
I have a friend whose son has joined a monastery in pursuit of spirituality. He finds great benefit from the vow of silence and from long periods of meditation on Scripture. Such disciplines have less benefit for me. But it is impossible for me to overstate how much my friendships with certain people have challenged me. Although being with large groups does more to drain me than stimulate me, I will rearrange my calendar just to spend a day or two with a friend.
There’s a difference between someone who derives great pleasure from meditating on a sunset and someone who meditates on a sunset because that’s what “deep” people do. We can read in Preaching & Preachers what Martyn Lloyd-Jones says about the importance of urgency in preaching, but if we try to be more urgent without having the values and passions that produce urgency, our preaching will strike listeners as affected. The ideas, themes, experiences, virtues, authors, and art that have gripped our souls are the ones that fill our preaching cup.
The number of issues that need to be addressed is so vast, the quantity of preaching material in Scripture so great, the needs of people so inexhaustible, a preacher couldn’t finish the job in ten lifetimes. If we organize our sermonic work and stay full of God, more often than not, as we sit down to work out our sermons, we will not only have something to say, we will have more to say than time allows.
Taken from Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching, The by CRAIG BRIAN LARSON; HADDON ROBINSON. Copyright © 2005 by Christianity Today International.
Haddon Robinson (ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary; MA, Southern Methodist University; PhD, University of Illinois) is the Harold John Ockenga Distinguished Professor of Preaching at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and he is widely regarded as an expert in the area of preaching.
Preaching well is hard work. We’re expected to be witty, warm, and wise. And then next week, we have to do it again.
The great science fiction writer H. G. Wells reportedly said most people only think once or twice in a lifetime, whereas he had made an international reputation by thinking once or twice a year. Lots of pastors have to think once (or more) a week! More often than we would like to admit, we begin preparing a sermon with the feeling not that we have something to say, but that we have to say something. Only one time in twenty do I start my preparation feeling that this sermon will go well. The creative process is accompanied with a feeling of ambiguity and uncertainty, of trying to make the unknown known.
Like the homemaker whose goal of three nutritious meals a day is complicated by toddlers making messes, demands of a part-time job, overflowing baskets of laundry, and a phone that won’t stop ringing, the multiple demands of pastoral life make fresh thinking and sermon writing even more difficult.
People never die at convenient times. The administrative load preoccupies pastors with scores of details that won’t go away. Emotional weariness from dealing with people problems drains creative energies. And speaking several times weekly outstrips your capacity to assimilate truth fully into your life.
Just as savvy homemakers find resourceful ways to feed their families—a deft combination of ten-minute recipes, healthy snacks, a microwave special, and a few full-course evening feasts—pastors, too, can find ways to keep tasty and balanced spiritual meals on the table.
Distinct Phases
When we feel we don’t have anything to say in a sermon, it’s usually because we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. We’re thinking about the sermon before we’ve understood the text. Instead, we need to divide our sermon preparation into two distinct phases.What Am I Going to Say?
I start the process by focusing on content, not delivery. Approaching a text with the attitude How am I going to get a sermon out of this? pollutes the process. We can end up manipulating the text for the purposes of an outline instead of first trying to observe, interpret, and appreciate the text.
For one message based on the story of Christ’s calming the storm, I began my study assuming my sermon’s main idea would be that we can count on Christ to calm the wind and waves in our lives. But as I studied the text, I realized I couldn’t promise the people they would never sink just because Christ was with them in the storms of life.
This passage has to be seen in its broader context. Jesus has called the disciples and told them about the nature of his kingdom: It will start small but spread wide. In that early stage, everything depended on the men in that boat—Jesus and the disciples. If they go under, the kingdom is gone. The point of the passage is that those who have committed everything to Christ’s cause can know that the kingdom will ultimately triumph because of the power of the King. This is an eternal truth that shifts the emphasis from the personal storms in my life and whether I will sink to the eternal kingdom that will never fail. If I promised that Christ would calm every storm, I would have twisted the text to say what I wanted. Instead I preached what the text taught me.
I have learned to let understanding the text dominate the sermon process early and later let sermonizing dominate. I have more material than I can preach when I first try to understand and interpret a text for its own sake. I ask,
What is the biblical writer doing?
Then I study the context for the flow of thought. (I usually get more preachable insights from context than from studying the grammar and word structure of the original language.) By studying the context, for example, I came up with a major lead for a sermon on 1 Peter 5. “To the elders among you,” writes Peter, “I appeal as a fellow elder, a witness of Christ’s sufferings and one who also will share in the glory to be revealed” (v. 1). In my study, I found the theme of suffering accompanied by glory runs throughout 1 Peter. Whether in marriage, government, family—or church—when we suffer for Christ, we experience the glory of Christ. My sermon therefore pointed to this theme as it applied to leaders in the church.
How Am I Going to Say It?
In this phase, I move to the communication question. How will I get the ideas I’ve uncovered in the passage across to people in a way that interests, informs, motivates, and changes them? Out of all that I could say about this passage, what will I choose to say?
This part of the process can also provide us with something significant to say. Early on I ask, Which of the following tacks is the biblical writer taking here: Is he primarily (a) explaining, (b) proving, or (c) applying?
(a) If the passage majors in explanation, then my sermon will major in teaching. In the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14), the primary purpose of this passage is to teach that the person who sees God as God and humbles himself before him is justified and exalted, and the person who exalts himself before God remains in his sins.
Accordingly, my sermon majors in explanation, not exhortation. I dig beneath the assumptions we have about the Pharisees and tax collectors, helping my listeners get into the minds of these two men. What did they think about themselves? What did others think about them? How would these roles look today? I talked about the nature of the sins of hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and disobedience.
(b) One of the best ways to overcome “sermon block” is to think through What’s hard to believe about this passage? We can underrate the need to prove the truth of a text. Even if there isn’t a skeptical bone in our body, we need to ask, Will those who hear me believe this? Does this conform to my and their experience? If not, why not?
Our experience doesn’t govern the Bible, but we need to explain perceived discrepancies between what the Bible says and our reality. Suppose someone hears a passage, “If two of you on earth agree on anything, it will be done for you.” She wonders, What if I want a blue Cadillac? If I can get two of the elders to agree with me in prayer, is that a done deal? Like most people, she questions, Do I believe that?
In my sermon, I try to be an advocate for that person. She won’t raise her hand and interrupt me, but like most people in the pews today, she listens to sermons with a keen sense of skepticism. The preacher who ignores that is ignoring reality. C. S. Lewis has been popular in recent decades largely because he deals with the “Is this really true?” question. He assumed people needed to be convinced.
(c) Good ideas for preaching also emerge as we apply the Bible’s truths to people’s lives. Sermon ideas ignite when the flint of people’s problems strikes the steel of God’s Word. Sometimes we can’t come up with much to say because our thinking is too steely; it’s all God’s Word, but we don’t link it to specific situations in contemporary life. Other times we come up short because we’re too flinty; we’re people-oriented, but we lack the authoritative content that only Scripture can bring.
But we almost always spark a preaching flame if we strike those two elements together. So part of my preparation is to ask these application questions: What difference does this make? What are the implications for our lives in this text? If someone takes this truth seriously and tries to live it on Monday morning, how will he or she live differently?
Kitchen Helpers
Like labor-saving devices in the kitchen, there are ways to write a sermon that can relieve the pressure of finding something to say. Here are six “kitchen helpers.”Develop a Preaching Calendar
Many pastors set up a plan for what they will preach over the next quarter, half-year, or year. We can take a retreat for several days and ask ourselves what the needs of the congregation are, what subjects we sense God impressing on our hearts, what themes we have an avid interest in.
A preaching calendar doesn’t have to confine us. If some brilliant stroke from God strikes us, we can always change our plans. But it not, when we walk into the study, we have a sense of well-thought-through, well-prayed-through direction. My calendars have been based primarily on expository series through complete books of the Bible (which provides more than enough grist for any mill).
Once a calendar is set, we can set up file folders for each series of sermons, which become repositories for the relevant material we come across in the weeks and months before the sermon is preached. When the time finally comes to begin preparing the sermon, we already have a file of illustrations, quotes, and insights.
Work on Sermons in Ten-Day Cycles
The purpose of a longer cycle is to provide simmer time. On the Thursday ten days prior to the Sunday I will preach, I do my exegetical study. I read the text and think about it till I hit a wall. Then I write down what is holding me up: What words don’t I understand? What issues can’t I solve? What ideas don’t make sense? If you can’t state specifically what your problems are, you won’t get answers.
Thus, ten days before I preach a sermon, I know what I need to be thinking about, which I do while driving the car, taking a shower, or lying awake at night. This also directs my reading. I know where the gaps in my understanding are, and I can more quickly find the answers. I can cull twenty commentaries in an hour if I know the key questions. Often when I sit down to resume study the following Tuesday, the issues in the passage are much clearer. I wonder, What in the world was I so hung up about?
When I preached a sermon on the seven churches of Revelation, I grew curious about the seven cities and how they affected the churches. I did some extra research that added significant insights. If I had been writing this sermon the day or two before preaching, I couldn’t have done that.
My next study time in the cycle is five days later, on Tuesday, when I finish up my exegetical work and organize the sermon. By the end of Tuesday, I want at least to have the sermon’s homiletical skeleton and introduction completed. I may also have begun shaping the main movements.
My final writing installment takes place on Friday. I finish writing and actually have time to rearrange and polish.
Get Double Duty Off Study
Duane Litfin, president of Wheaton College, first introduced me to the idea of preparing two sermons from research on one preaching passage. When he was pastoring in Memphis, if his Sunday morning message primarily explained or proved the truth of a passage, on Sunday night he focused on application. Or, on Sunday night he developed a subtheme of a passage that couldn’t be given justice in the Sunday morning message. In Philippians 2:1-11, for example, he might preach in the morning on Christlike humility and on Sunday night, the doctrine of Christ’s humanity.
Think Visually
Think of words on a spectrum, with abstract words and ideas at the top of the ladder and concrete ideas at the bottom. Scholars climb up the ladder of abstraction; communicators step down to get as close to specifics as possible. When I have an idea without a specific picture in my mind, nothing interesting happens in me. But my mind starts to roll when I have an image.
When I study a text, I ask, What image was in the biblical writer’s mind as he wrote this? If the subject is reconciliation, he didn’t write about some abstract doctrine; he was thinking about enemies who made peace. As I study such a passage, I pose questions that keep me close to real life: What’s it like to have an enemy? Why is it so hard to make peace? I’ll think about countries in the Balkans, where people who have lived together for decades suddenly begin killing each other. What happens when neighbors turn into enemies?
I don’t think about abstract ideas like “parenting.” I think of bouncing a baby on my knee, of getting up in the middle of the night and staggering to a crib of a child who won’t stop crying, and of the feelings of love and anger that go along with all this.
Work on a Sermon Out Loud
My family learned that if they walk by my office and hear me mumbling, I’m working on a sermon. I get in imaginary conversations with people I want the sermon to help:
“Robinson, you say God wants us to love our neighbors, but what do you do when you go to wash their feet and they kick you in the mouth? How many times do you get kicked before you say, ‘Forget it’?”
“You have to get kicked three times,” I’ll continue out loud to myself, “and then you can break his toes. No, I wouldn’t say that. What would I say?”
Working through a sermon aloud helps crystallize our thinking. It also gives us a feel for the flow of thought in the text.
Borrow
God doesn’t give us any points for originality. He gives points for being faithful and clear. To have sitting on our shelves books from the great teachers of the world, people who have spent years of their lives studying a book like Romans, and not use them is to deny the many contributions of Christ’s church. To think that in three hours of exegesis we’re going to match the insights of those who’ve spent years studying a book is a mistake.
But save commentaries for later in the process. If we go to the commentaries too quickly, they frame our thoughts. But once I have read through a passage and know where my difficulties lie, commentators become our teachers.
Tributaries for High-Water Preaching
I have developed habits that help me collect material for sermons on an ongoing basis (not just for the sermon I will be preaching this Sunday). They are tributaries for high-water preaching.Observe and Interpret Daily Life
Helmut Thielicke said, “The world is God’s picture book.” We can waste a lot of experiences. There are lessons in every day’s events, in things as mundane as getting stuck in traffic or hearing a joke.
This is especially so when something happens that touches us emotionally, either positively or negatively. Even if I don’t immediately grasp its significance, I write the anecdote down on a 3x5 card and reflect on it. It’s a piece of life that someday will fit some insight, illustration, or sermon.
Reading books and magazines and watching movies and television—even commercials—is another way of observing life. I recently watched the Italian movie Jean de Florette, which begins with a city dweller inheriting a farm, moving to the country, and trying to learn farming from books. Wanting the farm for themselves, some unscrupulous neighbors block a spring that irrigates the farm. The new owner, unaware that he owns spring water, prays for rain. Storm clouds gather, but the rain falls on the other side of the mountain, never watering his land. Eventually the man dies, and the corrupt men buy his farm for next to nothing. There the movie ends.
I turned off the VCR profoundly depressed. I said to my wife, “That’s the way many people see the world. Evil triumphs—The End.” If I ever preach on Ahab stealing Nabal’s vineyard, though, that movie will be part of my introduction.
The questions I ask about ads are, What do they want people to do? And how are they motivating them? Marketers spend millions of research dollars to learn what motivates people. Watching their ads, we see the results of their research.
In one recent ad, a school appealed for new students, stating repeatedly that graduates make more money. The school didn’t promise its classes would make students deeper, better people or open the door to a more fulfilling career. The carrot being dangled was money. In preaching, I can use that ad to raise the question of whether money alone is ultimately going to satisfy.
As another tributary for high-water preaching, I make it a point to converse with people different from me. I’ve learned to make the most of the power of questions: How do you make your living? In your field of work, what are your biggest problems? Who are the successful people in your world? What makes people winners or losers to you? What do you have to worry about? If you could have anything in the world, what would it be?
One of the most meaningful conversations I’ve had recently was with a person who has AIDS. He had been involved in a homosexual relationship with a man with whom he thought he had a “love-bonding relationship.”
“He didn’t tell me he had AIDS,” he said sadly. He described his fears of dying in a few years and his anger that someone he loved had done something that would kill him. He talked about his feelings of regret, of being ostracized, of wanting others to care but not sensing their care, of being sexually frustrated yet at the same time hating sex for its drawing power. “I couldn’t do to another human being what that man did to me,” he said.
Through all of this, he had become a Christian. Talking with him helped me better understand people in such situations. Such conversations feed my soul and add richness to preaching.
Soul Attention
The more full our souls, the more we can preach without running dry. Of the many spiritual disciplines that enlarge spirit, mind, and soul, we need to find the ones that benefit us the most.
I have a friend whose son has joined a monastery in pursuit of spirituality. He finds great benefit from the vow of silence and from long periods of meditation on Scripture. Such disciplines have less benefit for me. But it is impossible for me to overstate how much my friendships with certain people have challenged me. Although being with large groups does more to drain me than stimulate me, I will rearrange my calendar just to spend a day or two with a friend.
There’s a difference between someone who derives great pleasure from meditating on a sunset and someone who meditates on a sunset because that’s what “deep” people do. We can read in Preaching & Preachers what Martyn Lloyd-Jones says about the importance of urgency in preaching, but if we try to be more urgent without having the values and passions that produce urgency, our preaching will strike listeners as affected. The ideas, themes, experiences, virtues, authors, and art that have gripped our souls are the ones that fill our preaching cup.
The number of issues that need to be addressed is so vast, the quantity of preaching material in Scripture so great, the needs of people so inexhaustible, a preacher couldn’t finish the job in ten lifetimes. If we organize our sermonic work and stay full of God, more often than not, as we sit down to work out our sermons, we will not only have something to say, we will have more to say than time allows.
Pride Comes Before a Bad Sermon
By Tim Raymond
Tim Raymond has been the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Muncie, Indiana since April 2006. He received his MDiv from the Baptist Bible Seminary of Pennsylvania in 2004 and has pursued further education through the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation.
“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
—Proverbs 16:18 (ESV)
If you’ve preached more than, say, 25 sermons, you’ve almost certainly had the experience. Saturday evening you sit back in your desk chair, look at the sermon you intend to deliver the next morning, and marvel, “Is it possible? Have I really created the perfect sermon?” You begin to imagine the weeping masses falling down at the altar after your sermon pleading, “What must I do to be saved?” You picture J.I. Packer who, for some unknown reason, just so happens to attend your church that particular Sunday, turning to the man next to him in the pew saying, “I’d gladly exchange all my learning if I could move men’s hearts like that simple preacher.” You honestly start wondering, “Let’s just say I’m invited to speak at the next Together for the Gospel conference…”
Sunday morning comes and you bound into the pulpit with a spring in your step, a smile on your face, and confidence in your voice. You’re prepared and eager to be a guide to the blind, a light to those in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of children. But then the sermon begins. Ten minutes in, all your deacons have fallen asleep. Fifteen minutes in you’re thinking, “This is not going well at all. I hardly understand what I’m talking about.” Sweat begins pouring down your brow and you’re sure somebody must have forgotten to turn the AC on that morning. A few minutes later you begin seriously contemplating, “Maybe I should just call it quits right here and send everybody home early.” By the conclusion of your sermon you’re hoping your mother will let you move back into the basement since you’re fairly certain the parsonage will be vacant soon. The sermon you thought would ring forth like thunder from the heavens keeled over like a dead duck. What happened? The Lord has simply been faithful to his promise: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6).
While the scenario I just described is obviously somewhat exaggerated (emphasis on somewhat), I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve had this sort of experience many, many times in my relatively short career as a preacher. The Lord has taught me firsthand that He will not share His glory with another, including those who preach the unsearchable riches of Christ. And while I’m certainly slow to learn, my hope for this post is to communicate some of the lessons the Lord has taught me from these experiences with the goal of saving you, my brother-pastors, from the same humiliating fate.
In no particular order, here are some reflections for fighting pride as a preacher:
I trust these lessons are of some help to you, brother-pastors. Again, my hope is to spare you some of the humiliation the Lord has brought me through. As you preach the Word, in season and out, beware the perils of pride.
Tim Raymond has been the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Muncie, Indiana since April 2006. He received his MDiv from the Baptist Bible Seminary of Pennsylvania in 2004 and has pursued further education through the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation.
“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
—Proverbs 16:18 (ESV)
If you’ve preached more than, say, 25 sermons, you’ve almost certainly had the experience. Saturday evening you sit back in your desk chair, look at the sermon you intend to deliver the next morning, and marvel, “Is it possible? Have I really created the perfect sermon?” You begin to imagine the weeping masses falling down at the altar after your sermon pleading, “What must I do to be saved?” You picture J.I. Packer who, for some unknown reason, just so happens to attend your church that particular Sunday, turning to the man next to him in the pew saying, “I’d gladly exchange all my learning if I could move men’s hearts like that simple preacher.” You honestly start wondering, “Let’s just say I’m invited to speak at the next Together for the Gospel conference…”
Sunday morning comes and you bound into the pulpit with a spring in your step, a smile on your face, and confidence in your voice. You’re prepared and eager to be a guide to the blind, a light to those in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of children. But then the sermon begins. Ten minutes in, all your deacons have fallen asleep. Fifteen minutes in you’re thinking, “This is not going well at all. I hardly understand what I’m talking about.” Sweat begins pouring down your brow and you’re sure somebody must have forgotten to turn the AC on that morning. A few minutes later you begin seriously contemplating, “Maybe I should just call it quits right here and send everybody home early.” By the conclusion of your sermon you’re hoping your mother will let you move back into the basement since you’re fairly certain the parsonage will be vacant soon. The sermon you thought would ring forth like thunder from the heavens keeled over like a dead duck. What happened? The Lord has simply been faithful to his promise: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6).
While the scenario I just described is obviously somewhat exaggerated (emphasis on somewhat), I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve had this sort of experience many, many times in my relatively short career as a preacher. The Lord has taught me firsthand that He will not share His glory with another, including those who preach the unsearchable riches of Christ. And while I’m certainly slow to learn, my hope for this post is to communicate some of the lessons the Lord has taught me from these experiences with the goal of saving you, my brother-pastors, from the same humiliating fate.
In no particular order, here are some reflections for fighting pride as a preacher:
Prayerfully examine your heart daily for pride and repent quickly.
Pride is one of those sins that can infect your soul subtly (Proverbs 12:15). You may not realize it is there until you’re doing and thinking grotesque things. This temptation to pride is all the greater for those of us who regularly stand before crowds and congregations. Therefore, brother-pastors, you’ve got to be proactive in the war on pride. As part of your daily prayer time, include maybe two or three minutes of self-examination, looking for expressions of pride in the last 24 hours. Renounce these, repent, and claim the blood of Jesus for forgiveness and cleansing. If I could suggest a resource here, every pastor should prayerfully work through C.J. Mahaney’s Humility: True Greatness. It will give you much food for thought for fighting pride.Cultivate distrust for your own evaluations of your sermons.
For whatever reason, preachers can be the worst evaluators of their own messages. Like I illustrated above, some sermons I thought would change the world turned out to be absolute duds. Sometimes while I’m preaching I’ll think I’m experiencing the unction of the Spirit but afterward the response is, at best, ho-hum. The opposite has also been true: sermons I thought were terrible or incoherent, God chose to bless in a powerful way to the hearts of my hearers. The overarching lesson is to be suspicious of your appraisals of your sermons. By all means, do your best in the preparation and delivery of your messages, but leave the results entirely up to God.Grow in your realization that your sermon is entirely dependent upon God’s sovereign grace.
This is perhaps one of the top five lessons I’ve learned since assuming my role as preaching pastor of our church. Everything rides on God’s sovereign grace! I can put in 20 hours of exegesis, synthesis, and homiletics, but if I wake up Sunday morning with a pounding headache, it’ll be worthless. More importantly, if God doesn’t draw near to us by His Spirit through His Word to open hearts, to convict and give repentance, the best sermon will fall on dry bones. Sometimes the Lord gives His blessing on your sermons and sometimes He withholds it, and He has every right to do both. Therefore, be mindful that all our preaching, and indeed everything we do in pastoral ministry, is entirely contingent on a sovereign work of God’s Spirit. If I could suggest some resources here, two books that well understand this essential but neglected truth are Al Martin’s Preaching in the Holy Spirit and Martyn Lloyd Jones’ Preaching and Preachers. It’s appalling that most books on preaching say little to nothing about the work of the Spirit, but these two volumes hit the nail on the head.Pray desperately for an outpouring of God’s Spirit.
This point is an obvious application of the previous truth. If our sermons are entirely dependent on God’s sovereign grace, it stands to reason that we preachers should be diligently pleading with God throughout the week that He’ll pour out His Spirit come Sunday. Dedicate part of your daily prayer time to specifically praying for your upcoming sermon. Enlist your family members, congregation, and pastor-friends to beg God’s blessing on your preaching. After the sermon is over, pray that God would cause the Word to continue to percolate in the minds of those who heard the message. Something John Bunyan once said may apply most directly to preaching, “You can do more than pray, after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.” For more thinking on this point, I recommend E.M. Bounds’ classic Power Through Prayer [originally entitled Preacher and Prayer]. But be forewarned; reading it may make you feel compelled to quit the ministry.Exercise faith in the truth that God’s normal means of salvation and sanctification is the ordinary sermon.
Twenty-first century America is a culture of mindboggling technological feats, instant access internet, massive political rallies, and huge entertainment productions. Osama bin Laden can be eliminated halfway around the world and it’s on the news minutes later. One unfortunate side effect of this is that we begin to assume that it’s dramatic expressions and experiences that change the world. We have little place in our thinking for the slow, methodical, persevering mentality of the farmer. This kind of thinking can creep into the church with the result that we subtly begin to assume that it’s only the jaw-dropping, goose bump-producing, once-in-a-decade sermon that truly changes God’s people. This, in turn, leads us to think that if we don’t hit a homerun every time we preach, we’ve disappointed our people or failed as preachers. Realize, brother-pastors, in God’s mysterious providence, He more often than not uses the ordinary to do the extraordinary (1 Corinthians 1:26ff.). He more often uses base-hit sermons than homerun sermons to bring in the runs. Most of us will never preach a Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God; most of us will never be a John Piper or a Martyn Lloyd-Jones; but that’s okay. That’s actually God’s plan. If you’re faithfully expositing the Word, week after week, year after year, even if you’re an ordinary preacher, God’s Spirit will do His work. Sinners will be saved and the saints will be built up. And the gates of Hell will not prevail against the church.I trust these lessons are of some help to you, brother-pastors. Again, my hope is to spare you some of the humiliation the Lord has brought me through. As you preach the Word, in season and out, beware the perils of pride.
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