1. Tell the Story
2. Make the Main Idea Clear
3. Apply the Main Idea

In a bit more detail, here’s my suggested “default” starter outline:

Introduction – whatever is needed to make people want to listen to you and to the passage and message.

1. Tell the story – tell the story so people can imagine it happening.  Tell it accurately, tell it engagingly, tell it with energy.
2. Main Idea – make it clear what we are supposed to learn from this story. What is the main point the author is trying to communicate?
3. Application – take some time to describe the difference this idea could make, should make, to our lives.  Be specific.

Conclusion – review the main point, encourage application, stop.

So here’s a question from Philip on this site the other day: What differences should their be when preaching narrative passages to an audience of children as opposed to an audience of adults?  Will the differences be in the manner the story is told or taught?  Or only in the truths the story teaches?

Difference in Manner?  I would say not especially.  While we might feel the need to be more exaggerated and “hyped” to keep the attention of children, I suspect they can be gripped by a well told story minus excessive clowning from us.  On the other hand, perhaps we need to utilize more energy and motion in our story telling to adults!?

Difference in Truth?  I would say not especially.  We might state the truth more simply to children, but a story has one main idea.  That is the main idea whoever the audience.  A story isn’t theologically loaded for adults, but a simple moral instruction for children.  What changes is how we present and apply that specific truth.

Difference in Application?  Yes, this would be different.  We don’t need to help children imagine trusting God’s goodness in the face of employment challenges.  But the same truth is needed in their school and home experiences.

Difference in Awareness?  Yes, this is the main thing that comes to my mind.  Children don’t have the same historical and geographical/spatial awareness that adults tend to have.  We need to beware of assuming too much knowledge with adults too (in an increasingly biblically illiterate society), but I think details in a text that may be fascinating to adults can be confusing to children.

Same passage, same truth, but differing levels of detail, and differing specifics of application.

What do you think?

Steve Mathewson explains what good stories do:

Proclaiming a well-studied story in a well-prepared way will do what good stories intend to do: sneak past the listener’s defenses to penetrate the heart.

And I suppose this is painfully obvious, so please excuse my fatigued new-Dad-again state, but what we need to do as preachers is understand the stories we preach as well as possible, shape our messages as well as possible and then present our messages (including telling the stories) as well as possible.

Let’s hear a bit more from Steve Mathewson’s great book on preaching Old Testament Narrative (p157):

“Stories move.  They have tension, movement, interaction, emotion.  We cannot tell a story while standing like a four-storey building.  We need to consider motion, body language, and emotion in voice, face and gesture.  Consider how to physically and subtly represent the movement of the story on the platform.  Don’t get stuck behind the pulpit (Spurgeon called it a “coward’s castle!”)  Always point to Goliath in the same direction, generally let time flow from left to right from their perspective, etc.  Stories move.  Good storytellers generally do too.  And the best storytellers move physically, in large gesture and with clear expressions in a way that is consistently natural!  Being natural takes work!

Next week I want to probe preaching narrative a bit more.  For the most profuse genre in the Bible, my sense is that it doesn’t get the attention it deserves in many pulpit ministries.

1. Be sure to grasp and preach the main point.  A story does not consist of details collected together to offer you numerous launch points for vaguely connected ideas and insights.  The story consists of details deliberately chosen to help make the story work, to make the main point effective.  Be sure to grapple with the main point more than you hunt for “preaching points.”

2. Be careful to honour the form as well as the content.  Why chop it up and preach it as discourse when God made it a story?  This means that the bulk of your message should involve the best retelling of the story that you can manage.  Speaking of which, two critical elements of powerful story preaching:

3. Put your energy into effective description.  Study hard so you can describe well.  Build your sensory descriptive vocabulary so you can describe effectively.  Read C.S.Lewis or another great fiction writer to get a taste of compelling description.  Turn on your imagination again, because if you can see it, they will see it.  Take enough time for your descriptions to form on the screens in the listeners’ minds.  And pour similar energy into describing the application of your message too.  Speaking of energy…

4. Present with energy through engaging dynamism.  To be blunt, people don’t listen to dull stories.  To be honest, we rarely tell dull stories in normal life.  Ask me about my littlest girl’s birth last week and I’ll be engagingly dynamic.  I need to let that version of me show when I preach a Bible story.  When you preach a Bible story, remember that if you really care so it shows, they will care too.

I think these four suggestions are the very essence of powerfully preaching a Bible story.  What would you add?

I’ve been trying to get hold of a commentary series on the books of Samuel that does a stunning job of demonstrating the interconnectedness of the individual stories (a rarity in commentaries on narrative books!)

I’ve been pondering how the gospel writers wove together events and parables in a way that honoured their historicity, yet communicated their own theological emphases under the inspiration of God.  The gospels are not simply four perspectives on a car accident, it’s much richer than that!

So as we engage a story, we must break open the blinkers of the section headings and get a sense of what is going on around our focus text.  The context almost always sheds light on the point of our focus.

What is true on a local level, is also true on a macro level.  To be effective preachers, we need to be whole Bible people.  That is, we need to have a sense of how the whole fits together, not just historically, but as a greater plot.

The tension underlying every narrative is the fall of Genesis 3.  The characters in every plot are people responding to God as they hear His Word.  The resolution to the problem of Genesis 3 can never be the moral successes of particular characters, but rather the amazing intervention of God’s grace incarnated.

While we don’t need to always finish the macro story, we must always be aware of how our particular text fits into that larger narrative.  Only then can we be sure to avoid the simplistic little niceties of sharing tips for successful living through ancient tales with moral morals.  For whether we realize it or not, how we live this Thursday is part of the great narrative of God’s grace being spurned or celebrated in the epic of history and the annals of eternity.

So on a book by book level, on a canon-wide level, and on a history as a whole level, we must see individual plots as part of the bigger plot of God’s great story.  As preachers we have the privilege of shining light both in narrow focus, and in broad illumination.

Plot – the skeleton of every story, both fictional and historic, is the plot.  Every story has a plot, for without one it wouldn’t be a story.  At its most simple, a plot consists in a tension eventually resolved.  A tension is created in the context of an imaginable situation.  Somehow that tension is then resolved, or left uncomfortably unresolved in some examples.  Our primary task as we interpret a story is to grapple with its main point, as it grapples with us, and that main point will be tied into the resolution to the tension (or a comment on it).

People – every story has characters, and those characters are people (either in human form, or sometimes personified).  People engage us, for we too, are people.  So we identify with one character, but disassociate from another.  We can’t help ourselves.  Well told story will always engage us, whether it is from the cinematographer’s projector, or from the pulpit.

In – here’s the key word, in.  The characters are in real life situations, living in response to a real God.  We listeners find ourselves in their shoes, and they in ours.  We enter into stories.  Stories enter into us.  We live life in stories, and every decision we make, we make in response to our God – how we view Him, how we perceive His love toward us, etc.  Every story of our week is somehow shaped by how we have been captured by the story of our God entering in to the story of humanity.

If we view Bible stories as mere illustrative material, then we are blinded, not only to the richness of God’s Word, but also to the reality of God’s world in which we live.

Ever Old – Every sermon we preach is made of recycled materials.  All of us are standing on the shoulders of the giants who’ve gone before us (and sadly some are standing on the shoulders of non-giants too).  If I stop to think about it, as I prepare a message, I am in the debt of so many people, and I never have new source material.

Ever Old Influences: As I think about yesterday’s two messages, there are too many influences to name.  My mind scans over the preachers I have heard over the years, the professors at seminary who taught me how to handle the Bible, who taught through those particular books in survey or exegesis courses, who taught me the languages, who taught me homiletics and theology and pastoral ministry, etc.  I think of the conversation partners I turned to in the form of commentaries, and the footnotes attest to some of those that influenced them.  I could go on, but you see my point.  I’ve preached hundreds of messages, probably into the thousands, and it would be a bit self-aggrandizing to suggest that I have generated more than a few truly original thoughts.

Ever Old Material: While I pulled out a few illustrative elements for yesterday (and didn’t look them up in an anthology of distant impersonal illustrations), the bulk of the material was the Word of God.We must be ever wary of the temptation to think our thoughts, be they original or probably not, are somehow better source material than the ever living Word of God!  Yesterday in the course of my preaching I returned to texts that I’ve preached in this church in the past year, and without apology.  We need to hear God’s Word.

Always New – Every sermon we preach is new.  The text of Scripture doesn’t change, but everything else does.  The preacher can never stand still.  Either the preacher has grown, or the preacher has stagnated and changed negatively, but life never stands still.  Two congregations can never be the same in constituents or their circumstances, even if it is the same church.  The situation is always fresh.  Different preacher, different listeners, different occasion, different set of needs.  I suppose, in theory, I could preach the same text in the same church once a month for the next several years and never preach an identical sermon.

Tomorrow we’ll probe a bit beyond this foundational level as we seek to be good stewards of a preaching ministry.

Here’s the thing.  If we had looked at just the particular verse, even a good few minutes of studying it wouldn’t have been enough.  We had to look at the surrounding context.  By the end of our time in that passage, my own view of it had changed significantly.  But we could have easily misunderstood the verse, even with our initial reading the context.

As we look at any passage in the Bible, we must be quick to look and slow to decide.

Quick to look at context – This is not the same as looking quickly at context. What is going on before and after the passage? What is the tone of the section? What is the flow of the section? In the case of the verse we were considering, it began an apparently new section in the epistle, but we had to go back and see what came before or we would have misunderstood it.

Quick to look at connectives – The flow of the text depends, in part, on the author’s use of “for” and “therefore” and “so” and “and”, etc.  Little words that make a big difference.  In this case I continued to ponder the passage after others were off into broader context, and looking at the connectives I started to ponder the structure.

Quick to look at syntax – What was the structure of that paragraph?  What is the dominant thought and what is subordinate/supportive?  Phrase by phrase, how does it work?

Slow to decide – Without the extra looking and being open to learning about the flow and structure of the immediate context, our target verse would have been essentially misunderstood.  Every one of us had an automatic sense about the verse, but careful observation proved that our sense was wrong.  I am so glad for that reminder of the importance of being quick to look, but slow to decide.  I’d hate to have preached it the way that seemed obvious from first reading, when in fact the whole tone of the text is almost a polar opposite!

So on one extreme there are those that seek to wax eloquent to show their own so-called wisdom.  At the other extreme we have Biblical wisdom, such as that in Proverbs.  Then in the middle are preachers trying to share a word in season, especially in this season when so many make their annual pilgrimage to a place of worship.  And in the midst of it all, I can’t help but wonder at the Word of God who became flesh and pitched his tent among us.  Even before he learned to speak words on Mary and Joseph’s laps, he was the Word incarnate – so small, so tiny, yet the most powerful message the world has ever known.

Allow me to repeat the words of Richard Sibbes that I shared here a few weeks ago:

“We cannot too often meditate of these things.  It is the life and soul of a Christian.  It is the marrow of the gospel.  It is the wonder of wonders.  We need not wonder at anything after this.” (Sibbes, Works 5:485)

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Next Week - 

Survey Results: Missing Ingredients in Effective Preaching

1. Preaching topically may be fine.  I’ve avoided the more obvious approach of addressing a subject that Proverbs addresses with multiple references, but it’s fine to do that.  And it would be fine to not be exhaustive, why not just focus more on two or three proverbs and aim for effectiveness over exhaustiveness?

2. Preaching a shorter sermon will be appreciated.  I’ve shared how a full-length sermon may be possible from a two line truth, but why not preach short?  Finish ten minutes early and your listeners may talk about the message for years!

3. Preaching a section may be effective.  You can check out Bruce Waltke and discover structure that you’ve never seen before.  Or you can go where my Hebrew prof suggested . . . preach a series of apparently random proverbs since that is how life is experienced from our perspective.

4. Remember that Proverbs is primarily observation, not promise.  Don’t turn an observation of life lived under the covenant of Deuteronomy 28-30 into a promise for all people of God in every age.

5. Preach a pugilistic match-up of contemporary wisdom with Proverbial sagacity.  That is, take a saying from our culture and watch it lose in a fight with one of God’s inspired sayings.

6. Preach Proverbs with humour and with poetry.  Help people see what life is like and what it could be like with a healthy dose of sanctified wit and biblically saturated poetic presentation.  Certainly the main idea should be proverbial, poetic, memorable, pithy, precise.

7. Preach Proverbs for living with godly wisdom, don’t preach godly wisdom to fuel the fires of self-centred success.

8. Provoke further thought, don’t bore listeners into submission as if your extensive knowledge is the focus.  Their further thought, in the fear of Lord, worked into their hearts and lives: that is the focus.

And if you don’t have it yet, get hold of a copy of Jeff Arthurs book, Preaching with Variety – his chapter on Proverbs alone is worth the price of the book.  Actually, the rest is good too . . . and I will be giving a copy away on the facebook page promotion later this month – click here to go to the promo information.

1. Repetition.  In both cases the preachers repeated the main idea (the proverb) multiple times.  It never felt forced or tedious, but it did tattoo the truths on the hearts of those listening.  Proverbs are designed to be memorable.  While we don’t have the memorability of the original language to aid us, repetition certainly helped.

2. Memorability.  We don’t have sound-play in the wording like the Hebrew, but memorability can be achieved in other ways.  In the first example Haddon Robinson achieved memorability by pursuing visualization.  That is, through vivid description, the listeners could see what he described, and having seen it on the screen of their hearts, they wouldn’t forget.  In the second example, Gene Curtis achieved memorability by a different type of sound-play.  Not the sounds of the words, but the clever use of a repeated first line of a song.  Actually, this musical marker was so effective in flagging up the need for the proverb because he ended the mini-rendition by tweaking the tune into a melancholic minor key each time – a refrain introducing the main idea each time.

3. Non-linearity.  Neither sermon imposed what felt like a foreign sermon structure on the text.  There was no overt three point with sub-point presentation involved.  Both felt relaxed and slightly circular, yet on paper could have been defined using standard outlining, of course.  There wasn’t the urgency of a narrative, or the driving progression in logic of an epistle.  The structure seemed to fit the genre.

4. Application.  Both sermons were marked by specific, tangible, relevant and vivid application.  While the one placed greater emphasis on explanation, both felt absolutely preached to the listener, to mark the listener and to bring about transformation.  I’m sure many of us could manage it, but surely it must be wrong to turn a practical, vivid, life truth, into an academic curio.  It takes great intellect to make something simple and clear, but a lesser preacher can impress and confuse the listener.  Hey, was that a contemporary antithetical distich?  Nice.

Tomorrow I’ll finish the series . . .