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?

All too often I come across childrens’ ministry that seems like random ancient tales with a moral.  An interesting little tale from long ago and far away that is offered with a moral moral – do this, don’t do that.  But then children go to school where the tales told in the classroom don’t begin with “once upon a time,” but with “the scientists know that…”  All too easily the children in our Sunday School classes make the inevitable observation that there is more truth in one environment than the other.

Children need to have their Bible stories offered more carefully – with theology and historicity included, not to mention the gospel in all its glory.

But then we look at ministry among adults.  All too often it is abstract doctrine combined with moral exhortation.  A book we agree must be honoured is often dishonoured by being presented in dull, lifeless abstraction.  Then these adults go to a media saturated world where moral shaping doesn’t begin with a prayer and a verse, but with credits and a powerful opening sequence.  The world knows not to lecture us on what to believe and to do, but rather to dress it up in George Clooney’s wardrobe and wrap it in a plot.  Adults do their duty by sitting through sermons, and are shaped by a week full of stories saturated in moral guidance, political direction and conscience numbing power.

Adults need to have their hearts gripped and shaped by engaging Bible stories, where theology and truth are dressed up in real life!

God gave us a lot of His Word in story form.  This was not merely to resource childrens ministries, nor to furnish preachers with an anthology of sanctified illustrations.  It was because God is a great communicator, and because the truth about God is that His truth is incarnational.

Bible stories dress up truth in real life, they are theology in concrete.  Our privilege is to accurately, compellingly, engagingly re-present God’s great communication as we preach His real Word to this, His real world.  If we relegate stories to childrens ministry alone, then we restrict ourselves to a small segment of His Word.  Furthermore, we blind ourselves to the narratival features of the apparently “non-story” genres.

Over the next few days, I’d like to nudge us back toward preaching our theology in the dress of real life.  Let’s revisit the world of the Bible story well preached!

There’s plenty on this subject online already, so I’ll just offer a few thoughts on recycling content that is not our own:

1. As ministers of God’s Word, we should have higher standards than academics and journalists (and they can lose their jobs over it).  Sadly, some act as if everything is fair game for cutting, pasting and preaching as if it is personal work.

2. Oral communication doesn’t require, and cannot support, the tedious footnoting needed in academic work.  But it does need integrity.  If I’m quoting the words of someone else, I mustn’t give the sense that they are my own.  Last Sunday, for several reasons, I quoted “a great figure from church history” (and was fully prepared for people to ask who that was after the message).

3. Appropriately using a well-turned phrase or a helpful illustration as part of a message that is unequivocally yours is not the same thing as lifting a whole outline or sermon and preaching it as if it were your own.  The latter is stealing intellectual property, it is deceitful toward your listeners, and it is cheating both yourself and others due to your lack of time in prayerful biblical preparation.

4. First person illustrations from someone else should not be shared in the first person.  If it didn’t happen to you, and you give the impression that it did, you are lying.

5. Inasmuch as I’ve tried to be clear here, we need wisdom since there is so much that is unclear in this issue.  May our wisdom be thoroughly shaped by the good character of the God we represent as we preach!

Undoubtedly, a recycled sermon takes less preparation time than a sermon from scratch on a passage previously never preached.  But my suggestion, if you are preparing to re-preach an old sermon, would be to follow a process along these lines:

1. Prayerfully consider the text itself before looking at the old notes or outline.  Even if you only have time for a brief engagement with the text, there needs to be a freshness about your approach to it, even if the end result remains the same in terms of message outline and details (since the passage does communicate something specific, and that, at one level, does not change).  Be sure to feel the impact of the text on your heart as you pray through it.

2. Prayerfully consider the specifics of this occasion before looking at the old notes or outline.  It is good to get a clear image of who the message will be preached to on this occasion.  What are their circumstances, what are their needs?

3. Prayerfully walk through the whole passage preparation process as you reconsider the previously preached sermon (or ideally, your old exegetical notes).  Why are you selecting this text?  What are the pertinent elements of exegesis that should drive your understanding of this text?  What do you now think was the author’s purpose in writing this text?  Is that main idea still the best summary you can make of this text?  You may find that your interim growth and biblical studies have changed your level of understanding so that you start tweaking your old passage or study notes.  If you only look at the end product (outline, notes, etc.) then you are preaching without the richness of the exegesis that didn’t make it into the notes, but was fresh on your heart.

4. Prayerfully walk through the message preparation process as you reconsider the old sermon.  What is your message purpose this time, this congregation, this occasion?  Can you improve the message idea to fit this particular preaching event, or to better reflect the text’s idea?  Is your old outline the most effective idea delivery strategy?  Do the details of introduction, conclusion and “illustrative materials” fit?  You may well find that the message also changes in some ways.

5. If at all possible, prayerfully preach it through out loud.  Listeners can spot a stale notes-dependent presentation.  Just because it looks ok on paper, does not mean it can be preached with freshness from your heart and mouth.  Run through it and prayerfully “own it” again.

This may seem like a lot of work, but actually I could do this process in less than a couple of hours (plus the run through of step 5).  This is a lot less time than a full sermon from scratch, and as we’ll see tomorrow, time saving is not the only benefit.

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.

Some that I preach.  Some that others preach.  The sermon is moving along well, perhaps moving at a decent pace through a text, engaging and interesting, then suddenly, the sermon seems to go into thick mud.  Suddenly the momentum is lost and the experience for preacher and listener alike changes significantly.

Why does this happen?  The message is following the standard guidelines for sermons.  The text is being explained, the relevance is being emphasized, illustrative material is helping listeners see the message clearly, etc.  But momentum drains away and progress becomes elusive and there is a struggle on for the next ten to fifteen minutes as the sermon simply seems to stand still.

I was observing this recently from the listener’s side.  It seemed that at a certain point in the journey through the message, the momentum stopped and we felt like we were spinning our wheels.  Restatement.  Repetition.  Illustration.  Repetition.  Illustration.  But no progress.

Have you experienced this phenomena?  What would you suggest to avoid it happening?  I’d suggest we look at the outline or manuscript and prayerfully evaluate it for progress and momentum, as well as for content and clarity.  While a third illustration under the same point may compound the clarity, it might also feel like an anchor keeping the sermon from arriving at its destination.

I’d also suggest prayerfully preaching through a sermon to experience it through your own ears.  Sometimes sermons look perfect on paper, but in reality simply don’t “come out well.”

One more suggestion – when it happens, take the time to evaluate why it happened and try to learn from you (or someone else’s) mistake.  The tendency is to flee the scene of what feels like a sermonic flop, but perhaps there is more to learn there than when a sermon’s momentum was faultless.

How do you make sure your message keeps moving?

“When we just prayerfully look at the Bible text, then the Spirit can direct us and teach us.” (Implication: if you look at “the words of humans,” such as in commentaries, then you will not hear God’s Spirit.)

I stumbled across the same notion in a conversation this week.  “You went to Bible school, but I’ve been taught by the Holy Spirit.”  But?  Just because one claims to only be taught by the Spirit, this does not mean one has received more training from the Spirit.

Whether we are talking about use of commentaries or the privilege of “formal” study, let’s not make this false step of restricting where God’s Spirit can work.  This is similar to the nonsensical idea that the Spirit works when we don’t prepare a message, but is absent if we do prepare.

We absolutely need God’s Spirit at work in us as we prepare to preach, both in respect to understanding the Bible text, and in terms of sensitively applying it to those who will listen.  As one person put it this week, “Hearing how God has spoken to the community over the ages about the text will only give the Spirit more chance to speak, not less.”

Not only does the Spirit want to work in our biblical study, and in our ministry, but in light of yesterday’s book review, he most certainly wants to work in our hearts too.  What does he want to do there?  Let me finish with a quote from Reeves’ new book (p73):

My new life began when the Spirit first opened my eyes and won my heart to Christ. Then, for the first time, I began to enjoy and love Christ as the Father has always done. And through Christ, for the first time, I began to enjoy and love the Father as the Son has always done. That was how it started, and that is how the new life goes on: by revealing the beauty, love, glory and kindness of Christ to me, the Spirit kindles in me an ever deeper and more sincere love for God. And as he stirs me to think ever more on Christ, he makes me more and more God-like: less self-obsessed and more Christ-obsessed.

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Next week: Two-Person Preaching?

Conversation partners can be so valuable, but its worth picking them wisely. Conversation partners can be so helpful, but conversation requires both sides to speak. Thus it is important that we engage the text first in order to have an opinion to bring to the conversation. Then, when we get there, we can interact with the others at the table. Some of them we’ll find stimulating and helpful, others we might find inconsistent or agenda driven. We may tune some out. We may listen at length to others. But the key is conversation.

Don’t come to a commentary as a dumb animal ready to carry away whatever is offered. Converse. Let’s say I’ve been working in Romans and I am ready for some conversation. Who do I invite to the table?  What do I bring to the table? The more I bring, the better the conversation will be. “Doug, I see it this way, what about you?” “Tom, what’s your take on that?” “And James(Jimmy)? Oh, I see where you’re coming from! But what about these verses?” “Leon, anything to add?”

Now a conversation with Douglas Moo, Thomas Schreiner, James Dunn and Leon Morris – that would be worth having! Let’s bring in Cranfield, Murray and Calvin for good measure. This is the table to sit at in the biblical studies conference dining hall!

A few quick thoughts on buying commentaries (gathering the conversation partners):

1. If you can, try before you buy (library, google books, friend, etc.) If not, at least get good recommendations (such as on bestcommentaries.com).

2. Let your ministry provoke your purchases. I take a sermon series as a good excuse to buy a commentary or two if my library is lacking in that area. 2nd Chronicles now, Acts next.

3. Build a quality library slowly, rather than a junk collection fast. The personal library is a vital tool of the preacher. Even if it is only five books, if they are five good books, then it is worth having! Don’t rush, don’t get into debt, and don’t buy books with more hype on the cover than content in the pages.

4. Building an electronic library may save you money, but it may not. Last week we looked at software options – here’s the link.