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.

This leaves me in the nice position of being finished with the series, yet not finished.  My plan is to allow an aspect of Biblical theology to put the finishing touches on the series.  Let me explain.

One of the big themes in the last chapters of Chronicles is that of the devotion of the kings to the Lord.  Some were, some weren’t.  And the biggest manifestation in pre-exile Israel lay in the issue of overt idolatry.  As the book ends, hope dawns with Cyrus’ decree that the temple should be rebuilt.  Perhaps God’s promise to David will be fulfilled after all?

So in the progression of revelation, we move to a post-exilic Israel where overt idolatry was never a feature again.  Historically we see this determination for purity in books like Ezra and Nehemiah, but canonically, the next step from Chronicles is Matthew.  It’s a new world in Israel in Jesus’ day.  No physical idols.  But no idols?

Jesus addresses the issue of the less tangible idolatry of his day in the Sermon on the Mount.  And the beauty of this is that Matthew 6 speaks so directly to our, typically non-physical idol, cultural setting.  In post-exilic Israel, as in the modern Western world, money has become the “ba’al” for many.  Yet the issue of our devotion to God remains paramount.  Who is bigger in our eyes?  The false god, indeed the replacement god of financial security, or the true God who really cares?

So maybe I will get to preach Matthew 6 tomorrow to finish the Chronicles series.  Maybe I’ll get to push further into the New Testament and consider other areas of covert idolatry facing believers today.  Or maybe I won’t!

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Next Week?  Eco-Preaching: Recycling Sermons

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 . . .

The Every Angle Jewel Explanation Approach.  The message I have in mind is one I head a few years back from Dr Haddon Robinson.  Seemed like a simple saying, until he started probing it.  Like a connoisseur of fine jewels, Robinson took up that little saying and methodically turned it in every direction, probing each facet to gradually determine the richness of the meaning of the proverb.  Technically he used carefully developed paragraphs of thought.  Experientially it was like sitting at the feet of a wise sage giving a guided tour of a fascinating thought.  In the process of explanation I learned about metallurgy, about Hebrew culture, about the language used, and most importantly, about myself as the light reflecting from that jewel shone into corners of my life.  There was no bony structure sticking out, or jerky transition into time for an application.  It was relaxed, it was measured, it was well-crafted, it was a message that marked me.

The Every Direction Intersection Application Approach.  Ok, so my label is almost as long as a proverb, but I’m not Solomon.  The message I have in mind is one I heard in seminary chapel over a decade ago.  Dr Gene Curtis preached a masterpiece of a sermon that still influences my ministry today.  A typical two liner.  A full length sermon.  A lot of marked listeners.  How did he do it?  He explained the proverb, which didn’t take long, but then he applied it.  Then he applied it again.  Then he applied it again.  Multiple situational applications, all driving home the same point, the main point of the proverb.  In this particular case he also used the first line of a children’s Sunday school song to reinforce the point and offer a musical memory marker along the way.  If you can imagine a busy intersection in the centre of a large city, a roundabout/rotary with multiple roads leading off it, that was his sermon.  He left the world of the Hebrew sage and entered the office of the pastor, the conversation of the spouse, the lap of the parent, the phone call of the friend, etc.  Each time showing the relevance of the proverb, each time reinforcing the same point, each time returning to the text and then heading off on a different exit point.  I would love to have preached a sermon so effective.

I was impressed recently with a sermon by Andy Stanley on a single proverb, which was excellent, but despite the impressive feats, perhaps it didn’t quite attain to the two I’ve described.  (Or perhaps it had the strengths of both!)

Thought 2 – We should preach Christ, but let’s not be overly speculative and force Christ into every line.  I won’t delve into the issues, good and bad, with preaching Christ as “lady wisdom personified” in this post.  It is possible to preach Christ from Proverbs, but it isn’t a game where the most creative link wins a prize.  Some of what is done with good intentions does come across as Christian gymnastics and even the most informed listener struggles to see how anyone else would have come to that conclusion from that text.  Let’s be careful not to lose biblical credibility while trying to “preach Christian.”  Better to preach Christ in light of the larger flow of biblical revelation than to make a hop, skip and jump from a rock badger to the Rock of Ages.

Thought 3 – Proverbs gives us a compelling framing imagery of the two women.  Proverbs is a literary piece of art.  Now we do lose so much in terms of the assonance, alliteration, word play, etc. – kind of like translating “a stitch in time saves nine” into Italian, or “raining cats and dogs” into Korean.  And we are not really attuned to Hebraic parallelism when it comes to poetic writing forms.  But we shouldn’t miss how the collection of short, memorable and pithy sayings is wrapped in a frame of human imagery.  Specifically the two personified ladies of wisdom and folly.  Which path will the young man take?  The road to destruction in response to the heady flirtation of harlot folly, or the wonderful blessing of marriage to lady wisdom?  I would be inclined to allow that kind of overt literary framing to provide an overriding narratival snapshot into which the issues of wisdom and folly can be placed in relational terms rather than mere burdens of behavior.

So much more could be said on both of these thoughts, so feel free to comment and share your thoughts.

First, the question about this site is easy to answer.  I have neither preached from Proverbs, nor heard a sermon from Proverbs in the last few years and so my thinking hasn’t been provoked on this important issue.  I was involved in a preacher’s retreat on the subject of preaching Proverbs a while back, but thanks to Jon for provoking my thoughts!  (Actually, Jon’s written a lot on this specific issue, for example this post on preaching Proverbs.)

So, three thoughts on preaching Proverbs, before I explain two ways I believe a full-length sermon can be worthwhile on a single proverb!

Thought 1 – We need to be wary of preaching moralistic legalism.  This is a danger everywhere in the Bible – “so the moral of the story is . . . be a good boy/girl and obey your parents!”  This is too common in preaching, and massively misses the mark of preaching the extravagant relational grace that infuses the Bible with the life of God’s love.  This is especially easy in Proverbs.  Be good.  Try hard.  Be disciplined.  Be like this man.  Don’t be like that one.  Let’s be careful to prayerfully ponder the proverb we plan to preach in light of the bigger context of Scripture and in light of what our listeners really need.

Tomorrow I’ll offer two further thoughts before getting to two full-length sermon approaches that I have seen work very effectively.