Category Archives: Stage 3 – Passage Purpose

by Peter Mead | May 23, 2013 · 6:08 am

Dangerous Assumption 4: God (continued)

After pondering variations on the assumption that it is all about me (either in the direction of striving or divinely enabled successful independence), yesterday we probed the issue of an “all about God” assumption – namely, the glory filter. Here’s another “all about God” filter that may be corrupting our reading and preaching of the Bible:

6. The takeover filter. There is no question that God wants to be God in the life of the listeners. The Bible says a categorical No! to our autonomy from God. But we must be careful not to misrepresent the salvation plan. The predominant biblical motif is that of marriage, not dictatorial control. I have been crucified with Christ and no longer live, but there is also the life I now live. Huh? Captivated by our groom and united with him by the Spirit, we are invited into a marital relationship, not a bizarre state of hypnosis and unthinking passivity. The Bible does not invite us to enter into a non-communicative and non-reciprocal relationship with a takeover Spirit. We are not invited to go beyond the Bible into a higher level of spirituality that is impossible to describe, yet worthy of our greatest efforts to pursue personal surrender to it.

The Bible invites us to know God and to be in fellowship with Him by His Spirit in response to His love. It is a relationship of hearing His heart in His Word and responding to Him in prayer and walking with Him and keeping in step with His Spirit and being both dead to self and yet more alive than ever (since life is, by definition, knowing God). There are various unbiblical and sub-biblical versions and perversions of Christian spirituality. Some do sound very Christian, but even when the focus is apparently all on God, it is still possible to corrupt the Bible and misrepresent what He is saying.

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by Peter Mead | May 22, 2013 · 5:44 am

Dangerous Assumption 3: God

Dangerous assumptions lurk below the surface of our preaching preparation, always ready to undermine our most diligent exegesis and expositional planning. We can diligently do everything well in our study and message preparation, but the tinted glasses of our own dangerous assumption will colour the end result and undermine the preaching process. Our goal in pondering these assumptions is not to throw stones at others, but to prompt us to pray and ask God to help us see where we aren’t seeing clearly. It can be painful to discover an errant agenda in our preaching, but if our goal is to please Him, then surely we must ask Him to show us if there be any dangerous assumption in us.

So far we’ve looked at some variations of the assumption that it is “all about me” – both in the direction of pressure to perform for God and in the direction of getting God to perform for us. But there’s another assumption we need to be wary of too:

Dangerous Assumption B: It is all about God.

5. The glory filter. There is no question that everything should be done for the glory of God. But some have morphed this doctrine into a form that seems to have lost the relational and motivational moorings of Scripture. Rather than seeing the delightful glory-giving nature of the Triune God who is revealed by Scripture, glory becomes this dutiful commodity that a self-absorbed God demands from us constantly. There is a real danger that glory can become the measure of behaviour demanded of listeners, without their hearts being stirred by the glory of God’s glory. Haman glorified a man he despised from the heart. But God the Father has always glorified the Son because he loves him (John 17:24).

Should we be stirred to glorify God by the preaching of His Word? Absolutely. Who would ever come up with a God who is all-glorious, yet also lovingly gives glory to the undeserving? The danger is when we twist the God behind the text into a glory-grabbing tyrant and preach every passage accordingly. It will sound very biblical, but it may end up being a slightly sanctified variation on the duty filter that turns everything into a human-centred preaching model.

Tomorrow we’ll think on another variation of an “all about God” filter that may not be consistent with the Scriptures.

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by Peter Mead | May 21, 2013 · 5:41 am

Dangerous Assumption 2: Me (Continued)

The assumption that Christianity is all about me has many variations. Whatever version we propound, there will be problems as we try to preach the Bible faithfully. Yesterday we considered the duty and guilt filters – two ways that preachers can reframe any passage to preach pressure on those present. In these approaches, the Bible comes across as a whip to stir the lazy or the guilty into striving action. But there is another pair of angles to consider here:

3. The selfish filter. Here is a perversion of the same problem. Instead of turning the listener inwards with guilt or pressure to perform, this feeds the self-absorption in the other direction. Not “you are nothing” but instead, “you are god!” Somehow the self-absorption of the preacher has been corrupted so that the Bible is twisted to support selfishness. The text is read as a means to an end, and the end is a sanctified sinfulness. Suddenly God is the great slave of all who get their ducks lined up so that He will do their bidding. Suddenly the manifold grace of God to the undeserving becomes the heavenly affirmation of our incurvedness as we take advantage of plucked promises and twisted truths. The preacher here is the life coach and guru for sanctified sinfulness (in all its variations).

4. The success filter. Perhaps this is a low-level version of number 3. It doesn’t claim that God is our great slave who delivers freely for our selfishness, but it does still see life as essentially independent. The preacher becomes the life coach for personal success in all areas of life: marriage, parenting, work, leisure, health, etc. The Bible is seen as the instruction manual for successful Christian living, and the listeners are invited to have their self-focus affirmed in the continual pursuit of relevant applications.

The issue in all of these angles is not just the broken view of sin (i.e. not seeing the self-oriented nature of the fallen human heart), but also a poor view of God and salvation. The Bible does not suggest salvation is the divine provision for independent living. As preachers of the Bible, if our view of God does not grip our hearts and reorient everything, then we will misrepresent the Bible in our preaching and corrupt application into some form of self-serving exercise. God’s goal has never been our independent functioning, but rather the privilege of participation in His fellowship. Preaching that makes it all essentially about me will be problematic, whatever the flavour.

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by Peter Mead | May 20, 2013 · 5:07 am

Dangerous Assumption

Good preachers will preach the passage they claim to be preaching. Even in a topical message with several passages being presented, the preacher should be sure to say what that text is actually saying. Using texts to say what the preacher wants to say is an indication of a pride problem in the preacher. However, even the diligent preacher of the passage before them can undermine their good work by dangerous assumptions that undergird their work.

These assumptions come various sources, but they tend to be theological paradigms that cause the preacher to see any text in a certain way. They are like tinted glasses that change the hue of everything. This will lead to misrepresenting the Bible and potentially to some significant false teaching in the church. Over the next days I’d like to try to highlight some of these tints in the hope that some might be prompted to pray and ask the Lord to expose their own false or dangerous assumptions. It would be good for us all to do that.

Dangerous Assumption A: It is all about me.

There are many potential angles here.

1. The duty filter. This could be driven by a faulty view of God, an errant understanding of the gospel, a separation of gospel from Christian living, baggage from childhood abandonment, theological pride, personal guilt and a whole lot more. Whatever the root, the result is that every passage is seen through lenses that underline and embolden imperatival content, or even introduce this tone where it is not present. So the preacher takes any story or psalm or passage and turns it into a set of duties for the listener to strive toward.

2. The guilt filter. This is associated with number 1, but it seeks to transfer feelings of guilt onto the listeners. This is perhaps less optimistic. Whereas in the previous angle the listeners are pressured as if they can simply choose to obey and be diligent, this lens turns the text a shade of sour. Now the goal is not so much to instruct and pressure, but to make the listeners feel guilty and therefore pressured. The motivational effectiveness of guilt is questionable in the extreme, but this approach to preaching can have the feel of desparation about it. Like all of the filters in this sub-set, it tends to skim over the problematic issue of turning listeners in on themselves, which is at the very heart of the sin issue we are claiming to address as we preach the Bible.

There’s another side to this, which we’ll ponder tomorrow.

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by Peter Mead | May 17, 2013 · 6:00 am

The Gospel in Concrete 2

The epistles don’t assume full awareness of God and the gospel and proceed quickly into practical applications. Instead God has given us many case studies of the apostles applying the gospel in concrete situations, and they don’t just dive into instruction, or assume that believers all have the basics in place. Furthermore:

3. The apostles never assume that God is a given. This is a big problem in the church today. Too many people assume that anyone talking about “god” is talking about God. And I don’t just mean those outside the church. Some of us do sniff out that there are different conceptions of “god” floating around, both in religious talk and in cultural use. But even within the church, it is thoroughly naive to assume that anyone referring to “God” is necessarily speaking with a full biblical awareness of the one true God revealed in the Bible. The epistle writers don’t just use a generic label and press on into practicalities. They always clarify and specify. Often we’ll find reference to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, or references such as “the God of all grace.” Let’s be real about the fact that even within the church, the God described by some people sounds like a different God than we see revealing Himself in the Bible.

4. The apostles never offered a paper-thin gospel. ”God is the in-charge super-being who will judge you, so be sure you sort your relationship with him by praying this prayer.” Not something we find in the New Testament. The gospel they offer consistently communicates such realities as the intra-trinitarian relationships, the wonder of “in Christ” participation in that fellowship by the Spirit, inside-to-out transformation of a life by change of desires, the self-giving love of God as spotlighted by Christ’s atoning death on the cross, the divine countering of the Lie that still permeates this world through cosmic antagonism to the Truth, etc.

More could certainly be added (feel free to comment, of course). Let’s be looking at the epistles and recognizing the wonder of having these case studies in applied gospel theology for us to learn from and use as we seek to address the down-to-earth complexities of specific local situations.

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Filed under Audience Analysis, Christianity, Genre, Homiletics, New Testament, Preaching, Religion, Stage 3 - Passage Purpose, Stage 5 - Message Purpose

by Peter Mead | May 16, 2013 · 6:05 am

The Gospel in Concrete

In the New Testament, the gospel is never given “in a vacuum.” That is to say, we don’t find generic presentations of the gospel as a set of statements. Instead we find the gospel being applied to concrete situations: real people, real churches, real issues.

God didn’t give us a standard version and then leave the application to us. Instead we were given a set of case studies where we can observe the apostles engaging real life situations with the gospel. We see the church being split by a form of gnosticism in 1John, a different form creeping in in Colossae, the young believers under pressure from the antagonists around them in Thessalonica, the self-confident yet worldly church at Corinth, the divided churches of Rome, the threat of false-Law-teachers in Galatia, the discouraged by pressure believers addressed in Hebrews, etc.

As we ponder the “case studies” given to us in the New Testament epistles, here are some thoughts:

1. The apostles don’t respond to down-to-earth issues with mere down-to-earth instruction. You won’t find an epistle that just says, “here is how to act like Christians, pull yourselves together and just try hard, do the right thing and the feelings will follow…” Instead we find the apostles responding to sometimes very human issues with an application of theological reality. They certainly do get specific and practical, but always on the back of, or in association with, doctrinal instruction that needed to be grasped or reaffirmed. To put this in terms of relevance to today, just pressuring people to act appropriately is never appropriate. They need to be gripped by the reality of who God is and what He has done/is doing. They need to see themselves and the gospel clearly.

2. The apostles never assume the believers all know the basics. I could imagine some of us today writing a contemporary epistle along these lines: “Okay, so we all know who God is and what the gospel is, of course, so let’s get to the nitty gritty . . . ” The apostles didn’t do that. Even after spending months or years teaching in a church, they still chose to reinforce and re-communicate the truths of the faith. Why? Perhaps because they knew people didn’t easily grasp the wonderful realities of the gospel.

More thoughts tomorrow…

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Tagged as concrete situations, Religion, Theology

by Peter Mead | March 20, 2013 · 8:14 am

Wide View Application

If we are not careful we can easily misfire when it comes to applying Bible texts. One cause of dangerous misfiring comes from too narrow a view of the text. The result is application that functions as a legalistic burden – appealing to the flesh, but not consistent with the gospel.

In Narratives Look Up. In Bible stories we can easily focus on the human characters and determine to copy or not copy them. The moral of this story is . . . oops. This is a recipe for burdensome preaching. It is not a recipe for gospel preaching. It is not really good news that the Bible is full of examples for us to copy or not copy in our own strength. We need to always look up. The characters are not just humans in action, they are humans living in response to God and His Word. Their response is instructive, but we don’t live as their copycats, we live as people responding to God and His Word too. In preaching narratives, be sure to use a wider view and include the divine dimension.

In Epistles Look Out. In epistles we can easily focus on the commands and determine to obey them. The lesson for today is . . . oops. This is a recipe for burdensome preaching. It is not a recipe for gospel preaching. It is not really good news that the Bible is full of imperatives for us to harvest and apply in our own strength. We need always to look out. The imperatives and commands are not just stand alone instructions for holy living, they are imperatives and commands coming in the context of a whole letter that was written to be heard in one shot. The recipients would have felt the force of the instruction in light of the gospel content. Ephesians 4 is to applied in light of Ephesians 1-3, otherwise it becomes just another burden for our weary souls. In preaching epistles, be sure to use a wider view and include the divine doctrinal dimension.

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by Peter Mead | February 9, 2013 · 7:50 am

Three Thoughts in Preaching Numbers

I have to admit that Numbers is not a book that I rush toward. The main reason for this is that I have not studied it in depth and so should probably preach it in order to develop my appreciation. Nonetheless, here are three thoughts from reading it through these last few days.

1. Faith does not automatically flow from the miraculous. Many people assume that if we could just see something miraculous, then we’d believe. After all, if we could just see God doing wonders in our midst then the culture would come flocking. Numbers again underlines that even God’s people don’t automatically respond in faith to observed wonders, so assuming others will is presumptuous. Water from a rock, a budding staff, the ground swallowing rebels, and consequently that generation were a people of faith? Not quite. The issue is not what we see, but how our hearts perceive what we see. If we don’t want to believe, no amount of miraculous intervention will guarantee true faith.

2. The Law’s community function did not generate faith. The nation that had started with one man, become twelve men, then seventy, then hundreds of thousands needed to be constrained and ordered. Their sin and rebellion had led to a growing statute book and legal code. By the time we get to Numbers we might assume that being a people with well defined laws meant they were ready to believe and trust God. Caleb and Joshua are the glorious exceptions. The ten spies didn’t. The people didn’t. Even Moses didn’t. In fact, rather than getting caught up in what Moses actually did wrong in chapter 20, perhaps the writer is vague on the errant action to point us to underlying faith issues. The great leader under the Law who disobeys God through lack of faith (Num.20:12) seems to contrast with the great man of faith before Law who kept God’s commands (compare and contrast Gen.26:5).

3. God’s promise plan is not thwarted even when the faithless miss out. It is important to help listeners know that Numbers sits in the flow of the Pentateuch, rather than as a stand-alone collection of stories. God’s plan to bless the world back in the beginning of Genesis was articulated clearly in his promise to Abram. By the end of Genesis the seed promise has grown into an extended family, with blessing to all families reiterated in the blessing of Judah by Jacob. That nation through which the blessing would come is born in Exodus despite the three-fold attempt by Pharoah to curse the “too numerous people.” At the other end of the wilderness sojourn we see another king seeking three times to curse a “too numerous” Israel. Again, the attempts to curse God’s nation lead only to their blessing. Thus the promise to Abraham marches on, with just Deuteronomy left: a sermonic call for circumcised hearts and love for God from the new generation heading into the dangerous place of security and peace.

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by Peter Mead | January 30, 2013 · 8:25 am

Three Common Mistakes Preaching Genesis

Genesis is such a critical book! I suspect it simply isn’t preached enough. The rest of the Bible is built on the foundation of Genesis, and so preaching it enough and preaching it well are very important. Here are three mistakes to avoid, although many more could be added:

1. Atomistic Reading – This is where a text is snipped from the flow of the context and becomes a stand alone. Typically this leads to a Sunday School type of preaching that treats each narrative as complete in itself, and with its own “moral of the story.” Cain and Abel has to flow out of Genesis 3, and into the two genealogies of chapters 4 and 5. Abraham does not offer us a set of stand alone tales, but a sequence of growing faith, obedience and connection with God. Joseph’s brothers show consistency between snapshots, making them more than 11 faceless foils in the story of Joseph. Be careful to study and preach each unit in context.

2. Moralistic Reading – This is where a text is snipped from the artery of life that is God’s involvement in specific history, turning the text into a tale with a moral, a lesson for the day, a suggestion on how we can live better. So we should try to avoid infidelity like Joseph did, or not give away our wives like Abraham/Isaac did, or not get caught up in tempting conversations like Eve did. But actually the goal is not our independent successful functioning: that was what the serpent was pushing for. The goal is surely more God-centred than that. Eve didn’t trust God’s Word and God’s character, but God himself works the resolution to the sin problem and invites us to trust Him and His Word. Abraham was on a journey of faith as we are. Joseph lived as if God were with him, even though he had very little indication that he was!

3. Impositional Reading – This is where a text is seen, but not heard. It is where a text acts as a trigger to recall sermons heard and points previously stated. The preacher reads the text and looks for a sermon, instead of studying the text and looking for God. Impositional reading will always lead to superficial preaching. Probe, question, examine, query, ponder, mine, and wrestle with the text. Do that with God in conversation and see if the preaching of Genesis suddenly becomes a spring of living water instead of stale old picture book fables.

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by Peter Mead | January 25, 2013 · 6:12 am

The Preacher’s Clock: Anticipation

For the last couple of days I’ve been pondering issues of procrastination and preparation. But it is also important to consider anticipation.

Anticipating Future Preaching – The whole issue of preparation cycles is important. Robinson taught us that a five-day cycle was not long enough and he was right. This is only exacerbated by delays as you can end up with a message on Saturday night that has one night and one breakfast time to be embedded in your life as a preacher. That is hardly long enough to scratch the surface of personalizing experience of the message or forming any sort of conviction. You may know the material, but only in the head. A longer cycle allows for the Bible passage to do some work in you and on you, the preacher. But it could be argued that even a 10-day cycle is not really long enough if the goal is to let the message become part of your own life and experience.

This is why it is helpful to anticipate preaching for weeks or even months. Obviously you can’t be preparing months worth of sermons in any detail at all. However, knowing that a series is coming ahead of time does allow for an initial reading, some initial prayerful pondering, etc. I am considering preaching through Colossians later in the year. Awareness of that series, even without any sort of extensive study, can influence my life and thinking now. By the time the series comes, there should be some deeper rootedness in my heart and life.

Anticipating Future Interruption – Any talk of schedules and delays must also lead us to ponder the possibility of future interruption. Could there be a pastoral crisis, family illness, broken kitchen appliance, car trouble, unexpected guest or excessive administration between now and the sermon. I suspect there might be. That is why we need to build in margin to the schedule, rather than cramming things into every corner and relying on a smooth run through the week. This isn’t easy for most of us, especially when it means saying no to ministry invitations, but there is no other way to avoid seasons of overwhelming stress than to say no to things before the crisis emerges.

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