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.

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.

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 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.

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 main two 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.

We’ll finish the ten tomorrow, although ten is not the limit, there may be more!

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 that 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.

The list will build tomorrow, but feel free to comment on these or other things that come to mind at any point.

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 then 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 whet 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.

Tomorrow we’ll add a couple more to our list.

The Bible contains a variety of genres.  Look at the New Testament, for instance.  Here we have a combination of historical narrative and occasional epistles.  The theology of the Bible is offered to us in the vivid action of the Gospels and Acts.  It is given in the concrete situations of the first century church.  As Karen Jobes puts it in her Letters to the Church (p13)

In his wisdom, God gave us, among the inspired writings, the letters of the apostles to specific Christians living in very concrete situations during times that were very trying the Christian faith.  Because of that, we get to see how the Christian life was to be lived out in the context of first-century culture, and we can identify the same or similar issues today that challenge us.  Rather than giving us a book of abstract philosophy or theology, God’s Word has come in the form of very practical and specific situations.  It is another instance of God’s incarnational intent, to be Immanuel, God with us.

So here’s my question for the day: do we make enough effort to communicate the context of the passages we preach?  I’ve seen quite a number of preachers who preach texts from the epistles as if they are abstract presentations of truth.  They sometimes do a decent job of putting in concrete contemporary applications, but the text itself is treated as abstract truth statements.

God has given us a gift as preachers.  He has done some of our work for us.  He has given us the section of the Bible that is most likely to be abstract logical argument as occasional writings – that is, specific presentations of the gospel applied to specific churches, in specific cultural milieu, with specific issues at hand.  As we re-present these texts to our listeners, before we even get to contemporary application, our listeners will be translating from 1st century concrete to 21st century concrete.

Let’s be careful not to rush past presenting the situation that sparked the writing of the text in an attempt to be relevant.  Helping people to see what occasioned the epistle will already be helping them to see its relevance to us.

Actually, when it comes to biblical preaching there aren’t as many rules as people tend to think.  The preacher has all sorts of freedom that should be instructed through experience of what works effectively, what achieves communication goals, etc.  But there are not as many rules as people tend to think.  As I wrote on here some time back:

Some like to impose significant amounts of structure on the preaching event, but in reality there are few limits involved.  There may be some limits imposed by the culture and heritage of a church – congregational traditions – and it is wise to think carefully before smashing through those expectations in an attempt to be creative.  However, these limits vary from place to place and it is possible, once trust is established, to carefully adjust such expectations.

So is there any constraint, or is it all freedom?  And how is it people (in this age of freedom!) tend to choose to wear a strait jacket?  And the one they choose to wear is the one that could well be cast aside? Here are the two strait jackets:

Wear This One – “To have integrity as a biblical preacher, I must be constrained by the true meaning of the passage I am preaching.” Each passage is saying something.  When we preach, we need to say the something the passage is saying.  We cannot say anything from anywhere in the Bible.  While we can tailor and target and re-order and re-emphasize, we cannot say whatever we want from a passage.  Some people, in the pursuit of “interesting” and “relevant” and especially “original,” will undermine the exegetical integrity of their preaching by saying what the text simply isn’t saying.  Be constrained by the text you preach.

Don’t Wear This One - “To be considered a preacher, I must preach in a certain manner, using a certain form that qualifies as a real sermon.”  While the first strait jacket guarantees our integrity as Bible handlers, this second jacket can sometimes undermine our effectiveness as biblical preachers.  What shape should a sermon take?  What style of delivery should be used?  Matters of form are matters of freedom for the preacher to evaluate strategically.  Different texts, different circumstances, different occasions, different strengths as a preacher, different personalities, different listeners, can all prompt different sermon shape and delivery style.  At this level our goal is effectiveness in communication.  We do not need unnecessary limits in place to hinder our effectiveness.

Sadly too many preachers settle into a predictable pattern where actually there could be considerable freedom – in matters of form and delivery.  And too many show a wild freedom where there is a limit – in the meaning of the text.  Let’s be sure to wear the right strait jacket, but throw away the other!

This is where the big idea approach to preaching is so on target.  If the big idea of the text is the control mechanism during message formation, then the text should be coming through.  Sadly though, too many preach generic messages that essentially disconnect from the text itself.

I suppose preaching is essentially very easy for some folks.  A thirty-five minute message is really only a couple of minutes of “worked material” that builds tenuous links between the text and the message.  Once the text is tied in somehow, the standard message content can flow freely without hindrance.  Easy.

Some people do this by leaving the text behind.  It is read, a couple of comments are made, and then the message moves on from the text into generic sermon zone.

Others do this by pulling from the text the three things they want to find there.  Perhaps something pointing to human sin, and something to do with God, and maybe something along the lines of consequences, or perhaps a vague segue to Calvary, or whatever.  Thus the narrative is plundered for intro links to the message the preacher intended to preach.

Let me encourage you to make the preaching text more than an introduction for the message, or an introduction for the points.  Allow the text to be master over the sermon.  

Seek to preach so that God’s Word is communicated and God’s voice is heard.  Seek to preach so that listeners can clearly hear the text and its influence on the entire message.  Seek to genuinely preach the Word.