Van Harn presents a helpful analogy for us (Preacher, Can You Hear Us Listening, p53).  When you preach a biblical text, do you preach a snapshot or a replay?  Sports journalists use both.  Immediately after a key moment in a game, the replays kick in.  The moment can be savored, the action understood and the intensity felt.  The next morning a snapshot is placed on the sports pages.  It brings back memories of the action, but it is not the same.  A snapshot is a two-dimensional, frozen representation of an event that took place.  A replay is a moving image, perhaps from various carefully chosen angles, perhaps with slow motion, all intended to bring you into the moment of the action.

The text is technically a frozen image of the action, but we should be sensitive to the dynamic nature of the written text.  As preachers we need to do more than give a snapshot of the biblical story.  Rather we should seek to let our listeners enter into it as we choose careful angles and appropriate commentary alongside slow motion replays.  A sermon should not be a mere lecture of facts, but an entrance into the dynamic reality of a living text.

We must engage the text as literature, plot, story, history and record.  We must meet the listeners in the heart, the mind, the imagination, the conscience, and the will.  Effective preaching involves more than recitation of facts, it requires us to purposefully engage both the text and the listeners at multiple levels.