Christlike versus Like Christ

June 13, 2015June 12, 2015 / Peter Mead / 9 Comments

If the goal of sanctification is for people to become more like Christ, what is the best way for our preaching to help people get there? Perhaps the obvious way is not the most effective way . . .

The obvious way to nudge people toward Christlikeness is to preach about Christlikeness. You take a passage and then what do you look for? You might look to find any instructions, derive some applicational points, determine how Christ’s character is presented, identify some kind of divine demand, etc. Essentially, the obvious way to promote Christlikeness is to present Christlikeness and encourage Christlikeness in your listeners. Focus on character, focus on us. Apply, exhort, encourage.

There is a better way.

Turn the words around. Do your listeners like Christ? Do you? Christ did not come to the world merely to show us a new way to live. He came to give us life in union with Him. The life of the Trinity is given to us in Christ. This means that Christlikeness will not flow primarily from Christlikeness explained and demanded. Christlikeness will come from liking Christ, from loving Him, from knowing and worshipping Him.

Preach so as to present Christ. Offer the person of Christ rather than a programme for self-improvement. Invite people to know Him and to love Him. As the Spirit draws people to Christ, they will grow to like Him and to live like Him. As the text you are preaching presents instruction, then offer that faithfully in the context of relationship with Christ.

Christlikeness isn’t the goal of preaching for sanctification, it is the fruit. The goal must be to stir greater love for God that results in greater love for others, and love will be stirred not by demand, but by presentation of God’s love revealed in Christ. Inasmuch as we like Christ, we will grow to live Christ-like lives.

Tightly Woven? On Being Biblical

June 12, 2015 / Peter Mead / 5 Comments

Being biblical is like being a woven fabric. Woven fabric can be very strong, or it can be flimsy. Two sets of threads are woven together at right angles. When the warp and the weft threads are both numerous and tight, then the fabric will have real strength.

Warp – imagine this to be your understanding of the Bible, book by book. Each book is like a thread, and the more you know it the stronger the thread. Know the structure, the flow, the situation, the purpose, the details that make it what it is. To be biblical we need to be people who get to know Bible books. (In fact, each Bible book turns out to be like woven fabric too, but pushing the analogy to woven fabric made up of the threads of woven fabric might become too complex for non-weavers like me!)

Weft – imagine this to be your understanding of the Bible, theme by theme. Great themes are like a thread, and the more you know them, them the stronger the thread. Know the themes and where they touch down in the flow of the canon. Some touch down only periodically (think Melchizedek – Gen.14, Psa.110, Hebrews 7), while others are woven throughout almost every page (think sin and its effects, for instance).

Too many people in our churches have great gaps in the fabric of their biblical awareness. Great blocks of books are untouched. Thematic threads are unknown. Sadly, too many preachers have bare patches and weak weaving in their biblical knowledge. A collection of proof texts and favourite passages, combined with one or two key themes, will not make for biblical preaching, or even biblical living.

Three quick suggestions:

1. Be sure to be reading the whole Bible – sweep through it to get the big picture. You will find that reading good chunks will captivate in a way that close study alone never can. You will start to see how the books flow and how they flow together. You will start to become familiar with themes that may have remained hidden in close study alone.

2. Be sure to study the Bible book by book – take a book and let it get to grips with you. The building blocks, or perhaps, the warp threads of our biblical understanding has to be book by book for there to be any substance and strength to our being biblical as believers and then as preachers. Get to know the fabric of each book: the sections as they build, the themes as they weave through.

3. Be sure to enjoy the biblical themes – start to identify and follow the themes of Scripture. Some have done this exclusively, following threads without awareness of context. This is a weak approach. Others have ignored the themes and only focused on one passage at a time. This also is weak. We need both. Start to enjoy the promise theme starting in Genesis 3:15 – I loved tracing the theme of both the promise and the presence of the Promiser in Pleased to Dwell. What about holiness, or God’s heart, or themes of sonship, of marriage, of divine surprise, etc.?

Pray and ask God to show you where the fabric of your biblical awareness is threadbare. Read and weave and enjoy.

The Discouraged Preacher

June 8, 2015 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Preachers get discouraged. This post is not intended to offer any solutions, but sometimes identifying the issue or issues can be a start to addressing the challenge. Perhaps this list can also help you pray for other preachers, or pastors in your church.

Here are some reasons preachers get discouraged:

1. Lack of fruit – Almost every preacher will receive comments of gratitude after preaching, but most will realise this politeness is not the same as genuine fruit from their preaching. A lack of new life, or tangible growth can really get a preacher down. A lot of time and emotional energy can be invested over the long haul with very little tangible return on investment.

2. Loneliness – Preaching can be a strangely lonely ministry. It is easy to prepare in private and then process the post-preaching feelings in private. It can also feel lonely to be aware of the next two items:

3. Criticism – After preaching it is a strange feeling to know that a lot of people will be enjoying “roast preacher” for their Sunday lunch. Unless we have a big ego, most preachers don’t really want to be the subject of conversation. We try to make Christ the subject of conversation, but we aren’t naive to the conversations that go on! And then what if criticism is coming in from outside of our context? That will only add to the pressure.

4. Expectation – Preachers are not a different class of Christian. We struggle. We don’t have it all together. We can even say so in our preaching, and yet people still expect preachers to be “victorious” Christians. Therefore when we are struggling with temptation, with tiredness, with family life, with financial pressures, with personal and spiritual dry times, we feel the expectation that we won’t struggle and so tend to keep the struggle hidden. This circles us back up to number 2 again – loneliness.

5. Family Life – Preachers have real families. Our children fight and sin. Our marriages go through downs as well as ups. Churches tend to place expectations on spouses and children of preachers. Spouses of preachers tend to put expectations on themselves. The complexity of church life can take a massive toll on families, and even when preachers try to put family first, there will still be times when we question whether the ministry we do is worth it.

6. Lack of sleep / health – A cycle of not sleeping properly will really take the energy and joy out of life. This could be due to stress, to pastoral pressures, to family needs, to health challenges, etc. Whatever the reason, when our tanks are empty then life will feel tough.

7. Depression – Preachers can get depressed too. For those of us who don’t struggle with this it can be impossible to understand those that do. But they do. Famous preachers have struggled with extreme depression. And preachers do burn out. It is never a pretty sight. And this is where we should all be aware – burnout can be avoided.

That is a starter list of seven reasons preachers get discouraged. What would you add?

My Shepherd Today

June 1, 2015May 24, 2015 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Our church is in the midst of a season of transition. The team of leaders who committed to starting the church are leading the church through a process of recognizing its long-term leadership as we move forward into the future. Inevitably potential change creates opportunity for uncertainty.

Who should the pastoral leadership be? One fact holds us steady. The chief shepherd of the church is Christ. And he wants to be our shepherd today.

Yet how easily we can view the work of Christ only in past and future terms. In his days on earth we saw the Good Shepherd who would lay down his life for the sheep (John 10). In the future we know that the chief shepherd will appear (1Peter 5). But is Jesus our shepherd today?

The shepherd’s work is to lead the sheep to food, to care for them and protect them from harm. This forms the start of a strong list for church leadership job descriptions – we are to lead, to feed, to care and to protect. Perhaps we should add in “to equip” and we have a good grasp of the roles of church leadership in the New Testament, most of which are shepherding roles.

Jesus is our great shepherd today. He is in charge of building his church. He is the one most concerned to care for the sheep, including you and I. It is a thrilling thought that Jesus desires to feed me, lead me, care for me, protect me, and even equip me, right now!

I was speaking with a friend about a tough time of loss he experienced last year. He looked back on that time and his realization that only Jesus could really shepherd his soul through an intense season of grief and loss.

Perhaps we too easily look elsewhere and don’t spend time leaning into his loving care of our souls. Perhaps some of us are too busy leading others to stop and be quiet long enough to hear his tender care of our hearts.

The Lord is my shepherd, today.

There are other biblical images we could consider in the same way. My wife is expecting a baby and that means in a few months we will have another season of interrupted nights as the little one needs the care that only a mother can give.

In Ephesians 5, addressing the subject of marriage, Paul uses a pair of descriptive words. After telling husbands to love their wives with a self-sacrificial love, and with a washing in the Word kind of love, then he adds the need for a “as you care for your own bodies” kind of love.

At this point he uses two words – nourishing and cherishing.

Cherishing is a term Paul only uses twice. It speaks of a tender, warming kind of care. It’s a bit like the way we put on a sweater when our bodies feel cold. We cherish our bodies. He also uses it in 1Thessalonians 2:7 of how a mother takes care of her little child. There is a gentleness, an inclination to hold carefully and to protect. (And in the Old Testament, the term is used twice to translate references to mother birds warming their eggs!)

Paul also tells husbands to nourish their wives as they naturally do their own bodies. Again, the term is used twice. It speaks of providing for and helping the growth of the other. Husbands need to remember not only to put food on the table, but also to provide spiritual nutrition for their marriage. Paul uses the term in Ephesians 6:4, in reference to bringing up children.

He also uses the shorter form of the term in the same phrase in 1 Thessalonians 2:7. It is the nursing mother who takes care of her child. This is a vivid picture, the giving of yourself that only a mother can do for an infant.

So Paul urges husbands to nourish and cherish their wives, just as they naturally do their own bodies. And in his other use of the pair of ideas, as mothers nurse and care for their infants. All very poignant images for the darkness we experience in the middle of the night.

But there is one more critical link to notice here. What is he really speaking of in Ephesians 5? Even after making the connection throughout the passage, we are still surprised at the end to discover he is actually speaking of Christ and the church. Husbands, love your wives just as Christ nourishes and cherishes the church – what a thought!

I wonder if we more easily think back to the self-sacrificial love of Christ, which stands historically behind the launch of the church. We look back to Calvary and rightly so. But here Paul ties Christ’s loving of the church not to a past event, but rather to a present ongoing reality. Maybe we don’t ponder that enough. The present care of Christ for his own is such a glorious truth.

Not only did he give himself in self-sacrifice at the cross, but now he continues to tenderly give of himself to the church he loves so dearly, seeking to warm us and help us to grow.

Jesus is our bridegroom, nourishing and cherishing his bride, today.

It is no mistake that the Bible uses such relational imagery for the reality of our relationship with God. We have a devoted bridegroom, a loving Father, a faithful friend, a good shepherd. And we have them all right now.

Perhaps we need to pause for a moment in our leadership and our care for others, and thank Christ for his present care for us. Let us ask God to tune our hearts to discern what he may be doing very quietly in our lives each and every day.

Jesus is our shepherd, and our bridegroom, today – exactly when we need him.

12 Pointers for Effective Epistle Exposition (pt.3)

May 27, 2015May 25, 2015 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

And to finish off this series of pointers on preaching epistles, here are the final four:

9. Root imperatives in their own soil. It is tempting to simply harvest imperatives and preach a to-do list. Don’t. Instead let each imperative be felt in its own context, including the earlier sections of the epistle where our gaze was pointed to Christ. Don’t let application sections become self-focused when they actually are intended to present guidance for what flows from the doctrinal sections.

10. Be clear. You can never be too clear in the way you structure the message and present the content. Look for ways to help your listeners follow you, and also follow the author in his thought.

11. Preach the text. The church has a full history of preaching messages from texts, but instead preach the message of the text. There is a world of difference. God inspired the Bible as it stands, He doesn’t promise to inspire every thought that is provoked in our minds as we read the text.

12. Engage in conversation. Don’t just sit alone with your preaching notes. Get into conversation. First, with God. Second, with others – commentaries and co-preachers, as well as listeners, etc. Conversation about your sermon will almost always improve your sermon!

12 Pointers for Effective Epistle Exposition (pt.2)

May 26, 2015May 25, 2015 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Continuing the brief list of a dozen pointers from yesterday…here are four more:

5. Master the whole. Don’t just preach chunk by chunk through the epistle without getting to grips with the flow of the whole. You cannot accurately preach a portion of an epistle without a good grasp of how the whole is working together.

6. Get the author’s logic. Don’t read a section and look for three preachable parallel points. Instead wrestle with what the author is trying to do in this particular section. Sermon outlines can always adjust to fit the text, and they should do so. Don’t adjust the text to fit your outline.

7. Preach to today. Don’t just present a set of commentary labels and then try to apply “back then” truths to today. Instead, preach the text to today, and go “back then” to substantiate what you are saying. Wrestle with how that audience is similar to, and different from, your audience today.

8. Let truth be felt. Epistles can lull us into a false sense of abstraction. Don’t give theological theory, preach the gospel applied to real life (both then and now). Preach tangibly, use implicit imagery, be vivid, help images to form on the heart-screens of your listeners.

The final four tomorrow.

12 Pointers for Effective Epistle Exposition

May 25, 2015 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Epistles are often seen as the easiest texts to preach. After all, they tend to be logical, structured and, since they are written to churches, easy to apply. Here are some reminders that may be helpful for effectively preaching epistles:

1. Grasp the narrative. Hang on, I thought we were talking about epistles? Indeed. By exploring the historical setting, especially by paying close attention to the details in the epistle itself, plus any Acts context, we can start to get a sense of the narrative that lies behind the letter. The letter itself is one side of a conversation at one moment in time. “Narratives” can be preached with tension, with feeling, with imagery, etc.

2. Learn the background. Not just the specific occasion of the epistle, but whatever background understanding would help you. For instance, how much do you really know about slavery in the Roman Empire? What about proto-gnostic religions? And the geography? Take the chance to learn more, don’t just try to replenish what you once knew.

3. Familiarise like crazy. Don’t read a letter then preach it. Read it. Read it. Read it again. Each time through, the flow of thought will become clearer and clearer.

4. Focus on the frame. The “letter-frames” often get short shrift from expositors. They shouldn’t. Look at the beginning and end of the epistle: what is included, how conventions are followed or broken, each and every clue to the situation of author and readers.

Tomorrow I’ll share the next four…

4 Common Ways to Mis-Distill a Passage

May 20, 2015 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

The process of moving from passage to message involves distilling the passage text down to the passage idea. The goal is a single sentence summary of the passage – a more concentrated representation of the whole. I find the image of distilling the text helpful because it suggests that the details, the character, the tone and the balance of the passage should all influence the final statement of the passage idea.

But we humans love to short-cut.

When we short-cut this process we can seriously mis-distill what is there, with the end result that the passage idea does not carry the true content, nor the character, of the passage we claim to be preaching.

Here are 4 ways to mis-distill in preaching prep:

1. Seek out the best verse. Occasionally a passage conveys its main idea in a single verse (and everything else in the passage is related to that verse). Typically this is not so. Don’t pick a punchy verse and primarily preach just that. Your goal is to summarise the whole text, so that the whole text is influencing the single sentence summary.

2. Seek out a meaty truth. Always a lively temptation, we must resist this. If your goal is to be a biblical preacher, then don’t abuse the Bible by using it to preach your weighty doctrines of choice. Preach the Bible text itself. The passage you are studying may beep on your theological radar and cause you to ponder its broader implications (hopefully challenging and changing your theology, rather than the influence going the other way). It takes prayerful care to make sure a minor point in a section does not take over because it happens to be a major theological issue for you.

3. Seek out imperatives. Speaking of your theology . . . if your theology says that people are essentially self-moved and need to be both informed and exhorted to action, then you will probably get over-excited when you spot imperatives of any sort. “Aha! Action points! I sense a sermon!” Take a deep breath and look carefully. The process that takes you from passage to passage idea is one of distilling the weight of the whole into a single sentence. It is not an imperatival mood filter that strains out all content to leave a me-focused to-do list. What is the passage doing in its context? What is going on in the passage? What is the nature and function of the imperative details in the passage? Seek to preach the passage, not to be a purveyor of preachy points.

4. Seek out triggers for your pet points. This could be theological pet points or imperatival pet points. It could also be cross-referencing pet points (“Cool, I can preach Romans 3 under the guise of this passage too!”), or historical background pet points (“Great, this reference to the circumcision party will allow me to explain first century Israeli politics, my favourite subject!”), or church/cultural commentary pet points (“Jesus tells him to go to the priest, which is good because I want to critique our contemporary church culture on slack church attendance!”) Find a better venue for sharing your pet points, but don’t sabotage any biblical preaching opportunity to do so.

When you are wrestling with a passage, be sure to distill the whole passage down into the passage idea. Any other approach and you won’t be preaching the whole passage.

Explain Well – 4 More Thoughts

May 15, 2015 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Yesterday I shared four thoughts on how to explain a biblical text well. Here are four more.

5. Explain visually, not just conceptually. When an idea becomes clear to a listener, they don’t say, “Ah, I grasp your conceptual logic!” No, people say, “Ah, I see what your saying.” What do they see? A clear picture of the idea being explained. We need to engage listeners at the level of imagination. There is a screen in the hearts of listeners and by fault it begins foggy and confused. Clear the smoke and form images as you explain the text, or as you describe the application. If you can see it, they will. If you are grasping for concepts, they see smoke.

6. Let the structure do its work. As you help people see the structure in a passage, it will begin to explain itself. Orient listeners to the “chunks” before diving into the details. Give a newcomer to town the landmarks before explaining details of smaller side streets. Highlight connectives or repetition in content so the shape starts to form on the page – “Notice how many verses begin ‘By faith…’ in this section. As you scan down the page you can see, ‘By faith…’ in verse 3, ‘By faith…’ in verse 4, etc. Eighteen times the writer does that. But then in verse 13 that pattern is broken. This four verse thought in the middle is being marked out as the central pivot of the passage. Let’s zero in on that pivot…”

7. Take people there, or bring the truth here. Decide whether you are going to transport listeners to back then and describe things so vividly that they can smell the air, or whether you are going to bring the biblical truth to today with a contemporary simile, “this is like…” Weak explanation tends to flow from indecision about listener location. Take them there, or bring the Bible to today. Actually, do both, but do both deliberately and definitely.

8. Judiciously use explanation from others. Don’t get me wrong, there are thousands of people who are better at explaining that text than you or me. We should be ready to take advantage of that. But they aren’t standing where you are. They might be Martin Luther, but your listeners may be ready to dismiss him because of some perception they have of him, or they may be hard-pressed to distinguish him from his namesake in the twentieth century. They might be a great contemporary scholar and commentator, but your listeners may be distracted by their funny sounding name (they don’t know anything else about him/her), or by your superior learning (they don’t have books like that). When you use someone else’s explanation, start with “one preacher put it like this…” and then add further details judiciously for your particular listeners.

Explain Well – 4 Thoughts

May 14, 2015 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Preaching is a complex ministry, but one of the core ingredients is effective explanation of the biblical text. If this is removed, then it is difficult to see how what remains can be biblical preaching.

Yet it can be tempting to remove explanation. Why not simply read a bit of Bible and then say what you want to say, making the odd vague connection? This passes for preaching in many places. What’s more, surely that can be more interesting than dull explanation? Of course it can, but the answer to the problem of a poor version of something good and important is not to replace it, but to do it well. How?

1. Recalibrate your appreciation of God’s ability as a communicator. Unless you are gripped by the fact that God is a great communicator, everything else I say here will fail to register. Know that if your listeners could really see the richness and relevance of what God is saying in any passage, they would be gripped and transformed. But if you don’t see it, they are going to struggle. Many Christians trust God to have created everything, to have worked out a redemption plan and to have final justice and a glorious eternity all worked out, but at the same time to be a poor communicator. This is mystifying.

2. Give appropriate amounts of engaging context. Too much context will turn the sermon into a historical lecture. Too little will strip the text of meaning. The biblical text is not a random set of assertions that have mystical power by virtue of inspiration. God gave us inspired text that was always set in a historical and situational context. Rather than being dull background stuff, this is often a key way to forge connections between the text and your listeners. Get to know the background context and determine where the points of engagement are for your listeners today.

3. Set the scene textually. Many of the biblical books were written to be digested whole, but we tend to cut and slice. That doesn’t mean we have to preach a whole book in every sermon (although that is an option to consider sometimes). It does mean that we can’t just drop people into an alien text without any orientation. Be sure to orient your listeners to what is going on in the big picture of the book before expecting them to be gripped by the specific text of your sermon.

4. Don’t explain every word with equal effort. Recognise that in any passage there will be a gravity centre. Take people there and help them see why that is the case. Explaining seven introductory clauses to get there will numb your listeners and they will lose track of the point of the passage.

Tomorrow I will add some more thoughts to this list.