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25 Pointers for Preaching Epistles Effectively – pt.2

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So, the next five pointers:

6. Grasp the flow of the whole – As a preacher you need to be able to explain the flow of the epistle.  Some of us are better at the details, others at the big picture, but we all need to work on both.  Preaching that just methodically explains the details without a good sense of the whole will be tedious, atomistic and disjointed.  Preach so the whole epistle can hit home.

7. Study the sections in light of their detail and the big picture – So as you look at a particular section, you will need to wrestle with the tiniest detail.  That may or may not need to be explained when you preach.  But don’t forget to keep thinking about the big picture, the broad flow of thought – that will need to be explained!

8. Study details and structure – Close reading of a passage is not just about word studies, it is also about sentences, and how sentences connect, and how transitions are made, and how paragraphs link.  Be sure to recognize repeated terms and themes, as well as patterns in flow of thought.  We have to study and hold understanding of the text at multiple levels of elevation at the same time.  A fun challenge!

9. Let the shape of the text shape your message – Or to put it another way, stop trying to find a list of three equal points in every text.  Sometimes a text will offer a negative example, then a positive example and then five instructions.  This is not three equal points.  Sometimes a text is essentially in two parts.  Preach a two-part message, you’ll be fine, don’t worry 🙂  (You don’t have to preach the sermon in the shape of the text, and there may be reasons not to, but as a default, its not a bad way to go.)

10.Compare and contrast situations – The original audience and their situation is not going to be the same as your listeners.  Compare and contrast the two.  What need do your listeners have for this passage?  Adjust how you present it accordingly.  But don’t adjust its original situation or meaning accordingly, that will weaken the message.

Another five next time…

25 Pointers for Preaching Epistles Effectively

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Most beginner preaching classes use the epistles as the foundational preaching genre.  We can end up thinking that preaching epistles is easy.  After all, a passage in an epistle will tend to fall into “chunks.”  Voila!  Sermon.  Hang on, there is more to preaching epistles than that.  Nine nudges, ten tips, well, how about 25 tips?  That should keep us going for the week!

1. Drill into the occasion – Why was the letter written?  Remember that epistle writers weren’t just letting their pen meander over papyrus for the sake of it.  They were prompted to communicate by some situation.  Therefore a letter is a snapshot of a narrative.  Be sure to read through the letter itself and look for all the clues in the text.

2. Check other biblical background – With ten of Paul’s epistles, you also have the fertile territory of Acts to explore.  What background is available by a close study of the relevant Acts material.  Its good to know which journey each letter was written on, as well as what other letters were also written at that time.  Fill in the background for your own benefit, and maybe also for the listeners.

3. Fill in your background knowledge – The biblical text is your main source, but be sure to check out whatever else might be helpful to understand.  What was the geography of Ephesus at the time, what does an incipient Gnosticism look like, why do dualists tend to end up at one or both of two extremes?  Other good reference material will be helpful.

4. Keep re-reading the epistle – That is the beauty of epistles: they are relatively short.  So keep re-reading as you study background and the flow of thought will become clearer and clearer.  Read the epistle so much that it isn’t just the famous verses that stand out, but until the whole text starts to sing.

5. Become familiar with the letter-frame – Too many Bible studies and sermon series skip the beginning and end of the epistle.  Don’t.  Dwell on every detail – author, recipients, greeting, thanksgiving, biographical prologue, main idea . . . what are the added details, what is missing?  And how does it end?  Why does he say that?

Five more tomorrow…

Preaching to the Heart

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Just for a change, I’d like to offer a list of posts relating to this subject.  I think it is so important that we preach to the heart and not just fill the mind or press the will.  So here are some past posts on the subject:

Profound preaching involves profound preparation, profound application, profound presentation, all working toward profound transformation.

10 Biggest Big Ideas of the Bible made much of the central role of the heart, both God’s and ours.  Here are the links – God, Creation, Sin, Grace, Faith, Redemption, Community, Spreading Goodness, Hope, Christ.

Our View of the Bible is critical in respect to the heart.  This post on the clarity of Scripture pointed to the issue of the heart.  We don’t need to add force, we need to feel the force of what is there.

Preaching to the heart goes beyond guilt – four-part series – one, two, three, four.

How often do we hear the terminology of the Bible being overqualified.  Here’s a post from a while back on confusing the heart and the head.

Preaching from the heart?  Here’s a post.  Depends on your motive.  What about when the preacher is passionless?  What if there were a thermal imaging camera?  When should the message touch the preacher’s heart?  One thing I’ve said more than once is that we shouldn’t de-affect the text.

Preaching to touch the heart?  Images matter, especially biblical ones.  And so does vivid description.  How will you touch the heart?  Beware of manipulation though, or troublingly distant preaching, and one more.  Mentoring is critical to truly marking hearts.

Some historical thoughts on preaching and the heart?  How about Wilberforce.  Or Jonathan Edwards.  Even Chrysostom.  And Thielicke on Spurgeon, and more of that gold.

A series on the preacher’s heart.  Part one, two and three.

And an article on heart-centred hermeneutics.  (And a recipe to finish.)

Word Studies 2 – Identifying Key Terms

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This week we are pondering the specific skill of word study in preaching.  Today I’ll focus on identifying key terms, then tomorrow we can consider the actual processes involved.

So how do you identify words to define more carefully?

1. Prayerfully read and study the passage.  Sounds silly, but until you get some decent familiarity with the passage, you can’t start identifying words.

2. Recognize that not every word is equal.  All words are equally inspired, but not all words are equal in a passage.  You might assume this is obvious.  After all, a weighty word like justified or righteous must be worth studying, while a normal word like in or of is obvious, right?  Sometimes wrong.  A “weighty” word may not be a key term in a particular passage (it may be given in the build up to the point of a prayer, for instance), while an obvious word may be the key to the whole section.

3. Recognize that your time is restricted.  It would be great to do a full chase on every term in a passage.  Actually, hypothetically it might be great in your study phase, if you had infinite time.  But in reality studying every word equally will distract you from the force of the passage in your study, and it will certainly confuse people in your preaching.  For instance, in Ephesians 1:15-23, I would cover the first 47 words fairly briefly.  Why?  Because I want the focus to be on the point of the passage, which is what Paul is actually praying from the end of v17 onwards.  If I give detailed explanations of faith, Lord, love, saints, prayers, God, Father and glory in my sermon, people will be numb by the time I get to Paul’s actual request.

So how to identify key terms?

A. Look for repeated terms.  In Ephesians 3:1-13, the term mystery is repeated and seems important. (Dynamic equivalent translations may hide repetition of terms, prefer formal equivalence for focused study.)

B. Look for structurally important terms.  Down in verse 8, grace was given to Paul with the results being the rest of verses 8-10.

C. Look for key connections or little words.  In this passage, the as, of verse 5 feels significant when the passage is read carefully (even better, when the passage is broken down to a phrase by phrase structural outline, or disagrammed if you have that skill from Greek).  Incidentally, once you start looking at the structure of epistle text like this, a good formal translation needs to be the working text, not a dynamic equivalent text.

D. Look for key terms in the wider context.  A term may only be used once in the passage, but be critical in the flow of the book.  For example, stewardship in verse 2 is important in the flow of Ephesians 1-3.

E. Look for key terms that are missed by the other guidelines.  Here’s the catch all.  It forces you to keep looking and observing the text.  In this case, it allows you to notice that glory in verse 13 is massively significant.  Doesn’t look it structurally, but actually Paul digressed in verse 1, so completing that thought in v13 is a big deal here.

Heartfelt Explanation – Preaching to the Heart (2)

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Yesterday I gave three thoughts on preaching to the heart.  The heart of the author of the biblical text matters, the hearts of the listeners with whom the text communicates matter, and God’s heart is revealed in the text.  Three more thoughts to conclude the list:

4. Dispassionate presentation is not honest, be sure to incarnate it.  Some are committed to being as dispassionate as possible in presentation.  “If I let my own heart response show, then I might distract listeners from the information in the text.”  The text is therefore offered at arms length, and typically received as such.  It should make us stop and wonder why we see no support for dispassionate preaching in the biblical record.  Some preaching is more like 1980’s washing powder advertising than biblical preaching.

5. When we add “affect” to the text, we are in danger of manipulation or emotionalism.  Why do we assume the text is dull and that our job is to add a stirring or rousing challenge?  Why do we think the text is dull, but we can add windows to the building by fascinating little illustrations?  I’m not against effective challenge, nor helpful “illustration”, but I am bothered by the assumption that the Bible is sterile and flat.  If we would reflect the affect of the text better, perhaps we’d see more listeners genuinely stirred by it.  When we simply add our own impact, we shouldn’t be surprised when people seem superficially stirred, or uncomfortably annoyed.

6. When we remove “affect” from the text, we are in danger of dulling hearts.  Some preachers don’t preach to the heart.  They take a vibrant and living Word and turn it into dull lecture material for the heads of their listeners.  Do we really want churches full of well-informed heads with dulled, or hardened, hearts?  If our theology and view of ministry leads us in that direction, please let’s respond to the warning flag and evaluate where we might have gone slightly off target.  Or to put it another way, if you think preaching is simply about informing people in a dull manner, please stop preaching for the sake of your listeners. Take a sabbatical and prayerfully chase God’s heart on the issue through the Bible.

Preaching to the heart matters, because the heart matters.  And preaching to the heart is not primarily an issue of application or challenge, it is at the very centre of our explanation.  God’s heart revealed, in heartfelt inspired texts, should be felt by the hearts of those hearing it properly presented.

 

There is more to be said, some of which I’ve probably addressed previously.  What would you add to this list?

Heartfelt Explanation – Preaching to the Heart

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A common mistake is to assume that the explanation of the text will be dull, but the application should make up for this by riveting relevance and powerful personal punch.  An alternative, but sibling error, is to think that the illustrations will be the source of heartfelt energy, while the text explained remains dull.

Some preliminary thoughts on preaching to the heart:

1. The text is a heartfelt composition, it makes no sense to sterilize it.  Sometimes we need to re-tune our theological ears so that we hear inspired human communication, rather than just theological proposition transfer embedded in inspired packaging.  If you don’t hear a heart beating in the Psalms you are really in trouble.  And what about narratives written by someone who cares deeply that the story be heard?  And even the epistles are far more rich in tone than we tend to make them sound.

2. The text communicates to the heart, don’t neutralize it.  Epistles don’t just inform, they were written to stir, to encourage, to rebuke, etc.  Poetry, almost by definition, is meant for pondering and heartfelt response.  Narratives, by nature, will captivate, characters drawing us in to identify, or causing us to disassociate, tension in the plot gripping the listener for more than just a statement of truth, but for truth dressed up in real life.  We have a habit of disengaging truths from the packaging in which they come.  This is not to minimize the importance of truth, but to recognize that God’s choice of genre packaging was intentional and effective for life transformation.

3. God reveals His heart in the Word, don’t hide it.  The Bible is, supremely, God’s self-revelation.  But we’re often too quick to cover over that self-revelation.  Oh, that’s just an anthropomorphism (using human form descriptors to communicate about God who is Spirit and absolutely nothing at all like us), or worse, an anthropopathism (same again, this time removing any possibility that God might have any passions at all)!  Really?  God only pretending to have emotion?  Our theological assumptions can quickly override the plain truth of Scripture and leave us with a God so distant and uncaring that he might as well be the god of the Greek philosophers, and a Jesus only feeling and loving and dying “in his humanity,” and other such confusion.

Preaching to the heart is not primarily a matter of homiletical technique.  It is an issue of our theological assumptions and the accuracy of our exegesis.  Tomorrow I’ll add another three thoughts.

5 Reasons Why I Love Preaching Psalms

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

So yesterday I shared some thoughts on preaching the prophets.  How about another list on the Psalms?  Why do I enjoy preaching them?

1. They are self-contained.  A psalm is a complete unit of thought.  It may be part of a short collection, so it is worth looking at those before and after.  It may give a historical clue in its superscription, so it is worth looking at that and chasing the history if there is anything suggested.  But essentially with a Psalm I know what I need to study and prepare . . . the psalm.

2. They are real and messy.  Life isn’t all clean and simple.  Life gets messy.  Emotions soar and plummet.  Situations overwhelm and resolution of tension can utterly delight.  The Psalms don’t pretend we are unfeeling stoical creatures.  We might, but the Psalms remind us to be real.  Not only does this make for preaching that sounds real and not just some sort of religious talk, but it also connects because listeners are also living real rather than merely religious lives.

3. They are emotive and heart-felt.  As a communicator I know the danger of adding emotional thrust to cold sterile content.  It can be very manipulative.  But I also know the danger of sterilizing powerful biblical texts into safe little life lessons.  Oops.  The Psalms are sitting up to be preached with a full heart to those who have a feeling heart – whether that be pain, or joy, sorrow, or delight.

4. They are full of imagery.  I don’t have to look endlessly for imagery to add to a message when I’m preaching from the Psalms.  It is usually right there.  I need to spend that energy on the text and then on effective description and presentation, but then I can have confidence that the imagery choice was made by God’s Spirit rather than me.

5. They are always relevant.  When people have lived the Christian life for a while, they typically end up appreciating the Psalms.  The rugged rawness reflects their own personal experience.  It tends to be the less mature who can’t get into the Psalms.  So as I preach them, I can have confidence that nerves will be touched, hearts will be stirred, lives will be helped.

I haven’t even mentioned the messianic hopes, the glimpses into the godhead, etc.  Ah well, I will stick with the five I put in the title.  Just a nudge in case you’ve forgotten to preach from this great collection.

5 Reasons Why I Love Preaching the Prophets

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

After three days of reflections on a great series from Daniel, here are a few reasons why I personally love to preach from the prophets:

1. They are less familiar.  This isn’t to suggest that sounding novel is a good thing, but it is nice to see people leaning forward once they get the sense that you are going to make clear something they may have avoided in their own personal studies.  Obviously there are the familiar parts – Isaiah 6, 40, 53, the first half of Daniel, Habakkuk, etc.  But there is plenty of relatively untouched ground in both the major and the minor prophets.

2. They are stunning communicators.  The prophets had to get attention.  They couldn’t even be normal, let alone dull.  As a communicator it is a bit of dream to be able to tap into the creativity of the truly shocking, without taking any real flack for the choice of approach.  If we let the genre, the tone, and the creativity of the prophets shape our preaching of them, we should see this as a real head-start!

3. They are robust and direct.  You don’t have to go far in a prophet to get a sense of what God is feeling about things.  In the narrative sections you sometimes have to think and feel your way through multiple chapters for a single narrative.  In the prophets you’ll probably get struck on the nose within a few verses.  The prophets were, by definition, stunning communicators.  They had to be, since the people were so often so dull of hearing.  This leads on to another…
4. There are cultural similarities.  I don’t want to overplay the “Christian nation” ideas that some seem so passionate about, but there is a real sense in which our cultures have slipped from what they once were.  People taking God for granted or treating Him as irrelevant; people living to please themselves; people pursuing dishonest gain, plotting and scheming . . . this is the stuff of the Prophets, and of today.

5. They are hope filled.  There are layers upon layers of hope offered in the prophets.  Not only do they give the messianic predictions, but also the shorter term sense of God’s concern and interest and involvement in their lives . . . and also the longer term sense of ultimate reconciliation and kingdom hopes and guaranteed judgment on the wicked, etc.

I could go on, but I’ll leave it there.  When was the last time you preached from a Prophet?

Reflections on Great Bible Teaching – Part 2

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In this series of posts I am reflecting on Bible teaching I had the privilege of sitting under last week.  It was some of the most stirring and powerful ministry I have heard in a long time.  I won’t name the speaker, for I suspect he wouldn’t appreciate that, but I hope my reflections on this ministry might be a stir to us.  Yesterday I wrote about his masterful handling of the text … something that reveals hours, even years, of hard work.

Today I am struck by another labour intensive feature of the messages:

Brilliant and On-Target Application.

A. The speaker was sensitive to the specifics of a very mixed crowd.  I heard him speak from Daniel almost twenty years ago.  It was powerful then because it was targeted to a the group of young people of which I was a member.  This time the messages were different.  Part of that was the difference in audience.  This was a mixed group with a variety of ministry roles from across the continent.  Yet the messages were so pertinent to people living as a small minority in difficult anti-Christian cultures.

B. The speaker honoured the intelligence levels of those present.  This was a gathering of people that included a significant number of the highly educated.  The messages were not elitist at all, but the speaker was sensitive to the intelligence levels in the room.  Nobody would have felt patronised, nor would anyone have felt untouched by the ministry.

C. He obviously invested significant time in preparation.  The level of relevance and applicational targeting in these messages would not come from a quick scan of old notes.  The speaker evidenced a real love for the listeners by the level of specificity he managed to achieve in his thoughtful applications to the audience.

Tomorrow I’ll add one more post, on the issue of the speaker’s credibility.

Reflections on Great Bible Teaching – Part 1

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Last week I was at a conference, enjoying it both as a participant and as a presenter.  I was particularly struck by the main Bible teaching.  I have been pondering what made it so effective and will offer my reflections in three posts.  I know the speaker is not a limelight seeker, so I won’t name him, but I trust these reflections will be provocative for us.

Observation 1 – Masterful Handling of the Text

In four messages we were taken through the entire book of Daniel.  Not the easiest book to preach, nor the least controversial.  How was the text handled so effectively in the course of four one-hour presentations?

A. The speaker was sensitive to both the literary and historical context of the book.  He knew his Babylonian and subsequent world empire history and demonstrated a keen awareness of the various disciplines needed for pulling together the complexity of Daniel.

B. He was deeply aware of the literary structure of the book.  Layer upon layer of structure was masterfully woven together as the book was presented, leaving the listeners struck by the artistry of the writer.

C. He showed a remarkable ability to summarise the content of multiple chapters without losing the essence or the core intent of the passages.  The teaching had integrity, even when a chapter was surveyed only briefly.

D. The speaker was as bold as a lion, yet as winsome as a lamb.  In a mixed crowd of people from multiple denominations and disciplines, it would be tempting to try to please everyone with a sort of neutered presentation.  Not here.  There was a stunning level of courage in this presentation.  He knew that many would disagree on various levels, yet he was unashamed in his presentation of the book. I think this kind of courage required both a genuine winsomeness and an authoritative mastery of the book’s contents.

I was challenged by the obvious passion for the Word that showed in this series of talks.  But there was more to it than that, tomorrow I’ll look at the issue of targeted applications…