Why is it that some people are seemingly so alive, and others seem stone cold, when both have the same Bible? Maybe the difference is in them…click here for today’s post
Homiletics
Pulpit Talk Is Never Nothing
When you preach, what you say may or may not be biblical, accurate, helpful, engaging or even Christian. But one thing it can’t be is nothing. There is no neutral.
1. Poor handling of the Bible is not nothing. Some preachers may read the text and then say whatever they want, failing absolutely to communicate the meaning, the intent or the relevance of the text. But they aren’t doing nothing. You can’t judge dismiss it and say, “Oh, that’s just so and so, we know what he’s like…” Truth is that such poor handling leaves an impression on the impressionable, it trains the incompetent to greater incompetence in Bible handling, it adds fuel to the fire of the skeptic who silently evaluates and concludes that there really is no substance to Christianity. It may be damaging, but it is never nothing.
2. Improper application of the Bible is not nothing. It’s amazing what some people will seek to apply to the listeners. The disciples met with the risen Jesus in the evening, so we should be sure to attend the evening service at church. How is this any better than reading Noah and conclude the spiritual and godly are the few still prepared to throw birds through windows? Whatever might be said of this kind of applicational tripe, you cannot say, “Oh, that’s just preacher so and so, we know what he’s like…” Truth is that such improper application is harmful both in its impact and in its failure to impact. People whose lives are in need of the balm of the Word, in need of the conviction of the Spirit, in need of the wooing of Christ, in need of encouragement, of soul care, of love . . . these people get only guilt, pressure, nonsense, harm and damage. Whatever this type of application may be, it is never nothing.
I suppose I could list all manner of other things here . . . unthought-through illustrations, inaccessible explanations, anecdotal content that serves the main idea not one whit. The preacher preaches and there is no sense in suggesting that every word that proceeds is automatically a fruit of time spent with the Lord. Some words spoken are not befitting for the Christian pulpit. Yet no words spoken are merely nil. Each word, each sound, each expression, each detail . . . it all does something. Let’s be sure to make it all count for eternity.
Strangling the Gospel
David Gordon lists four types of failed sermon types that are prevalent today. The list is worth considering in full, but especially the first sermon type he describes. The first on his list, and the first on mine, is moralism. Here are some highlights that I have pulled from this section of the book:
Protestant liberalism was a way of understanding Christianity as essentially consisting of a particular moral framework, and of understanding Christ as essentially a great moral teacher. [It] often denied outright that Christianity was a redemptive religion. . . . Rather, it perceived Christianity as consisting of the discovery of a right and proper way to live an ethical life.
…Ironically, the very orthodox and evangelical Christians who protested against Protestant liberalism in the early twentieth century are quite likely to promote its basic emphases from the pulpit today.
…Moralism occurs whenever the fundamental message of a sermon is “be good; do good” (or some specific thereof). Whenever the fundamental purpose of the sermon is to improve the behavior of others, so that Christ in his redemptive office is either denied or largely overlooked, the sermon is moralistic.
…Go and listen to the typical sermon in the typical evangelical or Reformed church, and ask what Luther would think if he were present. Luther would think he was still in Rome. (Taken from pp79-81)
This is a huge issue. Moralism and legalism is a plague in some churches. Somehow the fresh and dynamic, personal and engaged reality of relationship with Christ tends to grow dim over time (and over generations). So in some churches today there are those who would essentially affirm the preaching of a Roman Catholic or Mormon or Conservative Moralist or child behavioural traditionalist guest speaker.
Legalism is not honouring to God. Legalism strangles the gospel. It chokes love. It throttles grace. It undermines the gospel. Let us be very careful to really preach the glorious grace of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Moralism is always an attractive shortcut to producing churches full of people who look very christian. Let’s dare to take the path less travelled – to preach the transforming grace of God, His captivating love that doesn’t mass produce Pharisees, but will stir a response. The love of the Trinity in the gospel will always polarize, it will distinguish, it will certainly bother some of the core people in any church. But let’s not forget who bothered Christ the most – it was the moralistic legalists who mastered the form, yet missed the heart.
Preaching is Dead vs Dead Preaching
There is a significant difference between using the wrong means to achieve a goal, and using the right means poorly. I like the way David Gordon puts it in response to those that claim preaching is not necessary any more:
I concur with them that the church is failing in many circumstances, but I attribute this not to the church’s employing the wrong means, but to the church’s employing the right means incompetently. If the patients of a given hospital’s surgeons continue to die, we could, I suppose, abandon the scalpel. We might also consider employing it more skillfully. My challenge to the contemporaneists and emergents is this: Show me a church where the preaching is good, and yet the church is still moribund. I’ve never seen such a church. The moribund churches I’ve seen have been malpreached to death.
(p33)
How true this is. I’ve yet to meet someone who opposes expository preaching that has tasted of the real deal. People tend to reject a caricatured, or an inadequate, or an incomplete version. The preaching of a church has a massive amount to do with the health of the church. Show me a truly healthy church with poor preaching. Show me a spiritually impoverished church with consistently good preaching. I suspect you can’t do either.
It certainly takes much more than preaching to build a healthy church. But it seems that it can’t be done without.
Not Too Good, Just Good Enough
Here’s a quote from David Gordon’s chapter on the state of preaching in Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers. I reviewed the book on Monday and recommend it as a quick but insightful read. Anyway, here’s the quote:
[People distort my concern with] “Ah, David, you’re right; ours is not a day of great preaching.” This is not my concern. . . . I don’t care about its presence or absence one whit. What I care about is the average Christian family in the average pew in the average church on the average Sunday. And the problem there is not that we don’t have “great” preachers; in many circumstances we don’t even have mediocre preachers. If Jesus tests Peter’s profession of love by the ministerial act of feeding his sheep, our sheep do not need gourmet meals. But they do need good, solid nourishment, and they are not ordinarily getting it. (pp14-15)
I agree. Now let me put this positively. I tend to teach people, particularly in respect to the main idea of their sermons, that the goal isn’t stunning or great. The goal is just good, faithful and clear. We read super-ideas in some preaching books. These stunning, out of the park, hit it for six, idea-of-the-year, super-main-ideas tend to be the very best the author has ever preached. We can’t live up to some of these pithy, witty, clever, assonated, succinct and memorable main ideas. We may never achieve a single one good enough to be published. But the thing is this – if we will just preach consistently biblical, faithful, plain, clear, just decent main ideas that are derived carefully from the text and targeted prayerfully toward the hearts of the people . . . just a steady diet of good main ideas will transform our churches.
Hear the Text Here
When we read a Bible text, do we really read it? Do we really read it? Two important and slightly distinguished questions…
1. Do we really read it? Everyone assumes that we read it if we run our eyes over it and notice what is there. The reality is that most of the time we don’t really look carefully at the text and notice what is there. We miss biblical quotations and allusions, we miss details in the text, we miss the flow of the text, we miss the mood of the text, etc. As Gordon writes in his book, we are not in a culture that trains us to be close readers of quality texts anymore.
2. Do we really read it? That is, we have a tendency to not only not read very well, but to excuse poor reading of this text because of a wider understanding of the whole Bible. Of course we should read every passage in its context in the Bible. We must have a Bible wide theology, and a Bible defined theology. Yet it is so easy to impose a theological position on a text so that the text itself is not heard. I observed this recently when one line in a Psalm triggered a theological thought for one person, so that he argued against the surrounding text in order to underline his own theological position. He would say he was being biblical, but his theological position was overriding his reading of this particular text.
This post is cast in a negative tone, but the goal is positive. Let us be careful readers, and careful readers of each text. Surely that will help us be better preachers.
Review: Why Johnny Can’t Preach, by T.David Gordon
It’s a short book,108 pages, but it packs quite a punch. T.David Gordon wrote Why Johnny Can’t Preach during a year of treatment for cancer. Given only a 25% chance of survival, he found his focus clear and the desire to compromise his message absent. The book is hard-hitting, but I found the tone entirely appropriate and not harsh despite the subject matter.
The writer is a media ecologist – that is, one who studies the effects of the change of media forms on the culture. Taking his title from two books in the 1960’s on the growing inability of students to read and write, this book focuses on why the present state of preaching is so dire.
The first part of the book sets out his evidence for his claim that preaching is ordinarily poor. While admitting freely that his first line of evidence is merely anecdotal, I found the presentation of evidence hard to argue with (not that I’m inclined to argue since my experience largely reflects the author’s). Yet Gordon’s evidence is not merely subjective. He goes to some pains to make clear that there are some objective measures of sermon quality that can be used to identify problem preaching. It is too common to hear “that is just your opinion” if a sermon is ever questioned or critiqued.
The author’s argument culminates with the almost total absence of the annual review, not missing in any other profession, but indicative that all sides know there is an issue. Gordon doesn’t blame seminaries for this state of affairs. In his perspective they haven’t changed, but the calibre of incoming student certainly has. What has changed? Because of the change in media forms, Johnny is no longer able to read, nor write, nor discern the significant, and hence he can’t preach either.
True preaching requires close examination and study of a quality text, something non-readers have no experience of today. People don’t study classical languages. They don’t read literature. They aren’t equipped to really study a text. People read for content, but don’t learn to look at how a text communicates.
True preaching requires careful composition. But people don’t write letters anymore. They talk on the phone. Instead of careful composition, we live in a day of easy and cheap talk.
True preaching requires a sensibility of the significant. But the only way to watch hours of television is to turn off such sensibility, so most do.
A once-common sensibility (close reading of texts) is now uncommon, and a once-common activity (composition) is now comparatively rare. A once-common daily occurrence (face-to-face communication allowing us to “read” the unstated feelings of another) has been replaced by telephone conversation in which visual feedback is absent. A once-common sensibility, the capacity to distinguish the significant from the insignificant, is becoming rare. For a minister today to preach a basic average sermon by early-twentieth-century standards would require a lifestyle that is significantly countercultural.
The book is not solely concerned with capacity to study and compose. The fourth chapter looks at the content of sermons and gives a fine rebuttal of four contemporary approaches – moralism, how-to, introspection and “so-called culture wars” . . . helpful content that I will come back to in other posts.
At certain points I would suggest that the author’s view of Christian preaching is a little narrow. There is more to an inherently relational faith than merely submitting our will to God’s will. Perhaps the Bible text, if read carefully, might present the heart of God such that our hearts might be changed in response.
Nevertheless, even taken on the author’s terms, the book’s message is important and needs to be considered. All of us live in a fast-paced world that simply doesn’t allow for careful reading of God’s heart in His Word. Perhaps it is time we were more counter-cultural in order to be able to read the text well.
Thankfully, T. David Gordon is still alive and serving the church through his teaching and writing. We should be grateful for this little gem of a book. Buy this book, perhaps even pass on a copy to someone else!
(If you are in the UK, click here to buy.)
Roast Preacher?
In a culture that is as committed to the Sunday roast dinner as it is to complaining, it isn’t surprising that people here talk about having Roast Preacher for dinner! But as parents we are sensitive to the presence of children at our dinner table (and for the record, the absence of roast dinners on a Sunday – all who manage that feat on a Sunday are borderline miracle workers in our opinion!) So how to discuss the sermon with the family present? I like three questions used by the author of the book I’m not naming until next week. I think we should try these:
1. What was the point or thrust of the sermon?
2. Was this point adequately established in the text that was read?
3. Were the applications legitimate applications of the point?
If the main point was not clear, then it will be interesting to determine together what the sum total, bottom line, distilled main idea actually was from our perspective. (Preachers note this, if you don’t make your main point clear, others will be guessing or dismissing, and neither is good!)
If the main point was not established in the text, then we have two paths ahead of us. One would be to guess where the main point actually did come from (danger of psycho-analysis with children present). The more productive path would be to look at the text again and determine what the main point actually is in the text. (Preachers note this, most people will not automatically go back to the text and hunt down a statement of the main point of it. They will either accept what you said, or they will ignore and move on – neither is a good result.)
If the applications were not legitimate applications of the point, then again we have a couple of options. One would be to trace out both the roots and the fruits of the false applications . . . which would hopefully lead to other Bible study and application of other biblical truth. Or it might lead to spotting false agenda and considering the long-term fruit of sub-gospel preaching. Depends on the sermon, I suppose. The other option would be to chase more legitimate applications of the teaching of the text read. (Preachers note this, most people either buy what you say or ignore it. You probably get the pattern here by now.)
So let’s say we end up chasing down the legitimate applications of the actual main point of a text, having heard a disunited message that failed to establish its main point in the text read or provide legitimate applications. I suspect we’d be a very rare family if we managed that over our Sunday lunch. Preachers note this – these three questions are not unfair, let’s be sure people can answer them easily and in the affirmative.
Irrelevant?
It isn’t unusual to hear people speak of expository preaching as an irrelevant mode of communication that has no place in the contemporary church. Outdated. Unnecessary. Irrelevant. Here’s a quote from a footnote in the book I just finished this morning and will review sometime soon, but will leave you in suspense for now (p79):
As long as original sin has the human race in its grasp, and as long as the conscience has the slightest awareness of guilt, declaring the competence of the sin-bearing Christ to rescue the guilty will never be irrelevant.
Absolutely. The problem with the “irrelevance” talk is that it seems to be looking at entirely the wrong thing.
1. People don’t always know what they need. Everyone seems to be an expert in how long they can concentrate, how they learn best, how they need to be fed, etc. As a parent I know it is possible to be most sincere about what is best, yet in my slightly advanced maturity I can see through the best laid plans of toddlers and children. In a culture that has degenerated on so many levels, the frogs in the near boiling water are happy to announce that preaching the Bible is now irrelevant to them since they are so advanced compared to all who have come before. It seems, at times, that the only advance is the march of sin toward judgment.
2. People don’t always know what they haven’t heard. For example, feed a church poor preaching consistently and they may moan, but they also will cling on to the scraps of good that they receive from the pulpit. Sometimes great expository preaching can be as much of a shock to the system as a nutritious feast is a shock to a starving body.
3. People don’t always know the difference between critiquing bad examples and critiquing something as a whole. I can say that tomatoes are unnecessary for me to have an enjoyable diet because I have only tasted sour excuses for tomatoes. But now that I have enjoyed some of the finer specimens from Italy and elsewhere, I wouldn’t be so brash in my dismissal of all tomatoes. The same goes for expository preaching. What may be irrelevant is the kind of pseudo-expository preaching many have grown accustomed to (lacking biblically, lacking communicationally, lacking applicationally, lacking spiritually, lacking in gospel, lacking in skill, lacking in prayer).
Baby. Bathwater.
Life’s Too Fast To Preach
We don’t always realize just how fast our fast-paced lives are. We live in an age of flashing images that rush by at frantic pace. As the book I’m currently enjoying points out, “we become acclimated to distraction, to multitasking, to giving part of our attention to many things at once, while almost never devoting the entire attention of the entire soul to anything.” (p50)
But preaching a biblical text demands that we slow down and focus. We must concentrate fully on the text.
1. Poetry – “the rhythms and cadences, the music of the language, cannot be experienced at all by scanning.” (p.50). Indeed the dense line by line nature of poetic art demands focused reading if we are to glimpse the gold that is there.
It is not just poetry though, we must also slow for:
2. Narrative – it takes focused concentration for the imagination to engage, for the images to form, for the tension to be felt. Characters have to be met, tension faced, resolution experienced. Narrative will only yield superficial and petty sermon outlines if it is not engaged slowly.
3. Discourse – it takes focused concentration to follow the intricate composition of an epistle or recorded speech. How does the thought flow? What is the main thought? How is it developed? Again, discourse will preach after a superficial glimpse, but it will be poor!
Slow down. Read the text. Then maybe you can preach it.
Biblical Preaching 