Homiletics

Speeding the Process

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A couple of other ideas that can be added to yesterday’s post:

“Sermon Ideation Groups to plan a series through a book.” John suggested this and I heartily concur.  Mapping out passages and initial ideas can be a great headstart to the sermon series planning process.  Anything that helps to avoid the “from scratch” sensation each week is helpful.  I would add a couple more thoughts related to this:

Phone a Friend and Talk it Through. There are times when sermon preparation is moving forward at a pace, then other times when things seem to grind to a halt.  Being able to talk with someone who understands the process, the concept of good Bible study, etc. can be the kickstart the process needs to get going again.  Such a friend is worth their weight in gold.  If you don’t have one, train some!

Allow Margin to Plan When Productive. I was really productive on planning a series for next January . . . all within a window of 24 hours at the end of May.  That is a significant headstart, which also allows me to collect useful material, illustrations, etc., over the next six months.

The goal is not to speed up the process of preparation, but it doesn’t hurt to be able to be prepared in the limited time that we have.  Cutting corners doesn’t honour the Lord, but thinking it through so we can give our best, even with all the pastoral and personal crises that will come between now and preaching time, is a worthwhile endeavour.

When Time is Short

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A good friend wrote the following:

As I anticipate teaching preaching overseas, I realize that I need to take seriously the lack of time that these pastors have for sermon prep. I feel like my training has prepared me well both to practice and to teach a strategy for preaching that requires quite a bit of time, and many western pastors have that luxury. My students will not.  Any suggestions?

I’ve seen this in many places, as well as in teaching bi-vocational preachers in the west.  How can the preaching process take less time without compromising what matters?  Where can the time be trimmed, without compromising the end product?  Here are some possibilities:

Remove the Passage Selection Headache.  Encouraging them to plan a series (typically through a book), allows study to overlap and build, and it takes away the stress of finding a passage from scratch every week.

Encourage preachers to preach one thing well, not to preach everything in one. Most people feel that preaching should be both an exhausting process and an exhaustive presentation of every exegetical detail in a text – so in some ways teaching them to preach is about teaching them what is not preaching, even though they have heard it every Sunday from others.

Remove pressure to discover endless clever illustrations. I’ve tried to remove pressure to chase quotable illustrations, encouraging good handling of, and effective descriptive of the text (so that if they explain a text, or tell the story well, summarize the main point and apply it specifically, they can feel like they are really preaching).

The default starting point for a narrative sermon outline is helpful.  I find giving a simple default outline for narratives to be helpful (so they aren’t scratching their heads about outline when it often can be as simple as tell the story, clarify the main point and then apply it.)

Recycle Bible study.  If people are preaching twice in a weekend, I encourage preaching twice off the back of one set of exegesis (that is, go back to the same passage and apply it further or chase issues in a different way).

Preaching to Youth

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

I received an email from Peter who was asking about preaching to youth.  Now I don’t know the setting of that message, the age of the youth, their culture, etc.  So my response has to be non-specific, and honestly, more focused on my cultures (US/UK).  Nevertheless, here are some thoughts, perhaps you could add others:

1. Be engaging,  don’t be silly.  Some people think youth can’t concentrate or don’t want meat, so they just act silly and try to entertain.  Youth are very capable of concentrating and value good quality content.  But if it is boring (as with adults), they will disengage.  So engage rather than entertain (although if you are humorous then don’t be afraid to use it).

2. This generation values meat.  When I think of who the popular  speakers are today among the younger generation, the names that come to mind are not entertainers.  Notice how younger folks flock to hear people like Tim Keller, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, DA Carson . . . which proves that the younger generation are not lightweight.

3. Recognize that you are speaking cross-culturally. You may be only 15 years older than them, and from the same place, but you are effectively preaching to a different culture.  It is good to think about their worldview, their values, their language, etc.  Don’t try to be one of them (too many try to act like a youth and have no credibility as a result), but do try to know who you are speaking to.

4. Don’t be longer than necessary, but know that concentration spans are as short as ever. That is to say, don’t think 15 or 20 or 30 minutes is the key.  The key is 3-5 minutes.  You can preach for an hour in some settings, but actually that has to be a series of 3-5 minute sections that grab and retain attention.

5. The younger generation value authenticity more than previous generations. Don’t make yourself out to be a total idiot, but do be real with your own struggles and life.  They don’t value polished rhetoric and a pulpit persona, they do value genuine and authentic communication from the heart and the head, to the heart and the head.

Stock-Fish and Dentures

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I am sure I will come back to both Thielicke and Spurgeon in the days to come, but let’s end this Thielicke on Spurgeon week with another hefty paragraph.  In a sense it brings us full circle, back to where we started – the need to seek to improve our preaching.  Let’s drink deep of the water in this paragraphian well:

Have we not taken the perfectly proper recognition that it is not we but the Word itself that creates a hearing for itself and made of that recognition a “pretext for evil,” an excuse for slovenly neglect of rhetoric? Is it not a misconception of the doctrine of justification when we allow “by faith alone” to become an abstention from works, including the work of rhetoric?  When a man preaches the pure Word of God and the pews are empty or those attending go to sleep in church, we are all too ready to make a virtue of our lack of sues and talk about the offense that must necessarily accompany the preaching of the gospel.  We have a great talent for persuading ourselves that it is not only the stones which can cry out but that the empty pews will testify for us.  And yet it may have been due only to the miserable structure of our sermons that people who value intellectual order were unable to follow them without torturously abusing their minds, and finally giving it up.  Perhaps it was also our poorly used voice that caused people to indulge in church rather than at home their desire for sleep.  Or we stood like stock-fish in the pulpit, or we revolved our arms like paddle wheels, or we kept threatening with our fists, or rattling our dentures – in short, we did not pay enough attention to, we did not cultivate, the instrumental factor.  We did not grieve over the poorly fired, porous “earthen vessels” of our disorderly sermon outlines and our miserable rhetoric.  On the contrary – what a strange perversion! – we were pleased with them because, after all, the wretchedness of the vessel seemed only to enhance the treasure it contained. (p.17)

We Don’t Believe You!

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Thielicke responds to Spurgeon’s insistence on the necessity for the farmer to sharpen his scythe (the need for Sabbath, for rest, for sabbatical, for vacation, for refreshment, as well as for preparation and, indirectly, training) with this:

Nor can the fisherman always be fishing; he must mend his nets.  . . . Whereas Spurgeon enjoins us to remember that preachers must not think too highly of themselves as instruments but in faith accept that they are dispensable, we hound our young vicars – not everybody does this, I know, but many do! – chasing them from examinations into the bustling business of pastoral service in the big cities, from funerals to marriage, and from the pulpit to doorbell-ringing, opening the pores of the body of Christ to all the bacilli against which, after all, we should be mobilizing the antibiotic of our message of peace.  We keep killing flowers in the bud, because we no longer let things grow because down underneath we have forgotten how to pray “Thy kingdom come,” and in its place have put our “manager’s faith,” our belief that everything can be produced and organized.

How true this is today.  If you are in leadership in a church, what would be the most honest label for what you do?  Spiritual leader?  Or People Pleaser?  Or Program Manager?  Or Schedule Maintainer? Or, well, fill in the blank as you choose.  Too easily the demands of ministry turn the spiritual into the stressed, the example into the bad example.

Health warning: what follows is likely to make you feel convicted and you may need to lie down.  You may not be able to concentrate on other things for a few minutes, perhaps longer.  You may need to kneel with the urge to pray, to confess, to repent.

We preach “Do not be anxious!” – and at the same time worry ourselves to death about whether everybody will he this.  We say, “God reigns” – and still we run about madly keeping the ecclesiastical machinery going.  We proclaim man’s passive righteousness (the righteousness that comes from God)- and still we behave like activists.  We preach eternity; but when Jesus asks us, “Did you have enough of everything?” we will have to reply, “Oh, no; we didn’t have enough time.”  This is why we preach peace and radiate restlessness.  This is why we give stones instead of bread, and men do not believe us.  The faith is refuted by the incredulity of those who proclaim it. (p.12)

Borrowed Light

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Thielicke, speak to us about Spurgeon . . .

For Spurgeon the really determinative foundation of the education of preachers was naturally this work on the spiritual man.  The education of preachers must not be directly pragmatic; it must not be immediately directed to preaching as its goal.  Otherwise the process of education becomes an act of mere training, the teaching of technical skills.  The preacher must read the Bible without asking in the back of his mind how he can capitalize homiletically upon the text he studies.  He must first read it as nourishment for his own soul.

This is vitally important, but easily neglected or misunderstood.  Too often homiletics is treated as a subject that fits only in some sort of pragmatic department of training institutions, somehow distinct from Bible, Theology, Spirituality, Divinity.  How wrong to view homiletics as the mere teaching of teachnique – tips for public speaking.  While there is real value in training in the skills of passage study, sermon formation and delivery, homiletics is so much more.  Ultimately the educator is not to teach a man to preach, but to teach a man, and to teach him to preach. (Adapt that sentence as you prefer for gender neutrality, but it simply doesn’t work to make that gender neutral by pluralising the terms.)  True biblical preaching is born out of the spiritual reality in the preacher, not just some assemblage of tips and techniques.  Let’s go back to Thielicke, this next part is priceless:

For the light which we are to let shine before men is borrowed light, a mere reflection.  He who will not go out in the sun in order to play the humble role of a mirror, reflecting the sun’s light, has to try to produce his own light, and thus gives the lie to his message by his vanity and egocentric presumption.  Besides becoming unworthy of being believed, he is condemned to consume his own substance and expend his capital to the point of bankruptcy.  Because he is not a recipient, he must himself produce and seek to overcome the empty silence within him by means of noisy gongs and clanging cymbals.  Thus he ends in the paralysis of emptiness, and his empty, droning rhetoric merely covers up the burned-out slag underneath. (p10)

Selah.

Of Inner Screens and Communion Closets

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Some more of Thielicke on Spurgeon:

When Spurgeon speaks, it is as if the figures of the patriarchs and prophets and apostles were in the auditorium – sitting upon a raised tribune! – looking down upon the listeners.  You hear the rush of the Jordan and the murmuring of the brooks of Siloam; you see the cedars of Lebanon swaying in the wind, hear the clash and tumult of battle between the children of Israel and the Philistines, sense the safety and security of Noah’s ark, suffer the agonies of soul endured by Job and Jeremiah, hear the creak of oars as the disciples strain against the contrary winds, and feel the dread of the terrors of the apocalypse.  The Bible is so close that you not only hear its messages but breathe its very atmosphere.  The heart is so full of Scripture that it leavens the consciousness, peoples the imagination with its images, and determines the landscape of the soul by its climate.  And because it has what might be called a total presence, the Bible as the Word of God is really concentrated life that enters every pore and teaches us not only to see and hear but also to taste and smell the wealth of reality that is spread out before us here.

Those who listened to these lectures of Spurgeon lived . . . in the atmosphere of the Bible.  They no longer needed to be exhorted to take the Bible seriously; it penetrated into what the psychologists call the “image level” of their unconscious.  Even the admonition to prayer was hardly needed, for the words that reached the hearer were spoken by one who himself had come out of the stillness of eternal communion with God, and what he said to the hearer had first been talked about with the Father in heaven.(v9)

Vivid preaching that reaches deeper than mere words ever could, aiming to transform the listener at every level of the heart, soul, spirit; penetrating to the screen in the inner man, so the vivid and striking reality of Scripture is lived even in the hearing, all coming from one who is personally intimate with the God whose Word he preaches.  It can’t get much better than that!

Theme Number One in the Church

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

I picked up a copy of Helmut Thielicke’s Encounter with Spurgeon.  Essentially it is a 45 page reflection on Spurgeon’s homiletics by a theologian you might not expect to rave so wildly about his work and ministry, followed by selected highlights from Spurgeon’s writings.  I have not read Thielicke since studying ethics at seminary, but I will have to be disciplined not to just copy most of the 45 pages here in the next few days!  However, I do think this can be a Thielicke on Spurgeon week as far as this blog is concerned.

It would be well for a time like ours to learn from this man.  For our preaching is, to be sure, largely correct, exegetically “legitimate,” workmanlike and tidy; but it is also remarkably dead and lacking in infectious power.  Very often it strikes us as an unreal phantom that hovers above and is isolated from what people feel are the actual realities of their life and what they talk about in their language.  There can be no doubt that for many preachers it is simply an escape when, in the face of this failure to get returns in the area of preaching, they take flight into the cultivation of liturgical ceremonial and even make a virtue of the vice of wanting to ignore the times and live in some timeless, spiritual world.

In this desperate situation which threatens to break down even the best of men – for it is a desperate thing to feel the burden of souls committed to our charge and not to be able to do anything about it – everything depends upon our gaining some standards for that which is “Theme Number One” of the church – our preaching. (p.2)

We can be technically good, but effectually useless.  If the preaching doesn’t connect with listeners in a meaningful way, then it is a ghostly imitation of the real thing.  So, for many preachers struggling with their ineffectual ministry, it is an easier cop out to act as if it is good to be irrelevant and aloof.  But souls are going to a lost eternity and we can’t do anything about it, and yet we can, we must, do this one thing – we must pursue effectual preaching because that is the main thing in the church.

Some Thoughts on Preparing to Preach Psalm 22

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments
This is not a complete post, but it may be helpful.  I received the following question from a good friend:

I have been asked to preach on psalm 22 and am at the moment soaking myself in it to try and make sure I understand the message, the structure and what God was saying then and is saying now.

I will resist the temptation to jump straight to Matthew 27 and end up preaching that, as the psalm should, in my current view, stand on its own merits.  Nevertheless I can’t imagine preaching this without bringing in Matthew.  I would really welcome your views on how to approach this to get the balance right.

Here’s my initial answer:

This is a key issue in preaching OT.  Many automatically go to the NT, especially from a passage like that.  I suppose I would study it in two stages – first what it meant then, then how Matthew / Jesus uses it (raising the issue of whether Jesus was pulling only specific verses or relating to the whole of it by quoting the start of it).

In terms of preaching it, I would probably want to preach it in terms of David first, for a significant chunk of the message, recognizing that everyone else is probably thinking of Jesus.  Then going to Jesus and showing his use of it would be perfectly legitimate, thinking about how it applies to us as a text, as well as how Jesus’ application of it applies to us.  I preached it a few years ago and found it effective to major on Psalm 22 at 1000BC, with a smaller focus given to Greater Son of David at 32AD, connecting it to us throughout (application of the concept or main idea in reference to David, and response to Jesus in reference to the latter part of the message).

The one thing I would add is that the psalm is not finished 2/3rds of the way through, as some preachers sometimes seem to think.  In your study you should probably wrestle with the issue of whether this was a purely predictive text (i.e.not of David, but all of Jesus), a double fulfillment type of text (sensus plenior in some respect – i.e. both of David and of Jesus), or a purely descriptive text that Jesus appropriated as appropriate to his situation and response to it (i.e. all of David, but Jesus could identify).  I wouldn’t address all these in the sermon, but I would preach according to my understanding of how the two relate.

There’s a lot to think about with this passage, and I haven’t got into any details here!  Hope you can really delight in the study of it.

Biblical Worldview and Ours

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Throughout Scripture God is seen as sovereign and providentially involved in all aspects of life.  When there were natural disasters in Israel, the prophets called the people to respond to the God who created everything.  When war or famine hit, they interpreted it in light of the covenant they were under, but also always recognizing and promoting the reality of a God who is present and immanent and involved.

Today we see two concerning alternatives:

Alternative A – God is Absent. In this view of things we preach about a God who was involved in history, and a God who will intervene again in the future, but a God who is essentially silent today.  The greatest intersection of earth and heaven today is essentially my preaching, and yours.  In many churches Christians live as if God is only slightly more engaged than the God of the Deists . . . that is, He was engaged for longer in the past, and He will be again in the future.  This is a problematic position.

Alternative B – God is Speaking and I Can Give Specific Interpretation. This is the hotline to heaven approach where certain preachers have sufficient anointing to be able to speak with an authority that is theirs, rather than an authority resting in Scripture.  It is the kind of authority that says “I know exactly why this disaster has occurred, and the reason is XYZ” (typically the cause would be their own pet peeeve issue).  This sensational approach to preaching undermines the credibility of all legitimate biblical preachers.

We need to stand in between these two.  We can’t give exact revelation on specifics in a sensational way, neither should we relegate God to history.  Let us instead live out a biblical worldview in which God is providentially shaking the world in order to get our attention.  Volcanic ash clouds, oil disasters, wars, economic crises, the price of fuel . . . let’s be, and let’s preach, a responsive Christianity that has the worldview presented throughout Scripture.  God matters, today.  It is our privilege to respond to Him.  Then what?  Then we go to His Word, where we can hear His heart clearly.