Homiletics

Biblical Girders 4

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

GirderWhere does each girder go?  The Bible has a superstructure that holds it all together.  So the thematic element of the promised seed in Genesis 3:15 will work its way through multiple books and become overt in places like Galatians 3 at the other end of the canon.  But this poses a challenge.  How much should we be preaching Galatians 3 when we are supposed to be preaching Genesis 3?

Many preachers would see no problem with springing from Genesis to Galatians since that is the fulfillment and the clarification of what is first stated in the Garden of Eden.  I am certainly not going to criticize the impulse to preach Christ and it would be strange to leave listeners wondering who that seed might be (unless such suspense were part of a bigger teaching strategy).

On the other hand, I do wonder if we can collapse themes forward too easily and lose some of the strength of the steel at that point in the biblical story?  If the Bible were a building, then Genesis would be the foundation.  Steel starting there does go through the whole structure and holds the whole together.  Themes of creation, of relationship, of fellowship lost, of divine grace and rescue, of divine promise, etc. all work their way from Genesis on through the Bible.  That  steel girder seen in Genesis 3:15 later on turns out to be the spire at the top of the whole structure, the pinnacle of it all.  It makes sense to let folks know the significance of that, but at the same time it makes sense to help people see the importance of the foundation.

That is to say, instead of immediately looking up to the spire that caps off the whole building, when we are preaching in Genesis lets be sure to help people see how the foundation fits together, how the hope offered by God’s grace in the seed of the woman is such a striking promise in the context of a spurned relationship in that first senseless human rebellion.  That passage is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training, etc.  So let’s preach Genesis 3, not just bounce off it to go straight to the spire.  At the same time let’s not get our noses in the foundations and let people miss the grandeur of the whole.

It isn’t either/or, it surely needs to be both/and.  And with that both/and, I think it needs to be honouring to the earlier text in its own right, not just a token glance.

 

Biblical Girders 3

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

GirderI have been writing about Biblical Girders: those superstructure passages that form the skeleton that holds the Bible together.  As well as key passages, we could well add a list of key themes that weave through the canon like ribbons.  I did this earlier last year with the 10 Biggest Big Ideas series (click here to go to the first of those posts).

So what do we do if we recognize that people in our churches are foggy on the biblical superstructure?  How can we help folk without turning the church into a lecture hall and losing the devotional and spiritual emphasis in our preaching?  Some ideas:

1. Periodically Be Overtly Educational –   Perhaps a seminar or evening class or group session where you trace through the superstructure.  You will find that there are people in every church that have a genuine appetite to know the Bible better and will want to attend this kind of training if it is done well.  You will also find that a false dichotomy between education and devotional spirituality need not be imposed.  Take every opportunity, even in a “lecture” to woo people by the gracious work of God in biblical history.

2. Be Alert to the Girders – If you are preaching Genesis 22, Abraham offering up Isaac, be alert to the place of that story in the flow of the narrative.  Take the opportunity to help people see it not as a stand-alone incident, but as the culmination of a journey over many decades for Abraham.  Include and highlight the importance of Genesis 15 as you preach Genesis 22.  When you preach about David and Bathsheba, don’t just look ahead to the fallout in his family life, but also look back to 2Samuel 7 and the amazing covenant God had made with him – highlight the importance of that to your listeners.

3. Preach the Girders – Take a miniseries and help people see the big picture of the Bible.  Too many Christians make too many “surprised and helped” comments when they hear a Bible overview.  This implies that it is not being offered enough.

4. Preach through Books Without Being “Flat” – When we preach through a book, it is easy to flatten it out into so many segments of equal length and apparently equal value.  Instead, look for ways to point toward and back to passages in the book that have a “superstructure status” for the book and the Bible as a whole.  Preaching through Habakkuk, don’t let 2:4 get lost in the mix.

Biblical Girders 2

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GirderLast time I wrote about biblical girders, the superstructure of the Bible that folks in churches tend to hear very little about.  While not seeking to diminish the well-known passages, let’s consider whether we can help people know their Bibles better by bringing to their attention the existence and importance of some of the biblical girder passages.

Biblical Covenant Passages – A strong case can be made for seeing the biblical covenants as a skeleton on which the Bible is built.  God’s promise and subsequent covenant with Abram/Abraham in Genesis 12, then 13, 15, 17 is critical.  Then there’s the Mosaic content in Deuteronomy 27-30 (how often do we stumble across “who will ascend?” or “who has descended?” allusions in the New Testament?)  Then God’s covenant with David in 2Samuel 7 and 1Chronicles 17.  And, of course, the New Covenant in Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 36 and the latter part of Isaiah.  Being unaware of these covenants is crippling if someone is wanting to grasp the Old Testament, or the development in the New Testament.

Biblically Quoted Passages – Some passages are quoted with a significant frequency.  Sometimes the quote is actually just an allusion, but that doesn’t diminish its significance.  Sometimes it proves the writer assumed hearers would spot it more easily.  God’s spoken self-revelation in Exodus 34 runs like a refrain through the Old Testament.  Psalms 2, 69 and 110 get their fair share of airtime once you get to the New Testament, as does Psalm 118 in reference to Jesus and Psalm 8 plays a key role in Hebrews.  Genesis 15:6 comes out three significant times, as does Habakkuk 2:4.  The lesser known part of Isaiah 6 does some heavy lifting, as does the allusion to Daniel 7.  And in the passion of Christ, where you might expect lots of references to Genesis 22 (Abraham & Isaac), instead you find lots of Davidic Psalms and Zechariah quotes.

Structurally Significant Passages – Some passages seem to serve a key purpose in the structure of a book or a section.  Joshua 1 serves a key transitional function between the Torah and the Kethubim.  Psalm 73 seems to provide the hinge for the turn in the flow of the whole collection.  John 11-12 offer a significant transition in John’s Gospel.

There are many more that could be listed.  The point is that many of these are less familiar to most people in the church than David’s slaying Goliath, or Naaman dipping in the Jordan, or Daniel in the den of lions, or Jesus calming the storm, or Paul in prison in Philippi.  All important, but in terms of grasping the flow and message of the whole Bible, perhaps there are too many gaps at critical points.

Biblical Girders

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GirderYesterday I started a three-week series where I am trying to give folks a sense of how accessible and thrilling the Old Testament is.  I am using three mornings for a landmark highlight tour to get a sense of the flow of the history.  And in the evenings I am wanting to give a more in-depth look at some of the critical passages that are so easily overlooked.

Why are some critical passages overlooked?  Let’s start with identifying the reasons before considering some of the girders in the architecture of the Bible.

1. Sunday School teaching.  Naturally Sunday School teachers tend to focus on narratives that are accessible to children.  Perhaps less wisely, they can also tend toward narratives that offer moralistic “lessons” (this can serve to obscure the gospel, but that is a post for another day).  So for those growing up going to Sunday school, there will be a bank of familiar stories.

2. Preacher Passage Picks.  Whether it is selection of passages for preaching, or choice of biblical allusions and illustrations, preachers also can do the same as Sunday school teachers (perhaps justifiably so in many cases – no point referring to something people don’t know).  So for an example, the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac in Genesis 22 will be reinforced repeatedly, while the Genesis 15 account of the covenant ceremony remains largely unknown.

3. Devotional Reading.  Whether people use guiding notes or read the Bible for themselves, they will tend to be directed toward the familiar passages.  So there is a reinforcing of passages that may or may not be as “load-bearing” as others.  Isaiah 6:1-8 is well known, the rest of the chapter is often overlooked.  But which part functions as a girder for the building of the biblical macro-structure?

I’m sure there are other reasons to add to this list, but hopefully this gives a sense of the situation.  People are more familiar with Psalm 23 than Psalms 2 or 110, even though the biblical reliance on the latter examples is greater than the more familiar 23rd Psalm.  This is not about diminishing the wonderful passages that are more familiar.  A large part of why they are taught and preached and read and known is because they have made such a difference in peoples’ lives.  But perhaps we do need to think about helping folks know some other critical passages more than they typically do.

Reading and Preaching

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StudyI remember hearing about someone who made the mistake of writing down a book suggestion for someone he was discipling.  The book was ideally suited to the situation, but the author was just too different.  The man was chased out of his church.

What makes a Bible school “liberal?”  In one sense the term refers to wide and free reading across the spectrum.  Strangely, I hear that there are many of the more “liberal” schools that won’t include “conservative” books on their reading lists.  At the same time, many “conservative” schools will recommend and even require the reading of “liberal” scholars.  If this were all that a label referred to, then they would need to be reversed!

Seems like we should be reading widely (and I’m not really referring to facebook / blog surfing!)  At the same time, it may not be wise to advertise the breadth of your reading habits in some circles.

Good reading should not only reinforce your understanding by affirmation, but also by challenging what you believe.  And as maturity increases, so can the band-width of your reading spectrum.  It seems to be a very immature trait to dismiss books simply because they are not 100% on target.

Read widely, disclose wisely.

Prayer and Preaching

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PrayingThe sermon is coming and the preacher is praying.  Sometimes this can be really passionate prayer.  Sometimes there can be a sense of a spiritual breakthrough.  Praying for the message, for the church, for the people, for the lost!  This can be a time of great excitement and great expectation.  And this can be a time of intense battle.  We fight not against flesh and blood, but against the forces of evil.  And in the intensity of battle the expectation for devil-destruction in the power of the glorious grace of the gospel can increase.

Then comes the sermon and it can all feel so, well, normal.  The sermon goes ok, and the listeners say nice things, but this wasn’t what you prayed for and longed for and hoped for.  It is just normal.

It is easy to let the normal-ness of ministry diminish our sense of expectation.  After a while it can become as if  we don’t really expect people to be transformed or the Spirit of God to be at work.  This is understandable, but it is wrong.  As Haddon Robinson once put it, “we’re handling dynamite, and we didn’t expect it to explode!”

The Spirit of God is at work, the Word of God is powerful, and whether we see it or not, we should prepare and pray with great expectation.  (What about the disappointments and struggles that come internally after we preach?  We pour them out to God and then press on, daring to dream again, daring to pray big and preach big for a big God!)

Preach the glorious gospel into the normal world of life and church.  Preach the wonder of God’s grace so that it connects with people in normal world.  But don’t preach as if preaching is just normal.  It is not.  It is a moment where the character of God is held forth in His self-revealing Word to draw hearts and lives into profound transformation.  This life changing process may feel normal all too often, but it is not normal.  It is supernatural.

Beware of Re-Assigned Language

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ConversationLast night I led a discussion on the New Age and Eastern Mysticism.  It was fascinating to try to get a handle on what is sometimes described as a “meta-network” . . . a network of networks where the religious ingredients may have some commonality, but are essentially optional.  I suppose it was a bit like trying to grasp a jellyfish.

The real benefit of the discussion, though, was for people in the group to not only be alert to some of the core features of this movement, but also to recognize where they might misunderstand what others say to them.  For instance, coming from an evangelical church, it is easy for some to get confused when they meet someone who “believes in Jesus.”  That language carries certain meaning in church-world.  It carries different meaning in non-church world.

As preachers we must be alert to this.  We can’t hide in a church ghetto and preach Christian language without clarifying the meaning we are seeking to convey.  We will not even know if people in our church are understanding what we intend them to understand.

I suppose there are several dangers to be alert to.  People need to know what others mean in order to interact with them and know where the disconnects may be occurring in the conversation.  It is not good people thinking they’re on the same page as someone who means something entirely different by enlightened or saved or delivered or believe or whatever.

At the same time people need to know not only what is different with other understandings of reality, but also what is attractive about other understandings of reality.  It is easy in a church setting to look down on the silliness of other views, but that is not at all helpful.  There is a reason people are drawn into different philosophies and religions.  There is a reason why people who’ve grown up in good churches can be drawn into these other religions.  To simply mock or ridicule is to fail to engage meaningfully with what others hold dear.  At the same time it is to set up people from the church to be picked off when they discover a more compelling presentation of an alternative than they were led to believe is possible.

Who Goes There?

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footprintssand2Now is the moment when more Christians are reading the Old Testament.  By Valentine’s Day they may have fallen out of love with a slow read through Leviticus and given up.  So what should we, as preachers, be pointing them toward?  What is the goal in Old Testament reading?  What was Paul saying when he wrote about the instruction and the example of the Old Testament?  Today’s post is found here, on the Cor Deo site.

Bridge Protection 3

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BridgeStream2Yesterday I pondered clutter from our current context.  But there is always another source of debris that will harm our bridge-building ministry – ourselves.  What are some of the personal clutter issues that could be dangerously weakening the bridge?  As I described on Wednesday, when the debris causes the bridge to do more than it is designed to do, it will be dangerously undermined.

Issues of Integrity – This seems obvious, but so important to keep in mind. Serious breakdowns in morality, sexuality, financial impropriety, etc., will totally undermine a preaching ministry.  But what about the small stuff?  A twig won’t destroy a bridge, but in combination with other twigs, and some time, the bridge could well be weakened.  As we dealt with the clogged footbridge the other day, it was mostly small stuff in combination that had caused the water to run up over the bridge and lead to potential gradual rotting of the wood.

What are the “smaller” branches and twigs?  Issues of self-control, inappropriate spending, low-grade anger, half-truths, gossip, selfishness, false spirituality, personal inflamed ego, contempt of others, competitiveness, power-brokering, self-elevation, not following through on commitments, inappropriate TV viewing, laziness, mental fantasy, procrastination, and on it goes.

Pursuit of Personal Burnout – Or to put it another way, ministry in the traditional model of a minister doing the work of the ministry while the church is filled with “lay people” who pay for the minister to, well, minister.  There is a reason that the New Testament presents the plurality of church leadership, and apostles typically working in teams, and gifts being given to all believers.  You can’t do it all.  You might try for a while, but it is not sustainable, nor is it healthy for your church, or your marriage, or your children, or yourself.

Over-commitment is so hard to avoid in church-based ministry, but we must be willing to say no to some things in order to be a good steward of the longer term ministry.  Even if some people will misunderstand?  Yes.  Even if some will criticize?  Indeed, expect it.  We can preach that the gospel is not something to be earned, then live a life of striving that undermines the very gospel we preach.  People don’t earn salvation by attending every single meeting, and the preacher’s don’t live in a separate category.  Guard your relationship with the Lord (which is not the same as an over-commitment to “serving Him”).

Dangerous Levels of Distraction – You know what draws you away from what you should be doing.  This may not be a sin issue at all.  Good interests, hobbies, social networking, etc.  Good things can become negatives if they undermine our primary calling.  Handling both well, with the Lord being with us in both work and leisure, will make for a genuinely healthy ministry.  Yes we need to be involved in things other than work and ministry, but that does not mean these things should become distractions that undermine our stewardship of the ministry.  Ask for wisdom and clear vision here too!

Bridge Protection 2

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BridgeStream2Debris and clutter under the wooden footbridge had clogged it up and water was streaming across the bridge. A minor inconvenience for dog walkers, or a gradual destruction of the bridge?  Pulling out the debris showed just how weak soaked and rotten wood could become, and without addressing the needs of the bridge, it too would rot to danger point.

So what are the debris issues clogging up the bridge we build in preaching?  What seemingly unimportant encumbrances are putting a strain on our messages and gradually leading us toward a rottenness that could undermine everything we do?  I don’t know which way you’d take the analogy, but here are some of the logs I see clogging up the bridges of preaching today:

1. Entertainment.  Good preaching should be engaging, and at times the biblical narrative is both gripping and entertaining.  But too easily we can start to think our role is to compete with the various entertainments of our culture, and consequently we undermine our own preaching.  Witty comments combined with powerpoint images will never compete with contemporary media banter and highly produced action.  We lose if we compete on entertainment alone, but we lose multiple times more in terms of what is sacrificed in the process.  The spiritual impact of the genuine preaching of a living Christ far outweighs anything our culture has invented to fill the void.  But if we pursue entertainment as an end in itself, our bridge will rot to danger point very quickly.

2. Political Correctness.  Like the proverbial fish that can’t see the water it is in, so we are so easily shaped by what our culture perceives to be “PC.”  My grandparents would come out with an absolute faux pas to my generation, but then be highly careful with a total non-issue (to my generation).  Too much focus on the current standard of what is acceptable will leave us dangerously weak in terms of the substance of the revelation that we preach.

3. Worship of Culture.  Every era has had its enticements.  The refinements of sophisticated living and liberal-leaning theology was a draw in the 1700’s.  Today some preachers are still drawn away by an inordinate enamoring of contemporary culture.  Don’t get me wrong.  We need to engage with culture, and we need to understand culture to engage people effectively.  But under the banner of cultural engagement it seems that some are so captivated by what attracts them that their gaze on Christ seems to fade and become something of a justifier of their interest in some aspect of contemporary culture.  Christ sanctifies their interests, and this seems to dangerously weaken their ministry.  Let’s not go to the opposite extreme of reclusive disengagement, but let’s remember that we are with Christ as He engages culture…we mustn’t disengage from Him in order to forge links on our own terms.

Tomorrow I’ll take another angle, but please feel free to comment . . .