Homiletics

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.

Effective Explanation: 15 Suggestions, part 3

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Finishing off the list of suggestions to help make textual explanation more effective:

11. Defer to a historic explanation.  “Martin Luther explained it in this way . . .” this can be helpful.  This can be unhelpful.  Whether it is Luther or Calvin or Wesley or Edwards, no matter how heavy a hitter, you have to be careful with this approach.  It is important to know your history and not just pluck a quote off a website.  Their context may have been different.  Your listeners may not grasp their significance, and may get confused by going to another different place in history.  Equally a historical explanation may allow for indirect communication of hard hitting truth.

12. Defer to a commentators explanation.  “Doug Moo explains it like this . . .” this can be helpful.  My preference would be for preachers to digest the commentaries in the context of a conversation with them, then preach in their own words.  Preaching is not a footnoted seminary project, nor an unpublished commentary.  Listeners typically don’t know the commentators (or even what one of those is).  The names can be distracting.  The impression given can be misleading.  But sometimes somebody’s turn of phrase hits the nail on the head.  “One writer put it like this . . . “ will usually suffice.

13. Develop an explanation piece by piece using effective review along the way (walking through a passage).  This is the more traditional approach, but it can work well.  Make sense of the first chunk, then build on that with the second chunk, etc.  Be sure to review the progress so they get a sense of the building explanation and logical flow.

14. Deliver explanation by means of a birds eye view of features and chunks (flying over a passage).  The opposite approach is to give them a birds-eye view of the whole passage before coming in closer to see the details.

15. Dive in to a key location and work out from there (skydiving into a passage).  Another approach is to drop in at verse 8, then work outwards to see what came in the preceding paragraph, then explore in the other direction and see how verse 8 is worked out.

This is still just scratching the surface.  What would you add?

Effective Explanation: 15 Suggestions, part 2

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Yesterday I started this list.  The goal is to avoid explanation of Bible text becoming dull and boring:

6. Do honour the whole text.  It may be tempting to dump half the passage and preach the preachy bit, but often seeing how the whole works actually can add focus to the more obviously powerful section.  There will be times to zero in, but don’t always do so and miss the text as a whole.

7. Do recognize and explain the text in light of its own structure.  This follows on from the previous suggestion.  Help people learn to see the structure in a passage.  If it is a poem, help them spot the stanzas (even if you use the technical term “chunk” instead of stanza or whatever sized unit you have).  In an epistle help them see the logical flow of thought.  Very rarely are texts three equal and parallel points.  Help people spot the textual structure, rather than predictable sermonic structure that you impose on the text.

8. Demonstrate the structure of the passage by means of the connectives and content.  One way to show the structure is to highlight the change of content.  Another way is to point them to the connectives.  “Scan down verses 11-16, notice how he says ‘and also,’ ‘you also,’ ‘again’, ‘and you also’ . . . he is really piling up the blessings here, isn’t he?”

9. Do describe the scene so effectively that people can see it.  Here’s a big one.  Too much explanation is too arms’ length and abstract.  Explanations can feel so dull, but when the narrative or situation (or potential application, but that’s for another time), when the situation is so compellingly described that listeners can actually see it in their hearts . . . they also start to feel it.  This is the power zone of explanation.  Help people with good description and they will thank God for your preaching.

10. Develop a contemporary simile.  “This is like . . .” here we enter into the realm of so-called illustrations.  I prefer to name them what they are.  All illustrations are either explanations, proofs or applications.  If you think the best way to explain the text is to use a contemporary example or simile, go for it.  As long as you know what you are trying to achieve, there is a good chance you will be successful.

Five more tomorrow, but your thoughts are invited at any point.

Effective Explanation: 15 Suggestions

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

I am pondering the issue of explaining the biblical text.  This is one of the staple ingredients in all true biblical preaching.  I wouldn’t like to taste omelette made without eggs, or preaching without explanation.  But doesn’t explanation get a bit dull?

It certainly can.  Read a verse, say what it means, read a verse, say what it means.  This can be dullness personified in a pulpit.  But it doesn’t have to be dull.  Actually, it has to not be dull, otherwise we’re boring people with the Bible which has to be wrong.

So hear are some brief suggestions on ways to explain a biblical text.

1. Don’t think that the context isn’t critical.  It really is.  Neither short-change the historical situation and setting so that the text feels like a random set of statements, nor overkill the historical background so that the listeners feel like they need to lie down before they’ve even met the text you’re preaching.

2. Do set the scene with the written context.  Even if it is only a few sentences, help orient listeners to what has come before, or how this text fits into the whole passage.  Remember that most books/letters were written to be heard as a whole.

3. Don’t forget that length of explanation may influence order of content.  In a single sentence, the order of thought may work in a way that it won’t when developed into a sermon.  The same is true of some Bible texts.  For instance, here’s a random sentence: “I am going to town, to go to the electrical store, to replace our dead washing machine.”  That makes sense, but what happens if I “sermonize” it?  “I am going to town: not to the country, nor to a suburb, but to town.  Specifically, the town of . . . “  Suddenly it feels a bit random and aimless.  The sentence wasn’t, but the explanation is.  Maybe I need to clarify the goal earlier in a developed sermon on that sentence – “our washing machine has died and so I need to replace it, here’s the plan…”  (Not compelling sermon material, but illustrative nonetheless!)

4. Do weigh words appropriately.  Or to put it the other way around: don’t treat every word as equal.  It can be dull beyond words to hear an explanation of word after word in a text.  Take, for example, Ephesians 1:15 and following.  It would be easy to explain great words like faith, Christ, love, saints, glory, etc., but lose people before they get to the main thought of the sentence – the end of verse 17 onwards.  Put energy into the main words, not equal energy into all words.  They all matter, but some are pushing you toward others.

5. Don’t treat a verse as a unit of thought.  This is the same as above.  It is tempting to go verse by verse, but sometimes a verse is half a sentence.  Don’t feel bad about summarizing chunks effectively in order to emphasise the main thoughts in a section of text.

Tomorrow, another five.  Meanwhile, any thoughts on these?

Explanation: Indispensable Ingredient

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

When you boil it down, preaching involves quite a bit of explanation.  The Word of God is read out, but then we also have this tradition called preaching.  Why bother?  Isn’t the Word read, enough?

Part of the reason for preaching is because listeners need the text explained in order to actually hear it.  The Bible isn’t some sort of religious ritual, a magical incantation that will somehow change lives merely by being “under the sound” of it.  The Bible is communication.  It is breathed out by God, inspired communication that, well, communicates.

At the same time, the Bible is two to three and a half-thousand year old material that was originally written to communicate in a different culture, different language, different situation.  There is a huge gap in terms of religious and political culture, geography and topography and technology and familial structures and so on.  Explanation is about helping listeners hear the message of the text.

This is why explanation matters.  It isn’t enough to hear the words of the Bible and then attach some contemporary relevance or personal twist and then preach a Christian sounding message.  Actually, that isn’t just not enough, that is downright dangerous!

No matter how clever you are, what you can make it say is not as good as what God made it say.  We must be honest and try to communicate the text accurately, or else it would be better not to preach at all.

So a big part of preaching involves explaining.  We explain what the author meant at that time in that context to those people.  We explain what prompted the writing, what earlier Scripture was feeding into this passage (informing theology, in Walter Kaiser’s terms), as well as how this passage fits in the canon as a whole.

Preaching stripped of explanation is not somehow more relevant preaching.  It is not preaching at all.  It is confusion to think that we make the Bible relevant.  We show its relevance, in part, by effectively explaining it.  We’ll come back to emphasizing relevance later in the week.

I suppose it is obvious, but in order to explain it, we have to understand it.  Is that a burden?  Often hours of brain-tiring work in careful exegesis . . . I don’t see this as a burden at all.  This is one of the great privileges of preaching.  Studying the Bible in order to actually understand it (rather than to find a preachable outline), this is one of the greatest privileges I know.  To prepare to preach is to enter into a personal audience with God in His Word, wrestling with the text while looking to the one who is such a master communicator.

Preaching requires explanation.  Explanation requires understanding.  Understanding takes time and effort in prayerful study of the Word.  There is nothing negative in this package!

Saturday Short Thought: Dangerous Preaching x4

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I recently heard Gavin McGrath speaking and he was asked what he thinks constitutes dangerous preaching.  I really liked his list of four off the top, as it were:

1. False teaching – of course.

But in good church circles, the other three would be –

2. The mocking or patronizing of non-Christians –  So easily done, so unhelpful to all.

3. Legalism and feeding religiosity – If you perform better then you will be a better Christian.  This leads to either pride or despair, but neither are helpful.

4. Formulaically simple preaching – Just follow this abc and you will have better life.  Problem is that the Bible doesn’t teach that, nor is it effective.

What would you add now that you’ve had time to think about it?

The Four Places of Preaching – 4

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Preaching begins in the study, then after the time with God in His Word, we stop and pray.  Having spent that time getting His heartbeat for these particular people, then we head to Starbucks (or wherever you like to work with people in your sights), in order to prepare a message that will effectively communicate to these people.  Then there’s one more place to add to the sequence, it’s the place where we . . .

Place 4 – Stand and Deliver (The Pulpit)

All eyes on you, nowhere to hide, now its time to deliver the message.  I know that it sounds spiritual to downplay delivery.  It sounds profoundly humble to pray that people won’t see you.  But they will.  Its part of God’s design, He likes to use the weak things to achieve His goals.  He has this pattern of incarnational ministry down through the years.  So to downplay delivery might well be to sabotage the situation.

God does use the weak, but He also delights in good communication.  Its part of who He is.  We have a communicating God.  A God who delights to reveal Himself in His Word, and who sends His Spirit to work in the communication of human to human, as well as heart to heart connection between Him and us.  It may be a hideous thing to perform that which is not real, but it is profoundly Christian to communicate as effectively as we can in reliance upon Him.

The goal?  To prayerfully deliver a biblical, clear, engaging and relevant message so as to offer Christ to the lost, to build up His church and to please our Lord.

If we fail to give prayerful consideration to the moment of delivery then we may be biblical, clear and relevant in content, but we will drop the ball on clarity in delivery.  And you can probably say goodbye to the goal of being engaging.  To present God’s Word in a dull or unenthused manner is to say something about God and His Word that does not bear saying.

So prayerfully consider how your delivery reinforces or undermines your ministry.  Consider the interpersonal connectivity of eye contact, of expression, of gesture, of posture.  Consider the representation of God’s character by demeanor, expression, energy and warmth.

Four places.  Study, prayer closet, Starbucks and pulpit.  Private, more private, public, more public.  Its quite a journey, and for many it is a weekly journey.  It can feel like an adventure.  It can be tiring.  It may feel like a  lonely path.  But we never travel alone.  He is with us, to the end of the age.

The Four Places of Preaching – 3

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So the preaching process starts in the study, then the preacher needs to stop and pray (in an even less distracted place), but then comes the third location.

Place 3 – Starbucks.  Huh?

Let me clarify before I start into this that I personally don’t tend to pick Starbucks (or pray in a closet, for that matter), but the principle applies.  I have a good friend, and a preacher I highly respect, who does literally go to a coffee shop for this phase of his preparation.

He takes five 3×5 cards and puts names on the cards – the names of individuals in the church, a cross section, essentially.  With his five listeners spread out on the table, and surrounded by real life and culture, he is then able to prepare the message.  He can ask himself as he goes, “would this communicate to Jim?”  or “How would Kerry take that?”

The goal in this place?  To prepare a message that will effectively communicate the prayed-through main idea of the passage to the particular listeners as an act of love for them and for the Lord.

The best biblical content will be wasted if it isn’t targeted appropriately.  Our task is not to make the Bible relevant.  It is.  Our task is to emphasize that relevance.  And by definition, something can only be relevant to specific people.  Relevant to this age.  Relevant to this culture.  Relevant to this community.  Relevant to this church.  Relevant to these individuals.

So John Stott was on target when he urged preachers to be at home not only in the world of the Bible, but also the world of the listener.  Haddon Robinson took the two worlds notion and expanded it to distinguish contemporary culture from the specific culture of the local church.  So we can misfire with  traditional presentations in a changing culture, as we can with postmodern engagements in a church that hasn’t gone there.

Whether we sit in Starbucks, or ponder the church’s phone list.  Wherever we spend time with church members and people from the community we seek to mark.  Somehow we need to make sure our messages are more than great biblical content.  They have to be on target, and to be on target, we must know the hearts we aim to reach.

The Four Places of Preaching – 2

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After spending significant time in the study, without company, yet not alone, the preacher needs to move to the second location.  What comes out of the study is a deep awareness of the passage, its meaning, its intent, its contours and details, all summed up in a single sentence summary, and all held as a treasure in the heart because of the work of God during the time in the study.  Now to the next place:

Place 2 – Stop and Pray (The Prayer Closet)

In his very helpful book, Deep Preaching, J. Kent Edwards urges the preacher to take God’s Big Idea into the closet and allow the Spirit to work there for the sake of deeper preaching.  So true.

This place doesn’t need to be a closet (it’s hard to find one humans can fit in in some cultures!)  It does need to be a place without study resources and Bible software and shelves of books, not to mention phones and email and satellite whatevers.  It might be an extended walk in the woods, or a chair in the lounge, or even, one of my favourites, the empty church where the message will be preached.

What is the goal here?  The goal is to spend focused time in fellowship with God concerning the preacher, God, the passage and the listeners, in order to be able to then prepare a targeted message for them from that passage.

Where is the focus?  God was certainly involved in the study, at least, He should have been.  But it is important to recognize that the preacher is not primarily a purveyor of ancient wisdom.  The preacher is, or should be, in fellowship with the Living God.  So the step isn’t from commentary to outline, but from study to focused prayer.

1.  Preaching should involve enthusiasm for the text and what you have discovered, but it should be driven by who, rather than what.  Prayer closet time allows that personal connection and responsiveness to the God who reveals Himself in the Word to develop and drive the preaching.

2. Preaching should involve awareness of the meaning and impact of the text, but it should be sealed on the heart and experience of the preacher, not just held at arms length as new discovery.  Time in prayer allows God’s Word to be driven deep into our hearts.

3. Preaching should involve a message carefully crafted to communicate effectively to a specific audience, but for that to be an act of real love, then God’s heart for the people needs to be our heart for the people.  Bringing the people before God, alongside the passage, is thus critical to forming and delivering a message as an overflow of God’s love for them.

More could be written, but let’s leave it there.  Study.  Then stop and pray.  Then?  Some people will be very excited by the next location!