How to . . . ?

Don’t Undermine Trust

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

NOTE – Peter has replied to helpful comment on this post.

Different versions translate some things in slightly different ways.  One version says “healed” where another says “saved.”  Sometimes a footnote points out an alternative reading to the one in the text, but other versions choose the alternative reading.  What do we do when we are preaching a text with a textual variant in it?

1. Recognize that the listeners may be using different versions. This means that it might be worth a brief passing comment that “your version may have it this way…”  Generally it is probably better to affirm both as possible, or express a preference for one over the other in a gracious manner that does not tear down the alternative.

2. Recognize that your listeners are not experts in textual criticism. (Incidentally, be honest with yourself too.  Just because you can pronounce a Greek word in a dictionary does not mean you are a Greek scholar.)  So we should be very hesitant to overwhelm people with textual critical issues.  In reality, most of the time this will achieve a double goal.  First it may show how much work you’ve done, what skill you have or perhaps add confidence in your understanding of the passage.  More importantly, second of all it almost certainly will undermine their trust in their own Bibles.  People don’t understand how their version came to exist, they don’t grasp the process from inspiration to translation, and so your textual critical observation may very well cause them to distrust their Bible.  “If my version is wrong in this verse, why should I trust it anywhere else?”

3. Do your work in preparation, but think carefully what you say while preaching. The last thing we want to do is inadvertently undermine peoples’ trust in the Bible sitting open in their lap!

Pre-Preaching Fears

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

New preachers my have fears concerning speaking to a crowd of listeners and similar nerves.  Those of us that have preached for a while don’t tend to have nervousness to the same extent in those areas, but that doesn’t mean there are no fears.  Here are some fears that may have risen in your heart in the lead up to today’s message:

Content Fears. What if I got it wrong?  What if I’ve missed the point?  Am I going to say something that is actually heretical?  Is this message simply too simple?  This can lead into…

Passage Fears. Should I switch passage?  The meeting is in a few hours, should I switch now?  The meeting is in a few minutes, should I switch now?

Listener Fears. He or she will be listening, what will they think?  What if so and so doesn’t approve?  I shouldn’t be the one preaching.

Personal Fears. Who am I to preach this?  Has this really been applied to me first?  Why do I suddenly feel so inadequate?

These and many more fears can creep up on a preacher before any or every message.  Pray about the fears, bring them to God.  Fear and faith fight a battle within.  Faith doesn’t require the total absence of fear, but they don’t cohabit well.  Allow fear to push your gaze back onto the Lord.  Consider whether this fear should be simply resisted and dismissed, or written down to be addressed later in more extended prayer.  Briefly consider whether change is needed to the message, but don’t undermine hours of prayerful work because of fear.

Perhaps as you shift your gaze back onto the Lord you will find renewed motivation to preach this message exactly as it is.  After all, if the fears are coming from a source beyond yourself, it is worth considering the motivation.  Perhaps there is fear of what your message might do, the light it might shine into darkness?

You’ve prayerfully prepared?  Step forward relying fully on Him, preach His Word.  Preach in the mighty strength of your own weakness – a contradictory paradox, unless, of course, we do not go to the pulpit alone!

Check Your Own Diet

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Many of us are rightly concerned about the diet of those in our churches today.  Of course, as preachers we try to feed good food on Sunday morning.  But the rest of the week is concerning.  People spend hours ingesting the values of Hollywood and HBO, chewing on the junk food of a tabloid culture, as well as the slightly sanctified fluff of some of what is labelled “christian” in magazine form or on TV.  Add to that the constant bombardment by advertizing, itself no less saturated in godless values than the most overt propaganda of strident atheism.  I could go on, but compared to all that, our preaching can feel like a mere healthy snack in a week-long binge of junk food.

But let us remember to check our own diet too.  It is critical.  Hear this timely exhortation from the mid-1600’s.  Richard Baxter in Watch Your Walk: Ministering from a Heart of Integrity, (pages 139-140) wrote:

When your mind is enjoying heavenly things, others will enjoy them, too.  Then your prayers, praises, and doctrines will be heavenly and sweet to your people.  They will feel when you have been much with God.

Conversely, when I am depressed in soul, my flock will sense my cold preaching.  When I am confused, my preaching is, too.  Then, the prayers of others will reflect my own state of preaching.  If we, therefore, feed on unwholesome food, either of errors or of fruitless controversies, then our hearers will likely fare the worse for it, whereas if we abound in faith, love, and zeal, how it will overflow to the refreshing of our congregations and to the increases in the same graces in others.

We are rightly concerned about the spiritual diet of our day.  But let’s be sure to be concerned about our own diet, and not just that of others.  If we feed on unwholesome food, they will suffer for it.

Preaching and Affective Hermeneutics

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I don’t spend much time going from blog to blog.  However, one blog that I do read and appreciate is A Spreading Goodness by a good friend and major influence on my life – Dr Ron Frost. He kindly asked me to write a guest post for his site which I was delighted to do. It’s a little longer than my typical post on this site, but I hope it’s worth taking the time to read. I won’t re-post it here as I’d like to redirect you to A Spreading Goodness – you might enjoy the earlier content on there and become a regular (I particularly recommend “I’m a Sinner…” posted on December 15th).

So for today’s post, please click here: spreadinggoodness.org

A New Year’s Commitment

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

So there are lots of things we could say should be our New Year’s resolution, or even commitment, but I just want to mention one at this point.  Let’s make a commitment this year in our preaching, a commitment that relates to our hermeneutics as well as our homiletics.  It’s a commitment that will make ok biblical preaching into solid and truly biblical preaching!

Let’s make a commitment to do justice to the specificity of a text.  Let’s wrestle with each text until we have not just a main idea that is biblically accurate, but the main idea of the specific text we are dealing with.  Let’s leave no stone unturned as we work through the details of the text, allowing every element of the text, every detail in the narrative, every image in the poem, every connective term in the paragraph, everything, to influence the main idea.  Let’s be sure that when we finish studying a passage, our main idea does justice to the text so that if we were to state the main idea, a true lover of the Bible would be able to identify the passage.

It’s always tempting to end up with a biblically (generically) true main idea – “In tough times God’s people trust Him.”  But that could be from any number of passages.  How can the main idea better reflect the specific details of this text?  Let’s commit to doing justice to the specificity of each text we preach this year.

Dealing With Deadened Motivation – II

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

What does it look like to address an issue of the affections by exposure to the attractiveness of our Lord, rather than by effort of the flesh?

Perhaps the marriage analogy can help here.  If I am growing cold in my affections toward my wife (which, if she reads this, I am not!), then the solution is not to “do the right thing.”  I can go and buy flowers and give them to her and even say “I love you” through clenched teeth.  That doesn’t do much for me, and does even less for her.  I am much better off simply being with her, allowing her attractiveness to draw my affections to her again. That is what I’m suggesting spiritually – allow the love of God to draw you to Him.

One last suggestion that has helped me was given to me by a good friend several years ago.  I pass it on to you gladly.  If I don’t feel like reading the Bible and being exposed to the attractive beauty of God’s grace, I don’t pretend otherwise and force myself, I tell him so.  “Lord, I don’t feel like reading your Word today.  Other things are far more interesting and attractive to me…”  Praying honestly (and out loud!) tends to bring conviction and brokenness as the Spirit of God works in my heart.  Before long I am broken at the foot of the cross, overwhelmed by the grace of God to a sinner like me.  Before long I want to be in His Word, not as an external duty, but with a captured heart, strangely warmed, but never proud of my own effort!

Dealing With Deadened Motivation

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

How are we to deal with a cold heart when we find one sitting in our own chest?  How should we respond to a lack of spiritual motivation?  I believe we need to think biblically and theologically about this very real challenge in our lives.

Effort of the flesh does not work. It is common advice.  Do the right thing and don’t worry about your feelings.  Your feelings must not drive you, choose by determination of the will to do what is right.  This is all very well, but it doesn’t hold up theologically.  The will is not an independent faculty of the soul that can switch on and take charge when our hearts are cold.  The will is in bondage to the affections, so what are we to do when there is a problem in our affections, a coldness of heart?  Forcing ourselves to do the right thing with a wrong heart is unwise.  Effort of the flesh leads either to sin (the fruit of the flesh in Galatians 5), or pseudo-success (external righteousness with a dead heart is the hypocrisy of Pharisaism).  Paul argues strongly in Galatians 3:1-3 against the notion that we can mature or increase in sanctification by the power of the flesh.

Deadened motivation is an issue of the affections. What does Paul contrast with flesh effort?  It is response to the Spirit, a faith response.  Our affections cannot be fixed by an effort of the will, that is getting it backwards.  Affection is only overcome by affection.  To put it another way, why do we love God?  We love God because He first loved us.  So when I sense the temperature dropping in my heart, my response cannot be to look to myself (flesh effort).  I have to look to Him (faith response).  I need response, not greater responsibility.  I need to delight again, not diligently stir up duty within.  So how do I address motivational issues in my own heart?  I simply lay myself open to the attractive power of the love of God.  What does that look like practically?  Well, typically it means spending time in His Word, perhaps listening to worship music, pondering creation or praying.  Isn’t that just “doing the right thing and letting feelings follow?”  Not really.  It may look similar on the outside, but it’s about being responsive to the love of God, not responsible to achieve my own spiritual motivation.

Tomorrow I will add a couple of thoughts to further clarify what I’ve described here.

Pondering the Cycles of Motivation

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Is it me, or is motivation cyclical?  I’ll use the term motivation, but it overlaps with issues of spiritual dryness, struggles with temptation, seasons of spiritual attack and so on.

The One-Week Cycle – Most of us recognize this one.  We build toward Sunday and then crash on Monday.  Some take Monday off.  Others use Monday for brain-dead admin catch-up.  Few preachers I know are at their best emotionally or spiritually on a Monday.

The One-Year Cycle – This is easy to spot too.  Something about January seems to reinvigorate and stir resolutions.  Perhaps December is so busy for you that it takes until February before the new year energy kicks in for you.  Nonetheless, there seems to be an injection of energy at the start of the new year for many of us.

The Six-Week Cycle – This is the one that is perhaps most significant for me.  Perhaps its just me, but I’ve noticed a roughly six-week cycle in my own motivation.  It could be 4-8 weeks, but I’ll call it 6 (I won’t call it 40 days in case it sounds like I have, or am making up, a biblical case for it).  It seems like I can trace a dip in motivation, or an increase in temptation, or a dip into dryness, roughly every six weeks.

You may be perpetually up, or unceasingly low, or you may notice some cyclical nature to your spiritual, emotional, ministerial motivation.  I think it is good to know our own patterns, to be aware of our own weaknesses, and to seek to deal with these things not through the effort of the flesh, but in an appropriate spiritual manner.  I’ll give my thoughts on that tomorrow.

Preaching One Text – Part II

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Yesterday I addressed why it is generally best to preach on a single text.  Today I’d like to address a possible misunderstanding that might result from this suggestion:

This emphasis on preaching a single text does not mean that I advocate preaching biblically naive or theologically unaware messages.  To really understand a particular passage usually requires us to study (or at least be aware of) other passages that feed into it.  For instance, can we grasp what is going on with the marriage issues in Ezra/Nehemiah without being thoroughly informed by the Torah?  Can we understand the prophets as they seek to enforce the covenant if our awareness of that covenant in Deuteronomy is lacking?  Can we grasp New Testament teaching built on Old Testament paradigms if our Old Testament pages remain clean and stuck together?  Walter Kaiser speaks of the “informing theology” of a passage.  We must be careful not to miss critical elements for understanding our preaching text when those elements are recorded earlier in the Bible.

Having studied to the full extent of our resources (time and skill), we then need to consider what our listeners actually need to hear.  A sermon should not be an information dump in which every detail of our exegesis is piled onto the ears of our listeners.  Perhaps no “informing theology” is necessary to communicate this passage.  Perhaps only a brief summary will do.  Sometimes we need to have them turn the pages and see it for themselves.   We must do everything we can to fully understand the passage, but remember that all our work cannot be squeezed into the minutes available for preaching, or squeezed into the minds and hearts of our listeners.  We study at length, then cut out everything unnecessary for preaching the main point of the message.

We may preach one passage, but let us not preach biblically naive or theologically unaware messages.

Preaching One Text

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I emphasize the need to preach a single text in most sermons.  There are exceptions, but generally one text is the way to go.  I want to be clear why I make this suggestion (today) and address a possible misunderstanding (tomorrow).

I strongly suggest preaching on one text most of the time, because it is so easy to scratch the surface of a passage and yet fail to preach the text.  Multiplying texts only multiplies the likelihood of missing the point and failing to really preach the text at all.  It takes a lot of work to wrestle with a text and have a text wrestle with you.  It takes a lot of prayerful thought to engage with historical and written context, to recognize rhetorical structure, to analyze each detail of content, to ascertain authorial intent (purpose as well as meaning) and to synthesize the core idea of a passage.  I don’t think I’m being lazy when I suggest taking multiple passages multiplies the workload beyond what most of us can bear (if we are to really preach rather than scratch the surface, or scratch some itchy ears).