Today’s post ponders the powerful punchy epistle that is Galatians. Click here to go there.
New Testament
Preaching to the Heart
Just for a change, I’d like to offer a list of posts relating to this subject. I think it is so important that we preach to the heart and not just fill the mind or press the will. So here are some past posts on the subject:
Profound preaching involves profound preparation, profound application, profound presentation, all working toward profound transformation.
10 Biggest Big Ideas of the Bible made much of the central role of the heart, both God’s and ours. Here are the links – God, Creation, Sin, Grace, Faith, Redemption, Community, Spreading Goodness, Hope, Christ.
Our View of the Bible is critical in respect to the heart. This post on the clarity of Scripture pointed to the issue of the heart. We don’t need to add force, we need to feel the force of what is there.
Preaching to the heart goes beyond guilt – four-part series – one, two, three, four.
How often do we hear the terminology of the Bible being overqualified. Here’s a post from a while back on confusing the heart and the head.
Preaching from the heart? Here’s a post. Depends on your motive. What about when the preacher is passionless? What if there were a thermal imaging camera? When should the message touch the preacher’s heart? One thing I’ve said more than once is that we shouldn’t de-affect the text.
Preaching to touch the heart? Images matter, especially biblical ones. And so does vivid description. How will you touch the heart? Beware of manipulation though, or troublingly distant preaching, and one more. Mentoring is critical to truly marking hearts.
Some historical thoughts on preaching and the heart? How about Wilberforce. Or Jonathan Edwards. Even Chrysostom. And Thielicke on Spurgeon, and more of that gold.
A series on the preacher’s heart. Part one, two and three.
And an article on heart-centred hermeneutics. (And a recipe to finish.)
Misdistillation
The study of the passage should lead to the passage idea. This is a single sentence summary of the passage. Or to put it another way, it is the passage distilled into a single sentence. There are several ways to mis-distill a passage. For instance:
1. Misdistillation by searching for the best verse. This is a relatively elementary error, but not too unusual. The passage is read and the preacher decides, “Verse 7, that’s the one, I’ll make verse 7 the passage idea!” Now there are occasions where a particular verse, or phrase, or sentence, may function as a passage idea. But typically this is not the case. The goal is to summarize the whole text, not just pick out a part that stands out to you. You should be able to test the passage idea against the rest of the passage and find that it is all feeding into the idea.
2. Misdistillation by scouting for commands only. This is a common mistake, driven by theology as much as anything. A theology that says people need to be informed and exhorted will probably be looking for the imperatives in the passage. Again, the passage idea may well tie in to an exhortation in a passage, but it is to be the summary of the whole, not just an imperatival mood filter. Be sensitive to what the passage is trying to do in the context of the whole book. This may not be a commanding passage at all. Take off the coloured glasses and try to see the passage on its own terms.
3. Misdistillation by spotting a meaty doctrinal truth. This is a tempting error. You scan the passage and notice a reference to a truth you’d love to expand at length. Voila. Main idea! But that idea may only be part of the whole, or even a minor player in the choreographed presentation of all the players. For instance, sometimes Paul makes a theologically meaty reference in the introduction to a prayer. Be sure to study the whole and distill the whole, don’t just get excited because there is a passing reference to sovereignty, or whatever.
When you are wrestling with a passage, be sure to distill the whole passage down into the passage idea. Any other approach and you won’t be preaching the whole passage.
Word Studies 3 – The Process
Once you have identified a specific term that you want to study, what do you do? There’s a short answer and a longer one. The longer one will always feed your soul more, so go there when you can.
Short answer – Look it up in a dictionary. Don’t use a contemporary English dictionary. If you look up “glory” in Oxford or Collins you won’t quite get the nuance of “glory” in John’s Gospel!
Some Bible related dictionaries will give various aspects of meaning, along with various terms used in a translation. Warning – do not dump all the possible aspects of meaning into the specific instance you are studying. The word “chip” does not mean everything it could mean whenever it is used, it means something specific.
Other dictionaries will give much more information (some even have pictures!) The point is, whatever you see in a dictionary is new information to bring back to the text. But don’t stop thinking. Think about how the word is being used in light of that potentially helpful (or potentially distracting) information.
Long answer – Do the work the dictionary folks should have done. This means chasing the term through a set of uses to see how it is used.
1. Determine the underlying term in your focus verse. Let’s take “glory” as a working example. A concordance (or software) will help you discover that the underlying term is probably “doxa” or 1391 (in Strong’s numbers).
2. Find every use of that term in the surrounding context. Be careful you don’t limit yourself to the English term because there may be some uses of “doxa” that aren’t translated as “glory,” or some uses of “glory” that don’t translate “doxa.” The first choice of context parameters would be the book in which you are studying. So let’s say you look at John’s Gospel. Are there enough uses of “doxa” to give you a good sense of its use by John? Yes indeed. If there weren’t, then you’d want to go to John’s other four books before spilling over into other writers. You might find John’s use of “glory” is slightly different than other writers.
3. Look at each use in its context and see what observations you can make. Try not to import your preconceived notions of “bright shiny-ness” or “weightiness” or whatever. You might find John uses the term in a slightly nuanced way!
4. Collect your observations of how the writer uses it, and write something of a broad definition. This is like the options in a dictionary. It gives a sense of the range of meaning. Feel free to check with a dictionary or two at this point, but remember that they may not have better content than your work has produced.
5. Bring that understanding to the specific verse and see how he is using it here. Don’t dump all the possibilities into the term’s use here, but recognize the specific aspect in light of the full range in his writings.
This longer approach takes time, but it is so enriching. Try it with “glory” in John’s gospel and see what you find! I love Bible software and thank God for the time it saves. But not all time saved is good stewardship. Be sure to soak in God’s Word and let this kind of chase mark your life and ministry.
Word Studies 2 – Identifying Key Terms
This week we are pondering the specific skill of word study in preaching. Today I’ll focus on identifying key terms, then tomorrow we can consider the actual processes involved.
So how do you identify words to define more carefully?
1. Prayerfully read and study the passage. Sounds silly, but until you get some decent familiarity with the passage, you can’t start identifying words.
2. Recognize that not every word is equal. All words are equally inspired, but not all words are equal in a passage. You might assume this is obvious. After all, a weighty word like justified or righteous must be worth studying, while a normal word like in or of is obvious, right? Sometimes wrong. A “weighty” word may not be a key term in a particular passage (it may be given in the build up to the point of a prayer, for instance), while an obvious word may be the key to the whole section.
3. Recognize that your time is restricted. It would be great to do a full chase on every term in a passage. Actually, hypothetically it might be great in your study phase, if you had infinite time. But in reality studying every word equally will distract you from the force of the passage in your study, and it will certainly confuse people in your preaching. For instance, in Ephesians 1:15-23, I would cover the first 47 words fairly briefly. Why? Because I want the focus to be on the point of the passage, which is what Paul is actually praying from the end of v17 onwards. If I give detailed explanations of faith, Lord, love, saints, prayers, God, Father and glory in my sermon, people will be numb by the time I get to Paul’s actual request.
So how to identify key terms?
A. Look for repeated terms. In Ephesians 3:1-13, the term mystery is repeated and seems important. (Dynamic equivalent translations may hide repetition of terms, prefer formal equivalence for focused study.)
B. Look for structurally important terms. Down in verse 8, grace was given to Paul with the results being the rest of verses 8-10.
C. Look for key connections or little words. In this passage, the as, of verse 5 feels significant when the passage is read carefully (even better, when the passage is broken down to a phrase by phrase structural outline, or disagrammed if you have that skill from Greek). Incidentally, once you start looking at the structure of epistle text like this, a good formal translation needs to be the working text, not a dynamic equivalent text.
D. Look for key terms in the wider context. A term may only be used once in the passage, but be critical in the flow of the book. For example, stewardship in verse 2 is important in the flow of Ephesians 1-3.
E. Look for key terms that are missed by the other guidelines. Here’s the catch all. It forces you to keep looking and observing the text. In this case, it allows you to notice that glory in verse 13 is massively significant. Doesn’t look it structurally, but actually Paul digressed in verse 1, so completing that thought in v13 is a big deal here.
Effective Explanation: 15 Suggestions
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?
Effective Bible Teaching 2 – History
Yesterday I nudged us to remember the importance of geography in our Bible teaching. As John Smith put it, history without geography wandereth as a vagrant without certain habitation. But it goes the other way too, geography without history seemeth a carcus without motion.
Our God is a God who not only created everything, including time, but He also has stepped down into this world, and into time. So, history:
Epochs and Eras – It is hard to fathom what the antediluvian world was like, it certainly wasn’t the same as after the flood. Travel for Abram was certainly different than the travel experience of Paul. Out of the swirling nations of the ancient world God called one man and began a story that has woven its way down through numerous epochs and era. The Patriarchs and the pyramids. The golden age of David and Solomon, finally a time of peace before the relentless march of empire upon empire. The age of human philosophy and wisdom yielding nothing but a blank page in our Bibles. The Greek culture and language outlasting the empire and sophisticating the Roman war machine. Roads built for enforced peace then used to transport a message of true hope and peace. And throughout it all, hints and promises and prophecies of a kingdom coming one day that will fill the whole earth.
The Great and the Small – The Bible is a masterpiece of the great and the small. The mightiest men on earth. Pharoah and Nebuchadnezzar, both relying on foreign nobodies to explain their terrifying dreams. Alexander the Great…unmentioned. The great Caesars of Rome playing a very minor support role in the great drama of the coming of the greatest of all, born in the most common of places, dying the most ignominious death, and turning the world upside-down. Yet it is not just the Great-Seen-As-Small, although He is the focus of it all. There are so many small people playing their part in the narrative of God’s great plan – from the small brother with big dreams, to the youngest of eight with his harp, to the teens taken to Babylon, to a shepherd of Tekoa, a young man fleeing naked and another falling sleepily to his temporary death.
Power and Politics – The story advances through time with perpetual shifts in power. Each power figure thinking they are the ultimate and discovering they are not. The hard-hearted king with his great nation seemingly under attack by its own gods, yet all at the hand of the One true God. The arrogant-mouthed conqueror sent home in disgrace and killed by his sons. The proud-hearted emperor turned into a beast of the field until he acknowledged who is really in charge. The partying-victor brought to fearful humiliation by a finger writing on the wall. The conflicted parties of a council with restricted powers stirred to rage by a carpenter-rabbi from Nazareth, who confounded the governor with real power in the region, while ignoring the entertainment-oriented “king” given his audience with a true King. History seems to be a tale of waxing and waning powers, but actually it is the story of the only true power, thankfully with a truly trustworthy heart.
History and Geography, partners in powerful biblical teaching.
Effective Bible Teaching 1 – Geography
There are many ingredients that go into effective Bible teaching – whether that be pulpit preaching or children’s Sunday school lessons. Two critical ingredients are history and geography. It is almost impossible to teach the Bible well without an awareness of history and geography. Haddon Robinson follows John Stott in speaking of the world of the Bible. I’d like to try and whet our appetites for study in these important fields. Work put in here will yield a real harvest in presenting the Bible to others.
John Smith, in his History of Virginia (not highly relevant here), wrote:
As geography without history seemeth a carcus without motion, so history without geography wandereth as a vagrant without certain habitation.
So true. So what are some of the elements of geography that will help our biblical teaching?
Nations and Empires – In the back of most Bibles are a set of maps. It can’t be just one. We need to get a sense of the ancient world from Spain to Iran, with Israel as a tiny place. We need to see Israel and even Jerusalem close up. But more than that, we also need to see a world changing through time. The great Assyrian Empire, so feared, then gone. The mighty Babylonians, then the Medo-Persians, the swift conquering, lasting cultural impact of Greece, the machine that was Rome. We need to see Egypt and Assyria with Israel in between. We need to see how Judea really was on the fringe of the Roman empire. Nations and empires, kingdoms and regions.
Distance and Terrain – The fertile crescent was quite some distance for Abram, or for a captured Judean king. The direct route from Babylon to Jerusalem was another story – that would need some major hill removal and valley filling if a motorway were ever to be made. The lush green rolling hills around Galilee are not out of reach of arid Judean mini-mountains, but again the direct path via Sychar was seldom travelled, many preferring the fast falling Jordan river route. Heading west wasn’t easy either – sea voyages were fraught with dangers from storm and foe (although there was the fishy option), but Roman roads and iron-fisted peace helped the spread of the gospel.
Cities and Towns – We all know that our town is not the same as the one down the road. A city isn’t just more inhabited than a town, it is different on numerous levels. So we must avoid seeing every biblical place as some sort of generic town. Nazareth was a garrison town for Roman soldiers, Tarsus was a city of some means, also well acquainted with Rome’s fast moving war machine, and Philippi had its history with Rome too. Yet each of these places was different. Tekoa and Jerusalem are by no means the same. A reading of Acts points to the strategic nature of hub cities in the growth of the church, while the most obscure of villages have a part to play in God’s plan – even little Bethlehem is graced beyond words! And what about Rome, can the gospel penetrate even Rome?
All of this, and more, lies motionless without the vivifying force of history. To which we turn tomorrow.
Insightful Incidentals?
Whatever passage you are preaching, there will be opportunity to make passing comments about relatively minor details. Of course, all Scripture is God-breathed and there is no such thing as a non-essential word in the Bible. But a high commitment to verbal plenary inspiration (i.e. the words are inspired, all of them), does not mean every word can become a preaching point on a whim.
So what sort of insightful incidental comments are best left unsaid altogether? Tomorrow I’ll address the potentially appropriate ones, but for now, just the baddies:
1. Distracting moralisms – For example, the preacher is working through the story of Zaccheus’ encounter with Jesus. The setup is finished, Jesus has just called Zac down from the tree and there is an interim comment before the big scene in his house. The interim comment is about the crowds grumbling. Cue preacher going off on a gentle tirade about grumbling and how bad that is for a church. A couple of wilderness quotes, the threat of excessive quail dinners and then the diversion is over, back to Zac’s dinner table. Oops. And then some. This story has nothing to do with whether people should grumble or not. Actually, if the preacher had observed more closely, it would have become clear that the comment by Luke is not wasted at all. The crowds grumbled at Jesus! Here is the key point in the story, the moment when Jesus diverts anger onto himself to free up sinner Zac. By looking for a moralistic application point, the preacher has missed the transformational gold of grace in action. Chances are, after missing that, the same preacher might go on to make Zac’s proclamation of distribution into part of his salvation negotiations, rather than the pure response that it actually is.
2. Errant critiques – For example, the preacher is working through the story of the blind man healed in two stages. In this case he hadn’t given any attention to the preceding content in Mark 6-8, which is so critical to understanding this unique story. Getting to the end of the passage, his eyes are drawn by the red ink of Jesus’ words in verse 26. “Do not enter the village.” Voila! Preaching point. We don’t do follow-up these days! We need to learn from Jesus. Jesus didn’t just heal, he also gave instruction. Don’t go back into the world. Just follow me. Etc. Etc. Meanwhile the more astute listeners have their eyes on the text wondering how the preacher missed the first half of the verse. Did Jesus ask this blind man to follow him? Or did he actually send him to his home? It is perilous to be looking for preaching points, rather than really reading the passage to understand it.
3. Personal soapboxes – I’m out of words, but you know what I mean. The slightest hint in a passage and off goes the preacher on a personal crusade.
So easy to preach in vague connection to a text. So much safer and better to preach the message of the text.
Biggest Big Ideas – 10. Christ
We’ve covered a lot of ground in nine posts. A lot of threads weave through the canon. The resulting tapestry is stunning and breathtaking, but we can’t help ourselves, our gaze goes from the whole to the who…the one who reveals God to us, the Son.
10. The centerpiece of God’s great Word is His Word, His Son, our Lord, the Christ, the deliverer called Jesus, from Nazareth.
The epic adventures of God’s chosen people take more than a few posts to tell. In various times, in different ways, God spoke to them. But in these last days He has spoken to us in a son! Can we ever get beyond the wonder of Jesus of Nazareth? Fully God, fully man, fully one.
His arrival should not have been a surprise. God predicted and announced His coming, as if the enemy were so unequal that even with press releases and pronouncements, his terror attacks would amount to nothing. More than that, God showed His Immanuel-ness all the way through.
God is the kind of God who would choose to walk on two legs with His creation in the garden. But what of an unholy people, surely they could not see His face and live? He is the kind of God who would meet with such as Abraham, and Jacob, and Manoah, and let them live. He is the kind of God who would dwell in tents near His special people, meeting face to face with Moses.
And so the communication of the Father became flesh and pitched his tent among us, so that we beheld his glory! No one has ever seen the Father, but if only we could request just a glimpse? If you have seen me, Jesus would announce, you have seen the Father.
So he spoke to a gathering of the biblically trained elite, and also to a pair of hurting disciples on a road trip. To both he made it clear that the Scriptures speak of Him – by prediction, by appearance, by certain types, by fulfilled themes. Their hearts burned within. Two, in delight at the One who came for them. The others, in anger for the love of God was not in them. The Christ stirs hearts, he can leave none in some hypothetical neutral apathy.
The glory of God’s grace and faithfulness manifest in the flesh of a carpenter from Nazareth. Can anything good come from there? He was the solution to sin, the revelation of God, the forever bond between divine and human, the one who is coming, the one to be worshipped, the one who is friend, who is brother, who is bridegroom.
The greatest theme in the Bible is not our sin, our faith, our redemption or our obedience. It cannot be primarily about us, and yet wonder of wonders, it is about the One who became one of us. The incarnation, the step us-ward, the path cross-ward, the indignity of humiliation at the hands of those created in His image. Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Oh yes, the only One who is good came to there, and from there.
The foundation stone and centerpiece and capstone of every good idea, promise, purpose and revelation is the Word made flesh, the ultimate revelation of the Father, His beloved Son.
Biblical Preaching 