Preacher’s Personal Life

Preaching, New Covenant and Sin

/ Peter Mead / 6 Comments

Sometimes we need to be contradicted.  For instance, we assume that if we are going to take the issue of sin seriously, then we need to give some significant attention to it.  Perhaps by implementing some self-controlled, self-disciplined approach to sin control in our lives.

On the contrary.

Hang on, am I suggesting that we shouldn’t take sin seriously?  Am I suggesting that we should go and sin freely?  Of course not!  Why do some people automatically assume that a turn from focusing on virtue is to turn in pursuit of vice?  The opposite of moral effort may not be immoral action.

I would suggest that the New Covenant takes sin more seriously than we do or think we do.  God takes sin seriously, which is why He promised the New Covenant.  Jesus Christ takes sin seriously, which is why He inaugurated the New Covenant with his own blood.  The writers of the New Testament took sin seriously, which is why they pushed the New Covenant so strongly.

And we need to take sin more seriously.  We need to stop thinking it is something we can handle by our own effort, our own discipline, our own practices.  This is true for the not-yet-saved, and it is true for the believer.  The foundation of the New Covenant is sin forgiven.

Sometimes it is hard to realize just how much we don’t grasp something we think we’ve known for so long.  Take grace, for instance.  At the core of God’s dealings with us is this issue of grace – His character, His glory, His self-giving.  Yet we turn grace into a commodity and preach grace-plus, or grace-but, or grace-however.  We don’t need to preach some sort of grace-balanced message.  We need to present to people, believers or not, the wonderful glorious extravagant imbalanced grace of a God who gives himself to deal with our sin.

If our listeners think that grace means license to sin, then we haven’t preached grace clearly enough.  Maybe we’ve offered a halfway house kind of grace, a grace that addresses guilt but doesn’t capture the heart.  A grace-as-thing that pays for guilt, but not a grace-as-person that captivates our hearts.

The solution to a license type of response is not to balance grace with guilt, pressure, codes and laws.  The solution is to do a better job of preaching grace.

At the foundation of the New Covenant is this wonderful truth that God has promised to remember sins no more, and that truth is presented like a vivid 3-d billboard to our hearts in the death of His Son on the cross.  It is there, in shocking shame and agony that we see God’s glorious grace made manifest to us.

Tomorrow let’s push this deeper and recognize the heart of the New Covenant.

Saturday’s Thought: Preaching for Response

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No preacher would admit to preaching in order to fill time, or to fulfill an obligation, or to fill a pulpit.  We say we preach for response.  After all, what other motivation could we cite?  I know, some will quickly rush to language of glorifying God.  But God isn’t pleased by time filling or untouched listeners.  So what do we mean?

Do we mean that preaching should get more than a polite thank you from the gathered listeners?  Sure.  Do we mean that preaching should get a positive or exuberant statement of reception from the listeners?  I don’t think so.  The Lord’s preaching certainly seemed to polarize rather than please all.  Some will be stirred and drawn, others will be offended and withdraw.

This is where it gets interesting for me, and here’s the thought for the day.  What is the division or polarization created by our preaching?  Simplistically we might assume that it is a sorting of sinners and saints.  You know, those in sin pushed away by how seriously we address sin and the godly encouraged; the culture upset and absent while the churchy folks pleased and present.  But that didn’t seem to be the result of Jesus’ preaching, did it?

What if we realize that the gospel is not about preaching a message of pressuring responsibility?  That is, what if we preach the glorious loving grace of God that stirs and warms and draws hearts to Christ?  Instead of whipping our listeners with burdens, what if we preach the One who was whipped for them?

This kind of preaching typically offends the religious who feel responsible for their own goodness.  These are the people who don’t see their own efforts and diligence and pride and self-centredness as being at all sin-stained.  This kind of preaching typically draws the broken and hurting and weak.

When we switch from preaching responsibility to actually preaching for a response we may find that the polarization both switches and increases.  When we recognize the difference between responsibility and response, then certainly our preaching will change.  It is so easy to preach to pressure people to be good.  It takes something more to preach how good Christ is, so that listeners might be drawn to Him.  What is the something more?

I suppose it comes down to me on my own with my Bible and my Lord.  Is it all about me?  Or about Him?  Is it about what I must do (responsibility)?  Or about what He is like (response)?

Preaching for response requires clarity on the distinction between response and responsibility.

Preaching to the Heart

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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.)

Our Core Vision

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This week I am travelling and adjusting to a new time zone.  So I thought I’d pull out an oldie from five years ago.  Here’s a good reminder for me:

“We shall never have great preachers until we have great divines.” That was C.H.Spurgeon’s opinion. In the busy world we now inhabit, a world of phone calls, emergencies, emails, travel, financial complexities, family responsibilities and ministerial intricacies, we need to freshly recommit ourselves to the core vision of the preacher. Our core vision is not a philosophy of ministry, a theological stance or sense of calling. Our core vision is God Himself.

We have the privilege of being so captivated by the greatness and grace of our Lord that every moment of our lives is lived in the shadow, no the glory, of that vision. A deep awareness of who God is will continue to drive us back to His Word, diligently pursuing more of Him so that we might respond further.

This is not about discipline and effort, this is about delight and response. We dive into His Word so that we might see Him more clearly, be captured more fully, and be stirred more deeply. Then we will preach more effectively.

Our preaching should flow from a personal intimacy with God and a personal commitment to His Word. That is what our people need.

Growing as a Preacher

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Many have made the point that the day you stop learning is the day you stop teaching.  The day you stop growing is the day you stop truly leading.  So let me ask the simple question, are you growing as a preacher?  What does that mean?

I suppose there are basically two areas to be considered, as well as two paths to pursue growth.

Preachers need to grow in their preaching, but not as much as they need to grow in their relationship with Christ.

How do we pursue spiritual growth?  Two options.  One is to pursue growth in our own strength – the self-moved effort to mature and learn, etc.  The other is to pursue growth in our responsiveness to Christ’s work in our lives.

I’ll keep this short and nudge you toward my Cor Deo co-mentor’s post on Growing . . . please click here to go there.

Word Studies 4 – Using the Fruit

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

This week we have been pondering the importance of word studies.  It is vital that we take the words of Scripture seriously, and thereby make our preaching as accurate and effective as possible.  So let’s say we’ve identified key words in a passage, pivotal terms on which the passage turns, and we’ve studied them to get a good sense of what the author meant by choosing those particular terms.  How do we use the fruit of the study in our preaching?  Here are some suggestions:

1. Default to smooth integration.  The majority of word study work that you do in your study need not show in your preaching.  By show, I mean overt reference to it.  The default should be that the study you’ve done is hidden, but the explanation you give is accurate.  Sometimes I would even go for smooth integration when I think the translation isn’t the best.  So I will read it as is, and then subtly state a preferred translation.  No fuss, no critique, just staying on track for effective explanation.  I think this is a good default.

2. Underline word studies sparingly and strategically.  There are advantages to sometimes letting some of the word study show overtly.  Perhaps you go to a couple of familiar or enlightening uses of the term, to give a taste of the process and help people see why you explain it as you do.  If this is done too much it will lose its impact.  Choose to show the word study more overtly in strategic moments – perhaps when the term is critical to the passage as a whole, or at least to a major point in the passage.

3. Avoid original language flaunting.  I know it is tempting to let your Hebrew or Greek hang out.  And if you haven’t studied it, it may be even more tempting to show you’ve read heavy commentaries.  I also know that some people will shake your hand and thank you for the wonderful insight into the original language.  What neither of us know is how many in your congregation are sitting there feeling linguistically inadequate, assuming that you can find things in the Word they never could, and therefore feeling less motivated to read the Bible between now and when you preach again.  Typically there is no need to refer to the actual term, just say “in the original” or “the word Paul uses here . . . ”

Tomorrow I’ll finish the list with three more suggestions on using the fruit of Word Studies.

 

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.

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!