The Four Places of Preaching – 2

June 6, 2012 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

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!

The Four Places of Preaching

June 5, 2012June 6, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

There is a journey from text to message. A journey consists of a sequence of locations, so I’d like to lay out the four places of preaching. Perhaps this will be helpful to someone.

Place 1 – The Study

The first place the preacher needs to go is the study. Just the preacher, the Bible, perhaps a desk, whatever study resources may be available, and a prayerful pursuit of the meaning of the text.

What is the goal in this place? To be able to accurately state the main idea of the passage in a single sentence summary as a result of prayerful historical, grammatical, literary study of the passage in its context, with a heart laid bare before God.

Who is involved? This place is where the preacher is in prayerful pursuit of the meaning of the passage. So there is a historical focus, a sense in which the preacher is seeking to go back then to the time when the human author wrote the passage. There is a deep concern with making sense of the text as it was intended, as inspired, with the historical and written context, the inspired choice of genre, the content of the passage in terms of its details and its structure or flow, and the intent of the writer.

So the preacher is studying, exegeting, interpreting. Yet in that quiet place of wrestling with the text, the text is also wrestling with the preacher. This is not some sort of abstract and entirely objective study. The preacher is there. When the Bible speaks, God speaks, and when God speaks, lives change. So the preacher has the privilege of being marked by the text as the Spirit of God first applies the passage to the life of the preacher.

The study is a place of deep fellowship between the preacher and God.

Why, then, the study? Should this not be the library, after all, studying involves resources? No, this should be a study, because a library is a place of people pursuing information for a variety of purposes. The preacher’s study is a place where the preacher meets with God as the biblical text is studied both exegetically and profoundly devotionally.

Should this not be the office, after all, ministry is a complex business these days? No, this should be a study (whatever the room actually is), because an office is a place of action and interaction, of incoming emails and phone calls, a place where multiple plates are kept spinning. No great and profound preaching can come out of an office. (If your study is too much of an office, then study elsewhere – borrow a room and leave your phone behind, study in your car in the woods, but go somewhere where you can be with the Lord in a “study”.)

Tomorrow, place 2 . . .

Reflections on Great Bible Teaching – Part 3

May 30, 2012May 28, 2012 / Peter Mead / 3 Comments

One more reflection on last week’s teaching. I’ve written about the handling of the text and the targeting of the application. But there’s an almost intangible element to be included in any set of reflections:

The Credibility and Integrity of the Speaker

A. Ministry and life. Since I am not naming the speaker, this post might seem a bit pointless. Nonetheless, rather than focusing our attention on him, I’d love it to prompt our thoughts in prayers in respect to our own ministry. Here is an individual who has been running the race for a good long time. The race for him has included crossing cultures, engaging with different and often very challenging contexts, success in other fields apart from biblical teaching, facing direct opposition with deep integrity, etc. There is a weightiness and a power in a life well lived.

B. Longevity. Maybe this is the same as the previous comment, but it is important. For those of us that haven’t been in the race for five, six or seven decades, it can seem a bit irrelevant to us. But that is exactly wrong. The longevity of our ministry and the impact of our service is very much about the life we live this week. Longevity and integrity doesn’t sneak up on us, it is cultivated in the daily walk with Christ.

C. Humility. It is always striking when someone who has reason to be proud isn’t. If messages like these had come out of a young man, it would be hard to imagine the possibility of such humility. Courage and boldness combined with humility is a powerful cocktail.

I will leave it there, just in case blogging about an anonymous individual is more annoying than helpful!

Jesus, How Should I Preach?

May 25, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Yesterday I had the joy of leading a morning seminar that overviewed the preaching preparation process. I guided the participants through the 8-stage path that I advocate on this site and find so useful in my own ministry. But I think there is another way to look at the process – in effect a view from a greater height, a helicopter view of the preaching process. Dare I say that this might even reflect Jesus’ approach?

I would love to get the in-depth Jesus preaching seminar. Surely it would involve issues of speaking with authority unlike the scribes, and how to select compelling images, effective storytelling, memorable motifs, etc. But I want to suggest a slightly higher level, helicopter (or should I say more heavenly) view of the preaching process.

The gospels don’t give us the answer to how should we preach. But as well as His example, there is also the consistent pattern of Jesus’ theology. How should we pray? He answered with a variation on the theme of what is the greatest commandment? Since the pattern was so common in his teaching, allow me to speculate on an overview of the preaching preparation process from Jesus’ perspective. Jesus, how should we preach?

1. Love God. The first phase of the process is to be loving God by sitting at Christ’s feet. Stop being manic and busy for God, but instead sit at His feet and allow Him to minister to you. Don’t search the Scriptures and miss the person that is there, but seek the Lord in His Word and you will find Him. Treat the Bible as if God is a good communicator and so diligently study and wrestle with the text, allowing it to do a work in you before you even think about offering it to others. Love God in response to His self-revelation in His Word.

2. Love your neighbour (congregant, listener, audience, etc.). That is, pray for the people who you will speak to. Really spend time with God concerning them. Then as you start planning your message, plan it prayerfully with a deep concern for them to understand, to stay engaged, to be able to follow, to feel the import and impact of the message of the text. And as you preach it, preach with the winsomeness and grace of God permeating your demeanour, because God is passionately excited about incarnating His grace and truth!

I could be wrong, but I wonder if Jesus might give an answer along those lines.

I Don’t Feel Like Reading My Bible

May 21, 2012May 18, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

What advice would you give someone who says they don’t feel like reading their Bible? What advice would you give yourself? Just do it anyway? Today’s post is hosted on the Cor Deo site . . . click here to go there.

Saturday Short Thought: Applicational Yet Unengaging?

May 19, 2012May 17, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about preaching that connects with the congregation. Part of the issue is the complex consisting of application and relevance. But this is not the whole issue by any means. So here is a question: is it possible to be totally applicational in a message, and yet completely unengaging?

I believe it is possible. If there is no personal warmth between preacher and listener, and if there is no vertical warmth between the preacher and God, then a highly applicational message could easily become an instructional rant based on a text.

This isn’t something any of us should strive for. Problem is that if we think being relevant and applicational is the whole deal, then we can overlook the fact that communication is best offered in the context of interpersonal warmth. As preachers our listeners need us to have that reality in both dimensions!

A good friend of mine has a stock of great sayings, one of which goes, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So true in preaching. A chilling of the temperature in our personal walk with God will show in our communication with others. Even the most winsome of texts can become an opportunity to hammer on the duty theme again, for example.

Let’s leave it there, that almost qualifies as a short thought!

Biggest Big Ideas – 7. Community

May 8, 2012May 7, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Woven through the warp and woof of Scripture’s great landscape are themes so glorious and rich that we can barely put them into words. I’m trying. What are the ten big ideas of the Bible? God, creation, sin, grace, faith, redemption. Where next? I suppose it is obvious if we pause to consider what kind of God we have:

7. The glorious tri-unity of God reaches out to both create community, and to draw us into the community of His love.

God’s passion for beautiful unity in diversity brings the unlikely into unexplainable unity to reflect the good and pleasant bond of God’s fellowship.

In the very beginning, the conversation of God led to the creation of two creatures made in His image. Male and female. United to each other and to God by His Spirit. Diversity, yet beautiful other-centred unity. The image of God. A wedding to start the story, but nothing like the wedding that will end it.

Sin drove distance like a wedge into the Edenic marriage, and the relationship with God. The apparent freedom of self-love is a destructive prison of competition, fear, hatred, as well as the deafening silence and dark terror of living as the dead, alone in the coffin of our self-defined worlds.

So God has continually moved toward His creation, promising to create community beyond our wildest dreams. He promised to bless all families through one man’s seed. He promised to establish a kingdom of righteousness, even though his holy nation resisted the privilege of priesthood.

He is now calling out a bride for the Son He loves – the church, a temple of stones united in one God-inhabited structure of worship, a body of diverse yet valued parts united under one head, a bride of diverse peoples bound together by the captivating love of the beloved and longing for His return.

As God brought together Jew and Gentile into one body, His multi-coloured wisdom has quite literally been presented to a watching world and spiritual realm. Where else can there be true unity between people long divided? Where else can a world be taken aback by the mutual love of people so different and naturally opposed? (Consequently where else is racism, or hatred, or political power-mongering, or falsity so unspeakably hideous?)

Unity among God’s people is not just a pragmatic idea – a means by which we can avoid losing energy for our greater mission of reaching the world. Unity among God’s people is our greatest testimony in reaching the world. Our unity speaks of His character and nature. Our disunity screams a lie about God to a watching world.

So we long for the day when all the tribes of Israel and all the tribes and tongues and nations and languages of the church will reflect God’s unity and diversity in our eternal reflections on His worthiness around the throne and the Lamb. This will be no cacophony. This will be the most harmonious symphony of voices, of languages, of stories, of peoples…of one people, united in the world of God’s love.

There are not a few passages that address issues of unity among God’s people – from narratives of brotherly disunity to psalms celebrating the refreshing nature of brotherly unity. From Jesus’ foundational instruction of squabbling disciples, to epistles extolling the glorious potential implicit in the gospel applied.

Let’s not preach unity as some pragmatic ideal for the sake of some other goal. Let’s not preach unity as independent creatures tolerating each other. Let’s recognize that God’s passion for unity flows from who He is, and what He’s making us to be.

Clarity: More Than Thinking

April 26, 2012April 25, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Yesterday I offered three implications of the doctrine of Biblical clarity for us as preachers. Since the Bible is written by a master communicator who made sure it could be understood, therefore we need to work hard at understanding, we should help others know it can be understood, and we should strive to be clear in our own preaching.

There’s one more issue that I wanted to add to the list. This might be the one we need to ponder more than the others. Clarity is not really about intellectual capacity. The brightest scholars can make the biggest mess with interpreting Biblical texts. The simplest Christian can profoundly understand God’s Word.

Intellect is a blessing, but it is not a requirement. Formal training is a privilege, but it is not the definitive necessity. Reference resources are helps, but they are not preconditions for understanding. We have to grasp the fact that understanding communication is not an exclusively brain-defined exercise – our brain, or anyone else’s.

Dr B may be a very intelligent individual. Mr S may never have finished school and struggle to read. But which of these two is most likely to understand the nuances of Mrs S’s communication? Probably the husband who loves her.

4. Preachers have to both recognize and model that understanding is not primarily a matter of intellectual capacity or formal training, but alignment of heart by the Spirit. We can so easily purvey the notion that scholarship and intellect are pre-eminent distinctives of effective biblical study. The Word of God makes wise the simple. But there is a profound spiritual and relational aspect to understanding the Bible.

Notice how Jesus speaks of the role of the soil in the parable of the good soils (Matthew 13, Mark 4, Luke 8). In his explanation the repeated issue is their hearing. He continues on in Mark and Luke to speak of a lamp under a jar, then returning immediately to the issue of hearing. He warns them, “Take care then how you hear, for the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks that he has will be taken away.”

So how is the good soil defined? In Matthew it is the one who hears and understands. In Mark, it is those who hear and accept. In Luke, it is those who hear the word, holding it fast in an honest and good heart.

As preachers we can easily give the impression that the issue is intellect. It isn’t. The real issue is the alignment of the heart, its responsiveness to the God whose word is being spoken. It is more about Spirit enlivened relational capacity than genetically transferred intellectual capacity. As preachers of God’s Word, we must both recognize and model that.

He Has Done This Before

April 23, 2012April 22, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Today’s post is not about the Perspecuity of Scripture. Ok, actually it is, but let’s call it the Clarity of Scripture…a doctrine many preachers need to ponder more… Here is the link to the post.

Beyond Guilt – Part 3

April 18, 2012April 18, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

So far we have looked at issues of stance and tone in this series. It is easy to have a minimalist default approach of piling on the pressure and using guilt to twist arms. The biblical preacher needs to get beyond that.

3. The Preacher’s Strategy. Let’s face the real issue head on. What is our strategy in preaching? If the goal is life transformation, then what strategy makes sense? It certainly can’t be a simplistic answer since the human is a complex creature. But here are some pointers on strategy issues.

Transformation involves movement from a negative to a positive. Preaching for that transformation cannot simply critique the negative. We need to help people see what life would look like if the biblical truth were to take hold. Simply making people feel bad is not a solution.

Often people simply cannot conceive of what a faith-filled Christ-like in-step-with-the-Spirit life would look like in terms of a specific issue. In one sense then we have some role as life coaches. But it is more than that.

Transformation involves motivation for applying the message of God’s Word. Preaching for that transformation cannot simply inform, or even pressure, it needs to motivate. We need to understand how people work at the deepest level. If we think that information plus pressure will generate good things then we have been significantly led away from the teaching of the Bible by the thinking of this world.

What is the root issue Paul points to in Ephesians 4:17ff? People act and behave a certain way because of their thinking – so we need to educate! Hang on, yes we do, but he goes further, there’s a deeper issue…the root issue is the hardness of heart. Somehow the heart influences even how the mind will process information. Christian transformation is not really about well-informed minds and well-disciplined wills. It is an issue of the heart, inside to out, a matter of response as opposed to responsibility.

Transformation involves response to more than a vision of better living. It is not about realizing innate potential, but about responding from the core to a compelling love that alone can truly transform a life.

So our strategy includes presentation of application rather than just declaration of guilt. Our strategy includes communicating with people as if they are heart-driven beings and not just informed decision makers. But the ultimate issue has to be the One to whom people should respond, which I’ll leave until tomorrow’s post.