Religion

Preaching Seen

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

screen2When we preach, we must aim beyond mere comprehension.  Making understandable truth statements is important, but it falls short of the ultimate goal.

Our goal in preaching is not to offer a verbal form of written commentary – principles and doctrines and truths.  Our goal is to go beyond that to the level of helping listeners engage with the text and the God of the text.  This requires various things beyond the reading of a commentary, including relevance and targeted communication for the specific listeners before you.  And it requires our aiming beyond mere comprehension.

How do we preach so that listeners not only comprehend cognitively, but also engage affectively?  After all, every encounter with a person goes deeper than understanding what is said to a heart-level response to the person themselves.  We always know whether we are drawn to and repulsed by any individual we meet.  We always have a “first-impression” that takes some work to overcome with comprehension and thought processes.  And since preaching the Bible is not merely about transferring information, it follows that we need to preach for more than mere understanding.

How do we do this?  There are many factors, but let me share one:

Preach so that images form on the screen in the hearts of the listeners.  When preaching narrative, do a good job at describing the characters and the action so that listeners can be drawn in and identify with the characters in their encounter with God.  When preaching poetry, do a good job at describing the imagery and emotion of the writer so that listeners can be drawn into the situation of the poet and engage with them and their God.  When preaching discourse, do a good job at describing the situation and the tension so that listeners can be drawn in and feel the force of the communication from the person presenting God.

Adequate preaching presents truths like a teleprompter.  Great preaching makes the truth felt as it becomes clear, lucid and vivid on the screen in the listeners’ hearts.

Bibles Open

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ReadingBible2When you preach, how long do Bibles stay open?

1. Open until right after the reading.  Perhaps your listeners know from experience that once the reading is over, the message will fly every which way and the text that was read will become a distant memory.  They may open their Bibles for the reading, but once that is done, the Bibles are shut.  So what are you preaching?

2. Open until disconnect is evident.  Perhaps they will be looking at the passage and listening for a while.  But after a while it will become evident that your message has no real connection to the passage.  At some point some will close their Bibles in an act of quiet pew-level frustration and sit listening in anticipation of the closing hymn.  Or . . .

3. Open as alternative to listening.  Perhaps some will stay open so that the listener can occupy themselves while your message continues.  For whatever reason, they have struggled to stay engaged and have decided that rather than being frustrated, they will read some Bible and make best use of the time!

4. Open until fingers grow tired.  Here’s another possibility.  Perhaps after the fourteenth cross reference, they get tired of searching for 2nd Hesitations and decide they’d be better off just listening rather than trying to keep up in the grown up sword drill for the initiated Bible handlers (or the folks with the indented pages for cheating in sword drills!)

5. Open until end of message.  Perhaps people keep their Bibles open right the way through, frequently checking that what you are saying fits with the text.  It is both textually accurate and personally compelling.  When the message ends, the Bibles are closed by grateful hearts and helped lives.

6. “Open” even on the way home.  Perhaps people close their Bibles with a finger in the text, because subconsciously they can’t wait to get back into that passage and pray through it some more at home.  This would be a good sign of effective preaching!

7. Open all week.  Perhaps you preach in such a way that listeners are motivated and stirred to keep their Bibles open all week.  They want to read on, read around, read more.  They discovered that the Bible was accessible, enjoyable and relevant to their lives.  They can’t imagine not wanting to pursue the God you introduced on Sunday.  Good preaching!

Good News and Good News

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GospelABiblical preachers have the best job on earth: we get to announce good news!  So here’s a thought to ponder . . . do we preach good news and good news?

There is a danger that we will separate gospel proclamation from instruction for the Christian life.  If we do, we will have problems.  Consider the case of the two-sermon Sunday.  Let me describe the downside of separating gospel proclamation from Christian life instruction:

Sermon 1: Gospel Proclamation.  The preacher preaches the gospel.  Good.  Problem is, the vast majority of those present are already believers.  He keeps telling us how much we need to be saved and how we cannot get there without God doing the saving.  Fair enough, we agree.  He preaches a message that would fit in a tent meeting, but seems entirely irrelevant to the congregation sitting before him.  Everyone hopes that someone is present who is not yet a believer.  It would be appropriate for them.  The sermon ends and a significant number of people leave the church without being fed or helped in any direct way.

Sermon 2: Christian Life Instruction.  The preacher preaches instruction for the Christian life.  Good.  Problem is, a significant number of those present in the morning sermon (Gospel) are not there in the evening.  But for those who are, surely this is helpful?  In some ways, yes.  But the separation is problematic.  Now we are told what our duties are and how we should handle the difficulties of life and what our thoughts and actions should be if trained by Scripture.  The separation means that the preacher does not apply the gospel to the believer, but gives instructions to the insider.

There are problems with both of these sermons.  Technically the preacher may be right in most of what he says.  But the problem with the Gospel message in the morning is that he seems unaware of his audience.  Most are already believers and the presentation treats them as “already in.”  Consequently they can only hope someone is present who needs to hear the message.  Yet the gospel should be relevant to believers too.  In the gospel message the believers could and should be engaged by what is presented.  In the Christian Life Instruction message, the gospel could and should be a defining feature.  Do we think that having believed and entered in by faith, that we now will grow to maturity by our own diligent obedience?  Check Paul’s thoughts on that approach in Galatians 3:1-3.  No, the gospel is relevant to all and it is by faith from first to last.

Perhaps we need to grasp our privilege of proclaiming good news and proclaiming good news: gospel proclamation and gospel-shaped Christian life instruction!

Dangerous Assumption 5: Other Options

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Assumption25This week we have looked at two dangerous assumptions that can override good preaching preparation.  One is overtly too human-centred, leading either to striving or enabled independence.  The other is apparently God-centred, yet perhaps open to the charge of misrepresenting the God-centred reality presented in Scripture.  One variation of this latter assumption makes God profoundly selfish, the other makes Him non-relational in His controlling.  Let’s finish the week with a few miscellaneous other assumptions that could be causing us to misrepresent the Bible text we are preaching.  Again, our goal is not to be negative, but to stir us to pray for God’s perspective on our handling of the Bible – let’s let God be the coach in all of this.

Dangerous Assumption C: It’s all about something else.

7. The power filter.  This may just be a variation on some of what we’ve considered already.  It is the notion that Christianity is about spiritual access to power on another plane.  Somehow we have to tap into this secret energy source that will give us super-human stamina or impressive miracle power to wow the world.  The Bible can then become a set of data to twist and use as leverage in accessing this heavenly fuel.  Again, the marital and relational nature of true Christianity gets lost here.  The Spirit who pours out God’s love into our hearts becomes the conduit for wow-fuel that leaves Jesus distant and enables our thoroughly dependent independence.

8. The nice filter.  This is where the preacher filters out anything tough or challenging or difficult and makes everything soft and nice.  In one form everything becomes syrupy and fluffy, without any hint of wrath or anger, etc.  In another form, the wrath and anger of God become another “side” to Him that is somehow held in tension with his love.  We therefore lean on the loving “side” of God and are spared the nasty side.  Alternatively we celebrate nice Jesus who has delivered us from angry Father.  Whatever version grips us, we have a problem.  Unless we see God’s holiness and justice and wrath and jealous nature as part of His triune love, then we will have a God with a split personality or a divided trinity.  Nice is not the issue, but His love might be more significant than we realise.

9. The hobby horse filter.  This is where every passage is seen through lenses looking for a hobby horse issue.  Consequently the pet topic becomes elevated disproportionately whenever a text offers a link.  It could be a theological issue, a pet illustration category, or whatever.  In fact, here’s another variation:

10. The agenda filter.  This is where our personal or political or cultural agenda is imposed on any passage.  We could all pick an issue in national or church politics and create a “study Bible” with notes linking almost any passage to the subject of our own choosing.  Thankfully publishers don’t publish most of these potential study Bibles!

Let’s spend time with God asking Him to show us where our lenses are changing the hue of His self-revelation to us in the Bible.  Our desire to be biblical preachers is to please the God who has spoken, who speaks, who has revealed and will be revealed by our preaching.  He is more than able to point out where we may be misrepresenting Him, so let’s be sure to ask!

Dangerous Assumption 4: God (continued)

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Assumption24After pondering variations on the assumption that it is all about me (either in the direction of striving or divinely enabled successful independence), yesterday we probed the issue of an “all about God” assumption – namely, the glory filter.  Here’s another “all about God” filter that may be corrupting our reading and preaching of the Bible:

6. The takeover filter.  There is no question that God wants to be God in the life of the listeners.  The Bible says a categorical No! to our autonomy from God.  But we must be careful not to misrepresent the salvation plan.  The predominant biblical motif is that of marriage, not dictatorial control.  I have been crucified with Christ and no longer live, but there is also the life I now live.  Huh?  Captivated by our groom and united with him by the Spirit, we are invited into a marital relationship, not a bizarre state of hypnosis and unthinking passivity.  The Bible does not invite us to enter into a non-communicative and non-reciprocal relationship with a takeover Spirit.  We are not invited to go beyond the Bible into a higher level of spirituality that is impossible to describe, yet worthy of our greatest efforts to pursue personal surrender to it.

The Bible invites us to know God and to be in fellowship with Him by His Spirit in response to His love.  It is a relationship of hearing His heart in His Word and responding to Him in prayer and walking with Him and keeping in step with His Spirit and being both dead to self and yet more alive than ever (since life is, by definition, knowing God).  There are various unbiblical and sub-biblical versions and perversions of Christian spirituality.  Some do sound very Christian, but even when the focus is apparently all on God, it is still possible to corrupt the Bible and misrepresent what He is saying.

Dangerous Assumption 3: God

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Assumption23Dangerous assumptions lurk below the surface of our preaching preparation, always ready to undermine our most diligent exegesis and expositional planning.  We can diligently do everything well in our study and message preparation, but the tinted glasses of our own dangerous assumption will colour the end result and undermine the preaching process.  Our goal in pondering these assumptions is not to throw stones at others, but to prompt us to pray and ask God to help us see where we aren’t seeing clearly.  It can be painful to discover an errant agenda in our preaching, but if our goal is to please Him, then surely we must ask Him to show us if there be any dangerous assumption in us.

So far we’ve looked at some variations of the assumption that it is “all about me” – both in the direction of pressure to perform for God and in the direction of getting God to perform for us.  But there’s another assumption we need to be wary of too:

Dangerous Assumption B: It is all about God.

5. The glory filter.  There is no question that everything should be done for the glory of God.  But some have morphed this doctrine into a form that seems to have lost the relational and motivational moorings of Scripture.  Rather than seeing the delightful glory-giving nature of the Triune God who is revealed by Scripture, glory becomes this dutiful commodity that a self-absorbed God demands from us constantly.  There is a real danger that glory can become the measure of behaviour demanded of listeners, without their hearts being stirred by the glory of God’s glory.  Haman glorified a man he despised from the heart.  But God the Father has always glorified the Son because he loves him (John 17:24).

Should we be stirred to glorify God by the preaching of His Word?  Absolutely.  Who would ever come up with a God who is all-glorious, yet also lovingly gives glory to the undeserving?  The danger is when we twist the God behind the text into a glory-grabbing tyrant and preach every passage accordingly.  It will sound very biblical, but it may end up being a slightly sanctified variation on the duty filter that turns everything into a human-centred preaching model.

Tomorrow we’ll think on another variation of an “all about God” filter that may not be consistent with the Scriptures.

Dangerous Assumption 2: Me (Continued)

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Assumption22The assumption that Christianity is all about me has many variations.  Whatever version we propound, there will be problems as we try to preach the Bible faithfully.  Yesterday we considered the duty and guilt filters – two ways that preachers can reframe any passage to preach pressure on those present.  In these approaches, the Bible comes across as a whip to stir the lazy or the guilty into striving action.  But there is another pair of angles to consider here:

3. The selfish filter.  Here is a perversion of the same problem.  Instead of turning the listener inwards with guilt or pressure to perform, this feeds the self-absorption in the other direction.  Not “you are nothing” but instead, “you are god!”  Somehow the self-absorption of the preacher has been corrupted so that the Bible is twisted to support selfishness.  The text is read as a means to an end, and the end is a sanctified sinfulness.  Suddenly God is the great slave of all who get their ducks lined up so that He will do their bidding.  Suddenly the manifold grace of God to the undeserving becomes the heavenly affirmation of our incurvedness as we take advantage of plucked promises and twisted truths.  The preacher here is the life coach and guru for sanctified sinfulness (in all its variations).  

4. The success filter.  Perhaps this is a low-level version of number 3.  It doesn’t claim that God is our great slave who delivers freely for our selfishness, but it does still see life as essentially independent.  The preacher becomes the life coach for personal success in all areas of life: marriage, parenting, work, leisure, health, etc.  The Bible is seen as the instruction manual for successful Christian living, and the listeners are invited to have their self-focus affirmed in the continual pursuit of relevant applications.

The issue in all of these angles is not just the broken view of sin (i.e. not seeing the self-oriented nature of the fallen human heart), but also a poor view of God and salvation.   The Bible does not suggest salvation is the divine provision for independent living.  As preachers of the Bible, if our view of God does not grip our hearts and reorient everything, then we will misrepresent the Bible in our preaching and corrupt application into some form of self-serving exercise.  God’s goal has never been our independent functioning, but rather the privilege of participation in His fellowship.  Preaching that makes it all essentially about me will be problematic, whatever the flavour.

Dangerous Assumption

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Assumption2Good preachers will preach the passage they claim to be preaching.  Even in a topical message with several passages being presented, the preacher should be sure to say what that text is actually saying.  Using texts to say what the preacher wants to say is an indication of a pride problem in the preacher.  However, even the diligent preacher of the passage before them can undermine their good work by dangerous assumptions that undergird their work.

These assumptions come various sources, but they tend to be theological paradigms that cause the preacher to see any text in a certain way.  They are like tinted glasses that change the hue of everything.  This will lead to misrepresenting the Bible and potentially to some significant false teaching in the church.  Over the next days I’d like to try to highlight some of these tints in the hope that some might be prompted to pray and ask the Lord to expose their own false or dangerous assumptions.  It would be good for us all to do that.

Dangerous Assumption A: It is all about me.

There are many potential angles here.

1. The duty filter.  This could be driven by a faulty view of God, an errant understanding of the gospel, a separation of gospel from Christian living, baggage from childhood abandonment, theological pride, personal guilt and a whole lot more.  Whatever the root, the result is that every passage is seen through lenses that underline and embolden imperatival content, or even introduce this tone where it is not present.  So the preacher takes any story or psalm or passage and turns it into a set of duties for the listener to strive toward.

2. The guilt filter.  This is associated with number 1, but it seeks to transfer feelings of guilt onto the listeners.  This is perhaps less optimistic.  Whereas in the previous angle the listeners are pressured as if they can simply choose to obey and be diligent, this lens turns the text a shade of sour.  Now the goal is not so much to instruct and pressure, but to make the listeners feel guilty and therefore pressured.  The motivational effectiveness of guilt is questionable in the extreme, but this approach to preaching can have the feel of desparation about it.  Like all of the filters in this sub-set, it tends to skim over the problematic issue of turning listeners in on themselves, which is at the very heart of the sin issue we are claiming to address as we preach the Bible.

There’s another side to this, which we’ll ponder tomorrow.

The Gospel in Concrete 2

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ConcreteWall1The epistles don’t assume full awareness of God and the gospel and proceed quickly into practical applications.  Instead God has given us many case studies of the apostles applying the gospel in concrete situations, and they don’t just dive into instruction, or assume that believers all have the basics in place.  Furthermore:

3.  The apostles never assume that God is a given.  This is a big problem in the church today.  Too many people assume that anyone talking about “god” is talking about God.  And I don’t just mean those outside the church.  Some of us do sniff out that there are different conceptions of “god” floating around, both in religious talk and in cultural use.  But even within the church, it is thoroughly naive to assume that anyone referring to “God” is necessarily speaking with a full biblical awareness of the one true God revealed in the Bible.  The epistle writers don’t just use a generic label and press on into practicalities.  They always clarify and specify.  Often we’ll find reference to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, or references such as “the God of all grace.”  Let’s be real about the fact that even within the church, the God described by some people sounds like a different God than we see revealing Himself in the Bible.

4. The apostles never offered a paper-thin gospel.  “God is the in-charge super-being who will judge you, so be sure you sort your relationship with him by praying this prayer.”  Not something we find in the New Testament.  The gospel they offer consistently communicates such realities as the intra-trinitarian relationships, the wonder of “in Christ” participation in that fellowship by the Spirit, inside-to-out transformation of a life by change of desires, the self-giving love of God as spotlighted by Christ’s atoning death on the cross, the divine countering of the Lie that still permeates this world through cosmic antagonism to the Truth, etc.

More could certainly be added (feel free to comment, of course).  Let’s be looking at the epistles and recognizing the wonder of having these case studies in applied gospel theology for us to learn from and use as we seek to address the down-to-earth complexities of specific local situations.