Stage 2 – Passage Study

Misdistillation

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

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 5 – Using the Fruit pt. 2

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Yesterday I offered three suggestions on using the fruit of word studies in our preaching.  I urged us to default to a smooth integration – just let the fruit show through accurate explanation, rather than excessive demonstration of exegetical labour.  There are times to underline and show the process a bit more, but they should be strategically selected.  And I think we should think twice and then again before letting the original languages show.  Three more thoughts:

4. Beware of cross-reference overload.  The nature of word study done properly is that you will end up chasing a lot of texts in their contexts to make sense of the author’s use of the particular term.  The danger is that when you preach you give people a quick dose of cross-referencing that is simply too much to bear.  You had time to pause and think about each one.  But if you fire them out like a machine gun, your listeners will have the tendency to be overwhelmed by other passages and stop engaging.  Alternatively they will try to follow and get bogged down in the process.  Or they will think that Bible study is about rapid cross-referencing without looking at texts in context.  None of these are good.  Better to keep hearts and minds in one passage as much as possible.  Venture outside of your preaching text on purpose and carefully.  Make sure you bring everyone back in with you.

5. Don’t fall into the etymological fallacy.  The process suggested this week shouldn’t lead you into this arena, but I know some reference resources will.  The word the writer uses here comes from two terms – butter and fly.  Butter is a dairy product made with churned milk.  Fly is the term used for pesky insects like bluebottles.  Interesting, isn’t it?  The butterfly is a creature that . . . well, that has nothing to do with butter or fly.  The key issue in word study is how the term is being used at that time, and ideally, by that writer.  Where it came from typically isn’t a key issue.

6. Pursue whole passage clarity.  This is the goal.  Do your best in your passage study to make sense of the passage.  Then do your best in the message preparation to make the message clear.  That is a big goal not easily achieved.

Words are little things, but the ones in the Bible are critically important.  God inspired them.  All of them.

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.

 

Word Studies 2 – Identifying Key Terms

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

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.

Preaching and Word Studies

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

These things tend to go in cycles.  For preachers trained in one era, preaching almost amounted to communicating the fruit of word studies.  Some years later and there is almost no evidence of skill in this area.  Let’s ponder some issues of methodology and implementation.

1. Word study is only one part of the passage study process, which is only one part of the message preparation process.  That means that we shouldn’t see preaching as a sequence of interesting definitions.  “…the next word I want you to notice is the word rock in the third verse. The word rock that David uses here means…”  This is not really preaching.  We need to thoroughly integrate our word study insights into our understanding of the passage as a whole, which then needs to be shaped into a message as a whole.

2. Word study matters because words matter.  We need to keep this skill in context, and we also need to keep it in view.  That is to say, as a student of the Bible, I need to take every word seriously.  In bibliology we may refer to “verbal plenary inspiration of Scripture.”  This means that we affirm God’s inspiration of the words (verbal), all of them (plenary).  To dismiss word study in favour of discourse analysis is to swing the pendulum too far.  To dismiss word study in favour of not studying the passage indicates a deeper issue in our view of God and the Bible.

3. Words hunt in packs.  To put that another way, a word on its own is not that helpful.  It has been fun to observe my children learning to read (and helping, of course).  Once they are set loose into the world of books there is no limit to what they can learn.  But suddenly they get past the “Bobby hit the ball to Suzie” stuff and start to meet words they’ve never met before.  “Daddy, what does snuff mean?” or “Daddy, what’s a cue?”  Like all good parents, my response is  to ask a question in response: “Can you tell me the whole sentence?”  This context allows me to make sense of that word for them in that place.  As we study individual words , we must always remember that we are studying them to make sense of them in a particular sentence, in a particular paragraph, in a particular unit of Scripture.

Tomorrow we’ll get into some more specifics on the how-to side of things . . .

Heartfelt Explanation – Preaching to the Heart (2)

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

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

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

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.

Effective Explanation: 15 Suggestions, part 3

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Finishing off the list of suggestions to help make textual explanation more effective:

11. Defer to a historic explanation.  “Martin Luther explained it in this way . . .” this can be helpful.  This can be unhelpful.  Whether it is Luther or Calvin or Wesley or Edwards, no matter how heavy a hitter, you have to be careful with this approach.  It is important to know your history and not just pluck a quote off a website.  Their context may have been different.  Your listeners may not grasp their significance, and may get confused by going to another different place in history.  Equally a historical explanation may allow for indirect communication of hard hitting truth.

12. Defer to a commentators explanation.  “Doug Moo explains it like this . . .” this can be helpful.  My preference would be for preachers to digest the commentaries in the context of a conversation with them, then preach in their own words.  Preaching is not a footnoted seminary project, nor an unpublished commentary.  Listeners typically don’t know the commentators (or even what one of those is).  The names can be distracting.  The impression given can be misleading.  But sometimes somebody’s turn of phrase hits the nail on the head.  “One writer put it like this . . . “ will usually suffice.

13. Develop an explanation piece by piece using effective review along the way (walking through a passage).  This is the more traditional approach, but it can work well.  Make sense of the first chunk, then build on that with the second chunk, etc.  Be sure to review the progress so they get a sense of the building explanation and logical flow.

14. Deliver explanation by means of a birds eye view of features and chunks (flying over a passage).  The opposite approach is to give them a birds-eye view of the whole passage before coming in closer to see the details.

15. Dive in to a key location and work out from there (skydiving into a passage).  Another approach is to drop in at verse 8, then work outwards to see what came in the preceding paragraph, then explore in the other direction and see how verse 8 is worked out.

This is still just scratching the surface.  What would you add?

Effective Explanation: 15 Suggestions, part 2

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment
Yesterday I started this list.  The goal is to avoid explanation of Bible text becoming dull and boring:

6. Do honour the whole text.  It may be tempting to dump half the passage and preach the preachy bit, but often seeing how the whole works actually can add focus to the more obviously powerful section.  There will be times to zero in, but don’t always do so and miss the text as a whole.

7. Do recognize and explain the text in light of its own structure.  This follows on from the previous suggestion.  Help people learn to see the structure in a passage.  If it is a poem, help them spot the stanzas (even if you use the technical term “chunk” instead of stanza or whatever sized unit you have).  In an epistle help them see the logical flow of thought.  Very rarely are texts three equal and parallel points.  Help people spot the textual structure, rather than predictable sermonic structure that you impose on the text.

8. Demonstrate the structure of the passage by means of the connectives and content.  One way to show the structure is to highlight the change of content.  Another way is to point them to the connectives.  “Scan down verses 11-16, notice how he says ‘and also,’ ‘you also,’ ‘again’, ‘and you also’ . . . he is really piling up the blessings here, isn’t he?”

9. Do describe the scene so effectively that people can see it.  Here’s a big one.  Too much explanation is too arms’ length and abstract.  Explanations can feel so dull, but when the narrative or situation (or potential application, but that’s for another time), when the situation is so compellingly described that listeners can actually see it in their hearts . . . they also start to feel it.  This is the power zone of explanation.  Help people with good description and they will thank God for your preaching.

10. Develop a contemporary simile.  “This is like . . .” here we enter into the realm of so-called illustrations.  I prefer to name them what they are.  All illustrations are either explanations, proofs or applications.  If you think the best way to explain the text is to use a contemporary example or simile, go for it.  As long as you know what you are trying to achieve, there is a good chance you will be successful.

Five more tomorrow, but your thoughts are invited at any point.

Effective Explanation: 15 Suggestions

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

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?