25 Pointers for Preaching Epistles Effectively – pt.2

July 10, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

So, the next five pointers:

6. Grasp the flow of the whole – As a preacher you need to be able to explain the flow of the epistle. Some of us are better at the details, others at the big picture, but we all need to work on both. Preaching that just methodically explains the details without a good sense of the whole will be tedious, atomistic and disjointed. Preach so the whole epistle can hit home.

7. Study the sections in light of their detail and the big picture – So as you look at a particular section, you will need to wrestle with the tiniest detail. That may or may not need to be explained when you preach. But don’t forget to keep thinking about the big picture, the broad flow of thought – that will need to be explained!

8. Study details and structure – Close reading of a passage is not just about word studies, it is also about sentences, and how sentences connect, and how transitions are made, and how paragraphs link. Be sure to recognize repeated terms and themes, as well as patterns in flow of thought. We have to study and hold understanding of the text at multiple levels of elevation at the same time. A fun challenge!

9. Let the shape of the text shape your message – Or to put it another way, stop trying to find a list of three equal points in every text. Sometimes a text will offer a negative example, then a positive example and then five instructions. This is not three equal points. Sometimes a text is essentially in two parts. Preach a two-part message, you’ll be fine, don’t worry 🙂 (You don’t have to preach the sermon in the shape of the text, and there may be reasons not to, but as a default, its not a bad way to go.)

10.Compare and contrast situations – The original audience and their situation is not going to be the same as your listeners. Compare and contrast the two. What need do your listeners have for this passage? Adjust how you present it accordingly. But don’t adjust its original situation or meaning accordingly, that will weaken the message.

Another five next time…

25 Pointers for Preaching Epistles Effectively

July 9, 2012February 11, 2022 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Most beginner preaching classes use the epistles as the foundational preaching genre. We can end up thinking that preaching epistles is easy. After all, a passage in an epistle will tend to fall into “chunks.” Voila! Sermon. Hang on, there is more to preaching epistles than that. Nine nudges, ten tips, well, how about 25 tips? That should keep us going for the week!

1. Drill into the occasion – Why was the letter written? Remember that epistle writers weren’t just letting their pen meander over papyrus for the sake of it. They were prompted to communicate by some situation. Therefore a letter is a snapshot of a narrative. Be sure to read through the letter itself and look for all the clues in the text.

2. Check other biblical background – With ten of Paul’s epistles, you also have the fertile territory of Acts to explore. What background is available by a close study of the relevant Acts material. Its good to know which journey each letter was written on, as well as what other letters were also written at that time. Fill in the background for your own benefit, and maybe also for the listeners.

3. Fill in your background knowledge – The biblical text is your main source, but be sure to check out whatever else might be helpful to understand. What was the geography of Ephesus at the time, what does an incipient Gnosticism look like, why do dualists tend to end up at one or both of two extremes? Other good reference material will be helpful.

4. Keep re-reading the epistle – That is the beauty of epistles: they are relatively short. So keep re-reading as you study background and the flow of thought will become clearer and clearer. Read the epistle so much that it isn’t just the famous verses that stand out, but until the whole text starts to sing.

5. Become familiar with the letter-frame – Too many Bible studies and sermon series skip the beginning and end of the epistle. Don’t. Dwell on every detail – author, recipients, greeting, thanksgiving, biographical prologue, main idea . . . what are the added details, what is missing? And how does it end? Why does he say that?

Five more tomorrow…

Misdistillation

June 26, 2012June 23, 2012 / 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.

Heartfelt Explanation – Preaching to the Heart (2)

June 16, 2012June 15, 2012 / 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

June 15, 2012 / 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.

Explanation: Indispensable Ingredient

June 11, 2012 / 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!

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 . . .

5 Reasons Why I Love Preaching the Prophets

May 31, 2012June 4, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

After three days of reflections on a great series from Daniel, here are a few reasons why I personally love to preach from the prophets:

1. They are less familiar. This isn’t to suggest that sounding novel is a good thing, but it is nice to see people leaning forward once they get the sense that you are going to make clear something they may have avoided in their own personal studies. Obviously there are the familiar parts – Isaiah 6, 40, 53, the first half of Daniel, Habakkuk, etc. But there is plenty of relatively untouched ground in both the major and the minor prophets.

2. They are stunning communicators. The prophets had to get attention. They couldn’t even be normal, let alone dull. As a communicator it is a bit of dream to be able to tap into the creativity of the truly shocking, without taking any real flack for the choice of approach. If we let the genre, the tone, and the creativity of the prophets shape our preaching of them, we should see this as a real head-start!

3. They are robust and direct. You don’t have to go far in a prophet to get a sense of what God is feeling about things. In the narrative sections you sometimes have to think and feel your way through multiple chapters for a single narrative. In the prophets you’ll probably get struck on the nose within a few verses. The prophets were, by definition, stunning communicators. They had to be, since the people were so often so dull of hearing. This leads on to another…

4. There are cultural similarities. I don’t want to overplay the “Christian nation” ideas that some seem so passionate about, but there is a real sense in which our cultures have slipped from what they once were. People taking God for granted or treating Him as irrelevant; people living to please themselves; people pursuing dishonest gain, plotting and scheming . . . this is the stuff of the Prophets, and of today.

5. They are hope filled. There are layers upon layers of hope offered in the prophets. Not only do they give the messianic predictions, but also the shorter term sense of God’s concern and interest and involvement in their lives . . . and also the longer term sense of ultimate reconciliation and kingdom hopes and guaranteed judgment on the wicked, etc.

I could go on, but I’ll leave it there. When was the last time you preached from a Prophet?

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.

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!