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.

10 Biggest Big Ideas – 5. Faith

May 4, 2012May 4, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

So what are the biggest recurring ideas underlying the whole sweep of Scripture? I am enjoying tracing out a few thoughts on ten of the biggest. So far I’ve pondered our triune God, His wondrous creation, our profound fall, His glorious grace. Now to the mechanism of our restoration:

5. Every person in every situation stands at a fork in the road, free to trust God’s good word or to orient their hearts after the words of another – for the just shall live by faith.

In that garden the first couple were presented with a lie. It was a lie about God’s character: He cannot be trusted to determine what is best for you. It was a lie about human status: you can be like God. And in God’s apparent absence it was a battle of words: His word versus the lie. It has been ever since.

Every person in every narrative of Scripture stands at a fork in the road. We stand continually at that same fork in the road, whatever the situation. The question remains the same. Will we trust the good word of God, or the forked tongue of the serpent. The truth versus the lie.

What is God’s solution to the great problem of sin? It is His grace. Yet it would be no solution if that grace were forced on people. They freely chose to love another. So God offers His word and invites us to trust, drawing our hearts from the magnetic captivating grip of self-love to respond to His self-giving love. Faced with the lie, gripped by the lie, saturated in the lie, we are invited to trust His Word.

Faith? Seriously God, will you make it all dependent on fallen ones trusting in your Word? Yes. The word of God’s promise can be trusted. The Word of God’s presence calls us to trust. Just as the serpent skewered and lifted up was a solution for snake-bitten sinners, so the snake crushing elevation of Him who knew no sin becomes for us the focus of a trusting gaze.

So faith is absolutely the antithesis of works. Works can never be a ladder out of death. Only God can raise the dead, so He calls humanity not to work, but to trust. Faith is not the answer to what must I do? Faith is the answer to the cry, I can do nothing!

God is God, we are not. God is good, we are not. And God is ours, if we will trust Him, His word, His provision, His grace. Faith is trust in His Word. Faith is gaze on His gracious provision. Faith is the bond that brings us into the fellowship of our Triune God.

May our preaching of His Word offer opportunity to trust in His goodness, both for those dead in sin, and for us who now having been made alive are delightd to do the good that He prepared beforehand for us.

10 Biggest Big Ideas – 4. Grace

May 3, 2012April 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

This week I have been pondering what might be the overarching, biggest of big ideas in the Bible. These ideas pervade so much of the canon and are reflected in the specific main ideas of individual passages.

So far we have pondered God, creation and sin. Now to the continual surprise of the Bible:

4. God’s solution to great sin is the greater power of His glorious grace.

God’s right to rule has been profoundly challenged by the rebellion of Lucifer and humanity. Surely if God is God then the response from above must be the crashing fist of divine judgment?

Surprisingly, yet unsurprisingly, God’s solution is grace. Surprisingly because in our power-hungry corruption of the divine image, we naturally would judge all sin in a self-serving display of divine wrath. Unsurprisingly God is not like the fallen us, but He is just like Himself – that is, self-giving, generous, the God who is love.

Yet surely this is to deny another side of God, another mood of His? Surely we must balance God’s love with God’s wrath?

No, we do not honour God by offering a schizophrenic portrait of a two-sided God. Nor do we help by making the Father angry and the Son kind. We must instead seek to present God as He does in His Word. God’s love spurned leads to wrath, but this shows the fullness of His love, not the reining in of love.

The holiness of God is His perfect, untainted, uncorrupted love. This profoundly loving God has a purity about all He is and all He does. So the prophets presented both the muscly arm of divine recompense, right alongside the arm that tenderly cares for the sheep that have young. And the climax of that prophetic vision is not the crashing down of the fist of divine judgment on sinners, but the outstretched arms of the Lamb upon whom that fist would fall. All sin will be judged, the wonder is that mine is judged already.

We should always be surprised by grace since it is by definition undeserved. We should never be surprised by grace since it comes from the core of who God is.

There are glimpses of grace in every corner of the canon, whispers of love when screams of vengeance would fit. Threaded from the fall in one garden to the rising in another garden is the ribbon of God’s great promise:

In a fallen world there is hope in the coming seed. There is to be blessing for all the families on earth through the seed of one man. There is hope for the firm and forever establishment of the kingdom of the seed of another man in the same line. The ribbon of God’s great promise threads through sinning kings and trusting prostitutes, through flawed heroes and unknowns, showing grace on its journey to grace made flesh in the single seed of the woman, of Abraham, of David. The seed that must fall into the ground and die, yet in humiliating death demonstrate the depth of God’s glory.

The great corruption of sin marks every passage, and the super-abounding solution is not raw justice, but unjust grace. God in His goodness moves toward his harlot creation in love, giving of Himself, so that the greatest of sins pale before the greater glory of God’s goodness and grace.

If we preach the Bible with a pounding fist of self-righteous indignation, what are we doing? Surely the Bible preached should lead to a pounding of the hearts of those captivated by God’s extravagant grace.

10 Biggest Big Ideas – 3. Sin

May 2, 2012May 2, 2012 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

The 10 biggest ideas in the Bible? We’ve considered God and His creation. Now we need to probe the problem.

3. Our profound capacity for love has been perverted into a self-love that drives a charade of independent divine status, in mockery of and in sickening rebellion against the loving leadership of our good God.

Within three biblical chapters God’s perfect creation is corrupted to the core. It is corrupted from the core. And the story of God’s resolution to our relational rebellion takes the whole canon to fully resolve, leaving only two chapters for the briefest glimpse of a post-fall new creation. This is the great tension in the grandest of meta-narratives.

Lovingly created for relational interdependence and trusting dependence, the human race is marred by love perverted and trust destroyed. The manifestation of the fall, the fruit, if you will, was in the eating of the forbidden fruit. Yet the core of the event was at the level of the heart, not merely a matter of rule-breaking. The corruption was caused by a love turned inwards, by a rebellious spurning of God’s right to rule in love, and by a fatal distrust of His good Word.

A God-given capacity to love another, delight in another, live for another, trust in another and give to another was twisted, perverted and corrupted. It became the horrific reorientation of the power of divine love into a love of divine power – shamefully manifesting in a love for self, delight in self, living for self, trusting in self and giving to self.

Now the god of a human heart is the perceived good of that same human heart. Instead of lovingly trusting a loving and trustworthy self-giving God, the default wiring of humanity is to hate and despise Him, performing the charade of god-hood as if that is really about self-concern, independence and power. Even the pathetic performance shows a profound corruption of God’s true nature.

Believing the lie, we present a lie. Every person a theologian by birth, and every person profoundly wrong. God is not self-concerned and power-obsessed – it’s not just the “who is God?” question we answer so badly, but also the “what is God like?” question.

Sin re-orients the heart, taints the mind and manifests in broken behavior. Some shake their fist at heaven in acts of overt rebellion, demonstrating the horrific and grotesque nature of sin by the evil that they do. Others shake their fist at heaven in an act of apparent goodness, diligently demonstrating their ability to do good in a self-loving independence from the God who alone is good. Even righteous deeds are as filthy rags. Whatever is of independent un-faith is sin.

Sin is the tension in every biblical narrative, and every personal narrative. It isn’t a question about whether we can do good, or whether we can be empowered to do good. It is a question about what or who can ever recapture our hearts and draw our incurved souls from addiction to self, to gaze on the truly lovely, the genuinely loving and the profoundly trustworthy God who made us for participation in His love.

So as we preach the Bible we must never miss the fallen condition focus of every passage, the context of sin in which every text swims. Neither must we offer any sense of instruction for independent goodness, for that was the root of the issue. Sin is pervasive and profound, and God’s solution is glorious beyond words. Yet we preach. We preach . . . you finish the sentence: “we preach . . . and Him . . . .”

10 Biggest Big Ideas – 2. Creation

May 1, 2012April 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I am slowly offering what I think might be the ten biggest ideas in the Bible. I encourage you to write your own list, the process is a real joy. Yesterday I wrote about God and His self-giving goodness. I need to develop one aspect from that post:

2. Even in its current corrupted state, God’s creation reflects God’s heart and nature.

Those who start with a generic God born of human speculation will tend to emphasize the power of God. Often this truth grows so loud that other truths are drowned out. Yet the God of the Bible doesn’t seem as passionate about His own power as some might suggest. He is all-powerful, of course, but that is defined and driven by the loving relationality of the unity of the three – Father, Son and Spirit.

The giving and overflowing love of the Three-in-One speaks a word, and an abundantly diverse and beautifully united creation into existence. His eternal power is seen in the stunning reflection of His divine nature – with its vibrant, abundant, giving, creative, procreating, beauty.

Yet the beauty of creation is merely a stage for the most powerful beauty of all – the wonder of loving relationship. Creation is the stage for the relationships of creatures made in the image of a relational God. So every field, every mountain, every sunset, every vista, is a delight best experienced alongside another with whom God’s creation might be enjoyed.

We live in a broken, corrupted and perverted creation. Even through the death and the brokenness, we still see overwhelming beauty – from the abiding grandeur of the milky way, to the unique features of an individual leaf. Yet it is not only the lingering beauty that captivates, it is also the smothered whisper of what could be and should be.

The greatest pain is not that felt in a dying body, or that of a marred creation, but the deepest agony of broken relationship. Sadly we may experience the worst of fallenness in our bodies, or see the most grotesque disfigurement of creation, but every human inherently feels the deepest agony of all in the context of broken relationships: with friends, with family, with God.

Creation stirs us, yet creation itself groans. It groans to be the stage of what could be and should be, and by God’s grace and power, one day will be.

The Bible repeatedly returns to the relationship of creation to God – He made it, He owns it, He stamped it with His imprimatur, and He will pour out life to overcome death. Our hope is the new creation, the stage for a greater joy than could ever have been known in Eden.

So we preach a Bible that is earthed, quite literally. Both the past stories, our present experience, and our shared future hope, is well earthed in a world that reflects more about God than we usually even begin to notice. One day we will.

10 Biggest Big Ideas – 1. God

April 30, 2012April 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Every passage has a unique main idea. But are there thousands of completely different main ideas in the Bible? Haddon Robinson said several times that there are basically variations on roughly ten big Big Ideas in the Bible. We students kept trying to get a list out of him, but to no avail.

So I’ve decided to suggest my own ten. As you read through the Bible you may come up with a different list, but I suspect these macro main ideas are recognizable to all who are reading the Scriptures.

1. Everything is defined in relation to the triune God whose relational nature overflows into all that He has made.

The Bible doesn’t argue for the existence of some generic divine being, but assumes the existence of the one true God. He is a God who exists in the loving communion of Father and Son and Spirit. God is not only inherently good, His loving bond is the very measure of goodness.

It is out of this relationship that creation comes, the unrequired but unsurprising act of a loving and giving God. Creation reflects His creative artistry, His generous power, and His delight in blending diversity in beautiful unity. Even creation in its present corruption demonstrates the pervasive power of relationship.

Yet creation is not all God gives to enable us to know Him. His nature and character is revealed definitively by the Son who always reveals the unseen Father to us, and His Spirit who points us to the Son. Both the Son and the Spirit are given into a fallen world in an act of deep generosity.

It is out of God’s nature that the whole human story makes sense. Created as loving responders, humanity has a wondrous capacity for love and joy and delight and response. Equally, as true heart-driven beings, humans have an equally profound capacity for hate and grief and sadness and diverted affection.

It is not possible to make sense of creation without seeing it in the context of God’s goodness and the profound impact of creaturely rebellion. It is not possible to make sense of any human without seeing him or her in the context of their relationships, especially the pre-eminent relationship with God himself.

Not only is every aspect of creation, and every human, defined by their response to God, so is every event only understood in light of God’s role. So every narrative in Scripture is primarily a narrative about God, even when He is not mentioned. Every character is either trusting Him or not.

Consequently every biblical sermon has to be, above all else, a sermon about God. Technically this is called Theocentric preaching. The term doesn’t matter. God does. And not just any God, or even some assumed generic God of human speculation, it must be the triune, covenant making and keeping, self-giving God who is love.

Let’s be sure to preach every passage with a profound prayerful awareness of the God whose Scripture it is.

15 Ways to Improve Clarity

April 27, 2012April 25, 2012 / Peter Mead / 6 Comments

This week I’ve been writing about the doctrine of Biblical clarity – the fact that the Bible may be understood. This is a cause for great rejoicing. Imagine for a moment that the Bible was absolutely impregnable. Anyway, one of the points I made the other day was that preachers are representing a God who made His book understandable, so we should model a passion for clarity in our communication.

Let’s have a rapid-fire list of factors that influence our clarity in preaching. I’ll start, you finish:

1. Voice. If it isn’t loud enough, and distinct enough, it isn’t clear enough.

2. Vocab. Don’t try to impress, try to communicate. Jargon doesn’t help, good word choice does.

3. Preaching Text. If you stay in your text as much as possible, it should be easier to follow.

4. Structure. A memorable outline remembers itself, there’s no need to be clever, be clear.

5. Main Idea. One controlling, dominant thought, distilled from the passage is critical for clarity.

6. Unity. Let every element of the message serve the main idea, nothing extraneous.

7. Order. Take the most straightforward path through the message, so others can follow.

8. Transitions. Slow down through the turns or you’ll lose the passengers.

9. Pace. Sometimes you really need to take the foot off the pedal to keep people with you.

10. Visual Consistency. Keep your gestures and scene “locations” consistent to reinforce well.

11. Verbal Consistency. Let key terms rain down through the message, don’t be a thesaurus.

12. Restatement. Restate key sentences in different words, less patronising, but helps clarity.

13. Illustrative Relevance. Be sure illustrative materials have clear connection to the message.

14. Flashback and Preview. Whenever appropriate, review and preview at transitions.

15. Pray. Pray for message clarity during preparation, God cares about this!

That’s a start, what would you add?

Profound Explanation

March 27, 2012March 27, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Yesterday we pondered some aspects of profundity in preparation for preaching. Today let’s probe a little more on the issue of profundity in explaining a biblical text. Almost every preacher does some sort of explanation of a text, but what makes for a high enrichment without unnecessary obfuscation, uh, unnecessarily complicating it or overwhelming listeners?

5. Help listeners feel the original situation, don’t just bring imperatives over to today. To be a bit more specific, help listeners feel the original relational situation. If they can enter into the felt intent of the author, then the force of the text will be more effectively communicated. The writer didn’t typically write to simply convey information – discourse intended to move, narrative intended to engage, poetry intended to stir. As much as people claim to like straight application or direct commands, the truth is that application will always be more effective when the authority of the text is felt in its context.

6. Be theologically enriched, but don’t impose your theology. Walter Kaiser speaks of an informing theology that is flowing into a passage – it might be the backdrop of the Fall, the plan of the promise, the history of the nation, etc. Don’t treat a passage as if it were a standalone story in a sterile vacuum, but don’t trample all over it with your theological system either. Be sensitive to the hints in the text, to the passage in its context, and in its place in the greater story.

7. Select the pertinent elements of explanation, don’t be exhaustive. It is tempting to want to show all the study that has gone into the message, to cite all the commentaries, to note all the interesting anomalies in the syntax or the cross-references in your Thompson Chain Reference. Think through how much explanation is really necessary and genuinely helpful. Be targeted and purposeful. Omit anything that isn’t genuinely helpful. Better to give just enough explanation and leave space for application and relevance throughout the message, rather than over-packing the explanation and making it too dense, too broad or too irrelevant.

8. Seek to plumb the text, don’t just harvest imperatives. I see this a lot with preachers in the epistles. Rather than offering the uniquely inspired content of a passage, they make it feel much like any other and simply present what we must do. But that is like judging a person by their shoes and wristwatch – why not get to know them as a whole person? Get to know the passage, its flow, its logic, its relational framing, its purpose, its mood, its tone, its strategy. Then preach the imperatives as part of the whole.

Tomorrow we’ll move onto aspects of profound application.

Profound Preparation

March 26, 2012March 26, 2012 / Peter Mead / 8 Comments

This week I’d like to ponder what it might look like to pursue a more profound preaching ministry. While most would acknowledge that preaching should neither be dense nor inaccessible, this does not mean that shallowness and dumbing down are the order of the day.

Profound preaching must surely start with profound preparation. Four suggestions to get a week-long list going:

1. Begin with humble recognition that you yourself need to be changed by God. It is too easy to think of preaching preparation as being about you the preacher pursuing a message to preach to them, the needy recipients. At this point in the process you stand very much in their shoes, needing to hear from God. You need to encounter His heart in His Word. You need to be marked deeply and changed by a God who communicates, who cares, who challenges and who changes. It makes no sense to have profound faith for the sake of others, but not an openness and humility in yourself. The preparation of a sermon will be a privilege, an opportunity for God to mark your life profoundly.

2. Study the passage to know God, not just the facts. It is easy to treat Bible study as a pursuit of non-trivial trivia. Don’t. Study the passage in order to know God better. What is His self-revelation saying of Him? How are the characters responding to Him? Wherever you are in the canon, the passage is theocentric, so make sure that your heart is too.

3. Don’t mix your message preparation with your Bible study. As a preacher who cares about the congregation, or as a preacher desperate to be ready on time, it is tempting to blend passage study with message formation. Keep the stages separate. You have the privilege of doing some in-depth Bible study, take advantage of that! You may not be able to help thinking of who you will be preaching to, but try to keep those thoughts until you’ve really gotten to grips with the passage (or better, until God has gotten to grips with you through the passage).

4. Saturate your preparation in prayer. This should go without saying, but it can’t, so it won’t. The entire preparation process should be absolutely pickled in prayer. Prayer in passage study, prayer in personal response, prayer in “audience analysis,” prayer in message formation, prayer for delivery, prayer for life change, prayer for immediate impact, prayer for long-term fruit, etc.

Tomorrow I’ll offer a few more thoughts, this time on profound explanation in preaching. Feel free to comment any time.

Top 10 Mistakes Preachers Make Preaching Story – Part 2

February 17, 2012February 17, 2012 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Yesterday I offered five common mistakes made in the preaching of Bible story, let’s finish the list:

6. They come up with a list of “principles.” A story isn’t given in Scripture to make masses of points (some preachers see launch points for pet thoughts throughout a story). To nuance this error further, stories aren’t given in Scripture in order to offer seven principles for a successful business venture, successful pet ownership or successful anything else. This is not some ancient text currently in vogue because of its timeless wisdom for living life. It is a story about people living under the question mark of God’s Word to a fallen world – will they trust Him, or not? Will we?

7. They make it into a human level story – be good, be better, be like. Don’t be blind! The Bible is not just about humanity. There’s a constant theocentric, christotelic, eternal and heavenly dimension. Whether God is overtly stated or not, the Bible story you are reading is written with at least an implicit assumption that these characters are living their lives, making their choices, facing their struggles in the context of response to God. Preach the story theocentrically, not anthropocentrically (i.e. it is God that is the main character, not just a human).

8. They treat it as a context-less moral lesson. Okay, I’m repeating the moral lesson bit to make a point, but actually the error here is to miss the context of the story. Not only does it have a historical context, which the preacher must plumb to make sense of it and preach it well, but it also has a written context. Why did the author choose to put it here in this sequence? It is both historically accurate and artistically presented to convey a theological point. You typically need to observe context to spot this.

9. They don’t apply the main idea of the story. Either they apply every sub-idea along the way, or they don’t apply at all. Stories mark and change lives. Help listeners to see what that might look like as the story preached is translated into their life lived. Never assume people will take general truths and apply them specifically. Never assume that application is automatic. Never believe that positive statements of gratitude from listeners equate to application. Instead, be overt and be specific.

10. They avoid preaching it altogether and stick in discourse sections. This is a mistake. Maybe they think stories are for children, or they think stories aren’t theologically rich enough, or they think that churches only need to be fed the food of epistolary discourse, or they think that they aren’t any good at preaching story, or for whatever reason, they avoid preaching story. This means somewhere between 50-70% of the Bible will remain unpreached in their ministry. I think it was Tozer who said that nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.

There are lots of other things that could probably be listed, some of which are specific to certain sections of narrative. But let me make the unstated assumption stated – stories are good for preaching, good for listeners and good for the church. Go for it, preach stories and preach them well!