Dangerous Assumption 4: God (continued)

May 23, 2013May 19, 2013 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

After 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

May 22, 2013May 19, 2013 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Dangerous 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)

May 21, 2013May 19, 2013 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

The 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

May 20, 2013May 19, 2013 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Good 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

May 17, 2013May 16, 2013 / Peter Mead / 4 Comments

The 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.

The Gospel in Concrete

May 16, 2013 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

In the New Testament, the gospel is never given “in a vacuum.” That is to say, we don’t find generic presentations of the gospel as a set of statements. Instead we find the gospel being applied to concrete situations: real people, real churches, real issues.

God didn’t give us a standard version and then leave the application to us. Instead we were given a set of case studies where we can observe the apostles engaging real life situations with the gospel. We see the church being split by a form of gnosticism in 1John, a different form creeping in in Colossae, the young believers under pressure from the antagonists around them in Thessalonica, the self-confident yet worldly church at Corinth, the divided churches of Rome, the threat of false-Law-teachers in Galatia, the discouraged by pressure believers addressed in Hebrews, etc.

As we ponder the “case studies” given to us in the New Testament epistles, here are some thoughts:

1. The apostles don’t respond to down-to-earth issues with mere down-to-earth instruction. You won’t find an epistle that just says, “here is how to act like Christians, pull yourselves together and just try hard, do the right thing and the feelings will follow…” Instead we find the apostles responding to sometimes very human issues with an application of theological reality. They certainly do get specific and practical, but always on the back of, or in association with, doctrinal instruction that needed to be grasped or reaffirmed. To put this in terms of relevance to today, just pressuring people to act appropriately is never appropriate. They need to be gripped by the reality of who God is and what He has done/is doing. They need to see themselves and the gospel clearly.

2. The apostles never assume the believers all know the basics. I could imagine some of us today writing a contemporary epistle along these lines: “Okay, so we all know who God is and what the gospel is, of course, so let’s get to the nitty gritty . . . ” The apostles didn’t do that. Even after spending months or years teaching in a church, they still chose to reinforce and re-communicate the truths of the faith. Why? Perhaps because they knew people didn’t easily grasp the wonderful realities of the gospel.

More thoughts tomorrow…

Contagious Pulpit Boredom 2

May 15, 2013May 14, 2013 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Yesterday we pointed out that God is not boring and the Bible is not boring. So why is some preaching boring? Two more facts and then we’ll get to the heart of the matter. . .

3. Life is not boring. Even in a safe neighbourhood where nothing seems to happen and people may complain of being bored, life is not boring. With all its complexities, doubts, troubles, questions, issues, fears, hopes, changes, challenges and memories, life is not boring. As we preach we preach from the inspired text to people desperately in need of what God has to say through the Word to them. Preaching with relevance should not be so hard, as long as we are in touch with life and its challenges.

4. Church is not boring. Many churches are, in fact, boring, but church itself is not. God’s glorious plan to call out and redeem a bride for His Son, working with materials that are still very much “works in progress” to build a beautiful temple, that is anything but dull. Now when we turn church into our own little kingdoms and lose any real awareness of what God is doing, then church can become a dull place of petty politics and personal preferences, but church from God’s perspective is never a dull matter.

So why is there dull and boring preaching? It must be something to do with the preacher! Hate to say it, but perhaps this can be a nudge to ask God to search our hearts and show us if there is any of the sin of boring people with the Bible in us? Actually, why not pray and then ask a few folks? It could be delivery, it could be personal manner, it could be that all the enthusiasm we generate for conversation about sport and family evaporates when we stand to preach. It could be a lack of personal vibrancy in our walk with the Lord. It could be a lack of sleep (perhaps due to number 4 above!) It could be something easy to change. Or it could be that we genuinely are finding God and the Bible and life and the church to be boring. If so, let this post be your call to a sabbatical or urgent action. Boring people through preaching is too dangerous to let it happen even once more.

Contagious Pulpit Boredom

May 14, 2013 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

It does not matter how true the truth you present from the pulpit, if you bore people with it, then you are doing damage.

Too much preaching is boring preaching. Sometimes it is due to the content, sometimes the delivery, sometimes the attitude, sometimes the preacher’s own personality. Whatever the reason, it should not happen.

1. God is not boring. Actually, God as a concept presented in a lot of theology has become personality-free. For many, He has essentially become an It, definable by a set of truth statements, but essentially unknown in his personhood. God has a personality. Our role as preachers is to pursue Him and chase Him and long to know Him more, so that we can represent Him effectively.

2. The Bible is not boring. How many classes and sermons and story times and lectures and presentations have turned the vivid and gripping self-revelation of God in His Word into a dull set of archaic moralistic tales? Sort of a set of ancient fables without as much of the talking animals as we might prefer. But the epic sweep of Scriptural history, the diversity of genres, the human personalities and the divine personality, the issues to wrestle with, the irony to catch, the pain to feel, the exhilaration to experience, and so much more . . . there is no collection of books like this one!

Tomorrow we’ll add a couple more factors and try to get to the root of the issue: Why is some preaching dull?

Preaching and the Harvesting of Imperatives – part 2

May 13, 2013May 11, 2013 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Last time we looked at the importance of seeing all of a text in its context, rather than plucking out heads of command for instant applicational preaching. We also highlighted the need for seeing the wider context since instructional sections of books were intended to be heard alongside the doctrinal foundations. Here are two more points to ponder, especially for those of us who tend toward the harvesting of imperatives for our preaching preparation:

3. Impartial tone sensitivity. Not every imperative is a command. As I have mentioned before, a little Greek can be dangerous. Knowing that a word is technically imperatival in mood does not mean it is automatically a command as we tend to think of them. It could be a pronouncement, or an request/entreaty, or even a stereotyped greeting! While it would be nice if we could all know our Greek better, that is not the only key here. One thing we can all do is to develop a sensitivity to the tone of the text. Some preachers are able to turn any textual “tool” into a sledgehammer–not because the text is one, but because that is all they can see. Their personal baggage makes every invitation, every encouragement, every description, every single text into a sledgehammer that needs to be smashed into the consciences of their listeners. Personal baggage is hugely damaging in biblical preaching.

4. What kind of God is this? Here’s a final thought to keep in mind. As you are reading through the Bible, consider whether the God being described is really a power-hungry law-giver, or whether we might be projecting something onto Him with such emphases. After all, what if the consistent thread throughout the canon is God’s loving relationality and therefore the imperatives might be reflecting a jilted lover rather than a distant law-giver? Perhaps it is worth a read through to see if that makes a difference to how we see the imperatives.

These posts are not intended to deny the importance of imperatives. Thank God that the Bible does not leave us in the dark as to what a person brought into relationship with God will look like in everyday life. But let’s beware that we don’t make our role as preachers into a pressuring role when our task might be presentation. How lives are changed is so significant an issue that I’d invite you to take a sabbatical and ponder it at length.

Preaching and the Harvesting of Imperatives

May 11, 2013May 11, 2013 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

In our natural desire to make our preaching applicable and relevant, we may be tempted to simply harvest imperatives. That is, to find the instructions in a passage and make them the preaching points. That surely avoids all the baggage and allows us to get to the point and preach with potent relevance? Here are four thoughts to keep in mind if you tend toward this approach:

1. Content, context and coloured fonts. Some people are huge fans of red-letter Bibles. These Bibles use different coloured fonts to allow the reader to spot when Jesus is speaking. Maybe that is helpful. And maybe, for some, it creates a level of confusion. After all, surely more than one or two folks have fallen into the trap of thinking something Jesus said is therefore more important than the fully inspired packaging of Matthew or Mark’s gospel writing around the quote? All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful, including the bits around what Jesus said. Same is true of imperatives. If we were to get an “orange letter” Bible with all the commands highlighted, we would be in danger of elevating imperatives in an unnatural manner. In our preaching we can effectively do the same. We need to be sure to study and present the meaning of the passage as a whole. All the content matters, all the context is relevant.

2. Wide, wide as the canon. The context of an imperative is not just the immediate setting of the sentence, paragraph or section. We need to develop sensitivity to the wider context. For instance, in the epistles we need to be sure to view the letter as a whole when we are looking at the imperatival sections in detail. That is to say, Ephesians 4-6 assumes Ephesians 1-3. It was meant to be heard at once. If we dive into the latter part of the letter (same with Romans, Colossians, etc.) without the first part, then we can turn description of God’s mercies and calling presented in real life terms into stand alone burdensome commands and duties. Let’s be sure to read imperatives in the context of the whole book, and with the assumed context of the theology of the writer as informed by earlier Scripture.

I will finish the list on Monday . . .