Stage 5 – Message Purpose

Neither Padded, Nor Dense

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It takes more than a good story, good actors and good visual effects to make a hit movie.  Think of a movie you particularly liked.  In most cases that movie could have been made in the form of a 10-minute featurette.  It would have been a whole lot cheaper to make, but it never would have made any money.  Why is that?

What is the difference between a 10-minute featurette and a full two-hour blockbuster?  The answer is not padding.  It is almost the opposite.  It is careful development of characters and scenes, giving space for the audience to grow into the plot.  But it is also numerous scenes cut and omitted to keep the flow from being too dense or too long.  All padding is typically cut out, but room to breathe is carefully included.

The same is true of good preaching.  You could take a decent sermon and hammer out the bottom line in a 10-minute sermonette.  You could include the main idea, the outline, etc., but you’d be missing a lot.  And the difference between that and a fuller version of the same sermon shouldn’t be 20-30 minutes of padding, nor should it be 20-30 minutes of dense information.

It is only the beginning preacher that wonders how they will fill the time.  Experienced preachers know the real challenge is in what to leave out.

This week I was speaking with a good friend who has trouble keeping his sermons from becoming overwhelming monsters of content.  All good stuff, but too much to take in for the listener.  We spoke of the main idea and its role in sermon development.  And we also pondered the possibilities of having a three step process.  First, define the main idea.  Second, work out a 10-minute development of that idea.  Third, move up to the full length.

So, how to go from the 10-minute to the full message?  The temptation here is to cram in the information.  But when information is crammed in, then there is a real problem for the listeners.  Actually, there are several problems:

1. They will have to be selective in what they take in.  It isn’t possible to grasp everything when there is too much.  Do you want listeners to pick and choose, or to be gripped by the whole?

2. They may select elements as take home material that was incidental in your eyes.  For instance, the passing remark, the humourous illustration, or the side point, could all become their memorable take home gem.

3. They may check out altogether if it is overwhelming.  While some may selectively choose highlights, others will switch to something their mind is motivated to cope with: their plans for the afternoon, their challenges at work, etc.

4. Their hearts are unlikely to engage.  This one suddenly takes us to a whole new level.  Not only is the issue with their ability to mentally grasp information, there is an issue with their experience of that information.

Tomorrow we’ll probe this fourth point some more.

Preparing to Preach OT Narrative – 5

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

This week I have been getting my head and heart in gear to prepare messages from the book of Ruth.  I’ve pondered issues of contextual unawareness, perceived irrelevance and the challenges of application.  I am not saying any of this should come before issues of study and interpretation, but before the messages can be prepared, these issues have to be faced.  I’d like to raise one more issue:

What is my strategy for preaching through the book?I have four sessions to preach through Ruth.  Slam dunk, decision made, right?  Four weeks, four chapters.  Voila!  Perhaps.  But I’m not a fan of instant obvious decisions.  I want to think through it first.

1. Preaching a narrative means preaching multiple scenes, not multiple chapters.  It may be that there are four scenes in four chapters, but I need to check that first.  Going with chapter breaks is lazy and sometimes naive.

2. How do I keep the unity in mind?  Ruth wasn’t written to be read over four sittings in four weeks.  It was written to be heard in one sweep.  I have to ponder that.  Should I preach the whole narrative in one go?  I could do that week 1, but then what?  I could take three weeks to revisit the text and zero in on specific aspects of the story.  Or I could review the whole narrative at the end.  Or I could let it build week by week, as if people don’t know what is coming.

3. And what about other options given by four weeks?  Maybe I need to take a week on the opening verses and engage the complexity of divine providence, suffering and life as experienced by most people.  Perhaps there are a couple of chapters that could flow together.  Perhaps the ending that points forward to David is worthy of a wrap-up message on its own.  So many options.

Simply splitting it into four roughly equal chunks with a big number at the start does seem a bit too hasty at this point.  I need to spend some more time in the text of Ruth, and be prayerfully considering what would be most helpful to our congregation.

Preparing to Preach OT Narrative – 4

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So I am preparing to preach Ruth.  I know that all preachers are tempted to overcome the perceived lack of relevance by multiplying applications from the details of the story.  Yesterday I suggested that the details are there for the sake of the plot, rather than as automatic teaching points. But there is more to be said on this matter of applying the text.

Furthermore, (2) I have to remember that narratives were not given to us merely to instruct our conduct.  It is not just conduct that matters in facing the horrors life can throw at us (Ruth 1), it is also truths applied at the level of personal belief, and even affection.  Ruth didn’t cling to Naomi, and give up everything to go with her, based on knowledge of “the right things to do in this situation.”  She did it all because of the God that had gripped her heart.

I don’t want my listeners to have lists of behavioural applications, but untouched hearts.  That would make a mockery of the force of Ruth.  Relevance doesn’t have to be just a to-do list.  Relevance is more to do with the impact of the text on the heart of the listener so that they leave the service as a changed person.

Finally (although not definitively), (3) I need to recognize that the relevance in the text is not on a merely human level.  It is tempting to look at people interacting with people and consider applications that can come straight over into our seen world.  But all biblical narratives are about the seen intersecting with the unseen.  There is a God alive and yet often not seen.  The narrative is about lives lived under the constant question of trust or non-trust in the Word of God.  If my listeners finish with great insight into an ancient narrative, but without a greater sense of God (both then and now), then I have failed to be truly relevant.

Tomorrow I’ll ponder another practical issue in preparation…

Preparing to Preach OT Narrative – 3

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I am preparing to preach a series from the book of Ruth.  This week I’ve been thinking out loud about aspects I need to keep in mind as I head into the preparations.  I’ve thought about the unfamiliarity of the context for the listeners, as well as their perception of the irrelevance of something so far removed from today.

Today I’m pondering a temptation I know I’ll face in preaching the narrative genre.

It is always tempting to multiply applications.  I suppose this is a response to yesterday’s concern with apparent irrelevance.  The preacher can fall into the trap of turning every detail of the text into a point of application.  “Look, Ruth isn’t an irrelevant book, we are only five verses in and here are four principles for keeping your family together!”  Oops.

As a preacher with a desire to be relevant to the listeners, I have to guard against illegitimate application of details in the narrative.  Just because a character demonstrates it, doesn’t make it an instruction for the reader.  Just because it happened, doesn’t mean it should.

As a general approach, perhaps I should put it this way – (1) my effort in preparation should go into grasping the thrust of the whole passage, and then seeking to clearly apply that main thrust.  And there will be ways to multiply the applications of that main thrust.  This will be better than multiplied mini-thrusts based on particular details plucked out of their unique role in the passage as a whole.

That is, all the details matter, but not all the details need to be applied.  Every detail in a narrative is working together to make the whole plot work.  But not every detail is there as a teaching point.  The plot as a whole (either the whole plot, or the plot of a scene if I preach it section by section), the plot as a whole carries a certain thrust that we would do well to open our hearts to and be changed by.

Tomorrow I’ll add a couple more thoughts on applying the narrative.

Preparing to Preach OT Narrative – 2

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Yesterday I pondered the challenges of unfamiliarity of context.  When we preach from the Old Testament, if our listeners are more used to the New Testament, then this will be a challenge.  We thought about the canonical context, as well as the historical context.  There’s another challenge:

Low expectation of relevance.  I have to remember that by the time I come to preach from Ruth, I will have spent many hours in studying it.  It will have taken root in my heart again and God will have stirred me through His Word.  This will not be the case for the listeners.

They will be coming into the meeting with minds and hearts on all sorts of things.  They will be thinking of anything but pre-monarchical Israelite history.  So if I start into the message with an assumption that Ruth is a motivating destination, I may well be starting into my message alone.  I’d much rather take folks with me.  How can I do that?  A couple of thoughts:

1. Introduce with relevance.  I have written this before, but I’ll reiterate because it is important.  It is not dishonouring the text to start with an introduction before reading it.  I think the text can be dishonoured by reading it before people care to hear what it says.  So one approach is to craft an introduction that overtly seeks to connect the listeners and their current state of disequilibrium with the text as relevant to them.  This is not to “pander” to felt needs, but to recognize the reality of life and what it is to be a listener.  Getting relevance into the introduction makes all the sense in the world.  The listeners need an early appreciation of the fact that the preacher is relevant, the message is relevant and the text itself is relevant.

2. Let the narrative bite quickly.  This does not necessarily contradict with the previous point.  With a narrative the preacher has the advantage of the inherently gripping nature of the genre.  TV show producers know that there is a better way to grip viewers than a long series of opening credits with promises of big name actors and actresses (as they did thirty years ago!)  The best way is to let the narrative begin and bite quickly.  Once bitten, viewers will then tolerate the 40 seconds of opening credits (sometimes several minutes into the show).  This illustrates what I am saying here.  The listeners should be gripped if the first three or four verses of Ruth are presented effectively.  Maybe it would be worth getting into the tension of the plot before pulling back to make sense of context, etc.

The Dangerous Half Quit

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A post on this theme from five years ago caught my eye, so I thought I’d offer a re-write.

There are always reasons to quit. This is true in anything you might pursue. Sport, music, hobby, fitness, work, ministry, marriage. Anyone who has ever been successful at anything has had to overcome numerous opportunities to quit. How true is that in preaching?

There are few things that can compare with preaching – how important it is, how much people need it, how much you give both in preparation and presentation, how emotionally and physically draining it can be, how open to criticism you become, how relentless the schedule can feel, how exacting the standards are in peoples’ minds for every other area of your life. To give the Lord our best as preachers we must exhibit a tenacious relentlessness.

The temptation to quit may always be lingering in the background, but for various reasons, good and bad, many of us would not simply quit. Perhaps it’s a little like marriage among some Christians a couple of generations back. A marriage could go very sour, but divorce was considered so inappropriate that couples would live out a “Christian divorce” – two separate lives lived under one roof for the sake of appearance. That’s a danger for us as preachers. When the pressures build, as they do so regularly, so do the temptations. Temptations to quit may be rejected. But temptations to half quit are an ever present danger!

When the schedule is tight and you are drained emotionally and physically, pulled in numerous directions, don’t half quit on your preparation. It may seem tempting to not really study the text, to short-circuit all exegesis.

When Sunday is rapidly approaching and your energy is low, don’t half quit on sermon shaping. Don’t just go with your study notes, but try to think through your audience and their needs, think through the best way to communicate this passage to them.

When you go through the post-sermon emotional roller-coaster that many preachers feel so often, don’t half quit.  Don’t make decisions that will undermine your subsequent ministry because of how you feel at that moment.

When you are on the receiving end of unfair criticism or unjustifiable sniping, don’t half quit. Don’t steel your heart against the people you minister to so that by not loving them they can’t hurt you. When you love you get hurt, but love anyway.

I’m not saying anything about rest, responsibilities with family, etc. I’m not saying sacrifice yourself to the point of burnout in an attempt to be spiritual. There are all sorts of appropriate balances to wisely employ in ministry. But those are for another post. All I’m suggesting here is that preaching is no easier than most other things you might pursue in life, and in many ways it is harder. To be the best you can be, to give the best you can give, you must be doggedly relentless. Don’t quit. And maybe more importantly, keep leaning on our good God and don’t half quit.

Watch the Whiplash

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

I have been writing about how preaching is the communication of the revelation of a Person or three. It isn’t something less than that. When the preacher steps up following a time of worship and  communicates only some sort of code for living, or peer pressure, or socialization program, then there is a whiplash effect that is felt by listeners. Let me probe that a little:

1. Whiplash from the worship tone to the message tone. This is common. The worship time focused in on the amazing grace and wonderful person of Christ. Then the preacher gets up and changes the tone completely. This can happen as the reflective, focused and prepared listeners suddenly get hit with an insensitive introductory joke. It can happen with a shift from the worship emphasis on being pleased by Christ to the message tone of pressure in the name of Christ.

2. Whiplash from the worship focus to the message focus. This is similar. The worship time typically will focus hearts and minds toward heaven, fixing the gaze on God in Christ. Then the message too easily shifts that focus in one of three ways. Either it can be the heart-jerking whiplash of focusing on how bad society is, or it can throw us toward focusing on the preacher (with his attention seeking behaviour, or his showing off, or whatever), or it can suddenly shift the gaze onto the navels of the faithful – you got saved by God’s grace, but now let me help you understand the burden you live under!

3. Whiplash from worship content to the message content. Okay, this is slightly repetitive, but unashamedly so. I am not hankering after a three point outline. I am trying hard to hammer the point that our hearts shouldn’t suffer whiplash when the Word is preached. We tend to sing of how wonderful God is, his grace, our love response to His, our hearts captivated, our lives stirred. Then the preaching can so easily swing over to how we must try harder to be better, be good, be disciplined, etc.

This kind of whiplash will always be present when preaching doesn’t preach the Person, but offers a program, a pressure, a commentary on societal ills, etc.

Preaching the Person in the Old Testament cont.

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As well as Christophanies and explicit predictions, there are other ways in which the person of Christ is to be found in the Old Testament. Jesus told the Pharisees that the Scriptures speak of Him. He showed the two on the road to Emmaus. To what else did he perhaps point?

3. Thematic fulfillment – There are legitimate themes working their way through the Old Testament. We need to go beyond a children’s story with moral morales and see how the Hebrew Scriptures are woven together to build a gripping revelation of God and His plan. His Son is central to that thematic design.

4. Legitimate types – There are some legitimate types of Christ in the Old Testament. It is hard to miss, if our hearts are sensitive and tuned to the full story, when we read of the sacrifices, the feasts, etc. We need to be careful not to become fanciful or appear to abuse the communicative intent of the original authors.

5. The macro story goal – Sometimes people abuse the text by making every sentence speak of Christ no matter what it originally said. It is healthier to grow attuned to the goal of the whole, the Christo-telic intent of the Hebrew Scriptures. We don’t have to make things say what they could not have been understood to say. Instead let’s be clearer on how the whole fits together with the goal of God’s promise plan fulfilled in Christ.

With these five aspects of Christ in the Old Testament, we should have plenty to be going on with (probably more than could be communicated in a seven mile walk to Emmaus!) And this means we don’t need to fall into a common error:

X. The subsumed or twisted biblical character – There are hundreds of characters in the Old Testament plot lines. Many of them were not intended to be either a type of Christ, nor a foil for Christ. Let’s not miss the many characters in the grand narrative responding to God. Let’s not twist their stories to tell a different story. Let’s trust God’s communication and not try to be cleverer than the God who inspired a wonderful canon! If the text doesn’t push us to directly tie the character to Christ, let’s do the work of understanding how the text in its context communicates specifically and relevantly. Sometimes the Christ-leap that is made undermines any sense that God is an effective communicator in His Word.

Preach the Person

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

It seems obvious, but it clearly isn’t. Paul wrote, I preach Christ, and him crucified. Yet there are too many sermons that contain little more than a tip of the hat to the person of Christ.

It would probably come as a shock to many preachers to discover that their preaching seems to skirt around the personal nature of our God, but listeners pick up on it once their antennae are tuned to the difference.

The sermon may be engaging, illustrated, perhaps personal in terms of the preacher’s own life and personality. The message may encourage, exhort, rebuke, educate, etc. The preaching may be lively, energetic, enthusiastic, humorous or whatever. But somehow, if the preaching doesn’t offer the personal God of the Bible, then it will always feel inadequate.

Somehow preaching that misses the person ends up targeting elsewhere, and with a different tone. It becomes educational and exhortational, focusing on us and our responsibility to implement some biblical advice or instruction. The difference when the person is preached, is that the focus shifts to response rather than responsibility, an invitation rather than imposition.

It is so easy to pressure people to perform, or to offer a gospel of private benefits, but to fail to mention the person who is at the heart of the gospel both offered and applied.

I was reading a book looking at a time in history when two streams of preaching could be traced. Those deaf to the difference seem to deny the distinction, but just reading the different ways in which Christ was described was so telling. One side offered a few cold truths, the other side were overflowing with description of a compelling and captivating Christ, and then only seemed to scratch the surface. I can tell you facts about lots of people, but I will talk about my wife differently. It was almost as if one side had barely met Christ, or if they had, hadn’t found him particularly gripping.

What if we could invent a double thermometer? One part to measure the warmth of the preacher toward Christ, and the other part to measure the heat of the pressure on the listeners to perform? I suspect that if the thermometer were measuring the temperature from the preacher in pressuring the listeners, then there might be a sense in which the two measures are almost mutually exclusive.

Let’s pour our energy into effectively speaking of the God who reveals Himself in the Word. Let’s trust that to draw and stir and motivate and captivate and challenge and convict people who are listening.

We need to preach Him. He changes lives.

Planks and Slices 4 – Whole Bible Grains cont.

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Yesterday I shared two thoughts on preaching Bible-wide thematic grains. It isn’t about chasing every use of a term through the concordance (although that may be part of the study process and a valuable pursuit). Neither is our goal to overload listeners with references. So what should we do?

3. Pursue genuine grains that feed forward through the canon. That is, know the Bible as well as possible and don’t think the concordance is more important than the Bible. Get to know the writers and their books, their sources, their influences, etc. I’m not chasing into radical liberal theories of unproven phantom documents, but the intertextual connections that are present within the text.

Somehow Paul wasn’t only thinking of Roman soldier garb in Ephesians 6, there was some Isaiah 59 in the mix too. Commentaries may help, but the real key is to read the Bible and recognize when an earlier text is influencing a later one. Walter Kaiser speaks about the “informing theology” of a writer. How did Isaiah influence Mark, how did the Torah influence Jonah, etc.

4. Move forward from your text with hermeneutical honesty, avoiding anachronistic imposition. That is, show how the themes in a text progress forward through the canon, but don’t make the text dependent on later revelation. If the listeners are looking at a text in context and can’t fathom how the text had any value without revelation from centuries later, they may question either God’s ability to communicate, or your communication about God. Can the text in question bear its own weight?

When the New Testament is on the Old inflicted, or the Old is by the New restricted, then we can lose too much. Much better to see the richness of a passage, then see how it builds forward to the fullness of all we know now in light of later revelation.

5. Invite people into the Scriptures, don’t intimidate them with your knowledge. Seems simple – if you want people to be in the Bible for themselves, then don’t make them feel completely incapable of finding anything worthwhile without you. If you want them to rely completely on you, something’s gone awry.

Our listeners need to get a sense of the richness of Scripture as a whole.  What strategies do you have for achieving this?