Stage 5 – Message Purpose

Expository Preaching is More Than a Commentary

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

In Christ-Centered Preaching (p55), Bryan Chappell makes the following distinction:

“Expository preaching is not a captioned survey of a passage. By this I mean the typical: ‘1. Saul’s Contention, 2. Saul’s Conversion, 3. Saul’s Commission’ (Acts 9:1-19). In my own circles I think I have heard more sermons of this type than any other. They sound very biblical because they are based on a passage of Scripture. But their basic failure is that they tend to be descriptive rather than pastoral. They lack a clear goal or practical application. The congregation may be left without any true insights as to what the passage is really about, and without having received any clear teaching about God or themselves.”

He is so right. My circles also yield many messages of this type. If you look at tomorrow’s notes and discover you have a message like this, what can you do? Well, with just 24 hours to go, probably not too much. Try to change the points from captions to full sentences that state the idea of that section. Try to change those sentences from historical statements to contemporary applicational points. Or just preach what you have and pray for God to use it anyway.

However, before you start next week’s message, there are things you can do. First of all, remember that your goal is not to present a vocal commentary, but a message where God’s Word is vital and relevant to the lives of your listeners. Take the time to evaluate the listeners as well as the passage. Make clear notes for yourself on the purpose of your message. Seek to integrate relevance and application throughout the message, not only at the level of “illustrations,” but right in the points themselves. Make the points full sentences. Preach to transform lives, trusting the Holy Spirit to do the transforming, but not “despite” your message.

Repent of the faulty idea that merely getting biblical information into peoples’ heads, perhaps with a brief vague application in the conclusion, is enough. To preach an expository message, seek to bring the truth of the Word and the lives of your listeners into an encounter. It is about real life, not vague application. It is about the heart, not just the head.

Who You Preach To – Part Two.

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Ramesh Richard presents a helpful angle on the variety of people listening to any sermon. He presents three attitudes that will be present at various times in a message. “An expositional ministry,” he writes, “allows you to put a weekly dent in their apathy, passivity, ignorance, or hostility to equip them for godliness and service.” So the three attitudes that we must be aware of and communicate with?

1. The I Don’t Cares! These are not hostile, they just don’t feel they should be there at all. They are there out of a sense of duty to friends or family, or habitual routine. For this attitude the need raised at the beginning of the message is critical. Without it, they are free to continue their inner stance of not caring.

2. The I Don’t Knows! They lack the background awareness that others may have regarding God, the Bible, Christianity and church life. These people need good biblical content clearly explained.

3. The I Don’t Believes! These people are doubtful about the truth of what is said, or the applicability of it to real life. They are likely to test what is said with questions such as, “Is this truth coherent?” or “Is the sermon consistent?” or “Is this truth practical?” and especially, “Will this work?” For this attitude you must demonstrate a coherent consistency as well as practical applicability.

These attitudes may come and go during the same sermon, sometimes within the same person. Before preaching, evaluate your sermon and adjust its design to overcome the potential pitfalls for these attitudes. Is a clear and valuable need raised? Is there sufficient accessible explanation? Is the message relevant and practical? We preach not to get our study into the public domain, but to see the lives, the hearts, the attitudes of our listeners changed by exposure to God’s Word.

Guarding the Authority of Application

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We may strive for objectivity and authority in our exegetical work (although it is tentative due to our limitations). However we tend to feel very tentative when it comes to application. How do we make sure our contemporary applications of the text are in line with the passage and its theological truth?

Timothy Warren, of Dallas Theological Seminary, suggests two guardrails that will help keep an application on track and protect the authority of the application. The expositional process moves from the text, through exegesis and theological abstraction to application (the exegetical idea, theological idea and homiletical idea, if you like). On each side of this path, Timothy Warren suggests a guardrail to keep the preacher on track:

Guardrail 1 – Audience. By considering the original referent and description of the passage’s intended audience, the preacher can be protected from an inappropriate application to his audience. For example, if the passage was originally written to scold Israel’s errant leadership (such as Ezekiel 34), it would be inconsistent to scold a church full of faithful followers. The audience is different, so the purpose of the sermon will differ from the purpose of the text. We move from original audience, to universal audience, to our contemporary audience.

Guardrail 2 – Purpose. By recognizing the original intention of the author, it is possible to consider whether the purpose will remain the same or differ for the contemporary listeners. So why did the author write it? Why did God make sure it was preserved for all? Why are you preaching this passage to your specific listeners?

Every time we study a passage and develop a sermon we are moving through these steps: contextualized, decontextualized, recontextualised. By keeping aware of the two guardrails – audience and purpose – we can be more certain that our applications of the text are legitimate and carry the necessary divine authority.

Moving Your Preaching Beyond Default­ – Part 2

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

There are many defaults that could be highlighted.  The fact presenter, exhorter and plodder are just three.  Perhaps you can give yourself another title to underline the tendency you see in your own preaching.  Then prayerfully consider how to push yourself beyond what is comfortable for you, or even what is affirmed by others. 

The fact presenter needs to wrestle diligently with sermonic purpose and audience awareness.  The exhorter needs to purposefully engage with the full range of needs present in their congregation, as well as increase sensitivity to the intention of biblical writers.  The plodding passage guide needs to study not just for phrase-by-phrase understanding, but for a fuller understanding of the flow of thought and emphasis, not to mention creative means by which to structure the message.

Here are a few more ways to stretch yourself beyond default, whatever your default may be: 

  • How can you preach so that people will not just know the passage, but also experience it?
  • How can the message itself be constructed as a plot to be experienced by the listeners?  As preachers we can easily dissect a biblical plot (narrative) and end up preaching an interesting but lifeless set of parts.  We should let story be story, but more than that, how can we take a didactic sermon and add features of plot to it?
  • How can the message maintain tension or intrigue throughout?  This means careful consideration of how each point works within itself, and how they work in relation to each other.
  • How can the transitions be worked for maximum effectiveness?  How can they be smooth rather than clunky, clear rather than random?

Moving Your Preaching Beyond Default

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

In every area of life we naturally have a default mode. It’s what comes naturally. It’s the way we function without adding thought and effort. This is true in any relationship, any hobby, and also in any preaching. If you are preaching for the first time, you are probably all thought and effort. You’re probably trying to fill the time, survive the experience and not make a fool of yourself. But for those of us who’ve preached a few times, perhaps its time to evaluate ourselves and push beyond default. In this post I will suggest some default modes I’ve observed in myself and others. In part two I will suggest some ways to crank it up a level.

Default Mode – Bible Fact Presenter. It is easy to study a passage at length and then fill the preaching slot with facts you have gleaned in the process. Historical awareness and Bible trivia may impress people to a certain extent, but this approach will usually hide from questions about purpose. What is the sermon supposed to achieve? Just because your information comes from the Bible or is about the Bible, does not make it a truly biblical sermon. The passage has not been inspired, recorded, copied, canonized and translated just to be a source of trivia.

Default Mode – Ethical Exhorter. It is easy to define a purpose, irrespective of the nuances of a passage, and then harangue the listeners. Some preachers never say anything strong, but others can’t seem to say anything but. Again, some people will be impressed by passionate finger pointing. Indeed, some people seem to have a strange theology that affirms the need to receive a verbal thrashing from the pulpit, somehow fulfilling a kind of personal penitence. The Bible does exhort us in many ways, but it does so much more, and listeners are also complex creatures. We must carefully consider our sermon purpose in light of the text’s purpose and the need of our listeners.

Default Mode – Plodding Passage Guide. Given a biblical passage and a piece of time, it is easy to methodically plod through the passage trying to run out of passage and time at the same moment in the meeting. In this approach every phrase or sentence in the passage is considered equal, given equal explanation and roughly equal time. In reality time will often start to slip away and the last part of the passage will often be short-changed. All Scripture is inspired and every word counts, but not every word counts equally in a sentence or a section. Sometimes a significant proportion of a text may require very little explanation or development, while another part may require diligent focus in our presentation.

Peter has responded to a comment on this post.

The Holy Spirit and Your Preaching – Part 1

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When it comes to preaching, it is easy to refer to the Holy Spirit by way of excuse. How simple to bring in the Holy Spirit as an excuse not to do some difficult aspect of preparation, or to cover for a lack of attention to some aspect of the preparation process. This is very unfair. Preaching is a spiritual work, and so the Holy Spirit must be given His rightful place. Here are some thoughts that will probably stimulate other thoughts:

Preaching is our work and God’s work, not one or the other. Our responsibility for the mechanics of sermon preparation in no way negates the Holy Spirit’s role in the dynamics of sermon preparation. Likewise, the Spirit’s role in bringing fruit from the preaching event does not remove our responsibility to participate fully.

The foundational concern is the spiritual walk of the preacher. Everything that the Bible teaches in relation to the spiritual walk of a believer is also, and especially, true of the preacher. This relates to character, to life choices, to prayerful preparation for ministry and so on. This means walking in step with the Spirit, not grieving the Spirit, fanning into flame the gift of the Spirit, and living a life controlled by the Spirit.

The preparation process involves the Spirit at every step. Every stage of the process could be prefixed with the term, “Prayerfully. . .” We must prayerfully select the passage, prayerfully study the passage, prayerfully determine the author’s idea and so on. We should not work in a personal vacuum and then merely ask for God’s stamp of approval just prior to delivery.

(Ramesh Richard has a helpful appendix on the Holy Spirit and preaching in Preparing Expository Sermons which influenced this post.)

Is Paper PC?

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I teach people to use a series of sheets of paper when preparing a sermon, just as I learned from my first preaching professor, John Wecks.  The sheets allow you to catalogue thought in appropriate compartments.  They allow you to write a thought and put it aside until it is time to consider that element of the sermon.  Let me list the sheets I would suggest.  Then I’ll suggest reasons to use real paper or virtual paper on the PC.

The Sheets – The first one to be used is the “Questions of the Text.”  Use this on your first read through and list everything that is not clear.  This sheet will be very helpful as you finish your sermon and prepare to preach it.  See previous post on this subject – August 14th.   Then I’d suggest sheets for exegetical notes (multiple sheets may be required), author’s idea, author’s purpose / sermon purpose, notes on congregation, sermon idea, sermon structure, possible illustrations, areas of application/pictured relevance, introduction, conclusion and then the manuscript (multiple sheets required).

Why go with paper? – No matter how much our computers improve, there is still something special about a desk covered in open books and paper.  So much sentimentality for one so young!  Some people may find the paper approach helpful, others may find it necessary.  It works.  In fact, I would suggest working on paper until it becomes a familiar process.  Then, if you like the reasons given below, shift over to the PC.

Why use a PC? – I suppose some comment about saving the rainforests would be a pc comment about use of a PC.  To be honest, my motivations are more selfish.  If it is on PC then I have a lasting record (as long as I back-up my files).  I have the ability to cut, paste, edit, etc. I can actually read what I have written!  I can cut and paste the Bible text from Bible software, quickly study the original languages and paste in helpful comments from commentaries and lexicons.  I sometimes have a list of unused potential illustrations that can be mined when preparing future sermons.

The PC is a helpful tool, but a Bible, some paper and a pen work amazingly well too!

Good Preaching Isn’t Just Bible Explanation

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

The importance of relevance and application in preaching can hardly be understated.  I recently came across this quote that I feel is worthy of our attention:

Good preaching begins in the Bible, but it doesn’t stay there. It visits the hospital and the college dorm, the factory and the farm, the kitchen and the office, the bedroom and the classroom.

Good preaching invades the world in which people live, the real world of tragedy and triumph, loveliness and loneliness, broken hearts, broken homes, and amber waves of strain. Good preaching invades the real world, and it talks to real people—the high-school senior who’s there because he’s dragged there; the housewife who wants a divorce; the grandfather who mourns the irreversibility of time and lives with a frantic sense that almost all the sand in the hourglass has dropped; the farmer who is about to lose his farm, the banker who must take it from him; the teacher who has kept her lesbianism a secret all these years; the businessman for whom money has become a god; the single girl who hates herself because she’s fat. Good preaching helps them do business with God; it helps them interpret their own human experience, telling them what in their heart of hearts they already know, and are yearning to hear confirmed.

Louis Lotz, “Good Preaching,” Reformed Review 40 (Autumn 1986) 38.

Is Application in the Preacher’s Job Description?

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Some people mistakenly suggest that the preacher has to “make the Bible relevant.”  While this suggestion may be well-intentioned, it is unhelpful.  The Bible is relevant.  The preacher has to “demonstrate the Bible’s relevance.”  Expository preaching, by its very nature, includes the task of application.

Some claim that the preacher’s task is merely to explain the Scripture, but the task of application can be left to the Holy Spirit.  I don’t know how many times I heard preachers say, “Now may the Spirit of God apply to our hearts the truth of His word” as a conclusion to a “sermon.”  Hershael York and others have pointed out the inconsistency of this position. 

There is a cultural and historical gap between the then and the now.  Sidney Greidanus refers to four elements of distance between the Bible and today’s listener: time, culture, geography and language.  Whose task is the translation of the Scriptures?  Whose task is the exegesis of the Scriptures?  The Holy Spirit and humans work together in the translation of the Bible into a contemporary language.  The Holy Spirit and the preacher must work together in the accurate exegesis of the passage.  In the same way, both the Holy Spirit and the preacher are involved in the application of the passage. 

The Holy Spirit does work through the Word in the lives of the listeners.  But if the preacher is not also involved in that task, then I suppose we should be more consistent.  Instead of preaching, perhaps we should just read the passage and sit down.  Oh, and we should probably read the passage out in Hebrew or Greek.  Application of the passage is very much in our job description!

Question: Should We Cover More in Our Sermons?

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Following on from yesterday’s post, I want to address the issue of “covering more.”  Here’s the question again:

In the Church today, we find that most preachers preach for 30-60 minutes on one topic or passage. Indeed, many will take a few verses and preach on them at length.

The examples we have in the bible of Jesus’ sermons show a very different way of preaching. He seemed to cover many topics in every sermon. For instance the ‘Sermon on the mount’ covers a range of things but preachers these days tend to just take one section of it and preach for an hour on that section.

Is there any validity, in your opinion, to the idea that we labour points too long and actually ought to cover more in our sermons?

Peter M responds:

Preaching on one passage – Expository preaching does not require a preacher to stay in one passage. It is possible to have an expository sermon that goes to several passages. Yet to deal with each passage as one should tends to make the process overwhelming. I always encourage preachers to deal with one passage more fully, rather than skipping around unnecessarily. There are reasons to refer to other passages, but for some preachers it seems this is a standard practice. I suggest it is usually better to stay put in one place.  This does not mean boring preaching though.  The preacher should be as engaging and interesting as possible.  It takes some skill to demonstrate the relevance and interest in a passage.  It is better to develop that skill than to hide the lack of it by jumping around the canon.

The example of NT sermons – We can learn a lot by analyzing the sermons recorded in the New Testament.  There are different sermon forms used, clear awareness of differing audiences, and so on.  Yet it is important to remember that while the written form represents the original accurately, it is not an exhaustive transcription.  I suspect Peter preached for longer than a couple of minutes at Pentecost, and Jesus’ “sermon on the mount” was probably not delivered as it stands in our Bibles.  So it might not be wise to try to recreate the Sermon on the Mount. At the same time recognize that it is not as random as many suspect.  What seems to be one subject after another, may actually be one illustration or application after another.  For example, notice the repetitive pattern in Matthew 5:21-48 – do we have five new subjects or five specific applications of the same principle?

Amount of content in a sermon – I am not an advocate for “dumbing down” sermons or “salad preaching” (no meat).  A message should have an appropriate amount of content at the right level of weightiness for the listeners present.  Yet the goal is to communicate the main idea of the passage in order to achieve the purpose of the message.  The goal is not to impress people with content (sadly, for some preachers, this is their goal).  This wrong goal is often encouraged as some listeners tend to affirm dense preaching despite their own inability to take it in!

Some preachers should cover more, others would do well to cover less.  There is no standard rule, but the passage and the audience are both significant factors in determining how much content, both breadth and depth, should be covered in one message.