Stage 8 – Message Detail

Excitement Is Both Taught and Caught

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

There are many exciting parts of the Bible.  Last night I was leading a seminar and we thought briefly about the story of Acts.  That’s exciting.  The problem we have, though, is decades of familiarity combined with a stoic tendency in traditional church settings.  Many of us have heard the stories since childhood, and sadly, many times we’ve heard the stories recounted and dissected without any enthusiasm.  Now the goal of preaching is not to whip up excitement as if that were an end in itself.  However, to faithfully preach exciting elements of the Bible requires us to think about how the tone and import of the passage can be communicated (as well as the truth therein).

Excitement needs to be “taught” – it is not enough to simply ooze enthusiasm and keep telling people “this is really exciting!”  It doesn’t work.  They need to understand it for themselves.  They will appreciate enthusiasm from the front, it might make a refreshing change, however, without understanding it they cannot genuinely enter into it.

Excitement needs to be “felt” – simply understanding the facts about the text is not enough.  Our goal as preachers is not just to say what the text says, but to appropriately do what the text does.  This means with a narrative, for instance, listeners need to not just know the story, but they need to be helped to see, hear, smell, taste, touch . . . feel the story.

Excitement needs to be “caught” – while enthusiasm alone can be quite annoying, it is necessary.  As people are helped to both feel and understand the emotion present in a text, we as preachers need to enter into that emotion in an appropriate but contagious way.  If the passage is filled with joyful excitement, but we seem depressed and bored, something is wrong.  If the passage is filled with awe and wonder, yet we are communicating as if it is “oh so normal” – we have a problem.

It’s all about congruence really.  The accuracy of our words, the effectiveness of our description, the evidence of our emotion – these all need to work together if the excitement, or wonder, or compassion, or righteous indignation, or joy of the text is to be effectively communicated.

Where Is The Burden of Authority?

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

When we are preparing a message there are many ingredients.  Biblical explanation, various forms of illustrative support materials, a variety of means of communicating application, etc.  A question worth asking ourselves is “where is the burden of the authority in this message?”  By this I mean, what part of the message carries the authority of the message?  There are, again, various message components that can carry the authority.  These are all possible, but are not equal:

Authority Through Illustration – While most preachers will claim that the authority lies in the Biblical text, some will put the burden on an illustration that “drives home” the message.  This can be particularly effective if the illustration is especially touching, moving or exciting.  It can stir people who may yawn at the same old biblical content, but sit on the edge of their seats for the sensational story or anecdote.  But think carefully, while a powerful illustration may be helpful, are you putting too much weight on it?  What if the report you read of the revival in such and such a place turns out to be fraudulent or exaggerated?  What if the story so overwhelms the message that listeners lose the Bible bit in the flashing brilliance of the illustration?  In the end, what authority is there in that moving story?  What if a false teacher down the road had a more moving or more exciting story, would people be right to follow them instead of your Jesus?

There’s a weightier version of the same:

Authority Through Personal Experience – There is certainly great need for genuine testimony, both as an evangelistic methodology, and as sermonic support material.  However, we need to be very careful not to shift the burden of authority from the Word of God to the experience of me.  It can be a hard balance to find.  After all, you’ve experienced the power of this teaching in a contemporary situation.  People can be encouraged to know that this truth still works today.  Just look at what happened during my ministry in such and such a place.  Careful.  Be very careful.  The added weight of the personal experience can make such an illustration carry too much responsibility in the message.  It is certainly not wrong to use personal experience in preaching, I encourage it.  But I encourage it with a caution – don’t shift the authority from God’s Word to your own word.

Let’s prayerfully strive to never take away from the Word of God the authority for the message, either deliberately, or by accident.

Reflect, Record, Relax, Renew

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Monday morning.  For preachers it’s the day after Sunday (I suppose that’s true for others too?)  Whether you are privileged to be in a paid ministry position, or privileged to have “normal” employment, Monday is an important time for a preacher.  My suggestion:

Reflect – Take a few minutes at some point to prayerfully reflect on yesterday’s preaching.  Whether you were the preacher, or a listener, or both (ie. two services), it is good to reflect on yesterday’s preaching.  My mind goes back to the three questions I’ve heard and used so many times in training sessions – (1) What did the preacher do well?  (2) What was the preacher’s main idea?  And finally (3), what one thing would you suggest the preacher could do to improve that message?

Record – How many helpful insights have been lost over the years like small toy cars under furniture?  It’s easy to relish them, then fail to hang on to them and they are gone.  I need to make a note of how well Josh did that first-person as Jude writing, um, Jude, sitting at the desk to write with the words appearing on the screen via simple but effective powerpoint, then standing to explain his thinking before sitting to write some more.  I need to make a note of how I failed to overtly link my message to the particular situation of that local church, but only spoke in broader terms of “the church” when “this church” would have hit home more directly.  I need to record those thoughts somewhere . . .

Relax – Unless you’re very diligent about Monday being a day off, this may not seem possible.  But in one sense, it is.  For those of us not in other employment, Monday can be a day to genuinely relax, or at least to deal with other matters – administrative, email, desk clearing kind of work.  For those who go from the frantic nature of Sunday to the hectic nature of Monday in the office (or on the site, etc.), it is still worth taking a mental break from the pressure of sermon preparation.  Don’t immediately get the adrenaline flowing by wrestling with the big idea of your next message.  Mentally, emotionally, even physically, we need to release that pressure and relax, even if only for a day.

Renew – Before diving back into sermon preparation, make it a goal to consciously renew spiritually.  Look to the Lord, dwell in His love, abide in Him, wait on Him, walk in step with the Spirit, etc.  Make it so the next sermon prep is not about getting things going spiritually again (that’s a sign of real spiritual peril), but rather make the next sermon prep an overflow of a close spiritual walk that births a fire in your spirit.

Mondays matter.  Have a good one.

Intersecting “Life Experiences” – 3

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Just a few practical thoughts on the issue of finding and using “illustrations” in preaching:

Bring Description to Life, Not Just Application –Listeners will tell you that you have great illustrations in your preaching, even if you technically have none.  If you are effective in your description of the narrative, the life situation of the author, the image conveyed in the poetry, etc., then listeners will often feel as though you used what they might call an “illustration.”  For more on this, click here.

Don’t Always Aim for the Ultimate Knockout Illustration – Sometimes we get intimidated by a message we hear, or by the pressure we put on ourselves, and we set the “illustrative bar” too high.  You know what I mean, the one that is deeply personal, moving, compelling, tension-filled, intersecting with every point of the message, etc.  Now and then you may have a humdinger of an illustration when you preach.  It’s nice when you get them, but often it will be the passing comments or observations that demonstrate you are a real person rather than a poor history lecturer.   Often the “choosing the wrong line in the supermarket” illustration is more effective than the “my death-defying fall from a cliff in a car” illustration (which will almost certainly overwhelm the text and the main idea of the message – warning!)  People live normal lives in a normal world with normal issues, so don’t feel like every illustration needs to be supra-normal or extraordinary.  Normal is usually ideal!

Describe Application Encouragingly – Don’t waste energy hunting down an obscure, witty, intriguing interchange from Elizabethan parliamentary discourse.  Much better to focus your energy on describing what it will look like to apply what you are preaching.  How might someone react in the days ahead in light of this passage?  What will faith look like when worst fears are confirmed, or when unexpected crises hits?  What does living in the light of that truth about God mean for normal life?  Describe listeners applying the truth, the instruction, the change of attitude, the deeper intimacy with God, etc., describe them applying it and encourage them with that “illustration.”

One last one, unless you’d like to add other ideas:

Create a Filing System, and Use It – Basic, but most of us don’t do this and should.  Make good notes of potential illustrative material, observations, quotes, comments, incidents, clippings, etc.  Then file them.  Perhaps in a searchable Word document with key words next to each entry.  Then use the file.  Something from life experience this week will probably not fit with the message for this Sunday . . . but in three weeks time, it may be perfect.  Now where was that quote again?

Intersecting “Life Experiences” – 2

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Continuing on from yesterday’s post.  How can we who struggle with generating “illustrative” materials do better in this regard (to keep preaching from being historical lecture)?

Prepare Messages with Personal Sensitivity – As you prepare a message, look at your own life.  Where do you see the sin, the struggles, the doubts, the hopes, the joys, etc. in your own life, in your own heart? In the past there was an emphasis on trying to keep yourself out of the sermon.  I suppose the prayer we sometimes hear, “May the people not see me, but Jesus.”  Very well intentioned, but people are seeing you, and hopefully more.  Preaching is, by the Brooks’ definition: truth through personality.  All that to say, without being a superstar or a buffoon, let listeners see you as a real, genuine, authentic and appropriately vulnerable communicator.  This means being sensitive to how the text works in your life, before preaching it for the sake of other lives.

Prepare Messages with Congregation Sensitivity – The better you know the people you are preaching to, the easier it is to intersect biblical truth with present experience.  This doesn’t mean preaching a message at someone in particular, nor divulging confidences, or causing embarressment in illustration specificity.  However, your listeners are not the same as mine.  Tim Keller’s crowd is not the same as Andy Stanley’s.  Preaching usually calls us to pastoral care of our listeners, which means knowing what their life is like.  Being a student of people needs to combine with being a student of the text in order to preach effectively.  This does not require us to make every Biblical text into a mundane how-to list, but rather to help humans love, know and respond to a God who chooses to engage with us.  (If you are new to the site, I’d encourage you to click on Audience Analysis in the categories menu to the right and see previous posts related to really knowing to whom we preach.)

Rather than looking through endless lists of “potential illustrations” in books or online, we have very fertile ground in our own lives and in the lives of our listeners.  We should being looking there with real sensitivity in order to find the points of intersection that will help give our messages a contemporary and relevant feel.

More practical thoughts tomorrow, but feel free to add your thoughts . . .

Intersecting “Life Experiences”

/ Peter Mead / 3 Comments

Thanks to Sarah for commenting on the post about Illustration Saturation.  As I mentioned in the post, many of us struggle with finding and using “illustration” material.  Sarah asked how to improve at intersecting life experiences with the text.  Here are a few random thoughts to get us going.  Certainly this is no developed strategy, but it is a start:

Read Bible With Sensitivity to Humanity – When studying the Bible, it is right to be theocentric in our reading because the text itself is theocentric.  God is the main character of the Bible and should be the central focus of our preaching.  However, some preachers preach as if humans are irrelevant to the Biblical story and all we need to preach is God / Christ.  The reality is that the Bible is all about God as He interacts and engages with humanity.  Consequently, as we read any passage, we will also catch continual glimpses of human reality.  Bryan Chappell refers to the Fallen Condition Focus.  Are the characters doubting or trusting, in what, why?  Are they loving or hating, who, why?  What is the effect of the Fall in these people, what is God’s provision, what is their response?  These kinds of questions help us to look at people in the text and see that they are people like us.  Once we see them as real people rather than flannel-graph characters, then it is easier to highlight intersection between the characters in the text and our own life experiences.

Read Life with Biblical Sensitivity – As a preacher you are not always reading the Bible.  Once in a while you do other things too.  Whether it is watching the news or entertainment, people watching at work or in the store, enjoying the joys of parenting or whatever . . . try to read life with a sensitivity to what the Bible teaches.  Why are they acting this way?  What is this attitude called biblically?  What character in the Bible does this person remind me of?  We need to read the Bible as it is, real and living revelation of reality.  We need to observe life around us as it is, a living out of the Biblically described reality.

More thoughts tomorrow.  Feel free to comment, this issue could be addressed from many angles.

Illustration Saturation

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

I’d like to ponder those things generally known as “illustrations.”  I tend to refer to them as “support materials” to recognize their function.  Or even better, I prefer to call them what they actually are, either “explanations” or “proofs” or “applications” since that forces me to be purposeful in how I use them.  Notice I don’t call them “fillers” or “entertainers” or “treading waters” or “favorite anecdotes” or whatever.  They are there either to explain, prove or apply what I am saying, otherwise they are not developing the thought or moving the message forward.  Anyway, back to the point of the post – there seem to be two types of preachers when it comes to “illustrations.”

1. There are those who struggle to find, record, keep, select and use illustrations. After all, it does seem to take quite a discipline to create, use, maintain and then access a personal illustration library or database.  I take my hat off to all who achieve this and use it well, but I know that many preachers are like me – illustration strugglers.  Generally speaking, and this is very general, people in this category should probably do better with illustrations.  Having said that, and it was only in general, but nevertheless, there are other ways to “illustrate” a message than the standard array of notes, quotes, anecdotes, personal experiences, etc.  But that is for another post.  For now, this category could probably increase the frequency and quality of their illustrations.

2. There are some, perhaps a select few, who seem to constantly overflow with illustrations. Every way they turn there seems to be three or four brief illustrations or passing comments that relate to the word currently before them.  While it may be superficially something to envy for the majority of us in the former category, I would like to offer one observation to illustration fountains.  It is possible to achieve illustration saturation.  Sometimes in the preponderance of “interesting” materials the text itself can be lost.

Some struggle to illustrate.  Others struggle to stop illustrating.  Remember the goal of preaching is to effectively and faithfully explain and apply the Bible passage(s) for life transformation.  The goal is not to bounce from important term to important term, filling the gaps with a string threaded with pearls of interest and offset with other biblical quotes in order to illustrate the gospel . . .

Some of us, perhaps not many, but some, need to be very wary of illustration saturation.

Preach for Faith – Lennox II

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Yesterday I was reflecting on Dr John Lennox’s concerns as Christians add fuel to the fire of Richard Dawkin’s faulty logic.  Faith, by his definition, is knowingly trusting in something which cannot be proven – believing against reason.  Yet Lennox yearns for people to understand that the faith is always a response to fact, and the Christian faith is firmly founded on trustworthy facts – not least the resurrection of Jesus.  Yesterday I shared his concern over the “leap in the dark” language used in some Christian circles as a very poor explanation of faith.  Today I’d like to share his second concern.

2. An over-emphasis on faith as a gift given from above.  Now it would be very easy for some readers to dismiss this, or to get into a theological slanging match.  I certainly don’t want to take sides or position this site on one side or the other of the debates this touches on.  Whether we agree with his own position or not, I think we must engage with Dr Lennox’s concern.  Could it be that an over-emphasis on faith as a gift received is inadvertently undermining the truth that Christianity is founded on fact, not least the fact of the resurrection of Jesus?  Could it be that internal theological debates undermine the presentation of the gospel to a culture now influenced by new atheism?  Could it be that irrespective of our stance on the so-called “free-will” debate, that we need to consider underlining, rather than undermining, the facts on which our faith response is built?

We preach the faith.  We preach for faith.  Obviously there is much to ponder in a world influenced by a whole smorgasbord of thinking, from the clear to the fallacious and deceptive.

Preach for Faith – Lennox

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I was not alone in really appreciating John Lennox’s preaching and teaching at the recent European Leadership Forum in Hungary.  As someone who has been focused on debating Richard Dawkins and other “new atheists” in recent years, Dr Lennox has a lot to say about faith and apologetics.  He points to a foundational plank in Richard Dawkins’ logic, his erroneous definition of faith.  I’m quoting from memory, but essentially faith, according to Dawkins, is belief in something where you know there is no evidence.  Consequently it is not possible to really discuss reality with a “person of faith” since by definition they know they are committed to that for which there is no evidence.  It is sad to see the strategy Dawkins has created for his own purposes, but perhaps even sadder to see some Christians rushing headlong into the illogical snare.

The critical role of fact. Faith is a response to fact.  If the facts are shaky, so is the faith.  If the facts are the tall tales of an untrustworthy teenager, then the faith is relatively worthless.  But if the facts are genuine facts, then faith in response to those facts is not so easily dismissable.  The Christian faith is founded on fact.  The central fact is that of the resurrection of Jesus, interestingly the central feature of early apostolic preaching (when there were plenty of eye-witnesses still around to corroborate or to refute the preaching).

As preachers we have a key role in being able to help our hearers understand that their faith is founded on fact.  Yet Lennox points to two common errors, as he sees it, in contemporary Christianity:

1. The tendency to present faith as a leap in the dark.  We hear this from uninformed testimonies where the person speaking is nervous at having so many eyes trained on them and quite naturally feels unable to fully and eloquently explain the whole Christian faith and so simply pulls out the “I don’t really get it, I just took a leap in the dark and now I can testify that something has changed in me” card.  While it would be nice to hear testimonies that are somewhat better informed, there is something compelling about a testimony that is still a work in progress, someone who stands like the blind man in John 9 and cannot compete with the theologians, yet can speak with the authority of personal experience.  However, as preachers we need to make sure we are not giving more of this “leap in the dark” error through our preaching, or even implying it.  Christian faith is a response to fact.

Tomorrow I’ll share Dr Lennox’s other concern in how we preach faith today.

Preach for Faith

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Probably it’s a combination of attending an apologetically driven conference and being scheduled to preach on faith this Sunday, but I’m pondering preaching for faith.  I suppose that is always close to the heart of the matter in Christian preaching.  Anyway, here are a couple of thoughts, although this could be a series of posts for the rest of the month.

The critical role of God’s Word. Right back in Genesis 3 everything “went wrong” when?  When they doubted God’s Word and listened to another “authority.”  Surely God’s Word couldn’t be trusted since this impressive creature had disobeyed it and yet still lived?  So they ate and they died spiritually, they began to die physically and the whole creation began to suffer death.  From that decisive moment on, the Bible is full of narratives, all of which have a big question mark hanging over them like an unfurled banner – “will people trust God’s Word or not?”  Interestingly, when God’s Son steps into the world to make a path back to deep relational intimacy with God, He comes as God’s Word.  Will he be trusted?  Doubting God’s word in the first place led us away, now there is a symmetry in the remedy in that we are asked to trust God’s Word (incarnated and inscripturated) in order to be brought back.  Consequently Paul writes to the Romans that faith comes by hearing, so the Word of God must be preached.  Peter tells his readers that they were born again through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and through the living and enduring Word of God.  Hebrews urges the believers to remember their leaders who spoke the Word of God to them, and thereby imitate their faith.  In John 17, Jesus prays concerning the Word of God that He has given to His followers, and prays that they will be sanctified by the truth, which is the Word.  I could go on pulling example after example, but the point is critical – the preaching of the Word of God is absolutely central to the purposes of God in redeeming a lost world.

So the simple question is this – as you look at your message this Sunday, what is the appropriate faith response to God’s Word as preached in your message?  Is it clear?  Is it central?

In the next post I’d like to share some provocative thoughts on faith from Dr John Lennox.