The Wonder of Christmas

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

One of the great occupational hazards of ministry is that we can so easily lose the wonder of what we are dealing with.  With the demands of the schedule, the expectations of people, the burden of creativity in a season that comes every twelfth month (but is only fully reported in two gospels), the ongoing reality of messy lives (people still get in trouble, marriages still fail, loneliness still bites, folks still sin), and so on, we can easily lose the wonder of Christmas.

In this post I don’t want to prescribe how to keep the wonder of it all, I just want to suggest we do.  Whatever it takes.  Perhaps time with family.  Perhaps some extra guarded time alone with God.  Perhaps a special treat carol concert. Perhaps a brief journey to a sentimental place.  Perhaps read one of those booklets the church is offering to visitors over Christmas.  Whatever it takes.

Let us make sure that we don’t go through Christmas feeling the pressure and the burden of it all, without also renewing the wonder in our hearts.  Let us be captured by the grace of God that He would step into this world.  Let us be gripped by the hope inherent in the Christmas story for a world of sinners – for Christ came into the world to save sinners!  Let us be stirred afresh by the history-changing event of the incarnation.  Ponder the first Christmas, ponder the reality of the incarnation, ponder the journey from Bethlehem to Calvary, ponder the everlasting nature of the incarnation.  Ponder.  Ignite the wonder again.  Whatever it takes.

Thriving in the People / Passage Tension

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Phillip Brooks said something along these lines: He never went to his study and looked in the Bible that he didn’t see his people’s faces running across his study. When he went out to meet his people, his study would beckon and he would see the Bible.

This tension is not a reason for frustration. When studying a passage, pause and consider who would be directly helped by it. Take a moment to pray for them. Then get back to study. When meeting people, perhaps on a Sunday at church, do the reverse. Between conversations consider what passage would help the person you just spoke to, again fire a quick prayer for them. Then press on to the next interaction. In reality every passage holds value for everyone in the church, but allow your mind to make specific connections anyway.

This mental exercise can bear ministerial fruit. With practice you will find yourself more naturally bringing helpful Bible texts into conversations, and more naturally bringing relevance and application into your preaching.

As preachers we live in a tension between people and passages. Embrace the tension and learn to thrive in it.

Don’t Half Quit

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There are always reasons to quit.  This is true in anything you 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 it – 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’s all sorts of appropriate balances to wisely employ in ministry.  But those are for another post.  All I’m suggesting today 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, don’t half quit.

A Preacher’s Personal Cloud

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It is too easy to get caught up in present ministry and future plans, but forget past blessings. As a preacher, whether you have only just begun or have been ministering for decades, you are not a self-made preacher. The truth is that people have marked you. Your ministry now is partly the result of past investment and example from others.

Let’s take half an hour and prayerfully go back over those people who have marked our lives for ministry. Perhaps you could take a piece of paper and list people that invested in you, or were an example to you. Make a brief note summarizing their influence. Take some time to give thanks to God for His work through them. Not only will this exercise allow for gratitude toward God, but it may also prompt an expression of gratitude toward others who have blessed you (who are still on earth), and a renewed passion to press on in your ministry. I suppose we could say that each of us is surrounded by our own personal cloud of witnesses!

Think of your early exposure to preaching and church ministry – perhaps a preacher who also noticed you and cared about you. Think about those who have invested time in you during your formative years, perhaps some were preachers, but took the time to pour into you. Think about those who opened doors for you to preach, to attend Bible school, to take on your first ministry role. Think about the trainers, perhaps in the local church, or perhaps in college or seminary (if only there were more trainers in churches, but let’s be thankful for both!) Think about inspiring examples you heard at key events, or regularly at certain stages of life. Think about formative books that shaped you in this area. Think about key prayer partners who believed in you. Think … make a note … give thanks … press on!

High-Calibre Listener, Beware!

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True expository preacher is not just about convictions regarding the Bible. It also involves convictions in relation to the congregation, the listeners. As a preacher you are committed to bringing God’s message from God’s Word to the people God has prepared and brought together for a particular service. Giving attention to both sides of the bridge, to use the metaphor Stott popularized, means awareness of the listeners as well as the text.

Typically a good awareness of the listeners will help you to preach relevantly. But beware of one type of listener – those you perceive to be “high-calibre.” I don’t like that term and only use it in the absence of a better alternative. What I mean is anyone whose presence tempts you to either feel intimidated or to show-off. Perhaps a well-known guest, or a seminary professor, or a published theologian. There are others too that could be listed. One of the blessings of studying preaching at Gordon-Conwell is to have to preach with Haddon Robinson in the room . . . and you’d better believe that feels intimidating at first!

In these situations everything in our flesh may cry out to try to impress them. Perhaps more erudite language, or complex thought patterns, or the old favorite – name dropping. Don’t. Intimidation or temptation to show-off is distraction from the purpose of preaching. Attempts to impress will usually fail. These kinds of people actually want real ministry, not posing. More than that, these kinds of people need real ministry. It doesn’t matter whether someone has a PhD in theology or flunked out of school early. What matters is that you are preaching before the God of the universe, and before people who need Him. Be aware of the listeners, but beware of any listeners who might tempt you to lose sight of your Audience of One, and the fact that everyone there needs to hear from Him.

New Category

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Just to let you know that we’ve added a new category in the menu to the right.  If you click on “Preacher’s Personal Life” you will be given a list of all the posts related to this vital subject.  Hope that is helpful.

Preaching Passion – Checking the Foundations

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According to Augustine, our task is to say what God says. One of our core convictions must be that when the Bible speaks, God speaks. So let’s take a moment or two to run a quick evaluative test to make sure our passion in preaching has not grown pale. These three indicators are by no means an exhaustive list, but they represent perhaps the foundational layer of passion for us as preachers. How would you rate . . .

Your passion for God Himself. This is primary. As Christmas approaches and we contemplate the incarnation again, are we stirred by the passion of a God willing to go to such extreme lengths, to step into His creation, to become like us and redeem us? The spreading goodness of God spread very far and very low in reaching us. Are we truly captivated by the great and glorious God who in grace reached out for us? Is He the object of our affection, our worship, our attention?

Your passion for God’s Word. This is how we know Him. This is the means by which all other channels of spirituality and experience can be evaluated. The Bible is an amazing gift. Has it become just a tool of your trade? Or is it still gripping your thoughts as you dive ever deeper into God’s great revelation to us?

Your passion for God’s people. This is not just the concern of those in formal ministry. This is an indicator of spiritual health in all of God’s people. We become like the One we love and worship. Over time His values become ours too. Consequently a passion for people is an indicator of spiritual health. People you will preach to this Sunday, and people you will never meet until heaven. Local, global. For God so loved the world . . . so if we are close to Him, we will too.

Then there is the strand running through it all. It was implicitly there throughout yesterday’s post, it is here stated overtly. The strand going through all three indicators in this post is prayer. Prayer indicates your passion for God. Prayer shows the difference between dutiful drudgery through required study and delight-filled questing through God’s Word. Prayer reveals your heartbeat for others.

How is your passion for preaching? Paler than it should be? As hot as it could be?

The Path to Preaching With Passion?

/ Peter Mead / 5 Comments

It is easy to fake pulpit passion. All you have to do is raise the voice, pound the fists, point the finger, grimace a little and before you know it, you have fake pulpit passion. But what does it take to have genuine passion? And why would you want it?

Why? Because genuine passion marks deeply. Genuine passion is contagious, people catch it. It is commanding, people aren’t easily distracted from it. It is convicting, people have hearts changed by it. It is challenging, people see their apathy wilt under it. Genuine passion marks people deeply. (Just in case you’re tempted to fake it, remember that fake passion is off-putting, embarrassing, ineffectual and counter-productive.)

How? Genuine passion is a spiritual dynamic. It all seems to come down to, and flow from, the heart. A heart captivated by a passionate God. A heart filled with the Word of God. A heart walking in step with, beating in time with, the Spirit of God. A heart moved with compassion for the people to whom it will preach. Gripped by God, saturated in the Word, filled with the Spirit, and crystal clear on the urgency of the task of preaching that particular text to those particular people at that particular time. A genuinely passionate preacher is truly a potent tool in God’s hands.

All this is not to say that relaxed or carefully casual delivery is wrong. I often use both and see others doing so effectively. But there is also a time for allowing the passion to show. May God give us the wisdom to know when.

Review: Preaching the Gospel from the Gospels, by George Beasley-Murray

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beasleygospels.jpg

This book is far more a book on the Gospels than it is on preaching.  It would serve well as a reference tool for the gospels, having an accessible scripture index included.  Yet while not addressing homiletics very much, what it does is share a fundamental conviction that the gospels were written out of preaching, by preachers and are ideally suited to the contemporary preacher wishing to preach the truth of the gospel today.

George Beasley-Murray is a top gospels scholar.  This book was forty years in the writing, beginning as a series of lectures, then published, then revisited and rewritten in light of developments in the field.  Preaching the Gospel from the Gospels is an academic work with a door left open for ease of access for preachers.  While aware of aspects of form criticism, the historical Jesus quest, British and German scholarly traditions, etc. the book does not get weighed down with such matters. 

The book, as you might expect from a series of lectures, consists of five lengthy chapters.  The first chapter focuses on the relationship between preaching and the writing of the Gospels – it is worth the value of the book.  As Martin Dibelius said, “In the beginning was the sermon.” 

Certainly the evangelists were collectors and compilers of known stories, sayings and events of the life of Christ.  However, they were more than that.  Through the process of redaction they were theologians with unique and distinct emphases to bring out regarding the work and mission of Christ.  One great insight from redaction criticism is that of how the gospel was presented to a specific audience.  As we see the evangelists using the history for a specific group of people, there is scope for the modern evangelist to see how the story of the gospel can likewise be used for a different contemporary audience.

The remaining four chapters deal with the life, the miracles, the teaching and the parables of Jesus.  Each writer began conceptually with the resurrection of Christ, then told the story, theologically, according to their specific goals.  The stories from the life of Christ, such as the miracles, are designed with the gospel as central rather than appended.  The teaching and parables are grouped and explained in five categories each.

In conclusion Beasley-Murray finishes with a postscript that affirms Jesus himself to be the parable of God.  As such, the truth of His teaching is ultimately found in His person.  This would be true of the whole book – His parables, but also His miracles, His teaching, His life, His passion.  Jesus is the revelation of God.  In preaching Jesus, the gospel is preached.  I suppose the big message of the book is that you don’t have to hunt through the gospels to find a gospel message.  If the content of the gospels are preached faithfully to their original intent, then the gospel will be preached.

Top Trumps: Genuineness

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My post on the 12th, Do They Know That You Know?, received a helpful comment. I wrote that “The preacher must build confidence in the listeners; confidence that the preacher knows the message, knows how it will progress and knows when it will end.” The comment in response included this statement, “A good balance of the two would be great, but if I had to choose, I would be more receptive to someone who is genuine than confident.”

I heartily agree. Confidence is a matter of presentation and I would encourage a quiet confidence that relaxes the listeners. But genuineness is a matter of integrity. Integrity is not a help for preaching, it is a fundamental for preaching. All the technique and skill and training and gifting and experience in the world is undermined instantly by a loss of integrity, or even the perceived lack of genuineness.

Preaching is not like the game of top trumps. As a child I had a set of fire engine top trumps. More water tank capacity, more speed, more versatility, more crew . . . more likely to trump the card of your opponent. If preaching were top trumps then you would be a fool to sacrifice genuineness for most other “preacher’s features.” Since preaching is not top trumps, we have the privilege of seeking to develop all aspects of personal life, spiritual gifting, ministry skill and so forth.

Genuineness is one of those things that undergirds all we do. And over-confidence is not helpful. So perhaps we should be deliberately under-confident? No. When it comes to genuineness, it would be wrong to try and fake it!