A couple of weeks ago I pondered the grains that work their way through Bible books. Today’s post considers the rich theme of table fellowship in Luke’s Gospel. Perhaps we need to take stock if our lives are so packed we are choosing fast food on our own. Let’s instead choose to never eat alone, but enjoy the richness of fellowship with others and with our Lord! Click here for the post.
Watch the Whiplash
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 Power of the Person
I’ve been pondering the issue of preaching the person. The person of Christ. The personal Triune God. If we aren’t captivated by the personal God that we know personally, then our preaching can too easily slip into instructional education and moralistic tirades. It is the person that captivates and draws listeners.
Let’s ponder a simple scale of personal encounter:
1. The moment of meeting – The truth is that as humans made in the image of a relational God, we are well attuned to each encounter we have with other persons. Within seconds we will determine subconsciously whether we like somebody. They might be a waitress, an airline check-in clerk, a salesman. It really doesn’t take long to determine our feelings about someone we meet. And those initial feelings can take a while to be reversed by further interaction. (Incidentally, as preachers we need to understand the power of our opening moments, those first seconds of encounter and introduction. But that is to get side-tracked.)
2. The power of love – Then there is the ongoing relational encounter. After the first impressions come the ongoing interaction, communication, sharing of life experiences and so on, all building a relationship so that we go beyond liking or disliking to deeply trusting (or distrusting), to loving (or the opposite). The follow-up relational interaction can be so powerful.
(Again, to get sidetracked for a second, we mustn’t be naive about the power of inappropriate interaction with members of the opposite sex – the magnetic power of interpersonal attraction has led many to compromise everything and discover the regret of the stealing power of sin. Preachers, we are susceptible!)
Getting back on track, what am I saying with all this? Well, I can, if I’m honest, express whether I like someone after moments of meeting. And those that I’ve known and developed a relationship with, mutually loving and caring and sharing life together . . . these are people I can talk about at some length, with my heart showing for them.
What does all this have to do with preaching? The second level of enthused personal connection is missing with some. Even the initial encounter response is apparently absent in some preaching. It is hard to tell with some preachers if they really like God at all. What are we to say to this?
If the God in our sights is benign, our preaching will be the same.
Rather than putting this in the negative, let me state this positively. Read God’s Word and get to know our personal and wonderful God. Then preach His Word. What a privilege.
And when we preach the Person, our preaching won’t feel like a pressure project, but will have a captivating and gripping power beyond words!
Preaching the Person in the Old Testament cont.
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.
Preaching the Person in the Old Testament
The Old Testament reveals the same God as the New Testament. Sometimes the focus is on the Father, sometimes even the Spirit. Let’s be sure to preach the triune God of the Bible as clearly and effectively as possible.
Now what about preaching Christ in the Old Testament? This is an important subject. I think there are many ways to preach Christ in the Old Testament. But not as many ways as some seem to think.
1. Christophanies – Ok, don’t worry about the technical term, but when we see the LORD walking on two legs, what we have is a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ. I think Moses on the Mount of Transfiguration knew Christ not simply because he’d been with the Lord after death, but because they had met face to face in the tent of meeting. Others encountered the LORD in similar ways. Abraham, Jacob, Manoah, Isaiah, and others.
2. Explicit predictions – There is a lot of prediction in the Old Testament from the very beginning. The seed of the woman, right the way down the line to the great promise to David, and so many generations in between. When we preach the Old Testament we should be stirring our listeners to anticipate the One who has already come! The already come-ness of Jesus should not dull our delight at the divine plan as seen in the Old Testament.
Tomorrow I will complete this list, and offer one way that we should be wary of preaching the personal God in the Old Testament.
Preach the Person
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.
Saturday Short Thought: One Best Way
This week I’ve been pondering the grains that run through all biblical literature. Recurring themes in the poetic books, traceable motifs in narrative books and unifying melodies in the discourse sections. Some of these are limited to a section, others to a particular writer, and in a broader sense they can be traced across the canon as a whole.
So here’s the point for today. How do we get to know these themes, motifs and melodies? Some commentaries and books will prove helpful. Seminary notes might be worth looking at again. But the bottom line is kind of simple – we need to be reading the Bible.
That seems like too obvious a thought to be worthy of a post, doesn’t it? Well, sadly I suspect there are many preachers who may study slices to preach them, but don’t have an appetite for the Word as a whole. Everyone is impoverished as a result.
Personal spirituality becomes ritualistic or moralistic, study becomes burdensome, ministry becomes draining, sermons become shallow and often anthropocentric (person focused – what to do, how to live, instructions, commands, guilt…)
Our preaching should come from the overflow of a personal delight in the God who reveals Himself in His Word. It may be a bit simplistic, but I’ll stand by the statement – unless we get into the Word the church will be gasping for “divines,” people who know God and speak out of the overflow of a heart filled. A church wanting for true spirituality will ultimately be shrivelled to the core, no matter how many programs, no matter how practical the teaching may be.
Let me invite you back into God’s Word.
Planks and Slices 4 – Whole Bible Grains cont.
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?
Planks and Slices 3 – Whole Bible Grains
Some who have only heard the preaching of books in slices may be surprised to discover that there is a long tradition of tracing themes through the Bible. Some who have only heard topical messages may be surprised to discover that some people preach through a book chunk by chunk. Sadly some are surprised to discover how rich the Bible is after only hearing human wisdom launched from the mortar tube of token Scripture readings.
Anyway, enough surprises, let’s get into Bible length grain issues. The Bible has the diversity of different writers, different languages, different cultural settings and writer circumstances. But it also has an amazing unity, almost as if it were inspired by the same Spirit throughout!
Sometimes we will trace grains length-wise through the Bible as a whole. It may be as part of a message, or it may form the entirety of a message. But it is not guaranteed to be helpful. It can be great. It can be terrible. Any pointers?
1. Don’t confuse tracing a theme with going on a wild safari in the backseat of a concordance. There is nothing worse than being in a small group Bible study where people are chasing through Bible references, ignoring the contexts and just noting repeated uses of a term. “Next verse, who has the Deuteronomy one? Thanks Bob…yep, there it is again! Our word for the night: ‘Remember!’ Great, who has the Nehemiah verse?” Okay, there may be one thing worse – a sermon that does the same.
A phenomena of language is that sometimes different writers use the same words in different settings, and sometimes they even mean different things. Linking sections together based on the proximity of concordance placement is not the key to being a master Bible handler. It doesn’t take much skill to chase the chain link of repeated terms through the Bible. We need to know our way through the Bible with a bit more skill than that to preach effectively.
2. Beware of overloading listeners with references. Even if you are legitimately making connections, the listeners have a threshold that is easy to cross with too many cross-references. Preaching is not a competition to reference as many passages as possible.
Sometimes a theme can be fully exhausted with three passages (Melchizedek), or effectively communicated with two passages (I’ve been thinking of Exodus 33 and John 1:14-18, for an example). Adding in Deuteronomy, Isaiah and Malachi may be more complete, but it may deaden the effect of the preaching if listeners feel overloaded.
More thoughts to finish this list tomorrow…
Planks and Slices 2 – Preaching Plank Grains
Yesterday I introduced the idea of tracing a grain through the length of a Bible book. Today I’d like to offer a few more thoughts before moving on to the bigger idea of tracing themes beyond the borders of a single book.
1. “Knowing tones” don’t do the job of preaching the richness of the Bible. It is easy to preach through a book and emphasize certain terms with knowing looks, vocal emphases and passing remarks. This doesn’t mean that you are doing anything significant. People may not get the point that unity has emerged again in Philippians 4 after taking a back seat in chapter 3, just because you intonate in some way. They haven’t been soaked in the text as you have…
2. Be overt in highlighting some grains if it is helpful to the listeners. Not only should we be overt to help people spot it, but we need to be clear in explaining what we are referring to. We can’t assume listeners have picked up on something subtle. If we make only a subtle nod toward a theme, then we can’t rely on that nod to carry the sermon forward significantly.
3. Be clear in explaining how a thematic grain is worth noting. Most people aren’t collecting biblical trivia as they listen to us preach. Some love that kind of stuff, but most tend to value things based on their perceived value. We need to be clear how the theme is present and what the writer is doing with it.
4. Preaching thematically doesn’t negate the need for deliberate message unity and purposefulness. It may be tempting to see thematic grains as something that is overlooked by preaching textual slices, and therefore a shortcut to preaching “something new” . . . this is not the goal. We need to preach clear, biblical, relevant and engaging messages. Help people see the grains, but do so with a purpose in line with the purpose of the text itself.
5. Beware of repetitious overload in a series. We need to repeat things in preaching, but beware that a shorthand reference to a theme can creep in, especially in a series. The negative here is that some may not understand the knowing tones and passing asides, while others who have heard about it before may not be finding the rediscovery of a theme as a wonderful delight. Be sure that each sermon preaches effectively, and that the whole effect of the series is sensitizing rather than dulling to listeners. Let the main thought of a passage drive the message. Sometimes this means that a theme may recede in a particular message, even if present in the text.
Tomorrow I’ll start to ponder canon-wide thematic grain issues. What would you add here?
Biblical Preaching 