 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
TEN STEPS TOWARD REFRESHING YOUR PREACHING
Scripture Lesson: II Timothy 4: 1-5
1. AIM AT, AND ASK, FOR HUMILITY AND TEARS IN YOUR PREACHING The text for humility is Romans 12:3, “For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.” The text for tears is Joel 2:17, “Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep and say, "Spare your people, O Lord, and make not your heritage a reproach, a byword among the nations. Why should they say among the peoples, 'Where is their God?'" Pulpit humility comes partly from a spirit of downward mobility, what our Lord called “the way of the cross.” “He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men, and being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.” (Phil 2: 6-8). That is the humility of self-forgetfulness, being lost in the cause of helping others. These were the two qualities for which the Puritans prayed before they entered their pulpits. Let us do likewise. It helps us to raise our standard of preaching. J.H. Thornwell said, “I have never preached and I despair of doing so.” His ideal of preaching was so high that he despaired of his own feeble attempts, though he was one of the most renowned preachers of his day. Recognize too your great dependence on the Holy Spirit to help you in your sermons. Remember that if He were to withdraw His aid, the glory would depart from your message. “Ichabod” would be written over it. Without Him you can do nothing. 2. BUILD PASSION AND MOTIVATION FOR THE PULPIT. So that it becomes the work for which you live and breathe, the centerpiece of your ministry, the joy of your life, the delight of your days. Remember that the great Head of the Church has made three repositories for His sacred truth: The Holy Scriptures, The hearts of believers, And the Christian ministry. We are given a sacred trust. We are stewards of the mysteries of God. Calvin: It is a great and excellent thing for a man to be set over a Church that he may represent the person of the Son of God. It is possible and most desirable for one, at the same time, to magnify his office and preach with the lowest personal humility. Remember why we preach. There are already other good forms of communicating the Gospel and edifying the flock. Why preach? There are good reasons: 1. We are charged to do so by our Lord and His apostles 2. Preaching is instruction plus application. It is the application that sets preaching apart from other forms of Christian communication. 3. True preaching is not about the Bible in the way teaching is. Preaching is pressing the Bible into the hearts of others. Even a great seminary lesson is not as valuable as a true sermon, because the lesson is about the truth or the text, but the sermon is the text itself screwed into the heart. 4. Preaching has all the benefits of sustained monologue. One can pile up reason for the church to believe a certain truth or practice a certain behavior. One can amass evidences for a point. One can use different styles of addressing the people, emotional appeal, narrative, the appeal to reason, drama,. All of these are legitimate and add variety and interest, where other forms of communication are limited. Remember what a sermon is: Definition: A true sermon is an exposition of a passage of Scripture in terms of contemporary culture with the goal of helping people understand and obey the truth of God. 3. DEVOTE YOURSELF TO YOUR PREACHING AS YOUR PRINCIPAL WORK. Today you will be called to be a kind of “pastoral director.” Many things may dilute your study time and distract from the main event, which is the Lord’s Day worship. Keep the main event the main event. Keep your study time sacred. Most interruptions could have waited. Those long quiet morning hours have gold in their mouths. You can meditate deeply and gain insight you may never have had before. Especially is this true in the longer pastorate. The preacher must be forever mining new gold, going deeper or his people will feel that they have “used him up,” and will go elsewhere for fresh spiritual nourishment. Harry Emerson Fosdick and others have set a standard of one hour in the study for each minute in the pulpit. 4. READ AND MEDITATE WIDELY. Don’t just concentrate on next Sunday, but freshen your mind with principles and illustrations from other disciplines; e.g., biographies, scientific advances, contemporary culture, sermons of Samuel Davies, Frederick Beuchner, Gerhardus Vos, Spurgeon. (Caution: stay away from sermons on your text in the period before establishing your outline and approach.) We are to study to show ourselves approved unto God. We are expert witnesses. We cannot be content to be merely witnesses. The secret of being learned in some things is to be heroically ignorant in others. 5. USE THE POWER OF INCUBATION AND RUMINATION That would mean that you need to start your preparation earlier than you might now be doing. So that when a sermon idea comes it is written down and put into a folder where it gathers other thoughts and illustrations until it is ripe and ready to be preached. Even your sleep can be used in this way, when messages are developing in your unconscious mind. 6. DON’T DO ANYTHING ALWAYS. Stay away from the predictable, so that your people need to stay on their toes to follow your thought. Don’t let them “read” you. We do this when we hand out outlines in the bulletin and ask them to fill in the blanks. That may be interactive, but what it loses is “pulpit surprise,” a valuable tool in the preacher’s arsenal. For example instead of always having 2, 3, or 4 headings under your proposition. Preach a sermon with just one great idea and then let your points be in the shape of IDEA: I - Illustrate the principle D - Define the principle E - Explain the principle A - Apply the principle. If you have been preaching paragraphs or chapters, go to textual preaching for a while. For example when have you ever heard a message on Psalm 85:10, “Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other.”? But what a great text that is about the marriage (made in Heaven) between the Law and the Gospel! Choose great texts to have great sermons. Prayerfully discern the needs of your flock and match the truths captured in these texts to meet those needs. If you take an old text, however, treat it in a new way, or if a you select a new text, then treat it in a familiar style. 7. PRAY OVER YOUR SERMONS. I know you do, but let us do it before the sermon is preached. During the preparation phase let there be a rhythm between the desk of study and the chair of prayer so that one goes back and forth between preparation of the message and the adoration of the truth of God. Then even during the delivery of the message, you can do as Wintley Phipps does and pray aloud to the Lord for help and mercy and clarity as he goes, or as others of us who speak, as it were, with the front of the minds and pray with the back of the mind. Following the message, do not hurry away, but linger perhaps in the sanctuary or some other quiet place where you can ask God to penetrate the hearts with the Word of God, rather than letting Satan replace the gospel with the latest talk of sports or politics. In some of my places of service, those would be important and memorable moments, with colleagues or friends, when we would pray the message into the hearts after it had been given. 8. PREACH GOD’S LAW AS PREPARATION FOR THE GOSPEL. That is what the Lord Jesus did. His first word was, “repent and believe the Gospel.” In his first sermon He reinterpreted God’s commandments. That is also what John the Baptist did. He laid the axe at the root of the tree in preparation for the Gospel which the Lord Jesus would bring. We live in an antinomian time, when the thunder of the law seldom precedes the announcement of the gentle rain of God's mercy in Christ. There are many who seem to be full but that have never been emptied, they know no tears of repentance, no sense of conviction of sin. They may hardly realize what it is from which they have been saved. Study the intimate connection there is between the law and the gospel. We can’t have one without the other. 9. BE A CALVINISTIC PREACHER. I don’t mean by that preach election and predestination first last and always. I mean that you believe and preach as if there are two sides to the Gospel vice where the Armenian preacher would have only one. We agree with him that one side of our witness is that the call for everyone to repent and believe. But there is another side to our message. There is the truth that no one can come to Christ unless the Father draws him. That every plant which God has not planted shall be plucked up. There must be the call for mercy with the recognition that only God can save a sinful heart. We agree with the Armenian that the human mind, will, and heart are involved in conversion, but we see that in a wider context, that it is God who bends the will toward Himself and inclines the heart to seek after Him and persuades the mind to believe. “It is God who works in us to will and to do according to His good pleasure.” 10. REMEMBER YOU PREACH IN THE REAL WORLD. GIVE ATTENTION TO PRACICAL REALITIES. That may mean more concise sermons, since our people have to develop the capacity to absorb sustained discourse. Be patient and give them time. They want to be fed. And if you give them the finest of the wheat and honey from the rock, they will respond. It means more attention to application. Our sermon time has been so crunched that we may be tempted to leave off application or nod to it on the way out the door. Try to do application as you go, (See Logan, Preacher and Preaching especially the chapter on application) But do it and do it with particularity; that is, targeting specific groups without naming them; e.g. backsliders, new Christians, unbelievers and nominal Christians. See that the young are reached and the children and the elderly, with application appropriate to their needs. Otherwise you may stand the risk of the advertiser who drew people with the notice of a sale of men’s suits for $39. At the bottom of the page in small print, it read “one size fits all.” Your people come in all different spiritual sizes and longings and mistakes. Address them where they are. It means paying attention to your speaking voice. It is your divinely given instrument, delicate and carefully designed to go with your personality. Treat it with great care and get training for your voice if you haven’t already. Be careful of cheering at your son’s or daughter’s soccer games, or any other straining of so precious a vehicle for communicating the Gospel. Conclusion: All I have done is to take you back to basics. We all become too elaborate and give up the old ways in search of something new. But do these things and your enthusiasm will return. And the empty seats may fill up. Soli Deo Gloria! |
