Preaching Matters

Encountering The Living God

Jonathan Lamb

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781783591497
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783591510
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Preaching matters. It is a God-ordained means of encountering Christ. This is happening all around the world. The author knows this only too well. He recalls:
- the student who, on hearing a sermon about new life in Christ, found faith which changed his life and future forever
- the couple facing the trauma of the wife's terminal illness who discovered that Christ was all they needed, following a sermon on Habakkuk
When the Bible is faithfully and relevantly explained, it transforms hearts, understandings and attitudes, and, most of all, draws us into a living relationship with God through Christ.
This is a book to ignite our passion for preaching, whether we preach every week or have no idea how to put a sermon together. It will encourage every listener to participate in the dynamic event of God's Word speaking to his people through his Holy Spirit.
God's Word is dynamite; little wonder that its effects are often dynamic.
This title is brought to you by Keswick Ministries. Find out more at https://www.keswickministries.org

1
Biblical preaching must be centred on God’s Word

The author and global preacher, John Stott, once commented that ‘the secret of preaching is not so much mastering certain techniques, as being mastered by certain convictions’. And there is no more significant conviction by which to be mastered than this: the Word of God is authoritative and powerful because it is God’s inspired revelation to all people, cultures and generations. As we have seen from Nehemiah’s account, Scripture is given by God – ‘which the LORD had commanded’ (Nehemiah 8:1) – and must therefore set the agenda for all preaching. Our job is to ensure that we allow Scripture to be at the centre, to work hard at understanding its meaning and intent, and to devote our energies to expounding its truth.

Submitting to the Word of the Lord

1. Authority

In some cultures, the preacher is perceived to have authority because he has the right theological credentials. Or perhaps, he has the right ecclesiastical title or status. Or we think his authority comes from wearing certain clothes or speaking from an elevated pulpit.

Not so. Authority comes from one primary source. When we look at the New Testament words for preaching, it is clear that they point towards one issue: preaching is not announcing our own words in our authority, but proclaiming God’s Word with his authority. Many years ago, Edmund Clowney highlighted the four words which help us understand the nature of preaching.1

The most common word group means to declare as a herald. Preaching is to proclaim the message, which is given with the authority of the God who sends us. The message is not generated by the messenger, but by God himself. The second word is related to announcing the good news. It is not used exclusively of the task of evangelism, though it includes this. Again, it is God’s good news, not ours. The third group of words relates to the task of witnessing or testifying to the facts. And the fourth word, often translated ‘teaching’, is to lay out the facts as God has revealed them. The significant thing to notice is not only the way in which the words are often placed alongside one another (which means that preaching will contain all of these different elements and should not be narrowly defined), but the emphasis on the ‘given-ness’ of the message. We are to proclaim the Word of the Lord.

Also, if we look at Paul’s instructions to Timothy, we see how insistent he was that the pastoral task should involve faithful, urgent, sustained reading and proclamation of that Word (1 Timothy 4:11–16; 2 Timothy 4:1–5). ‘Preach the word’ or ‘Proclaim the message’ (2 Timothy 4:2). Here, Paul is emphasizing the heraldic declaration of what God has revealed to us in Scripture. And his additional verbs – ‘correct, rebuke and encourage’ – indicate that this task is purposeful: we expound God’s Word in order to bring about change (as we shall see in chapters 8 – 10).

Paul’s previous paragraph underlines this, with the clearest statement of why we must rely on Scripture and expound it faithfully (2 Timothy 3:14–17). The Scriptures are authori­tative because they are God-breathed (verse 16), and therefore they are the only source of revelation concerning humankind’s greatest need (‘to make you wise for salvation’). Hence, the preaching task is to open up these Scriptures for the purpose of ‘teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness’ (verse 16). So, Paul presses home the point: our task is to proclaim the Bible. Nothing else will do, for nothing else reveals God’s purposes, and nothing else has such transforming power. In this way, the Bible passage establishes the preacher’s authority. Preaching is not authoritative because of personality, academic study or communication skills.

The great preacher Campbell Morgan made the point clearly: ‘My sermon has no authority in it at all, except as an interpretation or an exposition or an illustration of the truth which is in the text. The text is everything. That is the point of authority.’

2. Integrity

Most preachers are familiar with looking at a Bible passage ‘in order to grab the first preachable lesson that pops up’, as David Day has written.2 The text, in other words, offers us a pretext. It’s an excuse to preach on a topic or theme dear to our hearts, which, by a stroke of luck, appears in the passage. But this is to use the Bible as a peg on which to hang our thoughts. If preachers do this, they are failing to treat it with integrity. They are not allowing the Bible to speak. But as we have seen from Nehemiah, the Word must be centre stage. David Day urges us to ‘preach on the passage, the whole passage and nothing but the passage’.3 This is the central task for the preacher, if he truly believes in the authority of the Bible and the authority of the God who speaks it.

The apostle Paul was especially concerned that his ministry should be centred on God’s Word. We know from his second letter to the Corinthians that he was being criticized by the false teachers in Corinth for a range of issues, some of which included his apparent lack of rhetorical skill. In his defence, he outlined the calling of all preachers of the Word: ‘We have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God’ (2 Corinthians 4:2).

Paul underlines his determination to be faithful to the message. He stresses a key priority: we are not to distort the Word of God, but to present its truth plainly. To ‘set forth’ means an open declaration, a full disclosure of the truth. It’s the opposite of deception. It means ‘to show your hand’. It is like the conjuror or the magician at a circus who rolls up his sleeves to show that he is hiding nothing. Paul insists we are holding nothing back, but proclaiming faithfully the whole counsel of God. And this is the force of verse 2: we don’t twist the message to please our hearers, but set forth the truth. We don’t embellish the truth to win popularity, but speak the message plainly. We don’t reserve the message for an élite group who can be specially initiated into higher levels of spiritual experience, but commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience.

Just a few verses earlier, Paul has described the characteristics of his ministry: ‘Unlike so many, we do not peddle the word of God for profit. On the contrary, in Christ we speak before God with sincerity, as those sent from God’ (2:17). The false teachers tried to secure converts through deception. It’s possible that the preachers were similar to the occult groups of the day, salesmen who were marketing a new and mysteri­ous religious product. Some writers think that this group objected to the way Paul spoke so openly about the gospel; they preferred truth to be shrouded in mystery. And of course, they could charge significant fees if people really would like to discover this esoteric truth. Maybe the word ‘pedlar’ originally referred to those who watered down wine for sale in the market. They were guilty of distorting the product, the message, but they didn’t care, salesmen whose sole motive was profit.

Later, Paul gives us an insight into his concern about the defective preaching in Corinth. They used familiar language, but it was, Paul said, another Jesus, a different spirit, a different gospel (2 Corinthians 11:3–4). We are not sure what this might have represented: maybe it was a gospel that majored on strength, not weakness; a message that promised triumph, not suffering; a gospel that paraded glory, not the cross. But what really matters for Paul, and for all who are called to preach the Word, is a commitment to a faithful, clear, open declar­ation of the truth.

We have dwelt a while on this passage, because it so help­fully explains what we mean by Bible exposition, or exposi­tory preaching. It is simply making God’s Word clear and plain, bringing out what is there. Exposition is sometimes caricatured as though it were merely a running commentary on a lengthy passage, taking four years of Sundays, for example, to preach through the whole of Leviticus. Or perhaps, we think it is a particular cultural style with three neat points held together by ‘apt alliteration’s artful aid’.4 But exposition, simply defined, is opening up a Bible passage in order to expose its force and power. This is why John Stott often underlined that all true Christian preaching is expository: ‘Our understanding of preaching is that it is essentially...an exposition of the Word of God...in the broad sense that it opens up the biblical text.’5 ‘In expository preaching, the biblical text is neither a conventional introduction to a sermon on a largely different theme, nor a convenient peg on which to hang a ragbag of miscellaneous thoughts, but a master which dictates and controls what is said.’6 Let me suggest four priorities:

Four priorities

Our conviction is that Scripture is the authoritative and powerful Word of God. All preaching must be centred on God’s Word if it is to prove effective in fulfilling God’s purposes.

Our concern is that, if the Bible is God’s Word, his voice needs to be heard. In fact, we are convinced that nothing is more important for the life of the Christian and the local church than this. Peter is bold enough to assert that those who speak should do so ‘as one who speaks the very words of God’ (1 Peter 4:11). Despite the human frailties of both speaker and listener, God has chosen to reveal himself and his purposes through the faithful preaching of Scripture. As I will emphasize in the next chapter, before preachers stand up to speak, they must listen carefully to his voice. In his sermons on Ephesians, John Calvin observed:

It is certain that if we come to church we shall not hear only a mortal man speaking but we shall feel...that God is speaking to our souls, that he is the teacher. He so teaches us that the human voice enters into us and so profits us that we are refreshed and nourished by it. God calls us to him as if he had his mouth open and we see him there in person.7

Our attitude must be to submit to God’s Word, committed above all to let the Bible do the talking. In that sense, Bible exposition is not so much a method as a mindset: our attitude is one of submission to that Word, ensuring that what I am to preach flows directly from that divine revelation. And my priority, if I am a preacher, is to make that Word clear and plain.

Our approach will ensure that all preaching must take its context, content, shape and purpose from the Bible passage. We will think in subsequent chapters about how that might be achieved, but anything less than explaining clearly what the Bible says – what the Lord is saying – is not biblical preaching. The heartbeat must be the heartbeat of the Bible passage. This passage defines the message and shapes all we have to say. It is the architect’s plan, quite different, mixing our metaphors, from the description Haddon Robinson once gave of preachers who merely ‘salt and pepper’ their messages with Bible verses.8

I am not referring here to a particular style of preaching as such. As I have implied, Bible exposition is not a specific cultural approach, with detailed verse-by-verse commentary, linear arguments and three neat points. That may work well in some contexts, but every preacher has a unique personality, cultural context and way of communicating. The core commitment is universal: we wish to expose the force and power of God’s Word. At the end of your preaching (if you are a preacher), whatever your cultural style, the really important question is this: have the listeners heard the message and meaning of the Bible text itself? We have already emphasized the primary importance of preaching from a Bible passage, but it is helpful in church life sometimes to speak on a particular topic, and then we will need to range across more than one section of the Bible. But even then, there is wisdom in anchoring the sermon in one significant Bible passage, enabling hearers to focus clearly, and helping them to understand that we are not just preaching our own opinions on the topic, but finding out what God has to say about it.

3. Humility

Being convinced of the authority and centrality of the Word will also shape the preacher’s own approach and motivation to the task of preaching. We have already seen from 2 Corinth­ians 4 that Paul was concerned to speak the Word faithfully and clearly, and to keep that central. In the same chapter, he assured the Corinthians that he was not in the business of Christian ministry to impress the crowds, to build his own power base or to feed his own ego. Paul expressed it with characteristic directness: ‘What we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord’ (2 Corinthians 4:5).

As globalization took hold at the end of the twentieth century, some Christian commentators suggested that, at least in some parts of the Western world, a consumerist attitude was emerging in the church. This was described as a ‘McChurch mentality’, which was pushing Christian leaders and pastors to market themselves and their church in an almost competitive spirit. It suggested that congregations approached sermons in much the same way as they approached fast-food restaurants. Today, McDonald’s; tomorrow, Burger King.

In Paul’s day, there was certainly a problem with personality cults and a drive towards showmanship. Paul uses the words of his critics in 2 Corinthians 10:10: ‘In person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing.’ And in the next chapter, he admits, ‘I may indeed be untrained as a speaker’ (11:6). His rivals in Corinth were clearly very concerned about image, projecting themselves, their eloquence and their rhetorical skill. And Paul was not afraid to confront that directly: ‘What we preach is not ourselves’ (4:5). We are not projecting our personalities, not trying to build our own power base. He had already said this very directly in his first letter: ‘When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom...For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Corinthians 2:1–2).

In chapter 11, we will look more directly at the call to preach Christ. The point to underline here is that, if Scripture is at the centre, then preaching will not focus on us. Paul wanted nothing to get in the way of the gospel message. It was the authoritative proclamation that really mattered. In a media-conscious age, it is no surprise that our churches can become theatres where performance matters more than content, where we honour our evangelical ‘heroes’ and elevate their ministries. Christ and his Word must be centre stage.

4. Community

One of the significant benefits of Bible exposition is that it encourages the congregation to focus on the Bible passage, to explore and understand its significance, and to check what the preacher is saying against what they themselves are reading. Preaching, as we shall see in chapter 8, is a community event. The preacher’s concern is to bring the Bible to the ­congregation, not simply to deliver his own conclusions, but to encourage each person to encounter the Word of the Lord, and the Lord of that Word. Careful explanation of the Bible passage is not intended solely to provide a meal; it is also to demonstrate how to cook, so that each Christian can discover ways in which a Bible passage might be opened up. Note the commendable example of the Bereans, who ‘received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true’ (Acts 17:11).

There is special value for the congregation if the church commits to preaching through Bible books, working con­secutively across selected passages. Christopher Ash sets out a series of reasons why such preaching ministry is helpful. It ensures that the church hears the whole counsel of God and receives a rich diet; it means that preachers treat the Bible with integrity as they preach passages in their context, and thereby provide Christians with a good model for their own Bible reading.9

We can also ensure that the Bible is at the centre of our church life by taking seriously Paul’s encouragement to Timothy: ‘Devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching’ (1 Timothy 4:13). The loss of the Word’s centrality in churches is seen in many ways, including its marginalization when it is not read publicly, but also in the ever-decreasing length of time devoted to its teaching. It has been estimated that the average sermon length in UK churches has now fallen to fifteen minutes, leading one journalist to comment wryly that ‘this is a remarkable tribute to the power of intercessory prayer’ (that is, prayer for shorter sermons!). Congregations must play their part in ensuring that the Word is central – in its public reading as the church gathers, in appropriate and creative approaches for children’s events, in family life, and in personal spiritual disciplines. The warm guidance of Deuteronomy 6 still applies: ‘These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up’ (Deuteronomy 6:6–7).

Meeting the Lord of the Word

As the people gathered in Jerusalem and the Scriptures were opened (Nehemiah 8:1–2), they didn’t merely listen to the words of the law, but met the God who spoke them. The dramatic encounter on the road to Emmaus, which we saw in the Introduction, makes the same point. Having met Christ through the pages of the Old Testament, the disciples declared, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?’ (Luke 24:32). And breath-taking though it might seem, when God’s Word is opened faithfully in our congregations, the same experience is possible today. Indeed, should that not be our prayer and expectation? Should we not long for burning hearts as we encounter the living God for ourselves?

Recent surveys amongst UK congregations indicate that the vast majority of believers come to church with high expect­ations, longing to hear the Word of the Lord and to meet the Lord of the Word. Yet often, we know this hope is not realized. Greg Haslam tells the story of a Native American who visited a large North American church to hear a well-known pastor preach. ‘He held forth for about forty minutes to a congregation of five or six thousand people, while the Red Indian10 sat expressionless, his arms folded across his chest, listening very carefully. Afterwards, his host said, “Well, what did you think?” The Indian paused for a moment before saying, “Big wind. Loud thunder. No fire.” ’ Greg Haslam uses the story in the context of his concern about the spiritual state of our churches, and the urgent need to meet God in the power of the Word and the Spirit.11

Preaching the Word certainly operates at the horizontal level – preacher to congregation – with the purpose of mutual edification. But we should learn from Nehemiah 8 that the...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Section A: The Word of God and the heart of preaching
• Warm-up
• 1 Biblical preaching must be centred on God’s Word
• 2 Biblical preaching must pray God’s Word
• 3 Biblical preaching must understand God’s Word
• Section B: The teacher and the work of preaching
• Warm-up
• 4 Biblical preaching must be focused
• 5 Biblical preaching must be clear
• 6 Biblical preaching must be relevant
• 7 Biblical preaching must be embodied
• Section C: The congregation and the purpose of preaching
• Warm-up
• 8 Biblical preaching must involve the congregation
• 9 Biblical preaching must be applied
• 10 Biblical preaching must depend on God’s Spirit
• 11 Biblical preaching must proclaim God’s grace in Christ
• Appendix 1 Suggestions for further study and discussion
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3 How to work as a group on a manuscript Bible study
• Appendix 4 From text to sermon
• Appendix 5 Working on the sermon’s content
• Appendix 6 Running a preachers’ fellowship group
• Appendix 7 Evaluating a sermon
• Notes
• KESWICK MINISTRIES