Category Archives: Preaching

What good shall men get by hearing of sermons?

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Here’s a Puritan answer to this question:-

  1. The Holy Ghost is here given, Acts 10:44
  2. Men’s hearts are here opened, Acts 16:14
  3. The fear of God doth here fall upon men, Acts 13:16
  4. The proud and stony heart of men is here tamed, melted and made to tremble, Isa 66:2
  5. The faith of God’s elect is here begotten, Rom 10:14
  6. Men are here sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise, Eph 1:13
  7. Here the Spirit speaketh to the churches, Eph 1:13
  8. Christ here comes to sup with men, Rev 3:20
  9. The painful distress of the afflicted conscience is here or nowhere cursed by hearing, the bones that God hath broken receive joy and gladness, Ps 51:8
  10. What shall I say, but as the Evangelical Prophet saith?
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Connecting with postmoderns

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According to Robertson McQuilkin, there are some elements of postmodernism that we should adopt, others that we should modify, and still others that we should reject.

1. Adopt

(a) The spiritual trumps the material

(b) Authenticity is crucial

(c) Reality must be experienced

(d) Heart is more important than head

(e) Relationships are paramount

(f) Hope is at a premium

2. Modify

(a) Anti-intellectualism – a healthy suspicion of the cerebral helps dethrone materialism and scientific naturalism

(b) Story-telling – while not neglecting propositional truth, we follow Scripture when we tell stories

(c) Diversity – when taken to extremes, the celebration of diversity means that everyone’s ‘reality is different, and intolerance is the only sin.  …

50 Ways To Tweak Your Preaching

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Peter Mead has put together a collection of 50 ways in which preaching might helpfully be tweaked.  Here’s a summary, in a mixture of his words and mine:-

  1. Be mastered by one book of the Bible.
  2. Invite others into the preparation process.
  3. Use notes less.
  4. Focus more on the passage you are expositing; use fewer cross-references.
  5. Craft the main idea a bit more.
  6. Target relevance in your introduction.
  7. Use REF (review, encourage, finish) to conclude.
  8. Make sure your transitions are slow enough and clear enough so people can follow you.
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The art of sermon application

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Ask any preacher what they think is the weakest part of their sermon, and ask any sermon hearer what aspect of preaching is in greatest need of improvement, and the answer is likely to be the same: application.

Indeed, it can seem so difficult to get from text to application that some preachers are tempted to give up on expository sermons and offer topical messages the seem to speak more directly to contemporary issues and to people’s felt needs.…

In the mood

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John Carrick, in his recent book The Imperative of Preaching, urges the preacher to consider the various grammatical moods that we find in Scripture, and to reflect these faithfully in his own preaching.

There is, for example, the indicative mood.  This is the mood of declaration, or assertion.  The New Testament is full of gospel indicatives, of declarations of what God has done.  The preacher should sieze these, explain them, and announce them.

Then there is the exclamative mood. …

Leviticus 19:18 “Love your neighbour as yourself”

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Baroness Thatcher was a ‘devout Christian’, according to Dr Eliza Filby, author of God and Mrs Thatcher.  She regularly attended the parish church at Chequers, regarded the life of Jesus as exemplary, and drew on the Bible to support her political values.

I will not call into question the sincerity of Baroness Thatcher’s faith.  But I will, however, comment on one rather glaring (mis)understanding of the teaching of Scripture.

As reported in Christianity magazine (June 2013), Filby says says that in the early 1980s the text “Love thy neighbour” was often appealed to in support of the welfare state. …

Don’t keep it (too) simple, stupid

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I came across the following:-

We, as Christians, tend to complicate our faith.  We use words like ‘sanctification’ when we mean ‘growing’ or ‘substitutionary atonement’ instead of ‘Christ died for us’.

(Rob Wilkins, ‘The profound simplicity of love’, in Willow Creek magazine, January/February 1991)

Can you spot the problem here?  ‘Growing’ does not mean the same as ‘sanctification’.  ‘Growing’ can be predicated of many different things (trees, toe-nails, debts, and so on), whereas as ‘sanctification’ refers specifically to growth in holiness (but is that another ‘complicated’ word that Wilkins thinks we should eschew?).  …

Attention!

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How can preachers secure the attention of their hearers?

What follows is based on the sage thoughts of that master-preacher, C.H. Spurgeon.

To be able to command attention is no trivial matter.  Sin cannot be taken out of people, as Eve was taken out of Adam, while they are fast asleep.  And yet some preachers seem not to care very much about it: some of them stare up at the ceiling, as if they sought the attention of the angels, while others have their heads buried in their notes, as if they were talking only to themselves.…

In praise of Powerpoint

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As a teacher, I’m well acquainted with the expression ‘Death By Powerpoint’.  In fact, I use the expression myself, in order to remind myself and my students that it is easy to bore people to death using Powerpoint.

In some Christian circles (although not my own immediate circle) the use of Powerpoint in preaching is severely frowned upon.  Among the reasons I have seen given are:-

  • it lends a ‘professional slickness’ which is incompatible with the nature of biblical preaching
  • it inhibits learning because it requires people to attend in both the visual and the auditory channels, leading to ‘cognitive overload’
  • it focuses the preacher’s preparation on the technical aspects of the message, rather than its content
  • similarly, it focuses the hearer’s attention on the technical aspects of the message, rather than its content
  • in drawing the hearer’s gaze away from the preacher, it detracts from the inter-personal aspects of preaching
  • it can make preachers lazy, by doing their job of communicating effectively for them

My response to most of these objections would be, ‘It ain’t necessarily so’. …

The faculty of impromptu speech

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“You nearly found your preaching voice today.”

Those were the kindly, but slightly troubling, words of an elderly Christian gentleman after he heard me preach recently.

What he meant was that in my preaching I tend to be too tied to my notes, and to speak more to the head than to the heart.  In other words, in his view I tend to lecture, rather than to preach.

A number of somewhat random thoughts occur to me as I try to reflect on this:-

  1. I am by training and profession a teacher (of nursing), and I wouldn’t dream of speaking from fully written-out notes in my day job.
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