Preaching an Unbreakable Word

One of the best sermons at T4G 2014 was Kevin DeYoung’s “Never Spoke a Man Like This Before: Inerrancy, Evangelism and Christ’s Unbreakable Bible.” One of the most memorable parts of his message was when he shared Hughes Oliphant Old’s thoughts on John Macarthur’s preaching — with Macarthur in the audience.

Be encouraged from this testimony of Macarthur’s faithfulness and take heart from DeYoung’s concluding meditation on getting through to your congregation in the weekly sermon.

Don’t Be A Drone

“In order to get attention, make your manner as pleasing as it can possibly be. Do not, for instance, indulge in monotones. Vary your voice continually. Vary your speed as well–dash as rapidly as a lightning flash, and anon, travel forward in quiet majesty. Shift your accent, move your emphasis, and avoid sing-song. Vary the tone; use the bass sometimes, and let the thunders roll within; at other times speak as you ought to do generally–from the lips, and let your speech be conversational. Anything for a change. Human nature craves for variety, and God grants it in nature, providence and grace; let us have it in sermons also.” – Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, 132.

5 Minutes with Dever & Keller

martin-lloyd-jones

In his classic book Preaching and Preachers Martyn Lloyd-Jones asks, “What is the chief end of preaching? I like to think it is this. It is to give men and women a sense of God and His presence.”

The Doctor evidently didn’t think he hit the mark very often for he once said, “I can say quite honestly that I would not cross the road to listen to myself preaching.” The venerable J.I. Packer would beg to disagree. When Packer was a 22-year-old student he heard Lloyd-Jones preach each Sunday evening during the school year of 1948–1949. He said that he had “never heard such preaching.” It came to him “with the force of electric shock, bringing to at least one of his listeners more of a sense of God than any other man” he had known.1

Lloyd-Jones has affected untold preachers over the last few decades, two of whom are Mark Dever and Tim Keller. The latest 9Marks Interview finds Dever discoursing with The Manhattan Man on the latter’s biography and early ministry. Tucked away at the interview’s end is Dever’s question of how The Doctor influenced Keller’s preaching. What ensues is an edifying dialogue on the role of tone, personality, and power in preaching.

Listen to the short segment below and the download the whole interview here.

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Conversational Preaching

Conversational Preaching

R.E.O. White once talked about ineffective preaching as being “a monstrous monologue by a moron to mutes.” He was on to something. For the best preaching, while appearing to be a monologue on the surface, is in fact a silent dialogue between the preacher and his hearers.

I’m not thinking here of conversational preaching as the preacher and congregation physically speak back and forth to one another during the sermon.1 Instead, I have in mind the spiritual—unspoken—conversation happening while he preaches and they listen.

Tone Is Something, But Not Everything

We must recognize from the outset that dialogical preaching is not merely a matter of tone. Sure, some preachers have unique personalities and moods especially suited to creating spiritual, unspoken conversation during an exposition (Tim Keller comes to mind here). So tone is important. But if you’ve ever listened to a Matt Chandler sermon you know he’s got about one volume level in delivery—LOUD—and he still effectively draws in his hearers. Thus, tone isn’t everything.

What then are some things preachers might do, if tone isn’t the silver bullet, to stir up silent dialogue in their preaching?

Helps to Conversational Preaching

The first non-negotiable is knowing the sheep. Everything that follows in this post assumes a pastor has a vibrant, growing knowledge of those entrusted to his care. Preaching week after week to the same congregation will lose its fresh power if the pastor isn’t increasing in his awareness of the flock’s spiritual condition. How else can he speak to their current experience? How else can he wisely and pointedly apply the text? Knowing the sheep is the cornerstone of conversational preaching.

A second friend is anticipating objections. This Saturday I hope to preach on 1 John 2:18-27, which includes this little puzzler, “But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you” (1 Jn. 2:27). The current draft of my manuscript asks at this point, “What does John mean here about not needing teachers? Has he just put all preachers like me out of a job?” Anticipating objections invites the hearer into the conversation the preacher has had with the text all week.

One caution on this point is in order: we ought not insert common objections scholars have about a text that not of our people have. For example, maybe you are preaching through a series on the pastoral epistles. At the outset you could say something like, “The objections to Pauline authorship deserve serious consideration and are as follows . . .” Now, maybe you think you’ve just served to increase silent dialogue, but in reality you’ve likely inserted doubt into places it had never before existed. The commentators will quibble where the average laymen doesn’t. Furthermore, the immediate objections my church has to Paul’s great gospel teaching in Ephesians 2:1-10 will likely be somewhat different than those of a mainline church in San Francisco. Anticipate then the objections your people will have.

In his masterful Between Two Worlds John Stott writes,

One of the greatest gifts a preacher needs is such a sensitive understanding of people and their problems that he can anticipate their reactions to each part of his sermon and respond to them. Preaching is rather like playing chess, in that the expert chess player keeps several moves ahead of his opponent, and is always ready to respond, whatever piece he decides to move next.

Another aid for feeding the spiritual dialogue is using rhetorical questions. Sprinkle these liberally throughout your sermon just as you should douse tortilla chips with a healthy dose of salt. Rhetorical questions can be used during explanation, illustration, and application. Last week I preached a sermon on not loving the world from 1 John 2:15-17 and asked near the start, “What do you think about the world? What comes to mind when you hear Christians and churches speak about the topic of ‘worldliness’?” After walking through John’s warning about the dangerous power of worldliness I asked, “Have you noticed your love for God waning recently? Did you feel your devotion and joy in Christ vanish this week? Our text says it’s probably because your love for the world is raging in fresh ways.”

We can ask questions we intend to answer from the text or ask questions we intend the hearer to answer from his or her experience. Rhetorical questions tease out understanding, cement meaning, and challenge the mind to think specifically.

A final tool on the topic is something I’ll call conditional application. Don’t be afraid to say something like, “If you’re in here today and are not a Christian . . .” or, “Maybe you feel embittered toward God.” These conditional statements are launching pads for not only pointed application, but for specific silent dialogue. They summon particular individuals to attention with what’s about to come in the sermon. We could think of conditional applications as personal invitations to encounter God’s truth.

The Point of It All

Conversational preaching is preaching that connects and confronts. It connects the hearer’s inner experience to the objective content of God’s word. It confronts the hearer with God’s word by calling for responses suitable to the individuals spiritual state.

Revelation and response.

Connection and confrontation.

Declaration and dialogue.

May this be our aim when we ascend to the sacred desk.

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  1. You’d have to do something crazy with κηρύσσω (keruso; Greek for “to preach,”) to turn heralding God’s word completely into dialoging about God’s word.

A Ministry of Growing Power

Powerful Preparation

“A ministry of growing power must be one of growing experience.

“The soul must be in touch with God and enjoy golden hours of fresh revelation. The truth must come to the minister as the satisfaction of his own needs and the answer to his own perplexities; and he must be able to use the language of religion, not as the nearest equivalent he can find for that which he believes others to be passing through, but as the exact equivalent of that which he has passed through himself. There are many rules for praying in public, and a competent minister will not neglect them; but there is one rule worth all the rest put together, and it is this: Be a man of prayer yourself; and then the congregation will feel, as you are entering an accustomed presence and speaking to a well-known Friend.

“There are arts of study by which the contents of the Bible can be made available for the edification of others; but this is the best rule: Study God’s Word diligently for your own edification; and then, when it has become more to you than your necessary food and sweeter than honey or the honey-comb, it will be impossible for you to speak of it to others without a glow passing into your words which will betray the delight with which it has inspired yourself.”

– James Stalker, The Preacher and His Models: The Yale Lectures on Preaching, 53-54. HT: Murray Capill.

Forceful Preaching

Power In Preaching

I’m sure we can all remember a time when we heard God’s word preached with peculiar power. If you recall such a time, here’s my question, “What about that sermon was particularly powerful?” You see, it’s one thing to say a sermon had power and it’s another thing to know why it had power.

Understanding any powerful sermon is utterly dependent on the sovereign Spirit opening hearts, I want to think about a few ordinary conduits of sermonic power.

Like a solar panel soaks up energy, we want our sermons to soak up – to varying degrees – the power in each of these forces. In my mind there are at least four power sources in every sermon.

4 Ordinary Forces in Preaching

The preacher’s personality. Of all the forces I’m going to mention this one seems to be the most dangerous. Is it wise to build a preaching ministry on a compelling personality? I hope you’d say, “No.” Yes, any sermon is going to have undeniable elements of personality; as Phillip Brooks’ famously said, “Preaching is truth through personality.” Yet, if the forceful gales in our sermons depend on the leveraging of our personality we’ve missed something. I know some who think personality should be turned off in preaching and others who say, “Use it to the glory of God!” It seems better to treat personality as something like cilantro (or whatever ingredient you think is best). When cooking Latin fare cilantro is often needed to produce the right taste, but too much of it derails the dish. So too is it with personality in preaching.

The preacher’s rhetoric. The study of rhetoric has fallen hard in our day. A quick perusal of Twitter feeds and Facebook statuses show just how far we’ve gone. I’m not thinking here of rhetoric being synonymous with eloquence. Paul rung the death knell on sophistic eloquence in 1 Corinthians 2 when he said, “And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” If that’s what you associate with rhetoric, crucify that notion.

What I have in mind is other Pauline rhetorical realities, such as, “Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others.” Or his request for the Colossians to pray “that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak.” Our sermons needs persuasive clarity; that’s the biblical ideal of rhetoric. We must work hard with language and logic so that our sentences burn with simplicity. We don’t want sermons that wander in their argument or come with wimpy in coherence. Wise rhetoric keeps us from babbling and can function as a springboard unto forceful preaching.

Balance all the above sentiments, however, with what else Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2, “I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

The preacher’s godliness. Now here’s something we all need in our preaching: sermons which are the overflow of living communion with God. I can think of numerous preachers whose communion with Christ gives their sermons an unusual sense of living energy. When they ascend to the sacred desk they did so as men just come from the mountain of God. These men glow with the truth and of Jesus, and that glow radiates into their hearers. You feel as though you must listen for this is a “man of God.”

The exhortation here is to strive for that holiness without which no one will see the Lord, so our sermons will have a saltiness about them. Keeping a close watch on ourselves and the teaching will save us and our hearers. Get in the spiritual weight room and train yourself for godliness. Then, with the Spirit’s illuminating help, your sermons will really sting and sing.

The preacher’s passage. You may notice I am operating in descending order of importance. The preacher’s godliness is the irrefutable covert reality in powerful preaching. The only real overt reality in a strong sermon is the degree to which the preacher sticks to inspired Scripture. The pastor’s words are not breathed out by God (in the technical sense of inspiration), but his text is. And those words are useful for molding the congregation in Jesus’ image. Only His words are “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Saturate your sermon with His language more than your own.

The question then is, “How faithful is your sermon to your passage?” How you answer that question has a direct correlation to how powerful you sermon will be. Let’s long for and encourage plain preaching which clings to the supreme power of God’s word. The personality, rhetoric, and holiness of a preacher cannot – in and of themselves – do anything, not least of which is be an unquenchable source of power. But God’s word is indeed an unending power plant for preachers. Will you treat it as such?

All in Due Proportion

Use your personality wisely and humbly.

Pursue precision and concision in rhetoric ruthlessly.

Cultivate communion with God joyfully.

Root your sermon in God’s word expectantly.

And then preach with power.

A Motley Crew

The gang over at Mortification of Spin keeps churning out valuable content for ordinary pastors.

Their podcast is full of witty banter and sober analysis on the current evangelical landscape. You won’t always agree with their conclusions, but at least you’ll never have to doubt which side of the pastoral/theological fence they love to live.

You’ve got the Housewife Theologian, the cranky English historian, and a Presbyterian who recently converted from being a Baptist. Sounds quite fun, doesn’t it? My wife even loves listening to the MOS episodes, but I don’t yet know if it’s because of Amy’s presence or merely because Trueman has “a cool accent.”

If you haven’t tuned in before here’s your golden opportunity. Westminster Theological Seminary recently invited the venerable Kent Hughes on campus for the 2014 Institute on Biblical Preaching. The MOS team led the panel discussion with Dr. Hughes and my, my, what wise fun ensued.

Watch how this quartet of theological know-how takes on questions like: “How can I get in the pulpit when I am so sinful?” and, “Now that you’ve reached the pinnacle of evangelical celebrity, what’s the view like from the top?” and a Spin favorite: “Where would you draw the line of being vulnerable from the pulpit in sharing your own personal sin?”

Questions

– What is the secret of staying fresh after preaching to the same congregation after so many years? (4:08)
– How do you preach to a congregation with eight-year-old and eighty-year-old? (7:26)
– How do you preach through pain and sorrow? (11:10)
– Does pain, sorrow, and heartbreak make a pastor a better preacher? (14:46)
– How does friendship function in pastoral ministry? (16:07)
– Do we, as pastors, tell our wives everything in ministry? (18:56)
– How do you cultivate humility? (24:09)
– How do you strike the balance between powerful rhetoric and the power of the cross in preaching? (27:10)
– Do I always have to preach Christ in a sermon? Even from Proverbs? (31:00)
– Outside of ministerial positions where are Christians, training in theology, needed most? (32:55)
– Would you each discuss how you do family worship in your home? (36:06)
– Are can pastors cultivate a love for the church in their children? (38:42)
– Now that you – MOS team – have reached the pinnacle of celebrity evangelicalism, what’s the view like from the top? Will you sign my Bible? (41:49)
– How can I get in the pulpit when I am so sinful? (43:48)
– Should a pastor share his personal struggles and sins from the pulpit? (49:10)
– Do you think a layman can preach? (51:22)
– Should churches only serve grape juice for the Lord’s Supper? (56:17)
– Should a catechism be preached every Lord’s Day? (59:49)
– If we don’t take the time to pray and meditate on the passage we’ll preach, can we say the Holy Spirit accompanies our preaching? (1:03:32)
– How do Luther and Calvin differ in their preaching? (105:30)
– How should we think about unction in preaching? (1:10:08)
– What’s the most difficult text you’ve had to preach through Dr. Hughes? (1:13:56)
– What’s the role for women on the mission field who have M.Div. degrees? (1:15:09)