Preaching, part 2 again

Alrighty then. So you have the passage in front of you, properly exegeted. What does the burden look like specifically? I gave one example, I thought I would give a few more examples.

1. So when you preach from John’s Gospel. John has a burden and point and big picture he is after. He tells us in John 20:30-31, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” So every single passage is pregnant with purpose, and that purpose is to demonstrate that this man, Jesus, is the Christ the Son of God, so that you might believe and believing you might have eternal life. While I absolutely believe in the application of this book for believers, I whole heartedly believe John’s inspired purpose is the preaching of the gospel to the lost for their salvation. So no passage can be interpreted outside of that huge burden and intention. Which makes arguments against John 6 being applicable to our day laughable (but I digress).
2. 1 John 5:13 tells us that, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know you have eternal life.” Pastorally speaking there are those who can live with doubt that they have eternal life. (I think 2 Peter suggests this very thing as well when Peter says, “For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten  that he was cleansed form his former sins.”) So when you go to preach from 1 John, this burden for the people to KNOW that they have eternal life, weighs in to every single sermon. While there is all sorts of good theology taught in this small book, that theology serves the pastoral purpose of helping those believers who are struggling with knowing that they have eternal life. The flip side is this burden is also aimed at those who believe that they have eternal life, but have nothing at all in their lives to commend them.
3. Finally example from the Old Testament. Now here this is a little more tricky for a lot of pastors. Let’s take the book of Exodus. Now Moses wrote this book to God’s people. He wrote this books it seems for the purpose of reminding God’s people year after year, of the redemption that God had accomplished and the worship that God demands. Broadly speaking I think the themes of redemption and worship are the center of this book. So you would expect from what I have said, that perhaps the burden of this book is for us to see the redemption with which God has redeemed us and learn the worship that God demands of us. And, you would be right. However the trick, I would say here is that we are not Israel, we are the church, and it is clear that the Old Testament is clearly all about Christ and the redemption he has made for his people. So while the burden in the sermon is on the purposes of Moses, those purposes have to be finally made clear by the inspired New Testament authors who show us how these things were pointing forward to Christ his redemption and his worship. So even here, we are after that burden of the pastor who wrote these books so form up the points and message of our sermons.

So I hope this is helpful to give a little more detail with what I am talking about. Next time I will deal with how to form my sermons from this information and how at times I violate these things as well.

Preaching Part 2

SO the second thing about preaching that I think about is this.

What was the author trying to tell the people who would read the letter?

Now in most cases we call this the author’s intent.

However, for years now I have called this the pastoral burden. What do I mean?

That passage was written for a particular group of people for a particular reason. Whether it is the Old Testament or the New Testament, each passage had a reason for its existence.

And it is that word right there: reason. That makes all the difference in the world.

You see you can take a passage, look at the Greek or Hebrew, parse the sentence, draw your arcs, create your flow diagrams, and even chase out your typology. But without the reason for that text’s existence, the data you gather from these various tools, instruments and rules, leaves you without a cohesive whole.

I have called that cohesive whole: the pastoral burden. After proper exegesis, built on proper hermeneutics, bringing this passage into today can only be done, when we discover what the pastoral burden is of the passage.

I ask questions like:

• What spiritual good was expected in God’s people, who read this passage?
• Upon hearing this passage and the doctrine of this passage, what part of the life of God’s people was this aimed at? Was it aimed at them as a whole or individuals? Was it aimed at their thinking or their behavior?
• In what way does Paul use this doctrine right here?

An example might help. Romans 8:28-30 is a passage that so many people love. This passage speaks at least in part about the doctrine of predestination. But the passage is not simply giving a good theology lesson. That doctrine is being used for a specific reason namely way Christians should view and handle suffering.

Another way to say what I am saying is this: the doctrine does not end on itself, but serves the greater purpose of drawing our heart to worship through living life pleasing to God.

This was Paul’s pastoral burden, and when we preach I think a sermon should share the same pastoral burden as the writer we are interpreting. If we don’t, then I think we miss the chance to help God’s people see how practical doctrine really is, and we miss the change to show them how to read God’s word rightly.

So what is the pastoral burden of the passage?

Preaching, part 1

I have been thinking a lot about preaching. Partly because that is what I do for a living.

Now there are two parts about preaching to think about, or maybe three.

1. Preparing to preach – writing the sermon, planning the sermon
2. Then preaching – the actual talking part.

My thoughts have been on the first. So I thought I would share a few thoughts.

Preaching I think should still be a monologue. What I mean is we are expecting in the preaching moment to hear one person talking. And if the pastor is doing what he should, then one person is truly all we will hear.

This one person talking should be God and God alone.

The Pastor studies and writes his sermon so that when he speaks it is as though God is speaking through him because he has so accurately interpreted the passage before him that God’s voice in the text is unmistakable.

Since we expect a monologue, the idea of turning the preaching moment into an interactive time with dialog between people and pastor, just seems a bit off. I know people need to ask question and digest, but I suggest that the preaching moment is not the time for that.

God is speaking in His word, and we puny humans need to be quiet and listen.

3 Lessons for Dark Times in Ministry

There have been some pretty dark days in ministry over the years. Some of the darkest times stem directly from sin. It could be my own sin or the sin of others that pushes the darkness, but I have learned that there are 3 things a pastor ought to remember in these times. (yeah I am sure there are like 50 other things. But I find that these things are the ones that I need to remember the most)

First, you are not God

I am not God. I don’t have power. I can’t persuade hearts. I can’t move mountains. I can’t affect change. I can’t sooth hurts, calm nerves, enlighten eyes, thrill hearts, or illuminate minds. I can’t even do these things to myself. When I read the Scriptures, ultimately I can’t understand them without the Holy Spirit.

All I can do are two simple things. First, try to be as clear as I can when I am sharing the Word of God. Whether I am preaching, teaching, witnessing, encouraging, leading, persuading, or sharing, the best I can do, the MOST I can do is try to be as clear as I possibly can. And then get out of the way.

The other simple thing I can do is pray. Prayer is powerful because God is powerful. As God governs and guides his world, to his ends, for his purposes, with his aims, he has chosen to use the foolishness of preaching and praying. Prayer can do whatever it is God wants it to do.

So remembering that we are NOT God should help us clear out the cache of tasks that we really have no business worrying about. Then we can focus, as pastors that is, on the two things God has given to us: Ministry of the Word and Prayer.

Second, you are not indispensable

Even if we stay in the same church for decades, we are only one blip on the radar for the growth of these people. Their families, other pastors, friends, books, internet preachers, are all blips in their lives.

And God many times uses others when we can’t be used at the moment. Or let’s put it another way, God cares more for our church’s spiritual growth than you or I ever will. He will complete what he started in them, even if he does it without us.

There are even times we are simply useless. Our sin runs amok, and our zeal is lagging. Yet, God’s people are still making progress in spite of us. Why? Because God is not limited to one single man in the lives of hundreds of people. God has great means at his disposal.

So we are not necessary, but we are wanted. God wants to use us in the lives of the church we serve; the people want us to use our gifts to serve them and help them. But in the end, God can get someone else to replace us, and there are more people serving your congregants than just you.

Third, you are not alone

I think this might be the hardest part for most of us as pastors. We can spend hours with people in meetings, appointments, worship services, and even service projects, and we can still feel totally alone.

No one seems to understand the burden we bear. God has charged us with the spiritual oversight of a group of souls, and we will give an account of how we have shepherded these people. Then there are the daily pressures of preparing sermons and being clear, counseling and giving people advice that we hope is right, and leading and modeling how Christians ought to live.

So at times it feels that no one else is doing what we are doing. It feels no one cares what it is we are doing. But we are not alone.

God has promised to be our God and for us to be his people. The writer to the Hebrews reminds them that God will never leave them nor forsake them. It’s a New Testament way of saying, ” I will be your God.” Because of that, we are never alone. We have with us the Triune God in his oath swearing self. And so we are not alone. We can walk through these dark days; we can face the hard times. We don’t have to go it alone. If we feel alone, it is because we are failing to believe what God has said.

But I think we need to also say, usually the people in our churches are with us. They might not understand all the pressures we face, but they are there. They might not grasp what they could do for us, but they haven’t left. They might not be very vocal, but they are just a phone call away. They might even be ugly to us and expect of us beyond what they should, but they are still there. And we are not alone. God by his grace, through these people that seem to not be growing and learning or loving Christ, are actually the ones God will often use to bring his grace, mercy,and compassion to us. Because if they treated us as we have treated them(except those times when someone who is really evil towards us), we would suffer greatly. I think we find that these people we believed so immature, are actually many times more mature than we ourselves, because rather than throw their hands up and walk away from the church and from us. Quietly wait for us to get ourselves together, praying for us, and longing for us to realize we are not alone.

 

Preaching to myself

Each week I put in about 15 hours studying for the Sunday morning sermon, and it never fails, God convicts me usually more than he does anyone else.

I usually follow some sort of pattern to my studies that looks like this:

• Start in prayer ( continue in prayer, and frankly I am praying through the whole time of study)
• Then I usually take the English and do a flow diagram, which is basically trying to show the various dimensions of independent and dependent clauses and how the relate to each other.
• After this I will translate the passage, looking for other finer points.
• Sometimes this translation will show me an area that I need some further study, and I will do further study. Usually this involves, word studies, typology, chasing out parallel passages of the Analogy of Scripture type and Analogy of Faith variety as well.
• From here I write out a couple of different outlines that help me to process the passage and its main ideas.
• It is at this point that I will read commentaries, to see if there is anything I have missed, or even other information that is extremely helpful.
• Once that is done, I write the sermon. Usually I am writing the sermon by Thursday.

Here is where this turns personal. Usually before I start to write the sermon, things happen in my life almost every single week that makes it necessary for me to go over and over the passage.

It is as though God is forcing me to apply that passage that week, as I am working to get it ready to preach to God’s people. I think this happens for 2 reasons:

1. Because God wants to humble me and remind me that I don’t have it all together. I need a constant remind that I have not arrived. I am a work in progress, and having to deal with my own sin related to the passage I am about to preach on Sunday, is a great deterrent to arrogance.
2. It helps me to try to work through what does the application of this passage look like in life, really. Not just hypothetically. That doesn’t mean I get perfect application before I preach it, but I do get down the road a little ways.

But the great treasure in all of this: is to bring that portions back to my mind again and again that run to the gospel. Because in the passage I see my sin, writing out the gospel for my comfort in those moments, heals, soothes, grows, and thrills my soul.

This is how I preach the gospel to myself.

Preaching Simply

Sometimes I get slapped in the face. I will be reading some book and the author will say something so profound that my face reels from the shock.

I have been reading Feed My Sheep: A Passionate Plea for Preaching which is a compilation of chapters pleading with preachers to be faithful to the word.

In Chapter 6 R.C. Sproul Jr. is discussing, “Preaching to the Mind” when he says this:

With all due recognition of the technicalities and complexities of moving from ancient literature to modern ears, in the end, Paul wrote letters, David wrote Psalms, Isaiah made prophecies, and so forth. None of them gave us biological samples that belong under a microscope. If you find yourself preaching for six months on a single verse of the Bible, enthralling your audience with your mastery of the original languages, your precision of logical inference, your breadth of knowledge of the ancient Near East, you have forgotten the first thing—it’s a letter, a psalm, or a prophecy. We are to preach the text as it is written.

R. C. Jr. Sproul, “Preaching to the Mind,” in Feed My Sheep: A Passionate Plea for Preaching, ed. Don Kistler (Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust Publishing, 2008), 98.

His closing line: We are to preach the text as it is written.

I love that. I have been trying to hone my own thinking on preaching for several years now. Most of my thinking comes from simply listening to how bad my own sermons are. But part of my thinking arises from chasing the beautiful doctrines in Scripture, only to end the chase in a valley setting where these doctrines shine more beautifully than on the pages of my systematic theology.

What I mean is this: Doctrine first had a pastoral point to get to.

When Paul, David, John, Moses, Hosea wrote. While their writings overflow with doctrine, those doctrines are never one liners. They’re moving.

• They support a habit the author wants the people to start.
• They provide comfort for a suffering heart
• They challenge believers to live godly lives.

In each case, there was a point that did not terminate on the doctrine in abstraction. The point was terminate in the glory of God through the channel of a changed person who was taught that doctrine.

When I preach I try to preach the text as it is written, but I haven’t always done that. I believe the longest time I spent in one single verse was about 4 weeks. I was very proud of myself, believing that I had really feed God’s people.

The reality was, I had just obscured the overall message of God’s word.

I am not saying that I am really doing any better today, I try. But this has been a great reminder:

We are to preach the text as it is written.

God’s Good Plans

Do you want God to be for you?

What I mean is this: Don’t you love to know that God has great plans for you?

I supposed many people do because we love to quote Jeremiah 29:11.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

Recently I heard a sermon on this passage that basically said:

God always have great plans for us, and his plans are for our welfare and good. He wants us to live in hope.

But is this verse about what most people are being lead to believe? Is this verse about the unassailable, infallible plans for good things in your life?

I think it is not for two reasons.

Who was Jeremiah Talking to?

If you simply turn to the first verse of chapter 29 you read this:

These are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders of the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.

Jeremiah was talking to the exiles in Babylon. Now why were God’s people in exile? Because as a people they had sinned against God by worshiping and serving idols instead of the one true God. As punishment or consequences, they were to go into exile for 70 years.

So what sort of good plans can those facing their deserved consequences expect?

That their punishment will not totally destroy them nor obliterate their people. So for this reason I don’t think we can use this verse at new years for good plans for us as Christians especially if we are not talking about living in our consequences.

What did Jeremiah tell them to do?

In chapter 29 verses 5-10 hear Jeremiah’s letter from God to the exiles:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. 6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. 7 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. 8 For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, 9 for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, declares the LORD. 10 “For thus says the LORD: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.

Their false prophets were telling them don’t settle down in this place, because God is going to deliver us from this place that is not our home. God says, “Wrong.”

God expects his people to settle down and seek the welfare of their captors. Because only as they seek the welfare of their captors, will they experience welfare.

And they have to be there for 70 years and then God will restore them. For he knows his plans.

So that means that the plans that God has for his people are plans that center on restoring disobedience people, who have lived through their consequences and been obedient to God in the midst of consequences.

Conclusion

So how can we use this verse rightly? Let me suggest a couple of things:

1. It shows us the character of God. He is holy and will punish sin, but he is compassionate and will not totally destroy his people.
2. It shows us that God’s actions of punishment or discipline on us have a restorative purpose.
3. It shows that God in his providence was pursuing the establishment of the Messiah and was unwilling to let his people’s sin cut off his divine plan of redemption for mankind.
4. It shows God’s compassion on those who humble accept their consequences and live obediently before God.
5. Finally, it shows how even in facing consequences, God’s people can be a blessing to those around them.

So next time a pastor preaches from this verse without referring to the whole chapter, just get up and leave. That kind of pulpit crime needs to be stopped.

 

The Photo about was from: This Artist and I have tried to follow the rules of the license.

Failure in the Pulpit

Behold, God is my helper; the Lord is the upholder of my life. (Psalm 54:4)

I worry about pastors who preach without admitting that God is their helper. I am often fearful when the pastor acts like he has it together. Even greatly humble men seem like they have it together because of the way they preach.

We can’t use the pulpit as self-therapy, but we must use it as a means of grace for ourselves first before the congregation uses it.

I am not in favor of bleeding hearts as we preaching.

I am not in favor of tons of stories about myself while I preach.

But I am in favor of admitting that we don’t have it together. I am in favor of preaching that if it does tell a story about the preacher it is often his sins and mistakes.

Why? Because the people will be able to place the Word of God into time and space in their minds and that helps them to put it into practice in their lives.

So pastors stop telling the people about the really cool thing you said to someone that put them in their place. Stop telling your mic drop moments, and start telling them your oh, crap moments, your I’m sorry moments, and your failure moments.

Because then your life will be a living example of the truth that God is my helper and the upholder of my life.

Issues of the heart

Above all else, guard your heart,
    for everything you do flows from it. Proverbs 4:23

I am having to think about this idea this week. It is a scathing idea I think.

By that I mean, I feel so dirty, wicked and evil as I start to look into my heart. Because to guard it I believe I have to know what is either in it, or trying to get into it. And this week I am seeing some things I don’t really like

• A love of preeminence
• A longing to be known, without attempting to know
• A love for leisure
• A drive for the easy path
• A longing for success that was easy and all mine

Yeah, pretty wicked. But this proverb is instructing us to guard it. I am supposed to make sure stuff like that doesn’t get into my heart. I am supposed to make sure that it stays full of Christ, and it doesn’t fill up with this kind of yuck.

But more often than not, God brings situations into my life to expose this kind of yuck. And so now I have to do something else besides guard my heart. Now I have to clean it. And that is not very nice at all.

As I have been attempting to study for the sermon this coming Sunday, I am struck by the fact that time and time again as God exposes my heart, the sermon passage is usually the passage I have to run to in order to correct me, change me, challenge me, heal me, and rescue me.  So for now I will just leave this passage here for you. And maybe next week I will write a little more about it.

Ephesians 4:22-24 – 22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.