“I have erred by preaching doctrinal sermons that unintentionally come across as ‘do what I say and you’ll be okay.’ Such an approach does not rest on the work of the Spirit in someone’s life to each doctrine that has a transforming effect on someone’s life.”

‘Do what I say and you’ll be okay’ has a nice ring to it, but it puts an awful lot of pressure on the preacher. It also communicates the sense that Christian faithfulness is comprised of doing whatever can be proven to be doctrinally sound. If we get our doing right, then we are faithful, which is a much more manageable way of doing life than is depending on the Spirit.

Doctrine is important. One of the tasks of the preacher is to help our listeners read Scripture well ad to understand properly it’s demands upon our life. But when we communicate that our calling is to simply master whatever it is that the preacher has to say, we have mis-located the source of our dependency.

It is a subtle distinction, to be sure. Good preaching describes faithfully the will of God for the listener, but when preaching becomes more about communicating the will of the preacher than the will of God, even when the two are very much the same, we are running into trouble. Obeying the preacher is hard work. Obeying the Spirit is something we can do. It is less a matter of our effort and more a matter of surrender.

The truth is, I want more than just “OK” for my listeners. But if I am calling them to do what I say, then OK might be the best we can aspire to.

How often have we heard preachers who, having already made their point, continue to pile on extra illustrations and superfluous commentary in the attempt to accomplish what has already been achieved. I am not a homiletic referee, but I have often wished that I could blow a whistle on that kind of thing.

The preacher who piles on is betraying a lack of confidence in the sermon. The irony is that this attempt to strengthen the impact through the addition of excessive material actually weakens the impact of what we hear. The extra story or proposition actually diffuses the focus of the sermon, creating a kind of fog in the listener’s consciousness. By trying to make the point sure, we actually serve to loosen our hold upon the listener. We do exactly the opposite of what we had intended.

Of course, piling on in preaching also serves to unnecessarily lengthen the sermon. I know we sometimes feel the sermon has to reach a certain length, but in preaching, as in life, the old adage is most often true: less is more.

Richard Eslinger describes this pitfall as follows…

“A water-skimming bird approaches the text from above; it hovers over its surface, looking for an idea to preach. When the fowl spots one, it swoops down and plucks the idea or concept from the sea of the text without even getting wet. This bird views the text as simply a container for the idea and as therefore irrelevant to its interest once it has plucked away the idea it spotted.”

Sometimes preachers are overt about this practice. A giveaway would be when the preacher says, “I want to take this text as a point of departure,” which usually means they are going to depart from the text and never come back to it.

Most often, however, this approach is less obvious and perhaps even less intentional. Most of us have good intentions about our use of the text. We understand the danger of taking a text out of context. The problem occurs, however, when we make the mistake of looking at the biblical text as a sourcebook for sermon themes. When we think that way, we come to the Bible looking for something to kickstart our sermon process. The Bible, in this mode, becomes a sort of homiletic stimulus for the preacher’s personal creativity.

Of course, we understand that preaching must live in the text of Scripture from beginning to end. Not only is the Bible to be the source of our message, it is to be the sustaining element of every aspect of our sermon. If our goal is to help people hear from God through our preaching, then we will do more than skim the surface of the text. We will dive deep into its waters and emerge immersed – saturated with the truth from beginning to the end.

Richard L. Eslinger, Pitfalls in Preaching (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 31-32.

O righteous God, who searches minds and hearts, bring to an end the violence of the wicked and make the righteous secure. Psalm 7:9

This, earnest prayer of the believer is a consistent refrain throughout the psalms. It is profoundly engaging in its appeal to the continuing cry of the human heart. Few things are as deeply felt as our desire for justice.

We have all felt the frustration of the seeming invincibility of those who run roughshod over us even as we make honest efforts to do the righteous thing with our lives. Still, we are not sure we always feel comfortable expressing this anxiety to the God who holds everything in his hand. Somehow we feel it to be distrustful or unfaithful to raise a complaint to our heavenly father.

We need to instruct our listeners, that this prayer is not a complaint against our God, but that it is in harmony with the heart of God. Not only is such a prayer consistent with the Psalms, but it is consistent with the Gospel, which is the expression of God’s initiative to bring the wicked to justice and to restore the righteous by his grace. To pray for an end to injustice and for the triumph of the righteous is not to seek something for ourselves, but to seek the ultimate triumph of the will and plan of God. That plan has been enacted in Christ. When we pray this psalm, we are aligning ourselves with the truth of the gospel.

There is an opportunity for a proleptic kind of worship in this text. We describe in faith what will be true, as if it is already true. We worship the God of righteousness in the same spirit as our Lord’s model prayer, that his will is being done on earth, as it is in heaven.

The text inspires us, then, not to a kind of vengeful sense of personal vindictiveness toward those who have hurt and misused us. It is rather, a challenge toward a renewed commitment to righteous living in spite of the temporary consequences, in the confidence that the day will come when wrongs will be righted and truth will triumph. To live for that day is to live in the faith made possible by our Lord Jesus Christ. It is to make choices today in the light of what is ultimately true, rather than to capitulate what is temporarily evident.

This is, a text worth preaching!

Stanley was making a point about ethical standards for leadership in the church, describing the holding of a couple accountable for adultery but not for their homosexual practice. Like many, I found the story to be disturbing. Operating at a distance, however, I might like to give the man the benefit of any doubt. My concern in this piece, however, is to point to the way that stories and illustrations can lead to unintended consequences.

Our stories require scrutiny. Stories are less precise than propositions. They can misdirect in ways that we might not intend. I remember telling a joke that got me in trouble because I missed the double entendre. That was an avoidable situation.

Whatever Stanley’s view of homosexual practice, clearly it was not his intent to speak to that particular issue by means of the story that he told. Setting aside any theological malpractice for the moment, the illustration was an example of homiletical malpractice as it led listeners to engage an entirely different issue than the one intended by the preacher. Stanley’s point about leadership has been completely lost in all the heat about sexuality. Stanley should have been able to anticipate that this would be the case. If he really wanted to make his point, he could have chosen another story.

Avoiding this problem requires the skill of anticipation. We need to pre-hear our stories, anticipating how they will be heard by our listeners. This requires that we know our listeners and how they think. We might not catch everything before we say it, but we can surely catch the most egregious examples, before we make a regrettable error.

I am fairly certain Andy Stanley had not anticipated that his sermon would make news, at least not for this reason. Not anticipating, added greatly to his problem.

I recently heard a pastor refer to his sermon as “the speak.” I suppose that is what the preacher did. He spoke. It is what preachers do in the most literal sense. Still, the label bothered me. It seemed such an anemic way of talking about preaching. It seemed to betray a weak view of what could happen in the preaching task.

“Speaking” is safe in contemporary culture. Self-expression is something that everybody values. Nobody minds that we speak, as long as we don’t seek to persuade anyone of anything. Preachers in cent decades have adopted this safe, defensive posture, hoping to be heard, but afraid to offend. We speak our minds, but we’re careful not to push too hard. We are cautious with persuasion. We do not want to upset the seekers for fear they might not come back.

This is understandable, but it is not preaching – not really. Biblical preaching is more confident, more prophetic. Biblical preaching is not about our speaking. It about God’s speaking, and that is a greater thing altogether.

“I don’t want to engage (the listeners) in a story so I can then direct them to Christ using other elements. I want to engage them with a story and then use that same story to direct them to Christ.”

The difference, he said, “is subtle, but significant.” In both cases, the purpose of the preacher is to direct the listener to Christ. However, in one case, the purpose of the story is merely to engage the listener so that the preacher can present Christ. In the other case, the purpose of the story is, in itself to present Christ.

This does not mean that every story has to directly and overtly speak of Christ. It does mean that the link between the story and it’s Christological import must be evident. The path between the two ought to be short and the route direct.

One of the benefits of this way of working is that we do not set up a false distinction between the instructional and theological elements of the sermon with elements that are set up to seem more enjoyable.

I once, for example, told a humorous story about a man who didn’t recognize me as the pastor while out on golf course. It was a pretty engaging story and I used the humorous elements to full effect. The point in telling the story, however, was not just to get the crowd comfortable in listening to me, but to connect people with those in Scripture who had difficulty recognizing Jesus as the Son of God. The purpose of the story, then, was to develop a readiness within the listener to hear the theological truth about the identity of Jesus Christ.

Everything we say within our sermons ought to drive toward our theological purpose. Even the stories that we tell ought to lead us to worship.

These are wonderful technologies, allowing us to spend our time on the things that we value the most. It is biblical, after all, to choose whom one would follow. There is, however, a dark side.

Conviction is good. Moderating our influences is very good. Using technology to avoid the waste of time is also very good. And yet, I wonder at the same time, what we may be losing along the way.

Admittedly, this is not one of the sunnier passages we could chose to preach, but without an appreciation for the darkness of the human heart, there is no foundation for our preaching of the light that is the gospel.’

Depravity strikes quickly and completely. Within the first chapters of the Bible we find evidence of deception and shame, murder and fear – the pride that leads to destruction and the sin that God cannot abide. We like to think that there is good at the point of our truest selves, and in the sense that we are created in God’s image (also emphasized in these first chapters), there is something redeemable about us. Yet, the trajectory of our sinful heart is always downward. “Every inclination of the thoughts of his/our heart was only evil all the time.”