- Our Father, we thank you that you've
gathered so many people here to learn how to understand your word and learn of your
word, learn how to communicate your word here at this Gospel Coalition conference
this year. Thanks for bringing us here safely. Thanks for the innumerable
interactions that strengthen our hearts, strengthen our relationships, strengthen
our ties with you and with each other. Thanks for the instruction that's going on
right now, especially. I pray not only for us here, but for all the workshops, that
you would help us to stir each other up to love and good works, iron sharpening iron,
learning, having the word of God dwell on us richly. We pray that this would happen
in all these various workshops and classes. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Okay. I'm glad to be with you. This is
supposed to be a workshop. Isn't that a laugh, with this many people? However, I'm
going to do this. I'm going to give you a talk, a lecture, and then, even though
only a very tiny percentage and probably the most pathologically extroverted of you
will have an opportunity to ask questions. We will have some mics up front. There's
quite a lot of you, and the ones who want to ask questions should, because it's just
so boring to listen to somebody talk for an hour. I want you to be able to drill
down on some things that you hear and get a little more information. So preaching to the heart, the subject.
Alec Motyer, in his great little book, "Preaching?" Alec Motyer is an Old
Testament scholar and an expository preacher. He's British or Irish, I think.
He's, I think, in his 90s now and written a great little book on expository
preaching. In the book, he says this. He says that
"preachers have not one, but two responsibilities, First to the truth, and
secondly to the particular group of people in front of you. How will they best hear
the truth? How are we to shape and phrase it, so it comes home to them in a way that
is palatable, that gains the most receptive hearing and avoids
needless hurt?" So what Motyer says is if you want to
be- If you're a communicator of the Bible, you've got two responsibilities.
You've got a responsibility to the truth, to hold it up, to present it accurately,
to make sure you're expanding the text, but you also have a responsibility to the
people. You need to give them the truth in a way that changes them, that, as he puts
it, that you give them the truth in a way they can best hear it, in a way that it
can most shape and phrase. You can shape and phrase it so that it comes
home to them. Now, if this is the case, and I think it
is, most of our teaching and most of our books on preaching and exposition are
fairly unbalanced. Almost always, the books give almost all the time is
dedicated to how do you expound the text, how do you understand the truth. There might be a chapter on application or
a chapter on preaching to the heart, but even though Alec Motyer rightly says you
basically have two tasks, be true to the truth and be true to the people that are
in front of you, we actually don't spend that much time talking about how do you
bring the truth home in a way that actually changes lives. It's one of the reasons why an awful lot
of our expository preaching isn't very life-changing. There's not a great deal
of- There really isn't a lot of great stuff written about how to preach
to the heart. Sinclair Ferguson has a chapter in the
book, "Feed My Sheep." There's a book called "Feed My Sheep: Passionate Plea for
Preaching." It's an older book, good book. Sinclair's got a chapter in there
called "Preaching to the Heart." Sam Logan has a book, pardon me, has a
chapter in the book, "The Preacher and Preaching." This is very confusing, by
the way. Lloyd Jones wrote a book called "Preaching and Preachers," but there was
also a book put together by Westminster Seminary faculty, back in the 1980s,
called "The Preacher and Preaching." In that book, Sam Logan wrote a chapter
called "The Phenomenology of Preaching," which is basically on preaching
to the heart. There's a new book by Josh Moody and Robin
Weeks, called "Preaching to the Heart, " I think, or "Preaching to the Affections,"
I think it's called. But by and large, we haven't spent much time on it. Now, so I would like to give you an
overview of why it's important to preach to the heart and how you do it. I'm gonna
probably constantly be thinking about, because I am, I'm gonna be constantly
thinking about working preachers who are preaching every Sunday, but this is-
What I'm about to tell you, I hope, is gonna fit anybody who communicates the
Bible, whether you teach the Bible, lead Bible studies, teach, preach. I think this
should be broadly applicable in many ways. So just a couple ideas on why it's
important to preach to the heart. The biblical understanding of heart is just
unique in human thought. The Greeks and the Romans, the ancients, understood that
the passions were connected to the body, but the mind, the reason, and the will
were connected to the soul. Basically they believed that virtue was a
matter of, literally, mind over matter. That is, if you wanted to be a person of
loyalty, if you wanted to be a person of courage, if you wanted to have any virtue
at all, what it meant was you stifled the emotions. The reason needed to control the
emotions, and that was a virtuous person. So the ancients always pitted the thinking
and the feelings against each other, and the thinking needed to squelch and keep
down the feelings. That's what produced a virtuous person. However, on the other
hand, modern thought has reversed that. We live in what Charles Taylor calls the Age
of Authenticity, and we believe that the most important thing is that you look into
your heart and see what your deepest feelings are and your deepest desires and
dreams, and you fulfill them. So we do the same thing today, in our
modern society. We now, however, have reversed things. It's your feelings that
are the true you. The ancient Greeks and the Romans thought your feelings was the
false you. They had to do with your body. They weren't the true you. They weren't
part of the spirit. So they pitted mind versus the feelings.
Modern people do that too, except they reverse it. You have to let it go. You
can't hold it back anymore. I've been told all my life, I mustn't feel. I have to
conceal. All right. Right? That would be a great song. Wouldn't it? Three billion
people would hear me sing that on YouTube. In other words, we have always pitted, you
might say, the mind and the emotions. It used to be the mind was more important
than emotions. Today, the emotions are more important than the mind. The Bible's
understanding of the heart is completely different, and it's not halfway in the
middle. It's off the charts. Why? As you have often heard, and I
mentioned this yesterday, the biblical understanding of the heart is that the
heart is the seat, not so much of the emotions, but it is the seat of what you
trust the most, what you are committed to the most. Trust in the Lord with all your
heart. Proverbs 3. Where your treasure is, there is your heart. Matthew 6. What we're talking about is the thing or
the things that you most trust in, hope in, the things that most capture your
imagination, that you face, the center of your attention, the center of your
commitments, your main commitments. Whatever those things are affect your
mind, your will, and your emotions. So whatever your heart trusts in the most
affects not only your emotions. It also affects your thinking. So in some ways, the heart is the seat of
the mind, the will, and the emotions because it's coming from the trusts. This
is the reason why, when St. Augustine wrote "The Confessions," it was like a
bomb dropped. No one in history had ever seen anything like the book of "The
Confessions." The reason is because St. Augustine was
spending his time looking at his past and figuring out his emotions. So in the past,
in ancient times, nobody ever spent any kind of time thinking about your emotions.
Emotions were things to be ignored or to be squelched. Here's Augustine, sifting
them. Now many people have said Augustine, therefore, was the first modern person,
but yes and no. There's a long story there.
Because today, we don't do what Augustine was doing either. Augustine was being
biblical because he was saying, "No, you don't squelch the emotions or ignore them.
On the other hand, you don't just vent the emotions and express them. You sift the
emotions. You evaluate the emotions, and then you redirect the emotions
toward God." It's not like the emotions and the heart.
Because obviously, by the way, the heart does include emotions. It's not less than
the emotions. It's more, but it's not less. Emotions are not great, and they're
not terrible. They're not unimportant. They're not all important. They need to be
directed toward God. What that means is what you really are is
basically what you love the most. Using the word love here is not just an emotion.
Essentially it's not your beliefs, at least not the beliefs you subscribe to,
that actually makes you what you are. It's what your heart trusts in, what your heart
loves the most. You can say, "I believe in God. God is
this, and God is this, and God is this." Yeah, your heart is basically based in
your career. We all know how that works. Your heart is actually trusting in career.
Your mind is saying, "No, no, no. I trust in Jesus for my salvation. I trust in
Jesus for this and that and all. " But where is your heart? Jonathan Edwards, who was a great
Augustinian, therefore, said that if you're gonna be thoroughly biblical, you
must not pit knowledge and feeling against each other. If you say, "I know I should
be generous with my money, but I'm just not doing it," he would say, "Well,
there's a sense in which you know what you should do, but you're not doing it, but
there's another sense in which you don't really know what you should do."
Let me give you an example. Excuse me. I'm better than I was yesterday, but not as
better as I'd like it to be. When I was a pastor in Virginia, many years ago, I had
a young girl in my church. She was about 15 years old, I guess. She was discouraged. She was depressed,
often. At one point, the family was a prominent family in the church. I tried to
help the family with her. At one point, she came into my study, and we were
talking. Being a young minister, I was a little bit naive, and I said, "How are
you?" She was downcast. I said, "Well, you're a Christian. Aren't
you?" "Oh, yes. I'm a Christian." "Christians have many blessings. Don't
they?" "Oh, yes. We do." So we counted the blessings a little bit, about the
great things that, as a Christian, she could count on and she knew was happening
there and all those great things in her life. But at one point, I said, "So you're still
depressed." She said... I tried to encourage her, but here's what she said,
almost literally, "Yes. I know that Jesus loves me. I know he saved me, and I know
he's gonna take me to Heaven. But what good is all that when not a single boy at
school will even look at you?" I don't know why more of you aren't
laughing at that. What she was saying was, "Yeah, I'm saved. Yes, I'm going to Heaven
forever. Yes, I'm a daughter of the king. Yes, I'm gonna be glorified. I'm
justified, sanctified, glorified, and all that. But you know what? I'm in ninth
grade, tenth grade, and there's not a single boy will ask me out." Now, here's what Jonathan Edwards would
say. He would say she had the opinion that God loved her, but she had no real
knowledge that God loved her, because the love of boys was more real to her heart
than the love of God, or she wouldn't have been depressed.
So in one sense, you could say what she just needed to be told... Well, what did
she need to be told? See, what Edwards would say is she needed to be shown the
love of God in such a way that it began to get more real to her heart, and it began
to balance out how popular she was or unpopular she was. Some years ago . . . One more before I
talk about how to do it. Some years ago, I had a relative who never
would wear a seat belt. Every time I talked to him, he would get in the car,
and he wouldn't wear his seat belt, and we all would nag him about wearing a seat
belt. All right. He put his seat belt on. One day, we went to see him. He got in the
car and put his seat belt on right away. We said, "What happened to you?" He said,
"Well, " he said, "I went to a friend of mine. A couple weeks ago, I went to see a
friend of mine in the hospital. He was in a car crash, and he went through the
windshield. He had like 200 stitches in his face. For some strange reason, ever
since then, I've been having no problem buckling up." I talked to him a little bit about that.
What was interesting going on was I said, "Well, did you get new information? What
changed you? Did you not know that people go through the windshield? What happened
was an abstract proposition became connected to an actual sensory experience,
that is something he saw. There's some place where Jonathan Edwards,
the whole idea behind preaching to the heart. At some point, where Jonathan
Edwards says, "It's only when you attach. It's only when you actually attach an
abstract truth to some kind of sensory experience that you've had, or at least
the memory of a sensory experience that you've had" I'm gonna show you how to do
this in a second. Something that you know is true becomes
real to you. The point of preaching to the heart is to take abstract truth and to
make it real to people's heart, so that they are changed. A lot of us would like it if people took
notes from our sermons or our talks, and then went out into the world and started
to change their life. But what I'm telling you is, Jonathan Edwards never spoke that
much about preaching. But in one of his books, "Thoughts on Revival," he actually
says about preaching that preaching does not change you by giving people
information, that then they go out and practice as much as. It changes you
through the impression it's made during the sermon. What he means is this. If that girl is
sitting under preaching, that 16-year-old girl who's, by the way, probably in her
50s now, but anyway, that 16-year-old girl is sitting under preaching, and the love
of God, through Jesus Christ, in a sermon, becomes so vividly real to her and starts
to affect her. We're talking about the affections. It starts to penetrate to the
heart. She starts to say, "Why am I all that
upset about whether this or that stupid boy like me or not, when I've got this
kind of love?" When that sort of thing starts happening in her heart, she's being
changed on the spot. She's being changed during the sermon. She's being changed
because the preaching has reached her heart. So as Alec Motyer said- I started the talk
this way. What Alec Motyer is trying to say, it's not enough for you to take a
text and say, "Okay. I need to show that this text teaches that Jesus Christ
sacrificed for us and loved us with a costly love." That's the text.
It's not enough just to say, "I need to expound that accurately. "
I need to bring that home to people's hearts in such a way that it changes them
in the seats. So their hearts are affected by it, and the other things that are more
real to their heart than the love of Jesus become. Jesus' love starts at this place. So that's what I mean by preaching to the
heart. How do you do it? Let me suggest, believe it or not - Oh, boy.
I'm gonna be fast. You can ask questions. In fact, you're gonna complain
afterwards because you need more information about everything I'm about to
tell you, but we only have an hour. This is the best we can do. But I would say, in order to preach to the
heart, you need to preach culturally, affectionately, imaginatively,
practically, wondrously, and Christocentrically. Okay. So there's two
ways to go from here. One is to do an hour on each of these, but probably I can't. So
the other is to do just a few minutes on each of these. Okay. What do I mean by culturally? Let's just say if you're
evangelical parents, and you've got a 14 or 15-year-old boy or
girl, and one day, you're talking to them, and suddenly the 15-year-old girls says to
you this, says, "You know, I'm not really sure there's anything really wrong with
two people having sex if they really love each other. I wouldn't do it, of course,
mom or dad, but I just don't think there's anything wrong with two people having sex
if they love each other." Now what are you gonna do? You're probably- Your response is gonna
be, "That's not what the Bible says, " and go after them, go after the girl, also
knowing that when she says, "I wouldn't do it, but I don't think there's anything
wrong with it," you know she's gonna do it. If she says that,
"I wouldn't do it, but there's nothing wrong with it," she's
gonna do it. So how do you do that? How do you go after that? Now, if you say, :I'm
gonna show you what the Bible says. " Okay. Absolutely. Totally. Must do that. But I can tell you, almost certainly, that
15-year-old girl will start to experience, as you're talking about what the Bible
says... The 15-year-old girl will start to experience MEGO. Do you know what MEGO is?
M-E-G-O? My eyes glaze over. No? MEGO is, "My eyes glaze over." You can tell, as
you're talking to her, she's tuning out. You know why? Because there are cultural
narratives that are deeply imbedded. They have come into her life actually through
songs and advertising. Those cultural narratives are the reason
why the statement, "If two people love each other, they should be able to have
sex. " Why does that statement make sense? It makes sense because of the deeper
narratives. I'll give you three. There's the identity narrative. The
identity narrative is you've got to be yourself. In traditional cultures,
identity is formed like this. You are a good person if you sublimate your
individual desires for the good of the family. But in our society, identity is formed
exactly the opposite. You're not an authentic person unless you look into your
heart and decide what you want to be and what you want to do, and you assert your
individual interests over against what anybody else says. That's the only heroic
narrative left. That's in virtually every single sitcom. It's every single movie.
It's every cartoon. In other words, the only heroic narrative left is you figure
out who you want to be, and then you don't let anybody tell you not to be that.
Unless you go after that, unless you show that Christianity has a better thing to
offer than that, unless you show that that's incoherent and unstable and a sham
and doesn't really work, unless you do that regularly in your preaching, then
they are gonna think, "Hey, what's wrong with actually two people loving each other
and having sex?" Another narrative.that's the identity
narrative. The second narrative is the truth narrative. Only I have the right to
decide what is right or wrong for me and what is true for me. A lot of, by the way,
college students who are strong evangelical college students are still
gonna tell me, "Well, I believe in Christianity. I believe in Jesus, but I
have no right to tell anybody else what they should believe." Now when you say that, what is that? You
want to look at them and say, "You just said something to me that makes no sense
at all, and yet you're saying it as if it's a given, as if it's an unassailable,
unquestionable truth." No one has the right to tell anybody else how
they should live. First of all, you just did that to me, you
hypocrite. You just did it to me, which shows the very idea is self-contradictory.
It doesn't work at all. You use it selectively. In other words, unless you
know how to go after these baseline cultural narratives, these deeper cultural
narratives, with the scripture, as well as with common sense, in many cases, unless
you know how to go after the cultural narratives regularly, people's hearts
aren't gonna be reached. To a great degree, our hearts are shaped
by what the culture tells us, and we don't understand that. A thousand years ago, if
you're an Anglo-Saxon warrior, and you walk around, and you see, deep in your
heart, an impulse, you know what that impulse is? Let's just say
1000 years, ago, there's this Anglo-Saxon warrior. He's walking
around, and he notices, in his heart, a really deep impulse. You know what the
impulse is? He just likes to kill people. If they get in his way, he just likes to
smash them. Okay. He looks at that, and he says, "That's great," because he's living
in a shame-and-honor culture. He's living in a warrior culture. But if you're walking around Orlando, if
you're a young man and walking around Orlando, and you look in your heart, and
you happen to see this desire to kill people, you go to therapy. You go to anger
management, or you go to prison. Basically your culture tells you that's a
bad feeling. Whereas 1000 years ago, the culture told you that was a good feeling.
So we tend to think we're looking at our feelings, and we're just expressing our
feelings. No, no, no. We're taking grids that our culture tells us that we have to
bring down on our hearts, through which we're evaluating our feelings as
good or bad. You have to show people. Let the Bible do
that. Otherwise, you're a slave to your culture, and you think you're free. That's
how this culture operates. It makes you a slave to its ideals, under the heading
that you're free. Do you know how to do that? In your preaching, you have to do
that, or you're not gonna reach hearts. They're just gonna go MEGO. My eyes are
gonna glaze over. That's culturally. Secondly, affectionately. If you want to
preach to the heart, you have to preach from the heart. If you want to preach to
the heart, you have to preach from the heart. That's not as easy as you think.
What I mean by that is to reach the heart, to preach from the heart, means - I'll
call it this. There needs to be a non-deliberate transparency about you.
People need to be able to see, as you're speaking, that somehow the very trues that
you're talking about have repaired you, have mended you, mean the world to you.
Now one of the problems I see is the alternatives to non-deliberate
transparency are three. One is flat affect. Some people just speak with flat
affect. They're just going through their notes, and that's certainly not gonna
reach anybody's heart. We all know that. But there's a lot of other people who are
just excitable. You know? They're just excitable. They start off talking like
this, and all the way through, they're just like this. They're just passionate
about everything, and it's not transparent. It is. It literally is. It's
excitability. It's like you're psyching yourself up. You're putting on
your game face. People do not sense they're looking into
your heart and seeing a person who's a trophy of grace, someone who's been
repaired by grace, someone who's been wounded and humbled and no longer has any
need to put on a show. That's what people are. That's what moves people. I'm afraid a lot of us are too, frankly,
too afraid, too aware of what kind of impression we're making, working too hard
at trying to really be good, in fact, working too hard at trying to be
passionate. If you're trying to be passionate, almost always, that means that
through the whole sermon, you're just like, It's the same level of excitability.
You're just like this the whole way through. I remember some years ago. I remember the
first time I went to visit a friend of mine. He became an elder of my church. He
lived in a house that literally was 10 feet from the railroad track, literally. I
knew that, but it didn't occur to me. Anyway, we went, and we were sitting in
the living room. All of a sudden, the train came by. It really, literally, felt
like it was coming through the roof. It was just scary. I remember I went like
this. He laughed, and he said, "We've lived here for 20 years, and we don't even
hear the train anymore. We don't even hear it." Well, that's what's
gonna happen. If you try to be passionate, whenever you speak,
you're passionate. From the beginning, from the opening bell to the end, you're
passionate. Maybe at the end, you get a little more passionate. It's just gonna be
like a train coming through. They're just- If every single time, you're passionate
all the way through, basically people have got to see that when you get to certain
places, where the text is saying things that have really, really, really changed
your life, I don't know. You slow down. You just show it. That's non-deliberate
transparency. Well, I've spent too much time on this. If you're gonna preach to the heart, you
got to preach from the heart. By the way, there's two things you need if you're
gonna preach like that. Number one, you got to know your material. One of the
reasons why we aren't able to be transparent is that we're worried about
what's coming next. You got to know your material cold, so that you can have
emotional transparency. Otherwise, you are excitable, because you're just trying to
keep the ball rolling. You're trying to remember what comes next. You need to know your material cold, and
you need to have incredibly good prayer life, and you need to actually have the
gospel repair you. A lot of you are gonna say, "Well, this is no good. I was hoping
for something practical, something I could put into practice this week." You can put
this into practice, this lifetime, but not this week. Second, imaginatively. No, third. Are we
third? Yes, third, imaginatively. Now, I've already referred to this, but I'll
just give you some quick examples. Jonathan Edwards is the master here.
Jonathan Edwards believed in the importance of what he would call the
image. That's what you and I call illustration. See, a story is an
illustration, and many people say, "Use stories in your sermon. That'll help."
By the way, stories are good, but a story is only one version of an illustration.
Let me give you another example of an illustration. I'll give you four,
actually, real quick. When Jonathan Edwards says, in "Sinners in
the Hands of an Angry God," when he says, "All your righteousness would have no
influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell." Let me say that again. All of
your righteousness has no influence to uphold you or keep you out of hell. What is he saying? That's a very important
doctrinal statement. He is saying, basically, there's no salvation through
works. He says all of your righteousness could not uphold you or keep you out of
hell, no matter how hard you try. Your best deeds will not keep you out of hell.
Right? But it's an abstraction, but it doesn't stop there. This is what he says. "All your
righteousness would have no influence to keep you out of hell, anymore than a
spider's web could stop a falling rock." That's how he ends the sentence, "Anymore than a spider web
can stop a falling rock." Now the point is we all know something
about a spider web. If a rock comes down and hits a spider web, it doesn't bounce.
You know? Here's a spider web. The rock comes through. It doesn't go- No. It goes,
it's as if the spider web is not there. If a rock is coming down through a spider
web, it's like the spider web is not even there. The rock doesn't stop at all. What
a very interesting illustration. It's a sensory experience. That is, it's
something we've actually seen and felt, connected to the abstract doctrine. So
what it does is it gets across very vividly, the fact that your good deeds
will in no way keep you out of hell. What he's doing is he's bringing two fields of
discourse together, or he's connecting an abstract doctrine with something that you
experience through your body, through your senses, through your eyes or your fingers.
Basically that's what an illustration does. It takes something that you may know
is true, but by connecting it to the memory of a sense experience, it makes it
feel more real. God himself- I won't give you four examples, but God
himself gives us an example when he says, for example, in Genesis 4:7. He comes to
Cain. God comes to Cain, and he says- Well, basically in chapter four, God comes
to Cain because he sees Cain depressed. His face has fallen, and he sees the
murderous thoughts in his heart toward Abel. He comes to him, and he basically is
saying to Cain, "Sin is gonna get you into trouble." That's not what God says.
Here's what God says. "Sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you, but you
must master it." Interesting? What God is doing is he's likening sin to
a crouching tiger, hidden dragon. He's likening sin to an animal. He says, "Sin
is crouching at your door. It's desires to have you." It's very interesting. What he's trying to say is sin is a dark
reality in our lives. If you sin, it means that you bring something that's going to
eat you, into your life. It's gonna distort your emotions. It's gonna darken
your eyes. It's gonna create patterns of habit that you can't break. It's remarkable because, of course, what
God is doing is he's taking- The idea of a crouching panther or a leopard or a
predatory animal. Have you ever seen- We all probably, at certain points in our
lives, have seen a predatory animal pounce on a little bird or something like that
and destroy it. God is saying sin is like that. You give sin an
inch in your life, and that's what- That's God doing it. God's
using a sermon illustration. So you better do it. See, unless you do that, the heart is not
reached. What's important here is, yeah, stories are important, but word pictures
are just as important. To say, "Your good deeds cannot keep you out of hell, any
more than a spider web can stop a falling rock," that's not a story, but it is a
powerful illustration. If you read Edwards, you'll see that
Edwards actually, at least when he was in North Hampton, didn't do much in the way
of stories, but his word pictures are astounding. Go read "Heaven is a World of
Love, " by Jonathan Edwards. The way he uses the images of light and of
fountains and of water, it gives you- Essentially the love of God is not an
abstraction. When you're done reading that sermon, he's drawing you back into all
kinds of other experiences, sensory experiences you've had, and connecting God
and his love and his grace to those experiences. You sense the reality of it.
That's preaching to the heart. Fourth, preaching specifically, I mean
practically. I'm not gonna say much on this because I really would like to get to
questions and answers. This is the one area where most books- I've done a lot of
reading of preaching books recently, and I've been very unhappy with preaching
books on the subject of preaching to the heart. However, when it comes to application,
there are books out there, talking about application. That's important. The main
point is application should be very, very specific. You need to try very hard not to
get to the end of the sermon and say, "Well, you can think of some practical
implications. " No, help the people think about practical implications.
Application should, in some ways, be dialogical. You should look to people and
say, "Look. Maybe you agree that pride is a problem, that pride is good, bad, and
humility is good, but maybe you think you don't got a problem with pride." But if you don't have a problem with
pride, let me ask you a question, Christians. Do you have any problem
talking to your non-Christian neighbors about Jesus? Oh, you do. Why? What are you
afraid of? Maybe that is pride. So what am I doing at that point? You need
to not only be specific, but you need to give people questions. You need to
dialogue with them. You need to enter into conversation with them. You need to give
them some tests. It's extraordinarily important. You almost
need to turn some parts of the sermon into counseling, where you say, "Look. I know
that this hasn't been easy. But if you understand this..." Get very- Talk
directly to them about how, imagine you're in a pastoral setting, and the person is
saying, "How do I apply this to my life?" Just do it. Do it right there in the
sermon, to everybody. Okay. I said wondrously and
Christocentrically. Then we're done. I think I can do this quick. We have 20
minutes for questions. Wondrously just means this. I think I can do
this in one minute. J. R. R. Tolken, in his famous essay on
fairy stories, says that fairy tales continue to be popular because fairy tales
give you stories in which people escape time, escape death, hold communion with
non-human beings, find perfect love from which they are never parted, and triumph
over evil. Fairy tales. Escape from time, get outside of time,
escape from death, hold communion with non-human beings, find perfect love from
which you're never parted, and triumph finally over evil. Right? People buy fairy tales and read them, and
we're making them into blockbuster movies all the time. Why? Because it's a deep
desire of the human heart. Well, you say, "That's not reality." But if Jesus Christ
has been raised from the dead, if he really has been raised from the dead, and
you believe in him, all those things are gonna come true for you. You will step outside of time. You will
escape death. You will communicate with non-human beings, at least angels. Who
knows? Maybe there are elves. You will have a love that never parts. You're never
parted from it, and you will triumph over evil. Look. Do you preach- Isn't that amazing?
Do you preach like that? Is there that note of wonder in your preaching? Do you
ever lift that up and let people know? Do you have any idea? If Christianity is
true, all this stuff that most of you just, you pay all this money. Wouldn't it
be great if all these things were true? No, it's not. Let's go home. Yet, you keep
spending the money to go see. Why do you watch the movie? Why do you
read the fairy tale? Because it lifts you up. Frankly because deep in your heart,
you know that that's how human beings were supposed to live, and it's a memory trace
of the Garden of Eden, I guess. But the point is do you preach with that kind of
wonder? Here's the last thing. I don't think I
need to talk. I've talked to many other places of what it means to preach Christ
from every text, but what my wife used to say- What Cathy said, in the first five or
10 years in which I was trying to learn how to preach . . . She used to put it
like this. She says, "You know, in the first part of your sermon, in which you're
laying out the biblical truth, you're laying out how people should be living and
all this sort of thing," she says, "It's really good. It's like a really, really,
really, really good Sunday School lesson. But she says, "Until you get to Jesus, it's not a sermon." She says, "Everybody
is taking notes. They're learning, and they're saying, 'Oh, that's good theology,
and that's good practical, and that's good this" She says, "When you get to Jesus,
suddenly everybody puts their pencils down, and they start to- " She said,
"Suddenly the Sunday School lesson becomes a sermon. Suddenly, instead of feeling
like we're walking, sometimes we're flying." She says, "It's really- Because when you
get to Jesus, and when you say, 'This is really about Jesus, ' people start to
worship. Before that, they're just thinking. " Another way to put it now
would be, "Before that, in a sense, you were working on the head. But when you get
to Jesus, it goes to the heart. " Okay. We got 19 minutes to answer some
questions if you got them. So I just took 40 out of the 60 minutes. So we got a
couple of people who are gonna be living mic stands. Right? Don't we have a couple
of- Yeah, okay. So we've got a couple of volunteers who are going to stand where
they are, and you got to come to them. If you've got a question, go to them. Ask the
question. I promise to give you a response. Okay.
- Could you speak a little bit about the difference between good and
great preaching? - The difference between good and great
preaching? = Good and great preaching, RTS lecture I
saw online. - Oh, you mean you'd like me to say what
you heard me say before. - Well, a little bit. Yeah. Now that I'm
in person. - Yeah, no, no. I hope this is what you
remember. I don't know. Anyway. This is an oversimplification, honestly. It's an
oversimplification. But to me, the difference between a bad sermon and a good
sermon has, largely speaking, got to do with you, the speaker.
Have you done your job? Have you studied the passage? A minute ago, I tried to say
have you mastered the material, so you know the material well enough that you- If
I don't know my material, when I get up there, I won't have the freedom, a kind of
spiritual and emotional freedom to think about the wonderful truth. I'll be
thinking about what's coming next, and I don't want to be having to say, "Okay.
That was point two. Now what's point three again? What's point 3A? What's point 3B?" I want the emotional freedom. So I need to
know my material. I need to have done all the study. I need all that stuff. So the
difference between a bad sermon and a good sermon, generally speaking, has got to do
with you. The difference between a good sermon and a
great sermon is almost completely the Holy Spirit. That's probably what you heard me
say. I have often put together- I've often preached sermons that were just okay, but
seemed to have changed a heck of a lot of lives because God just decided to
use it that way. I've preached other sermons that were
actually fairly good, really tight. I liked it, and it didn't have the same
impact. See. So you can get in the realm of good/okay sermon. That's up to you.
This is an oversimplification. Obviously God helps you in this study too, but I'm
trying to say. To get yourself up to the good or okay sermon, it's got mainly to do
with you. But that which gets you into the realm
where the revival breaks out, that's just the Holy Spirit. One last thing. There was
an older man who heard both Daniel Roland and George Woodfield preach. Daniel Roland
was a Welsh preacher. George Woodfield, of course, is the famous Anglican preacher.
They both preached a lot in the 1730s, '40s, '50s. Many years later, there was a
guy who was interviewed, who had heard both of them preach.
He was asked, "Which preacher was the better preacher?" He said that both of
them were equally- Their sermons were equally powerful, but with Daniel Roland,
you always got a good sermon, whereas with George Woodfield, you didn't always get a
good sermon, but sermons were always equally as powerful. That makes no sense unless you understand
what I just said. Woodfield always, for whatever reason, whether Woodfield's
sermons were well-written or not, God always seemed to work through them. So
anyway, the difference between bad and good is mainly you. The difference between
good and great is mainly that God's working and deciding to work sovereignly
at the moment. Okay. Let's go back and forth until time is up. - Thank you for your laboring love for us.
My question has a bit of overlap with the previous one. What are some things you can
give to help hold the tension, on the one hand, in preaching, that we are standing
like Ezekiel in a valley of dry bones, unable to do anything, and on the other
hand, being like Paul, becoming all things to all man, pleading with men to be saved,
that tension of the impossible, but the responsibility to labor for what
we can't do? - That's actually pretty easy, believe it
or not. You're absolutely right. Those are the two things. The one is, on the one
hand, you're supposed to be becoming all things to all people that, by all means, I
might win some, which means Paul clearly is trying to be as ingenious as possible
in the way which he preaches. You can see it in the book of Acts. Every
single time he preaches, he preaches to Jews who believe the Bible, uneducated
pagans, educated pagans. He changes it up. Yet, it's all up to God because they're
all dry bones. Right? The answer is how you respond to what
happens after you preach. In other words, you work like crazy to preach the best
sermon possible. But then when you find you're not getting much in the way of
response, that should not bother you the way it does, because we . . . To really
say, "I'm trusting God's sovereignty," means that when you don't see a lot of
fruit, it doesn't eat you alive. When you don't see people showing up and your
church growing, it just doesn't totally eat you alive. Now you got to be careful here, because on
the one hand, you have to be careful that you are- you should be open to the
possibility that maybe you haven't preached as well as you could, and you
don't want to say, "Well, nobody is coming because God is just not working." So you
have to be careful about that. By and large, the way that you show that
you believe in God's sovereignty is you work like crazy to preach the best sermon
possible, and then you really do leave it up to God, and you don't judge yourself.
You don't judge. You don't judge yourself, frankly, by the results. We just get eaten
up by whether people tell us we're good, whether it's a good buzz, whether we see
conversions, whether we see the church growing, whether we see the attendance
growing. It just shouldn't eat you up if you believe in the sovereignty of God.
Let's go back and forth, over here. - Any thoughts on the length of a sermon? - Any thoughts on the length of the
sermon? I think I'm all for adapting to your audience. That does mean, I think,
for example I found- Well, I'll give you one example. Okay. By and large, I would say that if you have
an audience that are pretty mature Christians, and they expect robust
teaching, you can go longer if you're good enough. Even with a mature audience, you
have to be pretty good to be able to get past about 35 minutes and not be tedious,
I would say, today. But by and large, it depends on the
audience. Some people- The shorter, It's better for people with shorter attention
spans. I do see people's attention spans getting shorter. Social media and the
Internet is part of that. So no, I'm not real doctrinaire about it.
Generally if I'm actually evaluating preachers, Today, most places in America,
in America, and generally I'm thinking also about multiethnic or Anglo churches,
in America, multiethnic or Anglo churches. See, with multiethnic churches, you got to
split the difference a bit. People have very different ideas about what is a long
sermon. Generally you have to- The people who will think it's going on too long have
to be not tested or taxed. So generally speaking, I say 30 minutes. I'm not
doctrinaire about that, but an awful lot of people think that they're better
preachers than they are. I would say that when I was a younger man,
I needed to preach 20 to 25 minutes because I wasn't good enough to keep
people's attention any longer. As I've gotten older, and I've gotten better, I
can stretch that a little bit, not a lot, but I can stretch that a bit. Here. - Yeah, what are some ways you can
practically grow in preaching imaginatively? - It does help to read fiction, and that's
a shame because I'm not a real good fiction reader. My wife is better. We are
very gender-stereotyped. I read nonfiction. She reads fiction. I said,
"Come on. " You know? But anyway. Neil Plantinga, Cornelius Planting, has a
book on reading for preachers. I would say- Remember, don't forget what I said
about culturally. I would say that, generally, most expository preachers read
too much in just Bible and theology. They don't read philosophy.
They don't read cultural analysis. They don't read history. They don't read
biography. They don't read novels. They don't read poetry. To preach
imaginatively, you need to read very, very, very widely. If somebody says to me, "You read an awful
lot. Why do you read?" I think I did this also at the RTS at Jackson lectures this
year. Somebody says, "You read so much. Why do you read so much?" My answer is I'm
desperate. I'm desperate to reach people. If you're desperate to reach people, you
will read very, very widely and not just Bible and theology. You just got to read
across the spectrum. We only got 10 minutes left. Sorry these are kind of
short answers, but it's better than three or four really long ones. Go ahead. - I tend to be a pretty passionate person.
When I do preach or get to teach, I can preach affectionately, if you will. But
where do you draw the line between preaching affectionately and then just
shameless emotionalism? Because that's also my fear, is that people will be
moved, not by what is being said, not by certain truths, but just by my demeanor. - Well, you know what? That's actually
good. I guess what I most want to see is variation. I guess I didn't quite say
that. Did I? So thank you for giving me the opportunity to say it this way. If I see a person who is preaching and
Cathy, my wife, does say to me, "I know when you're trying to be the Holy Spirit."
She says, "I feel like you're trying- You see the people out there. They seem to
be kind of impassive. So you start to do what you can. You get louder. You can
start to show more emotion." She feels like, at some points, you're
forcing it. You're pushing. You're trying to get a rise out of them. That's always
been very convicting to me. So by and large, I guess, I want to make sure that
the emotion I show is not planned, certainly not planned. It's not real,
real, real regular. If it happens a lot or all the time or the same point at every
single sermon . . . In other words, if the pastor breaks down
into tears every week at 18 minutes after he starts, I actually know there's people
like that, that are actually pretty genuine. They still probably shouldn't do
it, because it doesn't feel genuine. So I guess I would say if I see variation,
if I see it doesn't happen all the time, if I see it happens- Also, if it seems to
fit the shape of the truth itself. Sometimes some texts are not particularly-
Some texts are what my wife would call meat-and-potatoes texts. They're meat and
potatoes. They're good, solid stuff. There's nothing particularly interesting
or unusual, just good to remind us. At that point, you probably shouldn't have
some emotional experience. It's not appropriate. There are other texts that
are remarkable, that are insightful. So as long as I think that the expression of
emotion is not constant, it's varied, it seems to fit the truth you've got out
there, that you're talking about, that's all right. What worries me the most are people that
are constantly always emotional, all the time. I do know in my- I think, in
some ways, it may be sincere, but it is a way of actually trying to manipulate
people. My own wife has called me on it over the years, at various times. Okay.
Over here. - You mentioned preaching dialogically, in
terms of the application. How do you choose what to dialogue with in such a
diverse congregation, like you have? - Well, that's a good question. Of course,
the text itself sometimes is giving you- Sometimes the text- This is another
subject. There's too much stuff in the text to ever bring out. I know that it's
traditional to say, and I would say this too, that an expository sermon is one in
which the point of the text is the point of the sermon. You've heard that. That's a way of trying to make sure you
major in the majors. That is, you find the main point of the text. You don't read
into the- You don't use the text as a way of talking about whatever you feel like
talking about. Make sure you understand the author of the text, what the biblical
author's main point is, and you preach that. Having said that, the reality is that it's
not always that easy to just find one point in a text. What's the point of Jacob
wrestling with the Angel of the Lord in Genesis 32? What's the point of that text?
The point? There's a number of points, a number of implications. Or what's the point of the text where they
throw the man, the dead man, into the grave? They throw him into the tomb, and
he touches the bones of Elijah and he comes to life and leaves. Remember
that? What's the point of that text, everybody? I don't know. But I guess when you- Narratives are very-
It's very hard to identify one single point that the narrative is about. Usually
there's a number of implications. So what you can do is you can keep a record.
If you've got diverse groups of people in your church, if you've got five or six
main groups, different racial groups, different age groups, that sort of thing,
you can keep a record. Sometimes even though there's four or five things you
could bring out of a text, you can just choose the one for the group that you
haven't really spoken to recently. Just keep a record. So in other words, there's more dimensions
in almost every Bible passage than you can ever bring out in a single sermon. So keep
a record and say, "Well, I could hit those people again with this text, but I'm not
going to. I haven't talked to this group over here." That's how. Just keep a
record. Be a good pastor. Over here. - Aside from yourself, who else would you
say characterizes these characteristics in preaching? - Oh, my goodness. Any good preacher
preaches to the heart. I'm glad you think I'm a good preacher. I appreciate that. - Well, I meant more like who uses those
characteristics and preaching Christ at the end. - Who uses which? - So who goes through, speaks culturally,
affectionately, passionately, and embodies all of them. - Look. I would say everybody. I do think
that the culturally thing is a place where we're not very good. I would say almost
all the preachers you hear at a gospel coalition conference know how to preach to
the heart. Most of them do. Some of them aren't necessarily ss you know, sometimes
they're not preachers. Sometimes they're professors or something like that, and
they're not ordinarily preachers. So when they give you their exposition, it's a
little more like a lecture than a sermon, which is fine. But by and large, I would say that
preaching to the heart is not- Preaching to the heart is instinctive. The reason
I'm trying to break it out is I feel like people who are trying to learn how to
preach don't know how to do it. The instinctively gifted preachers just do it.
My job was to try to break it out a little bit for you, so you had some way of
testing yourself and also avoiding the danger of putting all your time on the
exit Jesus and not thinking about how to preach to the heart.
Having said that, of all the things I mentioned, the culturally, learning how to
preach to the culture is something that we're mainly behind on, and I don't see a
lot of good models out there. I am trying to- The book on preaching, that's coming
out, at least has a chapter on this, which I do think is very unusual for preaching
books. I'm trying to write another book, in which
I show people how to do that. So in that sense, I might be- I would say I'm trying
to be a little more of a pioneer. In all the other areas, lots of people are quite
good. All good preachers know how to preach to the heart. I got time for one or
two more, at the most. - So I thought the panel discussion was
actually the most enriching session, and part of that was just because there's a
community. Even you asking for people to ask questions is another reflection of the
dialogue. In our church, we've actually tried- When I preach, I try to actually
ask the questions of the people while the preaching is going on, to get some
feedback, to hear what people are thinking, to try to even maybe nuance
while I'm preaching. But also, I realized there's grace in the congregation. Maybe
even having a faith story that lines up with the point of the text or maybe a
manifestation. So I kind of want to hear maybe your thoughts on the different
variations of doing that. Then also, since so many preachers can be
bad, or they're maybe not aware of how they could get better, what do you do in
your church, besides maybe the plurality of elders to open up your preaching to
feedback from the congregation or other people?
- Okay. That's great. By the way, you're gonna have to sit down because I've got
like 30 seconds. I have to answer this, and then I'm gonna dismiss everybody.
Sorry, those of you in line. Good question. Let me tell you something I did
originally. For 10 years, at the end of every service, I said, the minute the
postlude is over, the minute that the music is over, just come down front. I'm
standing down there, and you can ask me questions about the sermon or anything
that happened in the worship service. So my wife still thinks, Cathy still
thinks that was crucial to the success of Redeemer because, probably, anywhere from
50 to 200 people stayed every single week and pushed questions to me about the
sermon. I was able to not only give people a lot more information than I could just
in the sermon. You're absolutely right in saying that,
very often, the questions help- The questions are wonderful because they give
me an opportunity to bring out things that I didn't have a chance to bring out in the
sermon or even think about as I was preaching. It also gave me an opportunity to model
for people. How do you pastorally deal with people who are hurting or who are
angry at you? That was really, really, really good. We do something right now
called "Questioning Christianity, " where non-Christians are invited with their
Christian friends. I speak for 30 minutes. They ask questions for 30 minutes. Then we
have refreshments, and people can come up and talk to me about it. So I've always felt that the idea of
having questions and answers very, very closely connected to the preaching is
really helpful. However, by the way, in a small setting, I actually think that the
dialogical approach is a perfectly fine way to do a sermon. If you're a house
church, it's really a great idea. I think if it gets big, it's difficult,
even here. You did a really good job, but there's over 1000 of you or something like
that. So I couldn't do it. There is also something about a sermon, in which there
is no ability to answer back. In other words, the sermon is also authoritative. I
don't mind the dialogue stuff. I don't mind the question-and-answer stuff, but
it's also true that the sermon is from the word of God. If it's done well, it's very
authoritative. You also want to guard that as well. That's why I always
liked the idea of not doing the Q&A inside the service, but to
do it immediately afterwards. I did that for a good 10 years, until I was forced to
stop doing it because we started having services at another site, and I had to
leave after finishing the sermon at one site to go preach at another site. I
always missed that loss. The Q&A after the sermons was extremely
important. Okay. I'm two minutes over. So I'm gonna just say time's up. You need to
go to your next workshop. Bye.
