I have 3 rules for preaching; I thought I’d share them with you.
These are my first ports of call for assessing my own or someone else’s preaching. There is lots more that could be said and fed back on, but this is the centre of what I think we should be aiming for in our preaching. If we miss these, we’ve missed, if I can talk in that language.
It should be said up front that I have broken one or more of my rules several times, both before and after I formulated them. Having formulated them means I break them a lot less, of course.
Preach the passage
You should preach the passage for the day, however that works in your church setting. That means you shouldn’t preach another passage because that’s really what you want to say, you should do the hard work to unearth what’s going on in this passage for today. You shouldn’t bounce all over the Bible unless it explains this passage (and sometimes it does, so you should!). You shouldn’t use the passage as a foil to talk about something that it’s only obliquely interested in and so instead jump somewhere else and preach that instead. And, you shouldn’t preach topically without also preaching a passage, and then you should preach that passage with an eye to your topic.
This means we have to work hard in the study to understand these words and to try as hard as we can to make our point(s) be what these words are saying. Show your people that the Bible has what they need in it.
I reckon this is harder work than more surface preaching, but it should stop us preaching every passage as though it was exactly the same. Use the texture of these specific words in God’s word to show people the truth.
Preach the Gospel
You should preach the gospel every week. More than that you should pay attention to rule one and preach the gospel every week from the passage in front of you.
This means that your preparation will include unearthing the ‘gospel threads’ in the passage that you are looking at on this particular occasion. My conviction is that all of the Bible is about Jesus, because that’s what he taught his disciples on the Emmaus Road (Luke 24). That means every passage has a gospel thread. For that to be true we need to understand that we don’t have to say all of the gospel every time we preach, since that took God 66 books to explain to us. Instead, we uncover what this passage says about Jesus and the gospel, carefully, and show people that angle of what Jesus has done and won for us. We then apply that in line with the warnings or encouragements or examples in the particular passage of scripture in question.
Alongside this is the conviction that preaching is a sacramental act where we offer people Jesus. What I need at church every week is the person of Jesus offered to me in the gospel. What my preaching should do is offer people Jesus. Our sanctification grows through apprehending our justification and Christ in us working to bring our lives into alignment with everything that is now true about us. The gospel is a rich set of truths, it isn’t just the bridge illustration (reconciliation) or penal substitutionary atonement, but both of those are vital aspects of it. The fullness of all that God is to us in Christ takes multiple forms. Give me a sliver of it on Sunday, that’s what my soul needs.
Attempting to do everything usually means you achieve nothing, but preaching one aspect might look like attempting to show us that this passage in Joseph’s life includes death and resurrection for that character and that because of Jesus’ death and resurrection I can rise and my life will look like Joseph’s as I die in repentance and suffering and rise in new life and character through everything Jesus has already done for me and is working in me.
To make it simpler: we only have one thing to offer, make sure that’s what we manage on a Sunday.
Preach like you love Jesus
Don’t be dull. Being dull about Jesus might be the worst of sins.
If Jesus is truly the most wonderful person who has offered the most wonderful salvation and actually wants to lift us up into the arms of the Father without us having to do anything except trust him (and even that a gift!), then… sound like you mean it.
Be excited about Jesus. Don’t put this on, that would fail spectacularly, but get yourself excited about Jesus and then be excited about Jesus when expositing the passage in question.
Do you find Jesus endlessly amazing? Are you full of wonder at the God who loves you? Does contemplating his gift to you want to make you weep, or make you feel tall enough to take on an army yourself? Then great, you’ve got one of the qualifications required for preaching. It’s a long way from the only one, but we shouldn’t be preaching if we don’t think we have genuinely good news for people.
Don’t be embarrassed by the Bible, don’t apologise for it, and don’t smother the truth in obfuscatory language (like that), but believe it’s good news and offer it as such.
I don’t mean you should bounce up and down like a jack in the box while preaching on Hell. Your emotions and tone should match your subject. But it should never be dull. It should arise from the passage. It should offer us Jesus.
Photo by Mark Duffel on Unsplash
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