In his recent blogpost “Some Thoughts on Pulpit Methodology”, Iain D. Campbell challenges the prevailing wisdom in some evangelical circles that sequential exposition is always best. While I probably won’t change my prevailing pattern (I mainly preach through books), it reminded me not to put a straightjacket on preaching method.
God can use sequenced or unsequenced preaching. Just let us be biblical!
I agree with Peter Mead. Seminaries for pastors in training should not think of homiletics as a fringe subject. “In a sense all subjects converge in homiletics.”
Whether teaching biblical languages, exegetical skills, doctrine, or church history, seminaries are there to equip men to preach. Right?
I preached my first ever overview sermon yesterday. It was on Genesis. We looked at
It was particularly encouraging to think about ways in which Christ is promised and foreshadowed in Genesis.
I laughed when I read this counsel from Brian Croft. Preachers, take heed!
The enemy is trying really hard to put up as many barriers between us and our people. Therefore, whether in a hospital or greeting people as they leave on Sunday, eliminate one by always carrying gum or a mint…and don’t be afraid to use them.
Read the whole post.
Before I start preparing my sermons on Tuesday morning, I usually sing in the study, Speak O Lord, as we come to You, to receive the food of Your Holy Word. It can feel a little conspicuous, and I’m glad no one can hear me except the cows in the field outside my window! But it articulates well my request to the Lord at the outset of my preparations. Does anyone else sing a hymn, or two, before beginning their exegesis?
“The gospel is preached in the ears of all men; it only comes with power to some. The power that is in the gospel does not lie in the eloquence of the preacher otherwise men would be converters of souls. Nor does it lie in the preacher’s learning; otherwise it could consists of the wisdom of men. We might preach till our tongues rotted, till we should exhaust our lungs and die, but never a soul would be converted unless there were mysterious power going with it – the Holy Ghost changing the will of man. O Sirs! We might as well preach to stone walls as preach to humanity unless the Holy Ghost be with the word, to give it power to convert the soul.”
(Spurgeon, quoted in Stott, IBIP, 335)
Dr Josh Moody is the man who faced the daunting task of following R. Kent Hughes as the Senior Pastor of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois. His thorough answers to the 10 questions are well worth reading. Josh’s regular semons can be heard here.
1. Where do you place the importance of preaching in the grand scheme of church life?
If church, as they say in Australia, is God’s people gathered around God’s Word, then preaching – if it’s biblical preaching – is central to the life and health of church. You find that in Acts chapter 2 the early church devoted itself to the apostle’s teaching. You find Paul commends the Philippians for ‘holding out the Word of Life.’ Jesus was a preacher. He was more than just a preacher, but he was a preacher.This whole area of verbal witness is terribly important today; I was just chatting to someone about that this morning. It is said that Francis of Assisi was well known for the quotation ‘preach as much as possible and if necessary use words.’ As far as I can see, historically he never actually said such a thing despite how popular that quotation has become, and what’s more (irony of ironies) Francis was a preacher. The Puritans were preachers. The Reformers were preachers. Moses was a preacher. If you marginalize preaching from the life of the church you pretty soon have a human organization centered around human agendas. We constantly need to be brought back into line with God’s ways and God’s truth, and God’s means for doing so is the proclamation of His Word.
This does not mean that other aspects of church are insignificant, nor that social justice agendas, the environment, diversity of socio economic and cultural and racial backgrounds are not important. But it means that as we life up Christ he will draw all people to himself. It’s my constant experience that as we preach Christ from the Scriptures in the power of the Spirit, it is life changing. I’ve been to cities where the liberal churches that marginalize preaching and instead talk incessantly about diversity are made up of all middle class White Anglo-Saxon Protestants; and the evangelical churches that hardly mention diversity but preach Jesus are as diverse and multicolored as a rainbow. My screen saver on my computer for many years has been ‘Preach the Word.’ When Paul was passing the baton onto Timothy he emphasized this as the key last message he wanted to communicate to his protégé Timothy. Preaching for church life is so important that Paul’s famous last words in 2 Timothy were focused upon that charge to preach the Word.
2. In a paragraph, how did you discover your gifts in preaching?
A paragraph! My first sermon was at 13 years old soon after I had got converted. I went to a largely secular, nominally Christian, ancient English private boarding school. It was founded in 1558 by the man who perjured himself to have Sir Thomas More killed. Ever since then the British Parliament has a law on its statue books that this school has to have an annual founders day service in commemoration of the founder or else cease to exist, a stipulation that was originally intended to be for praying for the founders soul when the foundation was part of a Roman Catholic regime before the country switched back to Anglicanism.Anyway…there I am, somehow given the opportunity to preach to 500 of teenage peers, as a strapping 13 year old. I’d chosen the text from the end of Ecclesiastes on the end of everything being to fear God and keep his commandments. In that school, when the preacher walks in the whole chapel rises to its feet. You walk around to the pulpit which is one of those old ones where they are set apart next to a pillar and you rise up the steps to the top. I did so, asked everyone to sit down. And began to preach. It was a strange experience. Immediately afterwards I remember feeling that something was at work beyond just me. I put it to the back of my mind and went on through life, intending after Cambridge University to become what’s called a Barrister in the City of London.
But God had other plans and gradually wooed me to the pastorate. But I think my original sense of a call to preach was closely connected to a dramatic conversion/assurance experience when I was thirteen and preaching after that to my secular or nominal English boarding school. I think I most honed my initial gifts of preaching in the context of what was called “camp” which is a network of Bible camps for young people that has the heritage of producing English Christian leaders down through the years, like (for instance) John Stott.
3. How long (on average) does it take you to prepare a sermon?
I was trained that you should take one hour preparation for every minute speaking. That said, it does all depend, and this question is a bit like ‘how long is a piece of string.’ Some passages you’ve preached on many times before, some seem to come easier as sermons than others. But the basic rule to remember is that preaching is work and you have to pray, pray, pray; study, study, study; think, think, think; and only then can you preach, preach, preach.4. Is it important to you that a sermon contain one major theme or idea? If so, how do you crystallise it?
A sermon is a message, it has a thrust to it, so yes it is important that there is a central controlling idea or thought that runs through the sermon. This doesn’t mean there has to be only one ‘point’ formally, of course, there can be many, or fewer, all depending on what the passage intends which you are preaching. My feeling is that the Bible is (as JI Packer said) “God preaching” and therefore the preacher’s task is to ‘re-preach’ the Bible. Sometimes a passage you are preaching may have two or three, four or five, or more, major ideas or themes, but there is usually, if not always, a controlling umbrella idea and that’s the one you need to focus on.I’m not sure there’s a completely methodological way of crystallizing what the main point of the sermon is. Keep in mind Lloyd-Jones’ remark that great preaching is preaching on great themes. So be determined to find the big idea. Then express it in a clear way. Try expressing it verbally, as an active commitment, or encouragement, or command, or promise, or warning; try not to express it purely as a title or statement. But these are guidelines, and there are different ways of doing it. Preaching is an art, not a science. One of the most effective outlines I ever heard was by the British preacher Dick Lucas who said when preaching on Eli that Eli was ‘good but weak, and we should be good and strong.’ Powerful stuff.
5. What is the most important aspect of a preacher’s style and what should he avoid?
Style? There are whole books on that. I think the most important thing to be avoided is faking it. Not being yourself. Trying to be someone else. Preaching is a personal encounter. You are there. Make sure it really is you.
As important, if not more, is the idea of drawing attention to yourself. Avoid that like the plague. You are not there to draw attention to yourself you are there to draw attention to God.There are many subtleties here of numerous kinds. Spurgeon’s ‘Lecture to My Students’ has many helpful guides. I would say that in addition to the things already mentioned it’s important, perhaps above all or nearly above all, not to be boring. God is not boring. Your manner of delivery must not be boring. That does not mean you have to shout at your congregation for an hour. You can be relatively quiet. But there needs to be an electricity in the air.
In the end, it seems to me that all the rules of rhetoric can be boiled down to trying to teach us how to speak as if we really meant it. There are other aspects of course, and that’s a conversation on that idea I once had with someone about it. But the key part of style in preaching is to really mean it. You can get away with a lot if there is that authenticity. True preaching is not about having perfect grammar.
6. What notes, if any, do you use?
I’m developing. When I first started preaching I hardly used any notes at all. Then I found as I was preaching more and more that I was actually learning my message, and that became a mental strain. Then I switched gradually to a full manuscript, and I found that that was what Edwards did and Lloyd-Jones did in their early years, and in Edwards’ case for most of his preaching ministry. I think there is real value, especially for the preacher who is preaching every Sunday and does not have the luxury of the itinerant of honing his message to perfection in his head, there is real value in the discipline of writing out every word. It makes you think clearly. It makes you look at what you are saying and ask yourself whether you really mean it.That said, manuscript preaching should never be reading it. A colleague of mine once said to me that it is more like a security blanket than something you actually read. There’s a lot to that.
But as I say I am switching a bit at present. I still have the manuscript but I find now that for various parts of the sermon, particularly the illustrations, or narrative parts, it’s better just to indicate with a word or two what I was going to say and then say it. For the more accurate precise exegesis I still have large swathes of information. My guess is that as a preacher develops through his life there are certain topics where it becomes almost a barrier to have extensive notes. He needs the freedom to be able to express the idea with the words suited to the people in front of him at the time. But I do think it’s particularly helpful for younger preachers to start with full manuscripts. It develops precision, and people who have never done that can tend to sound rambling. Of course there are always the exceptions, and probably the most important thing is to develop an approach that suits your own temperament, gifts and personality.
7. What are the greatest perils that preacher must avoid?
Pride is the classic one usually mentioned. I think one that is seldom mentioned but which I find actually to be a more prevalent problem among preachers is discouragement. Preaching, if you are doing it properly, demands your heart and soul. As a pastor and preacher of God’s Word you want to see life change, heaven open, God descend, people saved, change, every time you preach. You are the aroma of life and death. Plus preaching is so personal and emotional. You are very exposed in a pulpit. It’s easy for a high on preaching Sunday to be a depressive low on day off Monday. We should neither rejoice in our victories (for they are his) nor wallow in our defeats (for they are not necessarily ours). Spurgeon’s story about ‘that terrible sermon’ of which he was so discouraged only to find several people had been converted through it is a lesson to all of us that the seed is sown and it gradually, and of its own, produces the growth.8. How do you fight to balance preparation for preaching with other important responsibilities (eg. pastoral care, leadership responsibilities)?
Basically, I prioritize the preaching. So that means my mornings, first thing, are given over to sermon preparation. Afternoons are for admin and counseling. Mornings are for preparation for preaching. All day Friday is for preaching. My job as a preacher/pastor is not to do the work of the ministry but to equip people to do the work of the ministry. I am the equipper, and I equip through prayer and the ministry of the word. As a senior pastor my job is to feed and lead, so there are many administrative tasks, but if the leading is primarily done through the pulpit, and when it is not it is still done out of God’s Word. So practically I guard mornings like a mother lion guards its cubs.9. What books on preaching, or exemplars of it, have you found most influential in your own preaching?
Books: Lloyd-Jones, Preachers and Preaching; John Stott, I believe in preaching; Peter Adams, Speaking God’s Word; Spurgeon’s sermons; Edwards sermons; Jackman and Green When God’s Voice is Heard; Piper The Sovereignty of God in Preaching. People: Dick Lucas, John Stott, Mark Ashton, many others.10. What steps do you take to nurture or encourage developing or future preachers?
We have an internship and a ministry resident program at the church where I work, and both of those are vehicles for training up future ministers of the gospel. I try to give people opportunities to preach – we have a large number of folk doing that over the summer months while I’m out of the pulpit – and good feedback when they do preach. I seem to remember sermons pretty easily; I remember freaking out one preacher I was mentoring by quoting back to him large sections of his sermon or at least all the structure of it some months after he had preached when we finally got time to review how it was going. It’s very encouraging to me to see folk I’ve been involved with over the years pastoring, teaching, preaching. We all have to replicate ourselves several times over as a matter of great urgency.
Some pastors lecture. Other pastors preach. I can safely say that Steven Lawson falls into the latter category.
Faithfully preaching Scripture throughout 29 years of pastoral ministry, Dr Lawson possesses that rare combination of ‘light’ and ‘heat’ in his expository style. Its an immense pleasure to put our 10 Questions for Expositors to Steven Lawson today.
1. Pastor Lawson, where do you place the importance of preaching in the grand scheme of church life?
I would place the preaching of the Word of God at the very center of the life of the church. It is biblical preaching that sets in motion and leads to everything that is good in the church—transcendent worship, godly living, loving fellowship, energetic service, and Christ-centered evangelism. We cannot worship God until we know who He is and what He has done for us. Expository preaching enhances such worship. We cannot live holy lives until our sins are exposed and the path of godliness is made known to us. Again, it is biblical preaching that leads to this. There is no true fellowship in Christ at a meaningful level apart from biblical preaching. Neither can we serve the Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit, nor carryout authentic evangelism, without being challenged by the truth in preaching.
A study of the life of Christ and the early church shows this to be true. Jesus Christ Himself launched His public ministry by preaching (Mk. 1:15-16). The first activity of the church in the book of Acts was preaching (Acts 2:14-40). One fourth of the book of Acts is the record of either a sermon or a defense of Christ. The early church was marked by powerful gospel preaching. No church will rise any higher than its pulpit. Strong churches are the result of strong preaching.
2. In a paragraph, how did you discover your gifts in preaching?
I discovered my gift in preaching in several ways. One, God gave me an overwhelming desire to proclaim His Word. The more I preached, the more I wanted to preach. God put such a strong desire in my heart (1 Timothy 3:1). Two, as I preached, I began to see people come to faith in Christ and believers were being encouraged in their faith. People began to give me positive feedback to my preaching, which was a needed confirmation. Three, I was providentially thrown into preaching. In circumstances beyond my control and through events that I would have never pursued, I suddenly found myself thrust into the arena of preaching. I could only assume that the invisible hand of God was moving me in this direction. Four, I had positive examples of biblical preaching placed before me. The more I heard true preaching, the more there was a fire ignited in my bones to do it.
3. How long (on average) does it take you to prepare a sermon?
The real answer on how it takes to prepare a sermon is all my life. In reality, the preparation of a sermon pulls forward all the years of one’s personal study of Scripture, as well as all one’s life experiences, including trials. God must make the preacher before the preacher can make the sermon. More specifically, it once took me about twenty to twenty-five hours to prepare an expository sermon. I can now do it in less than half that time, depending upon the ease or difficulty of the text and the occasion in which I am speaking.
4. Is it important to you that a sermon contain one major theme or idea? If so, how do you crystallise it?
It is certainly critical that a sermon contain one dominant idea. If you try to say twelve things, you will say nothing. But if you try to say one thing, you will say it well. There should be a straight-line of thought that runs throughout the entirety of the sermon, from the introduction to the conclusion. The preacher cannot be like the man who jumped onto his horse and rode out in every direction. He cannot head in every direction when he stands to preach. Rather he must have a clearly-marked path before him and stay on track, not veering to the right or to the left. Finding the central thrust of a text is a matter of capturing the thunder of that passage. It is finding what is dominant and what is driving the main thrust of the passage.
5. What is the most important aspect of a preacher’s style and what should he avoid?
The most important aspect of a preacher’s style is clarity. If he is not crystal-clear in what he is saying, it matters not how passionate he is or how compelling he presents his material. In other words, he must be insightful and speak in a manner in which he is understood. There is an old saying, “Just because a river is muddy does not mean it is deep.” Too often, people assume that a preacher, who is hard to understand, or who speaks over their heads, must be brilliant. The fact is, any speaker can be hard to understand with very little effort. The preacher who has truly mastered his subject is able to communicate it in such a way that others grasp what he is saying. Therefore, the preacher must be coherent and logical, then be fervent and passionate. We must not be like one preacher who wrote in the margin of his bible, “Weak point—yell here.” He must be clearly understood by the common man.
6. What notes, if any, do you use?
I carry a full-written manuscript into the pulpit, although I do not read from it verbatim. I stay fairly attached to it in the introduction, as I do not want to ramble as I come out of the starting blocks. I have written out my homiletical headings, transitions, explanation of the text, word studies, historical background, cross-references, geographical background, authorial intent, building argument of the book, implications of the text, application for the listener, and illustrations. I write the entire manuscript in full sentence form. However, I try to use these notes as little as possible. For the conclusion, I am usually in the overflow of the moment and in such a preaching mode that I am not using my notes.
7. What are the greatest perils that preacher must avoid?
The greatest perils that preachers must avoid: one, pride; two, lack of study; three, prayerlessness; four, withholding the full counsel of God; five, fear of man; six, lack of living the message; seven, a failure to “own” the manuscript; eight, being negative, rather than positive; nine, manipulating people; ten, a lack of compassion.
8. How do you fight to balance preparation for preaching with other important responsibilities (e.g. pastoral care, leadership responsibilities)?
There is no simple answer to this question. The temperament and personality of each pastor is different. The passions and strengths of each man differ. The pastoring demands of each church vary. The needs and age of each congregation differ as well. Each pastor is helped by different kinds of men around him. Each pastor must balance these competing demands, depending upon how he is wired by God and where he serves.
9. What books on preaching, or exemplars of it, have you found most influential in your own preaching?
The best books on preaching are those books which contain great sermons from great preachers. I have learned how to preach, primarily, not by reading books on how to preach, but by reading the sermons of powerful preachers like Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and John MacArthur. Great preaching is more caught than it is taught. Most who teach preaching are not the best preachers. And most of the great preachers are not writing books on how to preach. There are, of course, exceptions. The best book on preaching that I have ever read is Preaching and Preachers by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, himself a prince of preachers.
10. Finally Steven, what steps do you take to nurture or encourage developing or future preachers?
In order to nurture future preachers, I do several things. One, I host an annual conference on expository preaching called the Expositors’ Conference (www.expositorsconference.org). In this conference, I invite a noted expositor to join with me in preaching on the distinctives of expository preaching, as well as modeling it. Two, I preach in numerous pastors’ conferences and bible conferences around America and in other parts of the world. These venues allow me to excite and encourage young preachers and model for them biblical preaching. Three, I have written several books and articles on expository preaching, which have been used by the Lord with positive effect upon future preachers. Four, I maintain correspondence with young preachers who write and seek guidance. Five, my sermons are posted on the webpage and become an example, of sorts, for young pastors. Six, I visit with pastors at conferences before and after I speak. Seven, I teach expository preaching in the Doctor of Ministry programs at various seminaries, such as Ligonier Academy in Orlando, Florida and The Master’s Seminary in Los Angeles, California. Eight, I teach the Expositor’s Institute with John MacArthur in which we work with fifteen to twenty men in a small group setting regarding biblical preaching.
Steven Lawson has much to teach other preachers. Here’s what I would recommend, especially to younger preachers:
1) Listen to some of Steve Lawson’s sermons at Christ Fellowship Baptist Church, in Mobile Alabama. They are substantial and powerful. Even better, watch hispreaching here.
2) Steven has written some excellent books in recent years, not least a number of brilliant historical studies (See Pillars of Grace series). “The Expository Genius of John Calvin” and “Famine in the Land” are especially rich fare for preachers.
3) Hear Dr Lawson at a conference, especially if his theme is expository preaching. I wouldn’t mind going to this one!
4) Go to the New Reformation Ministries website where you’ll find more resources from Steven Lawson
“What makes preaching different from oratory or acting is that it is required to be rooted in a life of personal godliness.”(Frank Retief, When God’s voice is heard, 125)
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