Preaching With Depth

The past few weeks have been waaay too busy for blogging.  I hope to get back to it when things settle down, but as for now, I've got too many irons in the fire elsewhere to be able to come up with anything worth saying here.  The best I can offer is this second paper on preaching.


"Law and Gospel are rightly divided in preaching when the sermon is not primarily didactic, but rather something that claims the listener on God’s behalf… Christ is really present in preaching! Hence, preachers need to be bold enough to give Christ to their hearers. Preachers are tempted to give the text a moral – translating it into our terms or allegorizing it in order to offer us something to do. We miss Luther’s insight that it is the Scripture that interprets us. Preachers need to read the texts so as to allow themselves to be exegeted by them and then preach in a fashion that allows the text to do its deed to the hearers." - -Gerhard O. Forde "The Preached God: Proclamation in Word and Sacrament" (courtesy of Michael Borg)

PREACHING WITH DEPTH

 

YOU SHOULD BE WARNED

This article is the companion to the one concerning expository preaching, and depends upon what was introduced there.  If you have not yet read that one, please do so now.  The preacher truly interested in having depth in his preaching must develop his abilities as an expositor.  True and consistent depth is inseparable from careful exposition.  Not all expository sermons will necessarily qualify as “deep”, but deep sermons proceed from the kind of exegeses that expository preaching depends upon.   Flying high over the text may enable the preacher to notice the occasional “fortune-cookie saying” that he can rip out of context to stimulate a fine rant, and satisfy himself that he has delivered the Word of God.  But that approach is anything but conducive to discovering that which is deep.

A sincere preacher not accustomed to careful exposition may stumble upon a deep thought from time to time, but consistent depth will evade him because he has not regularly endeavored to dig down to where the deep things are found.   Meticulous exegesis is the way that things hidden deeply are excavated from the text.  There may be such a thing as a “deep” sermon that is not anchored in and driven by the text, but it is not likely.  More probably, any apparent depth was borrowed, and eisegeted.  In some cases, it is strictly artificial.

Concerning artificial depth, awareness of the need to be deep, at least from time to time, has often caused shallow preachers to invent outlandish interpretations, and even heresies in order to prove they can go deep too.  For example, recent “insights” into the Lord’s Supper offered by a prominent Independent Baptist pastor in a desperate attempt to go deep are nothing short of blasphemy.  The same is true of some imagined conversations concerning the plan of redemption that allegedly occurred between the First and Second Divine Persons.  Such concoctions are not deep, they are a witch’s brew of heresies and inexcusable eisegesis.   A firm commitment to regular exposition would have yielded something far more valuable, instead of something blasphemous and positively dangerous.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?

If you are reading this with the expectation that some easy trick to extracting the deep stuff will be revealed to you, or if you think you will be handed a skeleton key that unlocks the deep stuff in the Bible, go away now, and never come back.  Deep preaching demands diligence, patience, and focus to uncover the depth of the Bible and skill to present it to others. 

Many, if not most Christians can identify depth when they hear it, although the majority still seem to prefer the shallow and less challenging.  Depth is one of those things that “you know it when you see it,” but nobody seems to have bothered to define it, at least not in such a way that has given us a widely agreed upon definition for depth in preaching. 

This being the case, then we must look to the dictionary and work with what we find there.  The venerable 1828 edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language provides us with eleven possible meanings, some of which are so inapplicable that they can be dismissed immediately.  The ones that suit the purpose of this paper are:

·         The abyss; a gulf of infinite profundity. 

·         Abstruseness; obscurity; that which is not easily explored

·         Unsearchableness; infinity.

·         The breadth and depth of the love of Christ, are its vast extent. 

·         Profoundness; extent of penetration, or of the capacity of penetrating; as depth of understanding; depth of skill.

The first three on that list are offered mostly in jest, because they describe well some potential pitfalls that the preacher desiring to “go deep” may stumble over.  A “gulf of infinite profundity” would be a good description for many a failed attempt at depth in preaching.  The image comes to mind of the preacher attempting to be profound, but instead, sliding down a steep incline of whimsy into an abyss of abstruseness, tumbling farther and farther away from his audience in a shower of gravel, until an infinite gulf of obscurity renders everything he says unsearchable nonsense.  Failed attempts at deep preaching lose the hearers as the preacher goes out farther and farther into esoteric babbling.   We will seek to avoid this.

But despite the comical images generated by those first three definitions, they are still helpful in that they point in the direction of the character of deep preaching and the content it does address: the infinitely profound, the not easily explored, the unsearchable and the infinite.   Conversely, shallow preaching fails to tackle such matters, dealing only with the mundane, the clichéd, and the superficial instead.

Indeed, the definitions move in the direction we desire, referencing  what (or Who) is indeed the subject of deep preaching - Christ – the in-exhaustibleness of His attributes and Being, His ontological infinitude, which is in part accurately knowable, while simultaneously not fully comprehensible to finite beings.   The final statement is very helpful.  We can now offer both a definition for “preaching with depth” and also identify its goal.

Preaching with depth takes the listener on a mental journey to levels of greater and more skillful penetration into and analysis of those things in Scripture dealing with the person and work of Christ that are infinitely profound and not easily explored.  

The goal of deep preaching is to mentally lead the hearers into the person and work of Christ that they would never have thought their way to on their own.  

It should be self-evident that before one can preach with depth, he must study deeply and think deeply about what he has found while studying, and then labor deliberately to put it into comprehensible words and logical order.  That is all the formula there is.  There is no short cut to depth.  Yes, there is a way to frequent deep places, but it is time-consuming.

Now the probability of the preacher suffering from “Saturday Night Fever”, strip-mining the Bible for a heretofore unnoticed aphorism to jump out at him and provide the springboard for a deep sermon is zero.   By the undeserved grace of God, Who isn’t inclined to let His people starve despite the incompetence of His preachers, a thought, or maybe even an entire verse will probably “jump out” and engender yet another “Five S’s” or “Five P’s” sort of outline – not really a new sermon at all, but a new text to use to preach the same old thing. 

The congregation will at least hear a verse or two, and be reminded yet again that they need to be saved, surrendered, separated, sanctified, and steadfast; or that they have been purchased, are precious, should present themselves a living sacrifice, be prepared for the rapture, and please the man of God; all of which will be supported by personal anecdotes and overused clichés.  Hopefully, there will be enough of Jesus in it to keep them from dying, at least for a little while longer.  And that brings us to this:

STOP TALKING ABOUT YOU, STOP TALKING ABOUT ME, START TALKING ABOUT JESUS!

The goal of preaching ought to be to enable the risen Christ to walk in the midst of His Churches (Rev. 1:13-20)

Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.  (John 6:53)

Jesus said something revolutionary there (cp. 6:33, 48, 50, 51, 54-57).  We understand that this is a spiritual eating rather than a physical.  There is no argument being made for transubstantiation or consubstantiation.  But it is vital that you see this; Jesus said that you either eat Him or you die.  That eating is not a one-time thing.  It is a life-time thing.  The preacher’s duty is to prepare a nourishing meal of Jesus, put it on a plate, and serve it to the congregation.   The real spiritual vitality of people is directly tied to the amount of Jesus they ingest on a regular basis.  The whip-lashing and pep-talking that pass for preaching may keep self-righteous or intimidated people busy in religious activity for a long time.  But they will be starving for the good news and the Christ that it speaks of.   They may indeed have been saved by “eating” Him once, way back when.  But unless you are feeding them with Him week after week, they are starving under your care. 

To preach deep is to preach Christ.  He is woven throughout the entirety of the Bible.  He Himself told us so.   So much of value could be said about this, but in the scope of a pamphlet there is not nearly enough space.  But consider this.  Jesus Himself said:

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. (John 5:39)

On the road to Emmaus,  

… beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24:27)

Look up those verses, read the cross-references, and their cross references, and discover for yourself that the entire Bible really is about Christ, and until you have understood the passage before you with Him in mind, you have not gone deep enough.  You may moralize very convincingly and thunder away about everything but Jesus.  But you haven’t presented Him.  You can’t unless you know where He is in the text.

Do you want to know how to interpret the Old Testament?  Do you want to know how to really understand the deep stuff in there?  Then follow the example that Jesus provided in Luke 24.  Heed His admonition in John 5.  Did you ever notice the approach taken by the writer of Hebrews?  Over and over again, as He points to Old Testament persons and practices, he essentially says, over and over again, “Do you see that?  That’s about Jesus!”

LECTIO CONTIUA

Finally, the only way to really go deep, and stay deep, is to do so a little at a time, pushing down a little more every week.  Don’t expect to plunge down to the bottom of the mine at 9:00 on Saturday night.  It simply won’t happen.  But if you will select a book, any book in the Bible, find North, establish your control[1], begin at the beginning, and study thoroughly each segment (by the paragraph is best) until you really know what it says and how it points to Christ[2], you will not only have a new message every week, you will be going deeper and deeper, week after week.  

 By the time you have reached the middle of the book, after diligently working up to that point, you will be able to see things that will amaze and delight both you and your listeners – things that you could never have discovered in one session of even several hours.  But approaching it this way, you will have spent accumulated hundreds of hours studying in preparation for opening up the next paragraph. 

And that is the only way to really “go deep”.  May God richly bless your endeavors and reward you and your congregation with delightful and nourishing spiritual meals, week after week, year after year.

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[1] See the paper on Expository Preaching

[2] Tying it in

Surveying the Text

SURVEYING THE TEXT

The request was made for two pamphlet-sized articles, one on preaching with depth, and another on expositional preaching.  In my opinion, they are inseparable.   It is not the purpose of this brief paper to try and make a case for why Expository Preaching should be done, nor to spend much time addressing what it is and is not.  That has been ably handled by others.[1]  The assignment was to speak on how to go about doing it.  However, it is usually advisable to define one’s terms, so the simple definition of exposition as “a setting forth of meaning or intent” will be sufficient.

THE TEXT MUST SPEAK

Principally, anyone that would become an expositor of the Bible must let the text speak for itself.  That is really the whole of the matter.  Everything from here on is aimed at achieving that goal.  When constructing a topical message, the point is already decided at the outset, and Scriptures (as well as quotations, anecdotes, and whatever else may help) are compiled to lend support to whatever the preacher is attempting to affirm in the message.  This works reasonably well with doctrinal subjects; because in such cases, the subject is (unless the topic is a heresy) at least something the Bible actually addresses.

But outside of that, there is always the danger of committing the sin of eisegesis[2], which is far too common.   It is bad enough to import, but is also lazy, to teach Biblical truth from a passage that does not actually address that truth.  It leaves the layperson very confused as to where and how to locate Biblical truth.  However, that is not nearly as reckless and irresponsible as to teach one’s own opinions and other man-made traditions from Biblical passages that really have nothing to do with them.   Sound and faithful Biblical Exposition requires setting forth the meaning and intent of a given Biblical passage, nothing more, or less.

AND YOUR POINT WAS?

Expository preaching is sometimes derided as boring.  If the reason for that accusation is the equation of exposition with drawn-out and tedious word studies (in Greek, Hebrew, or English), or a disjointed series of remarks pointing out all the subjects that suggest themselves in a chosen passage, it is understandable.  Neither of those constitute a sermon, expository or otherwise.  They are at best, a running commentary, at worst, rambling. 

As is the case with any sermon, an expository sermon has to have a topic.  Furthermore, that topic must be derived from the text.  That, in turn necessitates a full understanding of the text,  not only in its own immediate context, but also in the context of the canonical Book in which it is found, the purpose and design of that book, and the entirety of the Biblical canon.   It must also be understood with regard to such details as literary form (Is this prophecy, or poetry?), the differences between descriptive and prescriptive, or indicative and imperative language, and of greatest importance; Is this law, or is it gospel? 

DETERMINING THE TOPIC

So then, how is a topic to be selected?  I dislike going into the first person, but it will be necessary at this point.  I was once asked by someone desiring to learn how to better handle the Word of God, how I came at a text of Scripture, and how learned to approach a text in that way.  After giving it some thought, what I realized was a bit of a surprise, but also quite sensible.  My response was, “I always find North first.”  Obviously, that needs some explanation.

My marketable skill is Land Surveying, and it is to surveying that I owe my approach.  I never  sought licensure, but I spent about 6 full years in the field and eventually became a “Party Chief”; that is, the one responsible for seeing to it that the right data was being gathered, accurately recorded in an understandable format, and brought back to the office.  All the design and layout work that was to follow, which in turn was to be followed by development and construction, would be done on the assumption that the data collected in the field was both properly recorded and correctly understood by the people to whom it was delivered. 

Good surveyors (and I had the privilege of working with some of the best) are very aware of the importance of precision.  They have a discernible attitude of precision, and take great personal satisfaction at the level of accuracy they can achieve when measuring land and locating physical structures, as well as in “staking out” new boundaries, new roads, or the foundations of new buildings.   The good ones are much more careful and meticulous with their medium of land than many would-be preachers are with their medium of the Divinely spoken Word. 

This attitude was so deeply drilled into me during those years in the field that it affects, to this day, the way I approach almost any task.  Sermon preparation has not been an exception.  Indeed, I believe that my years as a surveyor substantially affected my approach to preaching the Bible, both in the gathering of the data and in the presentation of it.  If I have anything original to contribute to the subject of expository preaching, it is because of the way that surveying shaped my approach to sermon making. 

In surveying, there is no importing into the parcel under consideration anything that is not actually there.  There can only be the careful gathering of the data concerning what is there.  There is no ignoring of any significant feature.  It all must be taken into account.  How can we do less with the Holy Scriptures?  Obviously, those reading this paper cannot just get themselves a job on a survey crew and do that for several years in order to develop this attitude.  But through my experience, it became so natural to me that I cannot easily think another way.  The best I can do in this little discussion is to make a couple of observations that I hope will be of some value to others.

FINDING NORTH

The most important task is to always establish “North” before proceeding.   When surveyors get out of the truck, the first question on their mind is “Which way is North?”  The Bible expositor should have a similar commitment to getting properly oriented to his present location in the Word of God.  No exact metaphorical meaning pertaining to Bible interpretation will be given for “North” in this paper.  It may mean a sound Biblical Theology, a sub-heading thereof, the intent of the author, the literary style employed in the passage, or something else.  In some way, they all apply at all times.  Think of North as that fixed and unchanging thing; that thing that must always be acknowledged in order to properly assess and present the data. 

In surveying, unless everything is located, and recorded with proper reference to known locations and directions, nothing is of any real value.   It will not do to draw diagrams on paper of trees, roads, manholes, fences and other features without showing their relationship to one another.  Those same things all exist in many different places, but they exist in that particular place in particular relationship to one another.  It is the surveyor’s job to properly record that information.  To switch metaphors for a moment, every musical composition is made up of twelve notes.  But after hundreds of thousands of musical compositions, the possibilities of arrangement of those notes is still not exhausted.

Likewise, in Scripture one can find doctrines, laws, practical instruction, principles, blessings, cursings, examples of obedience, rebellion and much more.  But they do not appear the same way everywhere.  Just as it would not do for me to stride into the office and say – “Over there where you sent me today, there’s a road out front, a fence around most of the property, a couple of buildings, lots of trees, and some utility services”, it also will not do in a sermon to just remark on the occurrence of a doctrine or a blessing in a passage.  It is there for a reason, in concert with everything else that surrounds it.  All that is there serves a purpose in that place, or it would not be there.  It may not be necessary to talk about it much, but you had better understand what it is doing there; and in most cases, it should be pointed out to those listening.

Establishing North on the ground can be done in a number of ways.  Of course, the compass comes to mind immediately.  Sometimes just knowing which way the streets run, or recognizing the position of the sun in the sky will suffice.  Orienting to a map of some kind is also a commonly used means.   But that map is only valuable if the cartographer understood the direction of North.  There were many companies whose work we would never consult.  They had proven to be unreliable too many times to risk it.  There are others that we would generally trust until we found reason not to.  The same can be said for commentators and theologians.  

Sometimes “finding North”, requires more effort.  At times, a survey crew may spend days establishing what is called “control”.  That is a set of “points” with known coordinates, from which everything else could be “tied-down”.  There is no allowance for skipping this step simply because it may be difficult in a particular situation.  A robust theology, such as expressed in a time-tested confession of faith can be very helpful here. 

Don’t ever simply assume you know where you are, or where North is.  You may know, but the gravity of task demands the humility to make certain.  Check to be sure that what you assume is really so.  Surveyors eventually become conditioned to always be aware of which direction they are facing.   They don’t have to remind themselves to do it.  It becomes second-nature to them.  A good surveyor will always begin by determining exactly where he is at the time, by degrees, minutes, and seconds, and by 100ths of a linear foot.  The expositor of the Bible should do no less. 

LOOSE ENDS

After “North” is determined, the surveyors objective is to locate correctly all known features, such as: the many things that can indicate a property line, a recognized boundary, topographical features.  These and much more are evaluated and recorded.  

Furthermore, it is essential that everything be recorded in such a way that it can be easily understood by the person to whom it is delivered.   Every preacher should be able to relate to that.

There are more surveying practices that would serve as metaphors, but there is no reason to twist the analogy that many times.  To do so would be committing the very sort of allegorizing than we are trying to correct.   Those I employed are in an attempt to explain the sort of approach and set of mind that is needed in order to properly and faithfully size up a text.   And though this has more to do with exegesis than exposition, without sound exegesis, there is nothing to properly exposit.  All that can be done without it is ranting and nagging about things imported, without Biblical warrant, into the text by the preacher.

PRESENTING THE DATA

During your data-gathering, some subject contained in the text will appear dominant above the others.  There will be some fixed point of reference to which everything else is related.  This will likely provide you with a topic worthy of a sermon.   There may be more than one, but one will have to do, and the others set aside for another time.  Do this, or your message will lack focus, and something other than a sermon will be the result. 

Once you have established, from the text, what it is that God has said, and that you are now endeavoring to press home, use every point given in the text to build your argument.   Tie it all in to one or more of your control points.  You may need to rearrange the order differently than the text presents them – especially in narrative portions of the Bible.   But unless re-arrangement  is obviously called for, it is best to follow the order given.  Stay with the order of the text because the reason for the order, while not initially noticeable, may become more clear as you proceed to put down your thoughts.

Concerning outlining, it is advisable to lay out the headings you want to cover and organize your thoughts beneath them.  This is another way of “tying in” to the existing control.   When delivering the message, try to have one thought flow as naturally into the next as possible.   Know that a truly “good outline” is not one that has good symmetry or allows for ranting on pet peeves, but one that actually headlines faithfully the content of the text.   If a sermon can be alliterated, or otherwise cleverly constructed for rhyme, or rhythm, the better it will be.  But the outline must always serve the text, not the inverse, or something other than exposition, something more akin to eisegesis, will be happening.   

The Word of God demands a more respectful treatment than sloppy analysis, careless eisegesis and disorganized presentation, and the people of God deserve a more faithful delivery of the Bread of Life.   May God enable you to adopt diligent methods of Bible study and always approach His Word with reverence and an attitude of precision that will not be satisfied with anything less than getting it right.

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[1] See Samuel P. Logan’s The Preacher and Preaching,

[2]  Eisegesis is certainly sinful.   The word means reading into the text what is not there - and interpreting everything based upon those assumptions.  That is to mishandle and twist the Scriptures to teach the opinions of man – one’s self, or some other, likely an admired teacher  or leader within a sect or movement.