Let the Earth Hear His Voice

Strategies for Overcoming Bottlenecks in Preaching God's Word

Greg R. Scharf

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781629950426
• eBook ISBN: 9781629950433
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Preachers speak for God. Do they do so faithfully and clearly? Scharf gives diagnoses, strategies, and exercises for overcoming eight common bottlenecks that (humanly speaking) can clog a sermon's message.

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Preaching as God Speaking through People: A Biblical and Theological Rationale

My Assumptions

I assume a conservative evangelical view of Scripture, as is so well articulated by others.9 I do not know any other meaningful place to start. If the canon as we have it is not the measuring rod of truth, then we have no fixed point outside our cultural and personal limitations from which to evaluate any idea or practice. The hermeneutic that I employ rests on the assumption that all passages of Scripture, including those I cite, can be read and understood by the diligent use of ordinary means, such as examining the grammar and syntax, as well as the vocabulary and idioms, of the original texts to understand what they meant to the original hearers of them.10 The illumination of the Holy Spirit, like any light on a page, merely helps the reader see what is there; it does not create meanings beyond what the author put there by using the words of the text. A corollary of this hermeneutic is that if I misread a text of Scripture, others who have read it properly and have therefore discerned its intended meaning are in a position to correct my misreading in ways that commend themselves to me.

Admittedly, some texts have built-in ambiguity and others seem not yet to be clear to anyone. This does not deter me from operating on the Reformed assumption of the perspicuity of Scripture. Assuming that a text is clear, I keep looking at it until I can see what it is saying because it is saying something that I (and those to whom I preach) need to hear, believe, and obey. This hermeneutic, therefore, reinforces a posture of humility, not only before God, its ultimate and infallible author, but also within the church and before the people to whom I preach. They also have a responsibility to read the Scriptures and, like Priscilla and Aquila in their ministry to Apollos, to show me “the way of God more accurately” if they discern that my understanding is limited (Acts 18:24–28).

I rely not only on contemporary fellow Christians both within and beyond my own culture but also on gifted teachers of any era, including those whose insights are available to me only through books or electronic resources. I do not want to be guilty of chronological or geographical snobbery. On the other hand, I do not want to neglect recent discoveries or insights that can shed further light on the text of Scripture. The value of reading a range of writers and commentators, including those from other cultures, is that by so doing I may see and unmask my own biases instead of unwittingly following them to questionable conclusions. Some contemporary scholars and writers, aware of the complexities in biblical literature, have postulated various forms of criticism, which function as lenses through which they claim to see with greater clarity what the text is saying or doing. These include form, rhetorical, and narrative criticisms, as well as sociorhetorical readings, among others. I hope that my awareness of these concepts and disciplines will alert me to things in the text of Scripture that otherwise I would not have seen. To that extent, they serve a useful function. On the other hand, to the degree that these criticisms function as a sieve, filtering out things that the scholar reckons the text could not say—in those cases where it seems plainly to say those things the scholar wishes to filter out—to that extent, I hope I have the discernment to reject their proposed readings. In other words, I want the text of Scripture itself to challenge and correct my presuppositions. In addition, I do not want another ancient or contemporary writer to add his or her presuppositions to the layers of possible distortion. Philosophically, I am not among radical perspectivalists who locate meaning in the mind of the reader. The meaning resides in the words of the text to which I seek to be in submission.

For all these reasons, I expect that my grasp of what God is saying and doing in Scripture and through preaching will grow as the words of the Bible, the illumination of the Holy Spirit, and the insights of Christian teachers and fellow students of Scripture bring additional facets of the truth to my attention. A theology of preaching, like so many other attempts to formulate the biblical data into a pattern of healthy doctrine, is somewhat self-propagating. Once one sees a basic insight, all sorts of texts then appear in a new light in ways that reinforce the concept, strengthening or perhaps qualifying it. This has happened to me as I have read Scripture with this subject in mind; I anticipate something comparable in your case.

There are also some specific convictions that are not at the level of operating assumptions as such, but that nevertheless are worth saying here so that when I list the following affirmations, they will not raise the red flags they otherwise would. One of these is that I do not equate the Old Testament prophetic office, the apostleship (including that of Paul), and the New Testament role of pastor-teacher. Old Testament prophets could say of their oracles “thus says the Lord” because they received direct verbal revelation from God that they then spoke to the people. The apostles bore eyewitness testimony to the earthly life and ministry of Jesus, as well as his resurrection and ascension (Acts 1:22). Paul did so only secondarily and indirectly as one untimely born (1 Cor. 15:8; see also Gal. 1:11–17). In the subapostolic New Testament era, preachers claim neither the sort of inspiration the Old Testament prophets had nor the authority of an eyewitness on a par with the apostles, and therefore, their words from God for the good of the church are to be tested by apostolic doctrine already received (1 Cor. 14:36–40; 1 Thess. 5:20–21). This does not mean that such words lack authority (Titus 2:15), only that the authority derives not from the fact that those words come immediately from God—for they do not—but from the fact that they come from God through the writings of the prophets and the apostles (Acts 2:42; Eph. 2:20). What prophets, apostles, and pastor-teachers11 have in common is that they speak for God, in his name, and on his behalf. The affirmations below stress this common element and are not meant to gloss over these important distinctions.

Below I articulate a rationale for biblical preaching in terms of assertions followed by clarification, discussion, and textual evidence. When needed, I discuss the texts to show that the passages in question do indeed say what I claim, or that what I claim can be justifiably inferred from a fair reading of them. These affirmations are sequential in that they build on readily demonstrated observations and move toward less commonly noticed ones. They focus the discussion in that they begin with affirmations about God and move toward assertions about preaching.

In some cases I will include historical or contemporary examples, instances where others interpret the texts in question as I do and where these interpretations have shaped the way people think about preaching. In doing so, I do not mean to imply that these historical readings of Scripture in themselves make my reading of them more valid—that must be assessed from the text of Scripture itself—only that they demonstrate that I am not the only one to understand these passages as I do.

The Rationale

1. The living God speaks.12 The Bible often reports that God “said” something.13 To reveal himself, he does not limit himself to verbal communication. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1). Creation itself provides a sufficiently plain display that all can know God’s eternal power and divine nature (Rom. 1:19–20). Nevertheless, in addition to the visible general revelation that all can see, God speaks. Sometimes, even though he isn’t saying anything about himself directly, his speech still reveals something of who he is. For instance, he spoke into existence heaven and earth and everything in them (Gen. 1:3–26; Ps. 33:6). That is powerful speech that reveals the power of the speaker. Other times, his speech is directly and clearly self-revelatory: He speaks to tell us things about himself. For example, he says of himself that he does not change (Mal. 3:6), that he is a jealous God (Ex. 20:5), that he is holy (Lev. 19:2), and that he speaks righteousness (Isa. 45:19). What he says is as good as done (Ezek. 37:14). He tells us that he is the only God (Isa. 45:21). He tells us what he loves and what he hates (Isa. 61:8). He speaks about the fallen human condition (Jer. 17:9) and offers the only remedy for it (Isa. 45:22). He predicts events that only he can know ahead of time (Isa. 42:9). Significantly, he always speaks truth because he cannot lie (Ps. 119:151; Titus 1:2; Heb. 6:18).

2. God speaks to people in words that they can understand. Repeatedly, the Bible says that the Lord spoke to someone, whether Moses, Joshua, David, Gad, or someone else. There were certainly times when people did not like what God said to them and so suppressed it or resisted it, but it was not inherently incomprehensible.14 God can communicate with any of his creatures,15 but he speaks in words to people made in his image and likeness. Even the fall of humanity (Gen. 3) and subsequent self-glorifying rebellions (e.g., Gen. 11) do not render communication between God and people impossible. True...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Preaching as God Speaking through People: A Biblical and Theological Rationale
• 2. The Bottlenecks
• 3. Bottleneck 1: Little Faith
• 4. Bottleneck 2: The Unqualified or Disqualified Preacher
• 5. Bottleneck 3: Faulty Text Selection
• 6. Bottleneck 4: Inadequate Understanding of the Preaching Passage
• 7. Bottleneck 5: Inadequate Contextualization to the Preaching Situation
• 8. Bottleneck 6: Faulty Organization
• 9. Bottleneck 7: Inadequate or Overused Illustration
• 10. Bottleneck 8: Flawed Delivery
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Supplemental Biblical Texts That Relate to Preaching
• Appendix B: Cross-Referencing of Let the Earth Hear His Voice with Bryan Chapell’s Christ-Centered Preaching
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Names