Deep Preaching

Creating Sermons that Go Beyond the Superficial

J. Kent Edwards

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780805446951
• eBook ISBN: 9781433668463
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

J. Kent Edwards recalls a story that late pastor J. Vernon McGee told about seeing children in South Africa playing a game of marbles in the dust with real diamonds. The precious stones were being handled with no regard for their true worth. Edwards fears the same thing happens today when preachers offer Scriptural truth to listeners without being completely overwhelmed by its greatness themselves in the process.

Deep Preaching is his call to "rethink" preaching. Edwards helps preachers learn to preach the word in ways that will powerfully change the lives of hearers. He contends that sermons "need not settle comfortably on the lives of the listeners like dust on a coffee table." He encourages preachers to join him in casting off the lines that moor their ministries to the status-quo and make every effort to steer their preaching out of the "comfortable shallows." He urges them to preach deep sermons rather than superficial ones, moving "beyond the yawn-inspiring to the awe-inspiring, from the trite to the transforming."

Preaching has never been easy. The Bible tells us and church history shows us that everyone who has stood to speak God's Word to God's people has faced enormous challenges. Preachers like Jeremiah, Amos, Stephen, Augustine, Martin Luther, and Jonathan Edwards did not stroll casually down the easy street of ministry. Everyone who has taken preaching seriously has faced serious challenges. But let's not underestimate the obstacles that you and I are facing.

Those who will dare to declare the Word of God this week will face unprecedented challenges. It may be tougher to preach today than ever before in history. Why?

The Information Challenge

Think of all you have to know in order to preach well.

• You have to be an expert in the ancient text. Since preaching is “the communication of a biblical concept,”¹ you and I cannot prep for Sunday the way that Oprah preps for her talk shows. Oprah tells people what she thinks as she reads magazines or surfs the net. We are called to tell people what God thinks as revealed in the biblical text. Karl Barth said that he preached with a newspaper in one hand—but not both! We must hold onto the Bible—and understand what it says.
• You have to be an expert of ancient culture. Understanding biblical texts is wonderful, but you also have to know the people for whom they were written. How, for example, did they select a spouse? Get married? Raise children? Prepare for old age? Bury their loved ones? And it is not enough to know just the details of ancient Hebrew and first-century Greek life. You also have to be able to compare and contrast the people of God with all of their pagan neighbors.
• Knowledge of church history is also helpful—for example, how was the text you are preaching and the idea it contains have been used and abused throughout the ages. Historical theology can be of enormous help to contemporary preachers. Remember the old adage: to fail to learn from the past is to doom yourself to repeat it!
• Knowledge of the present day is critical as well. In order to speak to people today you need to know the people of today. What concepts control their decision-making? Where did these ideas come from? A good grounding in developmental psychology, sociology, ethics, philosophy, and apologetics would not hurt. But don't forget that you have to read the local and regional newspapers (on line and in print) as well as the most influential journals. And don't forget movies, MTV and South Park. Mass communication is increasingly occurring in nonprint mediums. You not only have to read everything worth reading … now you also have to watch everything worth watching!
• Knowledge of tomorrow is also important. If you want to help people prepare for what is coming as well as what is, then it is important that you are familiar with what the trends are and where they are likely to take us. Who is your favorite futurist?

Preachers, like everyone else, have more information to deal with than ever before. According to Richard Wurman in his book Information Anxiety, a “weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.”² We have a lot more reading to do than John Owen or John Bunyan ever did. And the backlog is growing. I am told that

In every 24-hour period approximately 20,000,000 words of technical information are being recorded. A reader capable of reading 1,000 words per minute would require 1.5 months, reading 8 hours every day, to get through 1 day's technical output, and at the end of that period, he would have fallen 5.5 years behind in his reading!³

You cannot preach well without knowledge. But knowledge alone will not make you a good preacher. In fact, it can hurt your preaching.

Knowledge can be a communication curse because the more you know about a subject the harder it is to present it in a simple, memorable fashion. As your knowledge grows, so does the temptation to dump all that knowledge on your listeners. If you don't beat this temptation into submission, your preaching will be either too long or too complicated. Or both.

The courses we have taken can take the zip out of our preaching. Loading 500 pounds of facts into your brain can have the same effect as hitching a 25-foot Airstream travel trailer to a NASCAR stock car. Knowledge can drag something inherently interesting into the slow lane. It can make you boring.

It takes enormous skill to be an interesting expert. But that is what the upturned faces are looking for every Sunday morning. They want you to know as much as a research scientist, to be as relevant as a syndicated talk-show host, and to be as entertaining as a stand-up comic.

Good preachers are like great chefs. They do not smother God's ideas under a bland sauce of data. They only use the garnishes that will set off their entrée to maximum effect. They keep the main idea of the text the main idea of their sermon.

The use and misuse of the enormous amount of knowledge available today is not the only significant challenge that preachers face today. Another is our multimedia environment.

The Media Challenge

We exist in a kaleidoscope of sensory bombardment. It is truly astonishing to see how technology has converged to allow the media to bombard us with sensate-rich messages.

Have you ever seen Jurassic Park 3? Not many people did—and for good reason. When my wife was away on a business trip a few years ago I rented the DVD and discovered that the story line was astonishingly bad. The only Jurassic Park movie not directed by Steven Spielberg, this installment—much like its predecessors—had humans running around an island being chased by dinosaurs. The plot was so predictable that I had trouble staying awake. In spite of the boredom, however, I not only watched the movie but the bonus disk as well! What I learned on the bonus disk was that the filmmakers had spent multimillions of dollars to create the most accurate and lifelike animatronics ever featured in any movie. This culminated in an incredibly realistic 44-foot hydraulic dinosaur made just for this flick!

How can a preacher compete against this? When even second-rate movies get millions of dollars of special effects spent on them, how can preachers vie for the attention of their audiences? And it's not just the movie industry that makes our job tougher.

Have you watched TV recently? The split screen concept pioneered by the hit show 24 is now being emulated across the industry. Not only do the primetime cop shows have luscious sets, stunning costumes, and impossibly proportioned actresses, but now we also have up to four different scenes being shown simultaneously. And have you listened to the music playing in the background? Gone is the amorphous “muzac” of days gone by. Now we have hit songs playing at the climax of CSI that tie in perfectly to the theme of the episode. And all this is delivered in high definition to wide-screen plasma screens with theater sound systems. How do you plan to compete on Sunday morning? Some of us have trouble getting our Radio Shack lapel microphones working properly and the sound guy at the back of the room to turn us on.

I cringe when preachers tell me that they are “cutting-edge” because they use PowerPoint. If you think that a glorified overhead projector is cutting-edge then you are more lost than you realize. PowerPoint first came out in 1987! If you think you are going to “wow” people by twirling your clip art, you are not just behind the curve; you cannot even see today from where you are.

We should assume that every person who is coming to hear us preach has spent their week exposed to the finest in multimedia entertainment that our society has to offer. And that this has now become their benchmark for normal. Yet this makes it tough for us to compete. We preachers do not have access to the resources of George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic. Nor can we ask the London Philharmonic to provide the sound track to next Sunday's sermon. So how can local pastors meet the impossibly high expectations of their parishioners?

And it gets worse. Not only do our media bombard the senses of our congregants—they also introduce them to our competition. It used to be that people who lived in a town could only listen to the preaching of those preachers who lived close by. Not anymore. While the introduction of cassette tapes may have broadened our exposure to other ministries, contemporary technology has unleashed an avalanche of exposure.

Your parishioners listen to other preachers on the radio, watch them on TV and on the Web, and download podcasts to their iPods. Like it or not, you are not the best preacher that your people have listened to this week. Your congregation has compared and contrasted you with the best-known preachers of the day. And, thanks to the power of editing, these electronic preachers they compare you with never stumble over their words, tell a joke that is not funny, or have a hair out of place. They come across as flawless communicators. And you do not. People in the pews want the electronic perfection projected by the religious superstars of our day. And we cannot give it to them. The electronic media have made it easier to compare preachers today than ever before.

Rodney Dangerfield used to complain that he got no respect. Thanks to the media, many local preachers can join his chorus.

The Truth Challenge

In addition to the challenges posed by the explosive growth of information and the enormous power and influence of the media, today's preachers must also deal with a strong cultural aversion to the very idea of religious truth. Many people today just don't think that religious truth is even possible.

You and I are ministering to one of the most intellectually schizophrenic cultures in history. Our culture enjoys receiving the “absolute truths” of the hard sciences. They want, for example, to know if there is a positive link between obesity and diabetes. Or, if drinking red wine and eating kidney beans will help them live to be 98. Or, how DNA tests can definitively establish whatever we want proved. People want scientific research to give them truth on which they can make accurate life choices. The only part of life that people think we cannot know with absolute certainty is our religious life.

In matters of religion people talk about “blind faith” and personal preference—not right or wrong. It is not politically correct to talk about another person's religious convictions as being false. We like being encouraged to choose our faith the same way that we select our Ben & Jerry's ice cream—based solely upon personal preference. “Willie Nelson's Peach Cobbler” ice cream is no better or worse a choice than “Cherry Garcia” or “Chunky Monkey.” Likewise following Jesus is no better or worse a choice than following Mohammed or the feeling you get when you go for a hike in the mountains on Sunday morning. Whatever is true for you is fine. Whatever is true for me is equally fine.

It is increasingly difficult for preachers to make absolute statements about such topics as the reality of sin, the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, or the inerrancy of Scripture without raising howls of protest. People don't mind if you share your opinion—much like a radio talk-show host—as long as you don't claim to be speaking absolute truth.

What a terrible position for a preacher to be in! As representatives of the One who is the way, the truth, and the life, we have no choice but to speak truth. Truth is our business, our product. Biblical preaching—by definition—forces us to handle the absolute truth of God's word. Yet when we speak it we are called arrogant and insensitive. When we preachers fulfill our legitimate role as spokespeople of the Lord of the Universe we are labeled as intolerant fundamentalist extremists and get lumped together with Al-Qaeda. Not the kind of company any of us want to keep!

The Expectation Challenge

Preaching is even tougher when you cannot find the time you need to preach your best. If you are a pastor, especially a senior or solo pastor, you know firsthand about the crushing demands that ministry puts on you. And your family.

What does a church want?

• A high-powered visionary leader that sees the future and knows how to get there.
• A personal humility that makes you sensitive and responsive to the concerns of everyone in the church.
• A highly visible commitment to reproduce yourself in the next generation of leaders.
• You to play a prominent role in the community at large and lead by example in the area of one-on-one evangelism.
• A wonderful team player that befriends, motivates, and supervises the church staff.
• A paragon of hospitality who opens their home for youth group events whenever asked.
• An effective fund-raiser.
• A denominational leader of considerable influence to the wider church.
• A caring pastor who always tends to the needs of the local church (that pays their salary).
• The kind of counselor that James Dobson wishes he could be.
• A commitment to marriage that spurs you to spend six weeks of premarital counseling before performi...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Author
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index