Recently I’ve had to preach when it hasn’t been well with my soul. I had a really tough week and was experiencing major inner turmoil. It wasn’t even well with my body; I had a mild stomach bug at the end of the same week. I arrived exhausted at a weekend on which I was due to speak at a marriage conference, give a talk at a wedding ceremony and preach at our church. It was like staring up a huge mountain that I felt completely incapable of climbing.

On the Saturday morning I sent a text to my elders, asking for their prayer. They sent back assurances that they were praying for me, and off I went to speak at the marriage conference. I decided to adjust the ending of that talk in order to speak out of my own sense of physical and emotional brokenness at the time. I told the story of how earlier in the week, in the middle of the anguish I was feeling, my wife Anna had prayed for me, and what a special and powerful moment that was. I didn’t talk about the situation itself but simply how Anna had supported me through it. It seemed that people who were listening connected more to that story than anything else I said. It really seemed to resonate with them.

That experience reassured me that it’s ok at times to speak out of our brokenness and weakness. If that’s where we are at, I don’t see much point in putting on a fake happy face and pretending to be all jovial in the pulpit. I know nobody likes a sour puss, but I want to be real with people I speak to, and sometimes that’s going to mean being real in my pain. It’s encouraging that when people sense vulnerability in a preacher they often connect deeply with it and relate more emotively to what is being said. This is not an attempt to go for the sympathy vote but simply a plea for us to be a bit more raw with our lives in preaching; both in our joy and our suffering.

I got through the wedding talk that weekend as well, and the following morning’s sermon. I didn’t have my usual energy level but other than that things seemed to go ok. Even my upset stomach eased when I was speaking. I can’t remember much of what I personally prayed those days; I think it was more of a sense of just trying to rest in God’s presence and peace rather than using any particular prayer words. God was so faithful to me (and hopefully to those who listened!) and it reminded me that my preaching really is in his hands and not mine.

The next week was much brighter. It’s easy now to drift into self-reliance, but I think the experience of that dark week has left a mark on my preaching. I am more willing to be broken before those I preach to, and at the same time I’m painfully aware of the temptation to do so out of pride (false humility). I am more consciously aware of my total dependence on God throughout the whole process of preaching. And I’m encouraged by the words of Psalm 31: “I trust in you, Lord. I say, ‘you are my God.’ My times are in your hands.”

I realise this sits ironically above my previous blog post a year and a half ago titled ‘Ps: I love preaching’ (http://kiwimadepreaching.com/author/laura-giddey/) but trust me, I have not lost my passion for what I do in that time.  Keep reading.

The year has started with a whir and a bang, as I’m sure it has for many of us.  At the end of last year my supervisor suggested I don’t commit to preach in the first term as I would have the build-up to Easter Camp to contend with, as well as everything else.  Naturally I thought I knew best and didn’t listen to her.  (Apologies Heather!)  So I found myself a few weeks away from my preaching date staring at the theme, with not a lot of inspiration.  The weeks were filling with admin and planning for youth group and sermon prep was taking a backseat.  The topic wasn’t grabbing me, I wasn’t used to not preaching to a text, and I didn’t feel like I had personal illustrations to draw from.  Preaching wise, I was feeling flat.

So what to do?  What would you do?  Are you meant to push through and make it happen?  Or do you listen to your spirit and step back from something that you can’t handle?  How do you discern the difference?

I chatted to my boss about it and he directed me towards focussing on a passage if I felt more comfortable with that, and encouraged me to persevere.  Returning to the ‘First 15’ certainly helped and I began to carve out time to really focus on the text.  Slowly it came together and seemed for form something of worth.

Ultimately I was glad that I continued working towards the preaching date.  People seemed really impacted by the topic and a lot of really helpful ministry came out of it.  God clearly took my reluctant words and used them to hit hearts.  I ended up preaching quite a different sermon to how it first looked, but hopefully it remained true to the text and series.

I’m still struck with this question thought; what do you do when you don’t want to preach?

When I was training for ministry at Carey Baptist College a few years ago, one of our lecturers challenged us to consider spending as much time in prayer for our sermon as writing the sermon.

That’s quite a challenge!

For starters, for most ministers, there doesn’t appear to be enough hours in the week to do all the things that seem to need doing. One of the most difficult tasks for me as a fulltime sole pastor of a NZ Baptist church has been working out where best to spend my time. The sermon is very important to me, but it already takes a sizeable chunk of my average week to prepare one (some weeks more than others!) How can I commit the equal amount of time to prayer for my message?

On the other hand, those sermons that God seems to touch in special ways, do impact people’s lives. I have seen listeners strengthened, encouraged and brought to a place of change in Christ, when God has moved in their hearts through the message.

What sort of time should be given to praying for the sermon?

For me, the answer has come by trying to make my whole life one of prayer, rather than spending a specific time on my knees begging God to do something special with my message. I am still very much a learner, but since I have committed to spending a good half-hour first thing every morning with God, and then checking back in at least twice more in a day (usually after lunch, and then again in the evening) I am more likely to hear anything God wishes to say to me, and I am more trusting that He will do something with the sermon.

I do have a special prayer I pray while I am writing the message, then again on Saturdays when pulling it together, and then before I speak. It goes something like, “Help, Lord, please do something with this message. Please use it for your glory.” (Imagine this said with desperation some weeks!)

And you know what? I find that most of the time He does do something.

Having preached week in and week out, off and on for a few years now, I can testify to God’s faithfulness; that even weeks where I actually thought the sermon was going to be rubbish, He has graciously shown up and moved in people’s lives anyway!

In the end, it’s all about Him. No matter how poor or great a speaker I am, God is the only one who can bring transformation.

I’m glad, because that takes a lot of pressure off me. Sure I still do the work of preparation. Sure I still pray. But it’s what God does when He takes my paltry offering and anoints it that truly changes lives.

To Him alone be the glory!

Time for some honesty. The amount of prayer I put into my preaching falls well short of what I would like. It’s not that I don’t believe in the power of prayer. It’s not that I haven’t seen the difference it makes in the depth and delivery of my sermons. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just that when it comes down to it, as much as I want to pray, as much as I know I should pray, as much as my heart longs to pray … I just don’t. Well … not as much as I’d like.

I’m like Peter in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus asks him to pray and goes away. An hour later, he returns to find Peter sleeping. Jesus asks Peter to pray again. And an hour later he returns to find Peter sleeping again. A third time Jesus asks Peter to pray. Surely this time Peter gritted his teeth (just like I do); he summoned up all his will power (just like I do); he determined with everything in him that this time he would not let the master down (just like I do). But when Jesus returned for the third time, Peter was sleeping (just like I do).

It could be that I’m the only one who has this problem. I might be the only Kiwi preacher that bemoans the fact that my sermons are not more saturated in prayer. I might be alone in having tried so hard and fallen short too many times. But I doubt it.

The more you think about it, the odder it becomes that the solution to prayerlessness we instinctively gravitate to is greater self-discipline and willpower. Andrew Murray writes “What folly to think that all other blessings must come from Him, but that prayer, whereon everything else depends, must be obtained by personal effort!” You can almost hear Paul’s biting exasperation: “Are you so foolish: having begun in the Spirit, are you trying to be made perfect in the flesh?” (Gal 3:3) Perhaps, purloining the words of Andrew Purves’ brilliant little book, “The Crucifixion of Ministry” this is another area of our ministry that God needs to kill so that he can resurrect it in Jesus’ image. Perhaps (Andrew Murray again) it will be “by falling down in utter weakness at the feet of the Lord Jesus, we find there that victory comes through the might and love which stream from His countenance.”

One of the best books on pastoral ministry I’ve read in recent times is a little volume by Michael Jinkins entitled Letters to Young Pastors (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). When giving some advice on preaching he recalls the words of the puritan pastor, Richard Baxter, and says: ‘preachers who aim their sermons at the broken heart will seldom miss the mark of the gospel’. I find that an intriguing concept. What does it mean to aim our sermons at the ‘broken heart’?

First, I think it means knowing the people to whom we preach. The great American preacher, George Buttrick, was once asked, ‘What is the most important thing you do in preparing to preach each Sunday?’ His reply, according to Eugene Peterson, was this: ‘For two hours every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, I walk through the neighbourhood and make home visits. There is no way that I can preach the gospel to these people if I don’t know how they are living, what they are thinking and talking about. Preaching is proclamation, God’s word revealed in Jesus, but only when it gets embedded in conversation, in a listening ear and responding tongue, does it become gospel.’ If our sermons are to hit the mark, it means taking pains to know the people to whom we preach and what is on their hearts.

But, secondly, it means being honest about our own hearts. Jinkins puts it like this: ‘any sermon aimed at the broken heart must originate in a broken heart – in the broken heart of the pastor who bears his or her own regrets, sins, loneliness, his or her own small, and perhaps large, betrayals of those he or she loves. The pastor longs to hear the word of grace alongside all the other broken hearts waiting for that word from his or her lips. I’ve always felt that the sermons that have the best chance of being heard are those where the preacher is a hearer too, where the preacher is allowing the Word of God to address both preacher and people in the same breath.’ This kind of listening, I’m convinced, is the secret to preaching with passion. As William Willimon once said, if we find nothing in Scripture that grabs us, it is doubtful that our sermon will grab anyone else.

So sermons that hit the mark are sermons aimed at the broken heart of both our listeners and ourselves. But they are also, thirdly, sermons that are aimed like an arrow at the broken heart of God himself. Tom Long notes that much of the preaching in our day has taken on the posture of wisdom literature. It is sage advice on how to manage our money or handle our relationships or [insert the particular life skill or problem of your choice]. But, Long says, ‘true biblical wisdom is less about life skills and the management of problems than it is a seeking of the shape of faithful living that results from an encounter with the living God.’ Preaching that changes lives – preaching that hits the mark – will involve an encounter with the living God. In our preparation this means looking first of all not for a sermon outline but for the God who reveals himself in Scripture. And in our preaching it means retaining this theocentric focus and proclaiming the truth about God and his character, his actions, his heart.

“Lord, please take the stones of my words, and transform them by your Spirit into living bread, which will feed the hearts, minds and whole lives of all those who listen to this message. Amen!”

What do I mean and why pray in this way?  It stem s from my conviction that God uses real people [like you and me] to communicate real truth through human language, to inform and stimulate human minds, and to move human emotions, and evoke or provoke change.   This is most faithfully done when the words spoken are a faithful representation of the gospel, relevantly applied to the context and to the lives of the hearers.

BUT, the transforming effects and power in and for listeners are in the encounter with the Holy Spirit which comes in the moment, and which brings alive the message personally to the hearers.  How many times have you heard people say – and/or experienced yourself – “It seemed that you were preaching just to me?”

Now I am NOT making use of the often heard, but exegetically flawed, distinction between ‘logos’ as the human word and ‘rhema’ the divine or living word [they are used almost synonymously in most instances in the New Testament].  But I am saying that it is when the Holy Spirit engages with hearers in personal encounter that the words heard, the emotions stirred, the memories evoked, the failures painfully faced, the aspirations, dreams and hopes raised, become a living message within the very heart and soul of a person.

Then my words [stones] have become the living word [living bread], and bring life and hope, power and transformation into the whole life of the hearer who really hears.

BTW:  Acknowledging this reality is a great antidote to and defence against pride in a preacher.  The reality is that any real transforming effect of my preaching is the work of the Holy Spirit, NOT my exegesis, application, illustrations or oratory [all of which are necessary elements of faithful, biblical, relevant preaching].  Indeed, sometimes I feel very humbled, almost ashamed, that the Lord has used my inadequate preparation [yes, sadly], my lengthy rambling, and/or my lack of simple clarity, to effect such response in some hearers.  To God Alone Be the Glory! Amen.

The post is a response to Steve Worsley’s post last month. Steve’s post made me feel a bit defensive (I don’t know Steve personally so assume he wasn’t aiming it at me) but I am very lazy when it comes to application and so I thought I would take Steve’s provocation to explain why. I deliberately take a polemical tone to encourage debate, not because I believe Steve to be guilty of the extremes I warn against.

1. Everyone benefits from getting to know the bible better; application can seldom be universal – meaning more weight on exegesis benefits more of the congregation.

2. Application that is too direct can create defensiveness and resistance to the message, however get people to accept the principle and then when the penny drops and the spirit convicts it has more force to change their actions as well.

3. The sermon is not for telling people what to do but to lead them into a new way of thinking in the possibilities of the new creation. Transformation of the mind is the goal not information. We are shepherds who lead people to the green pastures of biblical imagination not dictators who control every step. Over-emphasis on application creates a sense of legalism – doing what the preacher says, rather than transformation as the mind is renewed by the Spirit.

4. The more time spent on application (i.e. considering how individuals in the congregation ought to respond to the sermon) means people are more likely to feel got at. I think it is important to avoid using the privileged knowledge of a pastor to preach into situations you know are happening in the church. If you’ve got something to say to someone you need to say it to their face not in front of x number of people. That way the sermon is for God to speak, not for the pastor.

5. Leaving work for the listener encourages engagement with the message and principles; spoon feeding them makes them rely on your insight into their lives to make application. You will not intend it but they will take it as exhaustive. Leaving it open ended allows for application far beyond the preacher’s limited insight and imagination. At a previous church we would leave application for the weekly small groups, so the preacher could lay out the Bible passage and its message but leave it to the small groups to discuss what that should look like in their own lives - I think that is a good way to do it in theory at least.

Example 1 In Steve’s account in his post he (internally) screamed at the preacher for not applying the sermon to his own life, but surely the good teacher is interested in getting the learners to work things out for themselves. Steve is still thinking about how to apply the sermon now, but with a selection of answers provided at the end he may well have been happy to close the book on that sermon and not think of it again. I’d say the sermon was a success.

Example 2 Recently while I was preaching on the Ten Lepers (Luke 17) I made reference to the prejudices that can blind us to what God is doing (e.g. with a Samaritan). I know that some in the church hold strong prejudice against, for example, homosexuals, the Roman Catholic Church and political Maori. If I named those groups in application I would have been mistaken for advocating for those groups and immediately had my point rejected. By allowing them to accept the point in abstract without attacking their personal views they may come to their own conclusions which will be far more powerful than having my conclusions thrust upon them.

Sometimes the text has to be applied specifically and directly and I am not an absolutist by any stretch. I also have to admit that people do appreciate direct and forceful application when I do it and I do get criticised from time to time for not doing enough of it. But you’ve heard my reasoning for doing it not much, what do you think?

Perhaps it comes of being only a sporadic preacher – and so not having a reliable “uniform” for preaching days. Perhaps worrying unduly about what to wear is simply a nervous divergence of energy that would otherwise go into worrying about the content of a sermon. Or perhaps it is (and I know I’m potentially just participating in my own stereo-typification here) because I’m a woman. But somehow, no matter how thoroughly and carefully and prayerfully I have put together a sermon, I tend to worry disproportionately about putting together an outfit.

When I took Paul Windsor’s preaching course a few years back he introduced an approach to preaching presentation with the acronym “Lucis” – laid back, understated, conversational, informal, and self-deprecating. This chilled-out model seems to work particularly well in the Kiwi context, and as I recall, much of our class discussion on the model centred around whether it was appropriate to preach in shorts/t-shirts/jandals/sandals. The conclusion was, well, probably, particularly during a long hot summer!

I was reminded of this discussion when, as a new faculty member at London School of Theology, I was scheduled to preach at our regular Tuesday chapel service quite early on in the academic year. In fact, I was the only female speaker scheduled at all in the entire first semester. And so I had a sudden dilemma when it dawned on me that all my male colleagues seemed to preach in shirt and tie; even besuited, most of the time – and I’d have no opportunity to see other women upon which to model myself before it was my turn. T-shirts and jandals somehow didn’t quite seem the thing anymore – ok for a beach-side Kiwi summer Sunday, yes, but not so much on a grey winter’s day in the UK!

So I consulted my trusty on-campus cross-cultural advisor (I confess, an Australian) and sure enough, “it’s best if you wear a suit” was her response.

Seriously? A suit? How many of you, male or female, if I may ask, have ever preached, in New Zealand, in a SUIT?

But here’s the thing: it became apparent that a simple matter of clothing was actually quite an important question of cross-cultural contextualisation. How was I to communicate best in this context, without putting up barriers or switching people off before I even open my mouth, simply by the way I dress? How could I present myself in a way that says to this audience “preacher with a message,” someone to be taken seriously?

Of course this contextualisation can only go to a certain extent. Preaching must still be truth through personality. I can’t stop being a Kiwi, or, for that matter, a woman. I can’t not preach out of the passion that’s in me – to do otherwise would be to lose all sense of authenticity.

But I can cautiously and generously test the waters of what is deemed appropriate here, to try and avoid obvious faux pas that could distract an audience from listening to the content of what I have to say. And so the grey suit – worn only once, for a job interview – came out of the wardrobe. I’ll save the jandals for another day.

For any who don’t know, the First Fifteen are fifteen questions you can ask of a passage of Scripture to help you unpack its meaning and to seed ideas for your sermon.  It’s a great tool and it sits solidly within the expository preaching tradition and associated values.

Many of us who are Paul’s students have used the First Fifteen for years; some of us use it on a weekly basis.  It helps you see layers of meaning that you may otherwise not recognise.  We are intent on being faithful to Scripture and seeking carefully after its meaning rather than imposing our own thoughts on it.

However, I’ve come to think that this weight of time attention we give to understanding the text is often not matched by a similar weight of time and attention to its application to life.  Do we need a Second Fifteen which pertain to how we can diligently, creatively and compellingly apply the text’s meaning to the lives of our congregation members?  There is a real art to doing it well.  It takes time, attention and prayer.

Ask yourself: What percentage of my sermons are about life application, as compared to the percentage that unpack the text’s meaning?  How much time do I give to each as I prepare my sermon?  On the day you preach, which of these two will go furthest to transforming the hearers?

Recently I heard an expository message where it became clear that the preacher’s key idea was that in trying to ‘upgrade’ our Christianity or add special new things to it, we can find ourselves falling back in to rules-based Christianity.  This seemed a pretty good take on the passage.  We heard about some church rules from the past that now seem ridiculous – ‘You must speak in tongues to be truly filled with the Spirit’; ‘Women must be silent and wear head coverings’; ‘Baptists must not dance’ etc.

That’s as far as we got. Inside I was screaming: ‘But what are the rules that we live by today that hold us back from being better followers of Jesus?’!!* I accept that it’s a hard question, but when you really think about it, there are a number of good answers.  Even if the answers vary from person to person, this question deserved time in the sermon to get us really thinking about it. It felt like a missed opportunity for people to be released from things; or to find greater freedom or to walk more closely with Christ.

It made me wonder whether the spiritual gift of preaching revolves more around this instinct for incisive application than the skill of unpacking the text’s meaning?  Okay – I can hear you saying it’s both/and!  But if preaching’s effectiveness hangs equally on both, then when will someone devise a Second Fifteen that help us preachers open our people up through compelling life application?

*Equally that sermon could have asked, What are the kind of things we add to our Christianity today which are actually not improvements?

We are plagued by a prevalent fascination with the tantalising and the trivial, the immediate and the individual. Such preoccupations threaten to rob young and old alike of any sense of human substance or significance, connected to heroic deeds, historical events, and traditions that actually matter.

No wonder loneliness, cynicism and despair are in the mainstream cultural air we breathe.

I cannot help noticing that Luke narrates an alternative way of being human in his account of Jesus’ words and deeds, initially compiled for Theophilus in the days of Roman Empire.

Luke writes: “In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah …” (1:5) and again in 3:1-2 Luke writes: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar … the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”

So what?

Ordinary people on a world stage. Without any hoo-ha or drum roles, (but of considerable significance for attentive readers of Scripture), Luke wonderfully connects the lives of ordinary people – Zechariah, Elizabeth, John – who live on the margins of the Empire, to the world rulers of their day – King Herod, Tiberius Caesar – and the world stage of which they are part.

Zechariah and Elizabeth lived a long way from the centre of the Empire. They were old, they were childless. Their lives, although they had loved God and faithfully served him over long years, had in important ways been disappointing and perhaps unnoticed. And the elderly Zechariah was just one of some 18,000 priests who served at the Jerusalem Temple. Only once in a priest’s lifetime was he chosen by lot to go into the holy place of the Temple.

But were Zechariah and Elizabeth insignificant? Certainly not. These ordinary old folks were about to participate in extraordinary events that would usher in an alternative Empire of peace and change the world for ever. Whether they understood it to be the case or not, they were players on a world stage. And so was their son.

Baby John, the unexpected child, was befriended by God’s Spirit before he was born. This child would grow to become an eccentric man, reminiscent of those edgy, unconventional Old Testament prophets whose earthly lives had long since passed. We are told that he was great in God’s eyes and yet, at about the age of 36, John would become a victim of Empire violence, beheaded by command of a drunk, cowardly king at the insistence of a seductive daughter and a spiteful wife.

John was a man on the margins. Who could have guessed at the impact of his life, from the corners of the Empire, on the world seemingly ruled from Rome by Caesars and their armies.

In our era, may young and old alike discover themselves as participants in God’s plans for the world. May all of us who feel ordinary find significant meaning through our participation in the extraordinary, world renewing purposes of God. May we take our place on the world stage and name our daily practices and routines as significant in ways yet to be revealed.