By Chris Philbeck
I recently had the opportunity to hear Dr. Orpheus Heyward share a message at the 2024 RENEW.org Conference. Heyward serves as head minister with Renaissance Church of Christ in Fulton, Georgia, and affiliate professor of expository preaching and Christian leadership at Lipscomb University in Nashville.
At the beginning of his message, Heyward said, “The Word of God saves us from sin (through the gospel), sustains us in crisis, and shapes our character.” He then emphasized how the Word of God shapes the character of a preacher by saying, “There is a difference between studying to preach and studying to grow.” Those words, so simply stated, reminded me of one of the most important and powerful truths about preaching. The Bible can’t be the root and source for your preaching if it’s not the root and source for your life.
I like the way Dallas Willard describes this truth in chapter 14 (“A Cup Running Over”) of the book, The Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching (accessed via preachingtoday.com). Willard wrote, “There is no substitute for simple satisfaction in the Word of God, in the presence of God.”
As I think about that quote in the context of what I will call the “action” of preaching, I know there have been times when I have preached without the satisfaction of knowing my message was the genuine overflow of time alone with God and his Word. Instead, it was the pursuit of mere “content” mixed with the overestimation of my own ability to deliver it in a significant and memorable way. But there’s a big difference between that kind of preaching and preaching that is the overflow of time spent connecting with God and his Word that leaves you with a message from God. That’s a message that can always be delivered in confidence because you know it’s God who is speaking. In that same chapter, Willard wrote, “One of my great joys came when I got up from a chair to walk to the podium and the Lord said to me, ‘Now remember, it’s what I do with the Word between your lips and their hearts that matters.’” Willard then wrote, “That is a tremendous lesson. If you don’t trust God to do that, then he will let you do what you’re going to do, and it’s not going to come to much.”
So, how do we avoid the kind of preaching that “is not going to come to much?” Here are three practical suggestions.
Guard your heart.
I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate the power of Proverbs 4:23, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Jesus said in Luke 6:45, “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart. . . . For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” The heart is the source of our thoughts, attitudes, and so much more, so we need to make sure our hearts are firmly focused on God.
Preaching puts us front and center regardless of the size of the audience. It doesn’t just give us the spotlight, it gives us a platform. All of that makes it easy to think that preaching is about us, but that is never the case. Preaching is always about the glory of God, love of God, grace of God, mercy of God, and the message of God. And preaching becomes deeper and more effective through a growing dependence on God which happens as we continue to surrender our hearts to him day by day. I know there’s something different about sermons I have preached where my heart has been absolutely broken by time spent with God.
Never separate the text of Scripture from the Lord of the text.
This reminds us the Bible isn’t just “content.” It is the living and active word of God (Hebrews 4:12). So, when we open our Bibles to write a sermon, we need to approach the Scripture from the perspective of what we need to learn before we focus on what we want to say. That doesn’t mean we approach preaching from a purely academic standpoint; it just means we share what God places before us from a position of knowledge. One of my favorite verses from Proverbs is: “Every prudent man acts [speaks/preaches] with knowledge, but a fool flaunts his folly” (13:16).
Share a message of hope. Because God is a God of hope, we need to preach his truth in a way that makes people believe their life can be different. I am constantly reminded that the people who come to my church are looking for hope because the personal experiences of their lives and the overall condition of the world today have left them longing. That provides me with great motivation to avoid the kind of preaching that’s not going to amount to much.
So, I think, for example, about Jesus and all the wonderful stories of the Gospels I have known since I was a boy. In John 4, when Jesus told a Samaritan woman he met at a well that she could experience living water, there was a moment she believed it could happen. And while it didn’t happen immediately, as Jesus continued to talk, that moment came. In John 8, when Jesus told a woman caught in adultery to leave her life of sin, there was a moment where she believed, maybe for the very first time, “I can do that.” As Jesus, who was God, spoke the Word of God, he brought people hope. That’s our example.
There will be a place for our effort so long as we live in this world. But when it comes to preaching, our effort begins and ends with drawing near to God and his Word so he can speak through us with a message that is so much more than we could ever create on our own.
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