On Preaching

These are just a few thoughts on preaching which I was mulling over on my walk this morning. They are relevant whether you are speaking to a small number of people, or to lots; and to whether you are speaking to the church or to the world.

There are three actors in the drama:

1. God and His Word
2. You
3. The "audience" (don't read too much into the use of the word audience!)

God and His Word

In 1 Peter 4:11 we are told to speak as if we are speaking the very words of God. Preaching is about communicating God's word, speaking on His behalf. We are here to communicate the message of God, in particular the message of the gospel.

You

God works through our personalities, and our experiences in life, especially our experience of His working in our lives, our experience of His salvation. 

The "audience"

We need to know who we are speaking to and, most importantly, to have some appreciation of "where they are coming from". One of the most important things is understanding why they find it difficult to believe the word of God (and this applies to Christians as well as non-Christians). At one level things should be easy. If we believe God and His Word, and if we obey His word then everything would be fine. Easy isn't it? Yet we all know it isn't. For all sorts of reasons we (and that includes you and me, as well as the "audience") find it difficult to truly believe God. The reasons can be spiritual, emotional or intellectual. Hebrews speaks about Jesus being a High Priest who is able to sympathise with us (Hebrews 4:15). We need to be able to sympathise with the people.

Now to preach effectively we need all three of these ingredients. If we only have two then we will be ineffective. God is obviously the most important. Many parts of the church (eg liberal parts, but not only them) pay little more than lip service to God, and it becomes about me (or man in general). If the preacher also has an appreciation of his audience this then becomes very dangerous, for his preaching will have an attractiveness to it, even though it is devoid of spiritual power.

If we miss out "you", then our preaching will be empty. We will be like the teachers in Jesus' day who lacked authority, and the people recognised it. Unless the word is alive in us we will have limited effectiveness. We will just be drones and we will drone on and on to nobody's benefit.

If we miss out the "audience" then we will fail to communicate, our preaching will either go over their heads, or round the sides, or just bounce off a brick wall. 

When we have all three in place, with God and His Word supreme, then we will be effective preachers in God's hands.