A gift for preaching

Mastering Contemporary Preaching
Bill Hybels, Stewart Briscoe & Haddon Robinson.
IVP, 1989.

Rediscovering Expository Preaching: Balancing the Science and Art of Biblical Exposition
John MacArthur Jr.& The Master’s Seminary Faculty
Word Publishing, 1992.

Biblical Preaching—the Development and Delivery of Expository Messages
Haddon W. Robinson.
Baker Bookhouse, Reprinted 1993.

The Supremacy of God in Preaching
John Piper
IVP, 1990.

As I come to review books on preaching by famous preachers such as John MacArthur, Bill Hybels and Haddon Robinson, I cannot help feeling a little presumptuous. It seems a little like commenting on how Greg Chappell could have improved his back lift. However, we can learn from these four very different books on preaching. They tell you at least as much about the personalities and styles of the different preachers as they do about the activity of preaching. I’ll quickly discuss the strengths and sometimes weaknesses of each.

Mastering Contemporary Preaching

Bill Hybels, Stewart Briscoe and Haddon Robinson have written a very readable and easy-to-understand book on preaching. There are interesting chapters on understanding today’s audience and the different ground that a preacher has to work on now as compared to one or two generations ago.

Hybels has a stimulating chapter on speaking to the secularised mind, that is, speaking to people who have never been churched. It’s interesting, he points out, that people who come to their Seeker Service will often stay six months or more hearing the Bible taught before they actually become Christians. It says a lot for the patience that we need to have, as people start their enquiry with less and less Christian understanding.

There are chapters on planning a long-term preaching menu—Old and New Testament, doctrinal and so on. There are also chapters on working hard at the application of the Bible’s truth, as well as making sermons interesting by appealing to the mind, the will and the emotions. The book has several chapters about preaching on controversial subjects such as sex, marriage and money. These are well worth reading.

The final section of the book deals with the preacher’s personal life and personal preparation for preaching and the subtle temptations of preaching (pride, laziness, self-promotion). If this book has a weakness, it is that it claims too much—it should perhaps be called “Some Good Thoughts on Communication”. There is no real treatment of how to deal with the text of Scripture: exegeting the text as it stands, arriving at the structure of arguments and the theology of a passage. The whole emphasis of the book is on communicating to your people, but the hard work of understanding Scripture is barely touched.

If this book is read in conjunction with other books on preaching that deal in depth with understanding Scripture, it will be useful. However on its own, this approach leads to the audience’s desires and questions, rather than the Bible, setting the whole agenda for preaching. My concern is that if this was the only book on preaching that you read, you would know how to ice the cake (communicate) but not how to bake it (understand Scripture).

Rediscovering Expository Preaching

This is an extremely thorough book, running to four hundred pages. The different chapters have been written by John MacArthur and members of the Master’s Theological Seminary which is associated with Grace Church in Los Angeles. Part one offers a biblical mandate for and a history of expository preaching. Part two deals with preparing the expositor (the preacher), dealing with topics such as prayer, godliness and the Holy Spirit.

Part three deals in detail with understanding the biblical text. The issues of hermeneutics, exegesis, grammatical analysis and the like are covered. The chapter by Robert L Thomas explains what is meant by exegesis. There is also a good chapter on a variety of different study tools available to the preacher. The rest of the book deals with central ideas, outlines in passages and how to structure and deliver a message. A further interesting chapter discusses Bible translations and expository preaching, covering the different philosophies of translation in various English text Bibles, from the literal translation to the dynamic equivalent method.

The great strength of MacArthur’s book is his desire and application to understanding the biblical text as it stands. The expository sermon must expose the meaning of the text, and the structure of the text should be reflected in the structure of the message. This book reflects MacArthur’s preaching in its desire to work hard at understanding the text of Scripture.

This book takes the Bible seriously; it expects the preacher to work hard at understanding the Scriptures and to be aware of the role of God in opening people’s hearts and minds. If it has a weakness, it is perhaps that one gets the feeling that there is more ‘science’ than ‘art’ in preaching. I sometimes got the feeling that it’s preaching by the numbers rather than the soul. It might also have been good to say a little about understanding your people and the audience to whom you preach. However, these are minor criticisms and this is an excellent reference book for those who wish to learn expository preaching.

Biblical Preaching

The great strength of this book is that Haddon Robinson pushes the reader to work hard at understanding the big picture of a Bible passage and the purpose in preaching a sermon. He talks about the process of selecting Bible passages and studying the passage to understand the main idea. He then talks about the road from text to sermon, which includes analysing exegetical data and then formulating the idea to be preached.

In the chapter called ‘The Power of Purpose’, Robinson speaks about the need to move people, that the purpose of a sermon must be stated in a change in observable behaviour or, put another way, the purpose of a sermon is “what one expects to happen in the hearer as a result of hearing this sermon”. He is saying the preacher should not stand up to preach,simply because it’s Sunday morning or because that’s what we do every week. The preacher should have purpose as he preaches. He speaks about the different shapes that sermons can take and the actual mechanics of delivery, such as using quotations, factual information and statistics, as well as the importance of carefully prepared introductions and conclusions. He has a good chapter at the end of a book on the importance of clarity in preaching: “A sermon is not deep because it’s muddy”.

While Robinsons’ book has nowhere near the detail of MacArthur’s with regard to working out an understanding of biblical texts as they stand, it is still an excellent book in what it sets out to do: to push the preacher to understand the big idea of the biblical text and form that idea into a clear, easily communicated sentence which forms the purpose of the sermon. It is worth reading simply for this idea.

The Supremacy of God in Preaching

This book is different to the other three in that it is not so much about the preparation of sermons, the delivery of sermons or even understanding our audiences. It is much more about the goal of our preaching, which is “the glory of God”. John Piper’s book is divided into two sections: part one is a series of lectures that he delivered concerning these topics: the goal of preaching—the glory of God, the ground of preaching—the Cross of Christ, the gift of preaching—the Holy Spirit and the gravity and gladness of preaching.

The second part was given at the Billy Graham Centre lectures on preaching at Wheaton College in 1984. These make particular reference to the life of Jonathan Edwards and the way in which he preached. The book is a great call to take seriously the work of proclaiming the Word of God. John Piper stresses the importance of bringing glory to God as we preach and the necessity of preaching the Cross. He also speaks about human weakness in preaching and the necessity of the work of the Spirit: “All genuine preaching is rooted in a feeling of desperation. You wake up on a Sunday morning and you can smell the smoke of hell on one side and feel the crisp breezes of heaven on the other. You go to your study and look at your pitiful manuscript, and you kneel down and cry, ‘God this is so weak! Who do I think I am? What audacity to think that in three hours my words will be the odour of death to death and the fragrance of life to life (2 Cor 2:16). My God, who is sufficient for these things?’”.

The section on Jonathan Edwards is very interesting. It shows the personal cost to the preacher of proclaiming the truth and speaks about the earnestness with which Edwards called men and women to turn to Christ. He speaks about the importance of the preacher’s own personal walk with Christ as well as the importance of understanding the sovereignty of God as one preaches the word of God.

If the book has a weakness, it is perhaps that there is no allowance made for the difference in culture between the eighteenth century and the twentieth century. For example, the use of humour in sermons is condemned. It would seem to me that humour can be a particularly useful weapon in a preacher’s armory today and need not diminish the passion or gravity of the way one preaches the Bible.

These four books on preaching are very different and reflect the different preachers’ styles and emphases. If you were to read all four, you would get a fairly balanced approach to preaching. However, if I had to choose a favourite as a regular preacher myself, the one that did my soul the most good was Piper’s on the supremacy of God. The cover has a quote from J.I. Packer: “A powerful tonic for tired preachers—a book that digs deep into the theology, strategy and spirituality of pulpit ministry”. Most preachers sometimes get tired. This book was a great help in pointing me to the goals of our preaching—to glorify God and communicate the message of the cross—and the necessity of begging God’s help as we proclaim that message.

If you are not yourself a preacher, but one of the many more people who listen to preaching, you may wish to give one of these books to your preachers. It’s always good for preachers to read more about how to preach. But make sure you find a subtle and courteous way to slip the books into their Christmas stockings.

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