Becoming an Engaged Preaching Audience

“He who has ears, let him hear” (Matthew 13:9).

Today, we pay a return visit to the Christward Collective website. When you are given the opportunity to deliver a sermon, there is no denying that an unusual adrenaline rush takes place. This probably happens to some degree in any public speaking situation. But in a church context, there is the additional rush (for lack of a better word) that you can experience as the Holy Spirit gives you things to say that weren’t in your written notes.

Sadly however, the audience is often very passive. You see people yawning, or reading their bulletin, and wish that every person in the congregation could be as engaged as you. (That’s the dynamic of small group situations that many find so stimulating.) The author below paints a vivid picture of a church service where everyone is equally energized and in a sense part of the teaching taking place.

Of particular interest here is a link at the bottom of the article. Don’t miss this. It’s to a book A Remedy for Wandering Thoughts in the Worship of God, published in 1835 and photographed for the archives of Princeton Theological Seminary. (Click the pages to turn.) If nothing else, read the table of contents to see the various aspects of the study the author made of this.

Meanwhile, click the title below to read today’s thoughts at source.

He Who Has Ears

by Jason Helopoulos

Some accuse the Protestant emphasis upon the preached Word as pastor-centric and non-engaging, but such an accusation assumes too little about the listener’s responsibility in corporate worship. Every individual in the congregation has responsibilities when the Word of God is preached. As we listen to the Word preached we want to aim at listening to it astutely, attentively, reverently, prayerfully, and responsively.

Astutely: As listeners of the Word, we must insist upon the sound preaching of the Word. We dare not fall into the ways of those who have “itching ears” and accumulate for ourselves “teachers to suit our own passions” (2 Timothy 4:3). The temptation to do so is great and subtle. The Word is our nourishment, we live by “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Our souls and hearts will languish apart from “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). The pastor who enters the pulpit should not be able to satiate us with stories, jokes, wandering tales, or dispassionate reflections. We want to hear from God, so we will listen astutely for that living Word (Hebrews 4:12).

Attentively: Our worship is never passive, but active as we engage with the Word preached. Of course, it is not our “laboring” that makes the Word preached effectual; that is the work of the Holy Spirit as He attends to the Word and works faith in the listener (John 3). But a disengaged and passive listener to the Word is no listener at all. As the preacher is accountable for what he says, so the congregation is accountable for its faithfulness in listening.

Reverently: God is speaking to His people and so we are to receive that Word reverently. With the Psalmist, we would say, “Let me hear what God the Lord will speak” (Psalm 85:8). The most blessed of sermons occur when the listener begins to forget the preacher and finds their mind filled with the Word of God, their heart moved with love for Him, and their affections running after Him. We are on holy ground in worship and knowingly hang on the edge of our seats as we long to hear the next words from our Heavenly Father. He speaks and we listen.

Prayerfully: The Spirit must attend to the Word, so we labor prayerfully in the pew as much as the preacher labors at preaching in the pulpit. Prayer paves the way for the Spirit’s effectual moving. We want our hearts to be fertile soil (Mark 4) for this eternal seed of truth. Even as our ears and mind our being stirred with the Word, so we are stirring our spirits in prayer.

Responsively: As the Westminster Shorter Catechism states, “The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of Man.” The Scriptures demand response: faith and obedience. We are to be “doers of the Word and not just hearers” (James 1:22). The fault lies with us if we emerge from a service asking, “Did you get anything out of that sermon?”  Rather, we desire to respond with, “I will believe what God says and will obey Him.” The sermon will never be perfect, because the man preaching it is never perfect. Yet, if the text was read and the text was preached, there is always something for the listener to respond to. Searching our thoughts and lives for where the Word preached that morning is speaking needed truth in my life marks every faithful listener. We dare not excuse ourselves, focus on how much others need to hear this truth, or think we have heard this message too many times. None of us are perfect in any area of our Christian lives, we are all straining forward, pressing “on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14).

Dear Christian, you may be sitting in corporate worship while the pastor is preaching, but this is no idle exercise. We are to be engaged with the Word. The little effect many sermons have upon listeners is less often due to the preacher’s lack of skill in preaching, but rather due to our lack of effort in listening. Listen astutely, attentively, reverently, prayerfully, and responsively. “He who has ears, let him hear” (Matthew 13:9).

 

Richard Steele, A Remedy for Wandering Thoughts in Worship

Joel Beeke, The Family at Church: Listening to Sermons and Attending Prayer

 

 

Repetition in Scripture: Poetry or Emphasis?

I am currently working my way devotionally through N. T. Wright’s second-newest book, The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential. Today I looked back at a section in the introduction that has been sticking with me:

The Psalms rely for their effect on the way they set out the main themes. They say something from one angle and then repeat it from a different angle.

^{NRSV Psalm 33:6} By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
    and all their host by the breath of his mouth.

^{Psalm 78:2} I will open my mouth in a parable;
    I will utter dark sayings from of old,

^{Psalm 139:3} You search out my path and my lying down,
    and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even when this doesn’t happen line by line, it often happens between different sections of a psalm or in the balance of the collection, or a part of it, as a whole.

The important point here is that some of the most important things we want to say remain just a little beyond even our best words. The first sentence is a signpost to the deep reality, the second a signpost from a slightly different place. The reader is invited to follow both and to see the larger, unspoken truth looming up behind. This means that only can the effect be maintained in translation, but the effect itself is one of the deepest things the Psalms are doing, making it clear that the best human words point beyond themselves to realities that transcend even high poetic description.

But then, Wright makes another observation — in parenthesis — that really got me thinking:

(Something similar is achieved elsewhere in the Bible — for instance in the provision in Genesis for two creation stories, offering two picture-language images for a reality that lies beyond either.)

Let’s look at that:

^{NIV Genesis 1:1}  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ² Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters…

³¹ God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

^{Genesis 2:4} This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

⁵ Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth^[a] and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, ⁶ but streams^[b] came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. ⁷ Then the Lord God formed a man^[c] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

1. Genesis 2:5 Or land; also in verse 6
2. Genesis 2:6 Or mist
3. Genesis 2:7 The Hebrew for man (adam) sounds like and may be related to the Hebrew for ground (adamah); it is also the name Adam (see verse 20).

One thing I have been taught from my youth is that where the scripture provides emphasis, the emphasis is there for a reason. It can happen within a single phrase. The angels don’t cry “holy;” they cry “holy, holy, holy.”  (Another author has more examples in this list.)

While I have no particular Bible-and-science agenda here, I think it is interesting that in today’s climate of creation controversy and a divided Christian community on the subject of creation — old earth creation, new earth creation, theistic evolution, etc. — that God would choose that the story should appear twice. What are we not to miss?

Sometimes the Bible seems to sanction repetition and sometimes it does not. We’re told in the introduction to The Lord’s Prayer not to keep repeating the same prayers over and over again, but in a Catholic article, written to defend the use of the rosary, the author appeals to the Psalms, stating,

Take Psalm 119… It is the longest psalm in the Bible, having 176 verses. On the whole, the psalm is a persistent repetition of the main theme, that is, of the excellence of keeping the law of God. It makes an excellent meditation and prayer of repetition — like the rosary — beautiful, pious, and thoroughly biblical.

(The article does make some points worth considering, though to many Evangelicals, the chanting of the Hail Mary prayer seems more pagan than Christian.)

Another author breaks down the variants of repetition we encounter in an article on Puritan Hermeneutics:

…Today I am typing out my notes from John Arrowsmith’s exposition of John 1:1-18.  It is entitled, ” Theanthropos, God made Man.”  I came across a very nice little hermeneutical discussion on what repetition signifies in Scripture.  In sum, Arrowsmith writes:

1.         In prayer repetition serves to express fervency and earnestness. Matthew 26:44

2.         In prophecies repetition serves to note the certainty of them.  Genesis 41:22

3.         In threats repetition indicates unavoidableness and, perhaps, suddenness.  Ezekiel 21:27

4.         In precepts repetition serves to note a necessity in performing them.  Psalm 47:6

5.         In truths repetition serves to show the necessity of believing them and of knowing them.  John 3:3, 5, 17

My point today is that when we encounter repetition in scripture it’s important not to simply say, “at this point the writing has moved into a poetic form;” but rather to say, “this repetition is for a reason, maybe God is trying to tell me something!”