How to Lead Teens Deeper into Their Bibles
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Welcome back on this Monday.
00:00:05.160 | Today we have a wonderful ministry question
00:00:07.280 | on preaching right in your wheelhouse, Pastor John.
00:00:10.320 | Young pastor writes in to ask you this, quote,
00:00:12.840 | "Hello, Pastor John, thank you for this podcast.
00:00:14.760 | "I listen every time a new episode is released,
00:00:18.460 | "and I'm thankful for the impact
00:00:19.720 | "that your biblical insights have made on my life.
00:00:22.540 | "My question for you is about expository preaching
00:00:24.820 | "and its place in student ministry.
00:00:26.980 | "I am the student pastor at my church.
00:00:29.860 | "Responsible for sixth through 12th grade ministry.
00:00:33.700 | "Whenever we gather for our youth worship time
00:00:37.100 | "on Wednesday nights, I typically preach
00:00:39.400 | "through books of the Bible in an expositional way.
00:00:42.780 | "I try my best to apply the text to them
00:00:44.780 | "in ways that they can understand.
00:00:46.100 | "However, I sometimes question whether I should
00:00:47.880 | "preach expository sermons to the students
00:00:50.100 | "because I don't believe it's a common practice
00:00:52.400 | "in youth ministries.
00:00:53.780 | "I love God's word and want my students
00:00:55.460 | "to come to love God's word as well,
00:00:57.340 | "but should I teach to my students
00:00:58.800 | "in a way that is more application focused?
00:01:02.100 | "I would appreciate your thoughts on this.
00:01:04.500 | "Thank you."
00:01:05.340 | - Well, I have endless thoughts about preaching.
00:01:07.180 | (both laughing)
00:01:08.380 | - Yes.
00:01:09.620 | - I could just go on and on and on.
00:01:11.740 | I love preaching.
00:01:13.960 | I believe God has appointed preaching
00:01:16.440 | to be part of the gathered worship of His church
00:01:19.060 | on the Lord's day especially,
00:01:20.980 | and I think all of it, all the time,
00:01:24.100 | should be based on and saturated with scripture.
00:01:27.720 | That's what preaching is.
00:01:29.360 | It is a God-ordained way of saving sinners
00:01:34.040 | and sustaining and growing saints.
00:01:37.300 | I think it's relevant for old people,
00:01:40.460 | middle-aged people, young people, children.
00:01:44.820 | So I'm thrilled that our young pastor friend
00:01:47.860 | is in a church and leading a youth group
00:01:51.320 | where he is doing exposition.
00:01:54.580 | So here are my, I originally had in my head
00:01:57.580 | a whole lot of thoughts, but I boiled it down to three.
00:02:01.060 | So here are my three thoughts
00:02:03.500 | I can squeeze into our few minutes together.
00:02:06.360 | Number one, as you unfold the meaning
00:02:10.100 | of particular biblical texts,
00:02:12.260 | be sure to stress what I call the reality factor.
00:02:17.260 | Now, you don't need to use that phrase.
00:02:21.100 | That's my phrase, but here's what I mean.
00:02:25.460 | Some years ago, it hit me when I realized
00:02:29.540 | that it is possible to do a great deal
00:02:33.220 | of explaining how the thought of the text actually flows
00:02:38.220 | and how the words and clauses relate to each other
00:02:44.700 | without actually dealing with the reality
00:02:47.780 | of what the words are trying to communicate.
00:02:50.180 | It just clobbered me that we can do this.
00:02:53.760 | We can stay at the surface of grammar
00:02:57.140 | and not get to reality.
00:02:59.960 | For example, in Philippians 2.12, it says,
00:03:02.780 | "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,
00:03:06.060 | for God is the one who is at work in you,
00:03:09.900 | both to will and to work for his good pleasure."
00:03:12.180 | Now, suppose in your exposition,
00:03:14.460 | you point out to the students
00:03:16.580 | that the first clause is an imperative, command.
00:03:20.100 | Work out your salvation.
00:03:22.140 | And the second clause is not a command,
00:03:24.500 | but an indicative, a statement of fact.
00:03:27.400 | God is at work in you, to will and to work.
00:03:30.900 | And then you draw attention to the connection
00:03:33.660 | between those two clauses with the word for,
00:03:36.700 | and you point out that the second clause,
00:03:39.100 | the statement, God is working, is the basis or the ground.
00:03:44.100 | That's what for means, or the motive for the first clause,
00:03:48.420 | the command, work out your salvation.
00:03:50.100 | And maybe you even go further and you say,
00:03:52.020 | this is typical in the New Testament,
00:03:53.860 | that indicatives ground imperatives,
00:03:57.340 | and then you stop, end of exposition.
00:04:00.640 | Well, the problem is, stopping there,
00:04:05.500 | is that we haven't even touched the reality
00:04:10.060 | behind the clauses and their logical connection
00:04:12.920 | until we see how does this work in life?
00:04:18.400 | Why does it work that I work out my salvation
00:04:23.400 | because Christ is at work in me, or God is at work in me?
00:04:28.240 | There's a vast difference between words and clauses
00:04:33.240 | on the one hand, and the realities they reveal
00:04:38.280 | on the other hand.
00:04:40.320 | And here you can see, this just blows people away
00:04:44.800 | when I pointed out, at least some people
00:04:48.600 | who have particular ideas about preaching,
00:04:50.700 | how artificial it is in the distinction
00:04:55.140 | between exposition and application.
00:04:58.000 | Let me say that again, how artificial it is
00:05:02.060 | to distinguish between exposition and application,
00:05:06.080 | because we're not really doing exposition of the reality
00:05:12.100 | behind the words until we are dealing with real life,
00:05:15.940 | and telling how it works.
00:05:19.520 | What will it be like this afternoon?
00:05:21.400 | So the question is at 10 o'clock tonight,
00:05:24.320 | after these students are at home,
00:05:27.840 | having heard this exposition,
00:05:29.840 | they're at home now in their bedroom,
00:05:31.900 | with their computer, or with their family in the den,
00:05:36.300 | what will it look like for these students
00:05:39.980 | to work out their salvation?
00:05:42.520 | What is that reality like?
00:05:46.480 | What will it feel like for them to experience
00:05:49.800 | the reality of God working in them?
00:05:53.220 | Do they have any sense at all what that it's talking about?
00:05:57.060 | What's the reality?
00:05:58.220 | How does it feel?
00:05:59.080 | How does it work?
00:06:00.860 | And how will they make the connection
00:06:03.360 | between those experiences of God working in them
00:06:06.080 | and their working?
00:06:07.720 | We really don't know what this text means
00:06:10.800 | until we can explain not just the words,
00:06:15.800 | clauses, logic, grammar,
00:06:19.460 | but the realities tonight at 10 o'clock in the bedroom,
00:06:23.280 | in the kitchen, how it works in people's lives.
00:06:27.860 | That requires a huge effort on the part of the preacher,
00:06:34.080 | because he's now working at two levels,
00:06:38.240 | the level of words and grammar and logic,
00:06:42.000 | we call that the text,
00:06:43.640 | and the effort to explain how the parts
00:06:47.180 | of the text fit together.
00:06:49.440 | And on the other level,
00:06:51.740 | what realities is this author with these words
00:06:55.600 | and this grammar and this logic?
00:06:57.000 | What realities is he trying to communicate
00:07:00.760 | to my mind and my heart and my hands?
00:07:05.160 | Language and reality, the two levels,
00:07:08.480 | and both are absolutely crucial.
00:07:10.520 | You can't do a shortcut around the grammar,
00:07:14.040 | around the logic, around the words,
00:07:16.080 | but if you stop there,
00:07:18.120 | you haven't done the kind of exposition needs to be done.
00:07:20.880 | It is real head work.
00:07:23.200 | It is real heart work,
00:07:25.820 | but the payoff for the students will be huge.
00:07:30.820 | So that's my first suggestion.
00:07:33.680 | Deal with the reality factor,
00:07:36.640 | as well as the text factor.
00:07:39.520 | Your students will love it,
00:07:41.780 | because it will touch their lives, their reality.
00:07:46.600 | Number two, in your exposition through texts,
00:07:51.600 | take doctrinal depth tours,
00:07:55.600 | not doctrinal detours,
00:07:57.820 | but doctrinal depth tours.
00:08:01.040 | Now, I just made that up.
00:08:02.440 | I have never in the history of the world said that before.
00:08:06.320 | This is my new term, and here's what I mean.
00:08:09.480 | I mean is that preaching that moves through texts
00:08:14.680 | without doctrinal depth tours,
00:08:17.820 | they're like detours, but they're depth tours,
00:08:19.840 | 'cause you're not going away from where you should go.
00:08:22.360 | That's what a detour is.
00:08:23.420 | You go away and you wish you didn't have to go,
00:08:26.400 | but a depth tour, you wanna go on this road.
00:08:29.880 | So this will build doctrinally strong people.
00:08:33.760 | And without it, I just don't know how you can build
00:08:35.880 | doctrinally strong youth group,
00:08:39.080 | doctrinally strong people.
00:08:41.560 | What I mean by that is people, youth group,
00:08:44.580 | who have a clear, deeply rooted understanding
00:08:49.080 | of really important biblical doctrines.
00:08:52.800 | Now, you can't do everything as a youth pastor.
00:08:56.720 | You're working in tandem with other groups
00:08:59.360 | and worship services and sermons and lessons and classes
00:09:03.040 | in your church and maybe even in the home
00:09:04.960 | and in the school.
00:09:06.200 | But I mean doctrines like God's sovereignty,
00:09:09.880 | God's holiness, God's grace, God's justice,
00:09:13.720 | the deity and humanity of Christ,
00:09:16.680 | the deity and personhood of the Holy Spirit,
00:09:20.120 | the nature of sin, both as action and disease of the heart,
00:09:25.040 | the nature of redemption and propitiation and regeneration,
00:09:29.560 | calling, faith, justification, sanctification,
00:09:34.120 | walking by the Spirit, perseverance of the saints,
00:09:37.920 | the nature of the church, what happens when you die,
00:09:41.600 | the second coming, eternal life, new heavens and new earth.
00:09:45.280 | If a young person studies texts of scripture
00:09:49.400 | without ever taking doctrinal depth tours,
00:09:54.040 | he's like a person who lines up all the pieces
00:09:56.680 | of a jigsaw puzzle but never puts them together
00:09:59.800 | to see the beauty of the picture that they make.
00:10:03.000 | But in fact, you can be pretty proud
00:10:05.440 | of putting those pieces in line.
00:10:07.760 | It could look, my pieces are all lined up.
00:10:11.160 | They might even recite the entire first chapter
00:10:13.800 | of Ephesians by heart and never have paused
00:10:16.880 | to do a detour into the doctrine of election.
00:10:21.760 | But it's the totality of the big picture
00:10:25.480 | that holds person, isn't it?
00:10:28.120 | It's the picture that holds, takes hold of a 16-year-old
00:10:33.120 | and keeps them for 60 years, holds them for a lifetime.
00:10:37.360 | Who God is, what he's doing, how did Christ save sinners?
00:10:42.360 | How does the Christian life work?
00:10:45.040 | Where's it all heading?
00:10:46.440 | Now, there are different ways to do this.
00:10:51.240 | You can do an expository series of messages through text
00:10:56.240 | and then do a doctrinal series separately.
00:11:01.000 | I'm not at all opposed to topical messages like that.
00:11:04.360 | Like we're gonna do five weeks, kids,
00:11:06.280 | on election and predestination.
00:11:08.760 | And we're gonna do five weeks on sin and what it is,
00:11:12.960 | what kind of disease do you have in your heart and so on.
00:11:15.760 | I'm not at all opposed to those kinds of things
00:11:18.800 | because they're all expository,
00:11:21.680 | meaning if I'm gonna explain anything,
00:11:24.200 | it's gonna be exposition of the scripture
00:11:27.200 | is where my explanations come from.
00:11:29.840 | Or you can take these doctrinal depth tours
00:11:33.360 | that I'm suggesting within the time of exposition.
00:11:37.120 | So 15 minutes, say, of your 30-minute message
00:11:42.120 | might be devoted to painting the big doctrinal reality
00:11:47.680 | behind one word in your text, like justification.
00:11:51.760 | It's not either or, you can mix it up in various ways.
00:11:55.600 | I think students love to see
00:11:58.880 | how reality actually fits together, really fits together.
00:12:03.880 | And they love to see how texts actually work.
00:12:08.220 | So some combination of exposition of texts
00:12:11.160 | where they get their nose in the grammar
00:12:14.080 | and efforts to build their doctrinal knowledge,
00:12:17.840 | both of these are crucial.
00:12:20.480 | And then last thing I would say, number three,
00:12:23.000 | is if your students hear good preaching on Sunday morning,
00:12:28.540 | I would probably not try to turn
00:12:33.440 | the Wednesday evening teaching time into another sermon.
00:12:39.240 | I would create a more interactive,
00:12:41.880 | Socratic method of teaching, probably.
00:12:46.080 | Now you know your situation better than I do,
00:12:47.760 | but this is what I would do if I were the youth minister
00:12:50.520 | and I had a good pastor who's doing real preaching
00:12:54.140 | on Sunday, I would probably not try to do the same thing
00:12:58.320 | on Wednesday, but train these students
00:13:02.600 | how to look at the text, look at the book,
00:13:06.240 | and how to ask really good thought questions
00:13:11.240 | because questions are the key to understanding.
00:13:13.960 | Lots of times people hear me say a participatory
00:13:17.320 | or interactive and they think,
00:13:18.320 | "Oh, I've been in those kinds of groups.
00:13:19.720 | Everybody shares their ignorance."
00:13:21.560 | All what I mean, I mean, I teach like this generally.
00:13:25.240 | I stay in control.
00:13:26.920 | I'm asking the questions, right?
00:13:29.800 | And if students ask stupid questions,
00:13:31.740 | then you delicately and wisely,
00:13:33.360 | you guide them towards good questions.
00:13:35.680 | You don't let everybody just share their ignorance.
00:13:39.040 | You know where you wanna take them
00:13:41.800 | and you take them there by training them
00:13:43.800 | to get there themselves.
00:13:45.760 | You're modeling how to pose really good questions
00:13:49.120 | about what you see in the text and getting them to look
00:13:53.600 | and think and speak and then correcting them
00:13:57.360 | so that they get better and better at reading their Bibles.
00:14:01.780 | It is possible to do very serious exposition
00:14:06.460 | and doctrinal teaching this way.
00:14:09.680 | You can do this Socratically.
00:14:12.720 | And the key is really good questions, provocative questions.
00:14:16.940 | I mean, I've been in so many groups where they say,
00:14:19.180 | "Who said this?"
00:14:20.260 | And the students are looking at each other and saying,
00:14:22.420 | "That's the stupidest question.
00:14:23.860 | It says, Peter said this.
00:14:25.100 | Why is he asking me that?
00:14:26.420 | That is such a stupid question.
00:14:28.540 | Who said this?
00:14:29.420 | Where are we in the text?"
00:14:31.020 | Those are not the kind of questions
00:14:32.420 | that get anybody excited about anything.
00:14:35.020 | They have to be thought questions, hard thinking questions,
00:14:39.340 | questions that really have to pay off
00:14:41.740 | in textual understanding and real life experience.
00:14:45.860 | So those are my three suggestions
00:14:48.500 | for handling the Word with your youth group.
00:14:51.660 | Deal with the reality factor, take doctrinal depth tours,
00:14:57.580 | and ask provocative thought questions.
00:15:01.460 | And of course, a whole nother episode,
00:15:04.500 | soak it all in earnest prayer,
00:15:07.700 | because if God doesn't show up, then everything is in vain.
00:15:12.700 | - Yeah, amen, sobering.
00:15:14.180 | God must act for anything we do
00:15:15.620 | to bear eternally lasting fruit.
00:15:18.340 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:15:19.340 | And for churches that don't preach exegetically
00:15:22.620 | on Sunday mornings, if that's a concern,
00:15:24.900 | see an old episode that we recorded titled,
00:15:27.700 | "Is the 40-minute sermon passé?"
00:15:30.940 | Is the 40-minute sermon passé?
00:15:33.540 | That was APJ 118, on why discussions
00:15:36.860 | in the Socratic method are out of place
00:15:39.140 | in the Sunday morning preaching context.
00:15:42.380 | Sermons are not just about learning.
00:15:43.900 | The first aim of preaching, he says in this episode,
00:15:46.260 | "The first aim of preaching is not education,
00:15:49.980 | but encounter with the living God."
00:15:53.900 | Excellent episode to check out
00:15:55.180 | on the purpose of preaching APJ 118
00:15:57.420 | in the archive right now at askpastorjohn.com.
00:16:00.900 | Thanks for joining us today.
00:16:02.060 | I am your host, Tony Reinke.
00:16:03.700 | We will see you back here on Thursday.
00:16:06.260 | Thanks for listening.
00:16:07.300 | (upbeat music)
00:16:12.300 | (upbeat music)