Look at the Book — Should Preachers Draw on Texts During Their Sermons?
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Speaking of preaching, we have another question
00:00:07.660 | on the topic, this one from a podcast listener
00:00:09.660 | named Caleb who writes in to ask this.
00:00:11.660 | Pastor John, the teaching style of look at the book
00:00:15.200 | is extremely helpful as you mark up a Bible text
00:00:18.240 | on a screen on videos available at DesiringGod.
00:00:21.960 | Would you ever consider adopting this method
00:00:24.380 | for when you preach a sermon?
00:00:26.540 | Why or why not?
00:00:28.100 | What would you say to Caleb?
00:00:29.540 | - I will probably lose this battle
00:00:32.140 | but because of how omnipresent visual media are in our day
00:00:38.160 | and I love to use them in their right place
00:00:43.580 | but I suspect I'll fight this battle till the day I die.
00:00:47.400 | No, I don't encourage the use of any visual media
00:00:52.400 | in preaching including what I do in look at the book.
00:00:56.520 | Look at the book for me is an exposure for others
00:01:01.520 | to see of what I do in private to get at the meaning
00:01:07.720 | of texts and to get ready to preach or teach.
00:01:12.080 | It's not a replacement for preaching
00:01:15.640 | and I do think there is a place for it,
00:01:20.640 | namely look at the book type analysis of text
00:01:23.240 | with an overhead projector or some kind of media.
00:01:25.900 | I do think there's a place for that in the church
00:01:28.360 | and I would encourage pastors and Sunday school teachers
00:01:33.120 | to do it in classes and other settings
00:01:35.640 | that are not considered the heralding of God's word
00:01:40.640 | but rather the more informal explaining of texts.
00:01:44.760 | In other words, I don't think preaching
00:01:47.920 | is the only important form of communication
00:01:52.920 | in the New Testament or in the church.
00:01:55.400 | There's a place for visual analysis like look at the book
00:02:00.140 | and a place for discussion and a place for Q&A
00:02:03.900 | and a place for poetic expression and song,
00:02:07.020 | et cetera, et cetera, but none of these is preaching
00:02:11.320 | and I wanna preserve the integrity
00:02:14.540 | of preaching as preaching.
00:02:16.720 | I think it has a special place in God's design
00:02:23.100 | and God's purposes for the church.
00:02:27.740 | Now, before I say why that is,
00:02:32.740 | let me just make clear that in all my 40 plus years
00:02:37.820 | of preaching, I've never in my own church
00:02:42.420 | used an overhead projector or a slide or a picture
00:02:46.540 | or a movie clip or a skit or anything else.
00:02:50.060 | I know that this is almost taken for granted
00:02:54.140 | nowadays by preachers and I don't expect everybody
00:02:58.420 | to follow me in this regard,
00:03:00.300 | but it might have a leavening effect for good
00:03:04.740 | if I just at least give my opinion
00:03:08.100 | for why minimal or zero media in preaching is better.
00:03:15.580 | It has to do with my understanding
00:03:19.020 | of the very nature of preaching.
00:03:21.860 | When Paul says in 2 Timothy 4, to preach the word,
00:03:26.200 | he uses a word, keruso, which implies heralding
00:03:32.220 | like what a town crier does.
00:03:34.700 | Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, the emperor has a message
00:03:39.020 | for all the people of the empire,
00:03:40.980 | all who were involved in the recent insurrection
00:03:44.340 | will be granted full amnesty if they lay down their weapons
00:03:47.860 | and swear allegiance to the king.
00:03:50.020 | That's what a kerux does, he heralds,
00:03:54.780 | he announces, he proclaims.
00:03:58.320 | Now he might have to circle back and explain
00:04:01.460 | for somebody on the front row what amnesty means,
00:04:04.540 | like, ooh, excuse me, preacher, amnesty,
00:04:06.980 | what are you talking about?
00:04:08.140 | But he'll never speak as one who is indifferent
00:04:13.060 | and he knows he carries great news
00:04:16.420 | of utterly important things from an infinitely important
00:04:20.180 | king, and so I've called preaching
00:04:23.100 | expository exaltation with a U, E-X-U-L-T-A-T-I-O-N.
00:04:28.100 | Preaching exalts over the truth that it explains
00:04:34.020 | and this exaltation is a work of the Holy Spirit,
00:04:39.020 | or it's unreal.
00:04:40.940 | It's an act of spirit-anointed worship.
00:04:45.940 | It's experience of the truth as glorious
00:04:51.780 | and beautiful and precious,
00:04:54.420 | even while the truth is being explained,
00:04:58.180 | and therefore preaching is a work of the Holy Spirit.
00:05:02.380 | It carries in it a power, the old-fashioned word unction,
00:05:08.480 | an anointing from God for the accomplishment
00:05:12.400 | of his miraculous purposes in preaching,
00:05:17.140 | and my experience is that the intrusion of other media
00:05:22.140 | into this moment of spirit-anointed heralding
00:05:28.640 | does two negative things.
00:05:31.960 | One, it signifies a loss of trust
00:05:35.480 | in the preached word itself,
00:05:38.680 | and two, it distracts from the actual spiritual dynamic
00:05:43.680 | of the flow of the power of the spirit
00:05:48.940 | from the word to the preacher to the people.
00:05:52.260 | It starts to create an atmosphere of the classroom
00:05:55.960 | or the lecture hall or the theater,
00:05:58.280 | and all of those atmospheres are contrary
00:06:02.000 | to what I call the atmosphere of expository exaltation,
00:06:07.000 | the very atmosphere of worship.
00:06:10.000 | This preacher is worshiping over the word,
00:06:15.000 | and a sacred mediation of divine truth
00:06:19.080 | is happening into the minds and hearts of people.
00:06:22.180 | Preaching has its own dynamic and its own atmosphere.
00:06:26.520 | It's a kind of incarnation in the preacher
00:06:30.120 | of the beauty and the value of the truth
00:06:34.120 | of God's word in Scripture.
00:06:36.980 | So I say again, I doubt that I will win this battle,
00:06:41.980 | but it seems to me that preaching of this kind
00:06:47.480 | was not a temporary phenomenon
00:06:51.280 | for the first 2,000 years of Christian history,
00:06:54.360 | followed by something more technologically arresting
00:06:57.660 | for the remainder of church history.
00:06:59.640 | I suspect that for those who have really tasted
00:07:04.360 | the nature of true preaching,
00:07:06.960 | there will always be a pull away
00:07:11.000 | from technical media intrusions
00:07:14.160 | into that sacred, precious, powerful hour
00:07:19.160 | called expository exaltation.
00:07:22.600 | If they know it, there's nothing like it.
00:07:26.000 | - Thank you, Pastor John.
00:07:27.560 | I can imagine some listeners familiar
00:07:29.360 | with Bethlehem's multi-campus model will ask,
00:07:32.280 | how does this priority not conflict
00:07:35.120 | with preaching on video and using video
00:07:37.880 | of the preacher's preaching, either live or recorded?
00:07:41.700 | What would you say to that?
00:07:42.840 | - Well, I've done it for many years at Bethlehem
00:07:45.560 | because we have campuses.
00:07:47.080 | I regard it as not ideal.
00:07:49.940 | It seemed to be the best solution,
00:07:53.360 | given our options 13 years ago.
00:07:59.120 | That is a little different than what I was talking about
00:08:02.720 | in the sense that the video is an attempt
00:08:06.420 | to capture the moment of preaching,
00:08:10.020 | not intrude into the moment of preaching
00:08:12.440 | with something different from preaching.
00:08:13.920 | You see the difference?
00:08:14.920 | - Yeah, I do.
00:08:15.760 | - So I would much rather be encountering the people
00:08:20.760 | face-to-face because of the living dynamic
00:08:25.240 | between the preacher and the people,
00:08:28.360 | but all the arguments that I just gave
00:08:33.000 | are not mainly arguments against duplicating
00:08:37.000 | the authentic moment of preaching
00:08:41.400 | by showing it on a screen in another place
00:08:44.720 | or even in the same place, like when I preach at Passion,
00:08:48.640 | you know, they got a screen up there
00:08:49.680 | because they can't see me from a quarter mile away
00:08:51.820 | up in the bleachers.
00:08:55.200 | So I don't think anything I've said is undermined
00:09:00.200 | by the use of the replication of the moment
00:09:05.200 | in another place by the video.
00:09:08.020 | Nevertheless, I would say that in the fullest,
00:09:12.400 | most wonderful moment of expository exaltation,
00:09:17.200 | it is an incarnation of a real person
00:09:21.020 | and a real people connecting in a real room.
00:09:25.120 | - Very good, thank you Pastor John.
00:09:26.760 | And if you want more information about,
00:09:28.560 | look at the book and the style of teaching
00:09:30.240 | that we've been talking about today,
00:09:31.300 | go online and check them out at DesiringGod.org/labs,
00:09:36.160 | L-A-B-S.
00:09:38.360 | And we're gonna return tomorrow and look at how
00:09:40.360 | and why Christians who float in the Christian life
00:09:42.760 | will actually drift.
00:09:45.000 | The sobering warning from John Piper,
00:09:46.720 | drawn from 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 11,
00:09:50.360 | a very necessary warning we need to hear.
00:09:52.840 | That's tomorrow.
00:09:53.680 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:09:55.200 | I'll see you then.
00:09:56.080 | (upbeat music)
00:09:58.660 | (upbeat music)
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