Latest / Harvest After Sunday / How We Preach at Harvest: Harvest DNA
Transcript
- Harvest Media: podcast. I'm Natalie and I'm your host and I'm here with Stefan Wilson, pastor of preaching and teaching. And today we're going to be talking about why we do what we do at Harvest, specifically the preaching philosophy and method. And it is evident to anyone who's attended Harvest for even a short time, heard more than a few sermons recently, that there is a very intentional structure to the sermons. And we're going to hear about the why behind that method. I'm excited because as someone who's never prepared a I'm curious about the process I'm sure there's so much that goes into it that I'm unaware of many of us are unaware of and then as someone who listens to the sermons weekly I care deeply about the why behind the how So let's start. I think it's always helpful to start with defining our terms Let's talk about what is preaching and why does it matter to the church? so preaching is ⁓ it is the proclamation of God's Word and that element, the proclamation of God's word is important because preaching is like public speaking because you are giving a public oration, but it's very narrowly focused. So you can't say that like a TED talk is preaching because that TED talk is about other topics that aren't the truth of God's word specifically. Preaching is a narrower category of public speaking that is specifically in the context of the church body and is specifically focused on the public proclamation of the truth of God's word. So that means that the subject matter is God's word. The outcome that we're striving for is the outcome God's word prescribes. And that then means that the ministry of the pulpit should be constrained by scripture. sure. ⁓ rather than scripture is just a ⁓ part of what's happening. I would say the further that you get from scripture's centrality in the pulpit, the further you get from biblical preaching. So for preaching to be biblical, how it's prescribed in scripture, the role that it's supposed to serve in the life of the church, it has to be centered on scripture and defined around that being centered on scripture. I see a lot of clips online of preachers and I've started noticing they'll go on for lengthy sections without not only cracking open their Bible, but even referencing scripture. And you can kind of see like just because they're in that position on stage during that time on a Sunday morning is the content even based in scripture. You have to be alert to that, I think, and really be paying attention. Sadly, totally. And because because we use similar terms in different context, it can be easy to say, well, if someone is standing in a pulpit on a Sunday morning at a church, what they're doing therefore is necessarily preaching. It is by definition preaching because of the context and the form that it takes. And I would argue that that is not true. Something is preaching because it is the proclamation of the truth of God. ⁓ You can stand in a pulpit on a Sunday morning and not preach. You can stand in a pulpit on Sunday morning and do public speaking that I would say is not preaching but is instead self-help, ⁓ moralistic therapy, hey I'm gonna help you be a better person. we can sometimes take those things that are preaching adjacent, right? Like I'm giving a public oration that is ⁓ in a church and it's toward biblical ideas and then I can pull from scripture, know, grab a verse here, grab a verse there, and then we can say, ⁓ that's a biblical sermon because he used scripture and... if we're not starting from scripture. That means we're getting away from what scripture is actually prescribing us to do, which would then call into question if it truly is preaching. So what I don't want to do is I don't want to say ⁓ anybody who doesn't preach like we do at harvest isn't preaching. Preaching takes many forms. And especially as you as you survey church history, preaching takes many, many different forms, all of which are biblical and honoring to the Lord and edifying to the church. The warning that I'm essentially highlighting is we must be careful to not call something preaching because of where it's happening. We need to call something preaching because of what it's doing in the life of the believer. And that is proclaiming the truth of God's word so that we're seeing believers transformed into the likeness of God's son. That's really helpful. And you set us up perfectly for this in talking about starting with scripture and not just topics maybe because I wondered about this I was wondering how we select passages here because people will notice ⁓ we go through like large sections of chapter of scripture or like books at a time right now we're in Matthew we will be for a while but we also insert other series in like we started the year with the means of grace so how do we select passages is a question but then also is this a preference our churches made or is there a more significant reason for this method and then what you touched on is it wrong to start with a topic and and provide the scripture that supports it is that a wrong method or is it just proceed with caution sure like you mentioned so there's a lot kind of in that question but how are we selecting scripture we're starting with scripture why and then ⁓ is that a preference yeah so let's zoom out okay We'll zoom out first and talk about kind of the two competing philosophies of ⁓ how you should select what scripture you're going to preach. So the two competing philosophies are expositional preaching, ⁓ expositing the text, and then topical preaching, finding a text that fits a topic you want to talk about. There is a version of topical preaching that I would say is often kind of like a caricature of topical preaching where ⁓ you know, we'll do five things for a healthier marriage. That's the topic. And then ⁓ each of the five things has a random verse from somewhere in scripture. And we're meant to just take those five verses for everything the Bible has to say about that topic. That's kind of the caricature of it. And the reason I say caricature is because ⁓ verses out of context are are very easily misunderstood, misapplied, misappropriated. So a lot of times when somebody talks about quote unquote topical preaching and they're speaking negatively about it, they are probably referencing that kind of topical preaching. But I think that topical preaching in the right way has a place. So these two philosophies, expositional preaching and topical preaching. come at the text from two different angles. So expositional preaching, you can hear in that in that word, ex to pull out. So to expose it is to communicate from the text what is in the text to the people in the room. So it's like reaching into a big container that nobody else can see in and you're pulling out what's in there and then you're explaining to everybody what you just pulled out. That's expositional preaching. And so to to exposit the text what you're doing is you're saying we're gonna we're going to take this section of scripture and Most often it's a book of the Bible and what we're gonna do is we're just gonna start at the beginning Because literary context matters. So if we jump into Matthew 12 without knowing what happened in Matthew 1 through 11 We are in danger of misunderstanding what's happening in the Old Testament. We've talked about this before though. It's one story, right? That's right So we're gonna we're say, all right, we want to walk through this book of the Bible. And so we're going to start at chapter one, verse one. And what we're going to do is as we walk through the book, the preacher's job is to pull out what is in the text and to explain it to everyone in the room, what is in there and how to understand what is in there. And so then the things that we preach are driven by the text. We just preach the next section and whatever it's about, that's what the sermon's about. Now, the way that you do expositional preaching well... Is you the the preacher starts with the text, you know, maybe that week or a few weeks out And studies the text for himself And so that's what I do. ⁓ I will take the text ⁓ the way that I I begin with the text is whatever language it was written in I translate it from that original language So if it's an old testament text i'm translating the hebrew if it's a new testament text i'm translating the greek Okay, and you're translating it. You're not looking at a translator. I'm translating ⁓ Now if you don't know Hebrew or Greek that's okay We have so many wonderful tools that that can make up some of that gap the reason why I think that translating it is helpful is because ⁓ It it puts more in your hands to understand the text if I start with an English translation I am I'm trusting the translation committee in the interpretive decisions they made right to translate it the way they did and and we have many trustworthy translations, but there's just something formative and helpful for my own. thinking as a preacher for me to translate it so that I see there are verb tenses in Greek that don't exist in English. ⁓ Well, when you translate it, you have to translate it into a verb tense that makes sense in English. Well, I can if I can discover those those grammatical elements in the text in the original language that helps me to tell the church, here's what's actually going on. So you spend that time in the text and what you're really trying to do is you're trying to say, I want to find the thread through this text. This was written by a human author under the inspiration of the spirit. So there is the divine author who is God. There's the human author who wrote it with an intended purpose. That means there's a meaning to be found in it. The meaning is not up to me. The meaning is up to the original author. That being the human author who wrote it and the divine intention behind the inspiration of that author. My job is to find that meaning, not to impose on it whatever meaning I wanted to have. So through the study of the text you find, here is the meaning of this passage, here's what Jesus is saying or what Paul is saying. Now I have the subject that the sermon is going to be about. Because I found it in the text now because this is preaching Proclaiming the truth of God's word now. I'm constrained by what I discovered in the text I don't get to go outside of that and when you say when you discovered so you've read you've translated the text and you've read it and Then kind of the headline becomes evident to you. Is that how you would yeah a topic totally? Okay. Yeah, so you think about any any written work? There is a progression of thought And there are points where the thought shifts to a new topic or there are sub points within a larger section. And in each and in good writing, you're able to find a common theme in each of those subsections or broader sections. You're able to see where the subject changes. Well, the goal here at harvest is to preach one thought from the text. So we're going to select passages where one thought is considered. And so sometimes it'll be 20 verses and sometimes it'll be two. That's right. This last Sunday, it was four verses from Matthew 12. Next week, it'll be 23 verses from Matthew 13, because those 23 verses in Matthew 13 verses one through 23 are one thought. as you're reading it, it's got three And so we're going to preach it in one singular sermon so that then I can communicate to the church, here's the point of this passage and here's what we're going to and now I'm going to take the things in the passage and I'm to prove to you that that one point really is the one point of this passage because of what the things in the passage are all communicating. And now what you can see in that is I'm not coming to the text with an agenda. I am saying, Lord, what is your agenda from this text for our church? Now, the other side is topical preaching, which, like I said, when done rightly has a right place in the church. ⁓ And we've done some topical series. ⁓ We've done the extraordinary, which was the means of grace earlier this year. We've done our family values series where it was our four core values. So it is okay to ask the question, what does the Bible say about blank? Well. What we don't want to do in a sermon is look at every verse in the Bible about that thing and now put them all together into a single sermon. ⁓ Because one, now all those verses are pulled out of their context. Two, now we got 35 verses that we're trying to preach. ⁓ And three, because there's such varied ⁓ source material at that point, what we're supposed to do with that biblical truth now becomes murky the more more content that we add. So what we do here is we'll say, what is a passage in scripture that where the thought, the main focus of that passage is this thing? Maybe it's marriage. What does the Bible say about marriage? So we're gonna preach Ephesians chapter 5 verses 23 through 33 where ⁓ I may have got those verses wrong, but it's in Ephesians 5 where Paul is talking to husbands and wives. Okay, we're just gonna preach that text There are other verses. Maybe we pull in a few to help us understand But what we're gonna do is we're still gonna exposit that text. We're still going to study that text What is Paul saying? What is the meaning of that text? And now what do we do with it as a church? ⁓ You can hear in that where you're you're always submitting to the text you're always submitting to God's idea what it was God's idea about this and let's understand it versus let's pick an idea or a topic and go find things right and you could see the pitfall of it being my own thoughts and let me pull from here because it It aligns with what I already think maybe totally and I would say there's there's two equal dangers in doing that one is I come with my own preconceptions to the topic and I I do what's called confirmation bias where I look for the things that validate what I already think ⁓ and I'll pick the verses that validate what I already think and I will conveniently ignore the ones that challenge what I think ⁓ The other piece is that I will, as the preacher, very easily fall victim to the fear of man. And I wanna make sure I don't say anything too challenging. I wanna make sure I don't say anything that might be controversial. So I'm gonna bring in the culturally acceptable version of this topic and find the verses that validate it. And that is where I see more. I see scripture misused more that way than anything else, where there is a prevailing narrative in the culture about a given topic. And we say, okay, well, we got to, that's what the people in the world think. So how can we use scripture to agree with it? Well, that's not conforming your people to the image of Christ. That's how that's using scripture to conform them to the image of the world, which is. travesty and so the the guardrail against that that's why we preach expositional preaching even if we come at it from the topical approach we are still expositing scripture we're still pulling out from the text what the text has to say to us because that guards us against imposing our own ideas on scripture and sub-benefit to that it also instructs the preacher in the truth too. lot of times people will come up to me after ⁓ a sermon and and you know maybe they'll say something like that was very convicting for me this week and I said it was for me too because the text confronts me as the preacher before I ever communicate it to the room well if I'm if I'm bringing in my ideas and imposing them on the text I'm never wrong I'm never corrected by scripture And I should be weekly, I should be the first one in our church corrected by that passage because it is going to then help in communicating it to the room in a way that corrects all of us so that all of our lives come more in line with the truth of God's word. So good and helpful for our people to hear. think you approaching it with that kind of intention and humility before you bring God's word to us that you're willing to be confronted and change before you proclaim God's word to his people on Sunday. You kind of touched on this, but I want to dig a little deeper, just moving from reading the passage, understanding the topic. And people could probably hear you say, yes, you didn't say anything. Big idea but the big idea emerges right because that this is the style that we have is there's a big idea And then there are some points under that The outline it follows a specific pattern. So speak more to how you get there and then Calling back to what you talked about at the beginning. We're proclaiming the truth of God But it's meant to transform the people of God. So you have application questions and you want us to be reflecting and ⁓ examining our own hearts during the sermon. So how are you moving from this is what the text says to the application for our people for their transformation? Yeah, that's I'll try to answer this concisely. So ⁓ let's let's back all the way up to the purpose of preaching and the purpose of a sermon in the life of God's people. When we look at who God is and how God created the world specifically mankind God is a God who is good and When his goodness is on display, he's glorified in Exodus chapters 33 and 34 when he's talking to Moses on Mount Sinai Moses asks to see God's glory and God responds by saying I will surely make my goodness pass before you and then later in the passage he says when my glory passes before you so in In that verse, God is making a direct connection between his glory being visible and his goodness being visible. when God's goodness is on display, he is glorified. That's why Jesus says, let your light shine before all men that they may see your good works and what glorify your father who's in heaven. When the goodness of God is on display in the lives of his people, he is glorified because what people are seeing is the goodness of God. God's people. Now let's go back to Genesis 1. He created mankind as his image to reflect him. What are they reflecting? They're reflecting his goodness. They are the embodiment of the goodness of God lived out through people who are meant to reflect him as his image to the rest of creation. Then sin happens. No longer are we reflecting the goodness of God, but we're rebelling against the goodness of God. Yet Jesus comes and makes us a new creation who are now being conformed to the image of, of Christ. All that creation language is still there. So what is the purpose of preaching, but to glorify God. through the transformation of his people to reflect his goodness to the rest of the world. So the preaching of God's word, the proclamation of the truth of God's word is telling us what God's goodness looks like and how our lives need to be transformed to reflect that goodness. That means that the purpose of a sermon then, is to find the truth in the text that tells us about the goodness of God and to teach the room what it looks like to live in line with that goodness because in being transformed more and more into that goodness we will glorify God. That means that a sermon is inherently applicational. sermon is not a theological lecture ⁓ though oftentimes it can take that form. That's not what it's supposed to be. A lecture is a theological lecture. A sermon is proclaiming truth toward transformation of people. So there should always be something that I am called to in a sermon. Something that I can look at my life and say, I see what needs to change in light of the truth that I've learned from this text. So now coming back to your question about the big idea and the application pieces, the big idea is simply that theme that or that main point of the text that, that the preacher discovers in his study framed into a single sentence that demands something of me. So every big idea is a single sentence. I typically shoot for 10 to 14 words, because anything more than that's a lot to write down. And. And there's always something that is in the big idea that is informing my mind and that is at least implicitly calling me to a response. Maybe that response is just that I need to believe something. Maybe that response is that I need to stop doing something. Maybe that response is that I need to start doing something. ⁓ but there is something that I need to intellectually assent to and that I need to morally submit to if I am to be in submission to this text. So the way that I find the big idea is I simply ask the question after doing all the study, I just ask the question, what would I not know if this text was not in the Bible? Now. might say you might say yeah but texts like that are all over the Bible that's right so what we're gonna preach from this text is what is unique in this text about that broader truth that is seen in other passages for this text we're gonna talk about what it is that I wouldn't know if this one wasn't in the Bible and then based on what I wouldn't know what would I then not be able to do and 10 to 14 words, there's your big idea. It's the main text of the passage or the main point of the passage. What would I not know if this was not in the Bible? And now what does this call us to do? And so then from there, the, anybody who's been here sees the outlines. Like there's always a, there's a, I call it a lead in line, you know, some, some phrase, ⁓ this last week was true belonging involves week before that was true belief involves. ⁓ and then the points complete the sentence. So the lead in line is the beginning of the sentence. The points are, they complete that sentence. And so by the end of it, you've got, if you've got four points, you got four sentences that all start with the same thing. But in each of those points, they are showing from the text that that big idea is actually the big idea. And they're showing what we need to do or think or believe or stop doing if we are going to do what that big idea said. It's very easy to drift into intellectualism with preaching. It's very easy to just make every point that you make a truth to be known. But if preaching is the proclamation of the truth of God with the end goal of the transformation of the believer to look more like Jesus, then we just help our people to phrase those things in a way that helps them to see what that transformation actually looks like. And so then from the application, piece, I will look at any given point in the sermon and the text that is undergirding that point, and I will simply ask the question, what does this teach us about God, ourselves, and the world? Those three things. What does it teach me is true about God? What false ideas about God does it confront? What does it teach me is true about myself? What sinful views of myself or flawed views of myself ⁓ am I prone to? And how does it correct those? What behaviors do I permit in my life that this text confronts? ⁓ What things do I avoid in my life that this text calls me to? does this text say that I am in relation to God? What is it correct about false identities that I'll embrace in relation to God? And then what does this say about the world? The things the world promises that it can't deliver on? the things the world says are true that are destructive. Right. I just asked those questions and I won't necessarily be able to answer every single one in every single way. But what starts to come to the surface are things that like we all get. We understand them like I'm living in it. And I'll hear people say like that that sermon took something that I'm actually going through right now and connected it to God's word. had I had this one young lady a while back. she had this kind of like southern drawl and I was out after the sermon she comes out and she walks up to me and she points at me and she goes, who told you my business? And I said, nobody. That's how it feels sometimes. It is how it feels. And it's not because somebody told me your secrets before the sermon, it's because I just think those three questions, what does this text reveal about God, myself and the world? God's word is going to do what it does. It's going to it's going to be applicable to those things. So all we need to do is just ask the questions, let the text answer the question and then explain how the text answers the question. And it feels like you're preaching to me. No, it's just it's just what the word says. We're just proclaiming the truth to the end goal of transformation, which means we're to talk about the things that you and I feel every day and how the text can such a helpful insight into the process. And I think there's some people that maybe come and they just they don't even realize the structure that they're getting every week. Or some people like it just because it's very organized and they can tell when they're getting close to the end. Yeah. But Jared and I work at the welcome desk. And over the last couple of years, we've interacted with lots of people that choose to come to harvest specifically because of our preaching philosophy. ⁓ And it's so important. I think we started this conversation Just with the unspoken assumption that God's Word is good and true And so obviously that's gonna be the source for the sermons here, but hearing more about the philosophy ⁓ Behind it the why and then the methods that used to develop the sermons for the benefit of our church body and their transformation is really helpful and when you said that seeing the goodness of God in display on display in the lives of people brings him glory, I thought of our women's event last night where it just that was that was the headline. It was so evident God's goodness in the lives of these women that shared ⁓ their stories. He was glorified. No doubt about it. So I'm so thankful to see that in the life of the people in our church and to hear more about the philosophy of preaching here at Harvest. Do you have any resources that you want to point people to on this topic that we're talking about today? Well, I think that if As I talk to people ⁓ in just this kind of current time in which we live and different experiences that you can have at different churches and maybe ⁓ experiences that they've had in relation to preaching I think that It's very common for people to desire biblical preaching because they see the need for it But they struggle to know what? What does that actually look like? ⁓ And how can I know? that the preaching that I'm hearing is Actually, what scripture would say is biblical preaching so that I can be confident when I sit under it and I submit to it and I allow it to shepherd my life that I am being shepherded where scripture would say I should go not just where this particular preacher says that I should go. And the book that was most impactful to me very early on when I was learning to preach and what I think is a great book for every church goer to read so that they can appreciate preaching in their church is it's called the supremacy of God in preaching by John Piper. He wrote it early in his pastoral career, but the premise of the book is that God is glorious and sin causes us to take that glory for ourselves and the purpose of preaching is to confront our glory stealing and to put that glory back on the God who deserves it. ⁓ It's a very good book. It's relatively short. It's only like 130 pages or so. ⁓ But it gives such a good vision for how you can know that preaching is biblical because it takes the glory that we are so prone to steal and it puts it back on God. ⁓ So I could give a long list of other preaching books, but most of them are... ⁓ mechanics of preaching whereas I think that I Piper's book is much more accessible and appreciable by anyone in the church so that they can appreciate the preaching ministry more yeah I definitely appreciate the preaching more after our conversation and I'm reminded to to just not only thank God for bringing a skilled communicator like yourself to our church body but to be praying for you as you prepare Prepare to preach weekly and the other pastors and elders and even visiting pastors that we have that are Doing the important work of preaching God's word for our transformation to be conformed into the image of Christ for God's glory It's so important and I have a deeper appreciation and I'm reminded to pray and invite all of our listeners to do the same So thanks for joining us for the harvest after Sunday podcast where we help you grow into the image of Christ by applying