"Preaching" Tagged Sermons
Classical rhetoric’s own concern with ethics and persuasion gets measured against a specifically Biblical rhetoric, one built to proclaim an event rather than merely illustrate an idea. Fundamentalist and evangelical approaches to preaching are weighed against that standard and found to fall short of it in different ways. Concrete examples of properly Biblical rhetoric close out the lecture, and the whole Lectures series.
Love’s permanence and Paul’s own handling of Corinthian boasting return here, with Paul’s humility held up as a model for preachers themselves. Along the way come reflections on homiletics, the art and discipline of preaching well.
Turning from the Corinthians’ spiritual pride to the pulpit itself, good preaching is contrasted with bad, using Paul’s own defense of his ministry in 2 Corinthians 11 as the foil. The chapter’s language of seeing ‘through a glass, darkly’ has as much to say to preachers as to anyone.
The series closes where Habakkuk himself closes, rejoicing in the Lord regardless of circumstance, the difference between preaching that merely informs and preaching that actually transforms. Every one of the elect participates in God’s saving acts the same way Habakkuk does here, Old Testament events and New Testament events cut from the same cloth. Habakkuk’s own early unbelief, oddly, makes him kin to figures throughout the New Testament who struggled the same way before faith took hold.
Bad preaching treats a text like Habakkuk 3 as too obscure to bother with; good preaching, the kind Paul models even with the Old Testament’s most arcane passages, finds Christ in it anyway. Verse 13 in particular repays that kind of close attention. God’s own work in Habakkuk moves him from selfish anger to real faith, not by argument but by transformation.
A valid ministry is judged by one standard only, the Word of God, against which Micah, Jesus, and Paul each had to contend with false prophets offering something easier. The true gospel does not flatter its hearers. What finally marks genuine ministry, in every one of these cases, is the humility of the cross, not success by any other measure.
Preachers who corrupt the Word for effect are described here as salesmen, trading on Moses’ earthly, practical ministry while rejecting the faith Paul’s ministry actually requires. The contrast between the two is not about which ministry is more spiritual but about which one a corrupted church finds easier to sell. 2 Corinthians 2-4 sets the terms for telling the difference.
Even within the OPC, the sermon warns, Paul’s eternal gospel can quietly be subordinated to something more marketable, the same earthly practicality that makes a peddler successful. Christ’s own temple-clearing in Matthew 21 is read as a direct verdict on that kind of selling. Mastering the art of the pitch is exactly what the true gospel refuses to do.
The healing in the synagogue and the healing in the house run in close parallel, and the move between them is not incidental. When Christ enters Peter’s house in 1:29, he begins to make a new kind of home, one that anticipates the church as his own body. Four implications follow from that single, unremarkable detail of geography.
Audience analysis dominates a great deal of modern church strategy, a trend this sermon measures against how Matthew and Luke themselves actually treat their audiences. The Lord’s own denunciation of Pharisaic behavior in Luke 6 offers a different model than market research. Knowing an audience, on Christ’s own terms, is not the same as catering to it.