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Preaching Lecture Part 1 By Jay Adams

I'm sure to be here with you today, something I've been looking forward to now for quite a while, I'm sure longer than you have, and I got in yesterday morning on one of the few planes flying and hope that I will be able to get home.
At any rate, let me explain to you why I'm sitting down rather than standing.
I have a little bit of a heart problem that developed some years ago and if I talk longer than an hour, hour and a half, it begins to get to me.
So that's why I'm seated and those of you who can't see me in the rear, you're the fortunate ones.
Those who are in the front may want to trade places and get to the back, that's your option and opportunity here.
So I'm just trying to explain those few things to you along with one other item as we get started.
And that is that I would prefer if you would be willing to go along with this to take all questions at the very end.
I have a habit of getting myself off track when people ask questions ahead of time.
I love questions and I like to follow them through as thoroughly as possible and so sometimes I just, when I allow questions too early in the game and I haven't laid the groundwork
for what I have to say, then I feel a necessity to lay the groundwork again and attach it to the question and the question just goes on and on and pretty soon there's no lecture
time left.
So if you would defer your questions to the end, I'd greatly appreciate that and you may
have some as we go along, so perhaps you'd like to jot those down, we'll try to give
you ample time to ask those questions.
While you do ask the questions, I have just a little bit of a hearing problem, not a bad
one, so keep that in mind if you would stand and then with a bit of a different accent
than the one I have, it makes it just a trifle harder, so I may have to ask you to do it
a little bit more slowly or repeat it or something of that nature, but you'll understand that's
no reflection on you, it merely reflects on the speaker.
So with all of those preliminaries out of the way and understandings, perhaps we can
get started.
What I want to suggest today is that preaching in the English speaking world as I know it,
and I must confess I'm not terribly familiar with preaching in this country except through
Ian Stewart, so if I don't have a proper understanding of it you can blame him, he was one of our
students over in our program and so I pretty well know Australia through Ian Stewart, but
in the English speaking world as I have known it, and I do know the British Isles fairly
well and know the U.S. I think perhaps a bit better, I believe that our heritage of preaching
is one that is in many respects dismal.
That is, as you look back into the history of preaching in English, you cannot find the
kinds of things that really ought to be there, and this is not just true of the English speaking
world, I think you'll find it's true elsewhere as well, but I'm just speaking about preaching
in English today.
You might have thought that there would be definitive texts on the preaching of Jesus,
for example, definitive texts on the preaching of John the Baptist, definitive works on the
preaching of Peter and Paul and all of the preaching that we have in the prophets of
the Old Testament.
Matter of fact, those books just don't exist.
They have not yet come from the press.
We have a heritage instead that goes back to classical rhetoric rather than a study
of preaching from the scriptures.
Well, certainly there are bits and pieces, snippets and little chunks of material here
and there and all kinds of works about the preaching of Christ and the preaching of Paul
and John and so on, a chapter usually in a book on Paul or something about the teaching
of Jesus, but usually it has to do with content more than it has to do with anything else.
And so as you trace the history of preaching in the English-speaking world, what you find
is a very interesting study.
It goes something like this.
I'm going to make this somewhat abbreviated, obviously, for the three sessions that we
have before us.
We have to cut many things.
But roughly speaking, you have classical rhetoric coming after the apostolic age.
And classical rhetoric comes into the Christian world through men like Chrysostom and Augustine,
who were converted and who had been outstanding rhetoricians in the classical traditions.
As a matter of fact, Chrysostom, as you recall, had been the number two man in the whole world
before becoming a Christian who was about ready to take the place of Labaneus, the number
one rhetorician in the classical world who resided at Athens.
And of course, when Chrysostom came into the picture, became a Christian and came into
the picture, he brought all of that background with him, as well as Augustine, who had been
a powerful rhetorician in three different places in the Mediterranean world, ending
up in Milan, where he eventually became a Christian.
And so classical rhetoric comes into the stream out of the apostolic age.
And it comes in two forms.
It comes through the Antiochian school over in Antioch in Syria, with which Chrysostom
was intimately connected, and the Alexandrian school, which prevailed under Origen, who
was the popularizer of the spiritualizing of the scriculae of the New Testament, though
Philo had preceded him in spiritualizing the Old Testament, Philo the Jew who was at Alexandria.
Only this spiritualizing or allegorizing of the scriptures that was part and parcel
of the Alexandrian school began with pagan Jews, Stoics in particular, who were concerned
about the writings of Homer and Hesiod, the religious writings from which the Gentiles,
the Greek Gentiles, received their religious heritage.
This heritage, of course, talked about gods who were deceiving one another, gods who were
playing fast and loose with each other's wives.
All sorts of sin and wretchedness was attributed to these gods who simply had more power but
were virtually blown up men.
And many of the pure poets and the writers and the speakers and the philosophers became
obsessed with the idea that they, instead of becoming total agnostics, they began to
allegorize the Greek writings of Hesiod and Homer.
Well, this strain of allegorism came into Philo in the Old Testament interpretation,
Philo being a Jew there at Alexandria, and then into the New Testament interpretation
so that passages that were a problem to the preacher became allegorized out of sight,
vaporized out into some other kind of meaning, and this was the method of dealing with the
imprecatory psalms and so forth and so on.
And this method, under origin, was popularized and for 1,000 years became the dominant method
of preaching in the New Testament period, in Christian period, up until the time of
the Scholastics who adopted it largely and modified it.
But it was in combination with the classical rhetoric of the day.
It was not a biblical exegesis, though Origen had started the practice, himself began the
practice of preaching through books of the Bible and of some kind of an expository method,
yet his practice was exposition, but then allegorization of the exposition and the literal
meaning had very little importance to him, and actually he was the one who said that
if you follow the literal meaning you have misinterpreted the Scriptures totally and
you have taught falsehood.
So this method of allegorization became the dominant method for 1,000 years, and there
aren't very many good preachers, at least, that we know about during that period whose
works have been preserved.
You've got Chrysostom, and you've got Augustine, and you've got a few others like Bernard who
come along a bit later.
But those are the names that stand out.
Then comes the pre-Reformation period and the Scholastic period.
In the Scholastic period, something very interesting happens.
The Scholastics, of course, were beginning to look at Aristotle and the Renaissance period.
They were beginning to get the classical rhetoric back into the picture in a dominant way, and
the Scholastics began to take every passage and analyze it down to its minutest point
in very detailed outline form.
You would have 1, and then you'd have A, and then you'd have 1 under that, and then small
A under that, and then small 1 under that, and small A, and then you'd go down to alpha,
and you'd go down to aleph after a while, and fate, and gimel, whatever you wanted to
put down there next.
But you begin to analyze everything in outline form, and these gigantic outlines began to
be the practice under the Scholastic period, much of an adaptation of Aristotle's approach
to life and brought to preaching.
Well, that methodology, which you can see perhaps most strongly in that period in people
like Thomas Aquinas' outlines, that methodology was totally rejected at the Reformation period.
We're here to start down now a little bit, if you like, not because that has any significance
of going up and going down, but just because the way the boards are set up here and how
far I can reach.
But we come over here to the Reformation, and the Reformation is quite a transformation
of preaching.
The Reformation goes back to a lot of what happened over here in Antioch, which had not
gone out, but had lost much of the influence of Chrysostom, which had been a good influence,
even though still based upon classical training, an influence that took the literal meaning,
the historical, grammatical meaning of a passage quite seriously.
And this Reformation period cast off the Scholastic analytical approach to preaching and got back
to more of a homily and the logos of the New Testament period, which we had time to talk
about, which was a more formal-shaped kind of speech that you find actually throughout
the Book of Acts.
You don't find homilies in the Book of Acts, you find this logos.
The logoi of the Book of Acts are more formulated addresses or speeches.
However you want to translate that word.
But they got back to this form, and one of the great differences of the Reformation preaching
was this change from simply analyzing everything down to the last toenail and the proclamation
of the message rather than the concern for form.
And then from the Reformation in the English-speaking world came the Puritans.
Now the Puritans retained the doctrine of the Reformation but went back to the Scholastic
form and method.
And what the Scholastics did well, the Puritans did better in terms of analyzing and outlining.
And this Puritan method is really the background, it's really the background for our preaching
method that has been taught in the English-speaking world up until today.
To greatly simplify it and not talk about all the exceptions to the rules, the Puritan
method had two, the sermon had two major parts.
Now I know they had four, they had five if you want to analyze it carefully, some of
them, but roughly it had two major parts.
It had the gathering of the doctrines, the gathering of the doctrines.
A man would go through a particular passage until he ran into something that was very
doctrinal, a word let's say like justification.
And then you would get a full discourse, theological discourse on justification.
Then you go along a little further and perhaps you'd run into the word sanctification.
And then you'd get a full discourse on sanctification.
And then perhaps further down if you were in Romans 8 or someplace you'd run into glorification.
And you'd get a full discourse on glorification.
Well, that would go on sometimes actually even all day long, some of these messages
where people took out an hour and had a prayer meeting between points or had tea or whatever
they used in those days and came back again and finished the discourse.
It would be in various parts like this.
And then the second part of this whole business would be what was called either improvements
on the text, and that didn't mean they were trying to improve in the modern sense of the
word, improve or doctor up the text so that we'd be in better shape when they were through,
but it meant to what could happen to me?
How could I be improved as a result of what the text had to say?
Strange way to put it, and yet that's what the word meant.
Improvements on the text or uses of the text, which was another great word that was used,
that is the purposes that the text could be put to or the various passages or doctrines could be put to.
And then finally, the word application was used.
These were all used synonymously, and the word application is the one that has won out in our day.
People rarely use the word use, at least in America or anywhere I've been.
Perhaps you're still using it out someplace in the booties in Australia.
I doubt it, but maybe somebody is.
But those three words are the words that prevailed, though there were a dozen others that just
sort of dropped by the wayside or various people had as their peculiar way of putting it.
But the idea down here was to find as many usages as you possibly could for each one
of these doctrines that was taught out here, so that sometimes you could literally get
fifty-fourthly or seventy-eighthly in the uses that followed the gathering of the doctrine.
Now, that method, of course, meant that the ingenuity of the speaker was what really excited his congregation.
How many possible uses could this man make of this doctrine?
And after a while, he began to run out of uses.
It was like preaching everything you know in one message and repeated himself in various messages,
and this thing began to become quite a problem in that way.
Now, in our day, I don't think there's any uniform method that's being used particularly,
but so much of this still falls into our situation.
Even where somebody is not necessarily giving us a doctrinal treatise on each doctrinally-sounding
word in the text and ignoring the ethos of the text itself or the purpose of the text itself.
Nevertheless, the servants often still are divided into two major parts, where you have
kind of the exposition of the text or whatever the person might decide to do there with it,
perhaps, let's say, a little bit more grammatical, historical approach to the text.
And then comes the application.
Now, usually the application is reduced, no longer as long as it used to be with all the uses.
As a matter of fact, sometimes the application is totally ignored if the man runs out of time.
And he has the clock starts to get around for the hour, and he says to himself,
the people are nodding, I'd better cut short on something, and of course it's the application
that gets it every time because the application stands down there at the bottom.
But the problem arises. Is this really the way to do things?
And is it the biblical way of doing things?
And is this really what is going to be effective with people as well?
As this is developed, it usually runs this way.
There is a lot of talk about the Amalekites, where they lived, what their history is,
what happened to them. Then the Amalekites are discussed in relationship to the passage.
The passage is developed in some way or something.
And if there is time, the preacher says, in effect, without perhaps using these words,
and by the way, here's what it all has to do with you.
But you've spent 25 minutes or a half hour, however long they allow you to preach
in your particular congregation, you've spent the major part of that time
talking about the Amalekites and what used to be when.
And then it gets brought up to the present day only in that last point of the sermon,
or part of the sermon if it isn't even a point, and it becomes,
oh, by the way, here's what it has to do with you.
Now, of course, the boys in the back row have long since gone to sleep.
Many of the farmers sitting out there didn't even make it as long as the boys in the back row.
The boys in the back row may not go to sleep, but they may spend their time making a book
on how many times you button and unbutton your coat instead of listening to what you had to say.
But the congregation has long since disappeared because they couldn't see
the relevance of the Amalekites that you've been talking about now
and what was going on when God used to do things back there.
And that's, of course, the attitude they begin to develop about the Bible under this kind of preaching.
When God used to do things back there in biblical times,
they couldn't see the relevance of that to their own lives here today.
They did not hear the message as a message to them from God,
in which his herald of truth was speaking to them about their lives
in relationship to himself and to their neighbors.
That's what has happened in this history of preaching too often.
Now, there are rare and good exceptions. I'm sure you can pull many of those out yourself.
And there are people who have stumbled on better ways.
But on the whole, as you look at the textbooks, as you listen to sermons,
and I've done a great deal of this over the years, this is what you find.
And the application, of course, in some churches that are not quite the same
as Reformed churches may grow into two or three items,
an altar call or something of that sort here at the end you can tack on.
I guess I have to screw the pin rather than pulling the top off there and do this right.
Really got it on there tight. Well, I'll try another one.
That one's tight too, but it's better. All right.
And some people may add an altar call and others may have a double application,
one to Christians, one to non-Christians, and so forth, depending upon what group you may belong to.
But Reformed people usually make this pretty slim if they ever get around to it at all.
And so that's where we end if we have time.
Oh, by the way, here's what it has to do with you.
And so preaching begins usually in the last three minutes of the sermon,
in any effective sense of the word, if anybody's still awake, that is to say.
Now, are you telling me I shouldn't do any kind of exposition
or any kind of doctrinal preaching where I explain things to people in my message?
Are you saying I shouldn't take the truth and spell it out and teach my people something?
Oh, certainly not.
But I'm saying that this method of handling these matters, and these matters all must be handled.
I'm not doing away with handling any of those issues.
This method has been death in our churches.
It has been deadly.
It has destroyed and killed many people in some kind of a non-literal sense, obviously,
though I guess some that died actually at church even, some literal sense.
But I want to ask you today, thinking about that method just a little bit,
and thinking about other practices, where do all these things come from?
I've given you just a little bit of a history of this.
Quite abbreviated and in many ways inaccurate because of the abbreviation.
But where do these dictums, these homiletical dictums that we've all been taught come from?
Let's just take one for example.
Always announce your points.
Now there is a clear, ironclad homiletical principle that goes back into hoary antiquity.
Every homiletician who ever taught, worthy to solve, said that.
And I knew somebody who was a member of a presbytery.
He's actually still a member of the presbytery, believe it or not.
I don't go that far back. I go back pretty far, but not that far back.
All my friends are dead yet, but he's still there and he's older than I am.
But he used to say to his young licentiate when they preached that sermon,
if you don't make your points clear, you fail.
And I tell you that before you even get up to preach your sermon.
That was a firm dictum. He couldn't find the man's points and write them down.
Point one, point two, point three, under one, A, B, C, and so on.
That poor licentiate died right there as far as he was concerned.
Out of the ministry, never end. You're banished forever until you can learn to announce your points.
But I ask you, where in all of the Old and New Testaments did anybody ever announce his points?
I mean, quite seriously, where did that ever happen?
In any preaching that is biblical. Never. Never.
And here's a man who made this orthodoxy, and yet it isn't even biblical.
There isn't even the slightest hint that it's biblical.
As a matter of fact, as you look at the Old and New Testament messages recorded in the scriptures,
and even the scriptures themselves, you can take a whole look at this business from a different perspective
that I believe is far more biblical and far more persuasive and far more helpful to your people,
and as a result may make a difference in some of your ministries if you care to think seriously about it
and don't become too offended at my attacking some of your choice and old standby.
So, that's where we're going today. We're going to do this iconoclastic thing of attacking homiletics
as it now exists in certain forms, and classical homiletics as it's been taught in the English-speaking world,
right down to Broadus and Haddon Robinson and all the rest of them,
and try to look at this picture from a more biblical perspective.
Now, I don't say everybody has followed that method. I've been making exceptions all the way through.
I've been trying to say carefully that there are glorious exceptions and great differences from this,
and that, in my opinion, as you say, the history of preaching is what has made men effective
where they have burst out of the bonds of this kind of approach
and have devised their own way of preaching in a more biblical fashion.
And I want to ask you, as we talk today, to keep asking yourself the question,
where do I justify my practices that I either follow or have been taught?
Feblixen, and if you can, not everything that's been taught, obviously, is wrong,
and not everything in classical rhetoric, obviously, is wrong.
You can't open your mouth without using some of the figures of speech and classical rhetoric
that have been analyzed and set forth and so on.
The New Testament certainly incorporates some of those, as well as the Old,
even though they weren't thinking of classical rhetoric there in the Old Testament.
But on the whole, I want you to ask yourself the question continually,
do my practices really conform to any biblical approach,
or did I simply accept what I was taught in the books and taught in the schools,
and I followed that old method that I saw in the models in front of me in the church?
And I think we need to ask that question, because homiletics has not been based upon the Scriptures.
We still do not have a definitive work on preaching the preaching of Jesus,
the preaching of Paul, the preaching of Peter, the preaching of John the Baptist,
and the preaching of the prophet, or the preaching of Moses or anybody else.
We don't have definitive biblical studies about biblical preaching.
So while we can't do all that today, I would like to try to get back a little bit
to what biblical preaching ought to look like instead of what it does,
what preaching does look like in our time.
Now let's think about what you may have been taught in the seminaries,
colleges, theological colleges, whatever you call them here.
In a good training, let's say here's your preaching portion.
I like to use the word preaching portion rather than text or passage,
all of which have all kinds of freight attached to them.
People argue about what you mean by text or what you mean by something else.
So take a word that's clean, and we can build our own concepts into a preaching portion.
Nobody uses that, so there it is. All right, preaching portion.
Now what do we do with a preaching portion?
Well, if you went to a good school, there was a certain kind of Antiochian background
rather than Alexandrian background for the way you were taught to approach the text.
You were taught to do a biblical, historical, grammatical, historical,
however you want to call it, whatever you want to call it,
biblical historical, grammatical historical analysis.
You want to know what the words in the Scripture mean.
You want to know what those words mean in certain contexts in their day.
You're not simply doing some kind of a word study of a sort where you go back to roots
because you realize that roots don't really mean anything at a given period of time
unless the word's a very new word or somehow or other retains those roots.
So you try to find out how it was used in that day and in that particular context
and you do all that grammatical work that's necessary in the Bible, so a grammatical work.
And then a historical work, you want to see what kind of context this came into,
what the particular background of the passage was and so on.
So a grammatical historical analysis of the text is what you were taught to do,
and that's very good. You were taught to do a grammatical historical analysis of the text
because without that, you're not going to understand the passage, or at least most passages.
And you were taught, if you went to a really good seminary or theological college,
whatever you call them, I guess you call them colleges, I keep getting used to that,
we use the word seminary, which only means a seed bed, that's not a very good word.
At any rate, as too closely related to the word seminary also.
But you may also have been taught to do a rhetorical analysis of the passage.
And as you do this rhetorical analysis of the passage, you also get yourself into a literary analysis.
Now this is a step above this kind of a seminary or seed bed teaching,
but the rhetorical and literary, that's a T whether you know it or not,
a literary analysis of the passage tells you many other things.
Rhetorical analysis tells you when you're working with figures of speech, let's say.
And here is an apostrophe, where Paul speaks to death as though death were a person.
Oh death, where is your seed?
An apostrophe is a rhetorical form.
It's very effective, certainly.
Paul's diatribe form, for example, in the Book of Romans,
where he takes up questions and objections and moves the thought along
by raising the questions that his listeners would raise in his mind.
Oh man, why do you yet find Paul?
For who has resisted his will?
The predestination so plainly that if anybody were listening,
that would be the response that a person would get.
If God elected and predestined somebody to eternal life and somebody else to eternal damnation,
you'd say, well, why does he find Paul? For who has resisted his will?
And when you're teaching this doctrine of predestination,
it lectures on to somebody who doesn't believe it,
he doesn't come up with that kind of response, you're not teaching what Paul thought.
And of course, nobody would ever come up with that response unless you were teaching,
unless Paul were teaching that.
If he were teaching something other, something lesser,
something kind of weak and anemic and Arminian-like,
then nobody would ever raise that objection,
so obviously he was teaching for something pretty stiff.
So the objection, the diatribe style.
I just throw these things out, you know, a little bit along the way for fun.
But here's this rhetorical analysis and a literary analysis, pretty important.
When you're thinking of preaching, what kind of literature is it that you're dealing with
in a given preaching portion?
Is this narrative, a long Old Testament narrative?
You've got Elijah and the prophets, the Baal spread out over two chapters,
that kind of a narrative where you can't just take those chapter by chapter
the way some people automatically do,
and instead you've got to look at the whole story,
and you can't leave people hanging in the middle of something, you know,
they're all sitting around, the water's been poured,
and you say, well, that's enough.
Time has run out, and it's come to the end of the chapter.
We'll see what happens next time, if any of you decide to come back again.
But no, you've got a whole story, and you've got to deal with it as a story
from beginning to end, because it's a narrative or a story.
That's what a narrative is, telling a story of something has happened.
Or perhaps you have a letter, an epistle, a poem.
It's a very different kind of literature.
Perhaps you have an apocalyptic portion,
apocalyptic portions have their particular canon for interpretation as well.
You have a great dragon that's so big that the tail is knocking the stars out of the sky,
and that kind of thing, and it's got certain kinds of heads and crowns,
and, you know, all those kind of things.
How do you approach that? The way you approach one of Paul's letters? No.
You have to bring a special canon to that.
And perhaps you have a parable or a proverb.
Perhaps you have a gospel that has a particular goal in mind,
like the Gospel of John, where material is selected and shaped purposely
for those ends that are in view of the author, not in an erroneous way, but in a proper way.
And so you've got different kinds of literature.
And so you have to do a literary analysis, because you can't treat in precincts,
so some people try, so you can't really effectively treat a narrative
that runs over two chapters the same way as a proverb that is one-liner,
just a one-liner or a two-liner at most.
If you say, well, I'm the kind of person who lets my outline grow right out of the passage,
that just doesn't work, where every time you preach in proverbs you have two points.
And that wouldn't be Presbyterian. If you preach the two points, you've got to have three.
The Reformed people say you've got to have three because the people bring enough nits,
one to reach the point, and they hand them out to the kids. Here's the first point, here's the second point.
Keeps the kids busy on the pews.
So you've got that problem of a literary analysis.
The way you treat a narrative is one thing, because it's spread out all over the place.
The proverb is compacted material.
It's truth of God compressed into a lot of life experiences.
It's the difference between the narrative and the proverb,
or the difference between a piece of hard candy and a piece of soft chocolate.
I don't know whether you have them here, but we have this kind of chocolate form.
It has a gooey mass in the interior with a cherry at the very center.
Sort of liquid inside, and you don't dare chew one, it just comes down all over you.
So you pop the whole thing in at once and chomp down on it,
and eat this thing quickly, and the taste lasts for just a moment.
It's gone, almost instant.
It's a piece of hard candy.
You put that in your mouth and you chew on it very gently,
unless you break a filling in your tooth, and suck on it.
And turn it over with your tongue and suck on it some more,
and turn it over again and suck on it some more, and keep sucking on it.
You've got to really work at a piece of hard candy.
That's the difference between a narrative and a proverb.
A proverb is like that hard candy.
You've got to suck on it until you get all the flavor from it.
It's been compacted into that piece of material.
There's a lot there.
It's not like this narrative that says a lot over a long space, but it says a lot.
It's a very compacted space.
So like a diamond, you have to turn it around and look at each of its proteins
to get the full cover of that proverb.
Well, okay, so you do this rhetorical analysis, literary analysis,
and you're good with school like the ones here.
You've really been jacked up, right?
You don't just do this and don't just do this.
You go even farther.
You do a systematic theological analysis
and a biblical theological analysis of the passage.
So if you're analyzing the passage,
not only are you doing the grammatical historical analysis,
the rhetorical literary analysis,
but you're doing a systematic and biblical theological analysis of the passage.
And when you do a systematic analysis of the passage,
what you're saying is that I want to be sure that what I think this passage means
is in harmony with all the rest of the scripture.
The analogy of scripture gets into play here.
So that when you're preaching from one of those passages in John
where the passage simply seems to say,
pray for anything and you'll get it, if you ask him my name,
you don't just get up and say,
well now, you can get anything you want, Cadillac,
or I don't know what Cadillac is or I don't know what Cadillac is.
You can get anything you want, a big, expensive car, nice house, money, galore.
Just ask for it, you know.
You keep in mind James has a few things to say.
He has a few conditions to ask.
He says if you pray earnestly,
and if you pray not to conserve it on your own lust,
that does away with the big car and the rest of it.
And if you pray this way and this way and this way and this way,
faith believing and so forth and so on,
and you look at a few other places,
and so you get a more systematic view of a whole biblical view of this thing
so that when you preach over in John,
even though you may not say everything that James says
or every other passage has to say about it,
you have that in the back of your head so that what you do say
doesn't contradict what you're going to say when you get over into James
six months later.
So a systematic analysis of the passage.
Another biblical theological analysis of the passage
gets you focused on where you are in life
and where that passage is
and what the differences have occurred between the time when the passage was given
and the time when you now look at it
and you look the whole New Testament picture
and how Christ is in this picture
and how Christ is in all the scriptures
and try to understand this passage
from the full light of the Christological truth of the Redemptions in Christ.
And so you want to look at all these things.
However, that's what we've been taught to do,
but if we do this,
if we do this,
at best where it takes us
is to the meaning
of the preaching portion,
the meaning of the preaching portion.
Now I understand sometimes you have to do more of this,
less of that, more of this, less of that, given the passage.
Sometimes it's charcoal, background isn't all that important like in a proverb,
sometimes it's very important as in something else.
But on the whole, doing that kind of work gets you the meaning of the preaching portion.
And most men have been taught to do just that,
go that far and no farther.
Read the meaning and then get up and preach the meaning of the passage.
And if they can and have time to,
check on a little bit, oh by the way,
a little bit of application, oh by the way,
here's what it has to do with you.
Now, suppose I write you a letter
and I say to you,
just can't stay in the United States any longer,
got to get out,
want to come to Australia
and I'm looking for an associate pastoral relationship in your church.
Could I be your associate pastor?
Well, you may take my letter
and do a grammatical study of it, a historical study,
what's driving him out?
Is it the political scene?
Why is he leaving in that country anyway?
And so forth.
And then what does his language mean?
Maybe you get a book or something I've written
and you say, what does he mean by pastor?
What does he mean by associate?
Over here he explains it more fully
so I can bring that material into this and so on.
You do all these kinds of things.
Why will you come to a conclusion and say,
the guy wants a job?
You've got to mean any of this thing.
Now, I don't mean to make fun of this kind of work.
It all has to be done more or less according to the given passage
because it isn't in our day and age and so forth
and those things are necessitated by the distance
that we are from the culture and the time and so on
to a greater extent than you would with my letter.
If you just go around and say, hey, I've got a letter
and I'd like to tell you the meaning.
Never do anything about the letter.
You have missed the whole point.
You have missed the whole point.
I want a job.
And you've either got to say yes or no or not now
or I think I can get you one with another guy.
I don't want you in my church, but somehow or other,
the purpose of a whole thing has been neglected
if you only focus on meaning.
So I'm saying in order to put the capstone,
let's use another cover for that.
The capstone on this pyramid, you've got to get the telos.
The telos of the passage for the purpose of the passage.
That's an R there in the crack.
Now the purpose of the passage is what has been missed
in this rhetorical work that's being taught.
Now of course the seminary liked this.
I'm sure they keep it here.
And in the front of various commentaries,
you get the occasion for writing in a general way
and that sort of thing.
But really a focus on the purpose has not been there in the literature.
That focus has virtually been non-existent.
People talk about meaning.
They don't talk about purpose.
The teleg emphasis is missing.
And so in accordance with the puritan approach,
boiled down to one or two,
people have historically, in the history of English preaching,
historically used the passage for their own purposes
rather than the purpose for which it was given.
That is a critical problem.
Use a passage for your own purpose.
Now let's see, how many uses can I make of this passage?
How can I improve upon this text?
How can I apply it?
Rather than asking yourself, how did God apply these words?
What was he up to?
What was the intent of the Holy Spirit
in giving this material in the first place?
What an inference it makes in bringing your intent,
your purpose, and going that further step
to ask what was God's purpose in giving this preaching course.
When a passage is used for the purpose for which it was given,
it has power.
And you can unleash real power from that passage.
That can hardly be released when you use it for some purpose of your own.
Now I got onto this thing many years ago by studying sermons,
printed sermons in the Westminster Seminary Library.
Back in the days before random sorting programs on computers,
as a matter of fact, most days computers were in rooms this large.
The computer was, I'll show you how far I go back,
there were no PCs and no laptops for sure.
They had floors, they had to build computer floors
and keep the room at a certain temperature
and the computer took a room this large to do it.
So I had no access to any of those things,
nor could I have figured out how to use one had I access to it.
So I developed my own random sorting method,
a method you never use in trying to find the will of God,
but one that worked very well for me in sorting out sermons
in the Westminster Library.
I would go into the preaching section and close my eyes,
which I might do during the lectures today sometimes
because I'm still way out of faith in terms of the flight over here,
which just occurred yesterday, almost 20 hours to get here.
And so I'd go in there and close my eyes
and just sort of spin around in various directions
until I was totally disoriented.
It didn't take too much, but when I was disoriented,
didn't know what particular area of the preaching section I was in,
I would pull books off the shelves here and a few off the shelves there
and a few of my eyes closed,
then take them out to the table and open them at random discernment.
That way I kept myself from bias and prejudice
and dealing with preachers of my own ilk.
So I would read these things and analyze them from various perspectives.
And one of the things that really impressed me
was how few men use a passage for the purpose for which it was given.
I began to get onto this thing,
that people use the passages for their own purposes.
They have something they want to do,
or if they've been going through a book,
they decide now what can I do with it, like the Puritans did.
How many uses can I make of it, or what use in particular might I make of it?
Rather than searching for the original purpose of the passage,
it just seemed to be almost nonexistent in these messages,
and naturally so after the Puritan approach,
which we boiled down to one or two applications,
where you search for all the purposes you could think of,
all the uses you could think of,
rather than what was the original purpose of this text.
When I looked at Spurgeon, I once studied all the sermons in the Metropolitan Tabernacle series for a master's degree.
And when I looked at Spurgeon, I found that he was high on using the passages for their purposes.
In fact, probably 50 percent of the time he used the passage for the purpose for which it was given,
which was very high by comparison to many others.
About 50 percent of the sermons were great, but from the wrong passage.
And this thing began to get to me a little bit,
because I began to think about this and ask myself some questions about my own preaching.
I began to see that I was at fault here as well.
Now what difference does it make if you use the passage for the purpose for which it was given,
and you use it for your own purpose?
Let's just take an example.
Luke 15 is a passage familiar to everyone.
Luke 15 is the, we even have named it sometimes, but what's it usually named?
Anybody think of a name sometimes given to it?
Any response here on this?
Well, there's more to it in that whole section than that.
That's part of it. That's a piece of it, yes.
But what about the chapter? What's the chapter usually named?
Yes, but lost and...
Ah, it's called the lost and found chapter.
Have you ever heard it called that?
I've heard it called that. I've heard people treat it that way.
It's called the lost and found chapter.
Actually that's not what the chapter is.
It's not three things lost and three things found.
That's not the purpose of the chapter.
And it's certainly not the purpose of the chapter to preach three evangelistic messages
from three different perspectives and viewpoints from this chapter.
The lost sheep, and so there are the sheep, and all of these sheep come on in here and get found.