Yesterday, I started a blog series that came from a talk I did at our church meeting. This is was to give background on how we interacted with current events at our Sunday service.
What are we doing when we are preaching?
The act of preaching is to deliver the Word of God to His people. This includes: reading it, explaining what it means, and applying it to our lives. It is easy to get this backwards, to believe that the most important part is to make it applicable to people’s lives – go into God’s Word searching for what you think people need to hear – sometimes, what you wish God would say.
We preach straight through books of the Bible, because we believe that it is a way for us to not impose on God what we think should be talked about. While the elders do right the schedule and pick which books to preach from, it is done through prayer and WELL before we actually preach it. We see this as one way to get ourselves out of the way to let God speak to us.
Every week, in His providence, God gives us eternal truth to interact with. In my 16+ years as a pastor, I have seen so many times when what we are preaching meets the cultural moment, or more often, the personal struggle that people are going through. Sometimes it’s even about things that we aren’t aware of until AFTER the sermon when people come to us and say: that is exactly what I needed to hear today. In those moments, the glory all goes to God. We don’t adjust to the moment, we trust God to give us what is needed. He does!
It is also important to recognize we lean into a long-term approach when it comes to preaching. I have described it before as: preaching towards a worldview. What that means is, in every sermon, I am not primarily concerned with giving you something that you can apply to your life this week. I am trying to draw from the text the particular idea about God or ourselves that Scripture gives. In a sense, I am filling your toolbox with tools. When you have to work through a particular issue, theological or cultural, you have the foundation of who God is, how He works, what He has called us to and where the guardrails are – so that you have everything you need to think through a situation when it comes. As pastor Sinclair Ferguson puts it in a video where he is asked some of the questions we are interacting with here:
What I am hoping to do in ministry is give people the lenses through which they can see the world fairly clearly.
Sermons are about constructing those lenses over time. If done right, the pastor doesn’t have to tell the congregation what they should be seeing in any particular moment, because we are all wearing the same lenses. In our sermons, we are will be teaching principles and constructing foundations that can be applied by the people of the church to the numerous situations, both personally and culturally, that they interact with.
I used the analogy recently: you don’t want to have to teach someone about God’s sovereignty and comfort when they are on their deathbed.
Hopefully they have already heard it and you can just sit with them in their time of need. We don’t want to preach the moment, but toward all future moments.
Speaking of analogies. When it comes to what stories or illustrations that we use in our sermons, we try to be very careful, not to force them or feel like we need to have one. When they come up and they fit, we will use cultural examples, as I did with Erika Kirk. We will use current events in our sermons, but not often – only when the text invites it. Which leads into the next question:
What is the theological issue this addresses?
This question is about how we approach any specific topic; it is an interesting question to consider in relation to Charlie Kirk’s murder in particular. As a cultural moment, there is a lot of conversations to have, but as a theological topic, it is a bit more complicated. We have to ask: what part of God’s Word applies to his murder?
Murder is wrong (10 commandments and the value of life), or it could be used as a warning of how far humans are willing to go when they allow bitterness and hate to overtake them (we talked about a few months ago with Cain and Abel).
I was trying to think about what text of Scripture (and theological ideal) his death aligns with (what sermon I might use him as an illustration in). The one that makes sense to me is John 16:33:
I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
Charlie Kirk’s death created a lot of calls to respond in kind or led people to fear, anger or just deep sadness. In this moment, it is important for us to remember that suffering in this life is expected. That doesn’t mean we enjoy it, but difficulty in this life (including murder) should not be a surprise to us. Our Savior also suffered (and was murdered). In His suffering and death He conquered. It is this final victory that should drive us.
If there is a theological issue at the heart of Charlie Kirk’s death, I think it is: Jesus has already overcome the world. Its okay to struggle, but nothing can undo the final victory that has already been secured. Take heart.
If I was preaching through John 16 at the time of Charlie Kirk’s death, I may have used him as an example of the kind of tribulation that we could face. The timing of his death with the sermon that God presented to us would have been connected. Since we were continuing in our sermon through Genesis, I didn’t. His death did not seem to fit as well in a sermon about Noah and the ark. Though the reminder of God’s sovereignty in that story is part of the lenses that we use to see current issues through.