How to Listen to a Sermon
by George Whitefield
Keys for getting the most out of what the preacher says
Jesus said, 'Therefore consider carefully how you listen' (Luke 8:18). Here are some cautions and directions, in order to help you hear sermons with profit and advantage.
1. Come to hear them, not out of curiosity, but from a sincere desire to know and do your duty. To enter His house merely to have our ears entertained, and not our hearts reformed, must certainly be highly displeasing to the Most High God, as well as unprofitable to ourselves.
2. Give diligent heed to the things that are spoken from the Word of God. If an earthly king were to issue a royal proclamation, and the life or death of his subjects entirely depended on performing or not performing its conditions, how eager would they be to hear what those conditions were! And shall we not pay the same respect to the King of kings, and Lord of lords, and lend an attentive ear to His ministers, when they are declaring, in His name, how our pardon, peace, and happiness may be secured?
3. Do not entertain even the least prejudice against the minister. That was the reason Jesus Christ Himself could not do many mighty works, nor preach to any great effect among those of His own country; for they were offended at Him. Take heed therefore, and beware of entertaining any dislike against those whom the Holy Ghost has made overseers over you.
Consider that the clergy are men of like passions with yourselves. And though we should even hear a person teaching others to do what he has not learned himself, yet that is no reason for rejecting his doctrine. For ministers speak not in their own, but in Christ’s name. And we know who commanded the people to do whatever the scribes and Pharisees should say unto them, even though they did not do themselves what they said (see Matt. 23:1-3).
4. Be careful not to depend too much on a preacher, or think more highly of him than you ought to think. Preferring one teacher over another has often been of ill consequence to the church of God. It was a fault which the great Apostle of the Gentiles condemned in the Corinthians: 'For whereas one said, I am of Paul; another, I am of Apollos: are you not carnal, says he? For who is Paul, and who is Apollos, but instruments in God’s hands by whom you believed?' (1 Cor. 1:12; 2:3-5).
Are not all ministers sent forth to be ministering ambassadors to those who shall be heirs of salvation? And are they not all therefore greatly to be esteemed for their work’s sake?
5. Make particular application to your own hearts of everything that is delivered. When our Savior was discoursing at the last supper with His beloved disciples and foretold that one of them should betray Him, each of them immediately applied it to his own heart and said, 'Lord, is it I?' (Matt. 26:22).
Oh, that persons, in like manner, when preachers are dissuading from any sin or persuading to any duty, instead of crying, 'This was intended for such and such a one!' instead would turn their thoughts inwardly, and say, 'Lord, is it I?' How far more beneficial should we find discourses to be than now they generally are!
6. Pray to the Lord, before, during, and after every sermon, to endue the minister with power to speak, and to grant you a will and ability to put into practice what he shall show from the Book of God to be your duty.
No doubt it was this consideration that made St. Paul so earnestly entreat his beloved Ephesians to intercede with God for him: 'Praying always, with all manner of prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and for me also, that I may open my mouth with boldness, to make known the mysteries of the gospel' (Eph. 6:19-20). And if so great an apostle as St. Paul needed the prayers of his people, much more do those ministers who have only the ordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit.
If only all who hear me this day would seriously apply their hearts to practice what has now been told them! How ministers would see Satan, like lightning, fall from heaven, and people find the Word preached sharper than a two-edged sword and mighty, through God, to the pulling down of the devil’s strongholds!
This excerpt is adapted from Sermon 28 from The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield. Published by E. and C. Dilly, 1771-1772, London. George Whitefield (1714-1770) was a British Methodist evangelist whose powerful sermons fanned the flames of the First Great Awakening in the American colonies.
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Healthy Church = Biblical Preaching
All of the following marks I will cover over the next few weeks come from 9Marks ministry. These are not essentials of a church but they are essential marks of a healthy church with healthy members. As I write this I am in preparation and study for our summer family devotions. We have spent the last year in the book of John but as we approach chapter 11 we will be departing for a short time to address the subject of, "Love and Centrality of the Local Church." As my wife and I clear some new ground in our parenting we are discovering many area's in which we take for granted without ever explaining. The local church is something all Christian families do, but why? Do our children understand the essential necessity of the local church? Do they understand why we are dedicated to a local church?
My wife and I allowed them to pear into our search process for a local church a couple years ago. We wanted them to see some of what we were looking for. In fact this first mark we will discuss was the first essential mark we were going to expect. This mark is the first mark I will look for when suggesting a local church to family or friends wherever they live. We first go to two trusted resources. One is Masters Seminary and the other is 9marks church finder. If we cannot find any of those we then go to the local church websites and then go to the resource page, look at past sermons and can determine if this church has this mark or not.
So to embark on this subject, I will be spending much time looking at the effect and result of the local church in the book of Acts and in a few other books after we have gone through the nine marks of a healthy church. When I say centrality I think it is important to explain what I mean. Men by in large over the past fifty to one hundred years have undergone an industrialized reconstruction of how they go about providing for there families. About one hundred years ago most families had farms and worked within the confinements of there own properties. But with the industrialization of the nineteenth century many men began to leave there homes to work within travel distance for there primary means to provide. Today most men do not work in there own homes to provide for there family. I for instance must travel nearly forty miles away every day to get to work. Well one of the subsequent problems of this sort of lifestyle is that we take that same way of thinking to our local church. We do not interact on a constant basis within the body. We may drive twenty or thirty minutes away. We may fellowship on Sunday and maybe on Wednesday night class but other then that we are disconnected with the body. I don't think this is the biblical outline of how church is to be. I believe there needs to be more daily involvement. A dedication to those believers and a commitment to making it more then just a part of our life but the central part of our life. Yes we have unsaved family and friends and we do interact with them. But the church (a group believers) are to be dedicated to one another and to the glory of God. So, with that said, I have much to learn, I much more to model and am praying for grace as I look for those opportunities. So As I begin my studies on the subject I hope to serve you well by putting some of the marks of a healthy church and how to grow in greater love for the local church over the next several weeks.
All of the subjects I will cover over the summer months are based on the premise that you understand that church is for the believer (1 Cor. 12:12,13). In the New Testament we see believers getting together to fellowship, preach, partake in communion, practice church discipline, etc(Acts 2:42, Matthew 18). I know many man centered churches believe the point of the church is to gather, work at, focus on, model programs after the unsaved. Fill our churches with unregenerate people and if we do it in a very cool way then they will stay. I will simply say that is not a church in the biblical definition of the church. The seeker sensitive and emergent church does not have God's glory or your sanctification in focus but entertainment and comfort to the lost. Many of these marks would be offensive to the lost so therefore they will not be utilized as they would remove there biggest crowd. If this is you then I would encourage you to pray for your church, pray for your pastor, get great resources, study and they talk to your elders. See if they are willing to work on these areas. What is there reaction? A good shepherd will be understanding and talk to you with love and respect. If this is not the case then you have much larger problems. This is an important distinction. So with that said, lets begin our list.
MARK ONE: EXPOSITIONAL PREACHING
A healthy church will begin with the foundational understanding that God's word is where we are to go for our growth and sanctification. We must focus our attention to God's Word. This is sufficient for every thing in life and growth in godliness. It reveals to us who we are, who God is and what we are to do. It shows us how to structure our church to glorify Him, how to evangelize, how to parent, do marriage and all aspects of life. A healthy church has a Pastor who is less about his random topics from week to week with an occasion bible verse but the Bible itself is the focal point of the church service and the sermon. This obligates any possibility for a Pastor to get on his hobby horse and it does not skip any of the hard things we must learn. Expositional preaching is when you take a book of the Bible and you preach out it verse by verse. The Word is the focus and all our attention is on it. Our job as members of the local church is to place leaders in our pulpit who are gifted at there ability to discover what the point of the passage is and make that the point of there sermon. Then there task is to apply it to us, in the church, at this time. Topical Sermons can be expositional but only when you preach a topic based on a section of scripture or scriptures that specifically addresses that topic. But by in large your steady diet needs to be verse by verse and book by book exposure of God's Word.
Expository preaching is not something marked by style or personality but by biblical content. Sometimes we will find a preacher reading a section of scripture then preaching a random topic based loosely on the scripture. This is not expository preaching. Again, and this is important, expository preaching is the idea that the verse or section of scripture is the point of the message not used to support a Pastor's message. The Word itself is the authority and in fact a Pastor's authority starts and end's upon the authority of scripture itself. This means that they are accountable to call black what scripture's calls black and white the scripture calls white. They are also not qualified to take the grey areas of scripture and call them essential when God's word does not. It requires careful attention to the context, author, history, genre, etc.
Yes this is a requirement of the Pastor but ultimately it is the responsibility of the congregation and the individual families to make sure this is what they are placing themselves under.If not, it will and does stunt the growth of the believer. It results in immature Christians who (when listening to verse by verse preaching)use terms like, that is a boring style (again this is God's inspired Word we are talking about), well what about worship? (as if the sermon itself was not part of worship), those Pastor's are to legalistic and arrogant (as if the Pastor who is teaching his random topic making himself the focus of the sermon is more humble then the one who submits to God's Word making "it" the focal point of the sermon as more arrogant. Not to mention just an immature understanding of what legalism is). The seeker sensitive, emergent church movement inevitably ends up being more emotion based therefore preaching more from random subject then of consistent truth. But Bible based churches always end up with the Word as there foundation. So in short expository preaching is a correct understanding of the text within the context, correctly preaching that text as to make its main point the sermons main point and finally it requires a correct application. If you belong to this sort of church then your responsibility comes to play in your applying what you are hearing from God's Word as God addresses you each week. Pray to this end.
Resolved Conference
As the 2010 Resolved Conference gets under way tonight I thought I would pass a highlight video from last year.
Jesus, I My Cross Have Taken from Resolved on Vimeo.
Loving the Church, Faults and all
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One theme in today's "Christian" relevance plays over and over again. It is either something culturally accepted and boastfully alluded to by modern day social gospel preachers or it is something that is totally avoided and neglected due to disagreements by a younger rebellious youth. It is not new and seems to follow all age groups from the creation of man. The subject is the church and its main preeminence within the believers life. Today it seems the more convenient the church is to cater to the worldly desires of today's youth, the least amount of demands it places on any individual, and its ability to submit to the desires of the congregations, well the more attractive she is. The unregenerate person has no desire to be inconvenienced by church involvement. Unless of course it is center stage and one day a week with no prior requirements.
We seem to be living in an era where devotion to the centrality of the church upon a believer is almost completely neglected. Cultivating within our youth a strong desire to love the church and be devoted to it as the central focus of ones life takes a back seat to more important things like sports, education, leisure, and an array of other topics. Youth are not loving the church, loving the education of a proper worldview, sports within the context of the local church and leisure with the people they go to church with. It all seems like "work."
This attitude is usually bred by parents who seem to be rather non-submissive and uninformed on the need to love the church. They seem overly critical and have complaining hearts. The church is great as long as it does everything they agree with. Once a sacrifice of trust is required of them they are the first to shoot and complain or even leave. In face the battle cry of today's relevant church is to look and act as little like church as possible and as much like the world as they can afford (which comes far short).
Beware, for one you are working yourself out of a job. How? Every generation has this youthful pride that says the best way is different. Its not 2000 years of biblical theology. Its now, its hip, its cool, its not old. Young man, you are getting older. Many of you in less then 15 years will be the older uncool man. The next generation will come and repeat your method of ecclesiology. And you my friend, will loose your job because you will just be to old. You will not be respected but discarded and the "new" perspectives of prideful know it all spirituality will become even more liberal then your "new" ways which will all to soon become "old" ways. But what do you expect? This was your modeled ministry.
What I want to do over the next few weeks as the Lord allows is go through the 9 Marks of a healthy church. If you have not ran by these then do a google search for 9 Marks Ministry and go through each of the 9 Marks to see how your church stacks up. These are not necessary controversial marks but they are marks that all to often are assumed but never explained. This results in a distorted view of meaning on each mark. The reason I am doing this is two fold. One reason to serve you in your search for a healthy church. The second reason is all to often I have seen people who have neglected to lead there family to a healthy church either due to a lack of biblical leadership, concern of self, or simply because they do not know what to look for. My prayer is that in each case this will serve you in order to stir up again a desire to lead you and/or your family to a church with a high view of God and His Word or to aid you in what to look for as you discern the difference of a God centered church from a man centered church. Maybe you are in a situation where your parents are going to an unbiblical church. My prayer is that as you go through each mark you will become more aware of your need to pray. Maybe you are a submissive wife who is following a husband who seems to prefer position and or convenience more then family leadership. Well let these things revive a desire to pray for your church and further your commitment to God. Know that He is in control and your gentle loving spirit has an impact. But do not neglect the need for prayer and become desperate in your desire to see your family grow in grace. God will honor those prayers.
So after this introduction our first Mark will be "Expositional Preaching" in which I will be posting later this week. Commit to prayer for your family and your Pastors. Commit to being a part of the solution within your local church. It is easy to sit back and judge and never do the heavy lifting. Start to show a pattern of self denial to your local church and service. Begin to love the church and teach your children to do the same.
1 Corinthians 12:18-21
God has arranged the parts in the body,
every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.
If they were all one part, where would the body be?
The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you!"
And the head cannot say to the feet, "I dont need
you!"
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