TEACHING AND PREACHING: WHERE WE GET THE CONTENT

As we begin to fill the role of verbal communication, I imagine many sense the same call as I....do your best to fill up the time.  Yes, we have adequate instruction in homiletics, hermeneutics, and volleyball.  Still, our main fear is we won't have enough stuff to fill up the time.

This battle for something to say creates bad habits because our most urgent mission is to hunt, as in Easter eggs, those quotes and ideas which will....fill up the time.  Due to such a self-salvaging process we forget a couple of significant items; God and the hearers.  Both desire to participate. 

Unintentionally the preaching/teaching process can drift from people hearing from God to all about us and our classy delivery.  Thus, the people and God suffer....and so do we.  In this age of elaborate media tools at our disposal, the threat is even greater.  God may be left out and the hearers dulled by endless chatter which basically says nothing other than we have given it our best shot to fill up the time.  Still?

So what do we do about it?  First, we simply realize this is going on.  I fervently struggled with this for my first couple of decades of preaching.  That's a long time to grapple; a very frustrating time.  Maybe now I can share a slight crack of hope upon our dilemma; the church's dilemma whenever this scenario would be a part of the teaching scene.

This isn't about how many notes we use.  It is about how much we listen for God in our preparation.  Our busyness and scramble for the Saturday night deadline can exempt God from participation.  We want to know root words, Hebrew and Greek identities, and check out what Barclay and Rick Warren have said.

An important question is, What is God saying now?  I can't wait for tomorrow's sermon.  Study?  Yes, every day I study.  I read God and I read authors.  I love it.  A difference now is I wait on God to participate in my preparation.  I listen for His input. 

This morning I was pondering Jesus' temptation to turn the stones into bread.  It occurred to me (that's all I know to describe God talking to me....He gives me His ideas for I don't possess them) that Jesus refused to turn stones into bread and yet as 5000 sat in need of food he turned bread into bread.  He turned a little bit into a lot (of which second graders know).  Yet, how it fits the sermon excites me.  My contagion will build contagion because God mixes in with the teacher/preacher as well as the hearers. 

From our presentations more than English words are heard.  Do you get that?  We hear heaven coming to earth and landing in the caverns of our very own eardrums.  Enormous and abundant translation takes place from the time our ears move the product of God's system from our ears to our lips.  By the time that split-second Word reaches a new set of eardrums (by our preaching and teaching) which causes ignition of their lips....the word multiplies.  Yet another set of ears hear the perpetuated and vibrant message which began by us listening for God.

And the Word of God kept on spreading; and the number of disciples continued to increase greatly in Jerusalem.  The Word continues to spread as we intentionally leave room for God to participate in all of our learning procedures.

Where do we get the content for our classes and our sermons?  From the Living Word and from the Living God as both interact with all of our other preparatory processes.  Don't block Him out.  He causes the messages to live.