You have to love Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages (Baker, 1980) by my former professor Haddon Robinson. How could we then imagine the thousands of sermons that would flow from our introductory preaching classes with Haddon and Dr. Scott Gibson? Those were the days...or rather, these are still the days! Preaching, with Biblical Theology, is a never-ending life-consuming pursuit. Today I'm reminded of why the basics are called the basics:
"Explanation proves difficult if the expositor does not know his audience. The more familiar he is with a subject, the less aware he may be of a congregation's ignorance of it. The people in the pew live in a different intellectual world from their pastor. Indeed they support him financially so that he can study what they cannot. He must not assume that his listeners immediately understand what he is talking about. He owes them a clear explanation of exactly what he means. As a guiding rule, a speaker should define every important term in language the audience understands. Certainly it is better to define too many terms than too few. Explaining the relationships and implications of ideas, we should know the explanation ourselves so clearly that no vagueness exists in our own minds. Then we should work through the steps in the explanation so that they come in a logical or psychological order. A mist in the pulpit becomes a fog in the pew." (p. 141)There should be no pride in preaching, but a sober and humble effort to both speak from the heart of God and speak to the hearts of people. Here's to continually clearing out the mist!
