Holy Expectation
Recently LEADERSHIP launched an online sermon resource, www.PreachingToday.com, which offers a searchable database of illustrations and a monthly online journal. Here’s a sampling of some recent elements in the journal.
If I had to make my living with my hands, I would probably starve to death. Living in the tenements of New York City, my family depended on the superintendent to make repairs when things in our apartment broke. So I never learned to fix things myself. A few years ago a neighbor, noting my ineptness, asked my wife, “Bonnie, how do you live with a guy like that?”
She replied, “Very, very carefully.”
Because I don’t believe I can fix things, I usually don’t even try. When I do try, I tend to give up whenever I hit a snag. That’s normally right after I pick up a tool. I live with low expectations, and Bonnie and I pay a price for it—to plumbers, mechanics, and handymen.
One day—surprise— we discover God was at work beyond our most expansive imaginations
—Haddon Robinson
Recently, I purchased some software for my computer and tried to install it myself. I followed the directions closely, step by step, and I was stunned when it worked! I was surprised by my surprise. But that is the result of living with shriveled expectations.
Our ministries are stunted when we live with diminished expectations. In fact, our surprise when God works is a dead giveaway of our condition.
We preach the Word of God and then are startled when a woman in our congregation hears the gospel and finds that it is, indeed, the best news ever.
We register shock on our personal Richter scale when a young man who was a victim of abuse hears what Jesus says about forgiveness and decides to confront his older brother who had molested him and get things settled.
We can hardly believe it when a husband involved in an affair sits at communion and, faced with taking the bread and cup, decides to end the illicit relationship.
We’re handling dynamite, and we didn’t expect it to explode.
When we lose the sense of holy expectation, our preaching gets downgraded to a performance in which we are required to say something religious to pass the time between 11:25 and noon on Sunday morning. We make the calls, attend the meetings, conduct the funerals, officiate at weddings, but we don’t expect that God will show up. We pray for the sick, but we don’t believe our prayers will make much difference. We counsel the bewildered, but we don’t count much on the difference God can make.
Haddon Robinson, professor of preaching at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts, is senior editor of PreachingToday.com.
How Urgency Seeps Away
One of the ways carnality plays itself out in my preaching is my automatic focus on “How am I doing? Is this connecting? Are people being attentive? Do they think it’s going well?”
One area I want to grow is to be able to let go of that. I want my goal to be simply to help people take their next step toward God.
When I can do that, on the one hand it relieves a lot of personal anxiety because it’s no longer my well-being or sense of value that’s on the line. On the other hand, it makes preaching much more important because if preaching is just about trying to convince people they should like me, that’s a trivial task. But if it is about proclaiming the Word of God and allowing the Spirit to form Christ in people’s hearts, then it is an authentically urgent task.
Remove the dividers When preaching is at its best, it is not a series of compartmentalized statements: a didactic proposition, an example, a joke to relieve tension, application.
That approach to preaching often feels canned and artificial to folks. When preaching is done at its best, it all melds together, and the heart is deeply stirred. Often there’s a sense of fierce joy and deep challenge that are combined. When that happens, that’s preaching.
—John Ortberg, from “True Urgency,” Preaching Today Audio #196. He is teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, and a contributing editor to Preaching Today Audio.
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