During my first pastorate in northeastern Minnesota, I befriended an older parishioner, Howard Ballou, a dairy farmer with huge hands and soft eyes. Throughout his long life (91 years), Howard suffered many losses: the death of his 10-year-old son, the sale of the family-run dairy farm (and his precious Guernsey cows), and the death of his wife and lifelong sweetheart, Chloe. Toward the end of his life, after the reconstruction of both knees, Howard struggled and ached. The once strong dairyman who worked 14-hour days now clung to his aluminum walker with each painful step. At times, his body and his spirit shook with sadness.
But until his last breath, one thing Howard never lost: his almost childlike sense of wonder.
When I visited Howard six months before his death, he had a Bible (open to Leviticus 13) and a TV Guide perched on his lap.
“Howard,” I asked, “what are you doing with Leviticus and TV Guide?” Howard chuckled and said, “God is so amazing. I’m reading my Bible from cover to cover, and I’m watching all the nature shows I can. I still have so much to learn.”
At the age of 91, Howard lived before God with unquenchable wonder.
As preachers it’s sometimes easy to lose our wonder for God’s Word. After a while we can approach the Bible like a guy I knew who was planning another sailing trip around the Caribbean. He nonchalantly told me, “Yeah, next week I’ll be sailing the Caribbean again—for the fifth time. Sure, it’s beautiful—crystal clear ocean, blue skies, hot sun, white sandy beaches, warm wind in your face—but how many times can you see the same stuff? I mean, it’s nice, but it just gets a little wearisome. It’s such a burden sometimes.”
I wanted to grab the guy and say, Are you nuts? Dude, how about if I take your place? Why don’t you just lay your “burden” down and I’ll carry it for you?
Sadly, sometimes we approach Bible texts like this dullard. Been there, done that. Yeah, I’ve read Exodus before. Sure (yawn), I preached the Resurrection last year. Well, I guess I have to do Romans again.
How much better to talk about God’s Word in a way that’s fresh and alive. Then we can also ask the Holy Spirit to enable our people to hear God’s Word with amazement—even if they’ve heard this text a dozen times before. How do we do that? How do we live before God and then preach as one fully alive?
Learn from Wonder-Filled People
I love to study writers who, like Howard Ballou, live with a spirit of freshness and joy. These authors heal my wonder-deficiency so I can see a biblical text with fresh eyes. The 20th-century Jewish writer Abraham Joshua Heschel helped me recover a sense of reverence for God. He used a simple phrase that captures our response to the mystery of God—he called it “radical astonishment.” For Heschel, “The beginning of happiness lies in understanding that a life without wonder is not worth living.” I want to recapture that spirit every time I open the Bible to preach.
I’ve also learned from Lewis Thomas, a scientist and physician who argued that “the more we learn, the more we are—or ought to be—dumbfounded.” In his essay “On Bewilderment,” after describing how the first brain cell appears in the human body, Thomas effuses, “All the information needed for learning to read and write, playing the piano, or the marvelous act of putting out one hand and leaning against a tree, is contained in that first cell.”
No one knows why an ordinary human cell turns into a brain cell. It just does. Thomas concludes his essay on a note of praise: “If anyone succeeds in explaining it within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write out one great exclamation point after another, until my money runs out.”
That challenges me as I prepare to preach. I want to approach the Bible with a similar sense of awe. God does indeed have something amazing to say to his people this week through this text.
Dig for the Awesome
Finding the awesome doesn’t just happen. I usually have to work at finding the wonder in each text.
Let’s say I’m preaching on a familiar passage (like the Lord’s Prayer or Psalm 23 or John 3:16) or a difficult passage (like Judges 3 where Ehud assassinates Eglon). Part of my job is to keep reading the text, meditating on it, savoring it, until I’m able to draw nourishment from its richness. That richness is there.
God’s Word is more to be desired than gold, and sweeter than the honeycomb (Psalm 19:10). If it looks bland or even bitter, that may have to do with the condition of my heart—or it’s just a hard passage to preach.
Or perhaps the Word of God looks blasé because I haven’t dug into its depths. My role as a preacher is to keep digging, keep praying, keep looking at the Scripture until the honey starts oozing out.
I love the attitude of G.K. Chesterton, who once claimed that the entire spiritual life hinges on this choice to see God’s wonders. In his autobiography, Chesterton writes that on his journey to Christ, he found “a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence.” It became clear to him that the entire goal of the “artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder.”
This is one of the glad duties of the preacher: to keep digging into a text—prayerfully, attentively, expectantly—until I strike the submerged sunrise of wonder.
Regain the Childlike
But this won’t come to just anyone. There’s a certain inner disposition that allows us to keep digging and then to keep finding the beauty of God’s Word. Jesus put it this way: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:4).
In terms of our salvation, that means that we can’t buy or earn our way to God; we have to accept it as a free gift. But this childlike attitude needs to continue throughout our entire life with Jesus.
We’re always in danger of missing the wonder of God’s Word whenever we assume that as a grown-up, we completely understand it all. I’ve got this down, we boast. I’ve read this 20 times. I’ve preached on this three times. I know what this text means. But every time I approach a Bible text, the Holy Spirit is working in my life in a different place. My congregation is in a different place. In a different season. The basic meaning of the text might be the same, but I can always see things from an angle that I never noticed before.
I want to come to the text with the humility of a beginner rather than the pomposity of a know-it-all. I want to come with openness and expectancy, as if I’m reading this text for the first time. That’s the key to finding the element of surprise in every Bible passage.
We’re in danger of missing the wonder of god’s word whenever we assume we completely understand it all.
For example, I’ve been thinking about “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3) for over 25 years. But recently, after I went through a profound encounter with my own spiritual poverty, I now see that verse from a different vantage point. The meaning of the text remains the same, but my grasp of that meaning is deeper, richer, and tinged with more pain and joy.
In a similar way, when I was younger, I preached on suffering, but my sermons were more abstract and theoretical. Then, after walking through a season of suffering, people commented that my sermons on suffering suddenly came alive. Sometimes when people ask, “How long did it take to prepare that sermon?” I want to say, “Oh, about 20 years.”
Ask God to Make Dry Bones Live
Of course, this isn’t something that we can do just by trying. We don’t pump ourselves up so we sound excited about this particular passage. I usually begin every week with a text that, in all honesty, looks like Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones. Every time I approach such a text, the Lord asks me, “Can these dry bones live?” and I respond, “Only you know, Lord” (which usually means, “You’ve got to be kidding, Lord”).
In other words, every week I look at the text and pray: “Lord, if you don’t do a miracle with these dry bones, this sermon will just stay dry and dead.” Dead bones can never produce life. Only God can give life.
So sermons never start with my inspiration or my excitement or my ability to say something fresh or interesting. No, it’s about God’s ability to do a miracle and bring life to this sermon, transforming my words into the words of God for those who hear. Ultimately, that’s my only hope as a preacher.
In one sense God wants to open our hearts to the wonder of the entire gospel, not just one biblical text or theme. For instance, just to know that God would come and die for us even while we were still sinners—that’s utterly outlandish and incomprehensible. It’s such lavish love. We didn’t deserve it, and there’s no way we could have seen it coming.
But God did it for us. How should we respond to that? By letting “radical astonishment” wash all over our souls. Should we rent a fleet of skywriting airplanes and write “God loves you” until our money runs out? I suppose that’s one way to respond. But here’s our amazing privilege: as preachers, each week we get to do something better than rent skywriting airplanes. We get to dig for the sub-merged sunrise of wonder in God’s Word. We get to taste his Word and see that God is good.
Then we get to stand up and declare the beauty and glory of our God—and we can do it all for free.
Matt Woodley is managing editor of PreachingToday.com.
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
