Last week David Jackman, who for more than a decade led hundreds of students through the preaching program at Cornhill Training College in London, gave a series of lectures on preaching at Moore College.
Every sentence was pure gold, and the talks may well appear on Sydney Anglicans in due course, but I've selected a few gems that are worth thinking through.
1. We want God's voice heard through the voice of the preacher.
Preaching that entertains and says good and true things is not good enough. Our hearers need to come away from a sermon thinking "I heard God speak this day". David Jackman rightly says the easiest and safest way to do this is by expository preaching: exposing the mind of God in a passage, as it is located in it's setting, book and in the story of the Bible.
2. Preaching is not lecturing, but dialogical.
In preaching we must put ourselves in the shoes of our hearers and ask "what would say now in response to this?" Our sermons must respond as if we are dialoguing with our hearers. We dialogue in order to undermine the false ground on which our listeners stand, to reason the truth of the gospel as they hear the voice of God, and persuade them to respond appropriately to God's voice.
I think these comments are brilliant, but we must work hard on determining exactly what our hearers may be asking. David Jackman says this skill takes years and it is the making of the preacher. Tim Keller says preaching in the early days of a preacher is "boney" in that it doesn't have much flesh on it for precisely this reason.
3. Because culture is opposed to God we preach not felt needs but unfelt and unrecognised needs.
The assumption is that left to our own devices we will seek answers to questions that are unimportant and seek solutions in the wrong place. Unaided by God, never will we ask the right questions or look in the correct places.
Much preaching methodology these days stipulates that we start where the listener is itching, with their felt needs. This assumes and reinforces that the listener's demands must be met. It also assumes that hearing the voice of God is a human transaction, rather than one performed by the Spirit of God. Jackman captures this error beautifully and brings many threads together in his rhetorical statement to his listeners: "rather than asking if there is any way you could accept God, you should be asking 'is there any way that God should accept you?'"
