Stetzer: You know, gosh, research, writing and work—let me share personally first and then I’ll get to that. I think ultimately, Mike, most pastors like me need to first and foremost recognize that there are certain key relationships that matter. Your preaching—some of the best preachers I know have flamed out. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. You know, we’ve got to begin with that right relationship with the Lord. I think we’ve really got to—you know, we love the pulpit. I get that. I love the pulpit. But ultimately we don’t have anything to bring to the pulpit unless we’ve heard from God through Scripture and through prayer.
And then secondly the family issue—I think ultimately—again this is
Preaching magazine. Why are we talking about family issues? Because it matters deeply. You know, one day every pastor who is listening to this tape is going to leave the church that they’re pastoring. Every single one of us. There’s only one group of people that’s going to go with them, and that’s the family. And they’re going to go to a new place. I think ultimately that you’ve got to spend time with the Lord, spend time with the family, have right relationships there. Then out of those right relationships overflows that preaching. It’s shaped by who God is and filtered by some degree by who we are. And so ultimately we want to communicate from a position of right relationship with God and others. And then—kind of step into that context—as far as the reality I think it’s important for us to recognize that we’ve got to culturally begin to see that preaching the way that we like is not as valuable as preaching biblically shaped messages in a way that people can understand them. I think a lot of folks choose their preaching based upon what they think is best rather than engaging and asking the question, “How can I best communicate the unchanging word of God in this changing cultural context?” And I think ultimately we’ve got to see—again back to what we said earlier—biblically faithful and culturally relevant ought to be our communication style. You know, let’s say for example that our goal is to help people remember. Well, a lot of people are beginning to realize that getting up and doing a monologue might not help people to remember the teachings of Scripture most effectively.
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I was recently in San Antonio, and I attended a church that one of my students was pastoring. It’s a great church. He was preaching through an Acts passage where Paul and his companions ended up having this call from Macedonia, and God was closing doors, that they’d tried to go to Phrygia—I can’t remember the context there—but Mysia and Troas. And God kept closing doors. And I still remember—great passage—I’ve preached that passage myself. But on the stage he had three doors. And God kept closing one door. He was working his way in a biblically faithful way through a text and showing door closing, door closing, door closing and how God opens doors and how He closes others. What a great pneumonic device. I think we’ve got to recognize that we need to not think—see—we say—this will probably get me in trouble, but I’m just going to lay it out there, Michael. It’s too late now. We like to say the word of God has all the power, but what we really mean is—my communication of the word of God has all the power. The word of God has all the power. You don’t. Most pastors think that if they just get up there and use their voice and bring that confidence that hundreds will come and thousands will be saved. Well, at the end of the day it’s the word, and what we need to ask, “How can I best communicate the word so that people will hear, people will understand and lives will be changed by the power of the gospel?” That’s biblical preaching.
