Preaching For Life Change: It’s All In Learning To Preach Like Jesus
This is the source of all the problems in our society. People don’t value truth. Today people value tolerance more than truth. People complain about crime, drug abuse, the breakup of the family, and other problems of our culture, but they don’t realize the cause of it all is their rejection of truth.
Moral relativism is the root of what is wrong in our society. But it is a big mistake for us to think that unbelievers will race to church if we just proclaim, “We have the truth!”
Their reaction will more likely be, “Yeah, so does everybody else!” Proclaimers of truth don’t get much attention in a society that devalues truth. To overcome this, some preachers try to “Yell it like it is.” But preaching louder isn’t the solution to this apathy. It starts by being “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”
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While most unbelievers aren’t looking for truth, they are looking for relief. This gives us the opportunity to interest them in truth. I’ve found that when I teach the truth that relieves their pain or solves their problem, unbelievers say, “Thanks! What else is true in that book?” Sharing biblical principles that meet a need creates a hunger for more truth.
Jesus understood this. Very few of the people who came to Jesus were looking for truth. They were looking for relief. So Jesus would meet their felt needs, whether leprosy, blindness, or a bent back. After their felt needs were met they were always anxious to know the truth about this man. He had helped them with a problem they couldn’t solve.
Ephesians 4:29 says, “ . . . [speak] only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” Notice that who we are speaking to is to determine what we are to say. The needs of those listening decide the content of our message. We are to speak only what benefits those we are speaking to. If this is God’s will for our conversations, it must also be God’s will for our sermons. Unfortunately, it seems that many pastors determine the content of their messages by what they feel they need to say rather than what the people need to hear.
One reason sermon study is so difficult for many pastors is because they ask the wrong question. Instead of asking “What shall I preach on this Sunday?” they should instead ask, “To whom will I be preaching?” Simply thinking through the needs of the audience will help determine God’s will for the message.
Since God, in His foreknowledge, already knows who will be attending your services next Sunday, why would He give you a message totally irrelevant to the needs of those He is intending to bring? Why would He have me preach on something unhelpful to those He’s planned to hear it? I believe that people’s immediate needs are a key to where God would have me begin speaking at that particular occasion.