Through his books and Insight for Living radio broadcast, Charles Swindoll has become one of America’s best-known preachers. For many years Swindoll was pastor of First Evangelical; Free Church in Fullerton, CA, then became President of Dallas Theological Seminary. Now chancellor of DTS, he serves as founding pastor of Stonebria r Community Church in Frisco, Texas. Preaching editor Michael Duduit recently interviewed him by phone.
Preaching: Your most recent book is Fascinating Stories of Forgotten Lives (W Publishing Group), part of your series of books on biblical characters. I know that much of the content of these books is drawn from your sermon series on biblical characters. You are well-known for doing biographical preaching.
Swindoll: Yeah, I love it.
Preaching: What drew you — and what continues to draw you — toward biographical preaching?
Swindoll: I think there’s nothing like a biography to incarnate the truth. You can talk about faith until you are blue in the face, but when you put Abraham with a knife in his hands standing over Isaac, until you go there, you’ve missed the application of how that occurs. You can talk about courage and spell it out, but when you wrap it around a life like Paul who demonstrated it when he got to Pamphilia, and probably at that time got malaria, continued on and went through the stoning of his experience in Derby and Lystra and all of that, you see courage in action. There’s something about putting it into a life that translates theory into reality.
Preaching: As you do biographical preaching, what are some of the strengths you see in communicating biblical truth in that way?
Swindoll: I think the preacher is always looking for ways to help people realize how relevant the scriptures are. I would like to underscore how I said that, lest you think I’m saying it’s our job to make the bible relevant. It is relevant. The preacher’s task is to help people who are either reading what he’s saying, or writing, or hearing what he’s saying to understand how in touch this book really is with life. So I think it helps underscore the relevance of scripture.
Second, I believe it breaks life down into believable chunks. People in the Bible go through experiences. They go through, amazingly, some of the very same things we go through today. Change the names, change the places, change the date, and you’ve got something that’s happening last night or today or tomorrow. When that happens I believe it is so much less complicated to then turn to an application because the people have seen themselves on the page. Something wonderful happens when that occurs. I’m not listening to something that is dated back to the first century or even a thousand years before the first century, I’m listening to how my life is today — it just happens to be in another setting.