Bible

In my last blog, I explained the three approaches of communicating the Bible that Andy Stanley outlines in his book, Communicating for a Change. Instead of teaching the Bible to people or teaching people the Bible, Stanley is an advocate of teaching people how to live a life that reflects the values, principles, and truths of the Bible.

This objective will change how you develop your message because your goal is no longer transferring information but helping people reach a destination (Stanley compares a speaker and their audience with a truck driver taking passengers on a ride). The journey is valuable, but its main purpose to guide listeners to the final destination that a speaker has in mind. The fastest (and often easiest) way to get from one point to another is a straight line. So instead of crafting multiple points and driving people through a series of S-curves, Stanley urges speakers to pick one point and stick with it.

All of us have sat and listened to speakers who crammed too many messages into a single talk. It’s hard to follow in the moment and it’s nearly impossible to remember days later. But what’s worse is that messages like these rarely change our lives.

The messages that have stuck with me the longest are ones that were simple and action-oriented. The point was clear and the application was specific. If you don’t have a central point that you can repeat multiple times, you won’t have a message that will stick with your listeners. Your point doesn’t need to rhyme, but it should be short and memorable. Here are some examples that I've used in past sermons:

• A hardened heart is slow to listen.
• Giants aren’t always what they seem.
• What God has joined together should stay together.
• No excuse is a valid excuse for disobeying. 

It takes me a while to craft a finely-tuned point, but this short phrase is what ultimately defines my roadmap. I typically don’t establish my point until I’m at least halfway through my preparation. This means that I already have several pages of scripted content and ideas that I’m sifting through. My point helps me determine what to keep and what to delete. It can be frustrating to cut good content that I’ve already spent hours developing, but in the end, I believe this makes my message stronger.

The ability to access information has never been so easy. Most of us have the ability to find facts, opinions, and theories about virtually any topic within minutes, if not seconds. And yet, most churches schedule their times of worship around a centralized teaching time—a moment when a speaker delivers a message from God’s Word.

With so much emphasis placed on the teaching time, it’s imperative that teachers understand their primary objective and that it fits the expectations of the teaching time. When you’re given the opportunity to teach, do you think about your communication goal? What would you like to see happen in the lives of the people who are listening?

Some communicators feel that their primary objective is to teach the Bible to people. If you’ve told yourself that you want to help people gain a better understanding of the Bible, there’s a good chance you’ve made this objective your goal. Practically speaking, most of your preparation time is spent studying the text so that you can explain each verse to the people you’ll be speaking to. You measure success on whether or not you've covered the material.

Other teachers place a greater emphasis on the audience: they want to teach people the Bible. This approach requires creativity because your job is to ensure that people understand the content and will be able to remember it. If you invest time into developing alliterations and illustrations, you likely subscribe to this teaching goal.

In Andy Stanley’s book called Communicating for a Change^* (a book that radically shaped my approach to preaching), he argues that the first two methods are concerned with information transfer. The goal of each method is to help people understand and remember the teachings of the Bible. The challenge with this goal is that Bible knowledge is not the same as spiritual maturity. Your faithful treatment of the text and creative delivery style might help people recall what’s in the Bible, but if it doesn’t change their heart, what difference does it make? 

Stanley’s approach is to teach people how to live a life that reflects the values, principles, and truths of the Bible. In other words, his goal is for people to make a change in their lives instead of just thinking about something. Covering every part of the text is not most important. The most important part for him is focusing his entire message on a single point that has an immediate and measurable application.

I’m memorizing the “armour of God” passage that’s found in Ephesians 6:10-18. I chose this section because I’m convinced that temptation is a lifelong struggle. I’ve been able to develop some degree of willpower over the years, but without the power of Christ, I’m still a slave to sin. I need more than personal effort to keep myself from falling. 

As I’ve studied the words in the first few verses and repeated them over and over again, I’ve noticed things that I never before saw in this passage. For instance, the word “stand/withstand” appears in verse 11 and then is quickly used three more times in verses 13 and 14. The image that now comes to my mind is not that of an attacking warrior, but of a soldier who is standing in the confidence of knowing that his armour is outfitted with God’s power and presence. The enemy cannot prevail so long as he stays alert and uses his weapons accordingly.  

But in order for this to happen, the soldier must do something that I never before realized. He must “do everything” (NIV). Standing firm will be the result of “having done all” (ESV).

What then is the “thing” that needs to be done? This is the question I’ve been asking myself as I keep repeating this verse and committing it to memory. And it has led me to study this passage so that I will gain a better understanding for how I can keep standing when the evil one attacks.

This experience has made me grateful for the various ways that I can read and interact with God’s Word and it makes me think about how each practice relates to another.