One of the greatest challenges in weekly preaching is remembering that you must meet your audience where they are and help them in their daily walk with Christ. The typical Reformed pastor spends a lot of time with books, reading old volumes of theology and sermons written by men who have been dead for many years, sometimes centuries. He may also spend time online or actively corresponding with other men about current theological controversies and the latest issue which has been designated the true test of orthodoxy. But when it comes time to write his weekly sermon(s), if he is a good pastor, he must remember that he was sent by Christ to shepherd a particular flock of sheep. He is not pastoring an audience on YouTube. He is not enlightening the broader presbytery by the brilliance of his exposition or saving his denomination by the power of his elocution. He is a shepherd sent to lead, feed, water, and protect particular sheep, and most of those sheep have very different priorities than their theologically attuned pastor.
Reformed churches are, rightly, critical of evangelicalish churches where the sermon is always something like Seven Ways to Have a Better Marriage or What Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Can Teach Us About Loving Jesus. Such preaching neither edifies saints nor points the unbeliever to Jesus Christ. But Reformed churches can easily make an equal, if seemingly opposite, error by concentrating on theological minutiae or the kinds of issues that, while important, do not truly serve the needs of the sheep struggling to follow Christ in the world today. This is how we get multi-year sermon series on “the error of the Federal Vision” or multiple lessons on “the implications of the 16th century Council of Trent for assessing the Church in Rome.” Some Reformed churches are so intent on preaching justification, and so averse to anything that seems like moralizing, that they cannot bring themselves to preach the third use of the Law. I have visited churches where the preaching was solid and Christ-centered and utterly devoid of any practical application.
There is a balance. The sheep need to be warned of errors and taught how to think biblically and christianly. The saints may not always recognize why a certain issue is important or how a particular topic may be valuable to them. Faithful preaching involves laying one brick at a time, week by week, year after year, hoping and praying that the Lord will use it to build his Temple and that it will not look like the tower in a game of Jenga on round twelve.
Biblical preaching is practical, and practical preaching in Christ’s churches should always be first and foremost biblical. That is why the Reformed churches’ commitment to systematic exposition of Bible books, as a general model, is so helpful and markedly superior to the preaching in many other traditions. If the pastor is faithfully preaching his way through Bible books, the Holy Spirit will get the nutrients to the sheep that they need, whether the pastor realizes what they are or not.
Good preaching is not just teaching what to do this week or how to think about a single issue. It is forming us in the likeness of Christ. It is a means of grace used by the Spirit to chip away the remaining sinfulness and carve us more and more in the form of Jesus. It is training discernment, teaching us not only how to view one thing but learning how to look at everything through the lens of creation and covenant, Scripture and the life of our Savior, cross and future crown. Faithful preaching is an exercise in forming the christian mind, bit by bit, step by step, from the youngest child in the congregation to the oldest saint waiting on the doorstep of eternity to see Christ for the first time. --JME
