Four Preaching Mistakes You Don't Know You are Making, part 3 & 4

As I finish up this post I am going to combine the last two mistakes, simply to save your and mine sanity. 

Mistake #3:  Group Therapy preaching

This type of preaching hones in on some emotional or psychological need that the preacher thinks the people need salvation from. 

I have listened to a lot of bad sermons via Christian apologists and many pastors think that what their people are missing out on is lost dreams. Somewhere you and I got off track from Gods plan and we have forgotten that God has a really big dream for us to accomplish. You could probably switch the word "dream" for "vision" too. 

Bad theology will couch this in "little faith."  We just need more faith and know that God has good plans for us. 

Maybe your dream/vision was to be happy in your marriage, the owner of a successful lama farm, or be a visionary church planter. Whatever it was you have got to repent of your lack of dream/vision planning and get back into the game.  God does not want any losers in His kingdom. 

I say this all tongue-and-cheek, but many preachers are nothing more than Oprah and Dr Phil wanna-be's.  These are just band-aids. Preachers give all kind of successful stories of people they found on the Internet or relate stories from their own life that sound really magnanimous. Unfortunately, what people need is to see Jesus Christ crucified for their sins and risen again conquering death, sin, and Hell. 

Pastor, are you telling people the bad news of their sin and the good news of Jesus or are you simply propping up corpses?  

This leads to...

Mistake #4:  Preaching Law

Pastors do this when they either take Old Testament laws and impose them on the church or they take New Testament commands and place them on par with truly being able to please God. "You want to please God?  Than you need to do ABC and XYZ!"  

They skim over the fact that our true need is cleansing from sin and restoration with a holy and angry God. Preachers love to make tithing an absolute command for pleasing God or witnessing or not drinking alcohol. They use a multitude of Bible passages to back up their claim, and make us feel absolutely guilty if we do or do not do certain activities. We should tithe - because we love Jesus. We should witness - because we love Jesus. We should refrain from drunkenness - because we love Jesus. These do not guarantee Jesus will love us more. It guarantees the proof of our salvation. Jesus has saved from more than we can imagine in our sinfulness and no amount of good works will cause Him to love us more. 

The law is a guide that drives us to Jesus because we can not keep His laws. Only Jesus could and that is why He is our substitute. He kept the law perfectly and not only that He took on Himself the punishment we deserve for not keeping the law. The law then becomes a guide to teach us Gods will and by the power of the Holy Spirit and a lot of grace and mercy we live it out. 

As a preacher do you put more guilt on your people than is necessary?

Are you making mountains out of mole-hills?  

Four Preaching Mistakes You Don't Know You are Making, part 2

In part 2 of "Four Preaching Mistakes You Don't Know You Are Making," I want to share a huge danger in preaching and that is making the Bible passage all about "you."

Preachers are notorius for doing this with narratives such as David and Goliath. The preacher always associates David with who?  YOU!  

Guess what?  You are not King David!  Goliath is not your (fill in the blank).  Goliath is my "bad marriage," "dead-end job," "lack of vision and purpose for my life," or whatever else obstructs your dream fulfillment. 

They preach saying all it takes to conquer your Goliath is faith. Faith in a God bigger than the giants you are facing. Faith to believe God wants you victorious over these giants who slow you down. 

This kind of teaching fosters the false doctrine of, "God wants me to be happy." So I will divorce my wife, leave a job, or make a wreck of my life by putting "me" at the center. 

If faith in Jesus is anything, it is this:  "less of me and more of Jesus." Yet, to often preaching puts man at the center, instead Jesus should be at the center. 

David was Gods chosen vessel for leading His people, the Philistines stood in the way of Gods people.  So,  God used one man, a shadow of the future Messiah, to bring deliverance in a bold and spectacular way. The story is about God rescuing His people, which foreshadows our Savior rescuing His people in another bold and spectacular way.  You are in the story but the story is not about you!  

Preacher, handle the Word of God carefully!  If you start every sermon with "you" you are doing a dis-service to Gods people and you are spoiling Gods Word of its Gospel power. 

Four Preaching Mistakes You Don't Know Your Making

I want to bring to your attention four mistakes in preaching you don't even know your making. As a seasoned preacher I have learned through listening to bad and good sermons what real preaching must be. These four mistakes have been made by all of us and if I can help you not to make these same mistakes than I have accomplished my work. So lets dive into the first mistake:

Preaching is not teaching! 

How dare I make this conjecture. 

I will acknowledge your protestations and show you what I mean. 

"Preaching must be about teaching." I will partially grant you this, there will be things taught and explained in a sermon. But a sermon is not about simply imparting knowledge.  

"When we preach we are opening the scriptures in order to tell people about the Lord."  But, this is not the sole purpose, to simply explain who God is.  If I were to simply explain what a smart phone is, this would be of no concern to someone who sees no need for such a device. 

"The Old Testament is explained in the New and the New Testament is hidden in the Old, so a preacher must teach all the scriptures." This also is true and a sensible preacher would have to interpret the context of his passage for those who may not know Old from New. 

If preaching is not teaching than what is it?  

Preaching is always and solely a call for sinners to come stand under the cleansing shower of Jesus' blood!  A summons to come to the Kings house.  A persuading plea for people, who have offended God, to find restitution through the sacrifice of Jesus. 

Can you imagine a preacher giving a thirty minute lecture on the facts of Hell and not giving a summon to repent and turn to Jesus?  It has happened before and I am sure it will happen again. 

If you have read this article I pray you will not fall victim to giving lectures from the pulpit on a Sunday without a plea for sinners to repent and come by faith to Jesus. Otherwise you have simple given a "talk."  

True Preaching Part 1: "The Shepherds Stewardship"

I just finished a book about preaching. It was fabulous! It answered the question: "Why preaching expositorally?" Expository preaching is line upon line preaching all the way through a book of the Bible. I am convinced this is the only reliable and God-honoring form of preaching. In the next couple of blogs I want to report some of what I learned. This helps me to process and gives you a reference for true preaching.

By the way, GET THIS BOOK FOR YOUR PASTOR!

The first thing I want to delve into is the responsibility preachers have. They are to be men who illuminate the Scriptures. There is NO new revelations being given by the Spirit of God. Ephesians 4:11 tells us that God gave prophets and apostles and evangelists, and pastor / teachers for the equipping of the saints. There has been a progression of bibilical revelation. That progress began with prophets - Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, and even John the Bapitst. These were men who recieved direct communitcation from the Spirit of God to them. We know that Moses was a man who spent time with the Lord face to face. There were prophets in the early days of the church, we read of them in Acts.

Then came apostles, the twelve who spent three years living with Jesus. Listening, watching, and ingesting all that our Lord did. These men, along with the prophets, ushered in the church-age. Paul, Peter, John, and James began writing as the Spirit prompted them, letters to believers. The prophets began to slide out. By the time the apostles were all dead the church still had many copies of these letters and thus began the creation of the churches holy sciptures.

Now, today, men of God, take that written, God-inspired word and illuminate it. This is the chief operation of any preacher, pastor, evangelist, and teacher, to rightly divide the Word of God. Preachers must take a text and dive deep into its meaning. We have 2000 - 4000 years of history to fill in. This is an ancient book, and Pastors are to be the resident experts of its content. The preacher is to take this book and make it understandable to modern worhippers. A Pastor is a good reporter, he understands his topic and brings it to the attention of the people.

DANGER! False preaching adds extra-biblical information as authoritative and then we have reduced God's word. Any therapist can evaluate marriages and then come up with principles to show how to have a good marriage. This is truth that God ordained, but it is not essential truth for the church. The Word of God reveals to us God's standard. It gives us enough information that sets the bar for us. The problem with modern day preaching is that preachers think all people want is "how-to" sermons. Preachers don't believe that preaching on the glory of God in marriage is enough. They presumptiously beleive, "Believers, already know that. They want to know how good marriages work." A faithful expository Pastor will mine the depths of God's word and reveal to hungry believers the needed nuggets to strengthen marriages. Yes, other books are helpful, but God's word gets to the core of the issue, ALWAYS. The root of knowledge is what believers need. The Bible provides it, and the faithful Pastor will reveal it.

"How-to" sermons are nothing more than candy bars. But, expository sermons are a Thanksgiving dinner. If your Pastor is using all kinds of stories, and videos, and dramas then he might be attempting to water down the truth. He wrongly thinks that people don't want deep doctrine, they just want the "rubber meets the road" stuff. If your Pastor uses his pulpit to talk about anything other than the Word of God, like politics and entertainment, then he is prostituting the preaching of God's Word and feeding you candy bars. The Man of God is to take the Bible, lay it open on that pulpit and begin to illuminate what is inside. Believers think they know all there is to know. Sorry, but that is wrong. You and I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of all the gold and jewels that await us in the Bible.

I pray you will come back for more.