Speaker: Sam Davison (guest lecturer; not Pastor Ryan Rench). The captions begin partway into the lecture, which is Chapter 5 of Haddon Robinson’s Biblical Preaching, with questions from the students.
Let me talk about what I see as the worth of this book. Now, this is not “Bible on preaching” by any means, but the reason it meant so much to me is twofold. One is that I never heard any of this in Bible college. I had no idea. The man who taught our introduction to homiletics was thrown into the class. He was a World War II vet, one of the finest men I have ever known, Ford Harper, a wonderful, wonderful man, and again a World War II hero, and we loved him. But he never preached a sermon in his life. I think he went to the grave having never preached, but they threw him into the class because the college was growing like wildfire. I think if you had said to Ford Harper, “We need you to teach molecular science, could you do that?” he would have said, “I will try.” But he had no practice in preaching whatsoever, and so we sat there that whole semester and a good part of the next and had no clue what he was saying, and what is more, he did not have any clue what he was saying. So that was kind of bad. Now, I do not want to make it sound like I was this hungry, thirsty student who was deprived of the teaching I should have gotten, because I became a good student only after I got married. I will just be honest with you. My wife made straight A’s and was on the President’s List and everything, and here I was struggling through. I had to go through summer school to get anything written on my diploma and make up some credits, and I was ashamed of that after I realized I had wasted some time.
Dave Hardy and the Text
So I never saw this book until I met Dave Hardy. He asked me, after we got acquainted, and I had already been in ministry seven or eight years, seven years as an associate and one year as a pastor, and he and I met and became friends. Does this group know who Dave Hardy is? It has been a while since he was here, but most would know him: a veteran, a great student, a great mind. He began to talk to me about the preaching he had heard me do at fellowship meetings, and he is a real straightforward guy, a Navy man. He just said to me, “Basically, what you do is take a text and depart far from it.” I did not know exactly what he meant by that, but I did not like the sound of it. He said, “It is not that I disagree with what you preach, but what you are preaching is not necessarily what that text was about at all.” So I began to become aware of that. Plus, I had men in the church I was trying to pastor who were educated men. One was Jerry Bowman, who had a PhD in entomology, that is insects and stuff like that, and he had a specialty. Another was a Navy man they sent to Oklahoma State, and I forget what field he was in, but he got his master’s there. Another man came from New York and was getting his PhD in animal science, aiming to be a vet. All three of these men, never together but at different times, would come up to me and say something to this effect. This is not word for word, but I heard it several times, enough to really disturb me. They would say, “I hear what you are preaching today, and I do not disagree with what you said, but I did not see that in that context.” When I realized they were right, I would try to bluff my way through it. If you look up the Greek, or some such, I do not know what I said; I was trying to make up stuff and act like I knew what I was doing. But each time I felt more and more that I was not properly equipped to do what I was supposed to be doing, and I did not know what to do about it. With these men asking me, never together, never with a bad attitude, always with a right spirit, saying, “I just do not see how you got that out of the text. I agree with what you said, but I did not see it there,” then as I began to study, instead of doing what I usually did, using the Bible to back up some kind of thought I had, I would start looking at a text and think, “Dave is going to ask me,” or “Jerry is going to ask me,” or “Jay is going to ask me. I had better find out what is here.” And amazing to me, and this has probably shocked you guys too, I found better ideas in what the writer was saying than I had to begin with. Shocking, is it not? So I began to do that, and the next thing you know, it became a way of study, before I even knew what expository preaching was. I had no idea what expository preaching was. Then, through the influence of Dave Hardy and our fellowship together, he put me onto this book. I read the book, and he said, “If you are only going to read it once, and you are serious about preaching, then why do you not just throw it away or give it back to me, and I will give it to somebody else?” I told you, he is very direct. He did not even try to be nice. So I said, “Okay.” I read it again, and then I read it again, and then I read it again, and the more I reread it, the more I knew that some of the things he said were probably right, but I did not know how to make sense of them. Then, just by reading and rereading and trying to practice what I was getting, it changed everything. It changed my whole approach to preaching and my desire to be accurate.
Avoiding “Preaching Out Here”
I know it has already been covered, but what we are trying to do is avoid what some call preaching “out here.” Now, I was in a camp meeting in Kentucky, and the man hosting the meeting was named Noah Bron. I do not know if you ever remember him, a wonderful, wonderful man. He was a classmate of mine. I went to Bible college when I was just turning nineteen, and he was a married man with kids, and he was one of the several I really looked up to, because he did not look at us as a bunch of kids, as in, “What are you doing here?” They actually tried to befriend us and help us. So I love Noah Bron. Anyway, he was hosting this meeting and had a very good, fruitful ministry, and there in Kentucky, I cannot remember the name of the town now, you probably have heard of it, they had this camp meeting. Well, he introduced another Kentucky preacher to preach, and this man got up and said, “I want you to open your Bible,” and he is a true Kentucky hillbilly, which they do not take as an insult; they are kind of proud of it, a hillbilly preacher. He got up and said, “I want you to turn to the book of Genesis,” and he turned over there and read the part of the lineage, where it says about Enoch that Enoch lived a certain number of years, and then, in Genesis 5:24: “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.” He was going to preach that day about what it is to walk with God, and the crux of his message was this. He said, “Now, Enoch walked with God. If Enoch walked with God and was not, then what was he not? Well, he was not an adulterer,” and he went through this whole big list of things that he could not be and walk with God. I am sitting there listening, thinking, “Oh, I bet God is surprised at how that is being used and abused,” because he never even mentioned the fact that God took him, that he was not here anymore. It was what he was not, so that he could walk with God. Well, you could probably find through the Scripture that those things cannot be in your life if you are to have a meaningful walk with God, but it was not remotely close to what the Bible was talking about. My friend Noah Bron got up after that and said, “Well, brother, now, we appreciate the desire and heart. Let’s see here. Let’s try to stay as close to the Bible as possible, gentlemen.” So I took that outline back to the homiletics class and I said, “Let me just give you something you might want to preach sometime,” and the guys started writing it down and everything, and about the time I got three or four points down, they said, “Wait a minute, this is not the way we are supposed to go about this.” So that kind of thing is very helpful, because we are supposed to preach the Word, not abuse the Word. There is a lot of abuse that has taken place, and is taking place.
The Ten Stages, and Not Taking Shortcuts
So the worth of this book, I want to say, as you are going through the ten stages in the development of a biblical, expository sermon, I found that those ten stages are worth the price of the book. I might have taught the class three or four or five years before it really got hold of me how valuable it was. I was in one of those times when I was doing a lot of meetings and was president of the college and trying to pastor the church and be a family man and travel and do revivals and all this kind of stuff at once. I was at a particular week where I was in the office on a Friday night, and I had two funerals on Saturday and just a full day, and I knew I was not going to get any study in, so I knew I had to finish my study for Sunday on Friday night. I had taught that morning in the class, I was dog tired, and I was in my office, and I had about six or eight pages of notes for the Sunday night sermon. I had Sunday morning done. I sat there and looked at the Sunday night notes, about 10:30 at night, and I wanted to go home so bad, and I looked at my notes and said, “This is not right. Something is not right here. This is not going anywhere. This is taking me away from where I am supposed to be going.” I just grabbed my sheets of paper in frustration, wadded them all up, and threw them in the trash. It is 10:30 at night, I still have a ways to go, and honestly, I will be honest with you, I sat there and cried. I was so stinking tired, and I was disappointed. This book was lying there on my desk, and I reached over to the corner of the desk and grabbed it, and I just opened it, and it turned to page 65, and that is where you have the first list of all ten stages in the development of an expository sermon. I just went through those ten stages, sitting there looking at them, and I realized that I had done what I have advised guys not to do: do not try to take any shortcuts. What we are trying to do is be as honest as we can with the Word of God and do what 2 Timothy chapter 4 says. “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.” I saw that I had taken a couple of shortcuts because I was pressed for time and weary and everything else. I closed the book and asked the Lord to help me, got home that night, and was ready to preach by Sunday. That reminded me: do not take shortcuts, because the development of a biblical sermon is work. It is work, and there is no way of doing this business, feeding a flock, doing what your pastor does, what I did for thirty-six years as a pastor, feeding the flock and preaching the Word week after week after week, without a lot of hard work. I can remember when I was about fifty years old, about three years before Heartland came, before I started teaching this class, I remember thinking, and how foolish could I be, “By the time I am sixty, sixty-five, I bet I will hardly have to study, because I have read the Bible through and through over and over and prepared all these sermons, and I think I am getting it down now.” And then I found out that the longer I went, the more time I spent. I was spending more time per sermon when I stepped aside from the pastorate in 1990 at sixty-four, almost sixty-five years old, than I had ever spent at any point in the ministry. It is because it is work, and if we are going to put the proper work into it, then we ought to do it right. To me, this book is not the only book, and you have other resources here. There is an author or two that Brother Gattis leans on in teaching, our pastor back home, but for the class I taught and for what has helped me, I am so grateful that Dave Hardy put this book in my hand and that I was able to teach it there at Heartland for those years. I am very, very thankful for that.
The Exegetical Idea: Subject and Complement
So what I thought we would do tonight, if you go to chapter five, I thought I had it marked, so let me see which this is, page 101. Okay, yes, chapter five, is that where you are? Very much so. Because you are not familiar with me nor I with you, I thought I would rehearse where we are by the time we come to this portion, formulating the homiletical idea. We select the passage, obviously. We study the passage, and what are we trying to do? We discover the exegetical idea, or do you use the term CIT? Okay, and that is another thing Dave Hardy did, established the CIT. In my first year I tried to change it, and we about had a rebellion in the school, and Dave Hardy was going to break off our friendship, so I stayed with CIT. Anyway, I think it is very, very appropriate: the central idea of the text. So how do we get to the point, when we are studying the passage, where we are starting to discover the CIT? What process do we go through to do that? Somebody answer: what is the process? In order to discover the exegetical idea, there is a process that is stated in the book, and you have already been through it. When we study the text, we are looking for what? One word? A big idea? No, we are doing what is necessary to get to the main idea. We have already discovered what passage we are going to use, and now we are ready to study the passage for the purpose of finding the central idea of the text. The process would be that we find out the subject. Everybody knew that already, students. Now, what is the subject? The subject answers the question “What is he talking about?” Whether it is a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, whatever it is, everyone has a subject. It is what the writer or speaker is talking about. Then every subject has a complement, and the complement is what he is saying about what he is talking about. So we discover the subject, and then we discover the complement or complements. I find that to be a most worthwhile effort in every passage: just get it clear in your own mind. If you and I are not going to get it clear in our minds, what is the likelihood it is going to be clear to the people we stand before, who have not even looked at the passage before that day, let alone studied it like we have? So in order to do that, we have got to know what the writer is writing about, what the subject of this particular portion of Scripture is, and then the complement is what he is saying about what he is talking about. It does not happen all the time, it does not even happen most of the time, but if you get the subject and the complement right, you are a long way toward getting an accurate outline through the course of the sermon preparation. Do you find that to be true? I certainly do. The complements are not necessarily always main points, but the complement, what he is saying about what he is talking about, is going to be found in the outline somewhere, and sometimes in some of the main points. You have not even come to outlining yet, so I will not go into that.
So out of the subject and the complement, what do we do about discovering the exegetical idea? Well, you put together, in one clear, concise sentence, what he is talking about and what he is saying about it. You take the subject and the complement and put them together, and what you are doing is putting together the central idea of the text: here is what he is talking about, here is what he is saying about what he is talking about. There is not much more than that in the text, is there? What he is talking about, and what he is saying about what he is talking about. So what we are trying to do, again, to get it clear first in our own minds, is to get it in one sentence, and when you put that sentence together, you are discovering the central idea of the text, here called the exegetical idea.
Analyzing the Idea: Explain, Prove, Apply
He also tells us a process for analyzing the exegetical idea. I learned this from teaching the class at Heartland, where we would evaluate a guy’s sermon, and he would say, “But I had my CIT,” and my answer would often be, “That is the problem. It was your CIT. It was not the central idea of the text. It is one that you made up, one that you wrenched and twisted, and you missed the central idea of the text.” So how do we analyze that? There are three questions. First, what does this mean? Can I explain it? Here is a student who says, “That is my CIT,” and when I would ask them for an explanation of it, almost everybody would say, “No, no, because the text says…” So he was off; he did not get it right. Can I explain it? Number two: can I prove it? Here is where the work comes in. To find this CIT can be a good deal of labor itself, and then to evaluate or analyze it and be able to say, “Yes, I can explain what it means, and yes, I can prove it.” Now, how do you prove it? By what is in the text, and it has got to fit in the whole big picture, of the chapter if you are doing one of the narratives, or if it is a psalm, or whatever it is. Is this correct? Can I prove it? And then: what difference does it make? Can I apply it?
Now, in my estimation, and I am just going to throw an opinion out right now, we are not necessarily going to cover this tonight, but much effort in today’s preaching is wasted because there is an unwillingness to make a strong application. I call it the absence of prophet preaching. In fact, I about go to seed on it; I talk about it almost everywhere I go: the absence of prophet preaching. What was it that got the prophets in trouble, in prison, stoned, people angry with them? It was not that they said truth but stayed vague about it, so that in case somebody would think they were talking about them, they could protect themselves. No, no, no. They were in trouble because they came home with strong application. I know the era in which we live, but I am going to tell you right now, in the time of our culture, and even in church life, there are people who are resistant to it. They do not want to hear it. But I have got news for you: they did not want to hear it when Isaiah made the right application either, nor Ezekiel, nor Jeremiah, nor the prophets. Why did the Jews get so mad at Jesus? Because He was so vague? No, He was not vague at all. You may stumble over some of the things He said and wonder what He was saying, but when they came after Him and wanted to kill Him and were opposing Him, they understood fully what He was saying. So much effort is wasted when there is a failure to make strong, clear, biblical application. I told my wife one time, from listening to some preaching, “The next time I hear a preacher get up there and, when he is almost to make some strong application, say, ‘Are we okay? Is everybody okay?'” Can you not see the prophets standing up and saying, “Thus saith the LORD. Are you okay with this, everybody? All right”? I am going to get right in front of my pew, walk up there, and punch him in the nose and say, “Just be man enough to preach the thing and say what it says and make the application.” So anyway, that is the analysis: can I explain it, can I prove it, can I apply it? So you discover the exegetical idea, then you analyze it, and then we come to chapter five, where we formulate the homiletical idea. I assume you have read this chapter since last week? So you read the chapter, and do you have another assignment as well? Mostly just read. Okay.
The Homiletical Idea
So then we come to formulating the homiletical idea. What is the difference between the CIT, the central idea of the text, and the homiletical idea? As you have read in this chapter, basically the difference is that the exegetical idea, the central idea of the text, is what the writer was saying to the people then. Does historical background matter? Sure it does. Does the literary approach matter to understand your text? Sure. All of those things matter. But when we do the central idea of the text, we are speaking about what the writer said to them then. Now we have asked the question, “Can I apply this?” The homiletical idea is then: what am I going to do with this? How am I going to preach this? So we go from then to now. And over and over, I noticed in teaching the class that there would be guys so proud of their CIT, and they would read it as if to say, “I got it, I discovered it,” but then they were already in the now and never really focused on the then. If we are going to be accurate, which is what we are striving for, then we have got to understand what the intent of the writer was then, and now we are going to work at, “Can I apply it?” We have already determined, “Yes, I can apply this.” So how do we bring it from then to now? The homiletical idea is, in another sentence, what we do with the exegetical idea, the central idea of the text, and we bring it into today. That is very simple, probably already clear in your mind, I hope; if not, it definitely needs to be. This is what the writer said at that time; this is how I am going to preach it now. We bring it from then to now.
An Example From Ezra 7
Two guys were not here this morning, so why do you not open your Bible, all of you, to the book of Ezra, chapter 7. For you guys who were not here this morning, this is where we were; I did a little devotional sermon here this morning, and I thought I might share with you the homiletical sheet. Ninety-five percent of the sermons that I have developed since probably 2004 or 2005, somewhere right in there, I started teaching the class in 2003, so probably 90 to 95 percent of the sermons I do, I make a homiletical sheet. Before I ever do, I already have a rough outline, I have already studied, got all kinds of notes scribbled on all kinds of different pieces of paper. I have everything in hand, not on the computer. I have never turned on a computer in my life. By the time I am still trying to figure out how radios work, let alone all this other stuff, so I do it all handwritten, but the principle would be the same no matter how you do it. I have done a lot of study, I have notes out here, and I have a rough outline, and as I go through it, something is going to change in the outline, sometimes a lot, sometimes not much at all, but I already have a rough idea where I am going. Before I move on to develop the sermon, I have this homiletical sheet, as I call it. I give the title, and I had several titles, but one of them is “How to Get What You Want From God.” If you were here this morning, you know what we are talking about. So: how to get everything you want from God. If you were not here this morning, no, I am not Joel Osteen. That is not what this is about. This is actually biblical. Then I write down the subject, and after the subject I write down the complement, and after the complement I write down the CIT, and then I write down the homiletical idea, and then the purpose of the sermon.
You have your Bible open to the book of Ezra. It is in chapter 7. As I may have mentioned this morning, Ezra is involved in the return of the Jews from Babylonian captivity, fifty-eight years after the Jews had restored the temple in Jerusalem. By the way, it took them twenty years to do that; they spent sixteen years doing nothing and got rebuked by the prophet Haggai. So between chapter 6 and chapter 7 is a fifty-eight-year period. We start a whole new section, and though it is the book of Ezra, he has been reviewing what has transpired before, and now we are going to see his actual involvement. Verses 1 and 2 and following: “Now after these things, in the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, Ezra the son of Seraiah, the son of Azariah, the son of Hilkiah.” and we talked about how he goes down all the way till he was a direct descendant of Aaron the chief priest. “This Ezra went up from Babylon; and he was a ready scribe in the law of Moses, which the LORD God of Israel had given: and the king granted him all his request, according to the hand of the LORD his God upon him.” As you go through the text, what you see is that Ezra was moved by God, according to the hand of the Lord that was upon him, to lead people from the captivity they had experienced. Seventy years, I mean, hold on, the captivity was longer than that; there were seventy years of captivity before the first return was made, so there are 140 years from the actual Babylonian captivity. Amazing. So here is Ezra, in the time of Artaxerxes, king of Persia. Remember, the Babylonian empire fell into the hands of the Medo-Persians and became known as the Persian Empire. Ezra is going to lead these people back to Jerusalem for the purpose of leading a revival. You see, Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, and Jeshua the high priest led the people back seventy years before, for the purpose of rebuilding the temple. The whole city was in shambles, and they were going to go back and rebuild the temple. Now Ezra is going back, I call it, to rebuild the people, because they are in a spiritual dive. While they had repaired the house of God and had a time of revival, they were in need of revival again by the time Ezra goes back, and they have one. It is the amazing grace of God. So when he goes back, he has made requests, now watch this, to the king, what was his name, Artaxerxes. He has to have permission from the king to go himself and to take people back to the land. He needs resources and money, and he wants the things that were taken from the house of God when they went into Babylonian captivity, which were still in that part of the world. He wants to take them back, and he wants to go toll-free, without taxation, on the journey back. So he makes these requests, to God, and if you were here this morning, you remember he made all these various requests to God and to Artaxerxes. The reason he was effective in convincing Artaxerxes was that the hand of God was upon him. God was at work. This is not just a good man by the name of Ezra doing a good thing. No, the hand of God was all over this, so to God be the glory. All of this is taking place, and he is going to go back, and when he goes back, they are going to restore worship as it is supposed to be. Artaxerxes writes a letter, a decree, to grant him everything he requested, and he grants everything he requested and even enlarges upon some of it that he did not even request, like stuff out of the king’s treasure house. He did not ask for that, but Artaxerxes opened the door for him, and to take back the law of God, the Word of God, which would have been in contradiction to the law of the Medes and Persians, but anyway, God favored him and blessed him.
So we are going to look at that passage and say, “Okay, as you go through chapter 7,” and I have kind of given you an overview, “what would you say was the subject?” I wrote it down; I wish I had this done well, and I could have printed it out and let you have it. Nonetheless, here is the subject: Ezra led the second expedition from Babylon to Jerusalem with great favor from God and the king of Persia. In one sentence, that is what the chapter is about. If you leave out the great favor from God, then you are not being very thorough. Or, as I like to do, and Robinson suggests this, I like to put every subject in the form of a question. To me it adds to clarity; it really does. So, as a question, the subject is this: Why did Ezra obtain such obvious favor from God and the king of Persia to return to Jerusalem? It says the same thing as the first sentence did, basically, but it is in the form of a question, and we are going to answer the question. Where did this great favor come from? How did this come about? So you have the subject. The second thing is the complement. We know what he is talking about; what does he say about what he is talking about? What is in the passage about it? I put it in one sentence. The complement: Ezra’s devotion to the Word of God brought boldness to make great requests of the king. We are saying, “Why did he have such favor?” The answer to that question is his devotion to the Word of God. Now, we know the hand of God was in this, and yet his devotion to the Word of God, and what God said about Israel, and God’s future purposes, even eternal purposes, for Israel, he saw in the law and the prophets. He saw in the Pentateuch, and in what he had access to of the words of the prophets, and he could tell by that that God was not through with Israel. And there are lamebrains in art, culture, and society who carry the Bible around and have not figured that out yet themselves: that God is not through with Israel, and He will accomplish His purposes on that. So, Ezra’s devotion to the Word of God.
Out of the subject and the complement, then, we have the CIT, the central idea of the text. Put those two together: Ezra’s devotion to God’s Word affected his devotion to God’s work, which affected the nature of his requests, resulting in great favor from God and man. Every request he made was in the will of God, a part of God’s purpose, and would help him accomplish God’s purpose. It is a little longer than I would like, but I still like it. You, sir, I do not like it? You do not have to; next week you can talk about it, that is fine. Ezra’s devotion to God’s word affected his devotion to God’s work, which affected the nature of his requests, or governed his requests, resulting in great favor from God and Artaxerxes and man, plus the people he took back with him. That is the exegetical idea. That is what he was writing about and what this account is about, then. [A student asked him to read it again, and said it was a bit long and might be shortened; he repeated it and invited anyone to say what is wrong with it.] So that is the central idea of the text.
Now, are we ready for the homiletical idea? That is where we are. We are going to bring it to today. What am I going to do with this? Here is my homiletical idea: When our desire is to do God’s work according to God’s Word, we may expect God to enable us. You can add to that “enable us in marvelous ways” or whatever you want, but I am just striving for simplicity and clarity here. What we saw happen then, I charged them this morning: anybody can do what Ezra did. When our desire is to do God’s work according to God’s Word, we may expect God to enable us, because we will not get His work done without His enabling. And I also wrote down a purpose: to challenge every believer to develop these Ezra qualities, as I call them, of devotion to God’s Word and work, and to experience receiving great favor from God and man. [Again he repeated it for a student who asked.] Then I go to work on the sermon after that, and if this is done right, I find I am ready to go to work. In fact, I am excited about going to work. Some fall out clearer and easier than others, but I think it is dangerous to try to tie a sermon to a text and not have this done to the best of our ability. That is how I approach it.
Back to the Chapter: Memorable Sentences
Then he talks about formulating the homiletical idea, and you say you do notes in your book? I never made notes for my class; I always taught out of the book. I have about three books like this, so marked up that it is hard to make sense of them, except I can, but nobody else would look at them and know what this is about. That is the way I love to do it. One of the reasons we use this book is the way it fits the semester. It is not only clear and good and helpful, obviously the content has to be right, but it is also just absolutely great for one semester of teaching, a three-hour class. And the way I liked to do it when I was teaching the class: anytime you have a question, raise your hand. This is not a Sunday morning church service, so anytime something comes up, just raise your hand and we will talk about it.
So let us go to page 102. The first part, on pages 101 and 102, is just a review of what we were talking about at the very beginning, getting the central idea of the text, and then working toward the homiletical idea, and the three questions: can I explain it, can I prove it, can I apply it? We go down to the bottom of page 103: “In light of the audience’s knowledge and experience, think through your exegetical idea and state it in the most exact and memorable sentence.” One of the experts at doing this is our pastor back home, Brother Gattis. He is very good at that, and you can always tell when he is doing it. He gives it word for word; he has it memorized and does it word for word, and I find it very helpful and effective as he quotes his homiletical idea, and he has a way of doing it so that it is not mechanical. He is pretty gifted. We are answering the question, “Where does all this fit in?” So we have done the background. My wife says I spend way too much time on background and not enough time on application; that is her opinion. I always loved it when I was pastor of the church and she was standing there after I preached an hour and fifteen or twenty minutes; I was long-winded back in those days. She would be standing by me, and somebody would come along and, just inevitably, say, “Thank you for laying the background out. It was so helpful to understand the whole thing,” and I would grab him and say, “Would you repeat that again, please?” and then try to get what he said in a very clear sentence, and work on that and reduce it down to a sentence. When I read that this afternoon and looked at my homiletical idea, no doubt if Jason Gattis took this, he could probably make it have more zap to it, and I might could too if I spent the time on it, I do not know. But when our desire is to do God’s work according to God’s Word, then we may expect God to enable us. That is what we are going to talk about, in one sentence, and then of course we enlarge upon that. Since some of you guys were not here, the way we enlarged on it: how does a person get to the point where he is giving that kind of attention to God’s work and God’s law? We went back to verse 10, and this is what you would call, you will come to it later, an inductive sermon. We do not come to the main point right off the bat; we work up to it. To me, we really get down to business at verse 10. “For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.” That is the crux of the preaching right there, because that is what anybody in this room can do: make it his business to seek the Word of God.
Be a Bible Reader
Let me just go ahead and preach to you a minute: read your Bible. Be a Bible reader. One of the life-changing events, and I may have shared this here in this chapel, not that I expect you to remember, was in 1991. I had been pastor of Southwest Baptist for one year, and David Gibbs, the Christian Law Association man, was scheduled to preach that day, and he did, and I sat down on the front row. He is a master at telling all kinds of stories and illustrations. He said that morning that he was flying with his law partner in the Christian Law Association, Charlie Cates, and he said, “We are just flying along, and Charlie said, ‘David, what is the most important book in the world?’ I said, ‘Well, obviously, Charlie, it is the Bible.’ And Charlie said, ‘When are you going to start reading it like it is the most important book in the world?’ I said, ‘I beg your pardon, I do read the Bible.’ He said, ‘I did not say you did not. What is the most important book in the world?’ ‘Well, it is obviously the Bible.’ ‘When you read it, do you read it like it is the most important book in the world?’ ‘Well, now, Charlie, you know that in our profession we have to read law books. We have to go back into records of the past and precedents that have been set, and we read and read and read.’ And Charlie said, ‘David, what is the most important book in the world, and when are you going to start reading it like it is the most important book in the world?'” As he was telling that story, God convicted my heart. I did not even hear David Gibbs; I heard the Lord say, “Sam Davison, what is the most important book in the world? When are you going to start reading it like it is the most important book in the world?” And of course I wanted to argue with the Lord: “Do I read? I mean, I prepare all these sermons, Sunday school and morning service and night and Wednesday night and preaching revivals and all this kind of stuff. I do read the Bible.” “When are you going to read it like it is what it is?” Then the conviction came to my heart that my Bible reading was primarily so I would have something to say to you. I had to stand before a congregation and preach, and I was studying and reading the Bible so I would have something to say to them, and God convicted my heart: “You are not reading My words so I can talk to you. You are reading My words so you can talk to them.” Wow. I got under great conviction, and when he gave the invitation that morning, the pastor was the first person to the altar, and I made a commitment to God that I was going to start reading the Bible like it is what it is, the most important book in the world. Not looking for a sermon, not looking for a lesson, not looking for more to say to people, but for God to speak to me. Since that time, that was in 1991, I have read it at least four times a year, every year. Right now I am not pastoring, and my schedule is different, and I am reading it five to six times a year, and that is not too much, in my estimation. What are we talking about here? Seeking the law of the Lord, seeking the Word of God, reading the Word of God. I do not stop and take notes. I just read. I have a pen, and I mark something I might want to look at later, but I am not looking for a sermon. I am not looking for something to tell somebody else. I am waiting on God to speak to my heart, and most of the time, when I do mark something, I go back to let it work on my own soul and my own heart. My wife would say, she is not here to verify this, but I have heard her say it to others, and she said it to me, that my life changed from that time on. Well, should we be surprised? It would be more surprising if it did not, do you not think? Because I have heard, I think I have heard it here, your choir singing, “God’s Word changes lives,” and indeed it does. There is not a man in this room who cannot do what I am talking about. I do not know what you are supposed to do, but I do know this: we need to consistently be in the Book, seeking the law of the Lord. The law of the Lord, Psalm 119 stuff: the commandments, the precepts, the judgments, the truth. Be a Bible man. If a man learned to preach and was eloquent, I would say, “Wow, what a preacher,” but if he is not consumed with reading the Bible, he may entertain people more than he feeds people.
A student asked: sometimes when I read the Bible, there are portions I do not fully understand, and I feel I cannot go on by just reading, and I get stuck, and I feel I have to truly understand it in order to move forward. Do you have any advice on that? Here is what I did, and let me give you an example. I have probably read the Bible through forty-five or fifty times, wondering every time, “What am I supposed to do with Ezekiel 40, 41, 42?” You know the passage I am talking about, Pastor, the last chapters of Ezekiel, about the future city of God and the people of God and the worship of the Lord and everything. I would read that and just think, “I have no idea what to do with it,” and after years, one time I read it, and a couple of verses stood out to me that had never grabbed me before, and I knew I had to work on this. So I developed a sermon and preached it at, I do not know, a Gibbs meeting, I think, maybe at Stillwater or somewhere. It is not like I am an expert on Ezekiel 40, 41, 42; I am not, but I got a grasp, and God spoke to my heart about it, and I just went back at the right time. Are there other passages I have looked at that made me scratch my head that I am going to visit? Yes, I have done that over and over and over. But what I have tried to encourage people to do is this: if you are sincere in your reading of the Word of God, believe me, He will give you plenty of work on that. So when it is time, that passage that you felt you had to go back to and could not move on from in your reading, it may happen like it happened to me; I do not know that it would, but it may: “Okay, it is time to look at that now. I am ready to feed you that.” Because the whole Bible is a mystery, and a mystery does not mean something that cannot be known; it is just that it has to be made known by God, and the Holy Spirit has to be involved. I would encourage you to give that a try, and if your style is not to keep reading but to go study and figure that out, then that is between you and the Lord, but I found it beneficial to keep reading and feeding upon what I do understand, and mull it over and think it over, and then, I do not know, just the time I was reading through there, it was like lights came on. I am not trying to be weird; I am just saying that is how it happened, and that is not the only passage, but that is the latest. Does that make any sense? Okay.
So he was seeking the law of the Lord, and he did it, and he taught others to do the same thing.
More From Stage Five
So let us see here. We are under stage five, and there is a paragraph, the third paragraph, I did not even know they had an edition three, that says, “People are more likely to think God’s thoughts after Him and to live and love and choose on the basis of those thoughts when they are couched in memorable sentences.” That is where he presses the importance of working on that exegetical idea, the CIT, and the homiletical idea, of making clear statements. And again, there are times I have worked at getting a clear statement in my own head, and in the fury of preaching I do not say anything like I wrote it down, but I said it clearer than I would have said it had I not worked at it, and lo and behold, there are times I said it better than I actually wrote it down. That is the grace of God right there, but sometimes that happens too. But the preparation, on the sincere, genuine preparation, that is key. Then he said that some of the statements of the homiletical idea may be identical to the statement of the exegetical idea. That happens every once in a while, rarely, but it can happen, like “Thou shalt not kill.” The exegetical idea and the homiletical idea are exactly the same. A weird illustration, but that is an illustration of it. Then let me read this line to you. It says, “As you can see, the homiletical idea is simply the biblical truth applied to life.” And then he gives some suggestions: State it as simply and memorably as possible. State the idea in concrete and familiar words. State the idea so that it focuses on response; you are wanting to get a response. And state the idea so that your listeners see that you are talking to them about them. So that is the homiletical idea. To me, I mean, you could say more, and there is more detail in the book, but if you get the exegetical idea, it is just a matter of doing the work to bring it to today, from then to now, which leads you to the purpose. All of this is aiming for the purpose.
The Purpose of the Sermon
And the purpose, he kind of suggests this, and I remember asking myself this question: What if somebody came up to me before church and said, “I see in the announcements you are preaching this. Why are you preaching that?” Is my best answer going to be, “Because that is where I am in my series”? Boo. What do you think? Well, that is not a good enough answer. So what are we trying to accomplish? That is why we work on the central idea of the text and the homiletical idea, and understand that we have to have the authority from God to preach what we are preaching. That is why we work on the central idea of the text, and then we have to be able to bring it into today’s time, the now. That is why we work on it so hard: we are doing this for a purpose, not because we are just coming to the end of a passage and we will pick up on it next week. That is not why we preach a passage. And I do believe that what he says in the following pages of this section is that we need to understand what we are striving for, what we expect people to do when we stand and give an invitation, an invitation for them to do what? “Respond to however God has dealt with your heart” is a standard answer right there, but should we not maybe be able to be more specific than that, probably in the conclusion and the end of the sermon, as we start the invitation time, calling people to attention, “Where are you in relation to this?” and be very, very clear about it? That is the purpose. He put it down here: “The purpose behind each individual sermon is to secure some moral action.” We need to know what that action is, and we ought to go to the pulpit knowing what that is. I have actually dealt with difficult texts and struggled to the point that I can remember saying, and I am not proud of this, “I do not even know how to give an invitation.” We finished the passage, and I did the best I could, and I was not even sure why. I was not proud of myself that I ever did that, but I did it. Why did I do it? Because I did not know what else to do, because this can be tough stuff to make clear. And then sometimes you preach a sermon where you might have gone off the rails somewhere, and it did not go exactly right. Did you ever preach one where you said, “I have no idea where that came from,” and then you got it so boxed up that by the time you came to the end you could not even give a clear invitation, because you do not know why you went off on what you went off on? Well, you are looking at me like you should not do that, but can it happen? Of course it can happen. But hopefully that is the rare exception, and we know exactly what moral action is to be taken as a result of what we preached. How could we respond to this that would be right with God and not be in rebellion against God if we do not make it? That is what the moral action is about.
So you have stage six: determine the purpose of the sermon. The purpose is what you are aiming at; the sermon is what you hit it with. I like that. The purpose is what you are aiming at: this is what should be accomplished by this sermon. That is why you shoot the arrow; the arrow is the sermon and the target is the purpose, why you are preaching this, and the sermon is what is going to get you there. Here is a line I have highlighted that is good: “An essay looks at ideas, but a sermon looks at people.” Much of contemporary preaching is essay sort, and may be impressive ideas, but not striving for the conviction for people to change and make that decision. Here is another line: “Whereas the idea states the truth, the purpose defines what that truth should accomplish.” About three paragraphs down from stage six, it says, “How then do you determine the purpose of your sermon? You do so by discovering the purpose behind the passage you are preaching.” That is genius, is it not? How do I know how to establish the purpose? Can I understand why this record is here of Ezra? Well, one of the answers is that it is history. It is accurate history, necessary history, and if you are a lover of history, you ought to love the Old Testament historical books. But do you really think God inspired these words just for historical purposes, so that we might have accurate history? No, no, no, no. God says this eternal Word of God, and what He expected of Ezra, He expects of us. How He responded to Ezra is how He responds to us, in ways that are known to Him. “You do so by discovering the purpose behind the passage you are preaching.” Sometimes that is not easy to find or articulate; sometimes it is a general idea that you have. He goes on to say that an expository sermon therefore finds its purpose in line with the biblical purposes. That is how you are faithful when it says “preach the word”; that is part of what he is talking about right there, that our purpose cannot be off in left field somewhere, some pet peeve that we have. That is not going to get it. It has to be according to the purpose that God inspired it and put it in His Word. I have a paragraph marked here with stars and marks on it, still under stage six, four or five paragraphs down, where it starts, “The inspired Scriptures were given so that we could be adequately equipped for every good work. It follows from this that you should be able to put into words what beliefs, attitudes, or values should be changed or confirmed, or what quality of life or what good works should result from the preaching and hearing of your sermon. You accomplish that purpose, Paul told Timothy, through teaching doctrine, refuting an error in belief or action, correcting what is wrong, instructing people in the proper handling of life.” That is a good, meaningful paragraph right there. That is what the purpose is supposed to be: doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness. Then the next paragraph: “Educators realize that an effective statement of purpose goes beyond procedure and describes the observable behavior that should come as a result of teaching.” So, anyway, a good chapter.
Questions
Are there any questions or comments on the part about the purpose? Do you write out your purpose for every sermon you preach? Almost every one, yes. Is that just for your own sake? Do you always state it? Not necessarily. I do not try to have it ready to state like I would the CIT or the homiletical idea. I would state it in some terms, but it would not look exactly like what I had on the page. There is more detail in the book; it gives good examples, a good table: should we believe something, should we do something, and then examples of them. Otherwise, that wraps up that chapter. Rather than a break, maybe we could just take some general questions and answers, and then wrap it up with our time of prayer for tomorrow.
A student asked: what led you to Ezra? That one stood out to me in a long series. I did Ezra and Nehemiah and Esther, so I was preaching through all of those historical books. I did not do all of them verse by verse, but that chapter just got me. To me it is amazing. And then when you got to verse 10, that is really convicting. Another said: I really appreciate the sermon this morning, because, of course I could not insert my name in there, but purposing to read the Word, apply it, and teach it. I was also able to give it to my brother, who just turned fifty, and that was so powerful. Should all of our goal be to know the Bible well enough to talk to people about it, to converse? There are multiplied thousands of people sitting in the pews of Independent Baptist churches who are scared to death to get into a discussion with anybody about the Bible, who may not be a Bible student, or maybe a critic of the Bible, and really there is no excuse for that. There is no excuse for us not to be men of the Book, where we can have discourse with people, not necessarily to be a know-it-all, not to win every argument, but at least to give a defense of the Word of God. That ought to be typical. I used to do this, and I probably did it when you were there too: we would go in on a Wednesday night and I would say to our people, “Well, I just finished Proverbs in my Bible reading this morning. Where are you?” and I would ask for volunteers, and if they did not volunteer fast, I would just start calling names: “Where are you in your Bible reading? Where are you?” Remember doing that on Wednesday night? Oh yeah, we did it, and we may not have done it as much after; I do not remember the timing. I do not know how many people would tell me to this day that being put on the spot was the best thing that ever happened to them, and it changed their lives. And what if you call on somebody who does not read their Bible? Well, then you help them along, and read the Book, read the Book. And our familiarity with it, you know, I spend an hour every morning, actually about an hour and fifteen minutes now, and somebody asked me the other day, a young preacher, one of our graduates, “Brother Sam, what do you do the first thing in the morning?” and I said, “Well, I get up and make my coffee, and then I sit down and write out my schedule for naps for the day.” Actually, what I do is get my Bible, and that is how I start every morning. I will fight for that time. I love it. I truly cannot wait for the time, and it was not always that way; I had to discipline myself, but once you do it, you start feeding on the Word of God rather than reading it and saying, “Here we go again.” That Book is deep and rich, and He keeps highlighting things in my life, about me, or about preaching, you name it. You name it, He addresses it. If He meant it to be His eternal Word, He meant for it to be fresh for us, to drink it, eat it, for it to be fresh every day, and if we are not getting that, then something is wrong in here. There is nothing wrong with this Book. It will feed the soul. And I think it is commendable that you guys are interested in this, because it will help you in your own personal witnessing, as well as the opportunity to stand before people and give the Word. Pastor, amen, amen.
