Homiletical Horrors: Overload
Homiletical Horrors is a series of pointers for the teacher or preacher to improve in the practice of proclaiming God’s Word.
This is just the second of a small collection of articles entitled Homiletical Horrors that will address a number of issues in that I believe are common pitfalls or areas of improvement for most that teach or preach. They’re given with very little thought to their order. I hope they’ll be helpful to you.
Here’s the previous entries:
In 1739 Jonathan Edwards preached thirty sermons from Isaiah 51:8. Just that one verse. Thirty-sermons. Look the verse up and it gets even more astounding1. Unfortunately, some young pastors and preachers hear a statement like that and think like I did when I heard some of my dad’s stories of his youthful adventures as a pre-teen: “I can top that!” May I encourage restraint?
I have to confess, I’m incredibly thankful for Edwards’ sermons and writings, and even the method by which he arrived at being able to draw thirty-sermons worth of substance from that single verse, but I also want to firmly remind all of us: none of us are Edwards. I know, that stings a little. You might be willing to feebly protest, “I know I’m not Edwards but maybe I’m the next-this-generation-Edwards”. But as I’m guessing Edwards opened sermon twenty-seven with after announcing his text: bear with me for just a little longer.
Exhausting the Text and the People
There’s a number of ways I think we can overload a sermon, but the first one is by trying to exhaust the text and (in doing so) exhaust the people. This is especially true for my fellow verse-by-verse expositors. Interestingly and thankfully, there has been a glorious resurgence of this sort of preaching in many churches. I’m thankful because I believe this is the most faithful pattern of preaching that should be ministering to a congregation. It does, however certainly takes on many different forms, some I believe are better than others. I have serious reservations about the guy who preaches through Ephesians in nine sermons. I have fewer about the guy who takes forty to fifty. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the one who takes over two-hundred to get through six chapters is doing the best job.
By the way, those numbers aren’t entirely arbitrary2. Each is based on a historical pastor. And that’s my point. Some men can stay for multiple years in a book with under a dozen chapters. But not all men should. One pitfall I’ve seen in some of my fellow expositors is that they attempt what one seasoned preacher referred to as “extra-gesis.” In the situation where a pastor (especially a new-er one) decides that in order to be faithful to the text he’s got to preach nineteen sermons on Paul’s introduction to Philemon, he’s likely squeezing more than he ought out of both the text and the congregation’s patience.
One reason for this form of exhausting the text is rooted in a righteous motive: they want to thoroughly explain the text and all its implications. But this can be naive. Often this is accompanied with an attitude that says, “I’ve preached that text, why would I ever need to preach it again?” In other words, they’ve covered all that the Holy Spirit will ever have to say through that text. Finished. Instructed. Now we may move on. As I mentioned earlier: naive. And possibly arrogant. They’ve said all that God needs to say from this text. They’ve exegeted all the nuance. They’ve considered all of the implications that a hearer will ever need. They may have disconnected from concern for the congregation and how this text will serve them at a different season because they did the work. This is the same arrogant foolishness that complains about having to instruct a three year old about something again because “I’ve told them not to do that!” With indignant impatience. They’ve been told, why do I have to keep instructing them?
Overpacking
The second form of overload is by trying to fit too much in one sermon. I’ve most often seen this in guys who are in the midst of preaching their first ten sermons. They haven’t learned what to cut. They haven’t developed a sense of what can stay in the study and what must make the sermon. Sometimes this is accompanied by the thought that, “Well I studied it, prepared it, I have to share it!” Again, this is often a form of arrogance: it lacks the humility to consider the hearer and whether or not that extra rabbit trail that doesn’t really fit into the sermon has to be included just because they spent an hour on it.
Over-complicating
This is a near-kinsman to the pitfall mentioned above. It is often fascinated with chiastic structures, obsesses over alliterated sub-points, and geeks out over technical jargon. This is most frequently manifested in the sermon by statements like, “Now for sub-point c, under section four, of our seventh point, let’s examine the contemplative Christ as demonstrated by this verbal form in the Greek….” Now hopefully, these words (or their near twin) haven’t been uttered by you from a pulpit because it typically displays a love for structure above listeners. A congregation can certainly be conditioned to appreciate this or maybe even follow it with a handout (one imagines a pew full of engineer types nodding approvingly with understanding, hurriedly taking notes). But normally, this sort of over-complicating leaves the hearer behind. As Dr. Martyn Lloyd Jones so well exhorted in Preachers and Preaching, there’s a tremendous difference between writing a paper and preaching. The reader can go back and retrace the steps: the listener has to be carried along. When you preach with over complicated analysis, multi-sub-pointed-structure, or overly detailed, jargon laden details, the hearer may be left behind.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost - But Some Are
The exhortation in this is simple: don’t leave your hearers behind. Whether that’s by digging so deep into the text that no one dares follow you for the duration of the journey, or holding them captive to a particular chapter for so long that no one is quite sure whether they’ll ever reach another passage, or meandering down every theological excursus that arises so that your audience gets lost in the woods, the goal is to bring them to a greater understanding of God’s Word. As Paul writes in Colossians 1, we’re endeavoring to present every man complete in Christ. In a word, we’re laboring for edification of the saints: equipping them for every good work. In order to do that we do need to labor to declare the whole counsel of God, we may not do so exhaustively but by he grace of the Lord we may comprehensively. We may not do it if we exhaust our hearers. So be patient. Be humble. We can’t unload the whole of every text in every sermon. By the grace of God the Word will still need preached next week. Labor diligently in the pulpit and in the personal application of discipling. Don’t lose your hearers with an overload.
And lest you wonder if it was soon after that he was dismissed from his pastorate at Northampton - it wasn’t for another eleven years, I looked it up.
Martyn Lloyd Jones took 232 sermons to get through Ephesians: Calvin was around 48.