October 15, 2014
Rabbit Trails
I’ve heard quite a few sermons where the message
gets derailed with extraneous examples and sidebars. Lately I’ve listened
to a couple of expository preachers and was surprised to see that they too take
rabbit trails — biblical rabbit trails. If I weren’t knowledgeable in the Word
I’d have been clueless as to the references. Unfortunately many speakers and preachers fail
to realize that when they take detours in their message we in the audience don’t
simply wait for them to get back on track, we follow them down the rabbit
trail.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----I notice many preachers have mistaken their purpose in the pulpit. They think it is to preach. Others think they have a more advanced purpose of preaching Jesus. As you noted, it is easy to detect by all the rabbit trails. They don’t tie together or deliver any particular benefit. It all just sounds good.
-----Certainly preaching is the activity for the pulpit, and more particularly, preaching Jesus. But the purpose is to exhort and edify. To teach and inform. To admonish. To encourage. The preacher’s task is to build reality into the spiritual lives of the congregation by presenting intellectual and emotional realities of the Bible relevant to its situations, and doing it in inspiring ways that cling like cockleburs.
-----One of the properties of human psychology is the fading of details from discovered, learned, and practiced concepts. This is partially beneficial. Every time we think of a concept we can’t be delayed by a recount of its every last detail. So we treat a concept like an icon on a computer. We see it and know the process it represents, but we don’t click on it and operate it just to think with it. So the rich and colorful, living details within its processes fade away the more we just think of it without actually operating it. And if we hardly ever operate it, well, you get the picture.
-----In that way too many preachers think of preaching. So they wind up preparing a bag of fluff to sprinkle over the congregation like confetti. If they do it well, it excites and inspires. It can even inform. But when “to preach” has replaced the purpose of preaching, even the exciting, informative confetti fails to tie relevancies from the Word of God to the problems and difficulties of a congregation’s lives and spirituality.
-----Now, again, you know I can’t resist charging back to Paul’s I Corinthians 14. In that chapter is a peephole into the worship service of the early Christians who were yet bubbling with and effervescing the Holy Spirit. I don’t see “The Preacher” there. I see “preachers”. “When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification.” (I Cor 14:26b) This is probably the impetus behind much of the recent home-church movement. But as you noted yesterday, even it can become a desktop icon.
-----I think the major portion of what has become wrong in today’s church is that the indwelling and personal work of the Holy Spirit has become a desktop icon. Having paid my dues in a Pentecostal church, I know the presence and moving of the Spirit within is not just a blab-it-and grab-it, name-it-and-claim-it thing. For the glossolalia, interpretations, slayings in the Spirit, and
Jericho marches become desktop icons, too. The only way to avoid spiritual mentality from becoming a mere display of icons is to meet each moment with an actual click upon a relevant icon, then experience again its process.
-----This is what the sermon is for - the preacher clicking upon a Biblical icon to process its operation momentarily in the minds of the congregation. There may not be a lot of Scripture quoted in a good sermon. And there may be a lot of illustrations and rabbit trails. But the difference from confetti is that the purposeful sermon networks illustrations and rabbit trails into edifying, encouraging, exhorting, teaching points brought from God’s Word in relevance to the congregation’s needs. Then as you hear him over his career of shepherding the flock you see his sermons themselves networking into spiritual concepts elevating your understanding and application of the Bible to what the Spirit is doing inside.
-----When I hear my preacher each week, it almost makes me want to forget I Cor 14:26b. He has no use for confetti. And when I see someone else taking to the pulpit, I go, “Oh no! I miss him already!” And this is in a Presbyterian church, no less!
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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