January 15, 2015
Preaching the Word
There were only 20 of us for worship in the small
Baptist church, but the pastor preached as though there were 200 people in the
room. His booming voice needed no amplification and the well-prepared message, told
in biblical story form, needed no illustrations, fillers or anecdotes. Rather
than trying to ingratiate himself to the audience, the preacher focused on presenting
the Word of God. It was refreshing to see shades of the Apostle Paul in this
preacher, “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words,
but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your
faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power” (1 Cor 2:4 NIV).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----If folks did not normally take highly heuristic approaches into their informational interrelationships with others, then ingratiating ourselves with each other would not be necessary for communicating important ideas. Right? Ok, Ok. Looking up “heuristic” in the dictionary won’t help much either because the dictionary’s so enamored with this word’s technical sense. But everywhere you mundanely encounter the word, that technical sense does not fit. Googling it gives a better street sense of “heuristic”. It is simply reaching a conclusion by using tried and tested mental techniques other than pure logic and math. An outfielder backpedaling to catch a high, fly ball could mentally measure the angle the ball came off the bat and its speed for applying to it the proper binomial expression for calculating its parabolic trajectory, then running to the spot on the field marked by the binomial’s solution. Sure! I’ll buy that when I see it. The outfielder backpedals at whatever speed in whatever direction it takes to keep the ball on a fixed point in his visual field. Then as it finally approaches him, he sticks his glove onto that same point, and wallah! -the ball and glove meet with no algebra wasted. That’s a heuristic.
-----Wanna be gullible? Neither do I. Nor do most of us (some don’t care.) That means we must verify the truth of all information and messages sent our way. Even some directly observed information must be verified before being believed. At dusk, one morning, I saw a white vehicle flying down Marine Road at what had to be 80 mph or so. I kept close, bewildered watch on it as it approached the 45 degree corner in front of me until it went straight up. That bent my mind! It was actually a bird whose flight path coincidentally aligned so well in my visual field with the roadway that my mind concocted up a speeding vehicle. The “rocket thing” verified “bird“. In my early adolescence a toy disappeared before my eyes only inches from my hands reaching to grasp it. It just went gone. I searched for it everywhere. But my never finding it verified what my eyes saw - it went gone. I don’t talk about it much because people normally haven’t experienced such, and not wanting to be gullible, they just won’t hear of it. That’s a heuristic, too. But it’s not always a good one. Raising one’s self from the death is also a rarity.
-----So, when it comes to folks passing information around, we are left to either intellectually examine any and every pertinent fact by relevant syllogisms, or we are going to have to trust the person telling us (which you’re probably not going to do for me anymore after hearing of my disappearing toy.) That’s a heuristic.
-----It takes a lot of experience to verify a person’s full trustworthiness. Usually we don’t have the time for it. If we hear a person mentioning things we relate to in ways that we relate to them, we tend to feel verification. This is another of many more heuristics. Thus, many preachers try to ingratiate themselves with their congregations by fluffy words and concepts. Fewer are going to simply tell you the way it is and leave the verification problem up to you.
-----Paul drove at this point. He usually told stuff straight forward. If you didn’t believe, that was your problem. He knew the non-obstinate folks would be engaged by the Holy Spirit for verification. He knew the Holy Spirit worked with the Word of God, which even verified itself by fulfilled prophecies and extensive miracles (like somebody once raising Himself from the dead.) I would take it that this preacher you heard was sticking pretty close to the unembellished, verified Word. Maybe, another more useful heuristic.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment