We're going to be talking together now about
how to prepare a message.
For some of you this may be the
key.
How to actually put together something that is
going to so feed and edify the people
of God that they grow towards maturity.
And may God really bless these thoughts and
principles, these practical things born out of a
little experience to our hearts.
I have on my paper nine points.
And the first is this, that any message
that you preach will arise, should arise out
of your own personal life with God.
Like a child, which is first born, it
receives life.
But then it needs discipline.
Then it needs to be governed, tamed, controlled,
pointed in a certain direction.
So too does a message.
Now I'm going to be talking in more
detail about study habits and prayer tomorrow.
The habit of regular systematic Bible study is
perhaps the key thing.
Perhaps the simplest help to you in the
future as a preacher would be this, to
have a notebook where seed thoughts can be
put down and you take that notebook with
you, it travels with you, it's with you
when you have your time of quiet before
God on a daily basis, it's with you
when you go to conferences, and God sometimes
gives you outlines, ideas, things to track down,
insights.
Do you ever find that?
Sometimes you're sitting listening to someone preaching or
even praying and suddenly a whole series of
things come.
Well, then is the time to write them
down.
Or in your morning devotions, if you have
them in the morning.
God will someday, as it seems, just give
you something on a plate.
There you are.
It may be usable months hence, but write
it down.
Keep it in a book.
I have downstairs a sort of red book,
bought it ages ago, full of all kinds
of scribblings from here and there, many of
which have been eventually trained, like the child
I was speaking of, it's given life and
then it's tamed and trained into a usable
form.
I was stuck on a railway siding in
Sweden, waiting for a train, a misconnection or
something, just reading in Matthew's Gospel.
God gave me a message for an OM
summer conference, just as if he was dictating
it.
Point by point, and I wrote the thing
down.
God will do that sometimes.
But you must be ready to write when
the inspiration comes.
Write in your own quiet times in the
morning.
Write as you study God's Word.
Get those seeds.
Now, a preacher is a bit like a
hen, in many ways, but he will sit
on his eggs for a long time.
You may learn egg, but the thing is
pretty useless.
You need to sit on it.
You need to keep it warm for a
bit.
That has tickled Stuart greatly.
And Stuart sitting on something, we're just about
finishing up, I think.
But you ought to have at the back
of your mind a number of ideas and
burdens, little seed thoughts that are just ready,
you know.
Because when a man stands to preach, he
needs to come before people able to say,
thus says the Lord.
He's bringing a burden from God.
This is how the prophets began.
Thus says the Lord.
You remember, Habakkuk is it again?
Martin Goldsmith is taking us through.
The burden of the Lord.
And the word in the Hebrew literally means
the load laid as may be on a
camel or a donkey.
Something that you have to carry.
Come before God's people with something to be
carried until by the end of the message
you feel you have laid it down.
A weight on your own soul, on your
mind, on your heart.
All preachers know this in varying degrees.
A book you see, an ordinary book, may
well be true words, just plain words written
on a page.
But a sermon is something else.
It's God's spoken truth carried in a human
personality, filtered through that personality.
And the preacher needs to sow weight on
God and think, sit on his eggs, change
the metaphor, wait till things ripen in his
own soul until he's got that which he
feels he wants to say.
I will say that if you preach often
on Scriptures you'll find that your appreciation of
a book of Scripture or a chapter will
change.
Your sense of the burden and thrust of
a particular part of Scripture will change.
But we must be men who stand before
God saying, look, thus says the Lord.
Secondly, right at the start of the preparation
process you must ask yourself one or two
questions.
What kind of a message is this going
to be?
What is its purpose?
Your sense of purpose must be quite explicit
in your mind.
Let me divide messages into four different types.
Christian preaching, four different kinds.
It will either be evangelistic preaching where your
specific aim is conversion.
You want to see people illuminated and converted,
their will touched and they begin to move
out of darkness into light.
Or it will be doctrinal preaching where among
ourselves as evangelical believers we make certain assumptions
about the Bible and we are aiming at
doctrinal understanding, illumination.
It may well, should have practical effects.
But our real goal is to produce understanding,
clarity of mind.
Evangelistic, doctrinal.
Thirdly, devotional.
Some preaching is not doctrinal or evangelistic.
It aims to warm the heart with some
fresh glimpse here on earth of our Saviour.
And the whole process of reading the Bible
to preach one or other of these kinds
of message is actually quite different.
I spend some of my time as an
evangelist, as I've already said, and sometimes in
Bible teaching.
And I find actually the discipline of reading
the Bible is quite different for the different
kind of message that you're going to produce.
It's an interesting thing.
I will have to, coming back from these
conferences and gearing up to evangelism back in
Britain, actually change gear in the way I
think about God's Word.
The kind of things I get from it.
So evangelistic, doctrinal, devotional or ethical.
You're aiming to persuade folk of new behaviour.
Now obviously any message may be a combination
of both.
Often the doctrinal and the ethical will go
together.
Or the doctrinal and the devotional.
People can be converted through messages that are
quite other than evangelistic messages.
But I don't know whether you ever read
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's recipe for a love
letter.
He said this, to write a good love
letter you will begin without knowing what you
are going to say and end without knowing
what you have said.
Well, in preaching that's a disaster, absolute disaster.
The little ditty, I shot an arrow in
the air, it fell to earth, I know
not where.
That does describe a lot of preaching and
it's a waste of time.
What are you going to do?
Why are you there?
What are you going to persuade people of?
What do you want them to understand?
Go.
Peter?
The question has been asked.
We often get invited along to perhaps represent
OM and to talk about the work in
a church meeting and it doesn't fall into
any of these categories.
It's a report or a recruiting kind of
message.
How does this fit into my categories?
Well, if we just do that, I would
hardly take that to be preaching at all.
I, over the years, have become increasingly frustrated
and fed up with doing that and I
would rather preach the word of God because
I believe that people will be recruited, drawn
to what they sense is the presence of
God in the word, in the fellowship, as
it comes out.
Now, the making concrete what OM life is
can come out in the message as you
illustrate, very often from your OM experience.
But if it's just a sort of 20
minute introduce the ship in the course of
a church service because the ship is going
to come in six months' time and this
is part of the build-up process.
You obviously can't pinch the preacher's slots and
begin with scripture.
I think you've got to forget these and
just do your stuff.
If you're invited along to represent OM for
a whole evening's meeting in a church and
you are the preacher, I would urge you
to preach the word, one or other of
these approaches and bring in OM,
not as the most important thing.
I want to preach Christ and Him crucified.
I want to preach the word and let
people ask me questions afterwards, let me illustrate
about OM and so on.
Now, does that make life more difficult for
you?
Yes.
Bring a report about the work if it
illustrates a point that you want to preach
to the people.
Very often we would want to preach something
about world evangelism or prayer or the body
of Christ or something using the ship and
the work and OM, the summer crusades and
so on as illustrative of God's word and
God's divine precepts and scripture and so on.
The question is, to what extent do I
use notes?
I will deal with that on number eight.
We'll get there eventually.
But underlying all four of these types of
categories I've suggested to you, you have one
common aim.
It is the, you are aiming at a
manifestation of God in the souls of the
people that are listening to you.
Let me talk of evangelism.
People will come in, who knows what they've
been doing, they sit down, they're not particularly
interested, one of their friends has dragged them
and you notice almost a moment in the
message where they suddenly begin to be gripped
by what you're saying.
It is as if God starts speaking to
them.
They're hearing something of his authority, seeing something
of his grace and forgiveness.
Suddenly becoming aware of a crossroads and the
Lord himself there.
Or, as you're speaking devotionally, suddenly people get
a sense of God there to meet your
real need that perhaps you hadn't even understood
was there until the man started speaking to
you.
But Christ has come to meet that need
which you perceive to be your own.
And that sense of God in the soul,
that is what you're aiming at.
Because our hearts grow cold, don't they?
You remember Revelation 2?
I know your works, I know your toil,
I know your labour, I know your patience.
I know how you've been plodding on, some
of you in OM, for a long time,
but I have this against you.
Your love for one person in this universe
stopped being as important as it used to
be.
In fact, it's gone cold.
And because that happens, it happens in my
life as yours, we need to be aiming
at folks, as I put it, seeing God,
hearing him, sensing his presence, responding to him
in their hearts.
And they will be converted if that happens,
they will be moved doctrinally or ethically if
that happens.
I don't think I ever begin preaching without
aiming that that should be so.
And you should aim to leave people different.
You know, you're not just giving an essay
or a lecture, you want people to be
different.
And they go out of hearing you, their
behaviour, their standards, the way they're going to
treat one another, their prayer life or whatever,
is to be different.
Otherwise why bother?
A waste of time.
So the will must be touched.
Okay?
Your goal, your sense of purpose.
Never, never speak to people without a sense
of real purpose.
I am aiming this session at every one
of you getting something practical that illuminates you
as I say it and will help you
in your practical preparation for the future.
I don't know how that fits into my
four categories.
I haven't thought long enough about that.
But I want you to go out with
something practical that's going to help you as
a habit of life.
Thirdly, let it be said that there is
a variety of technique the way people prepare
messages.
Now Spurgeon used to pick his topic and
he used to give his secretary his text
or his subject and she would go into
the library in his house and she would
bring him the files on that that he'd
been amassing over the years or any relevant
books and he would, in his study, begin
to prepare.
Moody kept masses of ideas, quotations, scripts and
scraps in a number of envelopes, big baggy
envelopes and he used to pick out the
relevant envelope and then begin to work, to
prepare from material that he'd been amassing over
the years.
A man called Henry Ward Beecher who was
a great preacher in America in the last
century his total preparation, he said was to
spend half an hour undisturbed in his study
on a Sunday morning.
I do know of preachers who spend less.
John Stott, in his book, will tell you
that you need to spend one hour in
preparation for every five minutes that you propose
to speak and for a beginner he suggests
that any message will need between nine and
twelve hours of preparation for that message.
Now, John Wesley was in the habit of
getting up at four in the morning prayer,
preparation.
Billy Graham dictates his sermon notes for the
evening early in the morning.
He gets up around six and by about
seven thirty he's dictated his notes for the
evening message before breakfast.
People have completely different ways of preparing.
I have seen an O.M. leader on
his knees in the leader's prayer meeting before
the evening meeting say I've got the message
I just need the verse to hang it
on.
Others who will spend hours in careful crafting
and study.
Now, you have to find the way that
suits you best.
I cannot say that there is just one
particular way.
Spurgeon is no more right than Wesley.
Moody and John Stott and Billy Graham and
Festo Cavengery and these men around the world
who have moved multitudes have simply been honest
with God.
They've grown in their characters.
They have found their own way.
And therefore there's no one particularly right technique.
Therefore, if I say anything that's helpful, take
it.
If I don't, forget it.
But I want to suggest to you what
I do and I feel it's good for
you to think about some of these disciplines.
You're going to have to begin with Scripture,
aren't you?
And my next point, number four is that
you're going to have to work hard at
Scripture.
Chewing over a passage.
Trying to grasp the dominant thought in a
paragraph or a chapter.
And your message, I have used the picture
already of training up a child.
It's got some life, but it's young, it's
untamed.
Has to be trained up.
Let me use another picture.
Your message will have to be like in
a blacksmith's fire and come out and you
beat it on the anvil a bit and
you put it back in the fire again
and you take it out and you beat
it a bit more.
Hard work at your Bible.
The key, perhaps, to your entire ministry any
ministry, even if you're not a preacher will
be your Bible study.
Working at your Bible because Bible will release
in you every gift.
Not just the preacher's gift.
And there's really no substitute for regular, disciplined
study of God's Word not study to preach.
Study to study God.
Terrible to simply study to get sermons because
then it just stays in you however long
it was before you had to preach and
it's gone.
And if the wine doesn't stay in the
barrel very long if it's in one day
and out the next it doesn't leave very
much flavour in the barrel.
And the business of preparing the night before
and then preaching it and then you forget
it and next week it's something different.
It doesn't change you very much.
John Stock, again has committed himself to print
in saying that Sunday's text should, at the
latest be chosen by the preceding Monday so
that it's got at least a week to
ripen and to be thought over.
As you take a...
Yes?
Now we've got some questions coming.
As I was coming to church, God told
me to speak.
Well, there was a preacher who was like
that.
He used to be openly proud of this
that he would get his message on Sunday
morning walking from the manse, the vicarage to
the church.
It was a distance of about five minutes'
walk.
And do you know what his elders did?
They bought him a new house five miles
away.
Longer to walk.
Now, the question at the back.
The amount of Bible reading that I'm recommending
is impossible.
Well, I'm quoting to you John Stock who
is a professional minister.
My own experience of learning to preach was
within OM.
I hadn't done very much before I left
college.
Yeah.
Well, I'm just about to give you the
example of how I managed.
Because Boba sent me down to Kerala to
preach.
Dear George, he said, I want you to
preach.
I hadn't done any preaching.
So I went down south of India and
I was due to preach in these conventions,
these enormous big conventions.
I prepared four messages.
I thought I'd live off that for a
week.
I was so bad.
You wouldn't believe it.
I stood up.
Frank Dietz was due to be preaching the
same night.
I preached all four messages and gave my
testimony and I was done in about 25
minutes.
But the discipline of teaching the team every
day for an hour or so after lunch,
not exactly a prepared message for all souls,
lang and place.
But, you know, if you get up, I
used to get up early, good early time,
and have a couple of hours in the
word in the morning.
And you will begin to live off your
growing knowledge of God's word as time goes
by.
I think it's unwise to be overburdened with
preaching when you are too young.
Spurgeon is an exception.
Preaching sort of Sunday by Sunday at the
age of 19.
It's good for a young man to bear
the yoke in his youth, but don't over
-preach yourself out while young.
Christ begins his preaching ministry older than many
of you.
First, get into the habit of regular disciplined
Bible study.
Let me come back to all that question
when we talk about the preparation of the
preacher.
The preparation of the message itself, you cannot
get away from time in the word.
And if you don't get very much time
in the word, then don't preach too much.
That's a good discipline.
But you're going to have to wrestle with
the Bible.
What did it mean to the writer?
How is a New Testament writer drawing on
the Old Testament?
You're going to have to read, and think,
and question what is its application today.
Turn to 2 Timothy, chapter 2, verse 7.
Paul says to young Timothy, now you consider
what I say.
You go over it.
You think about it.
You ponder what it's really getting at.
And the Lord will give the understanding in
all things.
He was inviting Timothy to be someone who
gave time to thinking, wrestling with what he,
the apostle, had been saying.
I know of a church in, well, one
or two churches now, in my own country,
Britain, where a group of people share the
preaching.
And they study together, and then one of
them will preach.
They meet on a Monday.
They will spend perhaps a couple of hours
in study, hard work Bible study.
One of them will preach then the following
Sunday.
The beginning of the next Monday's session is
an evaluation of how he got on on
Sunday.
That can be quite crucifying if the little
group is telling you how you did and
if you made a mess of it and
if the illustrations got out of control and
were too long and if you missed the
crucial point.
But they will actually be gentle because maybe
next week they're going to have to preach
and now you're sitting in the group doing
the evaluating.
But that sort of group preparation, the cut
and thrust of study and argument and what
does it really mean and how can that
be buttressed from the rest of Scripture is
very important because it takes away from the
preacher the solo performance dimension, you know.
People stand up and this is my goal.
And look at me.
If you can get into a team of
people.
I think we ought to do a lot
more talking about the Bible together and preparing
to preach together.
I've got in my own home church now
some new developments along these lines.
The entire church has been divided up into
small Bible study groups.
I don't get time to go to the
groups very often but I take the leaders
regularly at least once a fortnight and we
will have two, between two and three hours
of Bible study every fortnight and they will
then go and teach what they have been
learning in the debate, the argument, the Bible
study together.
And then when we come back we will
share how we're getting on.
I have another young man in the church
who wants to learn to preach and I've
told him that Scripture says let not many
be teachers but he still seems to want
to do it.
So sometimes when I've got to prepare a
message to go somewhere or he has, we
will do some of the preliminary grafting work
together.
That has certain advantages.
It means that it broadens the scope of
your material possibly.
It will force you to be clear in
your thinking.
It will perhaps help you to be simple
in your style.
Don't be afraid of using other people in
your preparation.
I sometimes, I mean even within recent days
I've started to draw Peter into things like
this.
I ask him, I say look I've got
to preach in such and such what would
you say?
And he'll give me a few ideas and
then I might ask him one or two
questions back and if we've got time we
could go deeper into it.
Don't, get away from this thing of me
being the sole prophet when I stand up
alone to preach.
Use friends because the act of preparation may
be valuable with them.
Of course you're going to have to do
your own praying.
You're going to have to wait on God
so that the thing can sink into your
heart and reach that rightness so that you
can bring it.
But on a team as you get on
in the work look for team preparation.
I have no doubt at all in my
mind that as Paul travelled with Timothy and
Titus Epaphroditus they used to talk about scriptures
together get things ready together and these younger
men would learn from the older.
I have a co-worker in Britain.
He wants to come and work alongside with
me.
We commit ourselves to meeting together to study.
Last year it was John's Gospel as regularly
as we can.
And we're actually preaching John's Gospel but we're
sharpening up each other's messages with our sharing
the insights.
Very, very valuable.
So if you find someone else on your
team who's got a burden for a bit
of study like that and a bit of,
maybe you both like to preach work with
them.
Get away from this notion that you've got
to go and be the prophet go away
off into the desert and get the message
and come back all blazed up.
Work together.
Now there was a question, a hand floating.
Yes, I've not been very successful.
The question is am I going to be
touching on evaluation, getting evaluation from others self
-evaluation.
It's always helpful if people do tell you
things so long as they're kind.
A good wife.
My wife can really help me.
Telling me that I'm doing things that are
unhelpful which I'm quite oblivious of.
I mean I get carried away by my
personality and she says, gently that wasn't very
good dear.
Psssshhh.
I once came down off the platform after
I'd been carrying on for about half an
hour this was really hard to take, she
said you used to be so good up
behind the microphone.
I think she was a bit angry with
me for one or two other things and
she was using the occasion to get at
me but normally she's much more constructive and
helpful.
Marry a good wife I'll talk maybe a
little bit more about that tomorrow.
But you see with itinerant ministry preaching in
different places it's much more difficult to get
evaluation because you're there once or there's just
a weekend, then you go.
If you're regularly in a church John Stoddigan
talks about this in his book he picked
two or three men whom he asked to
help him because they were seeing the fruits
of their own help and they were always
there.
John?
What struggles does one go through when talking
to the people?
There are all kinds of off-putting things.
I had I was with Peter once we
were working together in a college doing a
mission and there was a very strange couple
who it seemed to me had some unusual
even dark evil connections because as I was
trying to explain the gospel to this crowd
in the lecture theatre if ever my eyes
locked with theirs I lost concentration.
It was like a television set being jammed
and I did finish the week believing that
they were being used by the evil one
to try and hinder the work of the
week.
And so I simply blocked off in my
looking around that segment of the room and
I just never looked in that corner.
I looked at everyone else but I never
looked up there so that my eyes never
locked with them.
And it was interesting Peter was speaking in
the same place a year later or two
years later just three months ago and one
of them was there again and the same
impression.
You can get problems like that.
The funniest experience I ever had of this
kind of thing was standing in India preaching
through a translator some man that the church
had provided because my own translator within OM
was late but he wasn't very late he
arrived about five minutes after we started and
he came and sat in the middle of
the front row.
And I kept looking at his face and
he was like this and I didn't know
what was going on.
I was preaching about three different kinds of
hearts a very simple sort of evangelistic message
and I couldn't understand a word of the
language you see it was Malayalam.
I discovered afterwards that the chap beside me
paid not a shred of attention to my
message he preached his own about politics and
things like that.
And when I stopped he stopped that was
all.
And the translator of course knew that there
was no connection at all between what I
was saying and what this chap was saying.
Well that was quite off-putting.
I find people yawning and looking sleepy I
find it a challenge I try to conquer
it I usually try to get more lively
sometimes to use humour if I'm not going
to get through then I usually wind up
quickly I give up.
You know, bash on for a while and
if it's evident that we're not getting very
far if they're sleepy because it's been a
night of prayer or some other factor try
and be merciful to them.
I remember Winky Prattney came to an OM
conference some years ago he'd flown in from
the States somewhere we were all terribly tired
it was after the night of prayer we'd
gone, I don't know till three o'clock
in the morning people were pretty exhausted he
was also exhausted he was going to have
the meeting George introduced him he spoke for
two minutes and then stopped and then said
well I'm tired, you're tired why don't we
go to bed?
and the place broke out in rapturous applause
and everybody went to bed and the word
went round that this man is fresh he's
original he's not scared of George and was
there with expectancy the next night which was
tremendous you see original other problems I mean
no quite
often when I have felt so it's been
so bad I wanted to flee and the
ground opened up I have on a number
of occasions come off feeling God I'm not
going to preach ever again you're going to
have a job persuading me ever to preach
again and then the stories have come of
the blessing I mean it happened this summer
I preached and I felt that was the
worst message that an OM conference has ever
had to endure I said that was excruciating
and Peter Maiden came up to me and
said oh that was powerful you ought to
have made an appeal and got everyone to
stand up I said I don't believe you
my apprehension of it was quite wrong and
I must confess I've had occasions when I
thought oh I got them then didn't I
and my wife comes to me with criticism
and I've miscommunicated with someone else and it
hasn't worked and I've said stupid things not
aware of it I once in St Andrews
University in full floods in evangelism said to
become a Christian you don't have to be
a nun and live in a monastery you
see I didn't know what I was saying
and people were sort of sniggering all over
the place the thought of this nun living
in a monastery I just didn't you know
you sometimes come out of things there are
all sorts of struggles but your your sense
of whether you're getting through or not can
be quite unreliable there are times when I've
known and they've known that God has been
doing something unusual touches of real revival in
the meeting you know and I've almost been
shaking times when you feel almost like a
king raining from the pulpit I love them
but they're rare much more often you preach
as best you can the message that you
feel God gave you and you commit it
to him and you know that there are
going to be good and bad reactions and
it doesn't matter anyway because you did your
best that is very very common