One Preacher about Another Preacher (Jonathan Storment)

I’m a preacher and I never read books on preaching. I’m sure there are good ones out there, but every one I’ve read makes me think I’m better suited for selling cars.

Honestly the book that helped me understand the power of words and preaching the best was “Decoded” by Jay-Z, and that’s hard to know who I can recommend that one to without having some seriously angry emails later.

So mostly I don’t read or talk about books on preaching, I just try to preach.

But after reading Tim Keller’s latest book “Preaching” I’d like to do a short series reviewing this book, talking about what I found helpful and why. And I’d also to put Keller’s work in conversation with other preachers out there. If you’re a preacher, I’d love to find out what you thought of the book, and have a kind of virtual book club with his work.

Because, and I don’t know if every preacher feels this way, but I feel like preaching every week is to do a hundred different jobs. It’s to be part academic, part mystic, part journalist, part stand-up comedian, and part chaplain.

There’s a lot of work that nobody sees, to do a short talk that lots of people see (and some don’t like). There are plenty of days when you wonder if what you’re doing is helping to make disciples. And that’s part of the reason I loved Keller’s book.

Keller isn’t one of those preachers who thinks that preaching is the most important job in the world (he also wrote a great book on vocation outside of the church) But he does believe in preaching as a unique and important calling, and reading his book helps to step back from the grind and remember just what a breathtaking vocation that we really have been called to.

So how does Keller think preachers ought to preach? I think Keller’s book breaks down preaching to 3 basic challenges. We are to preach:

1. Biblically
2. Contextually
3. Wholistically

I’ll get into the other two categories over the next few weeks, but for now I’d like to address how Keller assumes a preacher should approaches the Bible.

One of the great things about Keller’s work is that he is putting evangelical preaching approaches in dialogue with some of the more traditional mainline preaching, something the mainline preaching guru Tom Long applauds him for.

So, as an example, Keller puts Andy Stanley’s book on preaching in tension with Fred Craddock’s, while affirming and challenging both. One of the great points Keller makes is in disagreement with Andy Stanley’s view of preaching. Stanley (who I think is a great preacher), works with the assumption that we need to start with people’s felt needs and then go to the Bible to help people answer problems they are already aware of.

But Keller believes that this places too much emphasis on what people are able to know about themselves, and that if we place too much weight on what problems people are dealing with, we might never let the Bible help address the deeper problems they aren’t aware of. Here’s how he says it:

It is also wrong to think that Bible exposition can’t have a very strong focus on human need. Nearly all Bible texts do address such existential issues directly or indirectly. However, if we start with our questions and only then look to the Bible for answers, we assume that we are asking all the right questions-that we properly understand our need. However, we need not only the Bible’s prescription to our problems but also its diagnosis of them. We may even have maladies we are completely unaware of. If we don’t begin with the Bible, we will almost certainly come to superficial conclusions, having stacked the deck in favor of our biases and assumptions.

I think Keller has a point, a steady diet of topical sermon series that begin with the problem our church is facing or something going on in culture, can lead to a reactive teaching ministry. Keller preaches topically (as do I), but not primarily, Primarily, he believes that expositional Bible preaching is the best steady diet for a church.

So how does Keller think that should look?

One of the best parts of the book for me, was Keller’s description of preaching Jesus throughout the entire Bible. I’ve found when reading Keller or listening to him preach, I often don’t agree with his basic starting points, but I almost never disagree with where he ends up.

Keller has found a way to preach Jesus from every text of the Bible. And if you’ve ever listened to him preach, you know he is smoking what he is selling here. Every sermon for Keller, no matter if he’s coming out of Habbukuk, Jonah or Jude, comes back to Jesus. And his reasoning I find compelling.

First, he says, if you are going to preach a Bible story you’ve got to put it in the broader Biblical story. Otherwise you find yourself preaching about David & Goliath as an example for how we need to rise up and “fight the giants in our own life” But in the context of that story, the point was that the Israelites could not fight the giants on their own. And when God does deliver them, it is through the weakness of God defeating the strength of the world.

Which sounds a lot like Jesus.

To be sure, Keller thinks that every text must be dealt with on it’s own first. He acknowledges that preachers can rush to Jesus too quickly. And when we do that we rob each text of it’s power, the Jesus we preach sounds the same from week to week, instead of the actual “resolution of the climax for the particular theological theme and the answer to the specific practical problem.”

But there are two ways to read the Bible, Keller says, “Is it basically about me, or is basically about Jesus?

And Keller’s most compelling reason for why we should preach Christ from every text is because that’s how the earliest Christians preached it.

The earliest Christians, starting with Paul and Matthew, saw Jesus behind every rock in the Exodus story and every strangely veiled prophecy that sounded even remotely like it could be about Him.

They preached Jesus according to the Scriptures they had, and Keller thinks we must do so today as well. Not just because it’s good preaching, but because it’s true.

Here’s how he says it:

Jesus is the hope of the patriarchs. He’s the angel of the LORD… He’s the rock of Moses. He’s the fulfiller of the law-both the ceremonial law, because he makes us clean in him, and the moral law, because he earns the blessing through his perfectly righteous life. He’s the final temple…He’s the commander of the Lord’s host. He’s the true King of Israel… he’s the true Israel. He is the promised King, the suffering servant, and the world healer. He is the true wisdom of God…He is the judge all judges point to (since he truly administers justice), the prophet all the prophets point to (since he really shows us the truth), the priests all the priests point to (since he truly brings us to God) and the King of Kings.

That’ll preach.

Have you read Keller’s book? What did you think of this first section?