Praying Through the Sermon: Five Gates of Prayer

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

To say that preachers ought to pray seems so obvious that it barely needs to be stated. I can’t think of any preacher I have known who didn’t pray in connection with the task. Likewise, trying to give preachers advice on how to pray for the sermon feels a little like trying to teach Grandma how to make cookies. J. C. Ryle was right when he called prayer “the simplest act in all religion.” Prayer isn’t brain surgery. “It is simply speaking to God,” Ryle explains. “It needs neither learning, nor wisdom, nor book-knowledge to begin it.” If you want to pray, just tell God what you have to say. It is as simple as that.

Except that it isn’t. Or perhaps I should say that the actual practice itself is not always easy. Not even for those of us who are professionals in the discipline. If praying were easy, there wouldn’t be so many books on the subject. Neither would there be the plethora of methods, strategies, traditions, and even apps meant to harness our energies and get us talking.

An Extended Conversation

Even the most accomplished at praying can still be susceptible to the usual obstacles, such as busyness, distraction, and discouragement. Our most common frustrations seem to result from a combination of time and practice. We do not think that we pray enough. However, if we accept Ryle’s simple definition – that prayer is merely speaking to God – we are probably praying more than we think.

The church tends to organize its prayer life into set hours and stated times. However, for most, it is more of a running conversation that occurs in various contexts, the majority of which are informal. When it comes to the sermon, preachers usually focus on three temporal points: praying at the beginning of their study, at the start of the actual preaching, and then after it has been preached. These prayers are sometimes formal, occasionally even rote, but that does not necessarily make them mere formalities.

“We may find that we are praying more than we realize and in ways that we are not even aware.”

Yet, I think our prayers for the sermon are even more extensive than this. If we focus on the nature of our interaction rather than specific points in time, we may find that we are praying more than we realize and in ways that we are not even aware of. During our preparation and delivery of the ordinary sermon, we pass through at least five gates of prayer.

What separates one from another is tied to the complex nature of the preacher’s task, one that involves listening as much as speaking. We pray for ourselves, the sermon, and the congregation. Our praying extends across the entire span of the sermonic event, from preparation to proclamation and even beyond.

The Gate of Self-Understanding

The first gate we pass through is one of self-awareness. Prayer is a statement directed at God, but it is an act of attention first. Obviously, we must focus our attention on God when we pray. However, all good praying is an exercise in self-awareness as much as it is an effort to be attentive to God. We often find this perspective in the Psalms.

They are much more than grocery lists of personal requests. They include all the things we would expect of prayers: praise, petitions, and lament. But there are also statements of deep personal reflection, spiritual analysis, and self–talk. The Psalms reveal that prayer is often a conversation we have with ourselves as much as a conversation with God.

Sermon preparation begins not with a prayer for the right words but with a prayer for understanding. As preachers, we are interested in knowing what the text says and what the author meant by it. But we tend to be primarily concerned with our own words. We want to know what we will say about it to our audience. Indeed, we often view this as the essence of sermon formulation. This one-sided perspective may cause us to lose sight not only of the congregation but also of ourselves.

Phillips Brooks famously defined preaching as the communication of truth through personality. He was not referring to the quirks or mannerisms we usually associate with personality, but to the expression of truth after it has been processed through personal experience. As Brooks explains, this is a message that is transmitted after “it has entered into our own experience, and we can give our own testimony of its spiritual power.”

Consequently, the most important prayer for the sermon may not be the one we utter when we step up to preach. Instead, it is when the preacher prays in the spirit of Jacob, who wrestled with the angel of the Lord. Like the patriarch, the preacher takes hold of the text and vows, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” I do not believe that anyone is prepared to preach on a text until it has hobbled them in some way.

“I do not believe that anyone is prepared to preach on a text until it has hobbled them in some way.”

This prayer is not a single plea. It is an ongoing discussion with God during which we reflect on more than the exegetical details of the text and the historical background of the passage. This extended self-reflection is carried out with the help of the Holy Spirit. It expresses our honest response to the text as we struggle with its truth and wrestle with God over its implications. Jesus’ disciples often asked the Savior to explain himself. Sometimes, they even challenged his teaching (Matt. 15:12; 16:22).

The Gate of Compassion

As preachers, we are accustomed to seeing ourselves as God’s messengers. We speak on behalf of God. This is certainly true, but it is not the whole story. Like the priests of old, we also act as advocates on behalf of those who hear us. Therefore, we take our stand with them as we listen to the truth of the text. We attempt to view it through the eyes of our audience and ask the questions that they would ask of the passage and of themselves.

We are not merely studying the text to have something to say. We are studying it from the perspective of our listeners so that we may listen to the text on their behalf. We are not listening as experts in the field but as fellow travelers who need to hear the truth of the text as much as the audience does. Consequently, the second gate through which we must pass is the gate of compassion.

“We are not listening as experts in the field but as fellow travelers who need to hear the truth of the text as much as the audience does.”

This kind of praying is an internal dialogue that begins by asking God to open our eyes to see the audience so that we can identify with them and preach with sympathy. We would like to pray in a way that enables us to come to the congregation as Moses did, down from the mountain with our faces filled with glory. But Thomas Long notes that the sermon’s true trajectory moves in a different direction: “Whether we have been praying, talking, teaching, preparing, or listening, we have been immersed in the lives of these people to whom we will speak, which is another way of saying that, symbolically at least, we rise to the pulpit from the pew.” Preaching is more than simply restating the truth of the text. The sermon is an address that we have carefully and sympathetically crafted for a particular audience.

The Gate of Structure

The message is tailored for a specific audience in a particular life situation, but we must also consider its shape. Sermon structure may seem like a purely mechanical matter. We don’t usually think of it as something we should pray about. In fact, sometimes we don’t think about it at all. After identifying the point of the text, we simply plug it into a generic template, and the sermon comes out.

It is no easy task to align the sermon’s thoughts with the passage’s truth and the audience’s life situation. It is a process of experimentation where we consider multiple options, reject them, and plead with God to show us the one that fits. I have found that God’s answer does not come audibly or even easily. My experience is more of a fumbling exploration than a simple matter of responding to divine dictation. I would compare it to the trial and error that Paul seems to have engaged in during the journey that eventually led him to Macedonia (Acts 16:6–10). I try one path and find that it leads nowhere. I try another, only to abandon it.

Frankly, it often feels as if I am doing all the work. Yet, there always comes a point when I see a path in front of me that seems to fit both the text and the audience. It is the struggle that encourages me to think that God has helped me to find it.

The Gate of Power

Preachers pray for anointing when they begin to deliver the sermon. This is a prayer for empowerment. The term is biblical. In Scripture, anointing has ritual and theological significance. It is associated with the Holy Spirit’s ministry. However, the answer to the question of precisely what constitutes anointing seems somewhat vague.

Is it a concrete feeling or an imperceptible force? Is anointing a static quality that resides within the preacher and the sermon itself? Or is it something that is fluid, intermittent, and unpredictable? Some of the confusion we feel stems from theological convictions that place primary emphasis on either the human or the divine side of the experience.

Those who emphasize the human side tend to view the power of the sermon as a combined function of rhetorical factors inherent in the message as well as personal and spiritual qualities possessed by the messenger. Those who stress the divine are convinced that the power of the sermon depends entirely upon God.

“The fact that preachers on both sides of the theological continuum pray for anointing demonstrates that we all recognize where the true source of power in the sermon resides.”

Interestingly, when John speaks of anointing in connection with the ministry of the word, he attributes it to God but locates it within his audience, describing it as something that “remains in you.” John seems to describe the effect of anointing in cognitive rather than emotional terms when he says that “his anointing teaches you about all things” (1 John 2:27).

Divine power and human effort are not necessarily incompatible. The fact that preachers on both sides of the theological continuum pray for anointing demonstrates that we all recognize where the true source of power in the sermon resides. Where spiritual power is concerned, it is our privilege to ask but not to control.

The Gate of Resignation

This fact brings us to the fifth gate of prayer in connection with the sermon. It is the gate of resignation. These are the conversations we have with God after the sermon has been preached. In practice, it often begins at the close of the sermon. However, it probably should not end there. I often brood about the message after it is over, comparing the experience with my expectations. The contrast is not always a happy one. Even when I am pleased with the result, I cannot always be sure that it means I have preached a “good” sermon.

There is too much about what happens next that lies outside my control. The real work that God is doing through the sermon is not confined to the few minutes I spent preaching it. So, my prayer about the sermon after it has been preached is more than an after-action report asking God to help me do better next time. It is a prayer asking God to continue the conversation with my audience in ways that I cannot see or hear. It is also a dialogue about what needs to be said next and why.

When we pass through the gate of resignation, we relinquish the illusion that we are in control and abandon ourselves to what Martyn Lloyd-Jones has described as the “romance” of preaching. “We do not control the situation; this is of God,” Lloyd-Jones observed in Preaching and Preachers. “This is where the romance comes in; you have no idea what you are doing.” Prayer plays a significant role in this romance. We all know how to pray. But we do not necessarily know what we are doing.

This Empire of Ruins

May 22, 2013May 22, 2013 ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

The images coming out of Oklahoma City are so painful to see that it is hard to say anything about them without somehow trivializing the tragedy. It seems better to hear from someone who has lived through a comparable experience. I was reminded of a passage from Helmut Thielicke’s series of sermons based on the Lord’s Prayer. Thielicke was a Lutheran pastor who preached these sermons to his congregation in Stuttgart, Germany during the collapse of the Third Reich and as allied bombs rained down on the city.

In the sermon based on the phrase “Thy Kingdom come,” Thielicke writes:

When we, inhabitants of a severely damaged city, walk through a flourishing undamaged section, almost involuntarily our eyes perform a little trick upon us and suddenly the intact facades are transformed into horribly mutilated walls and horror dwells behind the bleak and empty windows. We know what a house looks like beneath its sleek surface, and it is shockingly easy for our imagination to produce this little inversion in which the order system of beams are seen as a chaotic confusion of bizarre and splintered fragments of wood. Again and again the face of death peers out from behind the features of the living, and the shadow of ruins leers at us from the ordered peace of respectable homes…In this world of death, in this empire of ruins and shell torn fields we pray: “Thy kingdom come! We pray it more than ever.”

In his sermon, Thielicke goes on to say that God’s kingdom is to be sought at the point where two lines of the Bible intersect. One is the descending line of divine judgment. This rarely consists in God’s destroying offenders with a thunderbolt from heaven but rather in leaving them to their own wretchedness. “There is nothing more terrible than the man who is left to himself,” Thielicke observes.

The other line is the ascending line of God’s kingdom. This is not a matter of evolution, human development, or the gradual Christianization of the world. Rather, it is a mysterious exercise of God’s dominion which is simultaneous with and contiguous to the other. Thielicke explains, “The manifestations of God’s will are emerging ever more clearly and conclusively in the very midst of decline and decay, and God’s sovereignty rules in power above all rebels and usurpers, bringing his great and ultimate plans for the world to fulfillment.”

This is as true of those natural events which shake the foundations of our world as it is of human affairs. Jesus is the one of whom the disciples said, “the wind and the sea obey Him” (Mark 4:41). Perhaps it is not so surprising that instead of being comforted by such a thought, they were filled with fear. Jesus controls the winds. He is the living one who died and is alive forevermore. He alone holds the keys to death and the grave (Rev. 1:18).

Worship’s Dull Surprise

November 28, 2010November 28, 2010 ~ John Koessler ~ 2 Comments

In a new book about creating sermons based on hymns, music and poetry, Thomas Troeger observes that today’s church suffers from an imagination deficit. Troeger notes that “the starved imagination of the church and the resultant drought in the soul have driven many people from the community of faith.” He cites Fred Craddock’s observation that many parishioners “are not so much evil as they are bored, and their entire Christian experience has never provided them a chair in which to sit for an hour in the heavenly places with Christ.”

Troeger’s assessment agrees with my experience. In my thirty-seven years of serious attendance at worship, I have come to the sad conclusion that church is the location least suited to the contemplation of the heavenly places. The predominant temper of my experience in church has been one of boredom. Worship is for the most part dull. There have been exceptions, of course, rare moments when some hymn or song transports me into the heavenly realms. Or when the word of God causes the scales to fall from my eyes and I see God’s truth or myself in a way I have never seen before. But those moments seem few and far between.

It does not help that all the church has to offer worshipers these days is a boilerplate experience. Overly familiar songs and chatty sermons are served up with the monotonous homogeny of a fast-food franchise. The music of worship is Christian “top-forty.” The observations from scripture are trite and garnished with cute stories from the margins of Reader’s Digest. It is a corporate experience that at best promises to be mildly interesting but it hardly ever offers a taste of the transcendent.

Looking back on my experience, I suppose this boredom was one of the primary factors that propelled me into ministry. I am rarely bored when I am the one doing the preaching. Unfortunately, the same cannot be so said of my listeners. Time and again as I have been held fast by the grip of my own words, I have looked out over the congregation with an unsettling awareness that I do not have their undivided attention. They look bored. As bored as I must look when I am seated among them.

As long I am the one doing the preaching, I am tempted to blame the congregation for their boredom and for good reason. Listening, like reading, requires focused attention, and not everyone is willing to pay the price. But on those Sundays when I return to the other side of the pulpit as a listener and participant, the old ennui comves over me and I do not know who to blame. Indeed, blame is the farthest thing from my mind. On those Sundays when I am not the one doing the preaching, I take my place in the pew beside my fellow worshippers. I turn my gaze toward the front and wait. I am waiting for the music of worship to give me a glimpse of the heavenly realms. I am waiting for the word of God to arouse me from my slumber like a lover’s kiss. I am waiting for God to show up.

Thomas Troeger’s book is entitled Wonder Reborn: Creating Sermons on Hymns, Music and Poetry (Oxford). http://books.google.com/books?id=ZXHp2AL_qIAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=wonder+reborn+troeger&source=bl&ots=qCAa2TIL8C&sig=QKUfKEYo-D7xvm86J4yrYRlQdPM&hl=en&ei=5HXyTNHyAYKhnAf5kJijCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Fear and Loathing in Deerfield

October 19, 2010 ~ John Koessler ~ 2 Comments

Last week the Evangelical Homiletics Society (http://www.ehomiletics.com/) held its annual meeting at Trinity International University. I don’t attend the EHS conference as often as I should, partly because they meet at a difficult time in the semester and partly because I don’t enjoy traveling (probably more the latter than the former).

This year, however, I not only attended, I presented a paper entitled “Prophet, Priest or Stand-Up Comedian? The Priestly Role of the Sermon.” The environment of the EHS is wonderfully supportive, not at all like some other meetings where academics gather. Perhaps this is because the EHS isn’t made up solely of academics. It is a society of preachers. The atmosphere is collegial and the attendees are interested and encouraging.

Still, I found the experience unnerving. I finished feeling a great sense of ambivalence, torn between a desire to run away and hide in shame and a compulsion to stand at the door with a sheepish grin in a desperate bid for compliments. I walked away promising myself that I would “never try that again.”

But then, if you ever done any preaching, you know exactly how I felt. It’s pretty much the same after every sermon. I finish the message feeling a curious mixture of relief, self-loathing and insecurity. Basically, preaching is like being in the 8^th grade…FOREVER. Lately I’ve been thinking about giving it up. But I doubt that would make me feel any better.

One of my former students has started a Facebook group devoted to discussing matters related to preaching. Sounds like fun! Check it out at http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Biblical-Exposition-MBI/136375829745690

Ten Challenges Pastors Face-Challenge #9: Preaching Beyond Our Experience

September 21, 2010 ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

I once heard a pastor lament, “My prayer is better than my preaching and my preaching is better than my life.” One of the great challenges of the pulpit is that of preaching beyond our experience. We are the first to feel the sting of the sermon’s reproach. In preaching against the sins of others, we censure ourselves. This is not hypocrisy. Those preach to others must preach to themselves first (Ro. 2:21; 1 Cor. 9:27).

Preaching also takes me beyond my own experience because by it I offer hope for those whose sin or suffering may exceed my own. I do not have to have personally experienced all that those who hear me have experienced in order to speak with authority about their situation. I do not need to become an alcoholic to offer hope to the alcoholic or an adulterer to speak with authority to the adulterer. Jesus has already “been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15). The word of hope that I have to offer is based on his experience not my own.

One obvious implication of this challenge is that those who preach must do so with humility. We do not speak as those who have mastered all the disciplines of grace. There may be many in the congregation who are further along in their walk with God than we are. But we need to be just as wary of exaggerating our sins for the sake of credibility as we are of exaggerating our victories. We do not preach ourselves but Christ. It is God’s word not our personal experience that is the standard by which others should measure themselves.

Ten Challenges Pastors Face-Challenge #8: Prophet or Priest?

September 15, 2010September 20, 2010 ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

I first felt a calling to preach when I was in my teens. To my surprise my mother, who was not a church going woman, beamed with pride when I told her about my intention. “Oh, Johnny,” she gushed, “you’d make a darling minister.” I did not want to mouth poetry in a clergyman’s tame frock. Camel’s hair and thundering declamation were more my style. I aspired to the prophet’s mantle.

The parallel between the preacher and the prophet is obvious. But prophet is not the only metaphor that should shape our pulpit ministry. There is also a priestly dimension. Priests, like prophets, exercised a ministry of God’s word (Lev. 10:11). The priest, however, differed from the prophet because he shouldered an additional burden, serving as the people’s advocate. Priests were not only “selected from among men” but were “appointed to represent them” (Heb. 5:1).

Like the priest, the preacher does not stand apart from those who hear but is called from among them in order to sympathize with them. Whenever we take our place before God’s people to declare his word, we also take upon ourselves this responsibility advocacy. We may stand above or before the congregation in order to be seen or for the sake of acoustics, but our true location is in their midst. We speak to the people but we are also for them.

The key to priestly advocacy is identification. This means that the priest/preacher functions as a kind of mediator, standing between the text and the congregation and listening to the word of God on their behalf. The prophetic nature of preaching gives us authority to make demands of the listener. But it is the priestly nature of preaching obligates us to make demands of the text. It compels us to take our cue from the patriarchs, the psalms and the apostles, as well as from the prophets, and ask God to justify himself: Will not the judge of the earth do right? How long, O Lord? Why have you afflicted us?

Our priestly responsiblity compels us to give voice to the silent questions that plague our listeners. Our prophetic obligation means that we will refuse to smooth out the sharp edges of the text. These two dimensions work in harmony.

Challenges Pastors Face-Challenge #2: Routine

August 23, 2010 ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

Pastoral work is cyclical work. It is work which is marked by rhythm and repetition. There is the weekly cycle of sermon preparation. It doesn’t matter how well the sermon went on Sunday. When Monday comes, the process must begin again. The better the message, the greater the pressure we feel to repeat the experience. As much as we love sermon preparation, even the best of us must sometimes feel as if we are on a treadmill. Sunday night leaves many a pastor dreading the approach of a new work week just like the factory worker or office employee.

Our ministry of leadership is also cyclical, subject to the ebb and flow of life within the church. Every congregation has its own seasons. In some churches summer is the time when things slow down. Attendance dips and committees or programs go on hiatus as members leave for vacation. In other churches summer is the busy season. This rhythm of congregational life can frustrate a pastor whose planning cycle and expectations are out of sync with the rhythm of the church. Ignorance of this aspect of the church’s culture is a recipe for misunderstanding and mutual frustration.

On the surface you might wonder how pastoral counseling could ever feel routine. The church is filled with a variety of people whose background and circumstances differ from one another. Yet after a few years we discover that even when the faces and the names change, the problems are the same. We must confront the same sins. We are asked the same questions. Our preaching, too, begins to feel monotonous as the a few fundamental themes resurface in passage after passage. Or as the same holidays demand our attention year after year. It doesn’t take long before we begin to feel that we have only a handful of sermons and that we preach them over and over again.

Our first step to addressing this challenge must be to recognize the value of rhythm and repetition in the life of the church. Repetition is a necessary to growth and learning. Rhythm and repetition are evident in nearly every aspect of created life. We live in a world marked by the returning rhythm of work and rest, seed-time and harvest as well, as the need to hear the same things over and over again. It is only our frenetic leadership culture, afflicted as it is with the spiritual equivalent to attention deficit disorder, that sees these things as a detriment.

On Preachers and Preaching-Inflecting the Text

April 14, 2010 ~ John Koessler ~ 2 Comments

Preaching is an exercise in inflection, one that involves much more than pitch, volume and tone. In the sermon the preacher makes God’s written word incarnate by speaking the biblical author’s words into the contemporary context. This is an inflection not merely of the preacher’s voice but of the text itself. The task of inflection places a dual responsibility upon the preacher. One area of responsibility is to the text itself.

The preacher’s aim in the sermon is to animate the text without altering it. The written word has been detached from its original context but is not freed from it. We who preach must speak to circumstances that the biblical writers did not originally envision. But this does not give us liberty to wrest the Scriptures from their original context and make them say whatever we please.

The other area of responsibility involves the audience. An uninflected text is a dead text as far as the listener is concerned. “Somehow or other, every other agency dealing with the public recognizes that contact with the actual life of the auditor is the one place to begin” Harry Emerson Fosdick chided. “Only the preacher proceeds still upon the idea that folk come to church desperately anxious to discover what happened to the Jebusites.” Fosdick’s point has been heeded, perhaps too well, by contemporary preachers. But this does not make his assessment less true.

Inflecting the text requires application and application is local in nature. Despite this, preaching cannot afford to ignore what happened to the Jebusites any more than it can afford to overlook those who are actually present. A sermon which focuses only on the concerns of the contemporary audience and pays no attention to the historical and literary context of Scripture also removes the biblical text from its living voice. Such preaching co-opts the text instead of inflecting it, turning the living and active word into a ventriloquist’s dummy, a caricature whose hollow voice merely echoes the preacher’s own (or that of the audience).

Question: Do you think the preacher is important to the sermon? Why or why not?