Preaching Ears and Eyes

One of the things that I have discovered about preaching has come through the experience of evaluating trial sermons by the seminary students here at Fuller. It is a subtle but desperately important principle. It can change and revolutionize how you approach the preaching event. What is it? Well, let me set the stage so you will know what I mean. Here are the principles:

1. Any good preacher or any preacher desiring to do well in the pulpit will spend considerable time in their study researching and exegeting the text. This involves reading the text in several translations of the Bible, sitting with books that help inform your mind about the text - such as commentaries, word study materials, and historical information - and filling up the blank pieces of paper that you have in front of you. Your time is spent in research and writing down the insights and information you find. That's the first step in producing a sermon.
2. The second step is to try and figure out how to put this mound of material into sermonic form. It is here that many preachers begin to slide off track. Too many of the students I teach and the preachers I hear seem to think that you can take the material you have on those now filled "blank" pieces of paper and put it into the sermon. Preachers cut and paste the material into several points (usually three) and find an introduction to those points and a way to conclude (well, how to do that would be another blog at some point). The results are usually less than satisfactory. Why? Because the material is in the wrong form.
3. At Fuller, the students I listen to have just come through two years of learning how to do exegesis. Most of them have learned how to do that through study of the original languages (Greek and Hebrew) and how to try and get down to the centerpiece of the text. They then put that into a paper (called an exegetical paper) and hand that into the professor for evaluation or grading. Some of them become quite proficient at this process. Then they come to the preaching task (or to Homiletics Class) and they attempt to follow the same pattern they learned in their exegetical class. Inevitably, it fails as a sermon. The reason is simple but profound. You can't write a sermon for the eye. It has to be written for the ear.

Sermons are experienced by listening to them. How you express things in writing and how you express them in speaking are not nearly the same thing. How your mind processes things verbally and how it processes things visually are totally different processes. You can do very well with the written word and very poorly with the spoken word. A great example of this is Thomas Jefferson. Without question, Jefferson is one of the greatest writers of all time. His words have inspired generations. However, he was such a poor speaker that he never personally delivered a State of the Union address or an Inaugural Address. He wrote them but never delivered them. Others read them. It was not because he was bashful. Jefferson was not a public speaker. He could write for the eye but he could not speak for the ear. They are two different specialties. Oh, how I wish more preachers understood this concept. Too many of them try to preach to the eye. Too few know how to speak to the ear.
If you want to change how you preach, begin here. Change your process of communication. Listen to the Word (don't just read it) and Preach to the Ear (not just to the printed page).