Listening to some preachers is a veritable feast. I want to consider what it is that they do well, and why it is that people want to listen to them.
The best preachers make you strive for Christlikeness and value the great things that God is doing in his church. I examine twelve contemporary preachers in my book Excellence in Preaching: Studying the Craft of Leading Preachers: Tim Keller, John Piper, Vaughan Roberts, Simon Ponsonby, J. John, David Cook, John Ortberg, Nicky Gumbel, Rico Tice, Alistair Begg, Mark Driscoll and Mark Dever.
In this article, let’s look at the twelve things good preachers do; the requirements of excellent preaching and the ways Tim Keller’s preaching addresses cultural and philosophical challenges to the gospel.
A Composite Picture of a Good Preacher
There are twelve things good preachers do well:
1) Be aware of cultural and philosophical challenges to the gospel.
2) Inspire a passion for the glory of God.
3) Let the Bible speak with simplicity and freshness.
4) Be a Word-and-Spirit preacher.
5) Use humor and story to connect and engage, and dismantle barriers.
6) Create interest; apply well.
7) Preach with spiritual formation in mind.
8) Make much of Jesus Christ.
9) Preach with urgency and evangelistic zeal.
10) Persuade people by passionate argument from the Bible.
11) Teach with directness, challenge and relevance.
12) Preach all of the Bible to all of God’s people.
The Five Requirements of Good Preachers
To be a good preacher requires that you:
1) Be relevant and interesting, showing how the Bible applies to life today. Immerse yourself in God’s Word so that you are speaking from his and not your own agenda. Also help people appreciate that God’s agenda is controlling what you are saying.
2) Feed your congregation with the Word, but also encourage an appetite for more. Work hard to make your sermon clear, simple and memorable, using repetition, alliteration and rhetorical techniques that work for you. Use language and words as the well-sharpened tools of your trade. Communicate the importance and urgency of what you are saying, allowing it to move you and your congregation.
3) Use humor and story to reveal your humanity. Be careful to do this in a way that helps the congregation to see that you have found your joy, purpose and meaning in God.
4) Speak naturally and personally. Reveal the ways in which the message has had an impact on you individually. Don’t be bookish, but be people-ish! Don’t disconnect with people in order to prepare a sermon, but rather prepare by loving, praying for and rubbing shoulders with those people to whom you are preaching.
5) Pray. I have said almost nothing so far about prayer, and very little about the godliness and the integrated life of the preacher, concentrating instead on the act of preaching itself. But in fact none of these points will accomplish anything at all in preaching if the preacher is not himself growing as a Christian and deeply committed to preaching as a spiritual task.
Tim Keller: Preaching that Addresses Cultural and Philosophical Challenges to the Gospel
Tim Keller is a pastor in the Presbyterian Church of America. He trained at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and gained a doctor of ministry at Westminster Seminary, where he also served as professor. He and his wife, Kathy, live in New York City and have three sons.
Tim’s most significant work has been as a church planter in New York, “one of Manhattan’s most vital congregations,” according to Christianity Today, in an article examining the impressive growth of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, which began in 1989 with only fifteen people.
The current congregation of around five thousand is spread across three locations. In recent years Redeemer has hosted church-planting conferences and trained hundreds of pastors from around the world seeking to transpose some of Redeemer’s planting practice into their local context.
Tim’s sermons contain humor, but this is not mere entertainment. His style neither is flamboyant, nor is he a particularly energetic or showy preacher. His preaching demands your attention, and his sermons require concentration. But what makes Tim popular is that his preaching is so persuasive and engaging. He tackles difficult questions and leaves the congregation with a sense that those questions have profound, logical answers.
As a student in the doctor of ministry program at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, I first heard Tim teach alongside the late Ed Clowney. The classes were titled “Preaching Christ in a Postmodern World.”
Two things about those classes made a lasting impression on me. The first was the insight that all true Christian preaching had to be Christ-centered, whichever part of the Bible was turned to on any given Sunday. The unfolding of the story of God’s rescue mission, climaxing in his sending Christ as sin-bearer on the cross, is the big story and plot line of the whole Bible. This is an important hermeneutical key to Tim’s preaching.
The second insight is that the greatest need for the non-Christian and the Christian alike is the gospel. For in the gospel my greatest need is both exposed and met in Christ. The gospel is necessary, not only for my justification but also for my sanctification. This essential Christian truth, which Tim claims lies at the heart of Martin Luther’s message, cuts through the errors of both the legalist and the licentious, the “older” and the “younger brother” of
Tim repeatedly says that the gospel tells me that I am far worse, more flawed and more sinful than I imagine, and yet, simultaneously, I am more loved and accepted by God than I ever dared hope.
This critical insight enables Tim to preach to Christian and non-Christian alike, for both need the gospel.
Emerging from these foundational themes are some central features, in particular the necessity of evangelism and social action going hand in hand. At Redeemer Church they seek to “renew the city socially, spiritually and culturally.”
Tim has written several books, the most notable of which is The Reason for God. He says, “I’m a better speaker than writer, and always will be.”
Preaching to Provoke
Tim Keller’s sermons exegete the Bible, our culture and the human heart. No preacher has consistently taught me how to do all three in the context of every sermon more so than Tim Keller. I analyzed one of Tim’s sermons, titled “Who Is This Jesus?” based on
1) Maintain a sustained and substantiated argument. Tim brings together two key statements in a single thesis: “Jesus Christ is both intellectually credible and existentially satisfying.” The sermon proceeds to marshal the evidence to engage the hearer’s mind and spirit.
The emphasis of the Christian apologetic is that it is relevant because it is true, not because “it works for me.” The sermon is not argumentative; instead, it leaves the hearer little option other than to agree with the logic of the Christian’s position. As the apostle Paul has argued, “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ (
2) Read the culture and its books. Tim’s first point was taken from a study of the world’s great religions. There are only two tremendous lives: Buddha and Jesus Christ.
Both these men have had divinity ascribed to them. However, the difference between the two was that not only did Jesus Christ claim divinity but others ascribed divinity to him. By contrast, Buddha pointed away from himself, saying that he was not divine, even though others thought him so. In Jesus Christ there is a match-up between his own incredible claims about himself and the claims of his followers.
In another talk, titled “Doing Justice,” Tim urges his audience to become well-read. When you listen to and read only one thinker, you become a clone. If you listen to and read two thinkers, you will begin to develop your own voice. When you hear two or three hundred thinkers, you become wise and develop your own voice.
3) Use memorable and challenging illustrations. Tim used two particularly memorable illustrations to provoke his listeners to act on what they had heard. First he said, “There is such a thing as a placebo effect.” We know that it is possible for the mind to be persuaded through suggestion of something that is not true, but the effect is only temporary and does not result in real change. How do you know that what you think is true is not just a placebo? You need to check it out.
Second, he invites his audience to imagine two scenarios. You receive notification that the IRS owes you $100,000 dollars, or you receive a letter stating that you are a long-lost relative of the monarchy. Both claims seem incredible. But because the stakes are so high, you want to find out. The same is true of the tremendous claims of Jesus Christ. Because the stakes are so high, you will want to find out the truth.
Tim does not pepper his sermon with lots of illustrations, but these two, well-placed and memorable as they are clearly substantiate his point.
4) Preach in order to persuade. Tim acknowledges the Christian faith makes demands of people, and that it may seem to be incredible, but he argues, “It is hard to believe who [Christ] is, but it is harder not to do so.”
“You haven’t met the real Jesus if your reactions are not extreme,” he says. You will hate him, love him or fear him. He parodies C.S. Lewis’s famous “Mad, bad or God” argument.
Tim regularly returns to his central theme, that Jesus Christ is “existentially satisfying; intellectually credible.”
Dr. Stephen Um, a Boston pastor, is quoted in a New York Times article commenting on Tim Keller: “You need to enter into a person’s worldview, challenge that worldview and retell the story based on the gospel. The problem is evangelicals always have started with challenging the worldview. We don’t have any credibility.”
Tim anticipates objections and responds to them in his rhetoric. Throughout his sermon he says things such as: “Some of you think”; “Some of you are surprised”; “Some of you are saying, ‘My stereotypes have been shattered.'”
He says such things to challenge neutrality and complacency. He won’t allow the audience to be indifferent, and forces them to ask the question: What if this was true? Sermons need to persuade. But the aim isn’t mere intellectual assent, rather persuasion leading to genuine life change.
The distinctive thing about a sermon is that it is biblical teaching which is not only explained but also calls for decision and action, and is applied to the hearer. For these reasons, the forty-minute talk “Who Is This Jesus?” is better described as a sermon than a lecture.
Tim is erudite and well read, dismantling philosophical objections to Christianity. However, he does not leave his argument there but provokes the hearer to make a personal, faith-based response. This is what turns a theological lecture into a biblical sermon.
Adapted from Excellence in Preaching: Studying the Craft of Leading Preachers by Simon Vibert. Copyright(c) 2011. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515. IVPress.com.
