I can tell when I am hearing a sermon on a doctrine that the speaker hasn’t experienced firsthand. It’s not that he’s lying. He himself does not realize; he believes that when he lays out a homiletically top-rate teaching, he has done all there is to do.
The sermon, as it leaves his lips, makes a hollow sound on the ears of the congregation, but no one realizes that either. It is homiletically top-rate and three-pointed. They know they should appreciate it if they are spiritual, so they believe they have been well-served. They say, “It was a good sermon.” If this goes on Sunday after Sunday, a vague melancholy sets in unawares.
A gap between theology and reality widens, and something fascinating occurs: The most doltish man in the pew becomes a linguistic sophisticate. Abstract exhortations to “joy” or “reigning in life” from the pulpit are transposed on impact from their common meanings to a different category of meaning, what Francis Schaeffer might call “upper story” thinking.
But when the pastor is a man who has pressed into believing God’s promises in the morning, and at noon, and in the afternoon, and when he meets us at week’s end to report the concrete faithfulness of God on his spiritual living, the hearers—and language itself—are revived.
HT: David Sunday
