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 PrintableVersion What's worse - watching television or bad preaching?Television rots the brain. So says Professor Manfred Spitzer from the University of Ulm in Germany. In fact he went further to suggest that watching television contributed to the deaths of 20,000 Germans a year. Long hours of viewing contributed to deaths from obesity, high cholesterol and diabetes as well as stunting the development of children’s brains, by warping their sense of taste and smell in favour of unhealthy foods. (Study quoted by Libby Purves in The Times, February 2005.) So it seems that our obsession to live in a visual world where everything is relayed to us through a silver screen, is inadvertently sending us to an early grave. What will happen in the long run remains to be seen, but for now at least the obsession continues. Impact on biblical faithThe significance of this visual age and its impact on Bible-driven Christianity is a matter of debate. If people really are more interested in watching than listening, then what is the place of a book and the spoken word in church services, youth groups, home groups and the like? Whether our obsession with television and our disinterest in the Bible are connected remains unclear, but it is certainly true that there is an overwhelming lack of confidence in the Bible itself among Christians. Even in churches where apparently a premium is put on the preaching and teaching of the Bible, people lament the length of sermons and talk of ‘sitting through’ preaching, rather in the same way you would sit through the Queen’s speech at Christmas, knowing that when it’s finished you can get on with enjoying yourself. That the public explanation of the Bible could have any dramatic impact on our lives is a thought lost on many contemporary Christians, ministers included. It’s not only preaching which reflects this lack of confidence in the Bible. Ask an average home group or Christian Union who has read the Bible through from Genesis to Revelation, and the few who have are often too embarrassed to admit it. Time by ourselves is precious and the thought that we might spend it reading our Bibles is one we’re unlikely to talk about. We’d probably rather talk about what we saw on television. However, when I do read my Bible I discover it expects to make a difference to my Christian life. SKY and Psalm 19Take Psalm 19 for example. David begins his psalm by espousing the wonders he sees in the world around him, more specifically in the sky above. The glory of God and his creative skill are seen in every age by everyone, the sky speaks every language day and night (verses 2-3). David takes the daily path of the sun as an example. You can imagine him sat out on the veranda of his palace watching as the sun rises in the east, tracks across the sky and sets in the west. It’s like a bridegroom on his way to his wedding or a champion running, says the poet, and no one can hide from it. The surprise on first glance is that David doesn’t finish his poem there. Why carry on? If this revelation of God in the sky is so wonderful why say any more? Is it possible there’s a more vivid and effective revelation of God? (Centuries later, Paul, writing not a poem but a letter to a church in Rome, picks up this theme of God’s revelation in creation. He says again that God makes his nature clear in the world around us (Romans 1.20). Just like we can’t make anything or do anything without leaving our fingerprints all over it so God can’t make the world without showing us the kind of God he is. The greatness of his creation shouts to us about his power, the complexity of creation teaches us of his divine nature. However, the tragic problem is that we ignore what we see. We reject all that we see of God in the world he's made and dispose of any notions of his power or divinity. So strong is our desire to reject the God we see in creation, that we worship things he’s made instead (Romans 1.25).) But in Psalm 19 we see that despite the wonder of the sky and the sun we need a greater revelation of God, a revelation which will give light to our eyes where we’ve chosen darkness instead. The wonder is, according to David, that such a revelation is just what he finds in the written word of God. It revives his soul, makes the simple wise and the blind see. Needing the written wordWhen you compare the two halves of David’s psalm you see that, for all the wonder of the rising sun, it has no life-changing effect on him. He needs the written word of God to open his eyes that he might appreciate and not reject the revelation of God given in the world he made. Psalm 19 shows that we’re rather bad at the visual revelation and we need something more, something better, which is exactly what David says we have in the Bible. This theme is taken up and declared all through the Bible: from the longest psalm (119) which praises God for his word in almost every verse, to the New Testament writers who tell us that the power of God is found in the message of the cross (1 Corinthians 1.18), and that it’s through the word of truth that God chooses to give us spiritual birth (James 1.18). God-breathedThe reason for such high expectations of the word of God lies in its origin. The words of the Bible are given through human authors and written in their own style, yet are nevertheless the very words of God. He breathes them out, says Paul to Timothy (1 Timothy 3.16). So the Spirit of God takes the word he’s inspired and wields it like a sword (Ephesians 6.17), dividing and judging our hearts (Hebrews 4.12). The Bible in the hands of the Spirit who wrote it, is far from dull and irrelevant! Smoking doctors?So why has a book of such high estimation with a message of such power become so poorly valued in our churches? Or why, in churches which appear to value the Bible so highly, are these life-changing effects so rarely seen? It can’t simply be the result of television viewing. I wonder if one of the reasons is our deft skill at holding truths without seeing their implications. Like the lung cancer researcher who takes up smoking, we know things to be true but fail to see the difference it should make in practice. Two mistakesThis is particularly the danger for church ministers for whom it is substantially easier to sign an orthodox doctrinal statement on Scripture than it is to commit to explaining the Bible week on week. I know from my own experience the crisis of confidence you go through when you look out on your congregation from the pulpit, your mind scanning through some of their personal situations, then look down at your Bible opened at the passage for the morning wondering what possible use it can be. The preacher, whose sermon hangs so loosely to the passage that it’s difficult to see the point, and the preacher, who, in desperately trying (and failing) to emulate Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, gives the same four-point ‘gospel’ sermon from whatever the passage is, have both sold out to this crisis of confidence. Both think, either consciously or unconsciously, that they know better than the Bible what the congregation needs to hear. One preacher thinks the need is to contemporise the Bible to make it relevant, the other thinks the need is to hide parts of the Bible, considering them useless or peripheral. Both need to return to the Bible’s view of the Bible. Growing assumptionsLet’s be clear, the impact of these models of ministry is more than simple biblical illiteracy. Our problem is not only that people don’t know the stories of the Bible in the same way that seasoned drivers don’t know their highway code; the impact is more profound than that. Both these models of ministry leave people inoculated from the impact of Scripture. By distancing the hearer from the real message of the book we grow in them a basic assumption that the Bible has no impact. Whether this is because it seems to take bizarre and illogical footwork for the preacher to make it relevant, or because it apparently only says one thing from whatever the passage, the net result is still the same. And if this is the basic assumption about the Bible, no wonder we don’t read it on our own, teach it to our children or study it in our homegroups. The impact of bad preaching is much more serious than watching television. If followed through, the view of Scripture outlined above, and stated clearly in contemporary doctrinal statements, will drive the faithful minister to do something different from this. He will make choices of which parts of the Bible to focus on and he will teach doctrine. But the over-riding commitment will be regular and systematic explanation of Scripture, seeking like Paul to preach the whole will of God (Acts 20.27), which is a far cry from giving the same sermon every week. Hearing from GodWe’re not talking here about preaching which ignores the needs of the congregation or fails to engage with the minds and hearts of the listeners, but rather preaching, which is so passionately concerned for them that it shows a faithful understanding of the passage and its implications for the contemporary hearers. It will be driven by a belief that there is no good thing to be done by God’s people which the Bible won’t equip us for (2 Timothy 3.17), and done in a way which befits primarily the message, then the congregation and personality of the preacher. And while sometimes the preacher gets it wrong and misses the point of the passage, the conviction is always coming through that the congregation needs to hear from God and his word (not my good ideas or Christian framework). Television may rot the brain but bad preaching silences God. Stephen Palframan,
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