Odds and Ends
Introduction
Well, first let me say a very hearty congratulations, you have almost finished your first year with Teesocs and you’ve survived, well done!
Secondly I wanted to compliment you on the hard work you have put in to not only doing your homework but also committing yourselves to coming each month over the last year. I trust you have found it helpful and you’re looking forward to next year.
We’ve got a break now for the summer but we resume in September at Hardwick.
Now for the last of the lectures on teaching and preaching I want to talk about one or two practical matters that don’t easily fit under any of the other things we have looked at.
Use of Commentaries
I’ve briefly touched on this subject in a couple of the other lectures but I want to spend a little bit more time this morning explaining how we might use commentaries.
Firstly let me say a little bit about what Commentaries are useful for. Commentaries are primarily of help when it comes to understanding the meaning of the text. Our job when we are teaching the Bible in whatever context we teach in is to pass on what the Bible says not simply what we think. Now this is not as bad a deal as you might think. Just remember that the Bible is much more profound and wise and clever than you are. I know that’s an obvious thing to say but you need to remember it because your job is not to dazzle people with how clever you are but rather to pass on God’s wisdom and God’s assessment of the world and us within that world. Be encouraged that if you do the work of sticking with what the Bible says and then passing that on faithfully to the people who are listening then you will be a million times more profound than if you try and dazzle them with your own insights into living.
People are fed and grow as the word is taught to them, it is the word of God that produces the crop, it is the word of God that grows into a great tree, it is the word of God that does the work.
So when I am trying to be faithful in understanding what the Bible is saying then commentaries do play a vital role in helping me to see things I have missed and keeping me on track and away from dangerous cul-de-sacs.
Do your work first. Tackle the words and the structure of the passage. Use the tools that you already have and some of the others that are listed in “Dig Deeper” and “How to read the Bible for all its worth”, wrestle with the text and think it through, then when you go the commentaries you are in a much better position to know what they are saying and why perhaps they differ from one another.
Remember Difs and Dibs? Difs and dibs are the questions I am going to the commentaries to find help with. I can’t very well go to the commentaries to get help unless I know what I particularly need help with.
What I am saying is don’t go the lazy man’s route of simply going to a commentary and using that to give you the outline for your talk. It just may be that the structure to the passage you have come up with is sharper than the commentary, and it will certainly mean that you will be able to have a more informed “discussion” with the commentary if you have thought about the text first.
Which Commentaries
Let me say something about commentary series:
When I was growing up I spent my pocket money each week on buying banner series of commentaries by Wilson. I guess I was about 12 when I started collecting them and I remember two things about them very much:
1. The lady who ran the book stall at church was amazed that such a young boy was so interested in Bible commentaries.
2. They looked really good on my shelf as I built up the collection and had all the different colours matching.
The truth is that I wasn’t a godly young boy who wanted to dig deeper into God’s word, I simply liked the look of the books of my shelf and the idea that I was spending my money on something that may possibly make people think I was clever and godly.
I suspect that many people by sets of commentaries for the same reasons, it’s nice to have a collection on the shelf and it’s impressive for other people to see. But the problem with commentary series is that they are almost always uneven. That is to say that you end up with some volumes in the series that are outstanding and really helpful and others that are just shelf fillers.
By all means buy a series if you must but don’t think that they will all be useful to you.
The IVP Bible speaks today series, the Welwyn series, the Focus on the Bible Series are all good series and I use them happily but even those are not as even as some people suggest.
Rather than concentrating on series let me suggest another way to buy commentaries.
When I was training we were given a rough old photocopied handout of recommended commentaries that we could refer to as we were building up our libraries. So when I start preaching on a book I used to consult that list and buy two or three commentaries from the list which were highly recommended and then I would have some faithful and stimulating material to help me with my prep.
The sheet divided commentaries up into two rough categories, technical and devotional. When I am preaching on a book I reckon to read at least two commentaries as I am working through the book and make the two one of each category. So I will try and get a good technical commentary on a book and then along side that I will also read a good devotional commentary so I get ideas for application.
A good technical commentary is one that is at my level, so if I don’t have any Greek or Hebrew then a commentary that uses a lot of original language quotes may not be helpful. But I do certainly want a commentary that will explain to me the form and structure, grammar and syntax and tell me the difficult sections and give me the different views on them.
My devotional commentary may do some of that too but I am more interested with this type of commentary in a book that will speak to my heart rather than simply my head, where the author has already done the head work but keeps that working out to a minimum and instead makes wise and sensible applications from the passage into today’s world.
How do you choose which commentaries to buy (they are after all very expensive)? Well a good place to start is with your pastor if you have one. It’s a great way to kick off an interesting discussion and it may be that you will encourage him to dig his commentaries out again and have a fresh look at them.
So ask him which commentaries or books he has found helpful on… whatever.
Next stop is to borrow or get hold of these two books:
New Testament Commentary Survey by DA Carson
ISBN 0-852111-196-3
And
Old Testament Commentary Survey by Tremper Longman
ISBN-10: 0801031230
They will be a great help in giving a rough analysis of a commentary and then you can make a wiser decision about how to spend your well earned cash.
Next to your Bible a good set of commentaries is probably the most useful tool you can have in your library.
Secondly:
On Listening to Sermons
My advice here is to be careful and in general listen to sermons after you have worked out your outline, theme and aim sentences and done the commentary work. Better still listen to them after you have written the talk. You see the problem with listening to other people speaking is that sometimes they are so good that no matter how hard you try you just cant think of a better way to do it so it becomes a re-run of someone else’s material and sadly often an inferior re-run.
If preaching is truth through personality then part of the way we express our personality it by speaking in the way that we do, by putting the talk together in a way that we would put the talk together and even if that’s not as eloquent or clever as our favourite preacher then that doesn’t matter, what matters is that we communicate it in faithfully as ourselves not pretending to be someone else.
Things have changed in the last few years; there is no a mountain of material available on the internet that is readily available and very helpful to listen to.
UCCF have a great stack of recordings freely available from their conferences and in-house training. All Souls Lanham Place have a vast back catalogue of sermons on line for free, as does John Piper, Tim Keller and others too. Sermonaudio.com boasts that they have nearly 200,000 sermons online that you can listen to for free and I have no doubt there are others I don’t know of. One needs to be sensible with time of course, it takes time to write a talk and you can’t spend all that time listening to online sermons but they are a useful resource if you have access to the internet.
Feedback Junkies
There are two extremes it seems to me when it comes to feedback on sermons and talks. The one extreme is the person who is so convinced that they have a ministry from God that they will not listen to any advice or criticism no matter how kind and wise it is.
This is the church age prophet who speaks from God and if you disagree with him you are actually disagreeing with God himself.
The other extreme is the person who has become so obsessed with what others think of them and so deeply committed to self analysis that every little comment that people make either lifts them to the heavens or sends them crashing down into the depths of despair.
It’s what a friend of mine calls being a “feedback junkie” you end up desperate after each and every talk to find out what people think.
I suspect the wiser course is to be somewhere in the middle; to recognise that we all make mistakes, that sometimes we get it wrong and present things in an unhelpful way and so need to be challenged and sharpened in the way that we do our teaching.
I would suggest that you find someone who you respect and who is wise that can help you think through what you are saying and perhaps suggest things to improve what was said and the way it was said.
Heat and Light Forms:
During our preaching classes at Cornhill we had to fill in heat and light forms that assessed both the truth of what was being communicated – the light and also the passion with which it was passed on – the heat.
EMA – light is not as important as life.
False distinction – logic on fire
Maybe it would be good if you are doing some speaking to ask a friend to work through a heat and light form or something similar and discuss what you said and how you said it.
Preparation of One’s Self
I lay awake in the middle of the night last night thinking about this morning and realised that I hadn’t said something about the one thing I wish I had had more help with at Proctrust.
Pray
Start
During prep
Before preaching or teach
AFTER you have spoken, work not over
Preach the Sermon to yourself
Covering:
Commentaries and self preparation
Notes File: Full Notes
Audio File: Lecture 10
