Video Transcript: Introduction to Ministry Speaking

Welcome to this short course entitled so you've been asked to speak. My name  is Bruce Ballast, and I have the privilege of leading this course for you. And I just want to give a caveat here on so you've been asked to speak. Now I'm going to  

assume here several things, one that you are somebody who's been asked  maybe to preach in your church, or maybe you've been asked to give devotions, or maybe you've been asked to lead a Bible study and be the main speaker in  that Bible study. I'm going to assume that you, in some way or another, have  been asked to speak, and this course is intended to help you put together your  talk, your sermon, your message, in such a way that it will be effective, impactful and helpful to the people to whom you speak. Now a couple of caveats about  that, and one is that I am somebody who is a preacher, and I teach preaching in  CLI and what you're going to get in this class is a small section of a much larger  course, a 36 session course that exists in CLI on preaching. And I encourage  you, if you're interested in what's here, to go there and you will learn more. But  for now, what I want to remind you of is that I am a preacher, and so much of  what I say in this class, will apply to preaching, and I'm going to refer to  preaching and sermons. However, the principles that I'm going to give you will fit in any kind of talk that you might want to give. And so with that in mind, we are  going to talk about so you've been asked to speak. Now, one thing I want you to  take note of as we begin is, of course, who's speaking to you, and so just a brief  word of introduction. First of all, I'm somebody who was in ministry for I still am,  in some respects, for 40 plus years. During that time, I got to serve three  churches as pastor, and I began to look at speaking and the art of speaking, and officially, it's known as rhetoric. Very, very early on, when I was still in seminary, I had the privilege of working with an older man who was just six months from  retirement, and he was a good preacher, and so my first Sunday working with  him in Tucson, Arizona, I got up and preached one of my seminary messages,  and then on Monday, we got together to talk about that message, and he looked  at me on Monday and with a sense of disappointment but hope, he said, You  know what? Everything you said was right biblically, it was true, he said, but  nobody was listening after the first five minutes. And talk about crushing to a  seminary student who's trying to do his best in preaching, and all of a sudden,  I've been stabbed here. I don't I don't understand what's happening. But then he said to me, Well, let's go back and reconstruct that message with the hearer in  mind. And so we did that, and we did that each week during the 10 weeks I  worked with him during the summer. That was so helpful to me, and that began  me on a set, me on a search for what is effective preaching and teaching. And  so I have read voluminously on the subject. I have practiced what I am going to  share with you and preach to you today and in this coming sessions, I have  looked at this stuff carefully to find out what is effective. Now, a caveat again,  what is effective is often what the Holy Spirit does with it, not necessarily what  you are intended to get done, but still, there are some skill, skill actions, some 

some skill secrets to know that will help you be more effective for having people  tune into when you are teaching, when you are talking somewhere. So let's  begin today by just asking the question, where do messages come from?  Messages can come from a variety of places. I guess messages may come from God. When you look back at the Old Testament, you'll find that those prophets in the Old Testament received messages from God. God said to them, now, you go and say this to the other people. And so it was a message direct from God. And  the prophets wouldn't say, I am saying this. They would say, God says this.  Jehovah, Yahweh says this. And it was a message directly from God. Now,  sometimes when you have those kind of messages. Oh, man, that is exciting. I  had that happen a few times in my life where, you know, I just felt like this was  God's message for this people at this time in this place. One of them was when I was a guest. In fact, I was at a church that was considering to calling me as  pastor and and on Saturday night at a dinner. Some people from the church,  one of the elders of the church suggested that I talk about something other than  what I had planned to in preaching. And I said, No, I can't. I said, I can't do that,  because if I do that, the people are going to be distracted and they won't listen  to the message that I've come to bring. And I have a message for this church  that I believe is direct from God. Those are great moments. Now for me, they  happen with occasional kind of frequency. They didn't happen all the time, but I  knew occasionally that I had a message from God. And so sometimes you may  have that, that you're feeling this burden and you feel like there's something you  just have to share with somebody. In fact, I'm preaching in a couple of weeks in  a church as guest pastor, and I sent in my scripture passage to the worship  director there, and my title and just a summary of my sermons so that she could  plan worship effectively. And she sent an email back saying, Whoa, this is  something says we had a woman share just two weeks ago in our church. She's a member of our church, and she was reading the same passage you've given  me to preach on and and she just said she had to share this because she felt it  was a message from God for the church. And she said, I feel like God must be  saying something if you're going to preach on that passage too. Sometimes God does that. You're reading the scriptures, you're playing something, and it's just  this overwhelming sense of, I've got to share this message. Paul says it, you  know, Woe to me if I don't preach. I'm compelled to preach because I have this  incredible message from God. So messages come from God. Secondly, we  would say that messages come from the Bible, especially if you're preaching.  This is where you will all of a sudden get a message. And we're going to talk  about some of the ways that happens. But you may be reading a passage and  you say, Whoa, that will preach, that will that will be something that will be  meaningful for people to whom I'm speaking. And so you will begin to form a  message in your mind based on what you find in the Bible. Now the Bible, if  you're preaching, should be the source of every message that you have in one 

way, shape or form. So we could say that, where do messages come from?  Well, they come from the Bible, and they come from studying the Bible and they  come from, you're looking at how God views the world from the Bible. So  messages come from the Bible. A third place they come from are what I'm going  to call connections. Where do messages come from? They're connections.  They're connections that are made in our hearts and mind. That's the picture  there in our heart that all of a sudden we have a conviction about something.  And so we say, you know this, this has to be, I have to give this message. I was  reading somebody recently who wrote a book and and it was a book that was a  basic a Bible study. But this person had been in Nepal, and had been up in the  mountains there, and had found out the reality of slavers, people who were  going and purchasing young girls for prostitution down in the main country, main  capital of the country. And her heart was so burdened that she began studying  the Bible. And so what does God say to this? What is the responsibility for my  church back in the United States? What it was a connection that was made in  her heart. Sometimes it's made in your mind. Sometimes it's connection of  something, you hear, something, you see, something, you read, maybe you  listen to a sermon or read a sermon. You say that is something that you know, in the vernacular of us preachers, we say That'll preach, that is something that'll  preach. So messages can come from all of these different sources. They are  from these places. Might come from a sermon that you've listened to or read.  You know, I read other people's sermons with quite a bit of frequency, and  sometimes I will look at that and I'll say, You know what? I know? I know that this is going to make an impact, and so I borrow it, and we're going to talk about  plagiarism at some time point here, that you can't just take somebody else's  message and use it without first checking the accuracy according to accuracy of  assigning credit where credit is due, that's what I'm trying to say. So messages  come from all of these kind of places, and we're going to look at, you know, how, when you get a message like that, what do you do with it? And so in the next  session, we're going to check that out a little more carefully on where messages  come from. But the kinds of messages that can be developed as you think about you've been asked to speak somewhere, there are basically two different kinds,  if you want more to know about that you can. Check out the class that's in  Christian leaders Institute. I believe I'm preaching where I talk about various  kinds of sermons, but we're going to look at two different kinds, two different  approaches to Scripture. And so I invite you to come back for the next session  and we'll resume this. Then. Thank you.