Video Transcript: Session 8 Topical Preaching

So welcome back to preacher preparation presentation, a class on making and preaching sermons. This is session eight, we are in this part of the class, which calls talks about preparing to preach. Now, I hope the last session was helpful to you. As we went through the last two sessions, you know, we tried to look at exegesis and saying, what does that look like to look at a passage historically, and in looking at the literary issues and looking at the canonical or other scripture issues and apply, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? And you gain a lot of material? And then you've got to do a message? How did the to connect? I gave you one example of how that might work. Generally speaking, you can't use everything you find out. When you're doing exegesis. You'll have more information than you could do. But there's another step. And we're going to look at that in detail later going from exegesis to sermon. And that is the reading your audience, and what do they need? And what do they want. And so, so we're gonna look at more of that later. But right now, we're just talking about preparing to preach. Today, I want to look at another subject. You remember a few sessions ago, I we just started this definition process and had Francis Chan define exegesis for you as, as taking it out of the scriptures, our message comes out of the scriptures, we want to find out what God said back then, to those people. And we take that out, and then we apply it to today. So it's God's voice that's being heard. And, and then he also defined eisegesis as coming out from outside the Bible into the Bible to try to find a message or a lesson there. Now, he called that eisegesis, that's a word that that we looked at a little bit. Now. One way of eisegesis, that is, okay, I think not to be condemned is what we call topical preaching. That is where you find a topic. Let's look at the some of the definitions for it. Sometimes it's called free text preaching. In other words, it's not bound to this text. But you know, this particular passage in the Bible, but you can look all over the Bible. So it's kind of a free roaming, examination of what the Bible says about a particular issue about a particular place at a particular time. And so you can go anywhere, and that sometimes is called synthetic outlining, which means the outline doesn't come from the Bible. It doesn't come from what this main point is of this passage, but it comes from outside, it's, it's made up, we make it up as preachers. Now, there are those, such as Francis Chan, who are very, very critical of this system, but it can be worth it topical preaching can be done very well. And it can be done in a way that is true to the scriptures, true to the heart and the mind and the life of God. And it can be effective in the life of your congregation, or to whomever you preach. So what is it, Michael Duduit, Interesting person, he was the founder of preacher magazine, he's been the founder of some online preaching stuff. He's written several books on preaching. This is what he defines as topical preaching. When the preacher has an idea, and then searches for a biblical text or texts, treating that idea and feels free to develop the sermon without rigid adherence to the structure of the text and without the compulsion to deal fully with every verse, every phrase or word in that text. And so, in other words, I'm not going to just limit myself to this text. But I'm going to look at all of Scripture. I like the way Alfred Gibb put it. This is an interesting man. He was born in 1890. He lived a life of celibacy. He was a pastor, and he was a prolific author. And now he did some great work on preaching the book reference to the preacher and his preaching is now available in download, and you can download it as a PDF online, you can find that his name is Alfred Gibb, G I B B, and it's a marvelous instruction about how to go about preaching. But he Devine defines topical preaching this way. He says it's choosing a certain subject or topic, then searching through all of the scriptures to discover what light can be thrown on the subject under consideration. So I choose my topic. In other words, that comes from outside of Scripture. In many ways, I'm not trying to discover what God's message is in this passage, but I'm saying I want to know what God says about this or what the Bible says about this particular thing. Now, how do you do this? Well, you start with a topic. You can pick the topic, I'll give you some examples. You might pick a topic like a resurrection, you might pick a topic like, Who does God say he is. And you can look at all kinds of different passages that where God defines himself. You find Bible passages that deal with that topic. And you seek key principles within those Bible passages that you look at. You can talk about resurrection. And you could look at a variety of passages that deal with resurrection, both from the gospel stories, but also, from Paul's letters, from Peter's letters to talk about, you know, we're raised to a new hope. And you can talk about resurrection. But it's looking at all those passages, then you arrange those passages to exhort or encourage your congregation, your gathering of people to whom you're going to speak, you'll find the anecdotes of the illustrations or the quotes that are needed. And then you find a conclusion that applies the truth of all these passages to what you've been talking about. And I love his illustration. He says, It's really like a river. This is a river, and you'll see in North Central California, and the river, he says is the main message, but there are all these tributaries that come in and feed the river. So you've got the main idea. And you're trying to feed all of these new things into it that fill the river up and, and make it flow well. And I love that illustration on topical preaching, we're trying to take an idea, or taking supporting material that fill it up, that enrich it that expand it and then we apply it to people's lives. Now, A related term for this is expository topical method, some people will refer to the topical message as that the only difference is that pastor who does this will do a lot of work, because they will look at the historical, grammatical literary study of all the passages that he or she will use. And so that takes a lot of time. But some people make this feel like this is what I want to do as a result of that kind of study. Now, there are some real advantages to doing this kind of preaching. Pros, it allows an exploration of a Bible truth beyond a single passage. Now, no one Bible passage holds all the truth on that particular subject, that particular theme in the Scripture. And so it allows taking a broad view of what does the Bible say about that? In fact, it's easy to make a series of messages like this. What does the Bible say about that, in fact, I'm, I'm working in a church right now with a partner, and I'm there, I'm semi retired, but I'm there to help them help the pastor mentor him, and help the church do some strategic planning and that sort of thing. While the pastor there is committed to topical messages, over a period of time, and this past year, he focused on the word seek, when you look in Scripture and find all the ways that that word is used, what are the things we should seek? And so we've been all over the Bible, Old Testament new, we've been stories, we've been in a variety of historical settings. And in every situation, we look at what does the Bible say about seeking? You know, Wisemen is one of the passages in the last session, I use that in that series to talk about Wisemen, seek Him SEEK JESUS. Secondly, it encourages seeing the Bible as a whole. Not all truth is contained in one place. One of the great things about using topical preaching is that you can look in a variety of places, and you find that God speaks with great consistency throughout 66 Bibles, the 66 books of the Bible. And so when you're looking at this possibility of topical preaching, you can say, look at this, God has said the same thing in the Old Testament, and the New Testament. He's done them the same God from the beginning to the end. And you can look at all of Scripture, and that is a powerful experience for some people. And this type of preaching. Thirdly, talks, allow somebody to see the felt needs. In other words, I'm wondering, church that I just completed my service in a while back, and is now in a series this summer of what's your favorite verse? And what's your favorite subject? And so, the preachers in that preaching team are looking at the variety of subjects that people have suggested, and some of those are becoming topical messages because somebody wants to know I want to know what the Bible says about sin. I want to know what the Bible says about life, the abundant life, I want to know what the Bible says about money getting rich. And so it's easy to take these questions and start with a subject and then say, what does the Bible say about that? And then, fourthly, this allows great Bible themes and doctrines to be explored. You know, that's basically what we do when we do theology. Right? When we, in seminaries and elsewhere, when they're writing their theological tomes, they're looking at all the Bible passages that relate to that subject. And so that's how Bible themes are developed. And so you want to know about salvation. You can do that in one verse, you know, how are we saved? You can do that one verse, you can do that in a dozen. You want to know about Jesus Christ. And what does the Bible say about him? Well, it says, This is what he is about. Now, this one hits me. Because for a long time, I served in my church in California, and I served with a partner who had the gift of evangelism, the spiritual gift. And so he saw people coming to faith regularly as a result of his work and using that spiritual gifts. And then he would sometimes give me tough people, right? People to disciple or people to try to convince, because my evangelism style tends to be more of a discussion and the argumentative type things. Anyway, he had visited a family that had visited our church. And, as happened with him, quite often, by the end of the evening, he had the woman on her knees praying to receive Jesus Christ in her life. The man, however, was doubtful, he didn't want to take that step. He wasn't ready. He said, I want to know more. And so my partner gives me the job of meeting with him regularly, while he was a Jehovah's Witness, earlier in his life, and they are totally opposed to the idea of a trinity. And so when we began to study together, we were looking at the various questions he had and the issues that he had with a variety of situations. But one of them was what do you do with this thing called the Trinity? I said, Okay, Next time, we're going to look at what the Bible says about God as Trinity. And the next week, I came, and I had three, three pages, single spaced, of all the verses that talk about God as more than one person, and yet still refers to him as one God. And it was an impressive array. And in fact, you know, as we're looking at them, we're looking at them one by one. And, you know, we didn't get through all of them. But at one point, I stopped, and I said, you know, if it were my choice, I would not have this doctrine in, in the church, I would say, You know what, this is too complex. I mean, I've been a believer for years and years and years and years, and I've studied and I studied, and I studied, and I still did not grasp the idea of the Trinity. That idea that God is one God, but he's three persons is beyond my human mind. It's beyond its capability to even grasp this in any meaningful way. And, and yet, here it is, it's in the Bible. And so I accept that. I take it, I use it in my life. In a way, the short time Thankfully, he became a believer, and that was an exciting time. So. So these are the pros. These are the good things about trying to take a message topically, there are some cons that you have to be aware of. A one is taking verses out of context. It's a very easy thing to do, especially, you know, nobody comes to the Scriptures without some kind of bias. And if you're going to do a topical message, you probably have some ideas about what you want done. And often what can happen is that you know, you can get kind of on your own little hobbyhorse. Now, you know, one of the worst examples of that is one I read about this past week where a pastor in the church was rather upset about one of the new fashions and women's hair. And it was his belief based on Scripture and study of Scripture, that women's hair should just be down and flowing down. And that now they were tying them up in top knots of various kinds on the top of the back. This was in the back. And so he decided to preach a sermon on that. And one of the verses he took out of context was this one, Matthew 24:17, let him which is on the top not come down. Now. The context of that verse is Jesus is talking about the days of tribulation. And he's saying there's going to be things that are so bad that if you're on the top of your house, don't come down. Just hunkered down there. But when he quoted he said, you know, let the topnot come down. And he tried to make his points that way along with verses about the women dressing modestly, etc. So that's a danger of this, you can rip something out of context. And so if you're going to preach topically, you have to be sure that you look at the context of the verses you are using, of the passages you are focusing on to make sure you are saying what those passages say, not your own thing. Another way that some people like to use topical kind of preaching is, is you know, kind of say, I wonder what the Bible says about this? The old and awful story about that as a man who wanted to find out God's will. And so someone told them, Well, you know, you can do that. You don't have to just read one passage in the Bible, you gotta read plenty, but is there one way that's worked for me, as friends said, is just open the Bible and point and see what God says, The Holy Spirit will lead you in that way. And so he flipped open the Bible, point his finger, and it said, Judas went and hanged himself. And he said, that can't be it. So he shut the Bible, he opened it again, and pointed his finger and it said, Go and do likewise. And he said, that can't be it. So he opened it again and said, what you do do quickly. That's the idea of taking something totally out of context and, and making something that was intended as a message for that time and that place, something that you rip out of the context of that time and that place, and try to apply it to today. And I know that, in my country, tattoos, sometimes have been an issue with people and some people try to prove scripturally, that you shouldn't do that, or prove you shouldn't have a Christmas tree, or are men wearing earrings, et cetera, et cetera, you can take things out of context, be very careful about that that's a con. A second con is that you're going to end up with moral lessons, rather than the whole counsel of God. In other words, you'll, you'll come up with some passages that you'll say, Hey, this is good. I'm gonna grab this one. And just make a little moral lesson out of it. You know, I think that when I was involved in the children's ministry, it was in a place that was just evaluating stuff that was going on. And the children's message that day was the story of in the Old Testament, of a Mordecai and Esther, Esther going to the king, Haman trying to destroy the Jews, and how God used Esther, in all of that, to try to bring about the salvation of God's people. I believe the message for that lesson was simply this. Be bold in your life. Whoa, that missed the point. I mean, if you look at the book of Esther, the whole point of the book of Esther, is that God is involved in the background of things. There's something going on beyond what's going on in this world, that there is a God up there who's manipulating events, so that their salvation for God's people, hallelujah. And instead, it gets boiled down to this whole thing of just be bold. So that's a danger of proof texting of just using topically. And so you've got to make sure again, that the Bible passages you use are the message that the Bible intends to give. Thirdly, preaching this way can become need centered as the main way of preaching, in other words, you can just preach to people's needs. Now, people or people felt needs, people have a lot of needs. And one of the kinds of needs is their felt needs. They have real needs. Beyond that. There are things they need to understand from scripture, we're going to talk about different kinds of sermons and teaching sermons are, there are facts they need to understand and gain understanding of there are things they need to know. And they would rather just tell you how to handle their difficult situation, or how to deal with their spouse or how to deal with a child and cetera. So there's a danger here that it can do that. And then finally, the preacher can focus on his own agenda, rather than on God's agenda. And so if you're going to preach topically, you better be ready to spend a lot of time in prayer seeking to discern determine God's will for your life. Now, I want to give you an example of this. I'm not going to preach it. This is a sermon by Dan Eisner, the pastor with whom I'm working at present in that year of seek, and he said that one thing we should seek is Sabbath if we understood the Bible concept of Sabbath and so he did a topical message on Sabbath. Looking where you find this word. And what he presented was, what is Sabbath? That was his first point. And he had some answers to that. He said, it's the first thing in the scripture that's called Holy. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the creating, he had done. The word holy means to cut and to separate, that's the root of the word. And so God created a separation of this day and said, it's holy is to be revered is to be recognized. And so that's the first thing it's called holy. Secondly, it's a gift for humanity. Remember, when Jesus disciples are criticized for rolling grain and getting food on the Sabbath, because it's worked, according to them are Jesus when He healed on the Sabbath, and Jesus responded by saying the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. In other words, this is something that we're given as a gift to us, to help us in our life. What is Sabbath, it's a gift. And thirdly, it's a foretaste of eternal rest, there remains them to Sabbath rest for the people of God, let us therefore make every effort to enter into that rest. And so if you know what we do here on the Sabbath, the seventh day or the first day, in our kind of culture here in America, what you do, and that day, is supposed to be a foretaste of spending time with God or being an intimate communication with him. That's part of what it is. So what his seven second point was what God commanded us to do on the Sabbath. And then he looked at those passages referenced there called us to remember the Sabbath day. In other words, words, in the context of Exodus 20, which is the giving of the law, to remember God's greatness, to remember his power to remember what he has done for you in the deliverance from slavery for those Israeli Israeli people, you're to observe the Sabbath. In other words, there are ways to observe it in spending time in reflection, and you are to rest. One of the great things in our culture here in the United States is that we've lost the capacity to rest well, and then one of the blessings of the Sabbath while we won't be ruled, that's from Leviticus, we're not going to be ruled by someone or something else, and we will have security. These are the kinds of things that came out of his message on Sabbath. That's just a demonstration. Topical preaching can be done wonderfully and powerfully. But be careful that you're teaching the truth of God's word, not just your own stuff, be careful, you're not ripping verses out of context to prove your point, but that you're looking for verses to make God's point. And then topical preaching can be a wonderful thing. And I encourage you to put that in your list of sermons for the future, whatever you're doing to try a topical message if this is not your usual way of communicating. Thank you. We'll see you next time.