Video Transcript: Session 17 Developing One Point

Glad to have you back as we are in this section of this class called Developing a sermon. Last time, we looked at what it means to do exposition today, we're  going to look at that question there. What's the big idea? In other words, what's  the main idea of the passage that you're looking at. And when I thought of this, I  thought of the first time I was given tickets to the ballet, now, I grew up in a  middle class, blue collar family, that means my parents were relatively poor, and  they had eight kids. And so I never went to a ballet growing up, never.  Occasionally, I'd see a little snippet of one on TV, but I've never been to one. But we had somebody in the church I was serving that, because of his business,  was given free tickets, and he couldn't go. So he gave them to me and my wife.  And so we went with a sense of anticipation, and a sense of joy, at being able to  do this. And so we go to the ballet. And we had beautiful seats halfway back in  the auditorium sitting in the middle. And I watched a presentation that I was  incredibly confused about most of the time. Now, because you don't know the  story of the ballet a whole lot. And it might be hard to pick up in the process.  You're given these little cheat sheets that you could look at to say, here's the  story. Here's what's happening in this scene. Here's what's happening in that  scene. And I quickly glanced at that. But then once the thing started to turn  down the light so far, I couldn't read it. So if you asked me, what was the story  that was given through that ballet, or what were even were my impressions  about what happened in that ballet, I would have said to you, you know what  they had a beautiful sets, the sets were impressive and outstanding. And the  dancers, as far as I can tell, I'm not an expert, but they seem to be in concert  with each other and coordinated. And it seemed to do it well. But But the story, I  lost the point, I didn't know what the point was until later, when I finally sat down  to read the story of that. And then I tried to remember what they were doing in  the ballet at that point. Because, you know, there was all this action, there's all  this sub story, and it was even most of it in another language. And soI was lost  and lost the big picture. Now, today, we're going to talk about for a little bit,  getting the big picture into people's hearts, and minds, getting it the point of what you're doing. First up, and creating something that's memorable that people can  grab on to and stick with them. As they reflect on what you've said, I've been  learning a lot, you know, one of the things I do for Christian leaders Institute is  write a blog on preaching every week, and I had to learn how to do that. And so  there's a program called WordPress. And I was taught how to enter that and  how to begin it. And then they evaluate your writing. And one of the things that  came up consistently is saying you know what you don't have, you've got focus  words, three, or four words that you're going to focus on. And if you don't have it  in the first paragraph, that people should understand right away what this is  about. And the focus words are the ones that you want people to remember. And so you have to be thinking, Okay, I'm gonna write this blog 5,6,7 hundred words, with some pictures with maybe a video embedded or whatever, I'm gonna do all 

of that. But this is the reason I'm doing it. This is the point. Now, let me give you  some just reflections on that. This is John F. Kennedy, one of the presidents of  the United States, he was shot and killed by an assassin in 1963. When you  look back at John F. Kennedy's history, one of the things people say about him  is what a great speaker he was. He was able to capture people's hearts and  minds, and was able to accomplish a great deal in a short time in the  presidency, because he had learned the secret. And the secret was to have a  big idea. And the big idea of what he was speaking is the thing that you  remembered of his speech. Now, he didn't always have that skill. In fact, when  he first entered politics, he found that he couldn't take people with him in his  speeches. And so he went to a friend who was a pretty good speech writer and  became a speech writer for him. And he said that for him what's wrong here?  And his friend said, this is the problem. You speak in paragraphs, the people of  the United States think in words and pictures. And so he began to change the  way he spoke to think of words and pictures. What are the sentences that  people are going to remember? What are the facts that people are going to  remember? That's got to be upfront, and it's got to be seen. And let me just give  you an if you're familiar at all with the history of the United States, I realize many of you are not. But these are some of the words that He spoke years and years  decades ago at this point, approaching 50 years ago, and more. And yet, people still remember these words of my generation because they caught our attention.  For instance, in one of his inaugural addresses, he said, Ask not what your  country can do for you ask what you can do for your country. I don't even have  to look at the words to say that because that the rest of his speech was about  how this is a time of opportunity to make a difference. And he was introducing  some new concepts like the Peace Corps, where we're going to make a  difference, and we're going to spread peace around the world. But this is not a  time where you ask what your country can do for you ask what you can do for  your country. And here are some things, it all boils down to that one statement,  which was powerful and memorable. Or the one time when he was speaking in  Berlin, Berlin was being oppressed. At that time, the Soviet Union was trying to  envelop West Berlin. And so he came there to speak, John Kennedy as  president. And as part of the speech to speech, he talked about the fact that  anybody who wants freedom in the world could identify with Berlin and he spoke in German to the people and he said, "Ich bin ein Berliner." , and the people  went wild talking, and everybody remembers that speech. Now the rest of it was  about the same thing. But it's that everybody, everybody is a Berliner. If they  identify with freedom, and they want to fight for freedom, you can't do it. By  standing on the sidelines. We all identify with people in Berlin, people who are  struggling for freedom. Friend of mine put it this way, when we're talking about  this concept, he said, It's the difference between shooting with buckshot or a  rifle, you shoot a shotgun with buckshot. And what do you get, you get a shot 

pattern like this, right? You got all these BBs that go out and go like that. And it's  great if you're shooting a bird and, you know, birds flying through the air. And so  you've got some, you've got some allowance on either side of where you're  shooting that you might hit the thing and kill it but boy, if you've got a bear  coming towards you, you don't want to have buckshot. You don't want to have  birdshot. In particular, in your gun at that point, what you want is a rifle because  if you use a rifle, it creates a different pattern. It's a puncture pattern that creates a greater impact if you shoot a rifle at a bear coming at you. So the idea is we  want to be people who are creating rifle shots, we want to have impact on  people. One of the people I've learned this from is this man, Andy Stanley, is an  excellent communicator. And he wrote a book called communicating for change.  And it's about making sermons and I commend it to you it's a delightful kind of  reflection. But he talked about in one of his, in that book, communicating for  change, how he changed his style of preaching. And it happened when he was  invited to do a talk at a Christian high school. And so he decided that he was  going to talk about Naaman. Now if you don't remember the story from II Kings  5, Naaman is from another place and he develops leprosy. And they have a  slave girl. And so the slave girl says you gotta go to Elijah, in Israel, he's able to  heal you. So Naaman gets permission to do that comes there. And Elijah doesn't greet him. Elijah simply sends him away and says go wash in the river. And you  know, and you'll be made whole and Naaman and goes away angry, infuriated,  the Scripture says because says I don't want to wash in that dirty river. There  are better rivers back home and didn't even greet me. This doesn't seem that  important. Anyway, so he was going to speak on that. And he developed a  message and these were his points Naaman's problem. Naaman's pride,  Naaman's, plea. And then Naaman's proof, nice alliteration. The night before he  was going to deliver the message and he's praying for the students. And he  began to think differently about the message. This is how he puts it. As I was  praying, it occurred to me that they weren't going to remember one thing I said,  Five minutes after I said it, I got up off my knees, sat down at my desk and  determined to not let that happen. I got rid of my alliterated points and boiled  down to one idea. Then I worked on it until I had crafted a statement upon which I can hang the entire message. And so the message changed. And the message was that sometimes God asks us to do things we don't understand, Naaman  couldn't understand couldn't grasp the importance of the directions that were  given to him. And so what do you do then? When you're asked and speaking to  high school students, when you're asked to become this kind of professional  instead of that. when you're asked to serve in this kind of capacity instead of that and you don't understand why, what do you do? And the word that he boiled  down to the sentence he boiled down to was this to understand why submit and  apply. In other words, submit to God and apply yourself. Two years after that  event. He had a young man come up to speak to him in a store, it had nothing to

do with that message was two years later it comes up to him and says, You're  Andy Stanley writes, yeah, I heard you speak two years ago said, and I  remember it, to understand why submit and apply. Now, Wouldn't you love to  have that happen with your messages? Wouldn't you love to have somebody  come up to you two years later and say, I remember that. I can tell you as  somebody who has preached for a long time. Those moments are fantastic. And having gone through a retirement, I've had people reflect on that. And some of  them were messages I gave years ago that I don't even remember all that well.  But they were something that hit people, there was a statement that hits them,  and they remember it, and it was like a rifle shot into their life. That's the kind of  messages we want. And so how do you do this? Well, you avoid doing this sort  of thing. This is one of my favorite signs. Do you imagine a sermon that starts  out and goes that way, in that way, in that way, in that way, in that way, and  people get lost? You've heard, I suspect, you've heard sermons like this. Here's  a statement by Yogi Berra. Now. If you don't know the United States culture, you don't maybe know who Yogi Berra was. Yogi Berra was a baseball player. And  he was very good. He's in the Hall of Fame. He coached the Yankees he played  catcher for the Yankees. He was he was a tremendous baseball player, but he  would say things that were just stupid. It would make you'd stop and think, for  instance, he'd say, If you find a fork, and if you take a fork, find it a road, find a  fork in a road take it, is the way he would say it. Or he said, don't go to that  restaurant. Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. What do you make of  that? Well, one of the statements he made made sense in this regard. He said, If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else. That's the  Yogi Berra ism, for sure. You don't know where you're going, you'll end up  someplace else. And so as you're trying to develop a sermon, and you're looking at the scriptures, what you have to do is start looking in depth at what's the main point. Now, I've read a lot about preaching because I am a preacher. And I've  tried to learn how to do this better. And so let me just share with you some other  people that have said this in the literature of our preaching, this is by Donald  Miller, any single sermon should have just one major idea. The points or  subdivision should be parts of this one grand thought, just as bites of any  particular food are all parts of the whole cut into sizes that are both palatable  and digestible. So the points of the sermon should be smaller sections of the  one theme, broken into tinier fragments so that the mind may grasp them, and  the life assimilate them. You are now ready to state in simplest terms, the  burden of this chapter it is, every sermon should have a theme. And that theme  should be the theme of the portion of scripture on which it is based. Or Here's  JH Jowett, a preacher from long ago, but it did a series again of lectures on  preaching. He said, I have a conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching,  not ready for writing out until we can express its theme in a short pregnant  sentence as clear as crystal, I find the getting of that sentence is the hardest, 

most exacting, and the most fruitful labor in my study, to compel oneself to  fashion that sentence, to dismiss every word that is vague, ragged, ambiguous,  to think oneself through to a form of words, which defines the theme with  scrupulous exactness, this is surely one of the most vital and essential factors in the making of a sermon. And I do not think that any sermon ought to be  preached, or even written until that sentence has emerged, clear and lucid as a  cloudless morn. So this is what we're talking about, as far as what is that one  thing that you do? Let's look at some examples from Scripture. Peter, and the  story of Pentecost, if you read Acts 2, you find that the wind, and the fire and the sound of the wind and the tongues of fire come resting on them. And the people  say they're drunk. And Peter gets up to defend what's going on and he said, This isn't what you're talking about. That's not what's happening here that that that  we're all drunk. It's the morning. But what's happening is connected to  something in the Old Testament, it's a promise about the coming Messiah. And  then here is his theme sentence. Let all the house of Israel know for certain that  God has made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus, whom you crucified, the  rest of the message all hangs on that sentence. And so if you're preaching on  Acts 1, you can preach about the power of the Holy Spirit and the empowerment and the promise that it's coming. That was given that it's coming. I mean, Jesus  gives that promise stay in Jerusalem until you're you're clothed with power from  on high. Now, if I was preaching on Acts 2, that's where I would start, it's all  about the power. It's all about the power. Or you could say this. It's all about  Jesus, the Lord and Christ. You want to know how Jesus is seen as Lord and  Christ. Look at the power of His Church. Look at the difference that's coming. So you could develop a sentence based on this. Paul, if you look in Acts at some of  his sermons, in Pisidia, in Antioch, he's preaching to the Jews. That's he started  most of his ministry in a city going to the synagogue and talking to the Jews.  And he talks about the history of Israel. He's just giving a history of Israel. But  his theme sentence is this one, from this man's descendants, David's God has  brought to Israel the Savior, Jesus, as he has promised. It's that theme that  drives the rest of the message. Jesus is the Savior. God has been arranging for  centuries, Jesus coming as savior, Jesus is the promised Savior. That's, he  promised that all through the Old Testament. And you can give all kinds of  evidences of that. Or here's Paul in Exodus 2o where he's speaking to the  Ephesian elders and defending his ministry and giving them directions for how  to do ministry in the future. He says, Be on guard for yourselves and for all the  flock. And that's the theme sentence because he's going to talk about wolves  coming among them, and et cetera, et cetera. You're going back to the Old  Testament, and you can see the prophets. They have a theme sentence almost  always in their messages. And the burden of the Lord is what is referred to and  it's talking about returning to God or obeying God's commands or turning away  from idols or turning away from evil. Those kinds of things. And in those 

passages, you can find themes that are repeated a theme sentence or theme  idea that becomes essential to the rest of the story or the Psalms. Here's Psalm  117. Praise the Lord, all nations extol him all you people, for his love is strong,  and his faithfulness eternal. theme sentence of that is simply this. Why should  you praise God? Why Praise God? Well, you should extol him you should praise him, because his love is strong. And his faithfulness, eternal, and your message  would revolve around evidence and God's love is strong and his faithfulness  eternal. We can go on. Here's Hebrews, this is from Hebrews 10. And I'll give  you a little bit more of the context here. Because this is a longer passage, and  it's from letters. And so that's a different style of ministry. But Hebrews 10:19,  Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most  Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, opened for us  through the curtain, that is his body. And since we have a great priest over the  house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart, and with a full  assurance that faith brings having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a  guilty conscience, and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold  unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful. And let us  consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not  giving up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing but encouraging  one another. And all the more as you see the day approaching. Now, if I were  going to study that passage, I would look at it in a variety of ways. But I would  look at the theme. What, what is the theme? What is the sentence that I want to  focus on? Well, the the theme is simply this, the results of entering God's  presence with confidence. Let's enter God's presence in competence. And what  does that mean for me? Well, it means several things, here are the results. I get  the assurance of a cleansed heart, I don't feel guilty when I'm in God's  presence. Because of Jesus Christ, I get to hold unswervingly to the hope that  has been expressed to me, the hope that's been given me because even in the  tough times, I know Jesus will never leave me will never forsake me. And we get to spur one another on to love and good deeds. So that's the kind of thing I'm  talking about. So when we're looking at a passage, we're trying to find out this  question, what is God talking about in this passage, and then we're trying to find  the big idea. The one big idea. Now, you know, repetition is the mother of  learning, they say, and so for the next few minutes, I just want you to listen to  this person, somebody who's a trainer of preachers, and he's going to talk about this from a little different perspective. And so just tune in, and the next time we're gonna get into the idea of how do you introduce a message in such a way that it  catches people's attention and hooks them? Okay, so see you next time. This is  Dr. Carl, and I'm going to talk to you about making your best point the organizing principle for your sermon. Years and years ago when I was a seminarian, and  Dr. James Earl Massey was a professor of homiletics he was asked in class, the question of how many points should a good sermon have and his answer was 

simply, at least one, good one. We all laughed. But we got the message. Matter  of fact, I would add to that, that that one good one ought to organize your entire  sermon. When you have your main point that really connects with the people.  That is what should organize the whole sermon, because it will make it easier  for you to remember the message as you preach it. And it will make it easier for  the people to envision it. When you take that organizing principle, start with it,  end with it, and interact with it throughout the message, it makes a cohesive  whole. What you can do in any sermon is take your best point, it might be a  story that's associated with it, it might be an image or an example. But you can  take a part of that, and bring it to the front of the sermon at the introduction. So  that the life engaging principle that you might consider to be your best point,  kicks off the message. What we so often do is we start the message with a lot of detail, we help people follow us in our study. But that's not the natural way to  hear. The natural way to hear is to begin with the point of engagement, and then incorporate the bits and pieces of information about study, take something at the beginning, interact with it throughout your message, and then conclude and it  just kind of ties it all up together. When you start and end with the same  message, people feel like they've gotten the big picture. I made an allusion to a  dance in my sermon on the Holy Spirit in a previous lecture. In that sermon, I  began with a confession that I can't dance. And I showed an image of a dance  that you find in the movie, the classic movie, of sound of music. And after  showing that, I said now, I'd like for you to consider the words of keeping in step  with the Spirit. And I explained the spirit filled life, always making reference to  keeping in step with the Spirit. In the end, I even talked about the dips when you lose total control over your life, and you have to rely on God altogether. And  people really grasped it, I didn't have to say anything more be ready for the dip.  They already knew what it was. And then I concluded with the joy of keeping in  step with the Spirit. There's other ways of doing that. In another sermon, about reconciliation, It talked about a counseling appointment that was done in general  terms that wouldn't identify anybody. And I took a part of that moved it to the  beginning. And I asked the hearer, now what would you tell this couple if they  came to you? And then I preached through the message of reconciliation from  the book of Jonah revisited that counseling appointment, and left it unfinished  until the very end. And that's when we concluded what happened in that  counseling appointment. The entire message was enveloped in this image that  scene kept the plot going. I encourage you to make your best point, usually one  that applies most directly to your people, the organizing principle of your  sermon, and in that way, you will keep a master image and also find that it's  easier for you to preach it for you remember it in a picture in a scene. May God  bless you as you preach effectively and fruitfully about Jesus Christ