Growth in Preaching
Posted on | September 12, 2010 | No Comments
Because I have been preaching more than normal lately (this was the third weekend in a row that I preached), I have begun to recognize a huge weakness that I had not previously known: I always want to say too much.
My wife helped me to see this, but I very often try to give every nuance of the background behind the passages that I am trying to preach. For example, I preached today from Joshua 5, where we read that all the Israelites born in the 40 years of wilderness wanderings had not been circumcised, and so they had to be circumcised before entering the promised land.
So yesterday, as I practiced explaining what circumcision was, and why it was important, I tried at first to explain the call of Abram (Gen. 12), the covenant God made with Abram in Gen. 15, and the covenant of circumcision that God made with Abraham in Gen. 17. Then I wanted to talk about Gen. 34, when Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi slaughter an entire city of men who had undergone circumcision in the hopes that their prince Shechem would be allowed to marry Jacob’s daughter Dinah, whom he had raped. All of this took about 20 minutes.
In frustration, I said to my wife, “I’m saying too much again,” and she told me, “Just simplify it and get rid of anything you don’t need to tell them. Pretend you were trying to explain this to a first grader.”
I thought about what she said, cut out most of the extraneous material, and shortened that section down to about three minutes, and I’m pretty sure that what I ended up saying made a lot more sense that all the nuanced, precise details that I wanted to use.
I guess I have a pretty smart wife.
Related posts:
- Preaching and Preachers
- Purpose Driven Preaching (Or, the Purpose of Preaching)
- Analogy?
- Wives, Wells, and Jesus
- On the Efficacy of the Sacraments
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