THE SERMON IN CONTEXT

"The real preacher," Walter Russell Bowie remarked, "is more than a maker of sermons. He is a medium of contact between God and the minds and hearts of men." Bowie was placing both preacher and sermon in context, calling attention to what makes the preacher strategic and what makes the sermon important. At the heart of the preacher's work must be a clear understanding that sermons are part of a larger statement and that those who design and deliver them must partake of a larger Life.

PREACHING AND REALITY

Bowie's words place an accent on "the real preacher" as one who draws vitality from God and shares it with others by what is preached. Real preaching will therefore have a definite ring to it and a distinct power in it. Real preaching will not allow for sermons that are abstract, arrogantly eloquent, or terrifyingly out of touch with life and God.

Real preaching is rooted in God's concern for persons. The basic message of Scripture is about a real God who seeks our good. Jesus had a lot to say about God's concern, his nearness, and his deeds. Jesus did not speak of God as an ideal or as a regulating idea but as Father, concerned about the human family and active in our world.

W. R. Inge once explained that "God is a fact, not an ideal." Preaching lives in the light of God as the first of all facts, and it heralds the truth that God is and that "he rewards those who seek him" (Heb. 11:6b). These are root matters by which real preaching lives. By such preaching, hearers are helped in gaining a proper worldview and selfview. By such preaching, hearers are affirmed, undergirded for life—whatever its paradoxes, tragedies, distresses, distortions.

Real preaching is an agency of the grace of God. The sermon therefore deals with what does not originate with us; it discloses and describes and invites, offering something more to hearers than a mere theological statement. Drawing from the larger statement about God's concern and grace, the sermon is designed and preached to "open men upwards," so that the reality of God's graciousness will affect all who hear, and at those levels where real needs are most acutely known.

It must be said, and with emphasis: real preaching is not merely concerned with the nature of religious experience; it helps the hearer to experience grace, that divine help which deals with human sin and crippling experiences. As Helmut Thielicke has rightly explained, real preaching involves helping hearers "meet the decisive, active Word," that "strikes us as an effectual Word ... [which] breaks off the old existence and starts a new one, bringing sins to light and forgiving them, changing God's rejection into an acceptance which gives me a new future and makes me a new creature in the miracle of the Spirit."

It is not incidental that there are so many narratives about sin in our Bible. Nor is it accidental. Sin has been, and continues to be, the human reality. But where sin abounded, grace abounds all the more (Rom. 5:20).

Real preaching will highlight what Scripture gladly reports: that there is mercy to match any misery, and grace to handle any guilt. None who study the Bible aright can miss the clear notice there of the "sin-grace dialectic." Interestingly, our knowledge of sin deepens as we learn more about grace, but that same message opens to us the way out of guilt and shame. Real preaching will always bear this double character and wield this double power, all of which is of "a radical consequence for the structure of preaching." We see ourselves truly only when under the light of grace. And it is by that light that our change can come and our needed help be received.

Real preaching therefore takes seriously the moral and spiritual climate of the times. It does not assume that proclaiming biblical statements is adequate, neglecting to probe and address those prevailing assumptions and beliefs which have determined the major problems of our times. The real preacher will seek to know just what dominates the thought life of those who hear the sermons, and will want to understand the loyalties to which the energies and time of the people are being given.

Our generation stands lost in a wilderness of secularity, relativism, proneness to question, and the loss of any felt need to be accountable. The judgment of sinful, selfish living weighs heavily upon life in our time, and the evidences of a diseased human condition continue to suggest the need for help from beyond ourselves.

Preaching both points to that help and brings it within reach. The sermon shines best when the skies are dark and wrong choices burden people with a heavy awareness of failure and loss. So we design our sermons and preach them—not to preserve a world or to protect it, but to create a new order through announcing hope for change and bidding all to accept and act upon that hope and need.

It is in this light that such texts as Romans 10:14-15 and I Corinthians 1:21 must be viewed. These verses make it abundantly clear that God's will and way stand so stoutly revealed through preaching that something would be missed in the world if preaching had not called attention to it. That something is divine grace, grace offered by the One who makes preaching breathe his concern and evidence his presence.

Preaching must be real to be vital. It must deal with real people with real needs, offering needed help from a real God. It must proceed according to realistic goals: informing, persuading, encouraging, reminding, sustaining, and giving as it moves toward those goals.

PREACHING GOALS AND SERMON DESIGN

The ultimate goal in preaching is to connect the hearer with the grace of God, and nurture that hearer in the life that grace makes possible when it is accepted and regarded in full. Nothing less than this basic objective is worthy of any pulpit, and nothing other than this concern can rightly qualify as Christian preaching. Christian preaching is always rooted in the purpose Jesus announced for his coming: "I come that they may have life, and have it abundantly" (John 10:10). A preaching ministry maintains focus and balance when that purpose of Christ is kept central in all sermon planning.

But there are immediate goals for specific sermons, and these determine the focus and design of individual sermons at a given time. A sermon can be preached to offer a solution to a problem, or to instruct in an essential doctrine, or to prescribe a cure for some spiritual or social ill; it can be planned to support a cause, or to sustain hearers and keep them "on their feet" while living under pressure. In each instance of focus the preacher should be concerned with being understood, effective, and successful in securing the intended response from those who hear the sermon. The particular purpose of each sermon should be reflected in a design planned with that response in view.

Those...