SS01 / EP02 – Our hosts give insight on what it means to be a good listener and then doer of God’s Word.
SS01 / EP02 – Our hosts give insight on what it means to be a good listener and then doer of God’s Word.
Micah Klutinoty: You’re listening to “For the City,” a podcast of Gospel City Church. My name is Micah Klutinoty.
Brent Thomas: And I’m Brent Thomas. On today’s episode we’re continuing on the topic of preaching. Specifically, what are preachers trying to accomplish and how can you get the most out of a sermon?
Micah: All right Brent. So my wife posted a video today, sent me a video and then she I think posted it on social media. And it was my son Zion. So she’s getting ready to do devotions with the kids this morning. Zion is just like looking like a wreck like he needs to be back in bed immediately. And the sun is shining in his eyes and he’s just like stretching/grumbling, “I don’t want to. I don't want to.”
And she’s like, “What are you trying to say, Zion?”
And he’s like, “I don’t want to read my Bible!”
And she’s like, “We’ve got to do devotions,” and encouraging him. So she lets us in a little bit and she posted on the thing, “Go read your Bible.”
Brent: That’s amazing.
Micah: And I’ve been thinking, “I’ve been there.”
Brent: I’ve been there.
Micah: And it’s funny as the video was, I have been there. And you and I have been in church for a long time as have probably several of our listeners. And we’ve heard sermon after sermon after sermon, grew up going to church. What do you remember about when you were growing up and you were sitting in church during sermons?
Brent: So again, faithful Christian parents who loved me enough to make me go to church every Sunday. It wasn’t an option. And we sat in the seventh row back, same pew every Sunday, right next to a stain glass window depiction of the crucifixion, which is just, you know, a beautiful sight for a five-year-old child.
And then counting the planks because it was a wood ceiling. Counting the planks in the wood ceiling back to our row. And I think it was twenty-eight or something back. Yeah, so not so much sermons as much as…
Micah: That’s funny, because I was at a very ornate church as well and it had this like gold ceiling with these big squares. I used to count all the squares. Can’t remember. And then there was also an air conditioning unit in the top left corner.
Brent: Perfect.
Micah: And every ten seconds a light would zoom across it. And so I remember counting how many seconds slowly every sermon.
Brent: While your pastor is preaching his guts out on stage.
Micah: And so it’s funny that those are kind of some memories that we have. And we don’t so much remember a ton of the sermons and those kind of moments. And yet I’ve been thinking about that as a Christian and somebody who goes to church and the importance of the church. And last week we were talking about how we approach preaching the Word of God and the importance of the Word of God being preached with boldness and with accuracy and with history.
But why do sermons matter? And that’s kind of something I’ve been thinking about. If I’ve been a Christian for a long time and I’ve done due diligence in my study as a disciple, then why do I go to church week after week and listen to somebody talk about the Bible for a long time? And I think as much emphasis as our church puts on the preaching of the Word, we want people to come and be hearers of the Word and great listeners of the Word of God.
And so unpack that with me a little bit. Why do you think sermons are so important in this life or why does maybe our attention compete for the listening space?
Brent: Yeah, I mean, I think any sort of knowledge download in our life. You'll hear people talk about being, you know, “I need to hear something to learn. I’m a visual learner,” right? “I can learn by just reading,” and those type of things. But one of the longest standing forms of information download has been oration, has been someone standing and proclaiming. I mean the fact that we’re even in a podcast right this moment speaks to the power that’s behind the spoken word.
And so you couple that with what we talked about last week and the power of God’s Word and how He uses common man to communicate and herald that word. You know I think it has to be important in our lives to understand that I can't get everything I need just by reading for myself. I can't get everything I need just by, you know, like even with what we were saying about church, hunkering down in my home and reading the Word and doing that. I need other people.
And so the biggest thing for me that I think about is when you have stood and presented God’s Word to me or the preachers I listen to over the years, their perspective is different than my own perspective.
Micah: That’s good.
Brent: And so sometimes God will use that to reveal something that I never would have seen had I just opened up to that same passage of Scripture and read it while I sipped my coffee in the morning. And that’s a beautiful thing because that’s the picture of the Body of Christ to me. And so I do think it’s really important.
Micah: Yeah, I recently was reading a book by J.I. Packer and he talked a little bit and was unpacking this idea of being, the congregation, being great listeners to sermons and how that’s kind of like something that we’re losing in our culture and in society. And something he said was for congregations, “The hearing of sermons is the most momentous event of their lives. Worshippers ought to appreciate this fact and listen to the Word preached with awe, attention, and expectancy.
And so you hear a quote like that and you’re like, “Whoa, that’s a great quote.” And it has a lot of weight, but there’s no way that I think often of sermons being the most momentous moment of my life or that I approach the preached Word of God with awe, attention and expectancy all the time. I mean, there are so many things competing for our mind at any given point. There are so many distractions that this world affords.
Like you said, podcasts and social media and sound bites and Ted Talks and motivational speeches--our world is just littered with spoken truth. And so it’s like how do I come every week and submit myself to these sermons and allow it to be a momentous event? And what makes it a momentous event is kind of what I’ve been thinking about and unpacking.
I mean, you teach to students all the time. I’ve read about our attention span, and we were talking about that a little bit. I think our attention span now is said to be like eight seconds, and a goldfish is nine seconds. And so we have a hard time remembering what we just heard. It goes back to us as kids counting the tiles on the ceiling versus listening to what we heard. So there’s just a lot competing for our attention.
And yet a sermon is calling for us to give our attention wholeheartedly to something because of the importance of it. What else competes?
Brent: Yeah, I think even talking to our students, it is crazy how much is just being fed in. like there are guys making a living being TikTok preachers right now. And they’re taking, you know (we pray) like most of the time they’re taking the gospel truth that’s real and can impact lives and condensing it down to ten to fifteen seconds and trying to like get it in there because before the person swipes away and all of that.
And so that’s in their minds, but then all the other content that lives out there as well, right? And so we’re trying to dive into a world that is saying, “The faster you can get me this information and the more catchy it is, the more in tune and relevant with what’s going on in the world right now, like that’s what people are actually listening to. And yet we stand, we hold a historical, ancient book and we're trying to say like, “Oh, how do I get this in a new way and a new medium?”
I remember reading a book when I first started preaching called Saving Eutychus by Gary Miller. And it was this idea of, you know, there’s this famous story where Paul is preaching hours and hours late into the night and a kid falls asleep on a windowsill and falls and dies. And so he has to go out and like raise him from the dead. Awesome you know, like kind of little story that happens.
Micah: Praise God he could do that.
Brent: Exactly. The argument in the book was what took Paul hours to accomplish, like knocking out his audience, sometimes only takes twenty minutes for most preachers because they're so disengaged. They're just up there and they’re rambling on and on and on. And so there’s that side of it that I think is a struggle for people. Like they come to church and they don’t want to be bored to death.
But there’s also a side of it that I think where we can come to church now with the season of life that we’re in and the generation coming up is expecting to be “wowed” every single week. So speaking to that quota, the most miraculous, the most amazing, the most momentous event of their lives, I think we can put an unexpected expectation (right?) on the preacher to like somehow completely encapsulate everything that needs to be said in the shortest amount of time and in the most extravagant way possible.
And that can be frustrating for the guy preaching for sure, but more so as a hearer. Like if you get to the end of the message and you’re like, “There wasn’t anything crazy that happened,” I think that's being a bad listener. Because if you come with an exception of You’ve got to like completely rock my world and make it this amazing thing, then we’re going to be disappointed more than not. Because we need to come in in kind of a holy and sacred tone of saying, “God, what do You want to say specifically through Your Word to Your people today?”
Micah: Yeah, I remember John Frame, in a book that our church was going through in the fall more recently. And from the second Helvetic confession (so this confession that isn’t used a lot) it said the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God. So while a preacher who gets up and gives a sermon, they’re not infallible; they’re not inerrant. But if they deliver the Word of God in a true sense rightfully, then the Word loses no power.
Brent: That’s good.
Micah: It’s the same power that’s on the lips of the preacher as if it was Paul writing it down in the Bible. And so the Spirit of God takes the breathed out words of God through the preacher who has done due diligence and studied and applied himself to the text to deliver it. And that is what we are getting.
And so, you know, in a world where our attention span is dropping and in a world that says we shouldn’t ever have to sit and listen to spoken oration for more than twenty minutes anymore, how do you reconcile that with church where you might be preaching forty minutes or forty-five minutes or fifty-five minutes and you’re unpacking a lot of context?
And the truth is, you know, I approach those things differently. And I think the world, you know, it’s more and more it’s easy that I can approach topics and speech and communication so that I can improve myself as a person. I can get a lot better because there's a lot of really great leadership principles out there and there’s a lot of great Ted talks out there and motivational speeches out there that apply to the situations in my life. And bam, I can immediately start doing some of those things.
But in church I’m not coming so that I can get what I need today. I’m not coming necessarily so that I can have a checklist to walk out the door with. I’m coming and I’m saying, “God, would You reveal Yourself to me through the spoken Word of God? Would You by the power of Your Spirit show me Jesus today?”
And as the Word of God is unpacked and as the Spirit of God unites it with my sinful soul and my heart, transformation starts to take place. And, you know, Mitch is someone on our staff and he often talks about like a sermon being a well-prepared meal. Like people are coming and this is sustenance. You’re not going through the drive through. You’re not going to get something that’s going to like, you know, sustain you and carry you through the afternoon. Like this is a well-prepared, you know, three course or four course meal where you’re going to sit down.
But we’re also at the church not just cooking for you, teaching you how to cook. You get to leave with some principles of like, wow, there’s actually a lot in the Word of God. And if I apply myself and if I sit under the faithful teaching of the Word of God, something starts to happen in me and it ultimately results in glorifying God.
Brent: Yeah, that’s so good. I love thinking through. It’s not fast food, because how many times have I come and I want something that’s like, like you said, something that’s going to apply directly to my situation? And even as a preacher, there’s that tendency of I want to help people. I have specific people in mind even who are going through certain things and you might start to try to, you know, fit in little things that don’t actually fit the text. But you’re like, Oh, this would be a really great speech or people would applaud this or people would be motivated by this to go and do something different with their life.
And then you start to put a lot of the power in your own words, right? And you know, we’re preaching through Acts, right? And we’ve got Herod who is preaching a great oration and the people are like, “The voice of a god and not a man!” And he gets struck dead because he doesn’t give God glory. In the same like breath we need to be that handled the Word of God that well on a Sunday or whenever we gather as a church saying that this isn’t about what Pastor Micah can bring or Pastor Brent or whoever is speaking the Word of God. It’s about what is God doing right now in this moment through His Word and how can I take it and feast on it?
And I think of my kids where when we fix them a plate of food a lot of times there are vegetables that they don’t, that they wouldn’t choose. If they were going through the buffet line they wouldn't scoop as much broccoli as I probably put on their plate. But I know as a parent that they need to have a well-balanced diet in their life.
And so even when we preach verse by verse, like sometimes we’re taking big ol chunks of Scripture that we’re working through and we want every word to be handled rightly and given to the people for them to chew on and for it to feed them. Rather than just every week, “What should we preach this this week? And what do you guys want to talk about?” It’s not that.
It’s the Lord has given us this amazing gift of His Word. And as we work through it knowing that each part of it can play, you know, a role in our lives of equipping us and sanctifying us and washing us with the Word, like that’s an amazing realization for the listener that this isn’t just another, you know, sermon or Ted talk like we’ve thrown out there. This is another meal that the Lord has given me and it’s going to give me life.
Micah: It’s sitting at the feet of our God, Jesus, and being shaped into a servant, into His likeness. And you know we're being consistent. When we devote ourselves to the preached Word of God we’re being consistent with what the church has always done.
And I think we have to be careful in our society, in our culture that has so many tools and quick things available to us at the drop of a hat to not compromise what the church has always meant to be. In like Scripture from the earliest of times when the people began to gather in Acts, they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching. And you know in the church at Antioch they were there for a year. And Paul and Barnabas start to teach the Bible and they’re preaching and teaching. And I’m sure that those believers didn’t say after that year, “Well, I’m done with that and I’ll go to lesser things.”
No. They were hungry for more and they begin to teach and they begin to bring other disciples along and together they devoted themselves because something is happening in the gathered Body where the Word of God is spoken. And ultimately, great preaching leads to worshippers. And I’m pretty passionate about that. You would be passionate about that. Our church is passionate about that. We’re not just preaching sermons so we can fill ourselves up and feel better about ourselves. We’re preaching sermons so that we would stand in awe of a great God of glory and be shaped into the kind of worshippers that He’s seeking.
Brent: Yeah, that’s good. You said that about the early church that made me think of, you know, they spent a lot of times in homes and they’re breaking bread in prayer. And so you have to imagine that they gathered at the synagogues or heard teaching in some form. And then it wasn’t like they walked out of church and it was over. Right? Like the conversation carried on. And I’m sure they sat around the tables and it was like a lot of discussion about what they had read and how the Lord wanted them to live their lives in that way.
And I think if we’re going to be good hearers of the Word like James encourages us, don’t just be hearers; be doers also.
Micah: Yeah that’s good.
Brent: And sometimes we apply that like, “Ok, I’ve got to go out and like do acts of service or you know, fix the world with what I’ve heard.” That’s true, but on the other hand sometimes it’s just not just listening and right to the next thing in your life. It’s sitting and like lingering in that. And we try to help our church with that with simple things like small group questions based on the message that week and things like that.
But I think the most beautiful thing that a church could be is if the teaching of God’s Word then impacted the discussions and the conversation that happened all throughout the week. And not just a one and done and now I’m watching the game at 1:00 or whatever. And so I would hate for our society to just continue to look like I come, the preacher gives to me, and then I go on. Right? And I think that’s an important part.
I was preaching at a conference to a group of students and I preached hard on the holiness of God and wanted to give them an opportunity to respond. And kind of like, you know, it’s easy to like close that moment and be like, “Ok now, you know you’ve prayed and this moment is over.” But I wanted them to sit in it and I wanted them to like go back and have discussions with their youth pastors, because they’re the ones who are going to be doing life with them, of how we can be holy as God has called us to be holy.
And you know, I kind of left it at that. So it wasn’t, it didn’t feel like the moment ever ended. And then, you know, I’m standing there and a girl is walking back to her group and she passes me and she goes, “Oh, I just want to say thank you for your talk. It was so motivational.”
And like I wanted to scream in that moment because that’s the last thing. I didn't want it to be motivational; I wanted it to ruin her in the face of holiness. And I felt ruined, right? But again, it just speaks to this, “I came. I listened and it was great and I’m grateful. And now I’m done and I’m moving on. I’m going to go play basketball or volleyball in the gym.”
But how many times have I done that? How many times have I walked into church and expected to be fed and maybe even felt like I was fed and said to a preacher, “Man, I felt like you were preaching right to me”? Right? And while I get the compliment and I understand maybe what I was feeling, I think the better thing would be to, “Man, I can’t believe the Lord has spoken to us,” and then go and have discussions with brothers and sisters in Christ about how I’m going to be different. And what does that look like in their life?
Micah: So good. Thomas Adams says, “I complain not that our churches are auditories, but they’re not oratories,” meaning I come too often just expecting to hear and get something for myself when my expectations should be what I’m receiving is going to make me a prayer warrior, is going to make me a worshiper, is going to make me a proclaimer of Christ. And so I come with that expectation and I leave transformed by everything that was just said. And that becomes a pinnacle of my week. That’s how we can come with expectancy and the awe.
I would just say real quick wrapping up, I’m sure people want to be great listeners. And yet sometimes you feel like you’re in a dry season with sermons and you know, obviously our preachers have to submit themselves to the rigorous work of doing it with passion and with authenticity and with all of that. But how can I be a good listener? Like what’s a practical thing that you would say to somebody who’s coming in the doors of church every week?
Brent: I’d say bring your Bible. Like don’t…even if your church…
Micah: Hard copy or virtual copy?
Brent: I’m all about the hard copy. And I think there’s a very simple reason for that. It’s one less distraction, right? I can't get notifications when I open up my paper Bible, right?
Micah: That’s great. And the eight second brain...
Brent: And what’s even crazy I’ve noticed in my own life like there is now neural pathways of when I open my phone and swipe it open of things that I naturally think I’m going to go to. Whether it be Instagram, Facebook, email, text messages, stuff like that. So even if there is just a moment where I’ve lost the attention on the preacher and my Bible is open, I might all of a sudden swipe around checking scores on ESPN, right? Like what a waste.
Whereas if I just commit myself to the Word, if I get distracted and I just start reading God’s Word like, “Oh that’s interesting where he’s at. Let me keep reading.” I’ve done no harm to anybody. So I just think that’s a beautiful thing.
But yeah, I would say paper copy, hard copy of the Bible even if your church has like hardback copies in the pew or whatever. Like bring your own. Get your own copy. Amazon, $10.
Micah: I think that’s huge. Get your phone away from you because the texts can wait. I mean you can give the Lord forty-five minutes, one hour, without answering a text, without making a grocery list, without getting a buzz from Amazon and trying to figure out what you’ve got to get later. It’s like give the Lord that hour intentionally through the Word. And I think bringing a hard copy of your Bible speaks generationally. Like kids see parents and adults holding the Word of God, carrying the Word of God, caring about the Word of God. I think that's so massive. And then taking notes. Bring a pen. Underline things in your Bible. Circle words.
Brent: It seems sacrilegious. C’mon, you want me to write in my Bible?
Micah: Yeah, this is like dig this thing apart.
Brent: Yeah.
Micah: And take meaningful notes. Don't write just the things down, like, you know, preachers will put like main points on the screen. And sometimes I think if I only write that down, ten years from now I’m going to have a bunch of points that I have no idea what they mean. But if I listen intently to what’s being spoken and take some notes down that help me understand the passage and the text, man, that could really help shape my week, give me some things to think about.
And maybe you just need to sit and maybe you’re not a notetaker. That’s fine too. But attentiveness to the open Bible I think is just huge for being a great listener of the Word of God.
Brent: For sure.
So a hard copy of the Bible, a pen and a journal, be distraction free. Whether that’s just putting your phone on airplane mode for forty-five minute or just leaving it in the car when you walk into church. I think those are all really practical tips that would help you for sure.
Micah: Awesome.
Brent: Thanks for listening to “For the City,” a podcast of Gospel City Church. To find out more, visit mygospelcity.org. If you found this episode helpful, we’d love for you to leave us a rating and subscribe. Also, take a moment to share it with some of your friends. We’ll see you next time.