Why I Preach Like I Do Part 1

I often get asked by new people to Revolution, those with a church background anyway, why we preach the way we do at Revolution.

Two major things drive our preaching, how we develop our sermon calendar and how preaching plays out. The first, we preach through books of the Bible. To date, we’ve preached through 1 John, Song of Solomon, Jonah, Hebrews, Nehemiah, 2 Timothy, Philippians, James, Titus, Jude and right now I’m preaching through 1 & 2 Peter. We’re tentatively planning to do Habakkuk and Joshua after this current series. In between those series we’ve interspersed topical series on marriage, parenting, money, vision series, life purpose and a journey through the Old Testament. Even when we do that, we typically just take a passage and walk through it. I’m not much for bouncing around the Bible.

We do this for a few reasons. One, it gives the context. The bible was written by a person, to a person or group of people in a specific time and place. If you simply grab a verse, quote it, you miss this. When you miss the context, you often miss what makes this so powerful. I am reminded of this every time I preach through a book of the Bible. It happened this past Saturday in 1 Peter 1. Peter is talking about the resurrection of Jesus and the hope from that. That verse takes on a more powerful meaning when you understand what has happened in Peter’s life, denying Jesus and Jesus still redeeming him. Also, in the first 3 verses of 1 Peter, Peter talks about election and how God causes us to be saved (it really does say that). Why start with this? What is he trying to communicate to those who received his letters? Why hit that twice in the first 3 verses?

Two, we can’t skip things. I’ll be honest, every time I preach through a book of the Bible I hit a part I’d like to skip. When I preached through Hebrews, I learned why pastors don’t preach through Hebrews. Chapters 1 – 4, 11 and 12 are awesome. Chapters 5 – 10 are brutal. It was a hard 6 weeks getting through those chapters, making them relevant for our church. But I realized something when I got to chapter 11. It took on a more beautiful meaning because of 5 – 10 and all the talk about sacrifices, the old covenant, etc.

This is another reason pastors skip the Old Testament. When we did Nehemiah, it took us 22 weeks and 3 of those weeks were simply lists of names. When you do 1 Corinthians, you have to deal with homosexuality. Paul’s letters, you have to talk about election. These words, doctrines and concepts are in the Bible and you have to deal with them.

Three, it trains people how to study the Bible. When a pastor pulls a verse out of the Bible and quotes it, gets a concept from it, he doesn’t show any of the work he’s done during the week. Preaching is hard work. Most pastors spend 10 – 20 hours on one sermon. When you walk through a book of the Bible, talk about the context, train your church in that, they can see how to learn from Scripture by listening to your preaching. You show them how to work through a passage, how it all fits together. How men can lead family devotions.

There are some downsides. One, you can’t skip things. As I said above, you can’t skip stuff. This is good and bad as you will find things you will want to skip, for a number of reasons.

Two, you can get bogged down and spend too much time in a certain genre of the Bible. We try to do a good job of balancing the Old and New Testament, which can be difficult. It is easier to preach through a NT book. Often more applicable, hits more felt needs and easier to get to Jesus. At the same time, it is easy to work through a book slowly and not give your church a healthy diet of the Bible. I realize some books are longer than others, but you need to make sure you balance the Old and New Testament, different genres, different topics. We’ve had  long stretch of NT books, so after Peter we will do 2 OT books. We haven’t done a gospel yet, so we are planning to start 2013 off with either Mark or John.

I’ll share the other thing tomorrow.

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