2 Fatal Flaws of Instructional Preaching

1 – It doesn’t work.

• The worst way to teach anyone is by gathering large groups of people and lecturing them for 40 minutes.
• People don’t retain information.
• Lecturing to audiences is not an effective way to communicate.
• Small, relational community environments is the best place for teaching to happen.

2 – It doesn’t challenge people’s perceptions of reality.

• People have spent 6 days marinating in the both of the world of consumerism.
• This worldview shapes everything about us.
• We have a consumer worldview that teaches us we are the center of the universe and that everything [jobs, marriages, etc] revolves around us and value is found not in what things are, but in what they bring me.
• It teaches that the goal of life is to satisfy our desires.
• It teaches us there is a pill, program, or person to solve their problems.
• It reduces Jesus Christ to a commodity.
• We have spent decades convincing
• We’ve inoculate people to the Gospel.
• We’ve made it our mission in life to make people feel like Jesus Christ is the relevant answer to their unmet needs.
• We’ve made Him an end to our means, not an end.
• We’ve made Jesus into the equivalent of a DuctTape, WD40 Combo pack… just about all you need to fix anything.
• We’ve made Him into an instrument to fulfill our desires.
• Christianity is the most irrelevant but most beautiful worldview.
• The call of the Christian life is to deny yourself and follow Him.
• We’re not challenging the presuppositions people have, we are just reinforcing them.
• People who are walking in darkness don’t just need a cane to help them cope; they need to see a Great Light.
• They don’t need to see how to live in this broken world, they need to see another world, another reality.

Teaching is important; but when you give people how-to’s, they have no vision for why they should.

VIM – Vision, Intention, Means

• Teaching how-to fulfills the Means
• When people have no vision – the reality of God’s Kingdom – they won’t implement the means.
• When people have a means and no vision, it’s like unused home gym equipment.
• When you have a vision, the means take of itself – when there’s a will, there’s a way.
• A culture in which you have a ton of means and no vision is the culture of the church today.
• It’s a generation that has more access to teaching and Christian resources than ever before, and yet has a moral decline.
• We don’t lack instruction, we lack a vision for why it matters.
• Our people do not intend to follow Christ.
• Nothing in the Church is challenging their consumer values, it’s just reinforcing them.

How Do We Help Them See the Other Side?

• When the Kingdom of God is preached, it breaks the darkness of the world and let’s people see a vision of another reality, a place of peace, righteousness, wholeness and justice.
• We get enraptured in this beauty.
• It doesn’t happen through instruction, it happens through inspiration.
• It happens when we don’t see preaching as an act of informing but an act of inspiring.
• There’s an alternative way to preach, preaching as illumination model.

The Illumination Model

• Targets the imagination.
• Turns on the lights.
• Helps people see the reality.
• Solves the problems of remembering and challenging.
• Recognizes there’s a difference between preaching and teaching.
• In the NT the most common word for preaching meant “to announce.”
• Jesus came “preaching” the Kingdom of heaven was at hand.
• The word of teaching in the NT was “to instruct.”
• They are used differently.
• Jesus told His disciples to go out and PREACH, then He told them to TEACH.
• Teaching expects you to be competent with a set of knowledge.
• You don’t have to know jack to preach.
• Preaching is not about conveying information; it’s about announcing a new reality you have experienced.
• Peter and the disciples has experienced the Kingdom of God through the presence of Christ.
• Preaching is announcing flight 500 from Denver has landed; teaching explains how and why a plane landed.
• I can’t tell you how, but I can tell you it happened.
• Preaching requires experiential knowledge of the reality of the Kingdom of God.
• Our job is to help people see the reality of the Kingdom of God illuminated through the ancient words.
• Teaching engages intellect; preaching is an experience that illuminates.
• Preaching alters our vision – it helps us see beyond the darkness.
• Nothing Jesus taught made sense until people had their way of thinking altered… once you see the alternate reality, it makes sense.
• Once you see the Kingdom, things that don’t make sense, connect.
• Their vision of reality has to be altered.
• Vision has to come before instruction.
• Most of the people in our churches don’t need more Biblical teaching, they need their minds set free from the mindset of consumerism to see the beauty of the reality of the Kingdom of God.
• Jesus told people to “go back and tell what you have seen.”
• That’s our call… to help people see the reality we have seen.
• To help people see with new eyes.
• Our role isn’t to help people cope, our job is to help them see what’s unseen.
• We do that through our lives, stories, experiences and illuminating the ancient Scriptures.
• An awful lot of the verbs in the NT Greek are in the present tense.
• It’s not “Jesus went to Jerusalem…” it really is “Jesus goes to Jerusalem…”
• It was a literary device used to help the listener enter into the reality of the story.
• Don’t just share information, lift people’s vision.

What are you doing on Sunday morning?

• Are you getting people to DO the Christian life, or to SEE the reality of the Kingdom so they will want to DO the Christian life?
• We need to ravish people with the power, beauty and wonder of His Kingdom.

Preach in season and out of season, don’t just teach. Don’t just instruct, inspire. Don’t just educate, but take up your divine calling and illuminate.