One of my jobs when I was a regular church pastor was to prayerfully plan the preaching and carefully assign a biblical passage for each week.
That is perhaps what is in mind in 2 Timothy 2:15:
“Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.”
Preachers need to show that they are up to the job of communicating the message to the congregation. This means correctly handling Scripture, or as an older translation puts it: “rightly dividing the word of truth.”
There are numerous pictures of what is in mind here.
The preacher is an adventurer cutting through the undergrowth of the forest to make a clear path.
A preacher is a carpenter who has cut his wood accurately. As a carpenter friend of mine put it: “measure twice and cut once.” Central European friends are even more cautious, they reckon it is best to “measure seven times and cut once.” Maybe that is a throwback to the time when resources were limited and needed to be used sparingly.
Perhaps the image that appealed to me most was the idea of a parent cutting up their children’s food into small chunks so they could digest them.
Nowadays I tend to preach in places where the choices about the passages of Scripture for preaching have been made by others.
Sometimes this means that I get given a passage that is so long that it is difficult to make one coherent message out of it. This is a particular challenge when preaching on one of the New Testament letters, where the teaching is often detailed and dense.
Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, in their magnificent volume How to Read the Bible for all its Worth, have the following pithy advice about preaching from the letters:
“Think paragraphs!”
When assigned a passage that cuts a paragraph up or tries to navigate two or more long paragraphs, the sermon can become cumbersome and unwieldy.
Last Sunday I enjoyed preaching from Hebrews 11:23–41. This is the “By faith” chapter that takes a sweep through the whole Old Testament story to show that what marked out God’s people from the rest was the ability to trust God.
I approached this longish section by thinking of it as seven little snapshots from the life of Moses, the Exodus and the conquest. What becomes clear is that, in the words of JC Ryle, “faith is the eye of the Christian soul.”
Faith is a way of seeing life differently: seeing God, suffering, and impossible situations in a whole new light.
The climax of the story is the conversion of Rahab. This foreigner is rescued from the destroyed city of Jericho because she saw by faith that the God of the Bible is the one true God. It reminded me that the whole Moses story, with all its twists and turns, and the combination of the ordinary and the spectacular, was moving toward transforming the life of this woman.
Preachers need to learn how to communicate that God is willing to move heaven and earth to rescue one sinner!
Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash