BY BILL KNOTT
EAR GREG AND DIANE:
Every time I think of the two of you, I find myself smiling,
and especially when I get a letter from you. That familiar Wellington Drive
return address on the envelope has a predictable effect on me: I push the books
and papers aside, find my favorite armchair, and reenter the spirit of thanksgiving,
even when the holiday is long gone. Watching the two of you come to know Jesus
and grow as His disciples has been one of the great joys of my ministry. Enjoying
your friendship has been an extra blessing.*
Debby and I often talk about that afternoon when we first
met you. Our “chance” meeting owed nothing to coincidence, I’m sure. The conversations,
the picnics, the Bible studies that followed were somehow all contained in that
completely normal happening. Jesus brought our lives together at just the right
moment when we were searching for some way to meet our new neighbors and you
were searching for spiritual truth.
Diane, baptizing you (can you believe it was nine years
ago?) still stands out as one of my favorite moments as a pastor. I’ll agree
that it’s not typical for the preacher to be the one crying in the baptistry,
but I was so overcome with a sense of God’s grace and goodness that day that
I couldn’t have stopped the tears even if I wanted to—which I didn’t. The smile
on your face when you came up out of the water was what some writers would call
“angelic,” except that “angels never felt the joys that our salvation brings.”
Jesus has given you such a quiet, trusting spirit that all of us who know you
are made more secure in our own relationships with Him.
Greg, I’m still berating myself for that travel itinerary
six months ago that kept me from being at your baptism. You know I tried every
way I could to move that weekend speaking series when I heard of your plans.
I’m still talking with the Lord about that one. I’ve watched the video you sent
at least half a dozen times now, and I’ll admit to relishing every moment. When
I think of the Sunday afternoons we spent watching your Packers beat my Cowboys,
and the early-morning “racquetball wars” at the club, I’m reminded that the
Lord can turn the very ordinariness of daily life into growth for His kingdom.
We’ve logged a lot of hours together over the years. I treasure that moment
in the baptism video when you candidly admit how “weird” it seemed to have a
pastor as your friend. We preachers are by no means perfect, and not always
the easiest persons to listen to.
Which all somehow brings me to the central question of your
letter: “Can you give us some help on how to listen to a sermon?” Knowing
the two of you, I know it isn’t a casual question. You wouldn’t have asked it
because of your disappointment with one week’s sermon or your sense of distractedness
while Jennifer was teething. I’ll have to admit that no one has ever asked me
that question before in nearly 20 years of ministry. But as I’ve thought and
prayed about your request for several days, I’ve come to the conclusion that
it just may be one of the most important questions any Adventist can ask these
days.
As I listen to a variety of sermons and talk with many pastors
in my travels for the Review, I’m discovering that we are in a strange
moment for preaching in the Adventist Church. On one hand, we have a few brilliant
practitioners whose soaring sermons truly feed us and are eagerly distributed
by cassettes and videos almost before the benediction is through. On the other,
too many sermons in too many pulpits provide all the evidence needed that the
pastor isn’t having an encounter with the living Word week by week. I’m not
interested in playing the “blame game,” though. Nothing is going to be gained
by pointing fingers and muttering during the potluck. Your question pushes me
(and, I presume, you) back to personal responsibilities in the weekly experience
of “listening to the Word.”
I’ve put that last phrase in quotation marks because it’s
the best term I know to describe the covenant that both the preacher and the
congregation must enter into every week. To open the Bible before God’s people
on a Sabbath is to make a serious pledge to them, whether the preacher is a
professional pastor, a local elder, or even a guest speaker. He or she is saying,
in effect, “I’ve had an encounter with God this week because of the time, the
hours, that I’ve spent listening to His Word. I’ve come to know something more
of His justice, or His mercy, or His supreme revelation in Jesus Christ, and
I want to show you where I found it and how I found it and what a difference
this can make in your lives.” That’s clearly not a casual testimony. I could
wish that more of those who presume to open the Word every week could say those
words conscientiously.
“Listening to the Word” is also more than just being in
the same room where it is preached. While the pastor or speaker owns half the
responsibility for “listening to the Word,” he or she owns only half. The congregation—meaning
you, Greg and Diane, and your friends and your age-mates and even your enemies—participates
in that weekly covenant without which the sermon is only sound waves reverberating
in an enclosed space. By your presence on Sabbath morning, you are pledging
something like this: “I will listen to the Word differently than I listen to
the news or to the FM station or even to a political speech. I’ll let God’s
Word get into my life through this sermon more deeply and radically than I will
allow anyone else’s words—even my spouse’s words—to reach me.” That’s also not
a casual pledge. When I listen to God’s Word through the pastor’s sermon, I’m
promising a quality of focus and attention that stretches me every week to practice
what some counselors refer to as “active listening.”
Greg, I’ve found myself thinking most of all about how strange
the experience of listening to a sermon must seem to you. There’s probably been
nothing else in your life to this point that even resembles it. Almost no one
in our culture sits down to hear one person talk for half an hour about anything
anymore. Aside from the president’s annual State of the Union address—which
is usually a laundry list of promises designed to placate or please various
special-interest groups—even politicians have trimmed their orations to eight
or 10 minutes. The lecture circuit that entertained our great-grandparents a
century ago has almost completely disappeared. We don’t tolerate broadcasts
of baseball or football games without at least two, and preferably three, commentators
to offer play-by-play, color, and assorted statistical trivia. Which is all
a way of saying that you shouldn’t be too surprised that you find it hard to
listen to a sermon and often can’t seem to “get much out of it.”
For you, Diane, the challenge is different, but equally
difficult. After nine years of regular church attendance, you’ve heard something
like 400 sermons, including—gulp!—quite a number of mine. By now you probably
have a routine way of thinking about what is supposed to happen during the sermon,
and maybe even a typical posture in the pew. (If I remember correctly, you usually
sat with your eyes closed and that curious little half-smile on your face!)
Moving out of your current pattern into a new attentiveness to the Word won’t
be easy, but it should prove rewarding.
So here—for two of my favorite people—are some suggestions
that may help you listen to sermons with greater awareness of what Jesus may
want you to hear in His Word.
Remember that listening to a sermon
is an act of worship.
We’ve all grown accustomed in recent years to thinking of worship as
something we give or “do” in an active sense. When we stand up and sing “A Mighty
Fortress” or “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” we are giving “worth” to God through our
praise. We sense an immediate connection to the One we are adoring, for we are
saying, “You, Jesus, are the Lord of my life, and I gladly give You control
of everything about me.” As important and useful as this newer understanding
of worship has proven to be, it has left many church members uncertain or ambivalent
about that significant portion of the “worship service” in which someone else
is talking about God instead of to Him. How can listening to a preacher talk
about the Bible be my act of praise? It sometimes seems as though someone—the
preacher—has stepped between me and the One I am worshiping.
But if we understand that the preacher’s words are, in the
best sense, a witness, a testimony, to what he or she has learned from listening
to the Word, then our “part” in this act of worship becomes clearer. When I
listen to you give your testimony in that baptism video, Greg, the response
of my heart is deep gratitude to God and a lingering spirit of thanksgiving.
When I hear the pastor’s words as his or her affirmation of the goodness and
grace of God seen through a specific portion of Scripture, the best response
is “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”
A real sermon, a biblical sermon, isn’t an erudite examination
of obscure scriptural information or, conversely, a humorous collection of anecdotes
strung together by some thread called “grace” or “forgiveness.” It’s a testimony
coming directly from the heart of a man or woman who is saying, “I believe God
is good because He has acted in Jesus Christ to save me in the same way that
this passage of Scripture reveals.” Listening to a sermon is an act of worship
whenever you want to replace the designated closing hymn with “How Great Thou
Art” or “God Is So Good.”
Don’t be surprised that you find it
difficult to stay focused.
When we did that 10-week study on prayer some years ago, Diane, I remember
how relieved you felt when you discovered that I sometimes find it difficult
to stay “on topic” while praying. Many things rush into the quietness of my
prayer time, and if I let them take over, I can find myself composing memos,
anticipating difficult conversations, even rehearsing sermon ideas during what
is supposed to be an intimate conversation with Jesus.
Now that I’m listening to sermons more frequently than preaching
them, I’ve discovered that the same tools I use to restore a sense of focus
in my prayer life come in very handy while listening to a sermon. No, I’m not
a wicked, ungodly person because I think of Debby’s pasta primavera during the
sermon. I live in this body God gave me, and by 12:15 (sometimes 12:45!) I can
hear my gastric juices almost as clearly as the Word. The secret lies in not
berating myself, but in quietly asking Jesus to help me put first things first
as He gently redirects my thoughts back to what I really need to feed on. The
techniques of focused prayer that I know you have learned, Diane, and that you
are learning, Greg, will be truly useful to you in listening to a sermon.
Try to reduce the number of distractions
around you.
This is certainly one of those suggestions that’s “easier said than
done.” The number and variety of things to take our attention off the Word is
growing year by year. We find ourselves thinking about the poor quality of the
sound system that makes the pastor seem like he’s talking from the far end of
a tin can, or whether all the Power Point graphics she uses during the sermon
were ones she designed. We notice that the ceiling fans are obviously chilling
the elderly who always sit in the third row, and we spend half the sermon trying
to signal a deacon.
Many churches conveniently provide a sheaf of distractions
in the form of the weekly bulletin: there we can grow anxious over the state
of the church’s budget while the Word is being preached, or consider whether
or not to attend Sunday’s football tailgate party in the church parking lot.
It takes some planning—and some willpower—to know yourself well enough to take
steps to reduce the likelihood that you will be distracted during the sermon.
When I was a child, my father had a rule for us boys that
still seems useful to me. We could read our Primary Treasure or Junior
Guide during the opening parts of worship, but we had to put them away during
the sermon. The adult equivalent for me is to put the bulletin, the hymnal,
the Sabbath school quarterly, and any other pieces of paper I have collected
out of reach, usually on the floor. That leaves me with only my Bible in my
hands—a reasonable posture to reflect the Word I’m hearing with my ears.
I can imagine that you’re already protesting, Diane, as
you read this suggestion—“He clearly doesn’t know what it’s like to take young
children to worship!” And it’s true: I was about 100 feet away and safely behind
a wooden pulpit during all those difficult months when Debby tried to listen
to what I was saying and keep the peace between Evan and Brady. We will both
be forever grateful to the “mother in Israel” who volunteered to sit at one
end of the pew while Debby guarded the other. Her ministry to our family made
it possible for Debby to feel that she was actually part of the worship service,
instead of only a spectator in a far-off, dimly lit mothers’ room. The noiseless
playthings with which this saint surprised our boys each week kept them fascinated—and
usually quiet.
Other churches we have served have organized teenagers or
grandmothers to take turns watching young children so that beleaguered moms
and dads could have their souls refreshed by sitting peacefully under the Word.
The answer seems to lie in advance planning—for both you and your kids—so that
the good seed won’t be snatched away by all the distracting birds on the edge
of your consciousness.
Practice “openheartedness.”
I don’t think that there’s really such a word in the dictionary, but the one I’ve
cobbled together gets closer to the attitude necessary to benefit from a sermon
than any other term I know. All week long we listen to news, conversation, commercials,
statements from public officials with an entire set of filters in place. We
“divide by the relevant figure,” we say; we sort what we hear on some scale
of probable truthfulness, and calculate accordingly. We know that almost every
kind of communication is trying to “sell” us something: toothpaste, capitalism,
diapers, a new car. And so we are routinely skeptical of what we hear. We put
it in a halfway house to examine its claims and see if it’s worth taking deeper
into our lives.
While this is no doubt a useful habit when listening to
the world, it’s a serious problem when listening to the Word. The filters by
which we normally judge what we hear the rest of the week—“Do I like the product
being sold?” “Does it suit my sense of taste?” “How can I get it for the least
effort?”—are of no help to us in listening to God’s Word. The whole point of
listening to the sermon is to get something foreign to us—God’s truth about
who we are and Whose we are—deeply and unforgettably into our lives. If run
through our usual filters, God’s Word will undoubtedly offend us, repulse us,
and seem completely unattractive.
For decades dramatists have spoken of an attitude that they
deem critically important for their work to be understood by an audience. They
speak of “the willing suspension of disbelief”—a deliberate decision by the
playgoer to shut off the normal critical functions that would tell them that
the man on the stage is not really King Lear raging against fate on an English
heath but only a man dressed up to look like King Lear on a stage where the
thunder is produced by special effects. Unless the audience chooses to suspend
their habitual disbelief, the play cannot communicate.
Something similar has to happen if the Word is ever going
to get lodged in my heart each Sabbath. I have to listen with a heart more than
usually open, much as I would listen to a close friend whom I trusted. This
doesn’t mean that I have to know the preacher well or even like him or her in
order to benefit from what is said. But I must choose to extend trust week by
week that God can find me with His Word even if the preacher loses me.
If this process is going to work—if God’s foreign but ultimately
saving Word is going to be planted and nurtured in my sinful heart—I’m going
to have to shut down the normal critical functions that would tell me that I
am only listening to an average speaker give some pretty average thoughts about
the Bible. By practicing openheartedness, I choose to believe that something
more than a mere human event is happening wherever and whenever God’s Word is
preached. Through ways I frequently cannot understand, and that I’m certain
the preacher often cannot grasp, God uses the sermon to plant His life-giving
Word in my heart. I say this on faith, without which, that Word tells me, it
is impossible to please Him.
Affirm what you can with all that you are.
Not everything said in every
sermon deserves an amen. On occasions I’ve listened to sermons that presented
a distorted picture of Jesus and His gospel as determined by the Bible. And
I’ll have to confess to sometimes enjoying the sense of righ-teous indignation
that invariably arises when the authority figure speaking so loudly from the
front is wrong about something I deem important. (Add “righteous indignation”
to the list of distractions referred to above!) But even in the poorest sermon—by
which I mean one for which the speaker didn’t have an honest encounter with
God in His Word—there is also invariably some understanding of God, some truth
about Jesus, that I can emphatically affirm. Remember, Greg and Diane, the truth
you affirm doesn’t have to be new and exciting: it simply needs to be true.
I find myself praying in my pew, even during one of those poor sermons, “Lord,
anchor this truth about You so deeply in my life that I will see it at every
turn in the coming week and will praise You every day for it.” It’s a prayer
that He has never yet refused to answer.
The corollary to affirming what I can from the sermon during
the worship service is consciously living with that truth all through the coming
week. If the truth that I affirmed last Sabbath was “Jesus is the Lord of everything
in this universe,” then the right question to be asking all this week is, “How
am I surrendering each piece of my life to His lordship today?” Have I acknowledged
Jesus as Lord of “my” money and “my” body and “my” job? Have I chosen Him as
the healer of all my broken relationships, and the teacher at whose feet I choose
to sit? Living out the truth I affirmed during the sermon last Sabbath prepares
my heart to hear something new this week. “For to all those who have, more will
be given, and they will have an abundance” (Matt. 25:29, NRSV).
If these five suggestions have any merit at all, they’ll prod
you to think more deeply about what you experience each week during worship,
and to develop your own disciplines for “holy listening.” If there is any good
grain in what I’ve written, I trust that the Lord will see that it gets planted.
I also trust that He will lightly blow away any chaff here so that your hearts
and minds will be untroubled, and you will find lasting joy in Jesus.
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col. 3:16, NRSV).
I lift the two of you up to the Father every day.
Sincerely yours . . . and His,
Bill
*Names and some details have been changed to preserve confidence.
_________________________
Bill Knott is an associate editor of the
Adventist Review.
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