The Secret to GREAT Preaching Is THIS? | Pastor Reacts

And I know some of you are, you're getting your dander up right now. Some of you are thinking, ooh, expository preaching is where it's at, bro.

How dare he critique it? But Keller is not wrong. Some of us can watch Keller and go, oh yeah, those people outside the church, they don't know any better.

No, I'm talking about those of us in the church. We pit the mind against the heart. To preach to the mind only, and not the heart, is to fail to the preach to the whole person.

That can't be Nate. That's, that's rhetoric. Wait a second. That's off limits. No, it's not. The apostle

Paul is saying that he uses it. I'm about to blow a gasket. If you're a pastor or preacher at the pulpit already, or even if you're a

Christian who wants to understand the secret to great sermons, because you're looking for a church yourself, pay close attention to what happens in this video.

As a matter of fact, grab a pen, grab a notebook, because we're going to talk about something that I don't hear anybody talking about today.

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It's a game changer for the Bible student at every level. Okay. Today we're looking at Tim Keller giving a lecture at a workshop.

It looks like a pastor's workshop or something like that. He gives a lecture on preaching at a conference. This was several years ago.

What he says in this lecture is solid gold. Let's take a look. Alec Mateer, in his great little book,

Preaching, question mark. Alec Mateer is a Old Testament scholar and an expository preacher. He's British or Irish, I think.

And he's, I think in his nineties now, has written a great little book on expository preaching.

And in the book, he says this. He says that preachers have not one, but two responsibilities.

Quote, first to the truth and secondly, to the particular group of people in front of you, how will they best hear the truth?

How are we to shape and phrase it so it comes home to them in a way that is palatable, that gains the most receptive hearing and avoids needless hurt.

So what Mateer says is if you want to be, if you're a communicator of the Bible, you've got two responsibilities.

You've got a responsibility to the truth, to hold it up, to present it accurately, to make sure you're expanding the text, but you also have a responsibility to the people.

You need to do that. You need to give them the truth in a way that changes them. That as he puts it, uh, that you give them the truth in a way they can best hear it in a way that it can most shape and phrase, you can shape and phrase it so that it comes home to them.

So there are a contingent of folks in the church who immediately disagree with this, okay? They don't think that there is any other requirement other than to simply speak the truth of God's word.

Just preach the gospel. And I get the concern because if you, you know, if you veer way too far into the realm of shaping messages to get people to feel something, and that becomes your primary focus, then you lose the gospel.

And a lot of churches do this, right? And they water down the gospel in order to cater to people's feelings. And then all of a sudden they're riding, uh, wrecking balls on stage, right?

And so out of that concern, people say, just preach the word. But what that means is just read the words of the text and don't do much more than that.

And the problem becomes, uh, sermons that end up looking like just an open, uh,

Bible at the pulpit, right? Pastor reads the word, maybe explains what it means on a cursory level, and then just calls it a day.

And that is not what the pastors and teachers that God gave the church are supposed to do.

They're supposed to do a lot more than that. And before someone comments or emails, you know, and they say, well, it's the

Holy Spirit, Nate, what about the Holy Spirit? I absolutely affirm that the Holy Spirit is the one who does the lion's share of the work, uh, in convicting of sin, in taking a heart of stone and turning it into a heart of flesh.

But that does not absolve the pastor from the challenge to do more than the bare minimum with God's word.

And we'll get more into what that means in a moment. Now, if this is the case, and I think it is, uh, most of our teaching and most of our books on preaching and exposition are fairly unbalanced.

Almost always, the books give almost all the time to, um, almost all the time is dedicated to how do you expound the text?

How do you understand the truth? And there might be a chapter on application or a chapter on preaching to the heart.

But even though Alec Mateer rightly says you basically have two tasks, be true to the truth and be true to the people that are in front of you.

Uh, we actually don't spend that much time talking about how do you bring the truth home in a way that actually changes lives. And it's one of the reasons why an awful lot of our expository preaching isn't very life -changing.

Oops. Did you hear that? Ooh, he's stepping on some toes here, guys.

That's why a lot of, he just said, that's why a lot of expository preaching is not life -changing. That's, um, that's a cut.

That's a cut. And I know some of you are, you're getting your dander up right now. Some of you thinking, ooh, expository preaching is where it's at, bro.

How dare he critique it? And listen to me, friends. I love expository preaching too. Okay.

I'm a, I was an expository preacher at the pulpit, but Keller is not wrong.

Just get, hear him out. Let's see where all this is headed. Um, there's not a great deal of, um, there really isn't a lot of great stuff written about how to preach to the heart.

Uh, uh, Sinclair Ferguson has a chapter in the book, Feed My Sheep. You know, there's a book called

Feed My Sheep, Passionate Plea for Preaching. Um, it's an older book, good book. Uh, and Sinclair's got a chapter in there called

Preaching to the Heart. Uh, Sam Logan has a book, uh, pardon me, has a chapter in the book,

The Preacher and Preaching. This is very confusing, by the way. Lloyd -Jones wrote a book called Preaching and Preachers.

Which is a book that I highly recommend. D. Martin Lloyd -Jones' book. Okay. And if you're, and I've recommended this on previous videos.

If you're a preacher or an aspiring preacher, whatever, teacher of God's D. Martin Lloyd -Jones' book is a must read.

And not just the one time, right? Then you read it and you put it away. But like once a year, that's one of those books you just go back to over and over just so you can reorient yourself as you continue to write new sermons.

But there was also a book put together by, uh, Westminster Seminary faculty back in the 1980s called The Preacher and Preaching, and in that book,

Sam Logan wrote a chapter called The Phenomenology of Preaching, which is basically on preaching to the heart. There's a new book by Josh Moody and Robin Weeks called

Preaching to the Heart, I think, or Preaching to the Affections, I think it's called. But by and large, we haven't spent much time on it.

Now, so I would like to give you an overview of why it's important to preach to the heart and how you do it. And this isn't, though it's,

I'm going to probably be constantly thinking about, because I am. I'm going to be constantly thinking about working preachers who are preaching every

Sunday. But this is what I'm about to tell you, I hope, is going to fit anybody who communicates the Bible.

Whether you teach the Bible, lead Bible studies, teach, preach,

I think this should be broadly applicable in many ways. So, just a couple ideas on why it's important to preach to the heart.

The Christian, the biblical understanding of heart is just unique in human thought.

The Greeks and the Romans, the ancients, understood that the passions were connected to the body.

But the mind, the reason, and the will were connected to the soul. And basically, they believed that virtue was a matter of, literally, mind over matter.

That is, if you want to be a person of loyalty, if you want to be a person of courage, if you want to have any virtue at all, what it meant was you stifled the emotions.

The reason needed to control the emotions. And that was a virtuous person. So, the ancients always pitted the thinking and the feelings against each other, and the thinking needed to squelch and keep down the feelings.

That's what produced a virtuous person. However, on the other hand, modern thought has reversed that.

We live in the, what Charles Taylor calls, the age of authenticity. And we believe that the most important thing is that you look into your heart and see what your deepest feelings are, and your deepest desires and dreams, and you fulfill them.

And so, we do the same thing today in our modern society. We now, however, have reversed things.

It's your feelings that are the true you. The ancient Greeks and the

Romans thought that your feelings was the false you. They had to do with your body. They weren't the true you. They weren't part of the spirit.

And so, they pitted mind versus the feelings. Yeah, and I've got horrible news, but a lot of us are

Greek in our thinking today, okay? And I mean us in the church, right? So, some of us can watch

Keller and go, oh yeah, those people outside the church, they don't know any better. No, I'm talking about those of us in the church.

We pit the mind against the heart, as if these two things are in commensurate with each other, and they're not.

If you've been paying attention to any of the videos that I've made in the last several years, you'll know that the mind and the heart, or the intellect and the emotions, that's how

I've characterized it, are two essential components of the whole person. One reflects the other, and vice versa.

That's how God created us in his infinite wisdom. That's how he designed us. And the more that we can appreciate this, especially as pastors and teachers, but definitely as just Christians overall, you know, the more we'll see that preaching and teaching, even sharing the gospel, must include a connection with a person's heart.

When we get up to engage others on behalf of God and his word, we should never think that we're just relaying a bunch of propositions that we say with our mouths.

That does not represent the full teaching of Jesus Christ and the New Testament. Modern people do that too, except they reverse it.

You have to let it go. You have to, you can't hold it back anymore. You know,

I've been told all my life, I mustn't feel, I have to conceal.

All right? Right? That'd be a great song, wouldn't it?

Three billion people would hear me sing that on YouTube. So, in other words, we have always pitted, you might say, the mind and the emotions.

It used to be the mind was more important than the emotions today. The emotions are more important than the mind. The Bible's understanding of the heart is completely different, and it's not halfway in the middle.

It's off the charts. Why? As you have often heard, I mentioned this yesterday, the biblical understanding of the heart is that the heart is the seat, not so much of the emotions, but it's the seat of what you trust the most, what you are committed to the most.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, Proverbs 3, or where your treasure is, there is your heart,

Matthew 6. What we're talking about is the thing or the things that you most trust in, hope in, the things that most capture your imagination, that you face, the center of your attention, the center of your commitments, your main commitments, whatever those things are, affect your mind, your will, and your emotions.

So whatever your heart trusts in the most affects not only your emotions, it also affects your thinking.

And so in some ways, the heart is the seat of the mind, the will, and the emotions, because it's coming from the trusts.

And here it is. This is the secret to great preaching. And some pastors know this, and I'm just afraid that the rest of us have just not figured this out.

When you see people and you understand them the way that God made them, you will preach and teach better.

Right now, we've got a lot of pastors who preach to the mind, and they're incredibly intelligent, and they're very cerebral people, they know their

Bible inside and out, and especially in the day and age that we are in, where biblical illiteracy is a rampant churchwide problem,

I thank God for these kinds of pastors. But the problem is, they only preach to reach their congregation's minds.

I mean, if they could, they would just open up the congregation's heads and just pour in the knowledge like cereal.

And that's not sufficient, friends. That is a very ancient Greek way of treating

God's Word. I just—we do not appreciate, in our 21st century

Western context, that God has created all human beings as the intersection of both intellect and emotion.

And a lot of us in the church have adopted the Greek dichotomy of—it's almost like pitting the mind against the emotions, you know, divorcing the mind from the emotions, to the point where if we find anyone appealing to the heart in any way, we immediately dismiss them, and we miss the bigger issue.

To preach to the mind only, and not the heart, is to fail to the preach to the whole person.

This is the reason why, when St. Augustine wrote the Confessions, it was like a bomb dropped.

No one in history had ever seen anything like the book of the Confessions. And the reason is because St. Augustine was spending his time looking at his past and figuring out his emotions.

See, in the past, in ancient times, nobody ever spent any kind of time thinking about your emotions. Emotions were things to be ignored or to be squelched.

And here's Augustine sifting them. Now, many people have said Augustine, therefore, was the first modern person, but that's a yes and no.

That's a long story there. Because today, we don't do what Augustine was doing either. Augustine was being biblical because he was saying, no, you don't squelch the emotions or ignore them.

On the other hand, you don't just vent the emotions and express them. You sift the emotions.

You evaluate the emotions, and then you redirect the emotions toward God. Did you catch that?

Actually, let's hear it one more time. By the way, this right here is the most replayed moment of the entire video, and hopefully for good reason.

Let's hear that one more time. Hey, real quick, I'm so grateful that you're watching. If I've earned the right to get your sub,

I'd love it if you would just click the like and subscribe button. It would really help me to get the video out to more and more people.

I really do appreciate you. Augustine was being biblical because he was saying, no, you don't squelch the emotions or ignore them.

On the other hand, you don't just vent the emotions and express them. You sift the emotions.

You evaluate the emotions, and then you redirect the emotions toward God. It's not like the emotions in the heart, because obviously, by the way, the heart does include the emotions.

It's not less than the emotions. It's more, but it's not less. Emotions are not great, and they're not terrible.

They're not unimportant. They're not all important. They need to be directed toward God. What that means is what you really are is basically what you love the most.

Using the word love here, not so much just an emotion. Essentially, it's not your beliefs, at least not the beliefs you subscribe to, that actually makes you what you are.

It's what your heart trusts in, what your heart loves the most. You can say, I believe in God. God is this, and God is this, and God is this, and yet your heart is basically based in your career.

We all know how that works. Your heart is actually trusting in career. Your mind is saying, no, no, no, I trust in Jesus for my salvation.

I trust in Jesus for this and that and all that, but where's your heart? Did you catch the dichotomy that he presented right there?

It is absolutely possible to hold propositions about God and his word in your mind that you sort of mentally assented to, while at the same time, your desires run right up against those same propositions.

This sort of division of mind and heart, it causes internal conflict in people all the time.

Perfect example of this, my sons are 12 and 8 years old. They know in their minds, because we've taught them well, that brushing their teeth is good for them and good for their body, and at the same time, they hate doing it.

Or at best, they feel dead on the inside while doing it. It's just, it's something that they have to do. It's a chore, but if you ask them, man, do you love brushing your teeth?

They're going to say no. Well, they obey the command to do it, but they don't love it, and that right there exposes the issue that Keller is fleshing out right now.

Maybe actually some of you are struggling with this yourself. You know what is true about God and his word, but you struggle to feel it.

You struggle to sense a love for God or God's love for you.

This all goes to show that we cannot reduce ourselves down so much that we end up believing that the only functioning component inside ourselves is our minds.

The heart is all wrapped up in our beliefs and in how we live our lives, and that means, again, pastor, preacher, teacher, the secret to great preaching is shaping sermons that engage the whole person.

Jonathan Edwards, who was a great Augustinian, therefore said that if you're going to be thoroughly biblical, you must not pit knowledge and feeling against each other.

That if you say, I know I should be generous with my money, but I'm just not doing it, he would say, well, there's a sense in which you know what you should do, but you're not doing it, but there's another sense in which you don't really know what you should do.

Let me give you an example. I'm better than I was yesterday, but not as better as I'd like to be.

When I was a pastor in Virginia many years ago, I had a young girl in my church, and she was about 15 years old,

I guess, and she was discouraged. She was depressed often, and the family was a prominent family in the church, and I tried to help the family with her.

At one point, she came into my study, and we were talking, and being a young minister, I was a little bit naive, and I said, well, how are you feeling?

She was downcast, and I said, well, you're a Christian, aren't you? Oh, yes, I'm a Christian. Christians have many blessings, don't they?

Oh, yes, we do, and so we counted the blessings a little bit about the great things that, as a Christian, she could count on, and she knew was happening there, and all those great things in her life.

But at one point, I said, so you're still depressed? And she said, I tried to encourage her, but here's what she said, almost literally.

Yes, I know that Jesus loves me. I know he saved me, and I know he's going to take me to heaven, but what good is all that when not a single boy at school will even look at you?

Now, I don't know why more of you aren't laughing at that. What she was saying is, yeah, I'm saved.

Yes, I'm going to heaven forever. Yes, I'm a daughter of the king. Yes, I'm going to be glorified. I'm justified, sanctified, glorified, and all that.

But you know what? I'm in ninth grade, tenth grade, and not a single boy will ask me out. Now, here's what

Jonathan Edwards would say. He would say, she had the opinion that God loved her, but she had no real knowledge that God loved her, because the love of boys was more real to her heart than the love of God, or she wouldn't have been depressed.

And so, in one sense, you could say, what she just needed to be told... Well, what did she need to be told?

See, what Edwards would say is, she needed to be shown the love of God in such a way that it began to get more real to her heart, and it began to balance out how popular she was or unpopular she was.

Yep. This is what Jesus meant when he said this. This is Luke chapter 6, verse 45.

The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.

You see where the source of our actions and speech truly comes from?

Jesus says it's the heart. That requires us to engage the heart.

To try to engage the heart by simply focusing on relaying information to the mind is like trying to put a

Band -Aid on a bullet wound. You're not truly engaging anyone in this way. We need to, as pastors and preachers, learn how to engage the heart so that our congregations don't just hear the word but are equipped to do the work of ministry so that we build ourselves up in love.

That's Ephesians 4. Again, some of you are, you know, you don't like this, right?

You're getting upset when you hear this because it's stepping on traditions that you hold near and dear to, ironically, your heart.

Okay? But Keller is absolutely correct. The Bible does reinforce this idea that Keller is unpacking now, and our

Christian forebears knew this all too well as well. It's us who have forgotten this over time.

By the way, if you're curious, like, what the practical sort of application is here, like how to engage the heart in preaching, you're going to have to watch the whole video, so I'm going to leave a link to that in the notes.

You should definitely take a look at that, especially if you're a pastor, a teacher, you're about to preach at the pulpit, this would be a good exercise.

Some years ago, one more before I talk about how to do it. Some years ago, well,

I won't mention, I had a relative who never would wear a seatbelt, and every time I talked to him, he would get in the car and he wouldn't wear a seatbelt, and we all would nag him about wearing a seatbelt.

All right, he put his seatbelt on. And one day, we went to see him and got in the car and he put his seatbelt on right away. And we said, well, what happened to you?

And he said, well, I went to a friend of mine, a couple of weeks ago,

I went to see a friend of mine in the hospital. He was in a car crash and he went through the windshield and he had like 200 stitches in his face. And for some strange reason, ever since then,

I've been having no problem, you know, buckling up. And I talked to him a little bit about that.

What was interesting going on was I said, well, did you get new information? You know, what changed you? I mean, did you not know that people go through the windshield?

And what happened was an abstract proposition became connected to an actual sensory experience, that is something he saw.

And there's some place where Jonathan Edwards, the whole idea behind preaching to the heart, at some point where Jonathan Edwards says, it's only when you attach, it's only when you actually attach an abstract truth to some kind of sensory experience that you've had, or at least a memory of a sensory experience that you have.

I'm going to show you how to do this in a second. That something that you know is true becomes real to you. And the point of preaching to the heart is to take abstract truth and to make it real to people's heart so that they are changed.

A lot of us would like it if people took notes from our sermons or our talks and then went out into the world and started to change their life.

But what I'm telling you is, and Jonathan Edwards never spoke that much about preaching, but in one of his books,

Thoughts on Revival, he actually says about preaching, that preaching does not change you by giving people information that then they go out and practice as much as, it changes you through the impression it's made during the sermon.

What he means is this. If that girl is sitting under preaching, that 16 -year -old girl, who's, by the way, probably in her 50s now.

But anyway, that 16 -year -old girl is sitting under preaching, and the love of God, through Jesus Christ, in a sermon, becomes so vividly real to her and starts to affect her.

We're talking about the affections. And it starts to penetrate to the heart. And she starts to say, why am

I all that upset about whether this or that stupid boy like me or not when I've got this kind of love? See, when that sort of thing starts happening in her heart, she's being changed on the spot.

She's being changed during the sermon. She's being changed because the preaching has reached her heart. And so, as Alec Mateer said,

I started the talk this way, what Alec Mateer is trying to say, it's not enough for you to take a text and say, okay,

I need to show that this text teaches that Jesus Christ sacrificed for us and loved us with a costly love, okay?

And that's the text. It's not enough just to say, I need to expound that accurately. I need to bring that home to people's hearts in such a way that it changes them in the seats.

And so, their hearts are affected by it. And the other things that are more real to their heart than the love of Jesus become, you know,

Jesus' love starts to displace that. So, that... I understand that for some of you, you're at churches where, praise

God, your pastor knows this and has been doing this well. But I also understand that for a lot of you, this whole concept is entirely new.

And so, this is going to take some time to sink in. All I ask you is prayerfully consider what you just heard.

Look at this. This is 2 Corinthians 5, verse 20. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ.

Now, pay attention to the language. God making his appeal through us.

We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

Notice those terms, implore, right? Some of your translations might say, beseech.

This is emotionally laden rhetoric, okay? We implore you on behalf of Christ.

In other words, we're begging you on Christ's behalf. God is making his appeal through us.

Which, by the way, who's us? It's Paul and the apostles. Oh, but Nate, you're saying, oh, that's rhetoric.

That's persuasion. That sounds like manipulation. You're absolutely right, it's persuasion. That's what we're supposed to be doing at the pulpit.

Pastor? Teacher? Preacher? Where are my pastors at? That's what we're supposed to be doing.

Or else, we're not engaging the whole person. Which, by the way, don't get mad at me. Paul's the one who said this.

Look at this. Same chapter, a few verses earlier. Verse 11. Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we, what's this word?

We persuade others. That can't be, Nate. That's rhetoric.

Wait a second. That's off limits. No, it's not. The apostle Paul is saying that he uses it.

I'm about to blow a gasket. Think of it like this, friends. You remember when

Jesus was asked, what is the greatest commandment? What did he say?

Do you remember this? Matthew chapter 22, verse 36. Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?

And Jesus said to him, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your mind.

This is the great and first commandment. And the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. You remember this?

Now, here's the question. Why didn't Jesus say obedience? Isn't that important too, to obey

God and to obey his word? Why didn't Jesus say obeying the commands of God, obeying the law?

That's the greatest thing that you can do. The answer is Jesus knows something that a lot of us have forgotten today.

Your heart is the true source of what you think and how you live your life. The root down deep is the heart.

And the language that speaks to the heart cannot be stripped down to the abstract and the propositional.

It must also entail love and emotion. The whole person must be engaged if they are to live this

Christian life well. And pastors and preachers and teachers of the pulpit, we need to encourage our congregation in a manner that respects the way that God created human beings.

That is the secret key to great sermons, in my opinion. All right, well, now it's your turn. What do you think about what

Keller said? You know, is he right? Is he way off? What have you seen from your own vantage point at church?

I actually want to hear from you if you're a pastor. Let me know in the comments below. I'd love to get your thoughts.

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