10 Steps to Better Bible Teaching

The commentary is a corrector. It's a challenge to you. Okay, you've come up with a conclusion. Does your conclusion, are you the only person who's ever seen this? Right. The old adage is if it's new it ain't true.

The Need for Careful Bible Teaching and the Danger of Novelty

New truth is old heresy. Your Calvinist Podcast is filmed before a live studio audience. And welcome back to Your Calvinist Podcast. My name is Keith Foskey and I am your Calvinist. Do you want to be a better Bible teacher or maybe just be a better student of the Bible in general?

Well, today's podcast is going to give you 10 steps to better understanding how to prep for Bible study, whether you're teaching someone else or if you're just learning the Bible for yourself. I'm joined today by one of my best friends in the world.

You know him, not only because he's in the intro to this video, but he's also the Reformed Baptist in all of my skits that I do. Many of you like the denominational videos. Well, I have with me today Uncle Rich Roden and he's called that because he is like an uncle to my children.

Richard, how are you doing today, buddy? Doing good, brother. Happy to be here again. Yes, sir. Glad to have you. And I am thankful that you are coming to talk with me about this very important subject.

But before we talk about it, I do have some things I need to remind the audience of. I do this every time you watch the show, so you know what I'm going to say. We are a ministry of Sovereign Grace Family Church.

So if you're in the Jacksville area, come see us at Sovereign Grace Family Church and you can find us at sgfcjacks .org. And every time I have Richard on, I like to mention his church as well, because his church is not in my city.

It's in the next city over. It's actually in the city I live in. Can we call Callahan a city? Town. It's a town. Okay, in the town I live in. It's a very small area. But Richard is a member of Gray-Gables Baptist Church, where he serves as a deacon.

And his pastor, Cody, is a wonderful man, godly man. He's had me preach for him, so you know he's great. And he's a good friend. And he and his brother Adam are wonderful friends and both pastors. And so we would encourage you, if you're in the Callahan area and you're looking for a good church, try out Gray-Gables.

Also remember that this show is a partner with tinybibles .com. Have you ever seen the tiny Bible?

I've seen it on the show. I haven't seen it up close yet.

I'm going to hand it to you. And while I'm talking about it, I just want you to look at it. Okay. All right. So tinybibles .com provides the smallest printed Bible on the market. And I will tell you, Richard, it does come with an eyepiece, because it's a little hard to read without it.

But this Bible can be taken anywhere, can be hidden anywhere, can be given as a gift, kept as an heirloom. There's all kinds of good things that you can do with it. And if you want to get a tiny Bible, you can do so by going to tinybibles .com.

And you get a percentage off by using my name, Keith, as the promo code. Also, if you're interested in cigars, I recently won the cigar challenge on Twitter. I beat out the likes of Doug Wilson and all kinds of other guys to win the top of that spot.

And so if you use my name, Keith, at 1689cigars, you'll get a percentage.

Off there as well. My name's just everywhere. Mm-hmm. All you had to do was make one denomination.

Video. That's right. One denomination video. Nobody knew who I was. I put on the bow tie and, you know. There it is. It's so silly. Also, if you want to support the show directly, you can do so by either becoming a member of our club.

We have a club on YouTube. It's called the Superior Theology Club. And you can become a member. Or you can go to buymeacoffee .com and leave a donation there. And we would love that if you did it. It really helps us out.

I also want to mention one other thing. And I know everybody wants to hear the Bible study thing, but I have to mention the fact I've been wearing ties in all my videos. Do you know why.

I'm wearing ties in all my videos? If I remember correctly, you have church members who'd like to.

Buy you ties. I do. I have church members who have been... These ladies are... They're so funny. They go to the thrift stores and they try to find the worst ties. They're not looking for great ties. They're looking for the worst ties.

And they want me to wear them. And so I've just decided, because I now have so many ties, and there's no way I could wear them all on Sunday mornings. And some of them I wouldn't wear on Sunday mornings.

But this tie, I just had to mention for today, this is a Christmas tie. Last week, I posted a video of me in front of a Christmas tree in Hobby Lobby. And I said, is it really right to put out Christmas stuff in August?

No. Everybody was saying no, except for some people came to Hobby Lobby's defense and said, oh, they have all this stuff in the back. They got to bring it out. They got to get it going. I get it, if that's their store model.

But I just figured, in my defense of Hobby Lobby, I would wear a Christmas tie today. It actually has reindeer on it. This is my reindeer tie. Mounted reindeer. I don't know if that would offend a few people.

Well, after a while, I mean, is Blitzen really still at it? You know, that's the one thing, if you watch Rudolph the movie, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer assumes that there's going to be another generation of reindeer.

So Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen are eventually going to retire.

I'm just amazed at how quickly you did that.

Eventually, they're going... I love Christmas, by the way. When Christmas comes around, we always have fun episodes. We're going to do another fun episode this year about Christmas. Maybe another debate about Die Hard.

Be like our fifth year in a row doing a Die Hard debate. But no, I just wonder if the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer means that we're on like our fourth or fifth generation of reindeer, although other ones have died.

And that means they're probably on... Or you just got a bunch of geriatric... They're on Santa's wall. This is my ode to the eight tiny reindeer.

Well, it's not a bad-looking tie. So, I mean, it's not a terrible tie. It's just kind of... Yeah.

It is what it is. All right. We'll move on. 10 Steps to Prep Your Bible. Teaching is the subject of today's podcast. And who is this useful for? I mentioned this in the opening. It's going to be useful first for pastors and those who teach Sunday school, because that's where we're coming from.

I pastor church, which means I preach every week almost. A couple of weeks a year, I may be off. Richard preaches as a pulpit supply at certain churches, but he also teaches every other week in Sunday school opposite Brother Johnny.

So you're teaching at least 25, 26 Sundays a year?

Well, the way ours usually works out is he's the primary in the class, and I usually teach every second Sunday, because he has other obligations on that Sunday. But it ends up averaging out to where it's about half, because if I got a particular text that's going to take more than one week to explain or go through, there's been times I've gone four weeks in a row.

Gotcha. So, you know, it evens out about half.

Well, as we talked about, the process we're going to be discussing and the 10 Steps, and it's not as if 10 Steps was just a magic number. We just said, these are 10 things we do. It could have been six, could have been eight, but we wanted to look at both of us could contribute and say, here are the things that we do.

And some of them may apply more to preaching, some of them may apply more to Sunday school. And if you're not a preacher or a Sunday school teacher, it may be that these apply to your own personal Bible study, as I mentioned, or how you lead your family.

Family worship has been a big conversation lately. I've written some articles for it in Clear Truth, and so I recently taught a lesson on it at a church that I was invited to come teach on. So family worship is important, and prepping for that may be way different than what we're talking about, but these principles will still apply.

And so we're going to give you 10 things. But before, again, before we get to the 10 things, I want to talk about two things first. One is the idea of corporate teaching. Everyone who is a father is responsible to teach your children and to lead your wife, but not everyone is called to be a teacher in a corporate setting.

The passage that comes to mind, and should come to all of our minds, is James chapter 3, verse 1, which says, let not everyone be a teacher, because a teacher will be held at a—or will be held to a stricter judgment, depending on how it's translated.

Basically, the teacher has to be understood as one who is going to be judged for what he teaches and how he teaches. And so that's part of why we're doing this. We want people to understand that if you are taken to teach in the corporate body, whether you're teaching from the pulpit, whether you're teaching from a lectern in a classroom, you have a responsibility.

You're.

First asked to teach. Well, the operative word there is asked. So Cody Page's dad, Tim, I was in his Sunday school class. It was a young married class. And I just went through a discipleship process where I was mentored for about six months.

And I was becoming a little vocal in class. I was, you know, participating in the lessons, but from the audience standpoint, yada, yada, yada. Anyway, Tim saw in me the, I guess, the ability to teach.

But he knew if he asked me, I would say no, because I was petrified of public, like, speaking. It's one thing to offer a comment in class, another thing to—it's all on you. So he just showed up one Saturday and handed me the material and said, you're teaching tomorrow.

Get on it. And left. So I was kind of thrown into it. But after that, and I got started doing it more regular, I, you know, came across this text. And it was then that, yes, a nervousness kind of weighs down on you a little bit, because you realize, okay, I'm going to be held to a higher standard for every word that comes out of my mouth as I interpret this passage and explain it to other people.

So I need to rightly divide this. Absolutely. So there is a level of concern and care every time it's my turn to teach, whether it's doing public supply or doing Sunday school, because I'm going to stand before God and have a given account for what I've said here and how I've handled this text.

So I want to be as right as possible that I know I can be. Amen. At least. And that's the key, right,.

Is nobody's perfect. Nobody's going to give a—even John MacArthur gets it wrong. You know, there are guys who we respect who've been at this for 50 years, and they still say things that are not correct.

But at the same time, it's the effort to seeking to be accurate. Sometimes I'm even willing, when I'm preaching, to say, I don't know what this means perfectly. I will give you what I think the interpretation is based on my understanding of how the grammar works here and these different things, but ultimately I'm not going to hold you to this standard, because even I'm having difficulty.

And I think there should at least be some respect for that. I think some people, you know, you're the man of God. Well, you know, that doesn't.

That doesn't make me infallible. I'm not a pope. Well, me and Johnny have had discussion about, because we used to have more of a monologue kind of teaching in class, and with offering up opportunity for discussion, but most times when you ask, does anybody have any thoughts on this before we move on to the next, and most people wouldn't speak.

But now we're trying to—last several months we've been trying to do more with getting people involved in it. So with that, you'll get those questions sometimes that, you know, you just you don't know the answer to immediately.

Yeah. And me and Johnny have had a conversation about that in the sense of, if we don't know the answer just because they've asked us, we're not necessarily—it's not incumbent upon us to immediately answer.

That's right. We'll very quickly say, hey man, give me a week to mull that over, and then we'll open class with that next week and answer it then, or we'll contact them later and talk to them about it on the phone or something.

But usually, if it's asked in class, we try to answer in class. But we're not going to do something on the fly. Matter of fact, a couple—about three weeks ago, I'd made a comment about a particular text, and I wasn't teaching that morning.

I made a comment, and then later I had—I went back and researched what was actually asked, and I was dead wrong and had to address that to the class next time I came in. And I had to say, hey, on the fly, I misinterpreted this.

Let me correct that real quick before I started. Actually, it was part of my Sunday school lesson the next time. Don't you just love it? Oh yeah. It's like, let me go ahead and wipe the egg out of my face.

I've had times where I've had to, you know, recant over something I said in a sermon. Like, the very next week, I realized what I said was incorrect. Sometimes just a mistake, sometimes I misinterpreted the passage, and it's like, oof, you know.

And that's why I've noticed before every sermon you preach, one of your things is, Father, I'm an infallible man. Help me to not—. I am infallible. You said infallible. It sounds like you said infallible.

No, I'm a fallible man. I'm sorry. I'm a fallible man. Yeah. And guard me from error.

Yes. From what I understand, when Spurgeon would go to mount the pulpit, he would say, he would pray on his way, I need the Holy Spirit, I need the Holy Spirit, I need the Holy Spirit. That's the only way that, you know, we're going to have accuracy in our preaching is when we're relying on the Holy Spirit.

And there are times where we don't. We run right into error because we're fallible men. You got it. So pray for a guarding on that. So with that, I want to show a video. And I want to say to the audience, this is not the reason why we did this.

We had already decided this is what we're going to do. We always try to plan something every month or two to do together, maybe probably every two months, because it's so infrequent that we can get our schedules together.

But Richard and I had been talking about this, and then this video came to my attention. And this video is of Andy Stanley talking about how he preps for his sermons. Now, Andy Stanley is not a man who we would use as an example, and we're not trying to beat up on him in this.

Normally, I wouldn't even mention him in a context like this, but because he says something about his prep, I want to address it before we get to our 10 things. So let's listen to it.

12 to 14 people have my sermon outlines at least three weeks before I preach them. So if there are red flags in the outline, somebody or some somebodies brings it to my attention, whether, hey, Andy, this word doesn't mean what you think it does.

It used to mean this, now it means that, or I think this is too harsh, or all your examples are about men, or you've talked about this before. So I invite feedback way before I strap on a microphone to preach.

So that, I think, keeps me out of some of the ditches that I would have a tendency to go into when I let my emotion take over. And when I'm dealing with racial issues, I let a diverse, I invite different people into that, the outline, not outline process, but say, here's the outline.

If you're sitting in the audience and you hear me say this, how's this going to land with you as a woman, as a Democrat, as Republican, or somebody of different ethnic backgrounds? Because this is a minefield.

All right. So when I saw that, I sent it to you immediately, and I said I wanted to respond to that. You want to go first? You have some thoughts? I'm sure I saw your face in the camera.

How's this going to land with Democrats, Republicans, this, that, the other thing? How about just what does the text say and say that, and not worry about how it's necessarily going to land with certain groups?

One of the bigger problems I have with that is this man's supposed to be shepherding the church. And he is not able to do that if he has 20 people nitpicking through his sermon that he's supposed to use to help the people of God grow in their understanding of who God is and their sanctification and all that stuff, and edification, and pursuit of holiness.

If you got all these people behind, it's almost like he's a puppet master. Somebody is pulling the strings, and if it doesn't fit a political agenda or whatever, they're going to tell him, well, you need to take this out, you need to do this, you need to do that, so you don't want to offend anybody in the culture.

Well, the gospel offends the culture. So, I mean, if you're preaching the word as it's intended to be preached, what does the text mean and say and then apply it, then it doesn't matter. So that's my number one concern.

You can't shepherd a church that way. You've got too many people in the thing. Now, there's nothing wrong with seeking counsel over your text. That's where I was going to go next, yep. Cody and Justin, Justin's our associate pastor, but we have two elders, y 'all have three.

I know Cody and Justin discuss his sermon weekly, but they're not discussing it to see if it's going to affect the Democrat, Republican, or this or that. Is it biblical? Is it accurate? Am I interpreting this correctly?

And they go back and forth, and I imagine even if they couldn't come to consensus together, they would invite someone else that's trusted into that. He'd probably call his brother or somebody else, another pastor, to discuss that.

Is this right, true, and biblical in my interpretation of this text and how I plan to present it? That's fine. You know, when I was going through the process of him, you know, helping me learn how to preach, I would have to submit my manuscript to him.

He would go through it, then we'd sit down and discuss it, and it was more or less, you know, make sure it's accurate and properly interpreted, but also, you know, style and ways to improve it to where it's not, it sounds better, you know, because I can get a little wordy when I write something, but that's beside the point.

But the point is, we were searching to make sure I was accurate in what I was doing, and there's times in my Sunday school prep, I'll call Johnny. I've called you, you know, when I've had a question about something.

I've called Cody several times and I've had a question about something. So there's nothing wrong with bringing somebody else into your outline and discussing it, but not for the reasons he's doing at all.

Yeah, and I agree with you 100%.

I think the biggest issue with that video is his motivation. Right. Not necessarily the methodology, even though I wouldn't rely on a committee of 14 to 16 people in that regard, but again, it's that way because of his motivation.

His motivation is to be as inoffensive, and at least to his audience. I don't think he's too concerned about being offensive to people like me, because it's just about everything he says offends me at one level or another, but he's concerned about being offensive to a particular cultural demographic,.

The people that fit into his group. Right, and he has satellite campuses, don't he? Yeah. That's what he's worried about. He's broadcast all over the place, live to the world. That's right. And the last thing he wants to do is offend anyone.

But like with us, you know, at our.

Church we do have three elders, so when you talk about being concerned, I am. I want to make sure that what I say is what our other elders would say in that same context, and if there is a distinction between us, that at least I am fair in that distinction.

You know, Brother Mike and I did a debate recently on Roman 7, because we disagreed on that passage, and we were teaching hermeneutics, and we wanted to show how we arove at that hermeneutical conclusion.

I thought that was good for the church to see us disagree, because we disagree, you know, with each other in other areas. We don't make it known. Hey, we disagreed this week, you know, but it's good to see how Godly Brothers can do that and still continue to walk together and minister together.

And I remember when I first started, you mentioned your situation with Cody. When I first started preaching, our previous pastor was there, and my whole first year he was still there. He was the administrative pastor.

I was the preaching pastor for a whole year, and so every week I had to present to him my manuscript, and I always got it back. And the funny thing was, he was the dean of Jones College, and he was an English major, and so he would hand it back to me with red marks.

The red marks were never theological. It was always grammar, and I'm like, I'm writing this to speak, not to, I'm not going to read it. This is, you know, but it would still have, like, you missed an apostrophe here or something, and I always felt like I was back in Miss Proctor's.

English class, which we were both in together senior year. Initially, when we started the process, I would meet with Justin and then Cody, and the first manuscript I got back from Justin looked like a rainbow, because he was just, and nothing was bad in it.

It's just, you could put this here, and you could word it this way, and you could, and you mispronounce. I'm like, my first thought was like, oh my gosh, I got to start over. He's like, no, don't freak, don't freak.

Don't.

Freak out, man. It's all right. All right, well, people have been waiting on us to get to these 10 things, so I want to do that, and so, because it is 10, and, you know, we, each one of these could be an hour-long episode.

Right. What I'd like to do is, we're going to mention what they are. I'm going to go through the list very quickly, and just that way people know what to expect, and then on each thing, I'll let you say a few words.

I'll say a few words, and then we'll move on, but there are a few things that we need to develop more, but like on the first one, I think we'll be able to get through it relatively quickly. So, the 10 things are as follows.

These are the 10 things that both of us would recommend if you are studying to preach, or to teach, or just for your own personal edification. First, number one is pray. Number two, read the text in multiple versions.

Number three, observation. We're going to talk about what that means. Number four, read commentaries. Number five is meditation. Number six is application. Number seven, manuscript, and again, we're going to talk about what all this means.

Number eight, and these become, eight, nine, and ten are a little bit more lesson specific, what you're doing. So, number eight would be to create or devise discussion questions for class participation.

Number ten, I'm sorry, number nine is establishing a thesis statement, and this is more for preaching, and I'll talk about why when we get there, what's the main point of the text, and what are your sub points.

And then finally, and again, this is very important for preaching, and that is taking them to the cross, connecting the gospel, ensuring that you are making a distinction in law and gospel, the commands, the imperatives versus the indicatives, and things like that.

So all those are part of how we do this, and so let's go back to number one and talk about how prayer functions in your preparation. So let's do that.

Prayer and Dependence on the Holy Spirit

So with me, you know, it can be a lengthy process, it can be a short process, just depends on the day, but confession, obviously first, you know, confession of sin, and repentance, all those things is one of the first things I do.

And then, of course, seeking the Lord's help with understanding, comprehending, and applying the text. I mean, just asking the Spirit to open your eyes so you may behold wondrous things from the law. Being able to seek the Lord's help in understanding the text, first and foremost, is what I pray for primarily.

But I start with confession because those times when I haven't done that, I found it more difficult to handle the text and even understand the text, because as some people like to say, there's like a brass ceiling over your head, you got to get that out of the way so you can actually commune with God properly.

So anyway. All right, now I'm going to.

Ask you a difficult question, because I agree with what you said. Do you ever forget to pray?

That's what I'm saying. Yes, I've forgotten to pray. I've like been crunched for time or whatever, and just sat down and started going at the text, and 45 minutes to an hour in, I ain't got a note on a page, I can't even, I'm having trouble thinking, and it's like, hey dummy, you skipped step one.

Yeah. Yes, I've been—.

Sorry, this video is going to come up, my bad. We're professionals here in our Theo Shed, coming to you on location from the Theo Shed. No, that's the thing I wanted to mention when you mentioned prayer, is obviously we should start our day with prayer, we should start our study with prayer.

But sometimes, because we are in a crunch time or whatever, we get right into it, we open the Bible, we begin looking at the text, we start, and as you said, we get ahead of ourselves. So stopping and admitting our reliance upon God, admitting our insufficiency for the task is a wonderful way to begin the process.

It's the way to begin the process. And I have here, this is a sermon prayer that—I haven't done it yet, but I want to print this and actually put this on the pulpit. But this is a prayer not to pray to the congregation, even though you could, this is the prayer for the preacher.

It says, Lord, help me to understand the meaning of this text and how it points to Christ. Lord, please increase my love for the people who will hear this sermon. Lord, please give me wisdom to apply this text to the lives of the people in our congregation.

Lord, please use this passage to help me grasp and love the gospel more so that I may help my hearers do the same. Lord, please help me to see how this passage confronts the unbelief of my hearers. Lord, please help me to be obedient to the minds of this passage.

Help me to enter the pulpit, having already submitted my life to this truth before I preach it. Lord, by your Spirit, please help me to preach this sermon with the necessary power and with appropriate affection.

And Lord, please use this sermon to bring glory to your name, joy to your people, and salvation to the lost. I think that's great. I have no idea who wrote it, but this sits on my desktop all the time.

So, I mean, you know, I just pulled it right up. And the reason why it does is just so I can read it, you know, that I can pray that prayer. I'm not against written prayers. I don't know, some people don't like written prayers, but I like to sometimes use a written prayer because.

It helps me to focus on what I'm praying on. I agree with that 100%, and that was the other thing I forgot to mention was I often pray for the members of the class, for the Lord to go ahead and be kind of tilling their heart up to receive it, and for myself to receive it as well.

It does them no good if I haven't applied it to myself first. Amen. All right, well, let's move to number.

Reading the Text in Multiple Versions

Two. Now, again, we put these together based on both of our thoughts, so I know we have thoughts about this, and the number two is to read the text in multiple versions. Now, the thing we didn't mention, if you are preaching or if you're teaching, you may not already have a text.

You may have to choose a text, especially if you're going to preach as a pulpit supply, so there may be a part in that prayer where you're asking God to lead you or you're asking the church you're coming to, what is it you want me to preach on?

That's often what I do. If I'm asked to come preach somewhere, is there something you want me to talk about? Right. And that way I know where I'm going to go. So the assumption in number two is you know the text.

Right. You know whatever text it is. All right, so you read the text in multiple versions right away, just why did you put it that way?

This was something that when I was going through the mentor process, ironically his name was Rich. Yeah, Rich and Rich. So one of the things he helped me do when I first started teaching Sunday school was he sat down and he had, at the time I only had like an ESV copy, so he sat down with an ASV, the ESV, the King James, New King James, he even had the message Bible way over to the right, but he said if you read the text in different versions, one version over another may give you some insight into what it's trying to say because of the way it's interpreted.

So it's helpful and especially if you're struggling with a text you don't, you can't quite get your mind around, it'll help out. Now he had the message there simply, he said this is a garbage text, but because they take a sentence and span it into a paragraph, sometimes as you read it they may hit something that you can use, but don't quote it because you don't want people just reading the message Bible to read it, because it's a commentary.

Or paraphrase at best. I was going to say a lot of, the further it gets from the original language, the further it gets into paraphrase, the more it becomes like a commentary, and so I think that's a good point, and you mentioned all the various ones, and we've done this in other podcasts, I won't do it now, but there are different types of translations.

There's essentially literal translations, there are dynamic equivalent translations, and then there's paraphrases, and the further you get into that paraphrase world, the more it becomes like a commentary.

And this is something that you and I talked about that was interesting, and this is a stat on the subject of reading. It says, and again, I don't know where this came from, it was online, somebody posted it, so take the accuracy of this with a grain of salt.

I didn't go and ensure its accuracy with ChatGPD, but it says that 21 percent of adults in the U .S. read below a fifth grade level, 19 percent of high school graduates in the U .S. can't read, 42 million U .S. adults can't read past a fifth grade level, and 50 percent of adults in the U .S. can't read a book written at an eighth.

Grade level. What do you think about that? You think that's accurate? Probably. Okay. Given what... Anecdotally, you feel like this is what you run into? Yes, given, especially when I talk to some of today's youth, high school age kids that can't speak properly, or if you can't spell a word, they'll write something down, and simple words are just messed up.

So it's, yeah, I would probably think that's fairly accurate. Okay. Well, the reason why, again,.

I bring it up is because when we talk about reading the text in multiple versions, I believe, I agree with Howard Hendricks, who said that if you want to become a better Bible student, you should become a better reader.

And reading it in various versions helps you to become a better reader, because you're actually, you're reading different ways to interpret this, because what they do is they become more and more of a paraphrase, as they become easier and easier to understand.

And so if that's helping you to understand, like if the ESV is difficult to understand, but the New Living Translation gives you an easier understanding and helps you figure out, okay, why is this word in the ESV, and it's not here?

I do think that can be helpful. And I know somebody's going to immediately say, oh, well, that's not the Word of God. We, you know, especially, you know, we have folks who are dedicated to one particular translation, you know, King James, obviously.

But that's, I was going to say King James, but that's not the point of what we're talking about. You know, we're saying, okay, here's a passage, and we want to read this passage better, and also be able to communicate its truth better.

And you said you had some history with folks that didn't want to bring.

It down at all, that wanted to keep everything at a very high level. Yeah, I'll keep names out of it, but there was a pastor at a church that he could speak at a doctorate level, spent ample time in the text, and when he preached, he preached at a very high level.

But it was brought to his attention that there were those in the congregation that were struggling with how high of a level he preached. And he took that and really didn't do anything with it other than saying that he's already reducing the sermon down from an original draft of 15 pages to 10 pages or whatever, and he's not going to come it down anymore, and that he's going to trust the Spirit of God to apply it to whoever it applies it to.

And they'll understand at their level, and the Spirit of God will do that. That's all well and good as far as, yes, the Spirit of God can apply the text to anybody, but you have to understand that there are those in your congregation that you have to meet them at their level.