Stop Preaching at People!

I just want to do another video today talking about my pastor's sermon from Sunday.

You know, listen, I love my pastor, I really do. He does a great job and he was preaching on John chapter 6, when

Jesus feeds the 5 ,000. This is one of those passages, it can be deceptively difficult to preach on this because everyone's so familiar with this story.

It's in all four Gospels, we've heard it so many times. It's the kind of thing that you read and you kind of just breeze past it and sometimes you miss the power of really what's going on.

And you've got to put flesh on this kind of stuff and he did a great job doing that, painting the picture of how this would have likely went down and how many people were there.

Just think about it, just take a second and think about it, where a few loaves of barley and some fish were multiplied, it's like they're passing it out and they know it's not enough and they pass the basket to the next person and just somehow it's multiplying.

Think of what was being said and just the, it must have been an uproar, I mean, it's just awesome.

Anyway, he did a great job kind of doing that and also he mentioned a passage in Mark which is the same, it talks about the same incident and it adds a couple of comments on it that are slightly different than it offers in John.

And the Word of God is great like that because it gives you a couple different perspectives and all that kind of thing. But just love when a pastor can really paint that picture for you, help you see the glory of God, how amazing this was, 5 ,000 men, untold numbers of women and children and he feeds them all.

It must have been quite a sight, quite a sight indeed. But anyway, he said something about the passage in Mark that I think is very important for us to understand because when you think about, when you ask the question, right, how do you show compassion as a

Christian? How do you show compassion? You would get a lot of different answers I think if you asked, you know, if we're going to show compassion for LGBT folks, what do we do?

If we're going to show compassion for the hungry, what do we do? If we're going to show compassion for women who have had abortions, what do we do?

You get a lot of different answers for it. And a lot of the answers that you'd get, most likely in my opinion, would be, you know, the typical stuff.

Well, you feed the hungry, well, you give them a big hug, you affirm that they're made in the image of God, you, you, you, you, you know, you, these feel -good kind of ishy -squishy stuff.

And I think on most people's agenda or list of the compassionate things that you can do, probably preaching to them and teaching them would fall very low on that list, right?

Is it compassionate to preach at the abortion clinic? Is it to teach at the abortion clinic? A lot of people would say no, that's not an example of compassion.

And even if you would say yes, and you know the right answer, right, and you would say, yeah, that is compassionate, we should speak the truth in love, you know, and you did say that, like you would still, let's just be honest with ourselves, like a lot of us,

I'll speak for myself, the other stuff feels more compassionate than preaching at people, right?

It just feels more compassionate than preaching at people. Preaching gets a bad rep, it really does.

I mean, you know, especially street preaching, especially that kind of thing, it gets a really bad reputation, even from Christians who think it's somehow unloving to do what

Jesus did and to do what men are commanded to do, you know, men of God, pastors, things like that.

That's why people, we're just having a conversation here. That's why you get, you know, preachers that they don't have a podium anymore because they don't want to be associated with that kind of preaching.

So they'll sit at a bar stool, right? We're just talking here, you know, yeah, we're just talking here.

There's a desire to kind of move beyond the kind of old school preachy preacher, right?

There's a desire to kind of move beyond that kind of teaching and to move into more, you know, professorial type of lectures instead of sermons and stuff like that.

That's an intentional thing that a lot of men do these days. And preaching kind of gets this, this bad rep and that kind of teaching, authoritative teaching the word of God, it gets this bad reputation.

Let's just be honest. Even when you know that preaching is good, like a lot of reformed people do, it still doesn't seem that compassionate.

And yet it is. Now, Tim Keller here, this is a stupid tweet.

Tim Keller is, he tweets and like half of his tweets are like, you can always tell that he kind of regrets a tweet when he kind of walks it back a little bit or when he adds extra nuance.

And this one is one of those. He says, the gospel was spread in the early church by personal conversations and life examples, not through programs, not even through preachers.

That's a stupid thing to say. It's very easy to refute this, obviously. It is a very preposterous thing to say.

And you could tell that Tim Keller knows it was a little preposterous because then he says, I believe in preaching, by the way, so here's some context.

So, you know, he doesn't apologize for saying something stupid or change it. He's just, he adds a little extra.

The gospel wasn't, he's saying here, the gospel wasn't spread through preachers. That's ludicrous.

That's insane, right? Obviously it is. It's easy to refute that. I don't even need any historical examples.

I just need the Bible and I can refute this. This is a stupid claim and he knows it. And that's why he added this little extra here.

I'm not going to read that context because I don't care anyway. But there's a lot of people who believe like this.

Like the compassionate way to spread the gospel is through, you know, making friends and showing hospitality and, you know, your life is a letter.

And that's true. The Bible says that kind of stuff. That's a good way to spread the gospel. People talking person to person, house to house.

This is all good, right? But let's not be under the illusion that preaching and teaching, like the old school way that we've done it, is somehow not compassionate or somehow it's not not going to spread the gospel.

It is simply false. That's a lie. Listen to what

Mark chapter six says about the feeding of the 5 ,000. I thought this was so interesting. I had never noticed this before. Here's what it says.

It says that when he went ashore, he saw a great crowd and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd and he began to teach them many things.

And so the real compassion here in this, this miracle, because this is a miracle, right?

He fed them. There was a lot of people, thousands upon thousands. It was way more than 5 ,000.

We don't know the exact number, but 5 ,000 is how many men were there. There were also women and children. So everyone way more than 5 ,000 were able to eat from a little small, little amount of food that a, that a boy had brought with him.

That's a miracle. But let's just be honest. Like it's a small miracle in the sense of he was meeting a need, but it was a small need.

These people could have gone and got their own food, but he didn't want them to do that. He had compassion on them, but the real compassion was not the miracle itself.

Although that was compassionate too, but it's not like these people were about to, like, if they didn't eat this, they would have starved to death.

That's not what we're talking about here. There might've been hungry. They might've, you know, they might've had a hard, had trouble getting back to the town because it was so far away.

They might've, you know, some of them might've, you know, had issues, you know, especially the women and children. So yes, there were some of that, but these 5 ,000 men weren't going to die if he didn't feed them dinner, but he had compassion on them.

And what was the compassion? Well, Mark tells you what it is. They were like sheep without a shepherd and he taught them.

He preached at them and authoritatively taught them. That was a demonstration of his compassion.

And likely, I mean, we don't have this exactly here, but likely part of the reason he wanted to feed them so they didn't have to go is so he could continue to teach them, that's the compassionate thing.

So, so if you're a preacher and if you're a street preacher or if you're whatever kind of preacher you are, don't ever buy this garbage line that preaching is not really how the gospel gets spread.

Nope, that's not it. It's actually this other stuff. It's actually hospitality and all that other good stuff.

Don't hear me saying this. Not good. It's good, but it is compassionate to go to a college campus and preach at people and accept their abuse and accept all their nonsense and all of that stuff.

It's compassionate to go to the clinic, the abortion clinic and tell women what they're about to do is evil and to tell them to repent and beg them not to do it and tell them that you can help them and all of this stuff and preach to them about Christ and his forgiveness and all that, that's compassionate.

And all you people out there that want to denigrate preachers and preaching and say, well, that's not how you show compassion.

Well, that's not what Jesus said. It isn't because teaching and preaching from the word of God is one of the ways that Jesus showed his compassion on people.

And likewise, we can do the same thing. The next time you see a street preacher and you get preacher and you get that feeling,

I'll go, there's another unloving street preacher. Keep in mind that there is a very good chance that that street preacher is motivated by compassion.

And just because he uses a loud voice, Jesus use it allows voice. It says so very often in the

Bible. He cried out with a loud voice. That's the kind of voice that street preachers use. They're known for it booms.

Doesn't mean they're not motivated and driven by compassion on the lost.