Study More. Preach Less.

Study More.  Preach Less.

Written in 1962 by Helmut Thielicke,  A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, remains required reading in Christian colleges and seminaries around the globe. Earlier this morning I ew-read for what may be the hundredth time! It is one of my “before-the-semester-begins disciplines. One of my favorite lines – and one students I have read the book seem to hate the most – is “For the reasons I have mentioned I do not tolerate sermons by first semester young theological students swaddled in their gowns. One ought to be able to keep still.” (page 12) 

Thielicke is writing over fifty years ago and the world has changed and he is writing in the context of German Christian practice. I get that and I’m not particularly interested in telling anyone that he or she can’t share their faith. But I am interested in that phrase “one out to be able to keep still.”

Fast forward to April of this year and you might have seen the issue of Christianity Today that focused on the life and ministry of Billy Graham. If you haven’t seen it, it is worth finding. One of the articles in this issue is titled “What I Would Have Done Differently.” It basically is a collection of quotations from Graham where he expressed regrets.

One of those “regrets” is about preaching. John Stott, in his wonderful book on preaching, Between Two Worlds actually has this same quote in it in a chapter titled “A Call to Study.”  Here Graham’s “regret” about preaching.

                                One of my great regrets is that I have not studied enough. I wish

                                I had studied more and preached less. People have pressured me

                                into speaking to groups when I should have been studying and

                                preparing. Donald Barnhouse said that if he knew the Lord was coming

                                in three years, he would spend two of them studying and one 

                                preaching.  I’m trying to make it up.

That was originally published in an interview Graham did with Christianity Today in 1997.

If you think about it, that really isn’t all that different from Thielicke’s sentiment in  A Little Exercise for Young Theologians.

Unfortunately we live in an age where politics is not the only area of life where polarization happens. In the world of biblical studies and ministries, it is easy to find the polar opposites of those comfortable to spend a life time studying with little engagement with the community of humans around them; and those who spend all their time engaged with the community of humans around them with little or no real study of Scripture.

If I’m hearing Graham correctly, it really isn’t “either/or” but “both/and.” But it is so easy to overreact to the one who can’t tell me about Jesus because all he or she is interested in is how the synoptic gospels came into being in the first place. Yet, what in the world would make me think I can pick up a piece of Scripture written 2000 years ago, in a language that isn’t my native tongue, to a culture that has little similarity to my own, and written by people who would recognize hardly anything about living in the 21^st century and really understand its message?

If you’ve read Stanley Hauerwas’ Unleashing Scripture you might be thinking that I, like Hauerwas, think that the Bible should be taken away from North American Christians because we aren’t smart enough to read it and think that it’s all about democracy and we get to vote on what we like and don’t like. 

But you would be wrong!

What I do think though is that there is a desperate need right now for well-educated kingdom leaders who have figured out how to be biblical and relevant at the same time. After all, you can be so biblical that no one will listen to you and you can be so relevant that you really have nothing to say. In both extremes, the same thing happens – God’s truth is not heard. 

A local politician recently posted a clip from Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson. The point of the video was “college is too expensive” and “education outcomes” aren’t what they should be. The politician’s conclusion was that government ought to invest less in education. I don’t watch Carlson for a variety of reasons, including his pompous, self-inflated view of himself, and the extraordinary joy he seems to get in being condescending to others he deems less intelligent than himself. But from what I’ve seen of him, he is pretty good at manipulating facts to “prove” his talking points. I would also bet my last dime that he goes to a well-educated doctor, sends his kids (if he has any) to schools with well-educated teachers, and chooses to fly on airplanes whose pilots are well prepared for flying a modern jet airliner.

Here’s my point: in general, we don’t just stumble upon the kind of truth that can transform our lives. If the church decides that education is too expensive and education outcomes aren’t what we expected and gives up on “educating students for Christ-centered service and leadership around the world” as our mission at Point states – we can only expect fewer and fewer transformed lives. 

Almost any of us who have been believers for a while can scan through a paragraph in the Bible and declare “this is what it means to me.” The problem is, it wasn’t written to you! That’s not to say it doesn’t speak into your life – just that the way to get there isn’t by casually saying “this is what it means to me.” It means what God, the ultimate author meant it to mean to those whose ears were the first to hear it. From that vantage point – what a text meant – we can safely arrive at what a text means. We need good biblical scholars to help us here. 

I love Matthew’s editorial comment at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. That is where he says, “the crowds were stunned by His teaching, because He taught as one who knew what He was talking about, not like the poorly prepared teachers of that day.” (Huxford paraphrase, but I hope accurate!)

It’s one thing for a preacher/teacher to tell you what someone else knows about a subject – but a completely different think if he or she can tell you what they know. It seems to me that the world in general and the church in particular is in deep need of preachers, teachers, leaders “who know what they are talking about” because they have spent time with Scripture in a way that gives authority to their words.

That doesn’t mean only the educated elite can read Scripture. It does mean however our more devotional reading of Scripture can be greatly enhanced in an environment where resources are available – including well educated leaders – to help make sense of what we are reading!

To come full circle, I come back to Billy Graham’s “I would study more and preach less” comment. Surely if he – perhaps the greatest preacher of the twentieth century – felt the need to study more, most of us ought to get in line behind him for a seat in the library.

In that spirit, here are a few suggestions:

• ·         Good Bible study resources are more available today than ever, take advantage of them.

• ·         Good Bible study does take time – find a way to block out some space in life to converse with God through His Word.

• ·         Read the Bible devotionally, the more I get the big story firmly fixed in my brain, the more sense the smaller parts of the story will make.

• ·         Not everyone is called to be “pastors and teachers” to use Ephesians 4 language, so the point of this isn’t that you must be a Bible scholar to talk about the meaning of the Bible.

• ·         It can be helpful, however, to have a trusted person in your life with whom you can talk about the Bible and its meaning. Some parts of the Bible are more complicated than others and that means we could all use a trusted resource to help us navigate through these ancient and challenging but life-transforming words.

• ·         Read things other than the Bible. People like Scot McKnight, John Walton, Ben Witheringnton, Larry Hurtado, N.T. Wright and others are writing some outstanding, accessible to non-academic types, stuff.

• ·         Read the Bible expecting it to be counter-cultural and counter-intuitive. I promise you the Bible will shake your world if read properly and it won’t sound a whole lot like modern Western culture. If your reading of the Bible makes some cultural or political approach to life sound perfect, there is a good chance you need to do some re-reading.

• ·         Some of our reading of the Bible – especially the devotional kind – ought to be outside where the testimony of creation and the testimony of the Word can join hands in helping the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to God. (Ps. 19)

If you’re still reading – all I can say is “Thanks!” This has gone on longer than I intended, but frankly, I’m just tired of such “baby food” being dished out in sermons, lessons, devotions, articles, and whatever when there is such a desperate need for some “meat and potatoes.” (Hebrews 5:11-14)

The only way to discover “meat and potatoes” is to  have the courage “to keep still a bit.”