Recapturing the Voice of God: Shaping Sermons Like Scripture
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
There is a difference between preaching from the Bible and preaching that allows the Bible to drive the substance, structure, and spirit of the sermon. A text-driven sermon allows the structure of the text to become buoyant, to come to the surface so that the sermon can be built around that structure. In this way the word of God (the meaning of the text) is presented in a way that is influenced by the voice of God (the genre of the text). In Recapturing the Voice of God, veteran preacher Steven W. Smith teaches how to preach genre-sensitive, text-driven sermons—to allow the structure of the text to be the structure of the sermon. To do so, one must understand the genre of the literature in which God has chosen to reveal Himself. After a brief defense of genre-sensitive preaching, Smith categorizes Scripture genres according to their structure: story, poem, or letter. From these macro-level genres, each individual genre is explored for its unique features (law, prophecy, epistles, etc.). Smith then offers practical help in structuring a text-driven sermon and includes sample sermons as illustrations.
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Top Highlights
“Hebrew poetry works by parallelism: rhythmic features that relate the concept of the line to the previous line. What rhyme is to English poetry, parallelism is to Hebrew poetry. So, in Hebrew poetry the emphasis is not that words have a similar sound, but a similar meaning. The lines after the first line either explain, expand upon, or show a contrast to the previous line. So, the dominant force in Hebrew poetry is parallelism, not rhyme.” (source)
“If you commit your life to only preaching about the pressing application of the moment, when bigger needs arise you probably won’t have anything to say about them. In other words, preaching for immediate life change only, may leave you in the position of mining Scripture for application alone. This robs one of the ability to see, or rather to listen to, what God is doing in the bigger picture across the swath of salvation history. On the other hand, if you commit yourself to explaining texts of Scripture, you will then begin to interpret culture in light of Scripture.” (source)
“The word comes from a Latin root: we ex (remove) the posit (postulate) of truth that is in the text and show it to the people. Though the use of the word exposition has been well intended, I fear it has often become a referent for a tired, formulaic preaching template—so much so that when we say ‘exposition’ we are using the word to refer to a style of structuring sermons. But I’m not willing to call students to give their lives to a style. That’s nonsense since styles change with each generation. Expository, text-driven preaching is not a style but a theologically driven philosophy of preaching whose purpose is to get as close to the text as possible.” (source)