Why Are We Here?

The audience of preaching. The second part of verse 11 says, “we are made manifest unto God, and I trust also are made manifest in you consciences.” What does that mean? It means that preaching is known to God. And preaching is known to the people’s conscience. It means that when I preach, I have two audiences—God and you. And let me tell you something. You can be perfectly happy with my preaching and think that I’m the best preacher in the whole world. But if God isn’t happy with my preaching, then it doesn’t really matter what you think. Alistair Begg talked about a book by Neil Postman called “Entertaining Ourselves to Death.” Postman was not a Christian. He wasn’t writing about the church. He was mostly writing about education in America. He talked about the decline of education in America and blamed it on the Sesame Street generation. That’s me. I was raised on Sesame Street. But what he talked about was how we had crossed the line between education and entertainment. When you teach children with a puppet and you take the puppet away, they don’t miss the teaching. They miss the puppet. The sad thing is, we’ve bought into that lie in the church. We have said that you can’t teach people from the pulpit. We have to entertain them instead. Postman said that when you teach people by TV, you have three rules that you can’t break. You can’t have any prerequisites. In other words, you can’t teach fundamental principles that build on each other day by day or week by week. Then he said that you can’t have any perplexity. In other words, you can’t teach anything that is difficult or really makes you think hard for yourself. You can’t make people go and have to figure out things on their own. Finally, he said that you cannot under any circumstances have any exposition. In other words, whatever you do, you cannot have explicit, line-by-line, precept-by-precept explanation and teaching. Churches throughout our country have bought into that thinking hook, line and sinker. And as a result, drama and singing has replaced preaching. You know that I don’t have anything against drama and singing. Drama is an excellent tool inside the church to point to the preaching of the Word. Outside the church it is one of the best cultural bridges we can build to reach the lost. But here’s the point. Drama or singing or whatever can never take the place of preaching the Word. People say that people’s attention span can’t handle anything more than 15-20 minutes of preaching at a time. Really? The new Star Trek movie made over 70 million dollars in its opening weekend. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine it’s over 20 minutes long. We can pay attention to what we want to pay attention to. Granted, I like good preaching. But these guys at the conference pushed the limits of endurance. But Begg preached for an hour and 15 minutes on Wednesday and cut it short. And as we were leaving the sanctuary, I heard people all over the place saying that they wished he would have kept going. Don’t get me wrong. Some people preach for 15 minutes and that’s too long. But good, faithful biblical exposition takes time. Anybody can give a quaint little talk in a short period of time. But it takes time to be faithful to the text in explaining what it means and drawing application from it. I like the way Paul puts it. He says that what he’s doing in the way he preaches IS known to God. Then he says that he TRUSTS that it’s known to the people. That’s the right view of the audience of preaching. You need to understand that. And you need to help me to understand it also. We’re concerned with the message of preaching, the audience of preaching… we’re also concerned with the motivation of preaching.