Utumishi Blog

It’s great to preach through the Bible in decent-sized chunks (so we get the context – the whole story or argument or poem or picture) and as we prepare to do that it’s very helpful to try to boil down each chunk to one Big Idea.  Or, to change the metaphor, it’s good to dig down to the heart, to the core of the passage.  It’s worth doing that for at least four reasons:

1. Good human communication (and the Bible is certainly that) has a certain coherence to it.  It is about something.  Mark’s Gospel is clear what it is about (Mark 1:1).  The prophets of the Old Testament received a ‘Word of the Lord’ – not words (plural) but a ‘Word’ (singular) – a message.
2. In practice it is hard for most of us to remember more than one thing from a talk.  This is particularly true of children’s work.  It is loving to think how I can say one thing as clearly as possible.  As David Jackman has said, the real test of an effective talk is when your hearer is asked a few hours later, “What was the preacher saying this morning?”
3. Looking for the Big Idea will help us to give truths their proper weight relative to one another.  It is quite possible to preach a minor point of a passage and neglect the main point.  You could preach on Luke 24 and make your central message ‘We are allowed to eat fish’.  The sermon is not wrong it’s just missing the point.  Instead of seizing on a favourite verse or a favourite truth in the passage we need to see what Scripture is majoring on and make that our emphasis.
4. To get to that one thing the passage is saying is very hard – and that is good for us!  In our preparation we’ll need to read the passage over and over and over again.  Live with it.  Let it get inside us and work on us.  We’ll need to ask it a pile of questions – Who? What? When? Where? How? Why?  It will probably take us hours of hard digging to get to the treasure.  And we’ll need to pray desperately for light from the Father of lights who has hidden spiritual truths from the proud.  We’ll need to pray to the Lord who opens our minds to see deep truths of himself throughout the Scriptures (Luke 24:44-47)

Once we’ve got that Big Idea that is the Big Idea of our sermon (or Bible study or children’s talk).  The message of the passage is our message to communicate, its burden is our burden, its ‘punch’ will be the ‘punch’ of our talk.