Utumishi Blog

Up early for the third day of the Lweza fellowship for an exposition of Psalm 3.

After breakfast I rush us through Getting to the Heart of a Bible Passage. A few things came out of this:

1. It’s worth working at finding the big idea of a passage.
2. It’s worth taking plenty of time working on the big idea. We tried to do it in a ludicrously short time. Really you need hours.
3. The big idea should not be too short (e.g. “God is good” – so it could describe any number of passages) or too long (with multiple ideas). Pithy but specific is what we want.
4. The Theme of the Bible is Jesus and the Thrust of the Bible is the gospel call of repentance, faith, salvation and life in Him (Luke 24; John 5; 2 Tim. 3) so the Big Idea of any passage is going to have something to do with Jesus and the Gospel.
5. The big idea of the passage is NOT (as I erroneously suggested) a ‘summary of summaries’ but much more about the LOGIC of the passage. I initially said that what you need to do is break the passage into chunks, summarise each chunk in a sentence, and then squish all those summaries together into a sentence. We tried that and it didn’t work at all. As Loots helped us see, it’s much more about the flow. The crucial thing is not getting a bit of each chunk in the Big Idea but seeing how the chunks work together. You won’t necessarily give the chunks equal weight. So in our example of Matt. 23:1-23 we started to see that the crucial chunk is Matt. 23:10-17.

Then we looked at Crossing from the ‘world’ of the passage to the ‘world’ of the congregation. Key points:

1. It’s not about ‘making’ the Bible relevant but showing the relevance of the text. The relevance is there. It might not be relevance in the sense of addressing our felt needs. But it will be relevant to our biggest, deepest needs. In this sense, there’s not a huge chasm to leap between then and now. Yes we need to go ‘back to Corinth’ but when you get there you find that their context and problems and temptations look a lot like ours. It’s very interesting that Jesus quotes Isaiah’s 600-year-old prophecy to his contemporary Israelites and says, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you [first century Pharisees]” (Matt. 15:7). What God says to idolatrous Israel is basically what he says to the idolatrous church. It was written to them then but it speaks to us now in the present tense (Matt. 22:31).
2. Application we don’t want:
   

   Random – ‘bolt-on’ clichéd applications rather than ones that flow naturally out of the text.

   Superficial – we see a command in a story (e.g. Matt. 19:18-19) and we leap on it and just preach that.

   Allegorising – reading a story as a parable (e.g. in Matt. 21:2 we are the donkey and need to be loosed).

   Spiritualising – e.g. reading the healings (Matt. 8:14-17) as spiritual rather than physical or reading the storm (Matt. 8:23-27) as ‘the storms of life’ rather than a real storm.

   Imitating Bible characters – sometimes we’re called to imitate someone other than Jesus (Matt. 18:3) but the focus of the Gospels is relentlessly on Jesus; the disciples are generally pretty useless (e.g. Matt. 26:30-46). And when it comes to Jesus – he is first and foremost our substitute and then he is our example – he dies for Peter and then Peter dies for him.

   Moralising – preaching a moral lesson rather than the Big Idea of the passage (which will be Christ-centred and gospel-driven). This is a massive danger in our application – that we get something about Jesus but somehow in moving across to application we drop the gospel somewhere on the way and it just ends up being all about us and what we need to do again.

3. The Bible Timeline is crucial in applying rightly. How does the passage fit into the big story of Creation to New Creation? Where is the passage on the line? When it comes to the Gospels it’s interesting because we’re right on the cusp of the OT and NT. We’re in very unusual times – the last OT prophet, the incarnation, a time of miracles and salvation and seismic shifts. And when we look at the timeline we see that the relevance of the Gospel accounts (the life, death and resurrection of Jesus) is largely a narrative/historical relevance. In a similar way to the 2nd World War is relevant to a 21st century British person. As he reads about the 2nd World War and the sacrifices of the hundreds of thousands who died in France, he is not thinking “I am that man on the Normandy beaches facing the machine guns”, he’s thinking, “I’m glad that wasn’t me. I’m very grateful those guys did that so that we weren’t invaded by Nazi Germany, so we don’t live now under a totalitarian regime. I am free because they died.” That’s the main relevance. It’s a historical relevance.
4. Think about how the Gospel is particularly cutting home in this particular passage. What particular misunderstandings and attitudes and behaviour is it addressing?

In the afternoon we had quite a lengthy discussion time thinking about Matthew 13:1-23, how we’d often heard it preached (sowing a financial seed etc.), what exactly was the big idea and, more generally, what were the tricky issues in our context in moving to application in preaching. It was a good time of group discussion, grappling with issues of human responsibility (“He who has ears to hear let him hear”) and sovereign grace (Matt. 13:11; 11:25). We finally came round to thinking that the latter was the determinative thing and the key to the section. And also that it is a wonderful thing in that it is all ‘top-down’, all grace, all about Jesus the Good Sower.

The day closed with a brilliant exposition by Shadrach Lukwago (Kiwoko Bible Institute) of Matthew 22:23-33 followed by a great discussion.

• Everyone agreed this was crystal clear, demystified, transparent preaching of the text, we were just seeing the text itself and hearing it speak, electric, thrilling stuff.
• Shadrach’s preparation process was basically just reading the text, again and again and again.
• He didn’t use points or headings he just walked us through the passage but the main thrust was really clear: If you don’t know the Scriptures, you won’t know the power of God.
• Great use of detail – the crucial present tense in v32, the way the passage finishes not with the Sadducees but with the crowds (v33).
• In a church or evangelistic setting we would really need to work hard on our introductions and applications.

Two days to go…