Preachers tend to fall for one of two dangers. Either we can focus so heavily on the exegesis and exposition of a Bible passage, we make very clear what it means but we forget the application. It’s all very interesting but it doesn’t really land in a way that is practical and relevant to the congregation.
At the other end of the spectrum though is the danger that we over apply. We give people lots and lots of instructions on how their lives should change this week as a result of what God’s Word says. I think there are two dangers with this. The first is that the sermon gets heard as a kind of “self-help” manual. Here are all the ways in which your life will be better. This can become very legalistic too.
The other risk is that it simply becomes over-whelming. I remember becoming acutely aware of this after having completed my team’s annual reviews at work one year. Out in the workplace, we were under strict instruction from those with expertise in this area to select 3 or 4 carefully chosen objectives for employees to work on over the next 12 months. Better for them to have a few objectives that they could actually achieve, than lots of objectives that they fell short on. Yet in the church, we were handing out objectives like candy in a sweet shop. You would turn up on a Sunday morning and be told 3 things to do differently in the week ahead, then you might even come back for a Sunday evening to collect 3 more, add in a midweek Bible study and it was all beginning to stack up. How could you remember all of that.
Add into the mix that some application will be applicable to some church members and not to others and you have to filter out the bits that are not relevant to you. Not everyone does that so easily and so, quite a few people will feel hit hard by something that wasn’t for them, they will either feel rebuked for something that they shouldn’t have been rebuked about or encouraged to attempt something that they are not called to do right now.
A sermon with lots of application can feel as heavy as one with lots of doctrine. The final danger then is that because the congregation are so overwhelmed, they end up unable to take on board, remember and do any of the application.
So, it may well be helpful, if you are in the habit of throwing out a scatter gun list of application to cut it right back and maybe focus on just the one primary application. This will do two things, first, it will help you to flesh out the application and spend time showing the congregation how to go about it. Secondly, it will help you to be clear about who it is for. You have time to preach the negatives as well as the positives, to emphasise that you are not saying this to some people and why.
Now, at this stage you will be thinking “but what do I do when there is so much to say, so much to apply from a Bible passage?” What do I do with the rest of the application? We’ll come to that in a future article.
Faithroots 