Pr 4:20-1 iPREACH...?

“My son, be attentive to my words, incline your ear to my sayings.
Let them not escape from your sight; keep them within your heart.”
Proverbs 4:20-21

MEN'S BREAKFAST

July, 2008

My wife was playing with her mobile phone yesterday, and she made a little discovery. You can play music on it! There's a little MP3 device somewhere inside its tiny guts. It's a clever little widget. It plays high-quality music (at least, it plays music well – I won't vouch for the music that some people load into them). It can hold a lot of music, too. An old record collection that weighed twenty kilos can now fit into a device smaller that the toy telephones Maggie plays with. You see them on trains all the time – people can listen to just about anything on the train, and they do. Occasionally you can hear them twittering away, like some tiny band of ants trying to play Led Zeppelin covers.

They're also getting popular at Moore College, I've noticed. I was really surprised to learn that what a lot of students are listening to is not music, but... sermons. They're listening to sermons! Deliberately!There are a few of these things – no, a lot of these things – around at Moore College. The curious thing is that a lot of guys and girls aren't listening to music at all. They're listening to sermons. Deliberately! They're downloading sermons from some of the world's best preachers. Mark Driscoll, John Piper... Reg Piper... I wondered if the world had gone completely mad... was there a top-of-the-pops for preachers now? Sermon Top 20?

But it led me to consider one question... it's a question I've wrestled with, and most of my fellow first-year student will all wrestle with this year. And the question is this: How do we measure effective preaching?

Particularly in today's benchmark-obsessed environment, where there are ways of empirically measuring almost anything to see how cost-effective, how efficient, how effective things are, it could be considered a fair-enough question.
Let's look at one of the men we hold up as a great preacher – Saul Paulus of Tarsus. He was one who certainly earned the label euangellion - Evangelist. One who took the euangelion, the Good Message, around the world. I wonder what a preacher can learn from Paul's example?

And then I looked back over 1 Thessalonians. It's a book that we've spent a couple of Sundays in at the 7:45 and 9:30 services, and it's the book that has the Christian farewell that Reg has got us to memorise so well. Paul preached to the Thessalonians, we find in Acts 17, and while he was there he preached in the synagogue for three Sabbaths. Quite a few people came to accept the good message of Christ before Paul was forced to leave. But when he left, the most remarkable thing happened.

The Gospel flourished! It went bananas! By the time news could get back directly from his off-sider Timothy, he had heard reports from all over Macedonia about these Thessalonian Christians. News had spread all over the place, but so had something else; (1 Thess 1:8 “Not only has the Word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith has gone forth everywhere.”) Paul explains in here that they had imitated him and Timothy, and the Lord – but they then became examples to everyone around them.

I wonder, then, if we scared little first-years are asking the wrong question? Should we be asking how we measure effective preaching, or should be asking what real preaching is?

What Reg and Stu and Matt... and quite a few people in our church do... is to help teach and explain the Bible... and, traditionally, that's preaching. But there's another form of preaching, and that is, simply, teaching by living our lives as God would want us to live. The best preaching, really, starts in our houses. Being godly men to our families, to our wives, to our children, to our brothers and sisters and parents. Reg said something the other day that struck me; he said that his first job, before anything else, was to make sure that his wife and his children will be in Heaven with the Lord – nothing else was more important than that.

I've talked to people this week whose biggest problems with Christianity and Christians were... their fathers. Fathers who claimed Christianity, but in no way acted as imitators of Christ, have frightened so many of their children from Christ. And the really frightening thing is that it's not that hard to do!

I know, for me, one place where I can be the least Christ-like is at home. After a long day, when all the kids are wound-up, when there's bathing and nappies and dinner and washing-up and homework and garbage and chasing kids into bed... with visions of essays and Greek and research and history and exams... it is unbelievably easy to think that once the door is closed, and the world outside can't see...

Does my speech echo Christ? Do I love my wife as Christ loved the Church, sacrificing all for her? Do my children see me as an imitator of my loving Heavenly Father? At this point – as the father of my house, am I serving them and being an example to them that they can follow? Or am I a cranky, tired, short-fused man who (even if I don't say it out loud) demands to be left alone until I need something from one of them? I would love to tell you which one I am to my family... and I know which one I can be so often. If there's one area of weakness that the devil can attack, there it is – for most of us. When we're tired, when we're not so guarded with our mouths and our lives...

To a point, we're the iPods of our family – when the door's closed, all the outside noise is deadened, and what we speak and how we live still matters! Our little verse to carry around for the week is a bit of a reminder. It's from Proverbs. The writer says “My son, be attentive to my words, incline your ear to my sayings. Let them not escape from your sight; keep them within your heart.” The thing that we have to remember is that, whether we like it or not, our sons (and daughters, and wives, brothers, sisters, parents...) do incline their ears to our sayings. The next verse in Proverbs 4 tells us what our words should be – They are life to those who find them, and healing to all their flesh. And if that's not telling us that we need to be imitating Christ as we talk with our families, I don't know what is.

Let's go this week broadcasting the love of Christ to our families in our words and our lives. Let's be imitators of Christ so they can imitate us.