How Important Is Preaching?

Whether we’re preachers or listeners, the proclamation of God’s Word plays a role in our lives as Christians. But just how important is preaching? Today, Sinclair Ferguson addresses the centrality of this means of grace.

On this week’s Things Unseen, I want to reflect together with you on the subject of preaching. We’ve sometimes thought about that in passing on the podcast, but this week we’re going to do it each day. It’s a subject that’s relevant to all of us, whether we are preachers or—as all of us are, preachers included—whether we’re listeners. And no doubt, we’ve all got our own opinions about preaching and about the preaching that we regularly listen to. So, it’s important that we don’t just react to preaching in a, “I like it; I don’t like it,” kind of way or take it for granted, but that we think about it—what it is and what it should be. And apart from anything else, that should help us to do what Paul asked the Ephesian church to do, to pray for the preaching of the mystery of the gospel. I wonder if you do that.

But first, a question someone asked me quite recently: How important is preaching? Here’s something interesting in the Shorter Catechism. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s the old catechism that begins with the famous question about man’s chief end. Later, in Question 89, the catechism asks this question: How is the Word of God made effectual to salvation? That is, how does it point us to Christ and then transform our lives? And the answer is very striking: “The Spirit of God maketh the reading, but especially the preaching, of [God’s] Word, an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners, and of building them up in holiness and comfort, through faith, unto salvation.” I wonder if you yourself would say that bit, “especially the preaching.”

I get the feeling that many Christians today think that their own Bible reading or the home house group that they go to makes a far bigger impact on their Christian lives, and therefore is far more important to them, than the sermons they hear. So, where the men who wrote the catechism wrong, or just living in a different season? Was that true in their day, centuries ago, while we live in a different day, a technological day—things have changed? Maybe preaching was much more important in their yesterday than it is in our today? I suspect that Christians who draw these conclusions do so almost entirely on the basis of their own experience. But the fact that someone gets more out of the neighborhood Bible study than they do out of the preaching they hear doesn’t mean that that’s how it should be.

Remember how Jesus told us that we need to take heed what we hear? And He also said that we need to take heed how we hear as well as what we hear. So, we need to probe things a little deeper, I think. What if the problem is in the preaching we hear? Or, what if it’s really in the way we are listening—or not listening for that matter—or the way we are praying, or not praying? Then it wouldn’t be surprising if we thought that preaching was, at best, secondary to our spiritual growth, or hardly important at all.

Muddleheaded views about preaching seem to come round every decade or so. Sometime ago, there was a lot of talk to the effect that what we need is not sermons, but more dialogue. And in fact, some preachers started having dialogues in their pulpits instead of sermons. I remember when I first heard this, I thought: “People who say this kind of thing have never heard true preaching, because when you hear true preaching in the Spirit of Christ, you find yourself entering into the most intense dialogue of soul that’s possible. True preaching takes you to levels of dialogue with God that nothing else can.”

And then there was a call for drama. “People of dramatic gifts,” it was said, “so we should have less preaching and more drama.” I remember when this became the call thinking to myself: “If this weren’t so muddleheaded, it would be amusing. Don’t these people know that the Apostle Paul, the preacher, lived in the age of Greek drama? Don’t they know that the great Puritan preachers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lived at the high point of English drama, in fact, in the age of Shakespeare?”

And then there were those who said: “People don’t want to listen to preaching anymore. We need new methods of communicating the gospel.” Well, of course, there are new methods of communicating the gospel, and they can be rightly employed. I think of the printing press for that matter, but it’s muddleheaded to think that people telling us they don’t want to listen to preaching is a modern reaction—not at all. Paul told Timothy he’d experience a time when people didn’t want to listen to preaching. So, what was Paul’s counsel to Timothy? What was Timothy to do when people didn’t want to listen to biblical preaching? His answer? Well, it’s this: “Preach. Preach the Word.” The way to respond when people don’t want to hear preaching is preaching.

I suspect we need to think about this more, and we’ll do that tomorrow, and I hope you’ll join us. But in the meantime, let me sign off with this question: When did you last pray about the preaching that you hear?