“Occasionally a preacher is just so smart, just so almost-as-smart-as-God, that they have an axe to grind. They get up to preach and just can’t wait to say how wrong the Bible is, how primitive/ignorant/undemocratic were its pre-modern authors. Their sermons begin with pride, and end as a Toyota Prius commercial.”

You’re sitting in church, if not innocently, then at least penitently. The preacher (bless his soul!) says something in the sermon that undermines the Bible, and consequently, the whole sermon, and the whole concept of a sermon. Ouch. Here we go again. Sometimes I’ve been the guy sitting in church when this happens. Sometimes I’ve been the preacher.

In either pair of shoes, the rule holds: Undermined Bible = Undermined Sermon.

Here’s another rule: Person “Preaching” Personal Opinion = Person Not Preaching. A sermon is not an oral good advice column.

Here are some ways I’ve seen preachers like myself shoot themselves in the foot. Do these things if you want your preaching to be irrelevant.

1. Do things that make the Bible seem far away from your people.

My friend Jonathan was just going off on this the other day. There are bad ways to use your knowledge of Greek/Hebrew/Latin. You can preach in such a way as to make it clear that your congregation can’t really know what the Bible says unless they know [insert “original language” word here, and what it “really” means]. You can make them think they need to know Greek to read the Bible in English.

But this is bad theology. It ignores Pentecost, the divinely merciful imperialistic act of the Spirit that reveals that all the languages can be filled and fulfilled by the truth of Christ to the praise and glory of God the Father (Acts 2:4-6). It ignores the fact that Jesus probably spoke lots of Aramaic, so that his “original” words in the Greek New Testament are already a Pentecost-derived, Spirit-inspired, divinely authored translation.

Preachers who, for some reason or other (Romans 10:8 maybe?), don’t want their congregation to feel like the Bible is far from them and inaccessible, just might use their knowledge of original languages to tastefully deepen (rather than contradict) what this or that English rendering says. Note: this can even be done without saying the Greek/Hebrew/Latin word. You can expound the sense of it without even signaling your super education. So clever! But there are also tasteful ways to use the actual Greek word, etc.

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