What Christians need from God’s Word every Sunday are not human-centered scriptural truths applied to our Small Stories. What Christians need from God’s Word every Sunday is to be reminded that their Small Stories connect beautifully and mysteriously to the Larger Story of creation, redemption, and consummation.

All across America, a myriad of pastors take the summer to plan out future sermon series. Preachers bring key questions to the planning task including: Old Testament or New Testament? Topical or Expositional? Character study or Contemporary Issue?

Pastors wrestle with seminal questions with no clear-cut answers: should I tackle the apostle Paul’s book of Ephesians or should I address woke ideology?

One question that hardly occurred to me to ask even a few years ago—when I began a regular preaching ministry—is now beginning to crystalize with surprising clarity: how long should the sermon series be?

I have come to the conviction that while short sermon series certainly have their place in the life of the church, a longer sermon series seems to provide the potential for exercising a greater shaping influence upon the life of the church while delivering greater spiritual nourishment for the saints.

A longer sermon series communicates to the congregation several important truths that become evident to the church by the very length of the series. Longer sermon series communicate to the church that…

The Bible is a book that is meant to be studied.

A longer sermon series more effectively communicates to a congregation that “sustained reflection”, “struggle”, and “wrestling” with texts of Scripture play a foundational role in the Christian life.

During my recent sermon series on the book of Job, our congregation saw a preacher (1) wrestling with Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar’s application of the doctrine of retribution to an innocent sufferer, (2) fighting to make sense of Elihu’s long-winded speech (Job 32-27), and (3) squirming under the weightiness of the Yahweh speeches from the Whirlwind (Job 38-41). These are all difficult texts that a short sermon series would have omitted.

So what does a longer sermon series implicitly communicate to the household of God?

That the Bible is a book that is meant to be studied! That all Scripture, like the apostle Paul indicated, is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (1 Tim. 3:16-17).

If the pastor never carefully works through long texts of Scripture, then the pastor is probably implicitly communicating to the congregation: it’s not worth it, it can’t be done, and simply be satisfied with a shallow glossing over and skimming over the Word of God.

Which is the exactly the wrong message to communicate to the church.

The church needs a model of a preacher studying hard texts of Scripture in its midst because the entire church should be doing the same. The church needs to be constantly challenged to study the Word of God in all its breadth and depth for therein lies the very life and love of God communicated to His people.

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