Iron sharpens iron. Before the word is snatched away, think through what you have heard and speak about it. What challenged you? What did you learn? Be brave. Encourage honesty by opening up what you found difficult to hear or to understand. Admit your struggles. Remember that the message was preached to the church family so talk about it together.

This is what I find odd. Evangelicals invest huge amounts of capital into sermons. We spend large sums of money training people to preach and then pay them an annual salary to do it as a fulltime job. We set aside at least fifty percent of our weekly church services to sermons and we invest huge amounts of our hope in believing that preaching is one of God’s chief ways of saving and nourishing us, and his way of speaking to the nations.

Why are we so reluctant to talk about them?

It can’t be that we consider sermons unimportant. We invest so much in preaching because we believe with Peter that ‘the one who speaks, speaks the very words of God’ (1 Pet. 4:11). We stand with the Westminster Shorter Catechism when it says that ‘the Spirit of God makes… the preaching of the Word an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners, building them up in holiness and comforting them through faith unto salvation.’

Our Excuses

Some people would say that preaching is personal and that what God says to them is nobody else’s business. Some people, but not evangelicals! In the Bible, preaching was always to families, tribes or nations. Their response, whether weeping, anger, amazement or indifference, was always corporate. I can’t think of a time when people responded ‘privately’, can you?

Let’s be honest though.

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