How to Listen to Sermons, Both Faithful and Heretical
Jesus tells us to be careful how we hear (Luke 8:18). Yet many Christians approach the Sunday sermon with little to no game-plan for listening well.
To address that problem, Christopher Ash has written an outstanding booklet: Listen Up! A Practical Guide to Listening to Sermons.
The booklet is very accessible. It is short (only 31 pages), well designed, and written in an informal, catchy style. And the content is pure gold.
It is broken into several section. The first and longest part is devoted to seven ingredients for healthy sermon listening. They are:
- Expect God to speak.
- Admit God knows better than you.
- Check the preacher says what the passage says.
- Hear the sermon in church (as opposed to solely listening to sermons on the internet).
- Be there week by week.
- Do what the Bible says.
- Do what the Bible says today -- and rejoice!
The second section deal with listening to "bad" sermons, particularly dull sermons, biblically inadequate sermons, and heretical sermons.
The final section reminds us that congregations often get the kind of preaching they tolerate and encourage, and then provides seven suggestions for encouraging good preaching,
I found this booklet very, very helpful. If you are a preacher who wants to train your people to listen well to God's Word, this is the booklet you want to use. If you are a regular hearer of God's Word, this booklet will give you a great perspective and a ton of practical strategies for improvement.
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