Ministry Matters: Exegeting the Heart

This is part of a series exploring some of my core convictions in ministry, things that have increasingly shaped how I pastor. While obviously written from that perspective, I hope they can be useful to any Christian thinking through how to minister to the people around them.

John Stott, in his famous book on preaching, Between Two Worlds, argues that the preacher has two tasks: to exegete the text, and to exegete the audience. To understand and study and know Scripture, and to also understand and study and know human beings in a particular time and place in a way that brings Scripture to bear on their lives. Stott reflects the biblical model for preaching—Nehemiah summarizes the task like this: “They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” (Nehemiah 8:8) Doing this task requires, as Stott puts it, a foot in each world.

Obviously, there are churches and pastors that fail to take the first calling seriously. I’ve sat through sermons that had nothing to do with the text, or that had only the most basic understanding of what it said. I vividly remember one Sunday as a teenager, visiting a mainline Lutheran congregation, where the sermon was functionally exegeting the Disney movie Prince of Egypt (then recently released), and the main point was drawn from a part of the movie not found in the Bible at all. Such Scriptureless sermonizing might feel relatable, but it is in fact the height of arrogance. If we mount the pulpit and simply preach our thoughts and opinions, we have anointed ourself with an authority that rightly belongs to God. Preachers are called to study and know a text and say what it says, carefully and clearly. We will at times still err, but at least we are erring in proximity to the truth.

I’m part of a Christian tradition where this is not our main weakness. We value careful thinking and expository preaching. Every sermon involves hours of wrestling with a passage, praying for guidance, diagramming sentences, and consulting commentaries. I’m glad for this emphasis; Scripture is after all the power and revelation of God.

That said, where we often fail is in devoting ourselves to the text while failing to give the same attention to Stott’s other world: that of our hearers. We can successfully say in obsessive detail what the text says, but we fail to help the people understand its meaning.

This error can manifest in the stereotypical commentary-as-sermon a certain young minister often delivers. Thirty or forty or (heaven forbid) more minutes spent on the meaning of Greek words and cross-references with nary an application to be found. This is not preaching. Until it is applied to the hearers, a sermon is only a lecture that happens to fall on a Sunday.

That said, what concerns me more is the much broader swath of preaching I hear which does aspire to application but does so only superficially. The depth and sophistication applied to the Biblical text disappearsm and what is left is platitudes, moralizing, or simplistic gospel turns. In response to this weakness, I would suggest three things we need as we understand and apply Scripture to people.

First, exegeting the audience should involve a deep understanding of our world. We are subject to certain unique cultural forces and ways of thinking. Whether we call them a “worldview” or a “metanarrative” or something else, there is a particular set of ideas we are exposed to at this moment as the people that we particularly are.

Understanding our world must transcend the simple “culture bad, Christians good” paradigm of some evangelical spaces. In the first place, God’s common grace means that not everything in the world will be bad. Parts of it can be affirmed and built upon. More importantly, cultural narratives influence the world because we find them persuasive. Until we name what is persuasive about them, what elements make them so plausible in our moment, we will fail to help our people live faithfully in the midst of them.

So in preaching, I’m often considering the forces in our world that have shaped how we all think. Individualism. Liberal democracy. Secularism. Capitalism. The therapeutic turn. The polarization and politicization of everything. These are complicated ideas, and I don’t mean preachers should wax philosophically about them for hours. But helping people name the basic forces and some of their effects, good and bad, can help them understand where Jesus is calling us to different ways of thinking and living.

Second, exegeting our audience should involve a deep understanding of human experience. We should seek to understand, both intellectually and emotionally, what it is like to be human, both for ourselves and for people different from us.

While there are plenty of experiences I haven’t had, one I’m unfortunately familiar with is that of loss and grief. I have heard some beautiful sermons on these subjects, preached by people who have experienced similar tragedies. But I have also heard many that turn me off because it is clear the speaker has either never walked through grief or, if they have, they still have not processed it for themselves in a deep way.

How do we grow in this? Personally, we can name our own experiences and seek to really understand how they shape us. This growth requires things like emotional awareness, being able to realize how and why certain things in life make us feel certain ways. It also requires a wise introspection—not navel-gazing, but seeking to both experience life and to experience those experiences.

Beyond the realm of what we have gone through ourselves, we can also listen to and seek to understand and empathize with others. There is enormous value in hearing someone’s story and asking questions about how it affected them. There is also value in things like novels and memoirs that help illuminate experiences we might not otherwise get to hear.

One particular place I think many pastors in my tradition need to grow: I’m in a denomination that is complementarian. I believe that is biblical. But half (or more) of the people a pastor is called to minister to are women. Obviously, a man can’t experience that personally. But getting feedback from women, listening to their stories, and trying to understand the unique parts of their experiences and the questions they have are practices that I have found hugely helpful in seeking to understand the people Jesus has called me to preach to.

Third, exegeting our audience should involve a deep understanding of the human heart. Too much preaching is ‘what’ preaching—simply telling people what to do and (especially) what not to do. “Stop envying. Stop being angry. Stop looking at porn. Stop loving evil.”

Obviously, those are all biblical ‘what’s’. Yet I know a lot of Christians, and pretty much all of them know they shouldn’t do those things, Yet they keep doing them! What causes this failure to do what we should? Part of the answer is that in addition to ‘what,’ people desperately need to be told both ‘how’ and ‘why.’

The ‘how’ of application exists on a practical and an internal level. Practically, people need to be given concrete advice on living out the callings of God. Real wisdom and suggestions for changing habits and pursuing righteousness. Internally, people need to be given not just a method but tools to address the spiritual, emotional, and physical forces behind their struggles. What is making you angry? What is driving you to addiction? How do we work through the idolatries, feelings, and fears that drive us to sin?

The ‘why’ of application likewise exists on two levels—that of beauty and that of grace. An essential part of Christian ethics is actually aesthetics, helping people understand why what is morally good is in fact excellent, honorable, praiseworthy, and desirable. To open our eyes to the ugliness of sin and the beauty of obedience. And underneath all of that is the supreme beauty of the gospel. Every sin problem is ultimately a gospel problem, and ultimately knowing Jesus Christ in His cross and resurrection are the weapons we need to overcome our struggles.

Put together, these deeper understandings of people are essential because they are the way we build a bridge between the power of Scripture and the brokenness of our hearts. We are all growing in knowing them; I’ve only come to a place of naming all of this in the last few years, and I’m still far from feeling like I’ve mastered it. But exegeting the heart, just as much as the text, is increasingly becoming key to how I think we are called to minister Christ.