Trying to say it all

I want to share everything I can. It's part of why I created a website called "Learn create share" and why I was a teacher for a good while. I believe that we are blessed to be a blessing and knowledge is better shared. But that has caused some issues when I came to preach.

In my first sermons, I really sought to share EVERYTHING I knew about a topic. Well, maybe not actually everything, but basically everything.

In my head, this was the right thing to do. It was a way of treating the listener as a dilligent Bible student and instructing them on the deep complexities of scripture, textual criticism and more.

I was an idiot.

While it's not wrong to treat the church-go-er as a deep Bible student, there are also many people who are less well versed in the Bible. For them, some of the ideas I take as basic, are revolutionary.

I don't want to bury the basics of the gospel in the riches of it.

In Small Preaching, Jonathan eqautes a good sermon to an iceberg. What you share hints at the depths beneath the surface. This is more how I'm trying to approach preaching now.

When I preach, I seek to share something where there's an application for differen groups of the congregation and that includes both passionate christians with deep bible knowledge and unbelievers who are exploring the Bible for the first time.

One way around this I have found, is to invite those with questions to continue conversations after the sermon. It's a change to move from preaching to teaching and addressing specific needs. It's also a way to go deeper into topics only glanced upon during the sermon.

The challenge is to make sure that there is that nugget of gold to encourage people to go deeper and to feed the curiosity of the mature Christian.

I'm certainly not an expert but I hope I'm learning. Certainly I'm not making the mistake of trying to cram everything into one sermon.