Preaching to the heart [Video]
The heart is the seat of what you trust the most, what you are committed to the most. [Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Proverbs 3:5; Where your treasure is, there is your heart. Matthew 6:21]
Jonathan Edwards, who was a great Augustinian, therefore, said that if you’re going to be thoroughly biblical, you must not pit knowledge and feeling against each other.
Example: When I was a pastor in Virginia, many years ago, I had a young girl in my church. She was about 15 years old. She was discouraged. She was depressed, often. And at one point, the family was a prominent family in the church. I tried to help the family with her. At one point, she came into my study, and we were talking. Being a young minister, I was a little bit naive, and I said, “How are you?” She was downcast. I said, “Well, you’re a Christian. Aren’t you?” “Oh, yes. I’m a Christian.” “Christians have many blessings. Don’t they?” “Oh, yes. We do.” So we counted the blessings a little bit, about the great things that, as a Christian, she could count on and she knew was happening there and all those great things in her life. But at one point, I said, “So you’re still depressed.” I tried to encourage her. Here’s what she said, almost literally, “Yes. I know that Jesus loves me. I know He saved me, and I know He’s going to take me to Heaven. But what good is all that when not a single boy at school will even look at you?”
The Problem: She had the opinion that God loved her, but she had NO REAL KNOWLEDGE that God loved her, because the love of boys was more real to her heart than the love of God, or she wouldn’t have been depressed.
The point of preaching to the heart is to take abstract truth and to make it real to people’s heart, so that they are changed. A lot of us would like it if people took notes from our talks, and then went out into the world and started to change their life. Preaching does not change you by giving people information, that then they go out and practice as much as. It changes you through the impression it’s made during the sermon. It’s not enough to take a text and say, “Okay. I need to show that this text teaches that Jesus Christ sacrificed for us and loved us with a costly love.”
Preaching Affectively: You need to know your material cold, and you need to have incredibly good prayer life, and you need to actually have the gospel repair you. There needs to be a non-deliberate transparency about you. People need to be able to see, as you’re speaking, that somehow the very truths that you’re talking about have repaired you, have mended you, mean the world to you. The point of the text is the point of the sermon. You don’t use the text as a way of talking about whatever you feel like talking about.
