How quick are you to forget the message you heard on Sunday morning? Does it take one hour, one day, or one week? Do you forget because the message wasn’t great or not convicting? How much priority do you put on the ministry of the word on Sunday? How much priority should we put on the ministry of the word on Sunday? Should it be a Sunday thing or an everyday experience? These are all questions I was personally wrestling with the past few weeks. Why?
Well, because I was treating Sunday as just another exposure to the Word. Yes, I would listen intently during the hour and mediate on the word being preached, but only during that hour I would wrestle with the text and what was being said. I was treating it like a book I had to read for a class, the kind I just read to say that I read it. The kind I forget what I read as soon as I was done with the last chapter. A lot of the times the book was enjoyable, and when someone would ask me how the book was, I would say, “It was good,” and that was about it. I wasn’t at all engaged in the book. That is how I would describe coming away from Sunday morning’s messages. It was easy to acknowledge it was a good sermon, but couldn’t explain why it was good. I would have been classified as your typical American who thinks quantity supersedes quality in regards to exposure to the word.
Thankfully God brought Thabiti Anyabwile into my life through his book What is a Healthy Church Member? His chapter on A Healthy Church Member is an Expositional Listener completely rattled my thinking about Sunday morning.
Expositional listening is listening for the meaning of a passage of Scripture and accepting that meaning as the main idea to be grasped for our personal and corporate lives as Christians. (Page 20)
When we listen to the preaching of the Word, we should not listen primarily for “practical how-to advice,” though Scripture teaches us much about everyday matters. Nor should we listen for messages that bolster our self-esteem or that rouse us to political and social causes. Rather, as members of Christian churches we should listen primarily for the voice and message of God as revealed in his Word. (Page 19-20)
Thabiti gives five benefits of expositional listening.
• Cultivating a hunger for God’s Word
• Helps us to focus on god’s will and to follow him
• Protects the gospel and our lives from corruption
• Encourages faithful pastors
• Benefits the gathered congregation
He also gives six ways to cultivate expositional listening.
• Mediate on the sermon passage during your quite time
• Invest in a good set of commentaries
• Talk and pray with friends about the sermon after church
• Listen to and act on the sermon throughout the week
• Develop the habit of addressing any questions about the text itself
• Cultivate humility
Concluding this chapter he remarks,
Church members are healthy when they give themselves to hearing this message as a regular discipline. Expositional listening promotes such health for individual members and the entire churches. (Page 25)
As a result God has blessed the past couple weeks. The words from this pass Sunday on Genesis 16 are still affecting my soul in many ways.
