You may have heard a preaching that fills the mind, but not the heart; you are more informed and better educated, but little affected by God’s glory to do God’s will; at worst, this type of preaching inflates people with At best, this type of preaching is light without heat. You may also have heard a moving preaching, but not the mind. Listening to it can be a touching experience. People leave the service enthusiastic, energetic and feeling good, but they have an unteured zeal, like cotton candy, this preaching has a lot of flavor, but it has no nutritional value, which can make people have more (until they get sick), but it will not feed life and will not develop maturity.
The greatest tragedy of these two abuses of preaching is that they break the vital link between truth and love in Christ 😕 (Eph 4:15). The fact is not only that we need truth and love; the truth of the gospel only achieves its purpose when it produces love; love has no living roots without the truth of the gospel; therefore, the truth of Christ must be infused into the heart, by the Holy Spirit, to produce love. That is the kind of preaching we need.
- Reformed experience preaching is not just aesthetic.
- Leading people to leave saying.
- “What a wonderful idea!?It is not merely informative.
- It conveys knowledge about the Bible and theology.
- It’s not just emotional.
- It comforts the heart and produces strong feelings.
- It’s not just moralistic.
- Educating and exhorting what’s right or wrong.
- All these elements are present in good preaching.
- But none of them are at the center of the problem.
Reformed experience preaching uses the truth of the scriptures to shine the glory of God deep in the soul, calling people to live uniquely and totally for God; breaks us and makes us do it again. It is invigorating and humiliating at the same time, this preaching puts us face to face with the most glorious and pleasant Being in the universe and with our deep wickedness. Through this preaching, the holy God joins his heart with that of sinful men, through a word of grace bought with blood.
It is the preaching that
For now, I can offer the following working definition: Reformed experiential preaching is preaching that applies God’s truth to people’s hearts to show how things should be, how they really are, and ultimately how they will be. Christian experience. towards God and your neighbor? including members of your family, members of your church, and people in the world around you. More simply, we could say that the Reformed experiential preacher receives God’s Word in his heart and then transmits it to the minds, hearts, and lives of his people. Am I not saying that preachers who do not speak primarily of the knowledge of the spirit are useless? No way. They can accurately teach people the truth of God. They can build the church. We must remember that we do not change people through our experiences. The Holy Spirit changes people and can even use bad preaching on the person of Christ (Phil. 1: 15-18). Yet how much more can he use preachers whose hearts burn with love! If the Spirit intends to work in the hearts of those who hear the Word, it generally works first in the preacher of the Word. This is the reason why wise preachers long for the prayers of God’s people for the filling of the Holy Spirit, so that they can preach with power (Acts 4: 8, 29-33; Ephesians 6: 18-20).
You can see that there is a multidimensional richness in reformed experience preaching, but it is not so complicated. All these ingredients, when collected and cooked in the fire of spirit and suffering, produce delicious and satisfying bread. To help them, I examine these topics in more detail in the book I wrote: Reform Preached (Faithful Editor).