Marks of Good Preaching - Thoughts on Sermon Criticism

To the reader: This article was intended to be the first in this series, and its publishing was mistakenly overlooked. That is my fault. Please accept my apology.

I am beginning a series on marks or identifiers of good preaching. We might simply call it sermon criticism. But I want to give an initial warning about what that means and some cautions about it.

What this series is NOT intended to do is give ammunition to argumentative Christians. We need to understand that listening acceptingly and listening critically are both good things, and we err when we encourage only one of those to the exclusion of the other.

The practice of being a critical listener of preaching is not for the lazy Christian who uses sermon critique as escapism — a means of removing oneself from obligation to obey the Scripture by discrediting the sermon. But I dare say that mature believers who have an established pattern in their life of trust in and obedience to the authority of the Word of God should have a hyper-discerning ear for good preaching. Such Christians are the (usually) silent accountability in the pew that keeps the preacher honest and diligent.

The critical listener does not see the preacher as completely flawless and above bias or indolence. But he also doesn’t see the preacher as completely broken and without value. If you always find the sermon great, or conversely always find it terrible and unredeemable, you lack nuance and maturity. I would say, in most cases in our circle of Christians, you can always find many good and right things in a sermon. And those things can bring encouragement, help, conviction, and more. The Word of God by itself is indeed bigger and more powerful than the preacher. In this way, a good listener will rarely come up completely empty of spiritual good no matter how poor the sermon may be.

One is not required to be a preacher to have the right to examine preaching. He simply must be reliant on the authority of Scripture. This is the standard the preacher is held to. The Bereans were not preachers. And they likely had not been Christians for very long. Yet, they were commended by Paul for checking preaching against biblical authority. Any preacher who suggests you should simply listen without criticism because you’ve never had to prepare a sermon is probably just wanting to put himself above accountability.

Be willing to give the benefit of the doubt to preacher. Give him the grace you would want to receive if you stood where he stands. This means you should have the ability and willingness to enjoy a sermon that may not have given all you wanted it to give.

We must not ignore the good promptings from the Spirit of God during the sermon because we notice technical flaws. That’s hard to do the more errors there are. That is why it is the preachers duty to be so careful to remove all errors so that peoples’ attention is not put off track by them. Tim Challies said in his article “Sermons Are Not for Liking”:

“We tend to ask questions like, ‘So how did you enjoy the sermon today?’ It is just the wrong question to ask. I guess that isn’t always true. If a sermon is outright unbiblical–if the preacher butchers his text, misses the point, teaches nonsense or outright error, then I guess you are well within your rights to dislike it because God dislikes it and is dishonored by it. And maybe if it is clear the preacher put little or no thought into his text, if he is delivering a sermon only out of a sense of duty or the overflow of pride, maybe then you can dislike it because, again, it dishonors God. But I suspect few of us find ourselves in that situation on a regular basis.”

A sermon full of these problems makes it difficult to concentrate on the good parts.

But as with many things there is a balance. In this case, we are balancing the virtue of grace toward the preacher with the virtue of discerning the Bible. These are both good virtues, and they do compete with each other. Mercy verses truth, love verses justice, peace verses righteousness. When we listen to preaching, we are to balance these virtues that compete. In this way, the content of the preaching is not the only thing that matures us. The act of listening in this way is in itself a practice of maturing.

So as we go forward with this series, please understand what it is meant to do. And perhaps more importantly, remember what it is not meant to do.

NEXT: Original Intent