New Concepts
Idea
Two essential elements in the statement of an idea:
I do not appreciate opera; what is worse, I have several friends who do. Being around them makes me feel as if I exist in a cultural desert, so I have taken several steps to change my condition. On occasion I have actually attended an opera. Like a sinner shamed into attending church, I have made my way to the music hall to let culture have its way in me. On most of these visits, however, I have returned home unresponsive to what the artists have tried to do.
I understand enough about opera, of course, to know that a story is being acted out with the actors singing rather than speaking their parts. Usually, though, the story line stays as vague to me as the Italian lyrics, but opera buffs tell me that the plot is incidental to the performance. Should someone bother to ask my evaluation of the opera, I would comment on the well-constructed sets, the brilliant costumes, or the heftiness of the soprano. I could render no reliable judgment on the interpretation of the music or even the dramatic impact of the performance. When I return from the music hall with a crumpled program and an assortment of random impressions, I actually do not know how to evaluate what has taken place.
When people attend church, they may respond to the preacher like a novice at the opera. They have never been told what a sermon is supposed to do. Commonly many listeners react to the emotional highs. They enjoy the human interest stories, jot down a catchy sentence or two, and judge the sermon a success if the preacher quits on time. Important matters, such as the subject of the sermon, may escape them completely. Years ago Calvin Coolidge returned home from church one Sunday and was asked by his wife what the minister had talked about. Coolidge replied, “Sin.” When his wife pressed him about what the preacher had said about sin, Coolidge responded, “I think he was against it.”
The truth is that many people in the pew would not score much higher than Coolidge if quizzed about the content of last Sunday’s sermon. To them, preachers preach about sin, salvation, prayer, or suffering all together or one at a time in thirty-five minutes. Judging from the uncomprehending way in which listeners talk about a sermon, it is hard to believe that they have listened to a message. Instead the responses indicate that they leave with a basketful of fragments but no adequate sense of the whole.
Unfortunately, some of us preach as we have listened. Preachers, like their audiences, may conceive of sermons as a collection of points that have little relationship to one another. Here textbooks designed to help speakers may actually hinder them. Discussions of outlining usually emphasize the place of Roman and Arabic numerals along with proper indentation, but these factors (important as they are) may ignore the obvious—an outline is the shape of the sermon idea, and the parts must all be related to the whole. Three or four ideas not related to a more inclusive idea do not make a message; they make three or four sermonettes all preached at one time. Reuel L. Howe listened to hundreds of taped sermons and held discussions with laypeople. He concluded that the people in the pew “complain almost unanimously that sermons often contain too many ideas.”1 That may not be an accurate observation. Sermons seldom fail because they have too many ideas; more often they fail because they deal with too many unrelated ideas.
Fragmentation poses a particular danger for the expository preacher. Some expository sermons offer little more than scattered comments based on words and phrases from a passage, making no attempt to show how the various thoughts fit together as a whole. At the outset the preacher may catch the congregation’s mind with some observation about life, or worse, jump into the text with no thought at all about the present. As the sermon goes on, the preacher comments on the words and phrases in the passage with subthemes and major themes and individual words all given equal emphasis. The conclusion, if there is one, usually substitutes a vague exhortation for relevant application, because no single truth has emerged to apply. When the congregation goes back into the world, it has received no message by which to live because it has not occurred to the preacher to preach one.
A major affirmation of our definition of expository preaching, therefore, maintains that “expository preaching is the communication of a biblical concept.” That affirms the obvious. A sermon should be a bullet, not buckshot. Ideally each sermon is the explanation, interpretation, or application of a single dominant idea supported by other ideas, all drawn from one passage or several passages of Scripture.
The Importance of a Single Idea
Students of public speaking and preaching have argued for centuries that effective communication demands a single theme. Rhetoricians hold to this so strongly that virtually every textbook devotes some space to a treatment of the principle. Terminology may vary—central idea, proposition, theme, thesis statement, main thought—but the concept is the same: an effective speech “centers on one specific thing, a central idea.”2 This thought is so axiomatic to speech communication that some authors, such as Lester Thonssen and A. Craig Baird, take it for granted:
Little need be said here about the emergence of the central theme. It is assumed that the speech possesses a clearly defined and easily determined thesis or purpose: that this thesis is unencumbered by collateral theses which interfere with the clear perception of the principal one; and that the development is of such a character as to provide for the easy and unmistakable emergence of the thesis through the unfolding of the contents of the speech.3
Homileticians join their voices to insist that a sermon, like any good speech, embodies a single, all-encompassing concept. Donald G. Miller, in a chapter devoted to the heart of biblical preaching, insists:
Any single sermon should have just one major idea. The points or subdivisions should be parts of this one grand thought. Just as bites of any particular food are all parts of the whole, cut into sizes that are both palatable and digestible, so the points of a sermon should be smaller sections of the one theme, broken into tinier fragments so that the mind may grasp them and the life assimilate them. . . . We are now ready to state in simplest terms the burden of this chapter. It is this: Every sermon should have a theme, and that theme should be the theme of the portion of Scripture on which it is based.4
From a different tradition Alan M. Stibbs adds a seconding voice: “The preacher must develop his expository treatment of the text in relation to a single dominant theme.”5 H. Grady Davis develops his book Design for Preaching in support of the thesis that “a well-prepared sermon is the embodiment, the development, the full statement of a significant thought.”6 A classic statement of this concept comes from J. H. Jowett in his Yale lectures on preaching:
I have a conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as a crystal. I find the getting of that sentence is the hardest, the most exacting, and the most fruitful labour in my study. To compel oneself to fashion that sentence, to dismiss every word that is vague, ragged, ambiguous, to think oneself through to a form of words which defines the theme with scrupulous exactness—this is surely one of the most vital and essential factors in the making of a sermon: and I do not think any sermon ought to be preached or even written, until that sentence has emerged, clear and lucid as a cloudless moon.7
To ignore the principle that a central, unifying idea must be at the heart of an effective sermon is to push aside what experts in both communication theory and preaching have to tell us.8
A novice may dismiss the importance of a central idea as the ploy of homiletics professors determined to press young preachers into their mold. It should be noted, therefore, that this basic fact of communication also claims sturdy biblical support. In the Old Testament the sermons of the prophets are called “the burden of the Lord.” These proclamations were not a few “appropriate remarks” delivered because the prophet was expected to say something. Instead the prophet addressed his countrymen because he had something to say. He preached a message, complete and entire, to persuade his hearers to return to God. As a result the sermons of the prophets possessed both form and purpose. Each embodied a single theme directed toward a particular audience in order to elicit a specific response.
In the New Testament the historian Luke presents samples of the preaching that enabled the church to penetrate the ancient world. The sermons of the apostles were without exception the proclamation of a single idea directed toward a particular audience. Donald R. Sunukjian concluded that
each of Paul’s messages is centered around one simple idea or thought. Each address crystallizes into a single sentence which expresses the sum and substance of the whole discourse. Everything in the sermons . . . leads up to, develops, or follows from a single unifying theme.9
This assessment of Paul’s preaching could apply to every sermon in Acts. Each idea receives different treatment by the apostolic preacher. In Acts 2, for instance, on the day of Pentecost Peter stood before an antagonistic audience and, to gain a hearing, preached an inductive sermon. His idea is not stated until the conclusion: “Let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36 NASB). In Acts 13, on the other hand, Paul used a deductive arrangement. His major idea stands at the beginning of the sermon, and the movements that follow amplify and support it. The statement found in verse 23 declares, “God, according to the promise, has brought to Israel a Savior, Jesus.”
In Acts 20, when the apostle addressed the Ephesian elders, his structure was both inductive and deductive. First Paul drew from his own life an example of care for the church; then he warned in verse 28, “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock” (NASB). Having stated that central thought, Paul went on to explain it and apply it to the leaders seated before him. Not all the sermons in Acts develop in the same way, but each develops a central unifying concept.
If we preach effectively, we must know what we are about. Effective sermons major in biblical ideas brought together into an overarching unity. Having thought God’s thoughts after him, the expositor communicates and applies those thoughts to the hearers. In dependence upon the Holy Spirit, the preacher aims to confront, convict, convert, and comfort men and women through the proclamation of biblical concepts. People shape their lives and settle their eternal destinies in response to ideas.
The Definition of an Idea
What do we mean by an idea? A glance at the dictionary demonstrates that defining an idea resembles trying to package fog. A complete definition could send us into the fields of philosophy, linguistics, and grammar. Webster ranges all the way from “a transcendent entity that is a real pattern of which existing things are imperfect representations” to “an entity (as a thought, concept, sensation, or image) actually or potentially present to consciousness.”
The word idea itself moved into English from the Greek word eido, which means “to see” and therefore “to know.” An idea sometimes enables us to see what was previously unclear. In common life when an explanation provides new insight, we exclaim, “Oh, I see what you mean!” Still another synonym for idea is concept, which comes from the verb to conceive. Just as a sperm and an egg join to produce new life in the womb, an idea begins in the mind when things ordinarily separated come together to form a unity that either did not exist before or was not recognized previously.
The ability to abstract and synthesize, that is, to think in ideas, develops with maturity. Small children think in particulars. A child praying at breakfast thanks God for the milk, cereal, orange juice, eggs, bread, butter, and jelly, but an adult combines all these separate items into the single word food. An idea, therefore, may be considered a distillation of life. It abstracts out of the particulars of life what they have in common and relates them to one another. Through ideas we make sense out of the parts of our experience.
All ideas, of course, are not equally valid; we have good ideas and bad ideas. Bad ideas offer explanations of experience that do not reflect reality. They read into life what is not there. Often we embrace invalid ideas because they have not been clearly stated and therefore cannot be evaluated. In our culture, influenced as it is by mass media, we are bombarded by ridiculous concepts that are deliberately left vague so we will act without thinking.
Years ago Marlboro cigarettes were marketed as cigarettes for sophisticated women, but Marlboro captured less than 1 percent of the market. Consumer research revealed, however, that men smoke because they believe it makes them more masculine; on the other hand, women smoke because they think it makes them attractive to men. As a result of these findings, the advertisers switched their campaign away from women to men and gave Marlboros a masculine image. Rugged, weather-beaten cowpunchers were portrayed smoking cigarettes as they rounded up cattle, and the theme line invited the consumer to “come to Marlboro country.”
Because the association of cigarettes with cowboys conveyed the idea that smoking Marlboros makes men masculine, sales jumped 400 percent. The idea, of course, is nonsense. Medical evidence tells us that Marlboro country is a cemetery and the Marlboro man probably suffers from cancer or lung disease. (The model for the Marlboro man did in fact die of a smoking-related disease.) Yet because the idea that “smoking makes you masculine” slipped into the mind without being clearly stated, it gained wide acceptance and boosted sales dramatically.
This is not an isolated incident. William Bryan Key, speaking about advertising, makes this unsettling statement of a Madison Avenue doctrine: “No significant belief or attitude held by any individual is apparently made on the basis of consciously perceived data.” If that stands as a fundamental affirmation behind the “word from the sponsor,” we should not be surprised that truth in advertising is hard to come by.
Ideas sometimes lurk in the attic of our minds like ghosts. At times we struggle to give these wispy ideas a body. “I know what I mean,” we say, “but I just can’t put it into words.” Despite the difficulty of clothing thought with words, we have to do it. Unless ideas are expressed in words, we cannot understand, evaluate, or communicate them. If we will not—or cannot—think ourselves clear so that we say what we mean, we have no business in the pulpit. We are like a singer who can’t sing, an actor who can’t act, or an accountant who can’t add.
The Formation of an Idea
To define an idea with “scrupulous exactness,” we must know how ideas are formed. When reduced to its basic structure, an idea consists of only two essential elements: a subject and a complement. Both are necessary. When we talk about the subject of an idea, we mean the complete, definite answer to the question, “What am I talking about?” The subject as it is used in homiletics is not the same thing as a subject in grammar. A grammatical subject is often a single word. The subject of a sermon idea can never be only one word. It calls for the full, precise answer to the question, “What am I talking about?” Single words such as discipleship, witnessing, worship, grief, or love may masquerade as subjects, but they are too vague to be viable.
A subject cannot stand alone. By itself it is incomplete, and therefore it needs a complement. The complement “completes” the subject by answering the question, “What am I saying about what I am talking about?” A subject without a complement dangles as an open-ended question. Complements without subjects resemble automobile parts not attached to a car. An idea emerges only when the complement is joined to a definite subject.
Moreover, behind every subject there is a question either stated or implied. If I say that my subject is “the importance of faith,” the implied question is “What is the importance of faith?” “The people that God justifies . . .” forms a subject because it answers the question, “What am I talking about?” But the unstated question is “Who are the people God justifies?” If the words subject and complement confuse you, then try thinking of the subject as a question and your complement as the answer to that question. The two together make up the idea.
An example of a subject is the test of a person’s character. (To be precise the subject is, What is the test of a person’s character?) That question must be completed to have meaning. We do not know what the test of character is. A variety of complements could be added to this subject to form an idea. Here are a few:
The test of a person’s character is what it takes to stop him or her.
The test of a person’s character is what that person would do if he or she were certain no one would ever find out.
The test of a person’s character is like the test of an oak—how strong is the person at the roots?
Each new complement tells us what is being said about the subject, and each new complement forms a different idea.
Students of preaching must search for ideas when they read sermons or prepare sermons of their own. Davis stresses that a beginner especially must give attention to the way ideas are formed:
He must stop getting lost in the details and study the essential structure of sermons. For the time being he has to forget about the sentences, the arguments used, the quotations, the human interest stories. He has to stand off from the sermon far enough to see its shape as a whole. Stubbornly he has to ask, “What is the man really talking about, and what are the basic things he is saying about it?” This means that he must learn to distinguish between the organic structure of the idea, on the one hand, and its development on the other. It is like beginning with the skeleton in the study of anatomy.10
Finding the subject and complement does not start when we begin construction of our sermons. We pursue the subject and complement when we study the biblical text. Because each paragraph, section, or subsection of Scripture contains an idea, we do not understand a passage until we can state its subject and complement exactly. While other questions emerge in the struggle to understand the meaning of a biblical writer, these two (“What precisely is the author talking about?” and “What is the author saying about what he is talking about?”) are fundamental.
Examples of Forming an Idea
In some biblical passages the subject and complement may be discovered with relative ease, but in others determining the idea stands as a major challenge. Psalm 117 is an example of an uncomplicated thought. The psalmist urges:
Praise the Lord, all nations!
Extol him, all you people!
For his love is strong,
His faithfulness eternal.
We do not understand the psalm until we can state its subject. What is the psalmist talking about? We might be tempted to say that the subject is praise, but praise is broad and imprecise. The psalmist isn’t telling us everything about praise. Nor is the subject praise of God, which is still too broad. The subject needs more limits. The precise subject is why everyone should praise the Lord. What, then, is the psalmist saying about that? He has two complements to his subject. The Lord should be praised, first, because his love is strong and second, because his faithfulness is eternal. In this short psalm the psalmist states his naked idea, stripped of any development, but in its bare bones it has a definite subject and two complements.
Longer passages in which the idea receives extensive development can be harder to analyze for subject and complement, but the work must be done. In Hebrews 10:19–25 the author applies a previous discussion of the high-priestly work of Jesus:
Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the way which he dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh; and having a great [high] priest over the house of God; let us draw near with a true heart in fullness of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience: and having our body washed with pure water, let us hold fast the confession of our hope that it waver not; for he is faithful that promised: and let us consider one another to provoke unto love and good works; not forsaking our own assembling together, as the custom of some is, but exhorting one another; and so much the more, as ye see the day drawing nigh. (ASV)
While many details in this passage demand explanation, a careful student will distinguish the trunk from the branches. Until a subject emerges, it is not possible to determine the value or significance of anything else that is said. A casual reader might be tempted to state the subject as the high priesthood of Jesus, but that subject covers too much. The author of Hebrews does not tell his readers everything about Christ’s high-priestly work in this single paragraph. Nor is the text talking about boldness to enter the holy place, which is actually a sub-idea in the passage.
The subject can always be stated as a question. Therefore, the subject can be narrowed to, “What should happen because believers can enter into God’s presence with confidence and have a great high priest?” The complements of this subject will be a series of results, and there are three. First, they should draw near to God with the assurance that comes from a cleansed heart and life; second, they should hold unswervingly to the hope they profess; and third, they should spur on one another to love and good works. Everything else in this paragraph enlarges on this subject with its complements.
Look at how the process works with the poetry in an Old Testament book. The small diary of Habakkuk consists of a series of conversations that the prophet had with God. In the opening chapter Habakkuk is upset with God for not punishing evil in the nation of Judah and in the broader world. We must first state the ideas that make up the argument the prophet had with God.
Habakkuk opens with a complaint in 1:2–4. Stated as a subject and complement, this is the idea:
God replies to the prophet in 1:5–7. God’s answer can also be stated as a subject and complement:
Note that both of these paragraphs (1:2–11) can now be joined in a larger subject and complement:
That leads us, then, to the third paragraph in the passage found in 1:12–2:1:
There are many images used in the poetry of this chapter, but they must be separated from the ideas they support. It is important to go through the process of stating the subject and complement to get at the ideas. Ideas are slippery creatures that can easily escape your grasp.
In each of these passages, we determined the subject and its complement(s) to discover the structure of the idea. In order to think clearly we must constantly distinguish the idea from the way the idea develops. The effort to state the idea of a passage and then to state the idea of our sermon in exact words can be frustrating and irritating, but in the long run it is the most economical use of our time. What is more important, we cannot get anywhere without doing it. We do not understand what we are reading unless we can clearly express the subject and complement of the section we are studying. And those who hear us preach do not understand what we are saying unless they can answer the basic questions: What were we talking about today? What were we saying about what we were talking about? Yet Sunday after Sunday men and women leave church unable to state the preacher’s basic idea because the preacher has not bothered to state it in the sermon. When people leave church in a mental fog, they do so at their spiritual peril.
Thinking is difficult, but it stands as our essential work. Make no mistake about the difficulty of the task. It is often slow, discouraging, overwhelming. But when God calls us to preach, he calls us to love him with our minds. God deserves that kind of love and so do the people to whom we minister.
On a cold, gloomy morning a preacher worked on his sermon from breakfast until noon with little to show for his labor. Impatiently he laid down his pen and looked disconsolately out the window, feeling sorry for himself because his sermons came so slowly. Then there flashed into his mind an insight that had profound effect on his later ministry. “Your fellow Christians,” he thought, “will spend far more time on this sermon than you will. They come from a hundred homes. They travel hundreds of miles in the aggregate to be in the service. They will spend three hundred hours participating in the worship and listening to what you have to say. Don’t complain about the hours you are spending in preparation and the agony you experience. The people deserve all you can give them.”
DEFINITIONS
Complement—the answer to the question, “What exactly am I saying about what I’m talking about?”
Idea—a distillation of life that abstracts out of the particulars of experience what they have in common and relates them to one another.
Subject—the complete, definite answer to the question, “What am I talking about?”
Questions and activities for this chapter can be found in the student exercises section at the back of the book.
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1. Reuel L. Howe, Partners in Preaching: Clergy and Laity in Dialogue, 26.
2. William Norwood Brigance, Speech: Its Techniques and Disciplines in a Free Society, 35. See also the discussions of the central idea in Donald C. Bryant and Karl R. Wallace, Fundamentals of Public Speaking, 3rd ed., 146–48; Milton Dickens, Speech: Dynamic Communication, 58, 254–56, 267–71; Alma Johnson Sarett, Lew Sarett, and William Trufant Foster, Basic Principles of Speech, 215.
3. Lester Thonssen and A. Craig Baird, Speech Criticism: The Development of Standards for Rhetorical Appraisal, 393.
4. Donald G. Miller, The Way to Biblical Preaching, 53–55 (italics in original).
5. Alan M. Stibbs, Expounding God’s Word: Some Principles and Methods, 40.
6. H. Grady Davis, Design for Preaching, 20.
7. J. H. Jowett, The Preacher: His Life and Work, 133.
8. See, for example, Andrew W. Blackwood, Expository Preaching for Today: Case Studies of Bible Passages, 95; James W. Cox, A Guide to Biblical Preaching, 61; Faris D. Whitesell and Lloyd M. Perry, Variety in Your Preaching, 75; John Wood, The Preacher’s Workshop: Preparation for Expository Preaching, 32.
9. Donald R. Sunukjian, “Patterns for Preaching: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Sermons of Paul in Acts 13, 17, and 20,” 176.
10. H. Grady Davis, Design for Preaching, 27.