As men and women created in the image of God, believers are designed to become like Christ in ever-increasing measure. Effective, biblical preaching taps into this innate longing by helping people envision what God created us to be in Christ. This is the definition of visionary preaching.
Visionary preaching is not content merely to instruct people in the ways of God, or to confront the sin in their lives and the world, or to exhort believers to do better and try harder. Visionary preaching empowers people to pursue God's better future by painting a vivid and compelling picture of that future with words, images, and stories.
Consider one of the pastor's most daunting but essential topics—tithing. Some preachers will explain the Old Testament foundations of tithing and offer some grace-based principles for giving drawn from the New Testament. They assume that once people understand God's expectations they will conscientiously adjust their giving habits. Other preachers will take a more prophetic stance by summoning the words and spirit of Malachi to confront the materialism of our culture and warn believers not to "rob God."
But both of these approaches, the informative and the prophetic, fail to understand how people grow.
Willow Creek's popular REVEAL survey provides us with insights into how and why people grow spiritually. Those identified as "spiritually stalled" in the survey overwhelmingly said the reason was their failure to make spiritual growth a priority in their lives. In other words, the problem isn't that they don't know how to grow, but that they simply don't want to grow. It is not important enough to be a priority.
Unfortunately, most sermons, like the tithing examples above, fail to address the want-to factor in people's lives. They focus instead on what Dallas Willard calls "sin management"—teaching people how to grow, exhorting people to grow more, and warning people what will happen if they don't grow. The problem with such preaching is that it causes listeners to fixate on their fallenness and failures, establishing a self-fulfilling prophecy that often leads to more and deeper failure.
Yes, our fallen nature and sinful tendencies need to be exposed and addressed. The harsh realities and inevitable disappointments of life should not be glossed over by Pollyanna preaching. But when people are presented a compelling vision of what their lives can look like under the rule of God, they will be inspired to pursue that better future.
When addressing tithing, for example, the visionary preacher will help people imagine the numbers and kinds of people who will be served with a generous missions offering or sacrificial giving to a building project. She will describe, with vivid words and images, the joy and contentment of a life free from the love of money. Well-told stories will illustrate the blessings of tithing and help listeners believe that such generosity and blessing is within their reach. Why settle for miserly giving when the future is so bright and promising for those who are generous?
Other sermons focus on why people "have to" give; a visionary sermon focuses on helping people "want to" give.
Early in my preaching ministry, a motivational psychologist in the congregation presented me with a challenge: preach an entire sermon without using the words, should, ought, or must. I accepted the challenge but was surprised by how difficult it was. I saw how dependent my preaching was on those words. I was equally surprised by how refreshing it proved to be. It forced me to leverage visionary elements in the biblical text, which were far more prevalent than I had realized.
My messages took on an invitational quality that was more engaging, more compelling. Defenses came down. People were more eager to embrace the ideas I was communicating, and the responses seemed deeper and more genuine. I repeated the experiment the next Sunday and never looked back.
When we speak to people's intrinsic motivation and God-given longings, we don't need to "should" and "ought" them into obedience. I've found it's a lot more fun, and a lot more effective, to invite people to become the men and women they were created to be—and deep in their hearts, have always wanted to be.
Bryan Wilkerson is the senior pastor of Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts.
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