GOD IS IN THE HOUSE:
A fresh model for shaping a sermon
By John Woods
Langham Publishing. 226 pages. £14.99
ISBN 978 1 839 732 720
By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures (Prov. 24, 3-4).
In God is in the House: A Fresh Model for Shaping a Sermon, John Woods (training director of the School of Preachers Trust, chairman of the board of directors at the Latvian Biblical Centre, recently retired pastor, and Reviews Editor of this newspaper) has proposed a most hospitable model for sermon preparation and delivery. What he proposes is not a dogmatic system but a gently illuminating and compelling model.
Where guests are welcomed in
Biblical references to foundations, windows, doors, rooms and building pervade, and one is made to feel at home as one goes. While there are multiple suggestions and proposals made from the discipline of architecture, the idea is simple: a sermon, like the house in the proverb quoted above, might be made up of porch, connecting areas, and rooms into which a guest is invited, welcomed, and shown new light and perspectives. The model illuminates key evangelical priorities (hermeneutics, exegesis, etc.) rather than challenging them, and the breadth of Woods’ reading exemplifies the furnishing of the book – the book would be worth getting for the excellently chosen quotes alone.
Sample sermons are offered, and exercises are offered at the end of chapters.
Precious Father
Woods writes touchingly of not having had a father of his own and of how the fatherhood of God has been precious to him, and the grace of God is conspicuously seen throughout the text in the paternal voice with which he writes. The young preacher will find him patient, constructive – his suggestions having the wise, mature warmth of care – statements like: ‘Hearers tend to detect the phoney, secondhand and superficial use of cultural references.’
The implicit rebukes come as gentle warnings: ‘Do some of us love preaching more than we love the people to whom we are preaching?’
Preparing the preacher
When Dr Lloyd-Jones at last acceded to the request to teach on preaching, his lectures focused as much on the preparation of the preacher as on the preparation of sermons. The same emphasis is seen here: the preacher must be feeding on the word, must be eating the living bread.
In church history, the biographies, letters and journals of the preachers of earlier generations whose preaching can be demonstrated to have shone in, and even changed, history attest to this priority: just as Spurgeon could write that people come ‘to watch him burn’; and the fact that Whitefield would work through Scripture annually with Matthew Henry open can be seen in his sermons. But also in the crowds.
While these preachers spoke in times when there were horrifying inequalities, poverty and injustices, their sermons didn’t reflect the solutions that were being proposed by the world. They were feeding on and proclaiming the One whose gospel would attack root and thence branch of a sinful world. Listeners came not hear techniques and advice, but to hear Heaven’s ambassadors.
Dr Lloyd-Jones features repeatedly throughout this text, as does Dr Keller, whose preaching has influenced this generation in an equivalent way to his older, Welsh inspiration. While Lloyd-Jones himself was embarrassed later in life to find that young preachers were essentially impersonating him, Carl Trueman has observed that in our time (implicitly Keller’s) Christ-centred preaching has inspired a sort of Where’s Wally style of preaching, in which preachers are pulling Jesus out of magician’s-hat-sermons to the surprise and admiration of their congregations.
The point is that we can’t manufacture preachers. Moses’ bronze serpent becomes the idol Nehushtan, and manna breeds worms.
A wisely considered, graciously presented and well principled model, however, can be good seed on hungry soil.
The sermon isn’t explicitly described in Scripture as a house, and John Woods isn’t proposing that it is. This is a model which is being floated into the imagination of preachers which will help men, charged with the lonely and intensely demanding role of preaching God’s Word to his people, to be clear of their conception of what it is that they are doing and how they do it. It stands attractively, creatively, functionally, imaginatively and uniquely. Like a house.
