Sermons which convict, compel, inspire, and challenge God’s people find their center in God. To preach God-centered sermons, look first for the “vision of God.” I discussed this in my previous post. Once you identify the aspect of God’s character which serves as the focal point of the text, then observe the “depravity factor.” Haddon Robinson refers to this as the “human factor,” while Bryan Chapell calls it the “fallen-condition focus” (FCF). Robinson explains this concept in his second edition of Biblical Preaching:
"This human factor is the condition that men and women have in common with the characters in the Bible [or, I would add, with the original audience]. The human factor may show up in sins such as rebellion, unbelief, adultery, greed, laziness, selfishness, or gossip. It may also show up in people puzzling about the human condition as a result of sickness, grief, anxiety, doubt, trials, or the sense that God has misplaced their names and addresses. It is this human factor that usually prompted the prophets and apostles to speak or write what they did (pp. 94-95).
I prefer to call this the “depravity factor” since it reflects our fallenness rather than our humanity. Bryan Chapell defines it as “the mutual condition that contemporary believers share with those to or for whom the text was written that requires the grace of the passage.”
For example, if the vision of God in the book of Esther is God’s sovereignty, the depravity factor or fallen condition focus is our tendency to look at the difficulties we face in life and conclude that God is not in control. When we preach the passage, then, we show how a vision of God’s sovereignty helps us cope with the uncertainty and despair in our circumstances.
Identifying the “depravity factor” will help us keep our sermons from being so "God-centered" they're impossible to relate to or to apply. Rob cautioned us about this problem in a comment to my previous post.
By all means, preach from the two-line aphorisms in Proverbs and from the “imperative” sections of New Testament epistles. But tie individual proverbs or collections of them to the vision of God in Proverbs. He is the infinitely wise Creator who built pattern and order into the created world. The human factor is our tendency to rebel against or ignore the skill of living according to these patterns. If you are preaching from Ephesians 4, be sure to tie the “imperatives” in this chapter to the “indicatives” in Ephesians 1-3. Each imperative will be grounded in some aspect of God’s character or in what God has done for His people through Christ.
Posted by Steve Mathewson at 8:38 AM on September 4, 2007
