I Got A TED Talk, Not A Sermon

“They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” – Nehemiah 8:8

A man told me recently that he had stopped going to his church. Not over doctrine or anything scandalous, and not over some falling out. “I go on Sunday,” he said, “and I get a TED talk. A good one, sometimes. But it’s definitely not a sermon.”

I knew what he meant before he even finished the sentence.

There is a kind of “preaching”, so-called, that has learned all the moves of the motivational stage. A performance only, feel-good conversational speech with an audience, not a congregation hearing the unction of the Holy Spirit speaking through God’s appointed man to speak His truth. The pacing, the practiced pause, the personal story that lands just so, the single verse thrown up on the screen like a sponsor’s logo. The text appears, gets read, and is never heard from again. Everything that follows could have been said by a life coach with a Bible app. No Gospel, no mention of the wrath of God, of judgement to come. Maybe, sometimes maybe, you’ll hear the word sin, but it’s never dealt with other than a quick mention and a sweeping of it under the proverbial rug. In the meantime, those lost souls in the audience leave without Biblical truth that, with the Spirit’s moving, would save their souls. If they were to die tonight, many would be on their way to Hell, and their blood is on the head of the preacher-boy trying to make a name for himself and keep everyone happy.

Nehemiah watched something different happen, and he wrote down how it worked.

They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading. (Nehemiah 8:8)

Read that again, slowly.

They read from the book. The book came first, and the book was the point. They did not read from it in order to get to something better. The reading was not a runway for takeoff to some other destination.

Clearly. They did not mumble it or rush it or treat it as throat-clearing before the real talk began. They gave it weight. It had a gravitas, a seriousness, as it should. A people who had come up out of exile, who had not heard the Law read in their own assembly for a long time, stood from morning until midday and listened. Nobody stands for half a day for a performance.

They gave the sense. Here is the work of expository preaching, in a nutshell. To give the sense. Not to give a sense, your own clever, entertaining sense, the one you brought in the door and went looking for a verse to hang it on. No, no. The sense of the text. What did God mean by these words? The preacher stands between the open book and the listening people, and his one task is to make the meaning of that book land in those hearts.

So that the people understood. The aim is understanding, and understanding leads somewhere. The chapter does not end with the reading. It ends with weeping, then with feasting, then with obedience. But all of it came up out of the text. The response was the fruit of the meaning, not a mood worked up by a skilled speaker who never really opened the book at all.

Here is the difference, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. A text that is preached governs everything that is said about it. The sermon is bound to it, answerable to it, unable to wander off without being caught. You could hold the open Bible in one hand and the sermon in the other and check the one against the other.

A text that is used as a springboard does the opposite. It launches the speaker and then disappears underneath him. The verse grants permission, lends a little borrowed authority, and the man is off to wherever he was always going to go in the first place before he ever arrived at the church house. Five steps to a better marriage. Three keys to your breakthrough. The Bible beneath it is interchangeable. Swap in a different verse, and you could give the very same talk.

Test it this way. Take away the screen, the story, and the speaker’s jokes, and ask yourself what is left standing of any value. If what remains is the meaning of the Word of God pressed into the heart and conscience, you heard a sermon. If what remains is a warm feeling already fading by the time you reach the parking lot, you got a fruitless TED talk.

I am not against a good illustration. Watson reached for them. Spurgeon was a master of them. But the butter mold serves the butter. The story serves the text. The moment the illustration takes the wheel and the Scripture is riding in the back seat, something has gone wrong that no amount of polished slick-talk will fix.

The men and women who gathered at the Water Gate did not need a better speaker. They needed the book opened and explained. So do we. The hunger that empties pews is not a hunger for performance. People can find performance anywhere, and most of it is better produced than ours will ever be. They are starving for the sense of the book. Give them that!

They read from the book and gave the sense. It was that simple. Lord, let those under-shepherds in care of the souls of people do the same.