Category Archives: Church and Ministry

Jesus’ Colorful Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15

The last Discernology post called into question the modern trend in preaching to emphasize one main point or proposition in a sermon (commonly called the “Big Idea”). [1] We challenged the notion that this is appropriate for every sermon. Even if a passage of Scripture intends to communicate a primary point, constructing a message solely around one main idea without surfacing other colors and nuances of the text may leave the hearers substantially undernourished.

Bible practitioners and scholars alike have long treated the parables of Jesus as stories which culminate in a central claim or principle. For the most part, they are right. Ironically, that is precisely why the parables make excellent candidates for challenging the Big Idea approach to preaching.

Parable of the Prodigal Son

Consider one of Jesus’ most famous parables found in Luke 15:11-32: The Parable of the Prodigal Son. Jesus has been teaching his disciples in the Gospel of Luke using striking imagery—imagery which also serves to chastise the Pharisees for mismanaging their role as spiritual leaders of the Jewish people. It is critical not to overlook what Jesus is doing here – he is indirectly confronting the Pharisees (represented by the older brother) for their attitude toward lost sinners and their own undetected spiritual estrangement from God the Father.

Historically, a lot of preachers have missed the Pharisee-centered aspect of the parable, choosing instead to highlight the prodigal son’s sin, repentance, and return to his benevolent father. It isn’t hard to see why: in most cases, people can relate more naturally with the prodigal son than with the older brother. But preachers eventually realized that the older brother was often ignored, so today’s trend is to criticize preachers who don’t center their sermons around Jesus’ apparent main target—the religious leaders.

Surely preachers should address the older brother and relate him to their hearers. For this particular parable, I would say that a sermon should culminate in a challenge to “religious people” who may not see their own spiritual poverty and wrong attitudes toward others who have not been redeemed by Christ. But here is a key question: How can we retain emphasis on the older brother while doing justice to the intricate, powerful elements of the parable in its context?

Exposing the Colors in Luke’s Gospel

To put the question another way, how do we expose all of the colors present in the kaleidoscope which is the Parable of the Prodigal Son? The first step is to consider all that Luke has written to this point in his gospel. For example, more than any other gospel writer, Luke has emphasized God’s love and outreach to the downtrodden and to sinners without God in their life. If you were reading Luke 15 for the first time, you would undoubtedly think about the previous 14 chapters which show the constant compassion of Jesus through healing, acts of generosity, exorcisms, and forgiveness. The immediate context, Luke 15:1-10, reveals God’s compassion for lost sinners and his joy when they repent.

So even if Jesus’ primary intention in the Parable of the Prodigal Son is to highlight the Pharisees’ misguided attitudes, our appreciation for Jesus’ teaching arises from all the other truths that have brought us to this point in the text.

Colors of the Prodigal Parable

The Parable itself vividly expands on these prior truths in Luke. As such, it is hard to imagine covering Luke 15:11-32 without highlighting the profoundly moving elements of the narrative and challenging hearers to take a deep look at themselves in light of realities such as the following:

The prodigal son’s hurtful rejection of a Father who provided everything for him. He even had the nerve to ask for his father’s blessing to sever their relationship. (How could any of us reject such a good God?)
The attractive but abusive force of this world upon those separated from the Father. (How could this fallen world not enslave? Why would we possibly think we could escape its harm?)
The prodigal’s conviction that he could still humbly return to his Father and believe he would be accepted. (Do you believe God would accept you, no matter how severely you’ve rejected God?)
The instinctive, explosive celebration of the Father at the prodigal’s return. (Do we really believe we have a Father who is that good? Does he love us and other lost sinners that much?).

The above elements alone ought to move any hearer before they come to the older son’s shocking, inexplicable, indignant response to his brother’s return (15:29-30). Given all that Luke has written to this point, it is unthinkable that the second son would have such a stubborn and unforgiving attitude. Did you notice that the parable is open-ended? We don’t know whether the older son is going to accept his Father’s instruction, recognize the Father’s goodness, love his younger brother, and repent of his hardheartedness. (Will we?)

The four points above highlight some of the critical “colors” of the whole passage. The Big Idea of the Parable of the Prodigal Son would be a dud if Jesus had not told the whole story and included this rich picture of who God is—and who we are. In order to repent, both the older and younger sons must recognize sin’s scheming, seductive nature and be won over by the Father’s extreme love. So even if the Big Idea revolves around the older son, the powerful “mini-sermons” within the passage leading up to the Big Idea are just as vital and they are what turn hearts to God in the end.

“Retweeting” Kuruvilla

I thought I’d wrap up this article with some of the most stimulating quotes found in Kuruvilla’s “Time to Kill the Big Idea”:

“To convert the text into a Big Idea is surely going to entail significant loss of its details, meaning, power, and pathos, thereby deflating the thrust/force of that text . . . equivalent to a photo of a person, or the theme of a musical work, or the summary score of a ball game that can never substitute for the real thing.” (832)

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word to say what its meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.” (836, quoting Flannery O’Conner)

“A contemporary preacher ‘seems like a second-rate lawyer arguing a case.” (837)

“The preacher is the curator . . . preachers are to let their listeners encounter and experience the text as they themselves did when they were studying.” (842)

“The preacher is to be co-explorer of the text with the flock, not chief explainer of the text to the flock.” (843)

“The doing of the authors ought to be the interpretive goal of preachers—the discernment of the text’s thrust/force . . . without which there can be no application.” (838)

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[1] The article was inspired by Abraham Kuruvilla, “Time to Kill the Big Idea? A Fresh Look at Preaching,” JETS 61, no. 4 (2019): 825-46.

Preaching the Big Idea with Music and Underwear

“Don’t show your underwear.” That’s what one pastor-professor said when I sat in on a preaching workshop during my seminary years. What did he mean? “Underwear” refers to the fine details of the text and the laborious process the preacher engaged in to understand them. He was concerned that preachers may distract people from the Big Idea if they reveal all of their hard work behind the scenes to study the passage.

He advised us to address the exegetical elements of the biblical text only when necessary. Preachers must do the digging for themselves to discover the passage’s Big Idea and then build the sermon rigorously around it. He confidently proposed that preachers should prepare the hearers for the Big Idea with a careful introduction, support it with 2-4 complementary points, and write a conclusion that repeats and applies it. This is likely the dominant approach employed by most seminary-educated preachers today.

Who Taught Preachers to Hide Their Underwear?

The Big Idea approach was stimulated by a book that still remains a primary preaching course text in many seminaries: Biblical Preaching by Haddon Robinson. [1] Robinson taught that every Bible passage contains essentially one main point—a Big Idea which every interpreter ought to discover and stress in the message. The preacher, Robinson insisted, should toil to construct a single succinct sentence that clearly and cleverly states this Big Idea. The preacher should then construct the entire sermon to support this sentence and use it to drive the hearers’ personal and community application of the passage. Robinson’s ideas sound logical, and they are not altogether wrong. However . . .

A Message That’s Musical

For years, I’ve sensed the Big Idea approach was lacking something, even though I have largely followed it and seen others do so through much of my life. I was delighted to read an article in the latest Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society titled, “Time to Kill the Big Idea? A Fresh Look at Preaching.” In this article, Abraham Kuruvilla says that the Big Idea approach is a wrongful “distilling” of the Bible text down to what appear to be its essential elements. [2] This distilling often robs the hearers of essential elements in the text and causes us to pass over nuances that give a passage its punch.

Wouldn’t such “distilling” reduce the impact God intended for any given passage of Scripture? Wouldn’t it “result in significant loss of textual meaning, emotion, power, and pathos?” [3] Over the course of time, wouldn’t this method leave the hearers malnourished at best and impoverished at worst?

To illustrate his concerns, Kuruvilla compares the Big Idea approach to stripping the notes out of a musical masterpiece. Music theorists have demonstrated that most notes in a song can be left out of a tune and it will remain recognizable. Kuruvilla analyzed “Over the Rainbow” with this technique and came up with a few measures like the following:

If only the circled notes above were played, one would distinguish the tune “Over the Rainbow.” The problem is, this technique reduces the masterpiece down to something that the songwriter never intended, even if it still sounds nice or recognizable. A true artist would likely feel insulted by such reduction! If people only ever heard the distilled rendition of “Over the Rainbow,” it probably would never have been well-liked or become the influential classic that it is. Kuruvilla views sermons in much the same way:

Sermons should be faithful to the full range of a text’s power, and those preachers who carry away only main ideas … are traveling too light. [4]

The Master Musician

The Bible was inspired by a Master Musician, so often there truly are multiple threads of meaning, purpose, and punch in a single passage of Scripture. Sometimes a series of passages function like an ensemble of instruments, each adding their tones and tinges to the thrust of a book or section of Scripture. Hearers will be better nourished if preachers give every “instrument” God placed within a text its place in forming the overall song.

What does this mean in practical terms for the preacher? First, none of this suggests that readers/hearers should read into the Bible what they wish to see. The motive is to appreciate the complexity that God built into his Word. That means preachers have to show their underwear—at least some of it! They shouldn’t hoard the nuances of the text for themselves and give the hearers a mere summary of extracted principles. They must expose the hearers to the masterpiece that moved them to deep knowledge and reflection during private study and preparation.

Recovering from the Big Idea Syndrome

The world is presently bombarded with mind-numbing technology and oversimplifications. Everything is being done in the name of simplicity, efficiency, and ease of success. Christians should strive to recover depth of thought and reflection. Few books other than the Bible can induce such intense reflection on self, society, and spiritual realities. We should abandon the Big Idea approach if it means following these misguided patterns of the modern world. Instead of “stripping out” the details of a passage in order to get quickly to what supposedly matters, we should insist that all of it matters and all of it is worthy of our time and undivided attention.

Following the flow of the passage and its sophisticated signals may distract some hearers, but we are dealing with more than just hearers. Christians, aren’t we handling the precious Word of God? If God intentionally and artfully shaped his message with specific linguistic features, shouldn’t we expose them for our hearers? This can be done in a way that captures the imagination and interest of the hearer. Preachers need to figure out how to do so.

Must We Abandon the Big Idea?

We should abandon the Big Idea approach if it prevents us from treating Scripture as the divine masterpiece that it is. But contrary to Kuruvilla’s insinuation, we need not kill the Big Idea altogether. Many passages do build up to a single, prevailing point that should receive emphasis. What stands out in Kuruvilla’s analysis is the danger of allowing the main idea to control every step of sermon preparation. Surely those of us who preach must do a better job of illuminating all the colors of God’s Word when we preach or teach.

The next article will examine a Bible story that generates strong feelings (and sometimes controversy) due to the tension between the Big Idea and the details in the passage. I will also “retweet” some of Kuruvilla’s most stimulating quotes from “Time to Kill the Big Idea?”

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[1] Haddon W. Robinson, Biblical Preaching (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1980).

[2] Abraham Kuruvilla, “Time to Kill the Big Idea? A Fresh Look at Preaching,” JETS 61, no. 4 (2019): 825-46. Kuruvilla begins his article by developing the history of the Big Idea. His research reveals a surprising list of notable Christian preachers and authors who subscribe to the Big Idea approach (825-828).

[3] Kuruvilla, 841.

[4] Kuruvilla, 836, quoting Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching, 3^rd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2016) 116.

9 Marks of a Healthy Church – by Mark Dever

Christian communities are far from perfect, so most of us have a story or two about an unhealthy church situation. So how does a church become healthy and stay that way? 9 Marks of a Healthy Church offers far more than the latest band-aids. Mark Dever has presented indispensable correctives to contemporary church polity and practice. The book promotes fundamental principles to guide church practices in any age. I hope this review will inspire you to add it to your library or get one of its related resources. [1]

Faithful to History, Accessible, and Widely-Applicable

Dever’s familiarity with the subject of church health surfaces through his frequent citations of historical and modern resources. [2] The book is quite readable overall and suitable for church leaders and regular attenders. Some sections are a bit wordy, and Dever periodically includes more examples than necessary to prove his points. That said, 9Marks has developed a brief booklet and other smaller resources which condense the material for those seeking just the main thrust of each “mark.”

As many have noted, 9 Marks of a Healthy Church is written from a Baptist perspective. However, contrary to certain unreasonably prejudiced online reviews, informed Christian readers will heartily agree with the book’s main tenets, regardless of denominational affiliation. Anyone wishing to promote spiritual health and biblical faithfulness in their local church setting will resonate with most of the details Dever presents.

Valuable Chapters in 9 Marks of a Healthy Church

A few of the chapters are worth the cost of the book and deserve special consideration. Chapter 1 (Expositional Preaching) addresses the form and content of preaching. The necessity of expositional (or expository) preaching continues to be a hot topic in Christian circles, and Dever nicely exposes its indispensable worth. In a nutshell, expository preaching emphasizes a single passage in its historical, grammatical, and literary context. The preacher demonstrates careful interpretation of the text to the hearers, draws appropriate conclusions, and suggests pertinent modern applications. Typically, a preacher will move through a whole book or section of Scripture and deal with each passage as a series of messages.

Devers argues that expository preaching serves as an essential control upon abuse of authority and misuse of the Scriptures. He confidently proclaims its value for the spiritual maturation of a church: “Let a good expositional ministry be established and watch what happens. Forget what the experts say. Watch hungry people have their lives transformed as the living God speaks to them through the power of His Word” (54).

Chapter 9 (Biblical Church Leadership) explains the precedent in Scripture for elder-directed church communities within a congregationalist framework. Most people think of ecclesiastical structure as predetermined, biblically-mandated, and static for every church community. However, Dever is not necessarily advocating for a single rigid system of church government. He emphasizes the processes needed to gradually make thoughtful adjustments to church structure. Dever encourages that specific expressions of leadership be cultivated as a church body develops and matures. For these reasons, this chapter contains valuable applications for most church denominations.

Chapter 7 (Biblical Church Discipline) may seem offensive to an individualistic, consumerist Western culture, where authority and imposed consequences are often considered an infringement upon freedom. Yet while society clamors for churches to exercise less authority in the lives of their members, it simultaneously decries the hypocrisy of Christians that do not live according to their own stated belief in the Bible. That is exactly why Jesus and the apostles take the purity of the church so seriously and prescribe steps to ensure it.

Furthermore, contrary to popular opinion, church discipline is not punitive—the goal is always to restore members to healthy relationships with God, church members, and the community. Dever pleas for the resolute recovery of church discipline done out of love for straying members. For these reasons and others, I recommend 9 Marks of a Healthy Church to anyone who seriously longs for positive transformation in their church.

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[1] My comments in this review are based upon the New Expanded Edition. Though the book is a bit dated, I have reviewed it to encourage people who may never have read it to do so.

[2] I found Appendix 2 to be an extremely useful survey of the main marks of a healthy church as presented in a host of other published works since the mid-1980s.