Listen Better - Part 7 of 7 - Apply the Sermon

Part 1 - Introduction
Part 6 - Revisit the Sermon

We have not come to the preaching merely to hear what we do not know, but to be incited to do our duty. ~ John Calvin

Leaving a sermon you should be motivated to love God more, hate sin more, help people more, and obey God’s Word more. This is why it is a poor sermon that puffs up the audience to think they have somehow reached the pinnacle of sanctification or that their community has all of its needs met. Many sermons will declare "Peace, peace!" when there is no peace, and in so doing will lull their hearers into a sense of security and comfort when no-such luxury exists in the world.

The sermon should always exalt Christ and humble men. It was to this effect that Benjamin Franklin wrote of the preaching of George Whitefield, “The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous…and how much they admired and respected him, notwithstanding his common abuse of them, by assuring them they were naturally ‘half beasts and half devils.’” Whitefield said of preaching, “It is a poor sermon that gives no offense, that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher.”

Therefore, this is one of the harder articles to write, I could sink to moralism to tell you how to respond in every case. But, dear reader, the point is not in the act, but in the impetus to respond to how you are convicted. Haddon Robinson went so far as to call a direct application heresy, because in telling a congregation exactly what to do, the preacher denies the work of the Holy Spirit. Robinson instead recommends something to the effect, “This is the principle, and the principle is clear. How this principle applies in our lives may differ with different people in different situations.”

One thing is clear and concrete: If you sit under the most wonderful preaching but fail to act on it, you will at once forget what you heard. James writes that, 

If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. ~ James 1:23-25

Charles Spurgeon, a man with a vocabulary that could make a dictionary blush for inadequacy, once gave the application thusly,

Dear reader, after you sit under the Word of God next, I implore you, do something with that sermon once you’ve heard it!