Effective Sermon Application: Balancing Head, Heart, and Hands

If you’ve been tagging along with the blog for the past week you will have deduced from my posts that I’ve been doing some thinking lately on preaching. Don’t worry, this is the last post on preaching for a little while at least. One of the aspects of preaching that I’ve been contemplating a lot recently is application. How do we rightly apply a Bible text? How exactly can a preacher helpfully apply a text to the life of a church (full of individual believers in their own circumstances)?

There are two extremes when it comes to sermon application – the first extreme comes from the camp who say that the Bible does not need to be applied and people just need pure exegesis. The issue with that approach is that preaching is much more than an offload of information to the listeners. Good preaching requires solid exegesis, absolutely, but it also needs to be more than conveying truths. Good preaching should draw out the points of a passage and plant them into the lives of believers so that they are in awe of God and the gospel and have a greater desire to live for God, our of thanks to Christ and through the enabling of the Holy Spirit. The second extreme is the tendency to focus more on application than on the actual text which means that every Bible passage becomes about ‘little old me’. Personally, I would say that both of these extremes are wrong and have dangers of their own. Sermon application, or the application of the Bible in any circumstance, shouldn’t become a to-do list, a list of tasks to check off in order for ‘God’s plan to be fulfilled in your life’, but it also shouldn’t be so generic that you’re not moved to live out the biblical truths you’ve been listening to or considering.

Generally speaking I would say that there are three kinds of applications

1. Head – application that informs your mind, gives you a greater understanding of the Word of God and helps you see how the whole Bible story fits together. ‘Head applications’ are those that tell us what to believe (derived from Scripture and not of man’s intuition) and how to be influenced in our worldview, our thinking, our approach to concepts, ideas and philosophies by God’s Word rather than by the world. Think of the early church and how this played out in their lives in Acts 2:42 “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (ESV). The early church was a mixed bag of people from different backgrounds (religious and otherwise), but they were a learning church. They wanted to learn, they wanted to grow, they were babies or infants in the faith who needed to be taught. The early church sat at the Apostles feet and wanted to learn all that Jesus had taught them, they wanted instruction of what it means to live in this new community, the Kingdom of Jesus and they needed to be taught.
   
   
2. Heart – application that sets the heart ablaze for God, or as Jonathan Edwards might say, sermon applications that rouse your religious affections for God and cause you to love him more and hate the things of this world more. I find it devastating when I listen to a preacher who is expounding a text and speaking of absolutely mind-boggling glorious truths, but he’s doing it without an ounce of passion or conviction and without an invitation to have your heart warmed to the God who has done and does amazing things for his people.
   
   
3. Hands – application that is practical and might even leave you with a task or two to go into the week and live out the truths of the text you’ve been considering. Practical applications help the listener understand how the Bible text should impact their lives and their actions, not necessarily just for that coming week, until Christ returns. You could say that these kind of applications are the ‘do’s and don’ts’ of a biblical text that a preacher can draw out, which in turn will help listeners to know how to practically apply the Bible to their own lives on a daily basis.

But how exactly do you come to the application and how do you effectively apply it to the lives of the Lord’s people? Well here are some principles that I have found helpful over the years.

• Good exegesis will lead to good application. Do not try to force in an application that is not there in the text, but let the text do the work. You’re hard work of studying and praying will enable you to see how the passage should impact your life and the lives of the listeners (head, heart and hands).
  
  
• Apply the Bible to the people in the room! I have often heard preachers apply the Bible and automatically cut off half of the congregation because the application was too specific or too over their heads that they didn’t know where to begin. As you prepare, think of the people in the pews and apply what the biblical truth should look like in their lives. A preacher should know the flock he is preaching too and rightly be able to divide the Word of God and apply it to their lives out of a genuine interest and understanding of their circumstances.
  
  
• Don’t give people a to-do list. Nobody wants to walk away from a sermon with a check list of things to do in order to ‘be a good Christian’. The gospel doesn’t require a to-do list, so neither should our sermon applications. There can be times where it’s helpful to give people tasks to do in order to grow in their love for each other or their love for the Word – for example, for people to turn and pray with their neighbour in the pew after the service, or to read a related Bible passage at home that clarifies an application point, etc. Application that leaves people with a to-do list could lead people into moralism, which is counter the gospel of Jesus Christ.
  
  
• Don’t be too generic. If the last point was don’t be too specific, then this one is the opposite – don’t be so general in your application of the Bible text that people leave scratching their heads and unsure what they were even listening to or encouraged to do and consider. Even if the application and purpose of a Bible text is for you to grow in your awe and majesty of Jesus, don’t just leave it at that, but help the listener understand what that might practically look like in their lives. in other words, put some meat on the bones.
  
  
• Make your application Jesus-centred. A preacher should help his listeners see how the application of a text in their lives should point them to Jesus and to the glories of the gospel. Sermon applications shouldn’t make the listener focus on themselves, but focus on Jesus, focus on becoming more like Jesus (which the Holy Spirit does in us) and focus on living obediently to Jesus. As Robert Murray McCheyne wrote “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Jer. 17:9. Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief! Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in his beams. Feel his all-seeing eye settled on you in love, and repose in his almighty arms… Let your soul be filled with a heart-ravishing sense of the sweetness and excellency of Christ and all that is in Him. Let the Holy Spirit fill every chamber of your heart; and so there will be no room for folly, or the world, or Satan, or the flesh.“
  
  

I hope that these principles on the use of application in sermons will help you to apply the Bible without a to-do list and will give you, and the entire congregation, a deeper desire to live out the Bible’s truths and teachings with obedience and passion for the glory of God.

There is plenty more that could be said, there always is, but for the sake of time I will stop there. However, I am interested, what principles of sermon applications would you add?