“These were more fair-minded … in that they received the word with all readiness…” [Acts 17:11]
Just think what our lives might be, if only we heard every sermon as the Bereans heard Paul’s sermons. If only we heard the Word so gladly and then considered it carefully, comparing it with the Holy Scripture as a whole — not only to verify its truthfulness, but to confirm its importance to us, the vital necessity of our faith and obedience in the face of the Word. If every sermon set us hard at work in some way seeking after God and his will in our lives.
Only you can take a sermon and make something genuinely holy and important out of it, and every sermon that is at all faithful to the Word of God has plenty in it for such a hearer as the Bereans were.
The Puritans used to stress the great importance of hearing sermons and the way in which the preached word ought to be heard. Here is Richard Baxter:
‘Make it your work with diligence to apply the word as you are hearing it…. Cast not all upon the minister, as those that will go no further than they are carried as by force…. You have work to do as well as the preacher, and should all the time be as busy as he…you must open your mouths, and digest it, for another cannot digest it for you…therefore be all the while at work, and abhor an idle heart in hearing, as well as an idle minister. …call up all when you come home in secret, and by meditation preach it over to yourselves. If it were coldly delivered by the preacher, do you…preach it more earnestly over to your own hearts….’
So what are the parts of the faithful hearing of sermons?
- Listen not to the preacher but to God in his Word.
- Seek not a “blessing” but the truth.
- Intend not only to hear but to obey.
- Pray as one hears and after.
- Do not keep what you hear to yourself.
– Robert Rayburn