Have you ever met a Free Grace person who was utterly without grace in practice? (Was it me?)

I think we’ve all seen that there can be a serious gap between knowing grace as a doctrine and showing grace to others, so how can we bridge the gap in all areas of our lives?

One book that has helped me is Paul Zahl’s Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life, which suggests ways in which grace can be shown in different areas of life. One such area is in the pulpit.

You might think that being Free Grace would make it easy to show grace in the pulpit, but it’s harder than you think. According to Zahl, here’s the fundamental problem with the modern pulpit:

“You hear the law and not the gospel. What you hear, if you distill the many words, is always the same: Here is what you should do, you are not doing it, so get out there and try harder” (Zahl, Grace in Practice, p. 232).

How many sermons have you heard like that, even from grace preachers? How many sermons like that have you preached? Mea culpa! Even grace pastors can fall into the trap of preaching moralistic sermons.

So, what’s the alternative? How can a preacher embody grace in the pulpit?

Here are five pointers from Zahl’s book.

1. Have a personal history of grace. You need to have experienced grace to preach it effectively to others. A minister should know his sins and how much he needed and continues to need the grace of God. If he only knows performancism and legalism, he’ll preach law to the people and become resentful when they inevitably fail to obey. “Grace has to be the core of preachers’ own story in order for their sermons to carry any impact,” Zahl explains. “If this is not so, they will preach law and exhort. Then they will become angry at their own dispirited and paralyzed listeners. Ministers who start to despite their own congregations—and many do—do so because ‘their’ people are not doing what the minister is telling them to do” (p. 233).

2. Show humor. “Humor is a vital part of the theology of the cross,” Zahl claims (p. 234). In what way? Prideful people will not listen to a grace message, especially if it comes from a prideful preacher. Humor helps change that dynamic. “Humor in the pulpit says the preacher takes his own role with a grain of salt” (p. 234). Self-deprecating humor shows the preacher is “a fool and martinet and narcissist like everybody else.” A preacher who can laugh at himself shows he needs grace as much as anyone. He needs humor for his humility. And it also helps to lower the walls of denial that people bring in with them (p. 234). Getting people to laugh helps them lower their defenses and hear the word of grace. Hence, “Humor is part of the ‘heavy lifting’ of preaching” (p. 235).

3. Distinguish between law and gospel. Law is important and has its place, but it’s not the gospel. If a preacher doesn’t know the difference between the two, he will never be able to preach the gospel clearly. All his messages, especially those supposed to be about the gospel, will end up being about the law.

4. Be brief. “Another sine qua non of grace in the pulpit is brevity,” Zahl claims. Why? Once again, it relates to humility. “The reason most sermons are too long is that they are exercises in narcissism on the part of the preacher” (p. 236). As a former seminary Dean, Zahl saw this often. Based on his experience, the real reason preachers like long sermons is due to a desire for “self-expression” and for being “the star of the show” (p. 237). Instead of coming prepared with a focus message, the narcissistic preacher thinks so highly of his own thoughts that he will ramble on, giving free rein to his need for self-expression. By contrast, Zahl recommends a sermon be no more than twenty minutes long, making sure the message is focused, with plenty of humor and illustrations to connect with the audience. The grace preacher humbly recognizes his limitations, knows his narcissistic heart, and wants Jesus to be the focus. So, his sermons are brief and focus on God’s grace in Christ.

5. Don’t be expository. This next point will be controversial to Free Grace readers, but let’s hear Zahl out. According to Zahl, an expository approach to preaching assumes two things: first, that each verse of the Bible is of “equal weight and value.” And second, preaching word for word will have a cumulative effect on the listener: “The idea is that detailed treatment of every single verse, which checks the verse against all other parallel or comparable verses of the Bible and tries to get the meaning right using cross-comparison, will carry incremental power that transforms” (p. 238). In Zahl’s experience, very few preachers can do expository preaching well. “Most of the time, the effect is dry” (p. 238). What’s the alternative? Scripture requires interpretation, he says. Think of how Philip interpreted Isaiah for the Ethiopian eunuch, pointing him to Christ in the text. In keeping with his previous distinction between law and gospel, Zahl sees those two big themes from Genesis to Revelation. The law dismantles and deconstructs sinners, while grace lifts us up with God’s “one-way love.” For Zahl, preaching means interpreting how law and grace appear in the text. “This dialogue between two words, the second of which is always superior and conclusive, is almost omnipresent in the Bible. But it requires interpretation” (p. 239). The grace preacher should know how law and gospel do different things to the hearers: “Grace in the pulpit will absolve and strengthen the drooping spirit. Law in the pulpit will depress the already depressed and send them along their way within nothing but the unconscious resolution not to return” (p. 239). Expository preaching can miss that.

To understand Zahl’s point, imagine an expository preacher going through the Exodus story. Among other things, those verses contain inspired geographical information that gives us clues about Israel's route from Egypt to Canaan. Since an expository preacher believes every word in the text is equally important, he could potentially spend several hours’ worth of sermons explaining the Biblical geography of the Exodus route and assume that the cumulative effect of studying that subject will help the congregation. Zahl is saying that kind of preaching is actually quite dry and ineffective, and few preachers can pull it off. The information about geography is simply not as important as showing the congregation how law and grace operate in the story. So the grace preacher will interpret the Exodus passages for the hearers, showing how the law theme exposes our sins and how the grace theme of God’s “one-way love” redeems us. Zahl thinks that kind of preaching is truly transformative.

In sum, how can grace preachers show grace in the pulpit? I have presented five ideas from Zahl’s book. You may not agree with them all, but I think they’re all worth considering. If you disagree, write to let me know, or comment below.

After decades of preaching grace and showing grace, Zahl could say: “Grace in the pulpit, aided by grace in pastoral care and grace in prayer, is the secret of church growth” (p. 239). Free Grace churches certainly need that!

Send your questions or comments to shawn@freegrace.in.

Read his latest book, The Five Points of Free Grace for free, or buy it on Amazon.