“…preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions…” - 2 Timothy 4:2-3 (ESV)

 The Purpose of Sermons

 Sermons are designed to be one of the most, if not the most, formative worldview influence on our lives. What do I mean? I mean that students listen to sermons once, typically twice, a week. It is a time when they hear the Scriptures, the Word of God, opened and explained directly to them as a group. In listening to a sermon, the students are not only hearing someone speak, but they are hearing someone bring to bear all that is good, right, and true from a passage onto the listeners’ lives.

Listening to a sermon is different from personal Bible reading because of its organized nature. If students only read their Bibles, there is the danger of not understanding—or worse, misunderstanding—what they read. This is common. There is also the fact that a typical time of Bible reading lasts between 5 minutes and an hour. A sermon is the product of a person’s extended study, meditation, prayer, and research. 

A sermon, or, I should say, an expository sermon, can be described as a kind of guided tour through Scripture. The preacher takes a text and says, “Look at this, and that, and this over here; see how it fits together? See what God is doing? Do you understand what this means for you?”

Of course, not every sermon is this way. Not every sermon is equal and not every preacher is equal. As small group leaders, one of the things we want to test is the students’ ability to listen to sermons. Do they know what they are doing? Do they know what a sermon is? Many students have heard such a wide array of sermons in terms of quality that they are likely to be uncertain. It is hard to discern up to what standard something should be when the examples are highly varied and unevenly critiqued.

Obviously, students should not expect sermons to be entertaining like a Netflix show or YouTube video. That is simply not what a sermon is intended to be. And small group leaders must take care that they do not communicate that.

One of the ways small group leaders communicate the wrong idea about a sermon is by asking if the students liked the sermon. This is the kind of question we can ask about a TV show or YouTube video, but it is not as helpful when it comes to sermons. 

How to Listen to Sermons

So how should students listen to sermons? We can take a big cue from the passage at the head of this article. The passage says that Timothy should reprove, rebuke, and exhort. In general, most sermons will have something of that in each passage. Obviously, students need to understand what reproof is—a conviction or exposure, whether of outright sin or deeper motivation. A rebuke is a warning or stern address, asking questions and challenging people in ways that God does. Exhortation is calling people to a certain end or action.

This set of instructions from Paul to Timothy helps us have an idea as leaders of what kind of questions we can ask the students. How were you reproved? How were you rebuked? How were you exhorted? Of course, we can always ask what the students learned, but students growing up in church and hearing another sermon are not likely to learn something new so much as to connect ideas they already knew in a new or different way. 

Asking questions like these about a sermon assumes that the sermon fundamentally was the kind of thing that Paul commanded Timothy to do. It indirectly works against the idea that a sermon is supposed to be entertaining or funny. It also makes the sermon about the students’ response to scripture rather than their opinion of the preacher. 

This is not to make the point that preachers can be lazy or should not be concerned about how they’re coming across. Preachers should care how long they preach, how well they hold people’s attention, how interesting their illustrations are, and how varied their pitch, tone, and volume are. However, for a preacher seeking to declare God‘s Word in obedience to the way Paul commanded Timothy, all of these are concerns of the preacher because they serve their specific end, which is to preach God’s Word. Their goal in preaching God’s Word is to reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with patience and teaching, so that listeners may be made complete and equipped for every good work, just like the preacher has been.

When leaders ask questions about how interesting the sermon was, how skilled the preacher was, how entertaining, short, or long, leaders are teaching students to listen to sermons with different goals than the ones that Paul commanded Timothy to have. And doing that, leaders are teaching students to critique the preacher rather than critically examine themselves. In other words, the way Paul commanded Timothy to preach helps us to understand the way we should listen.

The Impact of Sermons

I said at the beginning of this article that sermons are designed to be one of the most influential experiences of our lives. Our passage helps us to understand why. If I am listening to one or more sermons per week that are designed to reprove, rebuke, and exhort me, how can my life fail to change drastically over time? In preaching, the people of God are listening to a man of God preach the Word of God by the Spirit of God. It is a powerful thing. The sermons I have listened to have molded me, for better or worse. This is what they are supposed to do. My life has been altered little by little, point by point, passage by passage, sermon by sermon. When you multiply those little changes by thousands of sermons specifically intended by God to make you complete and equipped for every good work, it is difficult to think of anything more influential in shaping my life than the preaching of God’s word.

If preaching is so important and formative, then leaders do students a great service in helping them to understand how to listen to sermons. It is not always a great change. It may be a slight adjustment here, a reinforcement of an idea there, a reminder of a truth nearly forgotten, emphasis on a point often overlooked.  A block of wood is whittled into a work of art by many small strokes. It is typical for a sermon to represent just one or two more strokes. To check for this, leaders can learn to ask questions of students that are in line with the intended goals of preaching, like we read in 2 Timothy 4:2-3.