Barnes in Common

the magazine of Churches Together in Barnes
July/August 2005

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How to listen to a sermon

Suggestions for getting the most
out of what the preacher says

An excerpt from Sermon 28 The works
of the Reverend George Whitefield

Jesus said, "Therefore consider how carefully you listen." Luke 8:18

Here are some cautions and directions, in order to help you hear sermons with profit and advantage.

1. Come to hear them, not out of curiosity, but from a sincere desire to know and do your duty.
To enter His house merely to have our ears entertained, and not our hearts reformed, must certainly be highly displeasing to the Most High God, as well as unprofitable to ourselves.

2. Give diligent heed to the things that are spoken from the word of God.
If an earthly king were to issue out a royal proclamation, and the life or death of his subjects entirely depended on performing or not performing its conditions, how solicitous would they be to hear what those conditions were!

3. Do not entertain even the least prejudice against the minister.
For even if a preacher could speak with the tongue of men and angels, if his audience were prejudiced against him, he would be but as a sounding brass or tinkling cymbal (see 1 Corinthians 13:1). That was the reason why Jesus Himself … could not do many mighty works, nor preach to any great effect among those of His own country; for they were offended at Him.

4. As you ought not to be prejudiced against, so you should be careful not to depend too much on a preacher, or think more highly of him than you ought to think.
For though this be an extreme that people seldom run into, preferring one teacher over another has often been of ill consequence to the Church of God.

5. Make a particular application to your own hearts of everything that is delivered.
How far more beneficial should we find discourses to be than now they generally are!

6. If you would receive a blessing from the Lord when you hear His word preached, pray to Him, both before, in, and after every sermon, to endue the minister with power to speak, and to grant you a will and ability to put in practice what he shall show from the Book of God to be your duty.
This would be an excellent means to render the word preached effectual to the enlightening and enflaming of your hearts; and without this, all the other means before prescribed will be in vain.

If only all who hear me this day would seriously apply their hearts to practise what has now been told them! How ministers would see Satan, like lightning, fall from heaven, and people find the word preached sharper than a two-edged sword and mighty, through God, to the pulling down of the devil’s strongholds!

George Whitefield (1714-1770) was the best-known evangelist of the C18th and one of the greatest itinerant preachers in the history of Protestantism.

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