Listening to Sermons
The Importance of Preaching
1. You must actively participate because so few people receive the word
More than thirty times in his commentaries and nine times in his Institutes, Calvin referred to how few people receive the preached Word with saving faith. He said, “If the same sermon is preached, say, to a hundred people, twenty receive it with the ready obedience of faith, while the rest hold it valueless, or laugh, or hiss, or loathe it.”2 If proper hearing was a problem in Calvin’s day, how much more is it so today, when ministers have to compete for the attention of people who are bombarded with various forms of media on a daily basis?
2. The Preaching of the Word is the source of salvation and Blessing
Faithful preaching is the means by which the Spirit does His saving work of illuminating, converting, and sealing sinners. Calvin said, “There is … an inward efficacy of the Holy Spirit when he sheds forth his power upon hearers, that they may embrace a discourse [sermon] by faith.”
the Puritans had a high regard for preaching. As lovers of the Word of God, the Puritans were not content with merely affirming the infallibility, inerrancy, and authority of Scripture. They also read, searched, preached, heard, and sang the Word with delight, seeking the applying power of the Holy Spirit that accompanied the Word. They regarded the sixty-six books of Holy Scripture as the library of the Holy Spirit. For the Puritans, Scripture was God speaking to His people as a father speaks to his children. In preaching, God gives His Word as truth and power. As truth, Scripture can be trusted for time and eternity. As power, Scripture is the instrument of transformation used by the Spirit of God to renew our minds.
The Westminster Larger Catechism summarizes such Puritan advice in Question 160: “It is required of those that hear the word preached, that they attend upon it with diligence, preparation, and prayer, examine what they hear by the Scriptures, receive the truth with faith, love, meekness, and readiness of mind, as the word of God; meditate, and confer of it in their hearts, and bring forth the fruit of it in their lives.”7
How to Prepare
“It is required of those that hear the word preached, that they attend upon it with diligence, preparation, and prayer,” the Westminster divines wrote (LC, Q. 160).
1. Prepare your hearts with Payer, like how your prepare yoiur bodies with clothes and food
2. Come Hungry for the Word
3. Think on the Importance of the Word Preached
Thomas Boston wrote, “The voice is on earth, [but] the speaker is in heaven” (Acts 10:33).
Ministers are simply God’s ambassadors, bringing you the Word of God (2 Cor. 5:20; Heb. 13:7). Do not focus on them but on the Word of God they bring, always remembering that one day you will give an account before God of every sermon that He has brought to you.