to understand your word and learn of your word, learn how to communicate your word

here at this Gospel Coalition conference this year. Thanks for bringing us here

safely. Thanks for the innumerable interactions that strengthen our hearts,

strengthen our relationships, strengthen our ties with you and with each other.

Thanks for the instruction that's going on right now, especially. I pray not only for

us here, but for all the workshops, that you would help us to stir each other up to

love and good works, iron sharpening iron, learning, having the word of God dwell on

us richly. We pray that this would happen in all these various workshops and

classes. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

Okay. I'm glad to be with you. This is supposed to be a workshop. Isn't that a

laugh, with this many people? However, I'm going to do this. I'm going to give you a

talk, a lecture, and then, even though only a very tiny percentage and probably

the most pathologically extroverted of you will have an opportunity to ask questions.

We will have some mics up front. There's quite a lot of you, and the ones who want

to ask questions should, because it's just so boring to listen to somebody talk for

an hour. I want you to be able to drill down on some things that you hear

and get a little more information.

So preaching to the heart, the subject. Alec Motyer, in his great little book,

"Preaching?" Alec Motyer is an Old Testament scholar and an expository

preacher. He's British or Irish, I think. He's, I think, in his 90s now and written

a great little book on expository preaching.

In the book, he says this. He says that "preachers have not one, but two

responsibilities, First to the truth, and secondly to the particular group of people

in front of you. How will they best hear the truth? How are we to shape and phrase

it, so it comes home to them in a way that is palatable, that gains the most

receptive hearing and avoids needless hurt?"

So what Motyer says is if you want to be- If you're a communicator of the

Bible, you've got two responsibilities. You've got a responsibility to the truth,

to hold it up, to present it accurately, to make sure you're expanding the text,

but you also have a responsibility to the people. You need to give them the truth in

a way that changes them, that, as he puts it, that you give them the truth in a way

they can best hear it, in a way that it can most shape and phrase. You can shape

and phrase it so that it comes home to them.

Now, if this is the case, and I think it is, most of our teaching and most of our

books on preaching and exposition are fairly unbalanced. Almost always, the

books give almost all the time is dedicated to how do you expound the text,

how do you understand the truth.

There might be a chapter on application or a chapter on preaching to the heart, but

even though Alec Motyer rightly says you basically have two tasks, be true to the

truth and be true to the people that are in front of you, we actually don't spend

that much time talking about how do you bring the truth home in a way that

actually changes lives.

It's one of the reasons why an awful lot of our expository preaching isn't very

life-changing. There's not a great deal of- There really isn't a lot of great

stuff written about how to preach to the heart.

Sinclair Ferguson has a chapter in the book, "Feed My Sheep." There's a book

called "Feed My Sheep: Passionate Plea for Preaching." It's an older book, good

book. Sinclair's got a chapter in there called "Preaching to the Heart."

Sam Logan has a book, pardon me, has a chapter in the book, "The Preacher and

Preaching." This is very confusing, by the way. Lloyd Jones wrote a book called

"Preaching and Preachers," but there was also a book put together by Westminster

Seminary faculty, back in the 1980s, called "The Preacher and Preaching." In

that book, Sam Logan wrote a chapter called "The Phenomenology of Preaching,"

which is basically on preaching to the heart.

There's a new book by Josh Moody and Robin Weeks, called "Preaching to the Heart, " I

think, or "Preaching to the Affections," I think it's called. But by and large, we

haven't spent much time on it.

Now, so I would like to give you an overview of why it's important to preach

to the heart and how you do it. I'm gonna probably constantly be thinking about,

because I am, I'm gonna be constantly thinking about working preachers who are

preaching every Sunday, but this is- What I'm about to tell you, I hope, is

gonna fit anybody who communicates the Bible, whether you teach the Bible, lead

Bible studies, teach, preach. I think this should be broadly applicable in many ways.

So just a couple ideas on why it's important to preach to the heart. The

biblical understanding of heart is just unique in human thought. The Greeks and

the Romans, the ancients, understood that the passions were connected to the body,

but the mind, the reason, and the will were connected to the soul.

Basically they believed that virtue was a matter of, literally, mind over matter.

That is, if you wanted to be a person of loyalty, if you wanted to be a person of

courage, if you wanted to have any virtue at all, what it meant was you stifled the

emotions. The reason needed to control the emotions, and that was a virtuous person.

So the ancients always pitted the thinking and the feelings against each other, and

the thinking needed to squelch and keep down the feelings. That's what produced a

virtuous person. However, on the other hand, modern thought has reversed that. We

live in what Charles Taylor calls the Age of Authenticity, and we believe that the

most important thing is that you look into your heart and see what your deepest

feelings are and your deepest desires and dreams, and you fulfill them.

So we do the same thing today, in our modern society. We now, however, have

reversed things. It's your feelings that are the true you. The ancient Greeks and

the Romans thought your feelings was the false you. They had to do with your body.

They weren't the true you. They weren't part of the spirit.

So they pitted mind versus the feelings. Modern people do that too, except they

reverse it. You have to let it go. You can't hold it back anymore. I've been told

all my life, I mustn't feel. I have to conceal. All right. Right? That would be a

great song. Wouldn't it? Three billion people would hear me sing that on YouTube.

In other words, we have always pitted, you might say, the mind and the emotions.

It used to be the mind was more important than emotions. Today, the emotions are

more important than the mind. The Bible's understanding of the heart is completely

different, and it's not halfway in the middle. It's off the charts.

Why? As you have often heard, and I mentioned this yesterday, the biblical

understanding of the heart is that the heart is the seat, not so much of the

emotions, but it is the seat of what you trust the most, what you are committed to

the most. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Proverbs 3. Where your treasure is,

there is your heart. Matthew 6.

What we're talking about is the thing or the things that you most trust in, hope

in, the things that most capture your imagination, that you face, the center of

your attention, the center of your commitments, your main commitments.

Whatever those things are affect your mind, your will, and your emotions. So

whatever your heart trusts in the most affects not only your emotions. It also

affects your thinking.

So in some ways, the heart is the seat of the mind, the will, and the emotions

because it's coming from the trusts. This is the reason why, when St. Augustine

wrote "The Confessions," it was like a bomb dropped. No one in history had ever

seen anything like the book of "The Confessions."

The reason is because St. Augustine was spending his time looking at his past and

figuring out his emotions. So in the past, in ancient times, nobody ever spent any

kind of time thinking about your emotions. Emotions were things to be ignored or to

be squelched. Here's Augustine, sifting them. Now many people have said Augustine,

therefore, was the first modern person, but yes and no. There's a long story

there. Because today, we don't do what Augustine

was doing either. Augustine was being biblical because he was saying, "No, you

don't squelch the emotions or ignore them. On the other hand, you don't just vent the

emotions and express them. You sift the emotions. You evaluate the emotions, and

then you redirect the emotions toward God."

It's not like the emotions and the heart. Because obviously, by the way, the heart

does include emotions. It's not less than the emotions. It's more, but it's not

less. Emotions are not great, and they're not terrible. They're not unimportant.

They're not all important. They need to be directed toward God.

What that means is what you really are is basically what you love the most. Using

the word love here is not just an emotion. Essentially it's not your beliefs, at

least not the beliefs you subscribe to, that actually makes you what you are. It's

what your heart trusts in, what your heart loves the most.

You can say, "I believe in God. God is this, and God is this, and God is this."

Yeah, your heart is basically based in your career. We all know how that works.

Your heart is actually trusting in career. Your mind is saying, "No, no, no. I trust

in Jesus for my salvation. I trust in Jesus for this and that and all. " But

where is your heart?

Jonathan Edwards, who was a great Augustinian, therefore, said that if

you're gonna be thoroughly biblical, you must not pit knowledge and feeling against

each other. If you say, "I know I should be generous with my money, but I'm just

not doing it," he would say, "Well, there's a sense in which you know what you

should do, but you're not doing it, but there's another sense in which you don't

really know what you should do." Let me give you an example. Excuse me. I'm

better than I was yesterday, but not as better as I'd like it to be. When I was a

pastor in Virginia, many years ago, I had a young girl in my church. She was about

15 years old, I guess.

She was discouraged. She was depressed, often. At one point, the family was a

prominent family in the church. I tried to help the family with her. At one point,

she came into my study, and we were talking. Being a young minister, I was a

little bit naive, and I said, "How are you?" She was downcast.

I said, "Well, you're a Christian. Aren't you?" "Oh, yes. I'm a Christian."

"Christians have many blessings. Don't they?" "Oh, yes. We do." So we counted

the blessings a little bit, about the great things that, as a Christian, she

could count on and she knew was happening there and all those

great things in her life.

But at one point, I said, "So you're still depressed." She said... I tried to

encourage her, but here's what she said, almost literally, "Yes. I know that Jesus

loves me. I know he saved me, and I know he's gonna take me to Heaven. But what

good is all that when not a single boy at school will even look at you?"

I don't know why more of you aren't laughing at that. What she was saying was,

"Yeah, I'm saved. Yes, I'm going to Heaven forever. Yes, I'm a daughter of the king.

Yes, I'm gonna be glorified. I'm justified, sanctified, glorified, and all

that. But you know what? I'm in ninth grade, tenth grade, and there's not a

single boy will ask me out."

Now, here's what Jonathan Edwards would say. He would say she had the opinion that

God loved her, but she had no real knowledge that God loved her, because the

love of boys was more real to her heart than the love of God, or she wouldn't have

been depressed. So in one sense, you could say what she

just needed to be told... Well, what did she need to be told? See, what Edwards

would say is she needed to be shown the love of God in such a way that it began to

get more real to her heart, and it began to balance out how popular

she was or unpopular she was.

Some years ago . . . One more before I talk about how to do it. Some years ago,

I had a relative who never would wear a seat belt. Every time I

talked to him, he would get in the car, and he wouldn't wear his seat belt, and we

all would nag him about wearing a seat belt. All right. He put his seat belt on.

One day, we went to see him. He got in the car and put his seat belt on right away.

We said, "What happened to you?" He said, "Well, " he said, "I went to a friend of

mine. A couple weeks ago, I went to see a friend of mine in the hospital. He was in

a car crash, and he went through the windshield. He had like 200 stitches in

his face. For some strange reason, ever since then,

I've been having no problem buckling up."

I talked to him a little bit about that. What was interesting going on was I said,

"Well, did you get new information? What changed you? Did you not know that people

go through the windshield? What happened was an abstract proposition became

connected to an actual sensory experience, that is something he saw.

There's some place where Jonathan Edwards, the whole idea behind preaching to the

heart. At some point, where Jonathan Edwards says, "It's only when you attach.

It's only when you actually attach an abstract truth to some kind of sensory

experience that you've had, or at least the memory of a sensory experience that

you've had" I'm gonna show you how to do this in a second.