Book Review of Preaching that Changes Lives

Overview

Preaching That Changes Lives gets right to the point when Fabarez quotes Tozer by saying, "bible teaching without moral application could be worse than no teaching at all and could result in positive injury to the hearers." (Fabarez, xii) Fabarez next writes that preachers need no cause their own people to change each week in the aria that God's Word is addressing. (Fabarez, xiii) Fabarez finely summarizes by writing that, " -- my goal is to challenge you to reevaluate and consider your current practices of preaching through the matrix of application." (Fabarez, xiv) Overall, a person could easily conclude that Fabarez writes in order to promote preaching that changes the lives of the listeners in terms of their applications of scripture.

Weaknesses and Strengths

Fabarez has great strength in his book as he can recognize the problem in many churches that needs to be addressed, and this problem shows itself when Christians go from church to church to affirm what they know and are being praised for doing what is right. (See Fabarez, 10) Fabarez then describes his preaching gifts as mediocre and having been absorbed by hundreds, then thousands of starving people. (Fabarez, 11) The point to be made is that Fabarez is able to identify that people are in fact starving for the Word of God, and Fabarez attempts throughout his book to instruct preachers about preaching for application. Overall, the strength of Fabarez's approach can be summarized in the statement, "in the end the preachers does not use the Bible to preach his own message; instead, it is the Bible that uses the preacher to preach its message." (Fabarez, 16)

An incredible weakness of Fabarez's book is that if church members become reliant upon their pastor to the extent as to need explanation for application, then they may not be seeing the world through the eyes of Christ and be able to understand how to solve problems without consulting a Sunday sermon. Fabarez however writes, "when one proclaims the whole counsel of God with intelligent and accurate applications, the modern church will be empowered to hammer out her business ethics as well as her bioethics." (Fabarez, 18) Overall, the problem is that although business ethics and bioethics can be worked our ideologically, problems that people would never normally consider can render biblical advice about how to practice the Word of God useless. Church members really need to be able to go beyond a three step process and to reason through complicated problems with the scriptures in order to be honoring God with their minds and hearts.

At one particular church for example the preacher gave a sermon about Solomon's temple and how people had to go through a process of purification in order to attend, and his point in the entire sermon was that the Word of God teaches people to dress in their nicest clothing when going to church. The next week a woman came directly from a nursing facility with dirty clothing on, and thus the congregation attacker her for not obeying the Word of God (the problem was that either she goes to the church directly after work or not go at all '" sadly many in the congregation did not even have jobs). Eventually the woman stopped going all together, and the point is that teaching church goers to apply the bible can be like handing fire arms to little kids (that cannot even do a paper route). Overall, people need to develop a type of maturity before reasoning through how to apply biblical teachings, and one could fear that people like Fabarez may focus more on application than upon the maturity and reasoning that Christians should be employing when practicing their faith.

Effective Preaching Promoted by the Book

Fabarez points out that, " -- we can easily develop an insatiable appetite for praise which can lead us to do things in our ministry just to be noticed and exalted." (Fabarez, 28) Although Fabarez is correct that preachers doing thing just for human praise is sinful, the fact remains that a preacher being noticed can in fact increase the productivity of the work of the Church just by being noticed. For example, if a preacher was noticed for hosting the best Christian Children's puppet show in the state, then that would encourage more people to attend and such could also encourage more church attendance. A preacher should thus avoid doing things that only render self gratification, and this is perhaps a point that can be gained by meditation on the meaning of the text.

Fabarez describes a case such that a congregation would show forgiveness in the home but malice in the workplace and Fabarez's suggestion is that a preacher considers this problem for a target of a sermon. (Fabarez, 50) One of the problems however is that usually many preachers are isolated from the world of work and have many misconceptions of the secular workplaces; moreover, a sermon on the subject can actually do more harm than good. If for example, a preacher was way, "off base" then a large portion of the congregation could be without a job the very next Sunday, and thus a preacher could have much to gain from the text only if their maturity to handle real life problems is very great to begin with.

Perhaps the most profound and true statement made by Fabarez that really teaches a lot is the statement that, "Without prayers, our sermons may look good on paper-they may even sound good in the pulpit-but you can bet that they will never leave the church parking lot." (Fabarez, 70) A point to be made is that teaching people application without those people being mature can result in some very bad things, and in this case prayer would really need to be implemented in order to prevent those bad things from happening. Overall, one must realize that if a person does not apply the content of a sermon it can likely be that they are not comfortable with the possible results, and prayer could make things such that God organizes things so that no bad results exist in doing the practice of scripture and that the Christian feels comfortable in doing what they are supposed to do.

The overall value of what Fabarez has written is that it provides a structure for how to approach preaching. The good part of that structure is that it provides an elaborate approach to preaching for application, but the downside is that it may not benefit those preachers that are looking to do what God wants done in a congregation. Jesus commands as the most important commandment to, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'" Mark 12:30 (NIV) If for example a congregation took this seriously, then the focus would not be on application as in finding a way to do the job of a Christian, but instead the focus would be more on learning how to navigate spiritually to arrive at more fully loving God. Rather than to look at a Christian as a worker of lots of different types of problems that they apply the scripture to instead everything that is done should be done not out of obedience to a God that for many has reasoning that cannot be understood, but instead people should do all of their works through this greatest commandment instead of isolated from it.

Bibliography:

Fabarez, Michael. Preaching That Changes Lives. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2002.