How To Make Meaningful Applications In Your Sermon

How To Make Meaningful Applications in Your Sermon

In the last post, I introduced the idea of making effective application in your message to the life of your hearers so that your message rings true to their experience and they are more likely to have a change of heart. Preaching is not a matter of the head; it’s a matter of the heart.  We are aiming for life change in our messages.  In this post we will consider how to make meaningful applications n your sermon.  In other words, where do your applications come from.

Meaningful Applications Training

I look back at my seminary training and realize that I was given great training in exegeting a passage.  Biblical Greek and Hebrew were required so that I could get back into the culture of the day when they were written.  Later there were many computer programs that were developed to help with figuring out what a passage says.   Logos will even help you with figuring out how the Greek language affects exegesis.

Unfortunately, I was not given any tools to help with application.  It was believed, it seemed, that if I could just get what the Bible says down, the Holy Spirit would take care of any application.  I got to be pretty good at exegesis, as shared in an earlier post.  But it wasn’t until that mentor in Tucson, Arizona pointed out the boring nature of my sermons that I began to reflect more carefully on how to make meaningful applications in a sermon.

Where do Meaningful Applications Come From?

Books

As I began to reflect on this, my first attempt was buying books of sermon illustrations.  There were many of these, and they were helpful, to a degree.  This, of course, was before the day of internet sites dedicated to preaching  (like sermoncentral.com).  In these books I could look by topic for stories and anecdotes and historical facts to better connect my hearers with my exegesis.

Reading

Later in my preaching career, I realized that reading broadly helped my search for meaningful applications.  The newspaper, as well as other periodicals that kept me up with up-to-date connections with the Word and the World.

Reading novels also helped look at the various crises of life and how one might address them.

Prayer

Even later in my career, prayer for illumination provided connections.   Not too long ago, was a guest pastor at my church with the assignment to preach on one phrase of the 23rd Psalm.   “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.”  I did the exegesis by reading several interpreters of that Psalm, and found that there are those like Phillip Keller (A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23) who think this is a reference to the Shepherd going to the tableland before moving his sheep there and looking for poisonous plants, etc. that might cause harm to the sheep.   From my prayer time I got the idea to go to  Psalm 139, where we are told, “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”  That led me to the application that God goes before us in our lives and prepares the way.  I asked people to look back in their life to see major turns and to think about how God used those to form their days.

Experience

I shared from my experience (another good way to come up with meaningful applications) of a call to ministry when I had never thought of it before, including a humorous story about my 6th grade teacher who was the first to suggest that I consider ministry.

Enemies Attack

A second interpretation has to do with the reality that there are going to be times when we face enemies.  Illness, financial collapse, personal crises.  In those situations God is present and provides.

Specific Applications

Then came the time for application.  What does this mean for us?  I said 3 things.

First of all, amazement.  In the first verses of Psalm 139 David reflects that God knows everything about us: when we sleep, when we get up, what we’re going to say, etc.  His response is this: “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, to lofty for me to attain.”  I sharedHow my reaction to seeing the first pictures for the Webb telescope and my sense of awe, thinking that my concept of God needed to expand.  This knowledge of God should cause us to do the same.  God is greater than we thought.

Secondly,  We need to be ready to obey.  Where is God calling us?    I shared the words of the hymn, “Where he leads, I’ll go.”

Thirdly, we need to trust.

When things don’t go well and the enemies surround.  I showed a screenshot of Joni Eareckson Tada when she talked at a Sing Conference in Nashville several years ago.  She talked about “Finding Jesus in your hell.”  If you don’t know her story, look it up.

As a teenager she dove into water that was too shallow, hit her head and snapped her neck.  Since then she experiences paralysis from the neck down. .  She then asked Laura story to share her story, “Blessings”, which makes the point that sometimes our blessings come through tears.  I had someone else read the words to the song, since at the time I was coping with my son having a brain tumor that eventually took his life.  But the point is, we need to trust God.  Trust is not the belief that everything will turn out the way we want, but the belief that whatever happens, God will supply what we need.  (See the book “Ruthless Trust” by Brennan Manning).

That morning people  lined up after the service to pray with elders about their direction in life, or more likely a crisis where they needed the reassurance that God knew and that he would provide.

Conclusion

How to make meaningful applications in your sermon is more than just saying, “Read the Bible more” or “Pray more”.  It is searching for those things, stories, facts, anecdotes that will catch your hearers’ attention and connect them to  your message.  This provides a means for the Holy Spirit to connect them to the Word, and that will impact their heart.