Okay, welcome to our homiletics class. Good to have you with us as we get into the material for today. Now, we're getting close to the end of semester, so I wanted to just run through the program for the end as we just wrap things up for the semester. Law Willing, today we'll get through the rest of the current section of notes we're working through on Preaching Basics with Speaker. That leaves us with one more segment of notes to go. So what I'm hoping to do is finish off the rest of the notes next week. Last week I told you that your final sermon outline would be June next week, but I'm actually going to give you to June the 12th for that. So if you want to write down that, if you go to the back, back to our page 192, So Sermon 3 was originally due on the 22nd of the 5th. We're going to update that to the 12th of the 6th, so June 12th. And part of the reason for that is because we've got a little bit of spare time at the end of semester, I've got a bit of a plan in mind. So what I'm hoping to do is finish all of our lecture notes next week. Then the following week, which will be June the 5th, which will be the week before your final sermon is due, I thought we could use that class time in a little bit more of an informal way. We could just go over the passages of Scripture you're looking at, ask some questions, just have a bit of a brainstorm, help each other. So, if you could have what I really need from you, I mean, definitely just keep working on it as you have time, but if you could have your passage of scripture selected by June the 5th, so that's two weeks from today, so that we can go over in class. Then, your exam, final exam for the... we've had tests throughout the semester, as you know, there will be a final exam on the last day of class, which is June the 19th. Now, we're starting to transition in the course from law to grace, okay? and I feel compassionate towards you with all the work you've got to do. So, what we're going to do is, I'm not going to get you, with the final exam, all that I'm going to require of you is two things. One, all of your memory verses. Now that will be a bit of work, but I want you to know all your memory verses. I'm not going to ask you any questions from the review questions won't be in the exam because you've done that essentially twice. You've done it for homework, you've done it for a test, each time we've gone through it. So I don't see any need to get you to go over that again. You've already had a fairly good dose of that material. But what I would like you to be ready for is all the memory verses that we've covered, which you'll have if you've got. And then I'm simply going to give you a verse or a small section of scripture to outline in exam time. And you'll be graded on your outline, neatness, you know, just your structure, just so that you can, it'd be good exercise. So your memory verses should probably, if you've got a two hour period, you've got roughly 20 minutes, half an hour to get your verses all written out. Then after that, you can spend the remainder of whatever's left of the two hour exam period, I'll give you a verse, probably just a verse or two to outline. So when you look at it, you'll be able to open your Bible and just, basically you'd be like, let's say the scenario is that you have, all of a sudden you've found out you've got to preach in two hours and you need to bring a gospel message. Outline John 3 16 for example that I'll probably won't give you that verse, but something like that, okay? So there will not be any none of the review questions will come into the final exam. It's simply your memory versus That's the most important thing the Word of God, and you've done the review questions already and gone through those in detail, so Right so just to recap so Lord willing next Next week 29th. We will complete lecture notes the week following June the 5th you'll have your final your final... test on the review questions, and then we're going to use the remainder of the class time to go over your scripture passages. So you must have your scripture passage selected by June the 5th, which you're planning to do an expository message for. We will then use that class time in an informal way just to discuss those passages. I can maybe give you some help a little bit here or there as needed. Then by June the 12th, your your final, sorry, by June the 12th, then your sermon will be due. Okay? And then June the 19th, we'll have the exam. Does that make sense? So June 12th, which will be the second to last, you will have Just that sermon due, but then there won't be anything else. Obviously your regular readings, I'm assuming that you're aware of that. That continues until it's finished. But June 12th, apart from having that sermon for me, you'll basically have a free day to prepare for your exam or do whatever else you need to do, okay? So we're trying to just bring the course to a a conclusion in an orderly way, and also not kill you at the end of the course, if we can. All right. Okay, so back to our notes now, please. Paige, we'll just skip the testimony time for now, because we do need to try and just get through the remainder of this section of notes for today. So we're on page 136. Page 136, and we are working our way through this section of the notes. on preaching basics. We looked at the setting, some of the dynamics to consider there with acoustics and seating arrangement, various things that can influence the preacher, the audience. Now we're looking at the speaker himself. We looked firstly at his qualification, salvation, the love of God and so on, consecration to the Lord. The preacher's character, we talked about that, education, temperament, personality, and now we're working through Roman numeral number three, the preacher's care. The preacher's care, and point A under that, his appearance. External appearances do convey a message. Clothing is a language. The way we conduct ourselves, the way we present ourselves does convey a message. So we need to be, as preachers, appropriately dressed. Number one, his attire, he must dress appropriately befitting the occasion. After all, preaching is conducting the King's business. So we don't need to look gaudy or flashy, but we do need to dress appropriately for the occasion, and the rule of thumb is to always dress up rather than dress down. We're living in a world where the trend in modern Christendom, broadly speaking, is to dress down for church, or I call it getting undressed for church. Instead of getting dressed for church, people get undressed for church and come in glorified underwear. That's just ungodly. We're here to glorify the Lord and the preacher needs to set a good example in the way he dresses. If he's sloppy, with a rough sort of appearance, then that does not convey a good impression to the audience. Facial expressions, number three. A man's face or countenance projects a message. We do convey a message through our countenance. In fact, you can tell a lot about someone by their countenance. We can't always judge everything about someone's countenance, but the countenance does tell you a lot about someone. Their eyes convey certain things. So we need to project a heart of love. Warmness doesn't mean that there's not a time to be sober in our countenance. If you're preaching on hell and with a great big Cheshire cat grin, that's conveying a mixed message. So, at the same time, if you're preaching on joy and you're frowning, that's confusing too. So, these things should come fairly naturally according to the message we're preaching, but we don't want to convey an angry expression or a frustrated expression. We want people to see through our body language, through our facial expressions, that we have their best interest in mind and that we have love for them. Posture. Posture is important. Point four. A relaxed, upright posture conveys confidence. Body language is partially expressed through posture. A preacher should stand up straight and face his audience. So, nice and erect. Things like slumping or hunching can convey I don't really feel like doing this. Or standing too rigidly says I'm uptight or I'm stressed. They suggest leaning slightly toward the audience conveys interest in them. It is easy for preachers to unwittingly develop bad habits in this area, such as slouching, rocking back and forth, or bouncing. It's very hard not to get into those sorts of fidgety mannerisms. I don't know what it is. I think sometimes it's the internal tension. of preaching the Word of God, you feel bad, and the nerves, and often when you feel nervous, nerves try, you know, some sort of bodily expression is often a common thing. So whether it's fiddling with something, or tapping, or rocking, and that doesn't mean that we can't move around as we preach, that's fine. In fact, that can be a help sometimes, but It's particularly the repetitive things that start to be a distraction. And I may have given you the example, I remember listening to a particular missionary preach, and he's a great man of God to this day, but he took his glasses on and off, I think it was like 30-40 times in the space of a 35-40 minute message. And the amount of people at that particular fellowship meeting who commented afterwards about him taking his glasses on and off, I mean, almost every couple of sentences, he'd pull his glasses off and put them back on. That's the sort of thing that becomes a distraction. And so everyone went away from that message. They didn't remember a thing, I don't think really, that he said. All they remember was, man, that guy took his glasses off so many times, it was not funny. So things like that can be a distraction. So you wanna try and eliminate those things. If you need to straighten something while you're preaching, that's fine. Little things can pop up, but it's those repetitive types of fidgeting that can be a problem and distract from the message. Number five is poise. Poise is more than physical posture. It's been described as mental posture. It is the ability to remain composed and confident during a message regardless of the circumstances. So you have your wits about you. By God's grace, the Lord is helping you with the message and you have spirit-filled confidence and boldness, not self-confidence. Self-confidence, what's the problem with being self-confident? Well, there's self at the beginning of that word, isn't there? So if self's involved, then we have a problem straight away. But a confidence that is given by the Spirit of God, a confidence that comes from being well prepared and prayed up, contributes to poise, and it conveys an authoritative tone with the message. If you're ill-prepared, or if you haven't spent appropriate time in prayer, and if you're not seeking to be filled with the Spirit of God, then you're going to be more timid in the pulpit, you're going to be holding back, and that conveys to people a sense of uncertainty in the message. So poise is mental posture. And there are a number of things that contribute to this. And we've got an A, B, C and D there. Being fully prepared, being fully prepped up, having the right mindset and also experience. So being fully prepared is important. When you're well studied and saturated in the scriptures, then it will be conveyed through the poise and through the way in which you give the message. If you're winging it, it will come through, particularly to the trained eye. If you've just hurriedly thrown a few verses together in the last half an hour, or worse still, just before the message, and you're going to get up there and just say words and try and wing it, as we say, then firstly, it's very unlikely that the Lord is going to use such a message that's been so sloppily prepared, but it's also going to show, and the audience isn't silly. They know if you've prepared properly or not. I won't mention names, but I remember sitting under a particular pastor and I heard sermons that clearly, I knew, were not well prepared. It was just thrown together and he was just winging it. The people are going to grow very weak spiritually. if we have not done due diligence in the study and in the place of prayer to give them something digestible and something that's going to strengthen their spiritual lives. So those are contributors to mental posture or poise. So that's the appearance of the preacher. We're looking at Roman numeral three, the preacher's care, those external factors that need to be addressed, his appearance, B, his appetite, B, his appetite. Many preachers will not eat a meal prior to them speaking. The reason is because food requires blood in order to be digested, but the brain also requires blood to think. Eating a heavy meal causes drowsiness and dulls the thinking. That's actually a very important point. I have had experience myself where I've eaten too much before a message and it makes it more difficult to preach, because the blood drains out of your head, goes to the stomach to digest that great big lump of food, and it means that your thinking will not be as sharp. So you need to eat well in advance of preaching so that your body has time to get most of the digestion process over with before you get into the pulpit or eat afterwards. There's a balance. If you go into the pulpit and you haven't eaten anything for many hours and your body feels weak and you don't have enough glucose to the brain, that can be a problem too. So something that's readily digestible, maybe a sweet drink of some sort or a light meal is best, but don't overload your stomach before going into the pulpit. That was a problem I had up for the first night of the camp. We arrived on the Friday afternoon and camp, you know, they dished up a great big meal and then the message was only about half an hour after that and I did struggle. I felt like, I felt almost, to begin with, I felt almost a little bit dizzy. Because it had this great big meal and I unwisely had seconds, which I shouldn't have done. And so I was so full of food when I got up to preach, it did make it difficult. Now I don't think the Lord was able to still use it and we got through it, but I thought afterwards I've got to be more careful not to... I recognised that I've eaten too much. So, page 138, number 1, when to eat. It says, Most men who preach on a regular basis have a somewhat unnatural eating schedule. This is helpful to their preaching, though not always to their physical well-being. It is best that a preacher eat well in advance of the time when he will speak, otherwise he should wait until after the meeting. And understanding your wife is a great blessing when it comes to his diet. So, either eat early, before the message, an hour or two before, so that your body has time to get that digestion over with, so that you're not going to the pulpit with a full stomach. Or, if you need to, defer it to afterwards, maybe have a light snack and a drink with a bit of honey or something beforehand, so you've got some glucose to the brain. But you want to have your mind as sharp as possible for that time of preaching. What to eat. Number two, it is best to consume things like A, light meals. Soups are always a good choice. Fruits and vegetables. Fruit juices. So it might be that you have a piece of fruit and a drink of juice before you preach, but nothing else. Or like I say, eating in advance. Three, what not to eat. Avoid things like A, starchy foods. Also known as comfort food. B. Foods that can cause burping. Cucumbers, onions, garlic, chilies. That's probably a good idea. You don't want to be burping in the pulpit. That's really very off-putting. C. Milk products. Milk products are not good for your voice. They tend to make your voice a bit clogged up and so on, so you're best to stick with water or a bit of juice. Or if you have any voice problems, Evangelist Glen Weeks recommended this to me and I've used it a number of times now with success. Some warm water. a heaped teaspoon of organic honey, and about two tablespoons of organic vinegar. So if you can get vinegar and honey in hot water and sip on that, it's amazing what that does for your throat. Now, that's a man speaking who preaches almost every night of the week. for most of the year, so he has experienced all sorts of things with his throat and his voice. So if you've got a bit of a cold or your voice is a bit, you've got a bit of a morning frog in your throat, two tablespoons of vinegar, one teaspoon of honey mixed in hot water, sip that through, it'll really clear out, really clear your throat and make it nice and crisp. So I've found that a blessing. Back to the notes there. A common problem for many preachers is that of overeating, often resulting from the pressures of having to eat at church fellowships, such as pot blessing dinners. Baptists love to fellowship around a meal, and many meals lovingly provided for the visiting preacher are extremely sumptuous and lavish. So it can be a challenge as a preacher because a lot of your work is sitting down. You're sitting down to study, sitting down to visit, sitting down to counsel. And often maybe you go to someone's house, they serve you a nice meal, or you go to visit the elderly, they bring out the biscuits and cookies. So you do have to be careful with overeating. C. His anatomy. So we've looked at appearance, appetite, now anatomy. It is important to take care of our bodies and also our voices. Number one, physical well-being. A preacher has only one life to give to his Lord. And with that one life comes one physical body. We do need to take care of our bodies. It is the temple or dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 6, 9-20, and as such must be taken care of. And this is an important point. We need to remember that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. If we are unduly driving our bodies, misusing our bodies, and not giving our bodies appropriate rest or looking after them, then we're dishonouring the temple of the Holy Spirit. Now, I'm not talking about sitting back and being lazy. That's not glorifying to the Lord either. But looking after our bodies, we only have one life to serve the Lord, and the body is the vehicle that we use for the service of God, and so we want to look after that. A preacher serves the Lord with his body. He uses his mind, his eyes, his ears, his voice, his hands, and his feet to preach the word. Therefore, he needs to keep it functioning as well as possible. So a busy preacher must take time to receive, a sufficient exercise, especially if he is sedentary. So if you, like I say, if you are Doing a lot of sitting down with reading, studying, a walk can be a good way to get exercise. Go for a half an hour walk sometime. That will actually freshen your whole body. body and also your mind. Walking is very, very good. If you work a manual job alongside of pastoring or ministering, then you may not have such a need for specific exercise times, but exercising the body is important. Sufficient restful sleep, that's important to get the sleep we need. There will be times during ministry and Bible college, as you already know, where you're going to lose some sleep, and you've got to trust the Lord with that. Try and make it up when you get an opportunity. If it comes weekend time and you've got a Saturday afternoon relatively free, it might be a good idea to crash out for a bit of a rest. Regular medical checkups. So looking after our physical well-being. Two, care of the vocal mechanism. So we need to look after our voices. The voice is a major tool of trade for preachers. Therefore, it is vital to take particular care of it and the marvellous organs God has created to produce speech." So we want to look after our voices. This involves, A, maintaining good general health, looking after the lungs, throat, mouth, teeth and sinuses. So looking after your general health will help. Having a reasonable level of physical fitness allows for a good air supply from the lungs. So if you're physically fit, that will help with giving you the air support that you need for preaching, keeping the voice strong, and that there are different vocal exercises that can be done for that. Now note here, while sometimes needful, a preacher should not rely on throat lozenges or water to help his voice, lest he become dependent upon them. So, there's nothing wrong with having a glass of water there. I tend to use a little bit of water, but you don't want to over-rely on things like that or you can become dependent upon them. It can help if you can sort of loosen up or warm up your voice ahead of preaching, and often the congregational singing can provide that for you. So if you've got three or four hymns to sing before you preach, join in with the singing, and that'll open up your airways, warm your vocal cords, and get you ready, hopefully, for preaching. So we have now Roman numeral four, his communication. Proper speech habits begin with a good understanding of the following. There are four steps. One, exhalation. Exhalation. This is where the abdominal muscles and the diaphragm force air from the lungs up through the windpipe and larynx. 2. Phonation, where air passing through the larynx causes the vocal folds to vibrate, producing sound waves. 3. Resonation, where the sound produced in the larynx is amplified as it travels through the pharynx or the throat, mouth, nasal cavity and sinuses. 4. Articulation, where the resonated sound is shaped by the tongue, lips, palate and the teeth. B. The way to breathe correctly. Proper breathing, note this or underline it, is the most essential part of speaking. We cannot speak without breathing and we cannot speak properly without proper breathing. If you don't take proper breaths, if you don't breathe properly, then you're going to tend to speak primarily from the voice. box and that brings a harsh sound and a hard sound and a stressed sound into the voice if you're trying to push the voice in the absence of enough air support. So it's important to take those breaths and then that will give you the support so that you're speaking properly. Number one, incorrect breathing is called clavicular breathing. This is where you're breathing from the chest and shoulders. So if your proper breathing will come from the diaphragm, so there's very little movement in the upper body. In fact, I remember I think it was a voice teacher or someone who had experience in this area explaining in a lecture that children naturally breathe properly. So if you look at a child when it's asleep, you'll notice that their tummy is going up and down or their diaphragm. It's often in adult life that we develop the bad habits of sort of breathing up here in the chest area and sort of moving up and down. So you want to just breathing naturally from the diaphragm and this will produce greater volume projection and voice control. Page 140. The abdomen should be moving in and out while the chest remains relatively stationary. And according to this quote here, we should be able to recite the entire alphabet on a single breath. So, taking a breath, you should be able to recite A through Z. I tried it this morning and it was easy to do, so you should be able to do that. If you can't, then you might need to work on your breathing. So make sure you're breathing from the diaphragm, not developing the bad habits of breathing up the top there, but taking those deep breaths and then speaking. This is something you have to make sure of, otherwise you Your voice will be more strained. You'll be inclined to have more voice problems if you're having to, in the absence of air support, push that voice in a hard way. C, the way to develop vocal quality. Vocal quality refers to the tone or timbre of one's voice. It basically means how one sounds. The key is to develop the resonation of the voice. This is the echoing of sound waves inside the three resonating chambers. Now, singers that have trained voices have learnt these things on a much greater level. In fact, I have a missionary friend in Fiji and his wife, she's quite a good singer, and she said she's noticed that good singers are often good preachers as far as voice production is concerned because they know how to use their voices properly. So I thought that was interesting. And so maybe if we can learn to sing properly, and use our voices properly for singing, then we may use our voices better for preaching. Number one, the throat. The throat is a flexible, muscular, resonating chamber. If it's tense, the voice will sound harsh, so relaxation of the voice is important. I remember at a music seminar, a preacher from America teaching us some things about relaxation. Again, that deep breathing. voice exercises, maybe a bit of singing or whatever, to try and relax the voice. So if your voice is really tense, it produces a harsh sound. When it's relaxed, it produces more of a full, rich tone. As an exercise, we won't do it in class, it'll be embarrassing, but you can speak in an exaggerated yawn fashion, okay, to open and develop the throat muscles. And they talk about this with singing, you've got to get that mouth open. Alright, if your mouth's, if you're sort of like a ventriloquist with your, you know, your lips pursed or you're only opening your mouth a tiny amount, it's not going to let the sound out. and it's going to sound pinched. So, speaking nice and clearly, opening up your mouth while you speak without looking like a... giraffe will help to develop the throat muscles. Two, the mouth is another resonating chamber. A preacher must learn to open his mouth wide. He cannot mumble, so this is important that you pronounce your words clearly, that you're opening your mouth enough so that the volume is getting out, so that the words are coming out clearly. If you're sort of mumbling, and you're sort of opening your mouth only just a little bit like this, then it's very hard for people to follow. You tend to slur your words together. Occasionally, sometimes I will just not listen to the whole thing, but after I've preached, I'll just scan through the recording, just listen to the segments. Not because I love the sound of my own voice. I can't stand the sound of my own voice. But, if you can listen to your own sermon, And even if you just go through bits of it, you'll pick yourself up on bad habits. So something I've noticed myself doing is sometimes I'll string a few words together kind of in a bit of a mumbled way or a bit of a hurried way without appropriate spacing between and it kind of, it's sort of slurring those words together. So it's important to open your mouth up to pronounce things nice and clearly so that you're not sort of just, you know, Blending those words together in a way that makes it hard to understand. So the three finger exercise can help you with the open mouth thing. So if you put the three fingers in. Try it. Yeah, okay. You would know that from singing, they talk about that. So learning to open your mouth up. the nose where the mmm and mmm sounds are resonated. So if you have your mouth shut and just go mmmm, you can feel the resonation up in the nose. That's where your singers learn to sing more up through the head. Using those resonating chambers. Resonance they call it. So rather than just singing from the throat, there's the deep breath and then singing up and using those So, it's coming through. Obviously, we're not singing when we're preaching, but being relaxed will help with some of this. If not, your voice will tend to have a hard edge to it or a harsher sound when you're speaking or singing. Point D, the way to ensure good speaking. The way to ensure good speaking. Certain aspects of public speaking need to be considered and mastered in order to enhance and not hinder the message being delivered. These are 1. Correct pronunciation. Correct pronunciation. That's very, very important. We want to speak crisply and clearly. Words have sounds and there is a right way and a wrong way to say them. Each word has a culturally accepted intonation and stress pattern. Consideration has to be given to your audience. If you're speaking in Australia, there's going to naturally be some of the pronunciation's going to be Aussie. If you're in Ghana and speaking to an audience there, you're probably going to pronounce some English words in the way that it's done over there. But whatever, we need to speak with correct pronunciation and people tend to, particularly those who are more educated, will wince a bit when you butcher your words. And one thing we have to learn to pronounce are the Bible names. That can be a bit of a challenge. But most of our Bibles have the difficult names with a pronunciation guide. And it's up to the preacher to verbally practice them ahead of time. So if you're preaching through a passage that contains a lot of tongue twisters, a lot of difficult names, you would be wise to read that passage of Scripture out loud once or twice before preaching it. Because otherwise if you get into the pulpit and you know when you get stuck on a name and you're sort of like, I don't know how to pronounce that, at least have a bit of a go of it before preaching so that it's not a distraction while you're reading the passage. You want to read it as clearly as you can. And look, there's always going to be some diversity when it comes to pronouncing the Bible names because sometimes we don't really fully know how to. So you might hear Yeah, I'm trying to think of an example. Oh, it'll come to me. But yeah, there can be differences there. But the main thing is that we're speaking clearly and pronouncing our words properly. Because we want people to be able to readily take in what we're preaching. So speaking clearly, even over... It's kind of like with singing. With singing, You need to over-pronounce your words, otherwise sometimes the message doesn't come across clearly. So it's the same with preaching. If you sort of mumble with preaching and don't open your mouth enough, don't pronounce your words clearly, then it makes it harder for people to receive it. You've got to remember it's not like a personal conversation where you're standing one metre from each other. People are sitting in the pew, you're up there on the pulpit. At the pulpit, sure, the sound system is an aid, but you want to be over-pronouncing your words in some ways, similar to singing, speaking nice and clearly, so that the message gets across. So there's proper correct pronunciation, and then proper annunciation. We'll stop there. We're going to go and have a short break, and we'll be back in five to ten minutes, Mr. Emanuel.