Let the Entire Sermon Reveal the Bible’s Relevance - Jay Adams Quoted by Michael Fabarez

Let the Entire Sermon Reveal the Bible’s Relevance

If the purpose of preaching is to change lives, and if outlining is underscoring the highpoints of our sermon, then we should make the passage’s applicational thrust the underscored points of our outline, accentuated throughout the entire sermon.
Jay Adams, an advocate of this kind of revolutionary outline, writes:
  It is in the message format that a preacher’s true theory and practice of preaching can most clearly be discerned. When discussing how he preaches, he may say much about many things, but what he actually believes about preaching most plainly appears in the way he finally organizes his material. Those preachers who understand that preaching is application organize their points for application.7

Elsewhere he writes:
  The preacher … using a genuine preaching outline applies all along the way; indeed, in one sense the whole sermon is application. The preaching format is an applicatory format by nature.8

This simple shift from outlining a text’s content to outlining its application can radically transform a sermon and the people who hear it.
In training untried future preachers, I have taught them to outline their sermons according to the passage’s transferable application. As their instructor, I review their outlines before they step into the pulpit to preach and satisfy myself as to with the direction of their sermonic roadmap. Sometimes the novice preachers struggle—occasionally with every facet of delivery imaginable! I have watched introductions crash, illustrations cast a fog on the audience, and conclusions burst into flames before my eyes. However, if the would-be preacher managed to spit out his carefully worded main tenets, each poignantly addressing the audience’s biblical responsibility, then the sermon was salvaged. At least its main points were engaging, convicting, and life changing. How much better was this than a smoothly delivered sermon which endlessly dices up a text and carefully categorizes informational points yet never engages the listener with the “so what” of the passage?
To those who fear that this kind of applicational outlining jeopardizes true expository preaching, Jay Adams brusquely responds:
  Often, preachers, especially those who try to “stay close to the text” and so-called “expository” preachers will tell you that they use the structure of the passage to determine the structure of their sermon. Typically you will hear them say things like, this text naturally falls into three divisions.” So, it falls into three divisions; so what? Does that mean that sermons from Revelation will have seven points? Will a message from Proverbs always have two because proverbs “naturally” fall into two divisions? Will all preaching from John, with his many contrasts (light/darkness, truth/error, etc.), also be two-pointed? To say that a passage falls into so many divisions may be good literary and rhetorical analysis, but what has that got to do with preaching forms? What is the purpose of following the “natural textual divisions”? To be more biblical? To do so doesn’t make you more biblical but less biblical.9

Some preachers have a missile lock on communicating Scripture’s structure that prevents them from converting to applicational outlining. Others believe that the prominence of true explanation, and thus the hearer’s understanding of Scripture, will somehow be jeopardized, and that keeps them from changing. To this Bryan Chapell responds:
  Recognize that the chief purpose of application is not simply to give people something to do. Application gives ultimate meaning to the exposition. Even if the explanation of a sermon were to define every Greek and Hebrew word for prayer, were to quote at length from Calvin, Luther, and E. M. Bounds on prayer’s meaning, were to cite fifty passages that refer to prayer, and were to describe the prayer practices of David, Jeremiah, Daniel, Paul, and Jesus, would the listeners truly understand what prayer is? No. Until we engage in prayer we do not really understand it. Until we apply a truth, understanding of it remains incomplete. This means that until a preacher provides application, exposition remains incomplete.10

7 Jay Adams, Truth Applied (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 85.

8 Jay Adams, Preaching with Purpose, 54.

9 Jay Adams, Preaching with Purpose,  56–57


Appendix / Bibliography



Fabarez, M. (2002). Preaching that changes lives (pp. 58–60). Nashville, TN: T. Nelson Publishers.

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