Barry Bonds holds the home run record in Major League Baseball. He’s only one of four players who’ve hit over 700 home runs, hitting number 762 in 2007. During his career in the MLB, he had 2,935 hits and 1,996 runs batted in.
Contrast this with Ty Cobb, who had only 117 home runs, and yet had 4,189 hits and 1,944 runs batted in. He had only 15% of the home runs as Bonds, but far more hits and 97% of the runs batted in.
Home runs are flashy, but you don’t need home runs to get the job done.
Some sermons are home runs. You sense the power of the moment as it happens. I’ve sat under preaching like that, and can remember key moments from these sermons decades later.
Most preaching isn’t like that. Most preaching is base hit preaching: the text is opened, Scripture is taught and applied, people go home, and nothing discernible happens.
You can get a lot done with base hit preaching.
Never underestimate the power of the ordinary means of grace: things like Word, prayer, worship, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. They are, according to Charles Hodge, “those institutions which God has ordained to be the ordinary channels of grace, i.e., of the supernatural influences of the Holy Spirit, to the souls of men.” I love that they’re called ordinary means of grace.
“Many Christians seem to believe advancement in spiritual maturity must come through some extraordinary or ‘breakthrough’ experience,” writes Thabiti Anyabwile. “ For them, it’s the fantastic that produces growth. But … it is the ordinary means of grace that ordinarily produces growth and maturity.” That includes the ordinary preaching of Scripture.
I’m a big believer in base hit preaching.
Mike McKinley warns of some of the dangers of trying to preach a home run sermon every week. It can cause the preacher to cherrypick exciting texts and ignore others, he writes. It can tempt the preacher to over-rely on emotion. It can train the congregation to believe that nothing significant is happening it the sermon isn’t particularly exciting.
“I’m not sure that ‘home run’ sermons are used by God to accomplish much more than ‘normal’ sermons,” he writes. “They are more exciting, but I don’t know that they are necessarily the means of more conversions or more sanctification.”
It can be particularly tempting to want to preach a home run sermon on a special day like Easter. The greater the pressure, the more necessary it may be to focus on the fundamentals of preaching, and to aim to, clearly and simply, put Jesus before people, and to trust God to do his work.
“Perhaps you have planned in your mind that God will raise up an extraordinary preacher whose ministry will attract the multitude, and while he is preaching, God the Holy Spirit will attend the word, so that hundreds will be converted under every sermon,” preached Charles Spurgeon.
“Now it may be that God will so visit us,” he continued. But in the meantime, we may miss out on “all the good which he may be pleased to give us because it does not happen to come in the shape which we have settled in our own minds to be the proper one.” After all, “It has very frequently happened that while men have been sketching out imaginary designs, they have missed actual opportunities.”
When the church is healthy, we don’t need extraordinary sermons, Spurgeon argues. “The only thing they would need in the great assemblies, over and above worship, would be a short encouraging and animating word of direction addressed to them, as to well drilled and enthusiastic soldiers, who need but the word of command, and the deed of valour is straightway performed.”
Let’s stop craving for home run preaching. It comes with dangers we’d do well to avoid. Don’t miss what God accomplishes through ordinary sermons, trusting God to do his work as Christ is proclaimed, and as the Spirit accomplishes his work through the faithful and ordinary preaching of the word.
