Sometime ago, already, we made a number of claims designed to interest you in continuing our conversation about covenantal preaching. Two of those claims have been explained — that only covenantal preaching is fully biblical preach­ing, and that only covenantal preaching is biblically evangelistic preaching. Two claims remain to be explained — that only covenan­tal preaching is healthy experien­tial preaching, and that only covenantal preaching is edifyingly pastoral preaching.

Experiential preaching will be healthy and sound to the extent that it is covenantal preaching.

What is experiential preaching?⤒🔗

Sometimes called "experimen­tal" preaching, this kind of preaching tends to apply the preaching text to the personal spir­itual experience of listeners. Often the phrase "experiential preach­ing" refers to sermons addressed to the heart. The preacher's expla­nation of the Bible passage issues in calls for self-examination and warnings against presumption, accompanied by the summons to surrender to God and to fight the reflexes of the old nature.

Perhaps you will be helped by this description from the pen of Dr. Joel Beeke, who belongs to a church in the Reformed family that continues to emphasize this kind of preaching. In his series of articles about Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine (eighteenth century Scottish preachers), Dr. Beeke observes that

The Erskine sermons were a combination of doctrinal and experimental (experiential) expo­sition. Doctrinally they focused on the great, central themes of Christianity: the person and work of Christ, sin and salvation, faith and hope, and God's grace. Experimentally they dealt with such matters as comfort, assur­ance, assistance in trials, and the privileges of being a Christian.

The Banner of Sovereign Grace Truth, April 2000, p. 89

Such matters as comfort, assur­ance, assistance in trials, and the privileges of being a Christian. Here you catch the flavor of what we mean by experiential preach­ing. It is marked by attention to one's personal relationship to the Lord — the peaks and valleys in that relationship, its stresses and strains as well as its blessing and beauties.

Experiential preaching provides sustained attention to the order of salvation in the believer's life. The phrase "order of salvation" is a traditional way in Reformed dog­matics of dealing with personal experiences like calling, regenera­tion, faith, conversion, justifica­tion, sanctification, perseverance, assurance, and glorification. This kind of preaching opens the preaching text to trace the dynam­ics of the Holy Spirit's application of Christ's salvation to the believ­er.

Unfortunately, some experiential preaching also includes an approach to the facts of salvation history whereby these events are individualized and turned inward. For example, each person must experience his or her own "Christmas" — it's not enough that Jesus was born in Bethlehem long ago; Jesus must be born in your heart, too. Every believer must experience his or her own Peniel, that exhausting struggle for God's blessing that leaves its mark upon your soul. Genuine Christianity means that I have my own Gethsemane experience, my own Pentecost. This kind of experien­tial preaching occurred in the Dutch Second Reformation, in reaction to the dry and lifeless preaching arising out of post-Reformation scholasticism.

History of salvation versus order of salvation? (1)←⤒🔗

Experiential preaching has received, in some Reformed and Presbyterian quarters, extremely negative press in the twentieth century.

A theologian as insightful and imposing as Dr. Klaas Schilder, a Dutch Reformed churchman whose refreshing writing and preaching during the 1920s through the 1940s sought to cor­rect a number of imbalances in the preaching of his time, was very critical of the individualism and inwardness of sermons in the Reformed churches of the Netherlands. He complained that the experiential preaching of his day emphasized the facts of per­sonal religious experience rather than the facts of salvation history. Schilder warned against psycholo­gizing the Bible — using the stories of the Bible merely to illustrate and teach lessons about the life of the believer's soul. Coupled to this, complained Schilder and oth­ers (like B. Holwerda and M.B. van 't Veer), was the error of mor­alizing the message of the preach­ing text by using questions of per­sonal ethics as the entrance into the text and the controlling frame­work for interpreting and preach­ing the text. The practice of indi­vidualizing the events of salvation history — whereby each person needs his own Peniel or Christmas or Gethsemane — was severely criticized by these Reformed Bible lovers.

Their remedy for correcting this imbalanced approach to the Bible in preaching was an approach to Bible exegesis and preaching that has come to be known as the redemptive-historical approach.

Generally speaking, the redemp­tive-historical approach interprets and preaches the sermonic text within the larger context of God's unfolding program of salvation, a program narrated from Genesis to Revelation. This approach enables the preacher to open up the "line" of salvation — the thread of God's history-long enterprise — which runs through the preaching text. Attention is focused on what God is doing here, in this episode or narrative, that is new. What progress of redemption is being revealed in this particular preach­ing text? This approach empha­sizes that the central Actor or Character in every Bible story is God, not man. The central ques­tion is, What is God doing? rather than, What lesson can I learn for my personal walk with God?

According to this approach, then, preachers will avoid isolating Bible passages from the flow and development of God's redemption in history. When our interpretation and preaching are controlled by the unity and interrelatedness of the Bible's history, we will avoid the errors of individualizing or psychologizing or moralizing the preaching text. To focus on Joseph's struggle of soul or on Samson's sin or Martha's distract­edness or Thomas's doubt is to disconnect their stories from God's story. This focus reduces their function in the Bible to that of examples of behavior we must imitate or avoid. Rather, the peo­ple in the Bible stories — Joseph and Samson and Saul and David and Martha and Zacchaeus and Peter and Thomas — are each in the Bible for the sake of Jesus Christ. Their "responses" must be interpreted and preached in rela­tion to the person and work of Jesus Christ. Often, the human characters in these Bible stories are positive or negative types pointing forward to the need for Jesus Christ, who is the Fulfillment of their office or func­tion in history.

If you wish to read a summary and an example of this approach to Bible interpretation, pick up the first volume of Promise and Deliverance by S.G. de Graaf and read the Introduction. He wrote this comprehensive study of the Bible for those who teach chil­dren, and in his introduction he outlines a redemptive-historical approach to interpreting and teaching the Bible. I know some parents who have found his four-volume set quite helpful for fami­ly devotions.

History of salvation versus order of salvation? (2)←⤒🔗

Even today, as in the days of Schilder, theologians and preach­ers are turning to a redemptive-historical approach of exegesis and sermonizing in order to cor­rect the imbalance of an individu­alistic and psychologizing use of the Bible.

Their aim is laudable; their con­cerns are legitimate. Too many sermons enter the preaching text controlled by our questions, our moral dilemmas, our spiritual problems, and these sermons exit the text with little more than recipes for our moral and spiritual conduct. A series of sermons on "How to Stay Married and Love It" or "Four Keys to Raising Godly Children" or "Moses: A Model of Biblical Leadership" inevitably use (as in: pick and choose) parts of the preaching text selected to answer a prior question or to fit a homiletical agenda — without opening up the whole preaching text in its biblical, his­torical, literary, and redemptive context.

Concerns about moralizing and psychologizing — that is, focusing on the individualized, man-cen­tered moral and spiritual "payoff" of the text while ignoring what God is doing in the story — are legitimate concerns. But too much preaching that is being called "redemptive historical" consists of sermons that ignore the personal faith-responses present in the preaching text. In fact, this correc­tive approach practices selection, too. Only those facts of history and elements in the text that can be "related to Christ" become grist for the "redemptive-historical" homiletical mill. Unfortunately, the "flour" ground by this mill fre­quently does not make for edible and nutritious bread.

History of salvation versus order of salvation? (3)←⤒🔗

So, which do you prefer? Preaching that opens up from the text the progress of salvation in order to exalt God's activity in his­tory, or preaching that opens up from the text the application of salvation in order to exalt divine activity in the human soul?

So-called moralistic preaching chooses the latter. So-called redemptive-historical preaching opts for the former.

Before you choose, read this advice:

"But the order of salvation is not inherently or evidently contradic­tory to the history of salvation. Rather, it is an integral part of the history of salvation. We could even call it, with a positive sense, the personal history of salvation.

A history of salvation in Christ is inconceivable without this so-called order of salvation. Were we nonetheless to ignore the order of salvation, we would simply be turning the history of salvation into an abstraction. This attempted approach would retain a number of facts within a composition, but we would never discover a real person in this composition. More serious still, this would be to speak of Christ while forgetting the Holy Spirit who stands in Christ's service."

Preaching and the History of Salvation: Continuing an Unfinished Discussion, by C. Trimp, p. 118

Sermons on Bible passages deal­ing with episodes in the lives of Noah or Abraham or Elijah or Martha or Thomas that refuse to examine the personal faith-responses of these human charac­ters arise from a mistaken view of moralism. Because these personal faith-responses are present in the preaching text, these responses must become part of the procla­mation of that text! How they become part of the proclamation is the real issue.

Why do we need experiential preaching?←⤒🔗

If the ultimate goal of preaching is not that we know the Bible, but that we know God, then sermons should emphasize living out one's personal relationship with the Lord!

Living out that personal relation­ship is best described by the word "covenant." Believers are to live all of life in constant awareness of God's presence and of His claim upon every thought, motive, and action. When your love relation­ship with God is fallow and lethargic, that should be exposed and remedied by gospel preach­ing. We desperately need preach­ing that exposes presumption of any kind — our inclination to assume, by virtue of our baptism or our church membership or our background that we are saved without exhibiting the fruit of sal­vation. Such presumption is dead­ly. And because our fight against sin as we seek to be holy will continue all the way to the grave, we need God's Word to identify sin's stratagems and to map out the path to victory.

Another reason for experiential preaching is the nature of the gospel itself. The gospel produces joy and eases doubt; it comforts the spirit and orders our affec­tions. The gospel is as penetrating as sin and as comprehensive as the law, leaving no aspect of human existence and personality' unaf­fected. Regularly the gospel com­mands you to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, and with all your strength." Because "the heart (or soul or mind) is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick" (Jer. 17:9), the gospel equips you to "watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life" (Prov. 4:23). Most often when the Bible speaks of the human heart, it is referring to a capacity belonging to the individual personality. Sin spreads from a person's heart to other dimensions of life, includ­ing social and political structures like marriage and government. Therefore, the gospel is addressed most basically, most personally to the individual heart, and once the gospel takes root, its gracious renewal spreads from the heart to all other dimensions of life.

A third stimulus to experiential preaching is that, like the Scriptures themselves, the Reformed Confessions are saturat­ed with the language of believing personal experience! Any church faithfully schooled in the hearty refrain "we believe" of the Belgic Confession stoutly rejects any separation of any doctrine from life. If you are a believer personal­ly nurtured on "your only comfort in life and death" (note well: not "the" only comfort, but your only comfort), you gladly hears news of your sin, your deliverance, and your calling. And any fellowship learning how to live out their con­fession of ULTIP so pastorally presented in the Canons of Dort is unembarrassed by pulpit talk about a personal relationship with the Lord.

Preaching from heart to heart←⤒🔗

Another way of describing this kind of preaching is to say that experiential preaching is heart to heart communication, from God's heart to our hearts.

In God's covenantal Word, He opens His heart to us in such a way that He lays claim to my heart. In covenantal preaching God's heart speaks to my heart, saying, "I will be your God, so you must be my child." And my heart responds, "Amen!" That is how God opens His heart to me. First, with the attracting promises of the gospel-promises whose inherent power pulls me forward and upward. Second, with the healthifying requirements of the law-demands that become, as I obey them, the path for life.

Perhaps the preeminent pattern for this kind of communication is the book of Psalms. Here faith responds to and reaches out for the heart of our covenant God, the LORD. No subject is off limits, no zone of life is out of bounds. Rather, every experience of life is "discussed" in the context of God's relationship with His child — that is: in the context of the covenant.

Healthy experiential preaching opens the Bible, specifically the preaching text, in such a way that the faith-experiences of Bible characters are interpreted within the warmth, the order, the design, and the progress through history of that relationship.

Covenantal preaching refuses to shy away from texts (or those parts of texts) that reveal to us the faith-experience of believers.

Here is why.

The gospel of Christ's first com­ing was published in the forward-looking OT and in the backward-looking NT (which also looks ahead to His second coming). This gospel has been revealed to us not only as the history of God's activi­ty, but also as the canonical histo­ry of the various faith-responses of God's children. In other words, the Bible's history is covenantal (God-and-His-children-in-rela­tionship) history — a single history of one relationship between God and His children. Covenantal preaching will disclose the spiritu­al dynamics of the "inner person" present in the preaching text, seeking to cultivate, order, and tutor the souls of believers by the gospel of grace and peace.

So beware of false dilemmas and the false choices they breed! We need not choose, after all, between preaching that opens up from the text the progress of salvation in order to exalt God's work in history, or preaching that opens up from the text the application of salvation in order to exalt God's work in the human soul.

In fact, to choose between these imaginary alternatives of empha­sizing either the history of salva­tion or the order of salvation would be, in so many ways, suici­dal.