Video Transcript: Introduction to Ministry Speaking

Welcome to this short course, entitled, so you've been asked to speak. My name is Bruce Ballast. And I have the privilege of leading this course for you. And I just want to give a caveat here on so you've been asked to speak. Now I'm going to  

assume here several things. One, that you are somebody who's been asked  maybe to preach in your church, or maybe you've been asked to give devotions. Or maybe you've been asked to lead a Bible study and be the main speaker in  that Bible study, I'm going to assume that you in some way or another have  been asked to speak. And this course is intended to help you put together your  talk your sermon, your message, in such a way that it will be effective, impactful, and helpful to the people to whom you speak. Now, a couple of caveats about  that. And one is that I am somebody who is a preacher, and I teach preaching,  at CLI. And what you're going to get in this class is a small section of a much  larger course a 36 session course that exists in CLI on preaching. And I  encourage you if you're interested in what's here to go there, and you will learn  more. But for now, what I want to remind you of is that I am a preacher, and so  much of what I say in this class will apply to preaching. And I'm going to refer to  preaching and sermons. However, the principles that I'm going to give you will fit in any kind of talk that you might want to give. And so with that in mind, we are  going to talk about so you've been asked to speak. Now, one thing I want you to  take note of as we begin is, of course, who's speaking to you. And so just a brief word of introduction. First of all, I'm somebody who was in ministry for I still am,  in some respects for 40 plus years. During that time, I got to serve three  churches as pastor and I began to look at speaking and the art of speaking and  efficiently it's known as rhetoric. Very, very early on, when I was still in seminary, I had the privilege of working with an older man who was just six months from  retirement and a good preacher. And so, you know, my first Sunday working with him in Tucson, Arizona, I got up and preached one of my seminary messages.  And then on Monday we got together to talk about that message. And he looked  at me on Monday, and with a sense of disappointment, but hope. He said, You  know what, everything you said was right, biblically, it was true, he said, but  nobody was listening after the first five minutes. Talk about crushing to a  seminary student who's trying to do his best and preaching and all of a sudden,  I've been stabbed here, I don't, I don't understand what's happening. But then  he said to me, Well, let's go back and reconstruct that message with the hearer  in mind. And so we did that. And we did that each week. During the 10 weeks, I  worked with him during a summer. That was so helpful to me. And that began  me on a set me on a search for what is effective preaching and teaching. As I  have read voluminously on the subject, I have practiced what I am going to  share with you and preach to you today. And in the coming sessions, I have  looked at this stuff carefully to find out what is effective. Now a caveat again,  what is effective is often what the Holy Spirit does with it, not necessarily what  you are intended to get done. But still there are some skilled skill actions. So 

skill secrets to know that will help you be more effective for having people tune  into you when you are when you are talking somewhere. So let's begin today by  just asking the question, where do messages come from? Messages can come  from a variety of places, I guess, messages may come from God. When you  look back at the Old Testament, you'll find that those prophets in the Old  Testament received messages from God, God said to them, now you go and say this to the other people. And so it was a message direct from God. And the  prophets wouldn't say, I am saying this, they would say God says this, Jehovah  Yahweh says this. And it was a message directly from God. Now sometimes  when you have those kinds of messages, oh, man, that is exciting. I've had that  happen a few times in my life, where I just felt like this was God's message for  this people at this time in this place. And one of them was when I was a guest.  In fact, I was at a church that was considering to calling me as pastor and on  Saturday night at a dinner Some people from the church, one of the elders of  the church suggested that I talk about something other than what I had planned  to in preaching. And I said, No, I can't, I said, I can't do that. Because if I do that, the people are going to be distracted, and they won't listen to the message that  I've come to bring. And I have a message for this church that I believe is direct  from God. Those are great moments. Now for me. They happen with occasional  kind of frequency. They didn't happen all the time. But I knew occasionally, that I  had a message from God. And so sometimes you may have that, that you're  feeling this burden, and you feel like there's something you just have to share  with somebody. In fact, I'm preaching in a couple of weeks in a church as a  guest pastor, and I sent in my scripture passage to the worship director there,  add my title, and just a summary of my sermon so that she can plan worship  effectively. And she sent an email back saying, Whoa, so this is something says, we had a woman shared just two weeks ago in our church, she's a member of  our church, and she was reading the same passage you've given me to preach  on. And and she just said, she had to share this because she felt it was a  message from God for the church. And she said, I feel like God must be saying  something, if you're going to preach on that passage, too. Sometimes God does  that you're reading the scriptures, you're planning something. And it's just this  overwhelming sense of, I've got to share this message, Paul says it, you know,  Woe to me, if I don't preach, I'm compelled to preach, because I have this  incredible message from God. So messages come from God. Secondly, we  would say that messages from the Bible, especially if you're preaching, this is  where you will, all of a sudden get a message, we're going to talk about some of the ways that happens. But you may be reading a passage and you say, oh, that will preach, that will, that will be something that will be meaningful for people to  whom I'm speaking. And so you will begin to form a message in your mind  based on what you find in the Bible. The Bible as your preaching should be the  source of every message that you have, in one way, shape, or form. So we 

could say that, where do messages come from? Well, they come from the Bible,  and they come from studying the Bible, and they come from, you're looking at  how God views the world from the Bible. So messages come from the Bible. A  third place they come from are what I'm going to call connections, where do  messages come from are connections, that are connections that are made in  our hearts and minds. That's the picture there in our heart, that all of a sudden,  we have a conviction about something. And so we say this, this has to be, I have to give this message. I was reading somebody recently who wrote a book. And it was a book that was a basic a Bible study. But this person had been in Nepal,  and had been up in the mountains there. And it found out the reality of slavers,  people who are going in purchasing young girls for prostitution down in the main country, main capital of the country. And her heart was so burdened that she  began studying the Bible. And so what did I have to say to this? What is the  responsibility for my church, back in the United States what it was a connection  that was made in her heart, sometimes it's made in your mind. Sometimes it's  connection of something, you hear something, you see something you read, or  maybe you listen to a sermon or read a sermon, you think that that is something  that, you know, in the vernacular of us preachers, we say, That will preach, that  is something that I will preach. So messages can come from all of these different sources, they are from these places, might come from a sermon that you've  listened to or read, you know, I read other people's sermons with quite a bit of  frequency. And sometimes I will look at that. And I'll say, You know what, I know,  I know that this is going to make an impact. And so I borrow and we're gonna  talk about plagiarism and some time pointing here that you can't just take  somebody else's message and use it without first checking the accuracy,  according to accuracy of assigning credit where credit is due. That's what I'm  trying to say. So messages come from all of these kinds of places. And we're  going to look at how when you get a message like that, what do you do with it?  And so in the next session, we're going to check that out a little more carefully,  where messages come from, but the kinds of messages that can be developed,  as you think about you've been asked to speak somewhere. There are basically  two different kinds. If you want more to know about that you can do Check out  the class, Christian leaders institute that will lead on preaching where we talk  about various kinds of sermons. But we're going to look at two different kinds,  two different approaches to Scripture. And so I invite you to come back for the  next session, and we'll resume this. Thank you