Listening to Sermons

How did God speak to you? Has always been a question I hear when we discuss a sermon from church or somewhere else. Generally people (and I tried too) to rephrase the question to, "Did anything from the sermon jump out or stick out to you?".

I mean, that's not a bad question to ask because the Holy Spirit does work in our hearts and sometimes only one thing from the sermon really speaks to us. But the more I think about it and how people struggle to give a response to a vague and general question like that, the more I realize I may not be asking a very helpful question.

If the pastor is faithful in preaching the word of God, then God will be speaking through the pastor on every point he makes, so long as it is consistent with the scripture (The Second Helvetic Confession, Chapter 1). And if that is the case with the preaching I hear, then what I hear from the preacher is what God is speaking to me about, whether it is immediately relevant or not.

So maybe the better questions are:

• What did God say? (i.e. What was preached in the sermon?)
• This is to refresh the mind with the contents of the sermon.
• What did you learn?
• Similar to the "anything jump out?" thing, sometimes the person may say "nothing new" and to that you can ask...
• What did the sermon exhort you to do?
• To recall the "application" part.
• Are you doing it?
• Many hear the application but it doesn't "jump out" at them because it's nothing new, but if God has told us what to do and we're not doing it, then we're merely hearers of the word (James 1:22-25) and we're disobedient.

Thats it. Perhaps this is one of the less general/vague ways to approach a sermon discussion. Truth is important and the content should be examined, but we cannot merely be hearers of the word.