Does our preaching lack bite?

Why do you preach?  Why do you listen to preaching?  Why do study the Bible?  I wonder how you answer those questions.  We preach, listen and study to hear from God, to understand more about who God is revealing himself to be and more of what he says about everything.  It is therefore, vital that we are listening to the text, working hard on what it said then and what it says now.  We must not jump straight to application or glean only from the passage what we feel the we want to hear, or what we are convinced our people need or want.  We don't start with application, we start with God's word to us as he reveals himself.

But here is where I have a concern, I notice it in myself, in my Bible Study, in my preaching and in my listening.  Often when I study and listen God's word lacks bite because having done the work on the text I so often stop at the implication rather than getting on to the application.  By implication I mean the principle which God is teaching us from a passage - for example the calling to go make disciples.  Its great that we hear that message, we need more than ever (not sure that's the right phrase - as much as ever?) to hear that call.  But if we just leave it at that it remains an implication, it is vague, it is nebulous and I am not sure what that really looks like in my week.

We need to work hard to make the implications of the text into applications, to take the implication and rub it into our lives and the lives of our hearers.  To flesh out in this example what it means to make disciples as being to be developing relationships with others, to be sharing life with them deeply, to be able to ask spiritually significant questions of an other, to be studying and applying God's word to an other, to be inviting them to see Christ in us as we live life together.  To be inviting them into your home.  To be talking about making disciples as a life long ongoing relationship.  To be giving people tools to be able to study the bible with others and be showing them why this needs to happen.  To be applying this implication to people in terms of; dads this is what you are doing with your children - you are making disciples with them - how?  In what they see you love, in how they see you treat the wife God has blessed you with, in how they see you fight sin, do good and call sinners to faith in Jesus.  In terms of church leaders - are you growing other church leaders?  Are you investing heavily in the next generation who will invest heavily in the next generation.

An implication is the principle the passage calls us to live out.  An application is what it looks like to live that out.  I wonder if sometimes we don't do that because we worry it rules out others in the congregation.  So we don't apply the need to be making disciples to dads because we worry about excluding the single woman, or the retired, or the teenager.  But in fleshing out implication as application we give people a model for how they can think this through themselves.  And over time if you track the groups you apply stuff in a detailed way to (and we will natural find it easiest to do it for those like us) you can make sure you over time cover everyone.

Teaching God's word always starts with God's word, but we haven't really taught God's word until we've shown the connection to peoples front lines.