I watched a YouTube video on landscape photography this past week to learn some tips on composition. Andy Mumford is a professional landscape photographer, and he made a statement in the middle of the video that was so clear and powerful I wrote it down and posted it on my desk.
In photography, as in life, the most important mathematics is subtraction. Subtract all that is distracting and unnecessary until only the essential remains.
What is true in photography and in life is true in preaching.
Subtraction is the key to powerful preaching.
SUBTRACTION RULES
RULE #1: Talk less about self and more about Christ.
I have, sadly, succumbed, at times, to the temptation to talk too much about myself and too little about my Savior. It is an easy trap to fall into as preachers because we have a platform from which to speak and a captive audience who listen. As I have listened to sermons preached by many today, this tendency is even more pronounced. There have been times when I have left a church commenting to my wife that I learned more about the preacher than I learned about Christ. The 19th-century Scottish preacher, James Denney, once said, “You cannot at the same time give the impression that you are a great preacher and that Jesus Christ is a great Savior.” Too many preachers today are trying to be popular instead of making Christ preeminent.
RULE #2: Subtract illustrations before subtracting textual exposition.
God said that His word will accomplish His purpose. It will not return empty (Isaiah 55:11). He promises to use His word, not our words, so our words should be secondary to His word. Many preachers love their illustrations so much that God’s message gets lost in the illustration. Unfortunately, illustrations are like dynamite. They can blow up in your face. Many sermons never recover from an illustration. I have had people remember an illustration but not the message, which misses the whole point of preaching. Remember that some of the greatest preachers in church history did not illustrate much. If you must cut, cut the illustration before you cut the text.
RULE #3: Eliminate rabbit trails that do not support the thrust of the message.
The human mind is prone to run down rabbit trails. Since the mind can process information much faster than words can be spoken and since the average attention span is less than eight seconds, listeners run off after new ideas like a squirrel after a nut. Don’t help them! Every unit of thought in Scripture has a pragmatic thrust. God wants to do something with that passage (2 Tim. 3:16-17). Our job as preachers is to grasp the main thrust of a passage and preach it effectively. Every passage has one big idea and perhaps several subordinate thoughts to support it. Every passage also has many small ideas that will lead us down rabbit trails. The small ideas are interesting, but we must not let the small ideas distract our listeners from the big ideas. Let’s not allow temporal thoughts to distract us from eternal truths.
RULE #4: Reduce information clutter rather than substantive application.
Someone has said that many sermons exhibit diarrhea of words and constipation of thought. Like a hoarder whose house is so cluttered we can’t find the important stuff, some sermons dump so much information on us we can’t sort it out. Sermons are not academic lectures. They are persuasive and transformative messages. Every sermon should lead listeners to a fresh encounter with God. Every sermon should call people to the point of decision at the altar of their hearts. Application, not information, is the heart of preaching. The verb parakaleo is commonly used in the New Testament for preaching. It means to urge, exhort, encourage, and comfort. These are applicational concepts. Sometimes information – even good information – so clutters a sermon that people miss the application to their lives in the stacks of words. Give less information so that the application remains clear.
Andy Mumford, the professional photographer, pointed out that the human brain is very good at editing out extraneous information to create order out of chaos. When the human eye observes a landscape, the mind edits what it pays attention to in the scene. Some details are simply not remembered. Psychologists call this capacity “differentiated attention.” A photo must do that for the human eye. The difference between a snapshot and a photograph is the difference between chaos and order. Snapshots contain much extraneous information, but a photo that captures the eye subtracts distracting information, so the essential remains. Every picture and every sermon have a focal point. Every element in the picture or sermon supports the focal point.
We don’t want our audience distracted by the grandeur of the scene, the cleverness of our stories, or the rabbit trails of the mind. Listeners will sort through the clutter of our sermons to find some essential truth in the message because that is human nature. Powerful preaching helps them out!
