"You preach what you know, and impart who you are"
~(forgot which pastor/missionary said this)
Larry Randolph, a pastor, once said that everyone has one life message. It's the message that you would preach if you knew you were going to die tomorrow. All other messages you preach in your lifetime have that one life message as an overtone. It doesn't matter what you're preaching about.
Even if you look at the gospels. A lot of the gospels have repeated stuff, but if you read them side by side, it's still a little different. Each of them mention/notice/remember different parts or different perspectives. And John. I always thought it was cute that John referred to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Just by reading the gospel of John, we can get a sense of who John is. Likewise, we can get a sense of what the preacher is like just by listening to a sermon or two.
If you give two preachers the same sermon outline and ask them both to preach, I'm sure the messages they preach will still be pretty different--or at least have different overtones. We preach from what's inside. Knowledge is good. Knowledge is very good. People die for lack of knowledge. But knowledge doesn't always change us. Knowing God changes us. Loving God changes us. God loving us changes us. God changes us.
In fact, everyone you love and value and treasure changes you. That's a reason why we should not love anyone above God. It is dangerous to do so.
So yea, we preach what we know, but more importantly, we impart who we are.
Sometimes when people preach to me, I don't remember what they said (because they said a lot and went seemingly 'off topic' a lot), but it was still good. I come out with a satisfaction for the preaching/answer they gave and I come out feeling like I understand God better and have a deeper grasp of who He is and His word. But I can't always summarize the sermon or the answer or the conversation. ... yea dude, a lot of preachers preach like that. They don't preach in bullet points; they don't do the three/five step/point preaching, but their preaching is continuous going from one idea/concept to another and usually in the middle of their preaching I feel like what they're saying is really awesome/good/helpful but I have no idea how it connects with the topic. But I'm like whatever, it was good. And at the end of the sermon, I feel like they preached on 20 different things all in one sermon. Probably because everything is connected. And you can't really expound on one thing without going into another thing. (hence my super long blog post) And everything connects back to your core beliefs and your understanding of God.
Like, two people can hear the same message and come out with different interpretations/lessons of that message. A pastor talks about God's love and grace, and two people summarize what they learned. One person says the preacher said that God is so loving that He washed us clean and He loves us as we are. Another can say that he thought the message was that even we are so bad, God still loves us. There is a difference in emphasis.
Version 1: God loves us because of Him, because He chose to love us. He has washed us clean.
Version 2: We are so bad, but God still loves us. God loves us even though we are so horrible.
[I heard that among Asian evangelical Christians, the second one is more often used, especially in prayer "thank you Lord for loving us even though we are so horrible"]
So it's not just the literal sermon, not just the knowledge that the sermon contains. It's the pastor who preaches it--his life, his understanding of God, his life message/overtone in the preaching. It is also about our understanding of God.
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