The sermon you hear on your iPod is significantly inferior to the preaching you hear at your local church on Sunday morning. Here’s why:

1. The preacher doesn’t know you. Although preaching is not the only aspect of shepherding, ideally preaching and shepherding should go together. A preacher feeds his flock the Word of God, though always presenting it in a way that’s meaningful for that particular congregation. To your pastor, you’re a known family member sitting around the (metaphorical) table; to your podcast preacher, you’re a hit, an anonymous number.
2. You can choose your sermons. Podcasts are perfect for people with itching ears (that’s all of us). Each sermon is labeled and invites us to download or delete it. When I go to my local church on Sunday, I usually don’t know the details of the pastor’s sermon. He commits to preach the Word of God as it’s written, and I commit to listen, test and obey the preached Word as I hear it. Dodging difficult messages is harder when you don’t see them coming.
3. You can listen while distracted. When you listen to a preacher while driving down the interstate eating your lunch, you’re probably not going to be able to concentrate quite as well as if you were sitting in church. The very value of podcasting is that we can take our preachers with us, so the assumption is that we’ll be multitasking when we listen. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with multitasking, but it’s not worship.
4. You can listen without your Bible. Although this is possible to do in church, the on-the-go multitasking quality of podcast audiences makes this much more likely. Having a Bible on hand as we listen lets us see as well as hear the Word; it also lets us quickly check the context of a verse and engage in on-the-fly testing of the preacher’s message.
5. You’re alone. In church I am both encouraged and challenged by the fact that I see my Christian family worshipping with me. Fellowship with God is accompanied by fellowship with his family. Although podcasting and Internet participation carry with them the idea of a virtual community, it’s still only virtual. I know there may be thousands of other believers sharing the podcast with me, but I don’t know who they are. Neither will they know me.
6. He’s always preaching to someone else. When we listen to a podcast preacher, it’s almost always someone else’s preacher. When the preacher challenges his congregation, it’s always someone else who’s being challenged, not me. Not only am I anonymous and unaccountable, the preacher isn’t even expecting me to be accountable.
7. It’s usually out of context. Sermons are an integral part of church worship, which usually includes other elements like singing, prayer, confession, communion and giving. To take the sermon out of that context deprives it of the participation and preparation that is a valuable part of the in-church sermon.

I’m not saying that we need to delete all of our podcast subscriptions. There are obviously exceptions to all the points I’ve just made.

Clearly, there is value in hearing the Word of God preached well by anyone, but our primary source of spiritual sustenance, beyond our own Bible study and prayer, should come through membership in a local church with a preacher that faithfully preaches God’s Word.

Everything else is gravy. Tasty, but not filling.

(Full disclosure. My own podcast list, in order of most listened to, is Sinclair Furguson, Alistair Begg, and RC Sproul.)

Jesus: Maveling and Moved

A Grace that Saves Suffices

Here’s what I find so attractive and refreshing:

1. It respects the power of the Word. Furguson doesn’t promise to rock our world, yet he does so simply by preaching simply.
2. It shows the benefit of going deep. Furguson knows the Bible, and it shows in the observations and insights he passes on to his congregation.
3. It engages the whole person. I love the way Furguson invites you to think with him about the Scripture, and then he moves beyond logic and touches the soul and the heart as well. Don’t tell anyone, but the conclusions of these sermons made me a little teary eyed.
4. It shows the benefit of sane thinking. A good pastor need not be out of his mind. Furguson uses careful thinking and logic to reveal profound insights that are not obvious at first reading.
5. It reaches the whole family. Notice at the beginning how children are encouraged to read the Word and follow the sermon. There aren’t any bouncers at the doors of this church.
6. The focus is on Jesus. These sermons are a careful study of Jesus and his grace. The first one, Marveling and Moved, invites you to sit and watch the Savior for as long as you possibly can. Furguson, through the Gospel, paints a picture of a loving Savior from whom you would never want to avert your eyes.
7. It is expository exaltation. When you hear the Word of God preached well, how can you not worship? As Piper said,
   

   Preaching does not come after worship in the order of the service. Preaching is worship. The preacher worships—exults—over the word, trying his best to draw you into a worshipful response by the power of the Holy Spirit.

8. It feeds the sheep. These sermons are excellent examples of how we can eat the Word. Learning anew of Jesus’ grace is life changing. Although these sermons don’t start out promising to solve some felt need, their life application is at once profound and practical.
9. It witnesses to the lost. After listening to the Word of God being proclaimed so clearly to the saints, how would you not want to know Jesus as your Savior? Furguson shows that good preaching to Christians is inherently evangelistic.
10. The accent is just right. Reformed theology and Scottish accents just work so well together (sorry, pastor).

All biblical worship is seeker-sensitive worship. The question is, who is the one seeking the worship?

The Father seeks such [us?] to worship him.

Put in other words, all biblical worship should be seeker sensitive to the One who seeks that worship from his creatures and from his children–the Lord Himself.

And it is so fascinating, if tragic, to see what shock appears in people’s faces when one says that the really important thing about our worship is not that it pleases me, but that it pleases Him.

That God and his Word has told me not simply how I may be justified, but how I am to worship him. That my pleasure in worship is not the goal of my worship, but a byproduct of the pleasure of the God that I worship.

Now that’s preaching.

Listen to the whole thing if you can. It’s the Strange Fire sermon that you’ll find here. The Scottish accent makes it sound even better.