Ready to Receive: Getting the Most from a Sermon

Ready to Receive: Getting the Most from a Sermon

July 22, 2025

Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell

Guest: Dave Christensen

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 7/22/25. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Jamie Mitchell:

Well welcome friends to another installment of Stand In the Gap. Today I am your host, Jamie Mitchell, director of church culture at the American Pastors Network. Okay, here’s a question for you. We’re going to be on the honors system on whether or not you get this right or not, but here’s the question I have for you today. Can you tell me what your pastor preached on this past Sunday? What was the text? What was the title of his sermon? Here’s a bonus question. Can you tell me what the main points or the outline was if hopefully he had an outline? Now take a moment now. I hope your pastor is such a great preacher that his sermon easily came to your memory and you were able to share quietly there at your home what impact it had on you. And while some individuals might recall specific points or the personal takeaway from a Sunday sermon, a significant portion of congregations typically forget the majority of the sermon context within a short period of time.

According to one source, around 90% of a sermon is forgotten by Monday. Other sources suggest by Wednesday, most people forgotten the sermon completely. Several factors influence. Much of a sermon is remembered. One would say an engagement is are we emotionally engaged with the topic? Is it relevant to us? And that’s more likely help us remember it, repetition and reinforcement, the pastor repeating key points or maybe even using visual aids and helping with retention application. What were the practical steps to take the sermon to the next step and to build it into our lives? Memory retention. The human memory is limited, but people are more likely recall things if it’s done in snippets. And finally, individual differences. Some individuals just naturally better remember detailing than others, and while forgetting a sermon is common, it doesn’t necessarily negate the value of attending church or hearing a sermon or a message.

Sermons can still provide spiritual nourishment, encouragement and offer opportunities for personal growth even if specific details are forgotten. Yet as a Bible believing Christian, we should be strategic about hearing and absorbing a sermon. The apostle Paul wrote this, faith comes by hearing the word of God. I would suggest that Paul is not just telling us to be present when the sermon is delivered, but actually receive it and then use it as fuel for life change. Today on Stand of the Gap, we want to consider this issue of how to listen to a sermon in such a way that it will change our lives and most importantly, conform us into the image of our blessed savior Jesus Christ, and to help us. I’m so glad to welcome back a returning guest to Stand In the Gap, Dr. Dave Christensen, who is the founder and director of the Rephidim Project, which helps pastors become more biblical and effective preachers. But today we’re going to be on the other side of it, how to receive a sermon. Dave, welcome back to Stand in the Gap.

Dave Christensen:

Hi, Jamie, thanks for having me on the program again. This is such a great topic because preaching is really dialogical. It is dialogue. The preacher speaks. Listeners respond. The preacher can talk until he is blue in the face, but if nobody’s listening, nothing much happens. So we have to learn to hear before we can hear to learn.

Jamie Mitchell:

Amen. Amen. Dave, you heard my opening and I know that you’re devoted to helping preachers preach better, but the reality is that you can be an unbelievable preacher, but if the congregation isn’t ready to receive the word of God and then know what to do with it, sadly his work, I don’t want to say is in vain, but he can certainly feel that. Dave, as we begin, can you explain why the sermon is important for the child of God and how does life change happen through the preached word?

Dave Christensen:

It’s interesting, Jamie, that Jesus never wrote any books and he didn’t commission any books to be written. He spoke, he preached and the disciples listened. Jesus said He who has ears to hear, let him hear. He didn’t say He who has eyes to see. Let me see from beginning to end, the Bible is a book about a God who speaks and people who listen and respond. The spiritual formation process in the Bible is really very simple. God’s the teacher. His word is his teaching and where to listen and respond to his teaching. Preachers included have to listen and respond, but preachers are merely the conduits through whom God’s teaching comes through people’s ears. So hearing is God’s spiritual aptitude. Test life change happens when we hear God’s word and then do what we hear, but it all starts with a hearing heart. Isaiah says in Isaiah 50, verse four, God awakens my ear to listen as a disciple. So listening well is the key to growing spiritually,

Jamie Mitchell:

Spiritually. Well, Dave, what’s interesting is I think we know the importance of a sermon on a Sunday morning. I mean come to church and we have music and we have fellowship and we pray, but in many respects, the keystone of the day is the sermon. Yet many believers at that point, either they check out or they start kind of drifting in their mind. It really is almost like a spiritual battle. Isn’t it going on when the word is being preached and the believer is there to receive it?

Dave Christensen:

Absolutely. It is a spiritual battle going on as the preacher speaks, as the people listen, that engagement issue, that engagement process is fraught with spiritual warfare and it is in the community setting as the preacher preaches that God’s word begins to affect people’s lives and to change people’s lives, but that’s why prayer has to be fundamental on both ends of this by the preacher and by the listener.

Jamie Mitchell:

I’ll never forget Dave, I attended Moody graduate school in Chicago and I remember hearing a lot of stories about DL Moody, but one of them that was amazing to me was that right underneath his pulpit in his church, he had a room where on Sunday morning he had people gathering there and would ask them to pray right underneath his pulpit. He called it the boiler room because he understood the spiritual battle that was going on as he preached, and the people in the congregation were trying to listen or he was hoping they would listen to hear God’s word. I know each Sunday we normally critique and evaluate the pastor’s sermon, but today we’re critiquing our listening and how well we are doing at intentionally receiving the word of God. We want to heighten the seriousness of you going into church on Sunday ready and prepared to hear God’s word from God’s man.

We want to gain some insights on how a pastor also prepares his sermon each Sunday and what we need to understand about that sermon preparation. And so when we come back, Dave is going to start to help us understand the pastor’s role so that we’re ready to receive so you’re not go anywhere. Well, thank you for being part of our program today, Dave Christensen from the Rephidim Project, the Ministry to Help Preachers Preach Better is my guest. Yet we’re not discussing how to improve the communicator or the preacher, but how to increase our listening skills each Sunday so that we get the most out of every sermon. Dave, you spend a lot of your time helping pastors become more effective expositors of the word. I also realize that not all pastors preach the same or have the same routines and deliveries, yet there are some very basic standard things that a preacher must do each week. I think it would be helpful for us to understand that because if we’re going to try to understand what we’re to receive and how to get the most out of a sermon, we need to know how a pastor is supposed to prepare his sermon and why that should be important to the listener. Can you give us some insights on sermon preparation?

Dave Christensen:

Sure. Jamie, the preacher begins by prayerfully wrestling with the Bible passage. You alluded earlier to the spiritual warfare component of this, so it needs to be a prayerful wrestling with the scripture. He wants to know what the passage meant to the original author and his audience, so he asks himself, what is the thrust of this passage? What is God trying to do with this text? Because God’s the teacher, too many preachers today use the Bible as a resource to sanctify what they want to say about any given topic, not really biblical preaching. A biblical preacher makes sure that the Bible is the source, not just a resource for everything he says. So that’s the first step, the hard work of interrogating the text. The next step is to aim the main thrust or big idea at our world today, what principles rise out of the passage?

How can he frame the sermon to make the text relevant to people today? Then he looks for contemporary life parallels. What is God trying to do with this passage in our lives today? The preacher then applies the passage first to himself, of course, and then to his audience, and finally he gets to the point of decision because every sermon should get to the point of decision because preaching is about life change. It’s calling people to respond in some way to God’s word on the altar of our hearts. So the method we teach is the safins funnel, state it, aim it, frame it, nail it, and seal it.

Jamie Mitchell:

Excellent. Dave. Dave, there are a couple of things you said there that I think would be helpful for people listening to a sermon, and let me bring a couple of these up. When a pastor develops a sermon, one of the things that he should do is figure out the book or the passage that he’s preaching on the author’s intent, meaning what was the actual intent of that author? Explain what that means and why is that important? If you’re listening to a sermon,

Dave Christensen:

Well, it means that what we’re trying to do is find out what Moses got through Moses, of course, but what Moses intended to say when he wrote Deuteronomy or Genesis so that we understand it in their context first. If we don’t do that, we simply can make it say anything almost that we want it to say. So we have to start there, and that’s really hard work to try and figure that out because ultimately what we’re trying to do is expose to people what is God’s point here? Not what is my point as a preacher or somebody else’s point, but what is God’s thrust? What is his point in this passage? What does he want to accomplish with this passage? Because all scripture was given purposefully Timothy Paul tells us in Timothy intended to change us in some way, so it’s important to find out what God intends to change, and that comes through the original author to his original audience.

Jamie Mitchell:

There was another thing you said, Dave. I think it would be really helpful and preachers use this term, and it’s the term, the big idea. I mean, I went to a church the other day and the pastor preached through the entire chapter of one Timothy four, and in that passage in that text, those verses, there’s just a lot of different things that were spoken on and you could discuss and you could go in all different in angles, but there was a big idea of the whole passage when a preacher says, I’m looking for the big idea, what does he mean?

Dave Christensen:

He is looking for the unifying principle in that unit of thought. Good preaching covers units of thoughts in scripture, so what is the unifying thrust or principle of that passage? That’s what he’s looking for because otherwise what you end up with is just sort of stringing pearls together, a whole bunch of unrelated ideas, but that passage, whether it’s a chapter, a paragraph, a book, or even the whole Bible, there’s a main point and that’s what we want to get across.

Jamie Mitchell:

When I’ve talked to preachers about preaching Dave, I’ve used the illustration of hitting the nail that once you set the nail up, you have to take the hammer, and I’m not much of a carpenter, but I’ve never been able to hit the nail time and drive it through the wood or the wall or whatever it takes three, four or five hits at the nail, but I’m hitting the same nail. That’s kind of the idea of the big idea. The big idea is that nail and as you work through the sermon, you’re just tapping and tapping and tapping at that same big idea. Isn’t that the idea with that thought?

Dave Christensen:

Oh, that’s a great analogy. Sure. The whole sermon should be hitting at that nail every time. So what’s the purpose? What are we trying to accomplish with this? We’re just keep hitting that nail. What’s the application? The illustration, it shouldn’t be something irrelevant. It should relate to hitting that same nail every single time all the way to the end.

Jamie Mitchell:

Dave, I struggled as a student throughout high school and it wasn’t until I was a freshman in college that someone said this to me, you need to figure out how the teacher teaches, and what they meant was that every teacher had kind of a certain way that they communicated information, and when I was able to understand that I flourished a student in the same case when it comes to breaking the code of the preacher, every preacher has his own style and his own way of delivery. And is that important if I’m sitting in the pew to listen to a preacher to break his code of how he is attempting to communicate?

Dave Christensen:

Absolutely. I think that’s a really good point. Jamie Phillips Brooks famously said many years ago, preaching is truth through personality, so the Holy Spirit communicates God’s truth through human personalities, yours, mine, but scripturally. Hebrews tells us that God communicated his word through many different people in many different ways. Paul’s style of teaching was very different than Peter’s or James. Jeremiah was different than Isaiah. This is the beauty of how God works and I often to tell preachers to be themselves, don’t try to be somebody else, be themselves because they need to be authentic. People today are looking for authenticity almost more than anything else. They want us to be real. So I would say to your listeners, look, your pastor is different than other pastors and that is a good thing. He shouldn’t be trying to be like some online preacher that you might listen to. He’s different and that’s a good thing. So get to know your pastor, how he communicates, how he speaks, and learn to listen to him and seek to understand what God is telling you through him and the way he communicates. That’s the way to grow spiritually and it’ll also be a great encouragement to your pastor of course, if you’re focused on that.

Jamie Mitchell:

Dave, you make a great point there. Someone while said the difference not wrong, it’s just different, and there probably is something to be said for being able to listen to different styles of preaching and different voices of preachers and still be able to get something out of that sermon, isn’t there?

Dave Christensen:

Absolutely. Jamie, as a homiletics professor, I spent my life listening to sermons, people deliver sermons, evaluating them, all of that. But when I go to church, wherever I am and I’m listening to a sermon, I try not to listen, to critique the pastor. I try to listen to understand how he’s communicating in a way that God wants to change my life. That’s how I become sort of the active listener, somebody who’s involved with the sermon. I’m looking to find out what God wants to teach me, not critiquing the style or so I can listen to lots of different styles of preaching, but I’m looking for the message from God in that sermon.

Jamie Mitchell:

Boy, that is just words of wisdom there because I’ve heard too many, too many Christians go and they hear a certain preacher or maybe even a visiting preacher to their church and they critique them and they’ll say something like this, well, he’s not like pastor so-and-so, and the word to that is amen. We don’t want every preacher to be the same, but we want them preaching the same word of God. Listen, friends, when it comes to listening to a preacher and getting the most out of a sermon, you must understand the style, their delivery, what the preacher’s attempting to accomplish. Do not go anywhere because when we return, how do we become active listeners and be able to learn how to actually receive a sermon and then begin to build it in our lives for transformation? I’m expecting everybody to have a different perspective when you walk into church this coming Sunday, so don’t go anywhere.

Stay with us here. Stand in the gap today. Well, thanks for staying with us, Dave Christiansen. As our guest, our topic is ready to receive getting the most from a sermon. Pastors are responsible to be ready, studied up, and to craft an excellent biblical message each week that will deliver God’s truth to our hearts and our minds and set us up for life change. Yet we’re responsible to be ready to listen and get what he delivers. Dave, I want to get really practical. What are some specific and intentional things that a congregant should do each week to be able to get the most out of a sermon delivered to them?

Dave Christensen:

Well, I would say we have to train ourselves to listen well, because we live in a video saturated world today, people have a hard time listening well, so I would say start by reading the passage before you get to church, maybe the night before that morning and asking God to teach you what he wants you to learn because this is spiritual warfare and you need God’s help. Then as you are listening to the sermon, jot down some takeaways, some explanations that are relevant to your life so you can look at them later. Look for things to do in ways God wants you to change and adjust your life. It’s interesting that CH Spurgeon preached a sermon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1868 entitled Heedful Hearing. You Don’t Hear too many sermons on How to Hear, how to Listen, but his text was Luke eight verse 18 where Jesus exhorted the crowd, take care how you listen, because God could take the opportunity away if you don’t listen well, Spurgeon laid out seven ways to hear God’s word. He said, we must hear attentively, believingly, candidly, devoutly, earnestly, feelingly and gratefully. So I would say cultivate a soft heart before God, a feeling heart, a grateful heart, an earnest heart that wants to understand and grow because hard hearts do not hear God’s word. Hearing is really a matter of the heart more than the ear of the will, more than the mind.

Jamie Mitchell:

Dave, as I was listening to what you were saying, there has been in the words of Spurgeon, a downgrade or there’s been a, I guess taking for granted that we show up for church and we want to have a sense of being entertained, but the old time preachers used to call the pulpit, the Sacred Desk, there was an awesomeness about the idea that we were going to open up the scriptures, that God has written a book and we were going to hear from God. And when Spurgeon says things that we need to be attentive and believing and working through his A, B, C, D, E, F, and G of how to heed fully listen to a sermon, there is a sense of seriousness that the learner has to come to on church. Now, Dave, I am going to be viewed as old fashioned in a dinosaur, but when people ask me about how to get the most out of the sermons, one of the things I say to them is, look, get a good night’s sleep on Saturday night before you show up so you’re not dozing off and not to mention don’t engage in non edifying activities before a Sunday morning because again, it orients your heart not towards the things of God but towards God.

And I’m a big proponent of things like sermon notes and all of that, and you’ve even mentioned there to jot down notes. Can you weigh in on that? And again, maybe as the people in the pure are listening, but maybe even pastors are listening, it’s important to have notes and to write and to follow along in a sermon and engage that way that’s important to both learning and transformational process, isn’t it?

Dave Christensen:

Absolutely. I love your suggestions, Jamie. I’m a dinosaur too, but it’s a well-known communication principle that taking notes just simply helps us remember, put them into our lives. I’ll be really blunt here. I think most preachers don’t provide notes because there’s not that much that is note-worthy. Much preaching today is sort of topical, talks about the preacher’s ideas and some advice with some scripture passages slipped into the sermon to sanctify it, and it’s clever and it’s contemporary, but it’s not very biblical. I call it clickbait preaching. Preachers should be explaining and applying the text of scripture to our lives so that we can see how those verses are relevant to us, and when we do that, it becomes noteworthy. I grew up jotting down sermon notes in the margin of my Bible when I was a teenager, as the pastor explained and applied the text, and years later I could read the passage in my Bible, see my notes in the margins, and remember what I learned so many years ago. I still have that Bible on my desk here. It’s worn out now, so I don’t use it much, but I can still go back and see those notes. So you’re absolutely right. Taking notes can be part of this life-changing process of listening with hearts that hear God’s word.

Jamie Mitchell:

Okay, Dave, I may right now lose most of our audience with this one, but I am a stickler for people actually having a copy of God’s word in their hands, not the pew Bible, and not relying on the words on the screen, which I think are helpful, but I think our preachers are hurting themselves by thinking to themselves, well, I got to put it up on my PowerPoint because nobody’s going to bring my Bible a word to people today about actually having their own copy of God’s word and bringing it with them on a Sunday morning. Why Dave? Is that so vital?

Dave Christensen:

Oh, I love to hear the rustling of pages. You don’t hear it much anymore when you’re preaching, it seems like, but you’re absolutely right. It’s vital. It should be my personal Bible, the one that I read during the week, the one that I go to for times of prayer and reflection so that now I’m jotting down notes in that I’m using that Bible to reflect on in my own personal devotional life during the week, and that’s very old fashioned. You’re absolutely right, but that’s what I’ve done throughout my years. I’m in my seventies now. That’s what I’ve done throughout my years of life, not just as a pastor, but as a listener, as somebody who is trying to always learn and grow, and that’s why I say it’s so important to have that personal bible that you use. You’re absolutely right. I love that,

Jamie Mitchell:

Dave. I visit a lot of churches in my role with the American Pastors Network, but recently I’ve moved and now Chris and I were looking for a new church, and I have to be honest with you, not that I want to be judgmental or seem legalistic, but I’m watching now when I go in and I visit a church and I look around, if I find 15, 20% of the people actually carrying their Bible, I am shocked the matter of fact, I was in a church recently and I was just so encouraged by how many people had their Bible and even some had a little notebook along with them. I thought to myself, have I died and gone to heaven? But there is. We’ve gotten out of the habit and it just tells us, Dave, that when we’re showing up to church, we’re not coming to work. We’re coming to just sit there and to see what you can do to engage me and I’m going to be passive at this thing, and it really doesn’t get us to the place where we need to be, where the word of God then becomes transformative. We just can’t be in that passive mode, can we?

Dave Christensen:

No, we can’t. I’m preaching in a church in a few weeks for a couple of weeks in a row, and I told the pastor I love preaching in his church because the people come with their bibles, they come with their notebooks, they are engaged, they want to learn. I preach like I’m like you. I’m in a lot of churches now and different churches, and so often there isn’t that involvement on the part of the listener, and I said, it’s fun to preach in your church brother because the people are right with me as I’m sharing and I’m telling them and teaching them through the word the passage that we’re studying, and that is becoming very unusual today. You’re right,

Jamie Mitchell:

Yeah. When I go into a church now I have this standard little shtick I do. I ask everybody to hold up their Bibles and that’s almost embarrassing, but then if I see a lot of cell phones go up, I explain how dangerous it is that they would use their cell phone and the Bible on their cell phone as their tool for studying God’s word. There’s a principle called association that what I use one thing for becomes associated in another thing, and I say to people, I said, that device that you’re holding, you receive all kinds of phone calls, texts, emails, and maybe some of you are even watching pornography on it. The last thing you want to do is associate God’s word to that, bring your Bible to church. Well, I hope that happens this week. Bible on hand, pen notebook, walking in the spirit and receiving.

When we come back and finish up, I want Dave to talk about what should happen after Sunday, not just being able to receive the word on a Sunday morning and get the most from it, but then when we leave, what do we do with God’s word to transform our lives? Don’t go anywhere. Well, thanks for getting back with us. It’s so good to have Dr. Dave Christiansen from the Rephidim Project. Dave, before time slips away, can you tell our listeners about your ministry and how might they encourage their pastor? Your ministry focuses on preaching enrichment and helping preachers preach better. Some of our people listening today say, I would like to listen to a sermon, but boy, I tell you my pastor needs help. How can they out about the ERDI project and what do you have going this coming fall? That may be an interest to some of our people.

Dave Christensen:

Yeah, Jamie, just before I do that, thank you for the opportunity to share about ERDI, but I want to piggyback just briefly on what you said just before the close of the last segment, and that is when we have our Bibles. You’re absolutely right. There’s a seriousness to what we’re doing as opposed to our phones that don’t convey that same seriousness to our heart, in my opinion. Alright, I’ll get off that now, but I just wanted to piggyback on that. I thought that was a good point as far as project is concerned, if you’re in Eastern Pennsylvania, we have a seminar for pastors going in Phoenixville on October 23rd. It’s a one day seminar, it’s free. All of our seminars are. We also have one in Maine on September 9th. I would say encourage your pastors to attend by going to www erdin project.org and registering for the seminar.

The Erdin project exists to equip and encourage pastors in their preaching ministries. So pastors need to refill their wells, they need to rekindle their passions and replenish their spirits, and we seek to provide that support. So we offer one day seminars and we lead preaching cohorts. A preaching cohort consists of six to eight pastors who commit to a two year program to help one another grow into better preachers. It’s collaborative learning and it’s a powerful way to stimulate spiritual growth among pastors. We’ve got lots of resources on our website and our YouTube channel that are freely available to pastors, so encourage a pastor to check out the resources on our website. By the way, I wrote two articles on the subject of ears to hear and the hearing heart, which also can be accessed on our website. Our topic for today,

Jamie Mitchell:

And as you begin your September begins kind of a new ministry year for a lot of churches. I would encourage any pastor listening today, one of the first sermons you should do is everybody starts coming back from summer vacation, is how to listen to a sermon, how to get the most out of a Sunday message. Dave, we focused on a lot what happens on Sunday morning, both the preaching and the receiving, but one pastor friend used to say to me, Hey, the real fortune is in the follow up, and what he was saying was helping people know how to follow up from Sunday and take that message. What insights do you have for our listeners regarding the sermon in the week or weeks after hearing it? What kinds of things should we be doing to maximize the impact of what they receive on a Sunday morning?

Dave Christensen:

Well, Moses and Deuteronomy laid out the process or God laid out through him the process for life-changing, listening. It’s very interesting process, and it’s very simple. I mean, the people gathered together to hear God’s word, so we gathered together on a Sunday to hear God’s word. Life change begins when we listen in community with other believers. Now, we can read the Bible on our own. We can certainly learn much from that process, but really much spiritual growth takes place. When we listen in community with other believers, this communal listening, then we take that and during the week, certainly in the Old Testament, Deuteronomy six says they were to teach it to their children, talk about it in their homes, discuss it when they walk, and think and talk about it when they lie down at night and get up in the morning, think about these things.

So I would say from a practical perspective, in terms of the week, we need to do the same. I would say talk about the sermon on the way home and at dinner that week with your family. I don’t mean now to talk about the clever illustration or the mistakes that the pastor made. We’re not critiquing the sermon. We don’t need roast preacher for dinner. I mean, talk about the scripture that was explained and think through the ways you and your family can apply it. So our pastor preached on Acts 28 this past Sunday, and I’m taking his sermon, his concepts in that sermon, and I’m trying to apply it to my life this week. As I think about and reflect on that passage in Acts 28 in Paul’s ministry on Balta to the islanders there. That’s the way you continue to move it in your life through the week and certainly with your children.

That was the deuteronomic system that God set up, and it’s still the biblical system today. So read the scripture, reflect on it during the week, and if you do that throughout the week, you’re going to reinforce it in your mind and implement it in your life and the life of your family, and it’s going to be an ongoing process throughout the week, but there has to be intentionality to that. I have to think about that sermon as I’m listening to it on this past Sunday, and then I have to think about it during the week as I seek to apply it.

Jamie Mitchell:

Dave, that is so good because in imp pedagological circles meaning in people who teach teachers and understand learning, and even with my time with walkthrough the Bible, we always talked about how will people remember after they leave? Well, they only remember 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they hear and see 40% of what they hear, see and write, but exponentially it goes up to almost 80, 90% if they teach it themselves or share what they said. So even going and talking to, let’s say another believer at work and you go back and forth asking, Hey, what did your preacher preach on this week? And have that dialogue together. There is a learning that takes place and it’s truly powerful. And so it is important that after we hear the sermon, we don’t walk out of the church and that’s the last time we talk about it. There has to be that continual conversation and using the sermon as kind of a launchpad is a powerful thing, isn’t it?

Dave Christensen:

Oh, it sure is. We in our church for a number of years where the church where I was pastoring, we would have a weekly Bible study, Sunday school class or midweek Bible study where the people would take the sermon and reflect on it again and discuss it and talk about applying it and talk about the ideas in that message and in that passage, in order to reinforce it, Deuteronomy six, one of the first things they say is God says is teach it to your children. So if you do nothing else, teach it to your children, because in teaching, you learn yourself as well as I do. When we study something, it’s okay, we learn a great deal, but when we have to try and communicate that to somebody else and then we engage in a discourse about that, a back and forth a dialogue, we’re going to learn way more through that process than we did by just listening to and learning it ourselves or reading it and learning it ourselves. It is in the teaching that we learn and grow, and that’s the beauty of the process that was laid out in Deuteronomy six.

Jamie Mitchell:

Amen. Hey, Dave, thank you so much for being with us Again, thank you for your work encouraging and strengthening pastors. I believe today we’re going to bear much fruit and hopefully next Sunday we’ll be a different because of what you’ve heard today. Thank you friends again for giving us an hour of your day. We’re going to be back here tomorrow with more topics, more guests to help you and your walk, and our goal is always the same, to be a catalyst to raise up a generation of courageous Christians, and so until tomorrow, like I say, at the end of every one of my programs, live and lead with courage. God bless you. Have a great day. This has been stand in the gap today.