In 2016, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, flew 40,000 km to complete the first air circumnavigation of the globe with no fuel. Their aircraft, Solar Impulse 2, was completely solar powered.
Theoretically, such an aircraft could stay aloft forever and never have to land. But on their round the world flight they did land, and often, for the sake of the pilots.

I love flying (…well, for 2 hours or less).
I love looking down and getting the “big picture”.
I have thrilled to look down over the Alps in New Zealand, or those in northern Italy.
I enjoy flying from Sydney to Brisbane on a clear day, and picking out the many places on the coast where we have had holidays.
I loved it one time Gavin Kelly flew us around Mt Barney in a small plane: in a few minutes I could pick out routes it had taken us hours to climb.
It gives you a whole new perspective to see everything at once.

But, like the pilots of Solar Impulse 2, you can’t stay up there forever, even if it were possible. As useful as such an overall view can be, and even a help to guide you when you are back on terra firma, you still have to get on with living with your feet on the ground.

Preaching with Your Feet on the Ground

With this in mind I encourage preachers to preach so as to help their listeners to live life on the ground.
As useful, and even necessary, as it is to give your people the “Big Picture”, you won’t help them live on the ground if you leave them up in the air.

I say this because I have noted that some preachers focus almost exclusively on “Big Picture” type sermons. No doubt they think that, by doing so, they are being “redemptive-historical” in their approach to Scripture – though this can be more an abuse of that method, than a good use of it.

At its best, the “redemptive-historical” (RH) approach seeks to tie all of Scripture into the unfolding revelation of Christ, as the coming – and then come – Saviour.
So far, so good. It is good to “look down” from above and get a view of God’s Grand Plan of salvation.

The problem comes when this becomes the theme of every sermon.
As exhilarating as the view from above is – and it is – your listeners still have to grapple with the everyday challenges of life on the ground. To leave them up in the air forever won’t help them do this.

Let me give you some examples of what I mean:

Some Examples

1) A world-famous Bible teacher (whose writings I generally appreciate) looks at Genesis 39, the temptation of Joseph by Potiphar’s wife. How does he expound this?

Chapter 39 prepares the way for the drama that unfolds in chapter 40 all the way to the end of the book. By [Joseph] becoming the prime minister of Egypt his own family (seventy of them who actually finally come down to Egypt), are preserved – because, humanly speaking, Joseph kept his zipper up.
And thus, because of his integrity, humanly speaking, the holy family is preserved, the promises to Abraham are maintained; and ultimately, Jesus comes as the Redeemer – because Joseph kept his zipper up.
Suddenly, the actions of chapter 39 are put within a framework that bring us straight to Jesus, and to our own salvation.
It is remarkable, isn’t it!

Yes, it is remarkable. But let’s get back to having our feet on the ground.
What was God actually teaching Joseph – and hence, us?
What did all this mean to Joseph back then?
Did he really “keep his zipper up” just so that Jesus would be born?
If that is what this passage is about, how does that help us to live a pure life today? It can hardly help bring the Saviour into the world now, now that He has come.

Surely the more immediate lesson for Joseph (and us) was his relationship with God: “How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” (v 9). This is what drove Joseph.
Isn’t the main lesson of Genesis 39 God’s relationship with Joseph, as it is spelled out for us in the bookends the narrative itself supplies: “The Lord was with Joseph…” (vv 2, 23)?
Suddenly our feet are back on the ground.

This is no isolated example.

2) Take David, going out to meet Goliath in 1 Samuel 17:12-58.
The leading exponent of RH preaching in the US chastises

We dare not preach David’s encounter with Goliath as an example of bravery to be emulated in our conflicts with the ‘giants’ that assault us. Such an approach trivializes the Old Testament revelation.
Rather (as another writer puts it) the only way to interpret this passage is that it, “points forward to a time when God would save all his people from a bigger enemy (sin and death) through his chosen one, Jesus.”

Really? Is that what David was thinking?
Is that all David meant to God in that story? Is that all we mean to God?
Whatever happened to those verses that are central in this passage: “The Lord, who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, He will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine”? (v 37)
Again, our feet are back on the ground.

3) I have also heard numerous sermons on God’s dealings with various barren women in Scripture: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Manoah’s wife, Hannah, Elizabeth.
But, as often as not there is no mention God’s tender care for such and His peculiar interest in “granting the barren woman a home, like a joyful mother of children” (Psalm 113:9).
Rather, you get the impression that these women are merely cogs in God’s Grand Plan.

4) Or take Naomi, especially as we come to Ruth ch 4 with the appearance of the kinsman-redeemer. Is this just about the Redeemer to come?
Are we not to learn about how God cared for the widow Naomi, and redeemed her bitterness?  In relation to this, Ralph Davis has a good comment:

There’s a bit of resolution for Naomi in 4:14-17 in the wake of all her previous troubles. Some may get impatient here. Some may say that we need to get our eyes off Naomi, that it’s not really about her, that there are ‘redemptive-historical’ issues in the text and we need to be paying attention to the ‘redeemer’ (go’el) motif that points us to Christ, and so on. But God never gets so wrapped up in kingdom affairs that he forgets his kingdom people.

Significance for the Players

I love that: “God never gets so wrapped up in kingdom affairs that he forgets his kingdom people.” The players in God’s narrative are not mere ciphers in some Grand Plan. God cares for each one; each one has his, or her, own story that is significant to the Lord and that we are to learn from.

It reminds me of Macbeth, when told the queen is dead, shrugging his shoulders and saying that anyway “life is but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Preachers such as I have referred to above, believe LIFE is significant. But sometimes you wonder if they believe the individual LIVES of all the little people in the Bible narrative are just “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The lives of His people are significant to God:

Thus says the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:
“I dwell in the high and holy place, with him who has a contrite and humble spirit” (Isaiah 57:15. See also Psalm 116:15)

The ironic thing I find is that, preachers like this often focus almost exclusively on the mundane, everyday needs of their hearers in the pastoral prayer in worship.
Yet in their preaching focus only on the “high and lofty” Grand Plan and little by way of everyday application.
There is a disconnect here.

Boring Preaching

One of the concerns that I regularly hear from those who listen to sermons like this is that, in the end, every sermon starts to sound much the same.
I have referred elsewhere to others, more astute than me, who have noted this. Eg.

Mark Jones: “It is not enough simply to mention grace or even Christ often in a sermon. Some of the most boring sermons mention them frequently… The same repetitive mantras are preached week after week, to the point that if you have heard one sermon, you have heard them all.”

Carl Trueman: “One of the problems I have with a relentless diet of biblical-theological sermons from less talented (i.e., most of us) preachers is their boring mediocrity: contrived contortions of passages which are engaged in to produce the answer ‘Jesus’ every week. It doesn’t matter what the text is; the sermon is always the same.”

Ralph Davis is critical of those who misapply Luke 24:25-27, 44-47 to tell us we “must preach Christ from every Old Testament text”:

I agree with making an extensive inference from Luke 24:27 and 44 but hold that an intensive inference is illegitimate… Jesus is teaching that all parts of the Old Testament testify of the Messiah in his suffering and glory, but… Jesus is [not] saying that every Old Testament passage/text bears witness to him. Jesus referred to the things written about him in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms – he did not say that every passage spoke of him (v. 44). Therefore, I do not feel compelled to make every Old Testament (narrative) passage point to Christ in some way because I do not think Christ himself requires it.

One is reminded of the anecdote of the Sunday School teacher who (according to one version) was trying to add  variety to his teaching and asked his class of five-year olds: “Who can tell me what is grey and furry and lives in a gum tree? It has a black nose and beady eyes and big furry ears.”
The children, taken by surprise by this new approach, didn’t know what to say and sat there staring blankly at the teacher.
Eventually one brave soul put up her hand and timidly answered: “Excuse me miss. I know the answer is Jesus; it’s just that it sounds an awful lot like a koala!”

A Plea for Balance

Please understand, I am not against using a redemptive-historical approach when it is appropriate. Much less am I against preaching Christ from all over the Scriptures. That is not the point of what I am saying.
Nor am I suggesting that all preachers fall into the errors I have outlined here. I think it is great that there is a lot of good preaching today.

I am simply pleading for preachers to think carefully about the passage they are preaching from. Fundamental to understanding a passage is to begin by asking: “What was it meant to mean to the original intended audience?”
Don’t just go straight to the Grand Plan.
Ask yourself:

• What was God doing with/ teaching this particular individual/ nation?
• How was God glorifying His own name in him/ them?
• How does that help me keep my feet on the ground, grounded in Him today?

By all means, lift your hearers up to the Mount of Transfiguration (Mark 9:1-13).
But equip them so that they can also live useful lives among a “faithless generation” when they come back down (vv 14-29).

The Plane Needs to  Land

Let me close with these words from Hendrik Krabbendam:

Preaching in the redemptive-historical tradition is often comparable to a ride in a Boeing 747 high above the landscape with its hot deserts, its snowpeaked mountains, its wide rivers, its dense forests, its open prairies, its craggy hills and its deep lakes. The view is panoramic, majestic, impressive, breathtaking, and always comfortable.
But there is one problem. The Christian is not “above” things. He is in the middle of things. He is trekking through the landscape.
As such he experiences heat, or cold, or pain, or failure. Sometimes the journey seems interminable, or monotonous, or cheerless, or impossible.
At times the traveller loses his sense of direction, or his strength to continue, or his hope of success, or his will to endure. At other times, he lacks wisdom, or expertise, or resources, or support. At all times he is engaged in battle.
That is why “aesthetic contemplation” is simply not sufficient fare for the Christian on his way through life. All by itself it is a starvation diet.
This is not to say that there is no truth factor in redemptive-historical preaching. A panoramic view is uplifting and from time to time necessary.
But it is to say that it does not begin to address the fulness of life and therefore, as a method [i.e “by itself” KS], is doomed to ultimate sterility.

Footnote: For a comprehensive, fair assessment of the emergence, and strengths and weaknesses of the modern redemptive-historical approach consult Yung Hoon Hyun’s Redemptive-Historical Hermeneutics and Homiletics