The Need the Text Meets

Romans 15:4 comes in the middle of an argument, and it should be read there. The church in Rome was divided. Some believers ate anything; others, whom Paul calls weak in faith, would eat only vegetables. Some kept special days and others did not (14:2-5). Each side was tempted to despise or judge the other. Paul spends a chapter and a half on the problem, and in 15:1-3 he reaches its root. The strong ought to bear with the weak and not please themselves, because even Christ did not please himself, and he quotes Psalm 69:9: 'The insults of those who insult You have fallen on Me.'

Then he stops to explain what he has just done, as if he expects someone to object that a psalm about a suffering Israelite has nothing to do with a quarrel about food in Rome. 'For everything that was written in the past was written for our instruction, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope.' The verse makes three claims a preacher lives by. The old scriptures were written for later readers as well as first ones. They were written to instruct. And their instruction has a purpose beyond information: endurance, encouragement and hope.

Paul makes the same claim in 1 Corinthians 10, after retelling Israel's failures in the wilderness: 'Now these things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come' (10:11). And two verses later he names why such old stories reach a new church: 'No temptation has seized you except what is common to man' (10:13). The link between then and now is a shared condition. The Israelites in the desert and the Corinthians in their city were different people in different centuries facing the same human temptations before the same faithful God.

John says the same of his Gospel from the other end: 'these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name' (John 20:31). Every book of the Bible was written for a reason, to people who needed it. A sermon that explains a passage without ever asking why it was written has done half the work. This lesson is about the other half.

The most widely taught method for naming that purpose in evangelical seminaries today comes from Bryan Chapell, who taught preaching for many years at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis and served as its president. His textbook Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon was first published in 1994 and is now in its third edition. Its central tool is what Chapell calls the fallen condition focus, often shortened to FCF.

In Chapell's account, the fallen condition focus is the shared human condition that the people of today have in common with those to whom or about whom the passage was written, which requires the grace the passage provides. He suggests that the preacher find it by asking three questions of the text. What does it say? What concerns did it address in its own setting? And what do we have in common with the people it was written to or about? The answer to the third question is where the sermon meets the hearers.

Two features of Chapell's idea are easy to miss and important. First, a fallen condition is not necessarily a particular sin. It is any aspect of the human condition that exists because we live in a fallen world: guilt, certainly, but also grief, fear, confusion, sickness, loneliness, persecution and the weakness of the body. Romans 15:1-7 addresses a sin, self-pleasing contempt for fellow believers. Mark 4:35-41 addresses fear in the face of forces no one can control, and the doubt that asks whether Jesus cares. Psalm 13 addresses the experience of God's apparent absence. All are fallen conditions; only the first is a sin to be repented of.

Second, Chapell's purpose in naming the need is to lead the hearer to grace. His book argues at length against sermons that name a need and then answer it with human effort alone: be like this character, be good, be more disciplined. He calls these the deadly be's, not because the Bible lacks commands but because commands cut loose from the grace that enables them produce either despair or pride. The fallen condition focus is meant to keep the sermon honest about the hearer's real situation and so to keep it pointing to what God has done about it. Module 3 takes up the question of how every sermon relates to Christ, where Chapell's position is one of several held with conviction, and the question of how to apply a text without moralism.

Here is the tool at work on this lesson's own passage. What does Romans 15:1-7 say? The strong are to bear with the weak and seek their good, as Christ did not please himself, so that a divided church may glorify God with one voice. What concern did it address? A congregation splitting over matters of conscience, each side looking down on the other. What do we share with them? Every church contains believers with different convictions on matters scripture leaves open, and every Christian is tempted to please himself and to treat those who differ with contempt. That is the fallen condition. The grace of the passage is Christ's own self-giving, and the encouragement scripture gives to endure one another in hope.

Chapell's tool is recent, but the question it asks is old. The Puritan preachers of England built every sermon around what they called the uses of a doctrine. William Perkins, whose The Art of Prophesying was published in Latin in 1592 and in an English translation by Thomas Tuke in 1607, five years after Perkins died, taught a plain method: read the text clearly, give its sense from scripture itself, gather from it a few profitable points of doctrine, and apply those doctrines to the life and manners of the hearers in plain speech. The application was not an afterthought; it was the reason for the sermon.

The Westminster Assembly's Directory for the Public Worship of God (1645) gave preachers a list of the kinds of use a doctrine might be put to: instruction in truth, the confutation of error, exhortation to duty, dehortation from sin, reproof, comfort, and trial, by which it meant self-examination. Each use names a different need in the hearers. Some need teaching; some are in error; some need to be urged, some warned, some rebuked, some comforted, and some need to test whether their faith is real. The Directory also warned the preacher to use wisdom in choosing which uses a congregation most needed, rather than running through them all.

Jay Adams, in Preaching with Purpose (1982), urged preachers to identify what he called the telic purpose of a passage, from the Greek telos, end or goal: what the Holy Spirit intended the passage to do in its readers. The preacher's purpose should be the passage's purpose. Thomas Long's function statement, met in the lesson on the main idea, asks the same question in different words: what does this sermon hope to do in the hearers? Haddon Robinson's third developmental question, what difference does it make, points the same way. The vocabulary differs. The conviction is shared: a passage was given to do something, and the sermon should do it.

One further voice must be heard, because it presses on what kind of need a text meets. Preachers in many churches of the global south, in the African American tradition, and in Latin American liberation theology have long insisted that the needs scripture addresses are not only inward and individual. The Exodus is about slaves set free. The prophets denounce the oppression of the poor. James condemns the rich who withhold workers' wages. These preachers argue that a method which names only private guilt and personal fear will miss what large parts of the Bible are about, and will tend to comfort the comfortable. Defenders of the fallen condition focus answer that it is not limited to the private; injustice, poverty and oppression are among the clearest marks of a fallen world, and Chapell's questions reach them as readily as they reach grief. The critique remains a useful check: when you name the need your passage meets, ask whether it was first spoken to a person, to a congregation or to a whole people, and keep that scale.

Every way of naming a sermon's purpose carries a risk, and it is best to know the risks of this one before you use it.

The first danger is letting the hearers' felt needs choose the text. In the late twentieth century the seeker-sensitive movement, associated above all with Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, built much of its preaching around the needs unchurched people said they had: stress, marriage, money, purpose. Its defenders pointed out that Jesus often began with what people felt, as when he spoke of water to a woman who had come to draw it (John 4:13-15), and that a hearer who senses no connection may never hear the gospel at all. Its critics argued that when felt needs set the agenda, the congregation hears only the parts of scripture that answer the questions it already has, and never the ones that would change its questions. Both sides make a real point, and both can claim John 4: the defenders because Jesus began with the thirst the woman already felt, the critics because he did not stay there, and the conversation moved on to worship, the Messiah and a whole town come out to meet him. Many seeker-oriented preachers would themselves say that a felt need is meant to be a door into scripture, not a substitute for it. For the method this course teaches, which is expository preaching, the rule is plain: the need must be found in the text, not brought to it. That is a commitment of this method, and a preacher in another tradition can weigh it on its merits.

The second danger is making God the means to our ends. A sermon that begins with human need can end up presenting God as the solution to our problems, so that he matters because he is useful. Preachers in the redemptive-historical tradition have pressed this concern: scripture is first about what God is doing, and only then about us. Chapell's own answer is that the fallen condition focus exists precisely to drive the hearer away from self-help and towards God's grace, so it should make sermons more God-centred, not less. The warning still holds for anyone using the tool carelessly. The need is the door into the sermon, not the house.

The third danger is forcing a need onto a text that is doing something else. Some passages are praise: 'Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!' (Psalm 150:6). Some are lament, which already names a need far more honestly than any preacher could. Some are genealogies and boundary lists. A preacher who insists on a neat problem-and-solution for every text may distort the ones whose purpose is to lead people to worship or to sit with them in their sorrow. Chapell would answer that even praise meets a need, our forgetfulness of God's worth, and many find that a fair answer; others think it strains. Either way, let the genre lesson guide you. Ask what the text does before you ask what need it meets.

Finding the need is a three-step move, and each step has a characteristic mistake.

First, find the need in the first hearers. This comes from your exegesis, not your imagination. Letters usually tell you their occasion: Romans 14 tells you about the dispute, 1 Corinthians 7:1 tells you the Corinthians had written with questions. Narratives tell you by their shape: what is the problem the story turns on? Psalms tell you in their first lines. Prophets tell you by what they denounce and what they promise. The mistake here is to guess, or to borrow the need from a sermon you once heard. If you cannot show the need from the text and its setting, you have not yet found it.

Second, name the shared condition. Ask what the first hearers and your hearers have in common as human beings before God. This is where 1 Corinthians 10:13 helps: what is common to man. The mistake here is to stay on the surface. The Romans quarrelled about vegetables; your congregation probably does not. But the condition beneath the quarrel, contempt for believers whose consciences differ from ours, is in every church on earth. Go beneath the particular to the human, and you will find the bridge.

Third, name it in your hearers' world. Now be concrete. In one congregation the strong and the weak divide over alcohol; in another over the festivals of the surrounding religion; in another over dress, or music, or which translation is read. In a rural church facing drought, Mark 4 meets the same fear the disciples felt, of a force no human can control; in a city church it may meet the fear of a diagnosis or a debt. The mistake here is to stay abstract, naming a need so general that no one in the room recognises themselves. A good statement of the need is specific enough that a hearer could think: he is talking about me.

Finally, test the need against the main idea. They should fit like a question and an answer. If your homiletical idea is that when God brings home someone you would rather keep out, heaven is celebrating and you are invited, then the need is the self-righteous resentment that keeps us outside the feast with the older brother. If the idea and the need do not fit, one of them has drifted from the text, and the text is how you find out which.

This lesson finishes the second module, and with it the first half of your sermon. Take a fresh page in your notebook, title it with your passage, and write out what the five lessons of this module have given you, in this order.

One: the passage, with its first and last verse, and the clue that tells you where it begins and ends. Two: the kind of writing it is, and one sentence beginning, because this passage is a, my sermon will. Three: your exegetical idea, in the past tense, beginning with the author's name. Four: your homiletical idea, in the present tense, in one breath. Five: the need the text meets, stated three ways: as the first hearers felt it, as the shared human condition, and as it appears among the people you will preach to. Six: one sentence saying what you hope the sermon will do in those hearers, now sharpened by the need.

Read the page aloud. Then ask the hardest question of this module: if someone heard only these sentences, would they hear what this passage says, or what I wanted to say? If you are not sure, take the page to another believer you trust, read it with the passage open in front of you both, and ask them. Revise until both of you can see every line of the page in the text.

Keep that page. Module 3 will ask how this passage relates to Christ and how to apply it without moralism, and module 4 will build the sermon on it. Everything from here forward is built on what you have just written. Nehemiah's Levites read the law, explained it and gave insight so that the people could understand. You have now done the first two of those for one passage. The rest of the track is about the third.