Preach the word! The Lord commands it. The body is blessed by it. The sermon is a good and necessary thing for the life of the believer.
In today’s world, the believer has access to more of the preached word than ever before. We can read books of collected messages. We can stream our favorite Bible teachers. We can turn on RYM Radio and hear teaching all day long. We can Google the Internet (I hear that’s what the kids call it), and find videos of pastors of small churches we will never hear of in any other way.
But, as a pastor, one who preaches weekly (and hopefully not weakly), can I warn you of a danger or two in too much on-line sermon consumption? I’m quite grateful for the resources that the Lord has placed at our fingertips, but I fear that some believers may move from being helped to being harmed by their consumption of material on-line.
I Know a Secret
One danger of on-line sermons that I think we would all agree on is the risk of consuming false teaching. This is more likely when a believer is listening to a pastor or scholar about whom they know nothing. If you are listening to a message or reading an article written by someone whose scholarship is not being checked by others, you run the risk of novel and even dangerous teaching.
One of the attractions of many an on-line message is the fact that it teaches you something you have never heard before. It is possible to run across a man who is translating the Hebrew of Genesis for himself and saying things about what it means to be human that no faithful teacher has ever taught. If a believer is not careful here, he or she may come away with a damaging, false belief that was all the more dangerous for feeling like it was something secret that no other teacher has brought forth.
I’d bet that you have heard of the problem of Gnosticism in the early church. Among the dangerous beliefs of the Gnostics was the ego-boosting belief that they possessed secret knowledge that was not available to the general public. It was easy for folks to love the fact that they were let in on the stuff that other, ordinary people could not grasp. See any similarities to how some folks feel about that special teacher they have found on-line?
Choose-Your-Own-Doctrine
Do you remember choose-your-own-adventure books? These were popular before video games took the idea to a whole new level. A reader would follow the story of a hero until a particular turning point: enter the cave or climb the mountain? The reader would turn to a different page of the book to find out what happened to the hero depending on the choice the reader made for the hero. Perhaps the cave contained a dragon. Perhaps the mountain led to a castle and a princess. The point was to give the reader a sense of adventure by being able to pick the kind of story he or she wanted to read.
Similar to the draw of novel and dangerous doctrine is the temptation to pick and defend your own favorite teaching. Sometimes people will have a particular point of doctrine they want others to agree with. Instead of examining faithful teaching of faithful teachers, the eager learner will scour the Internet for the one teacher who says it just the way they want to hear. Want to find that Calvinist who dunks on your Arminian friends, no problem. Want to find that Arminian preacher who makes your Calvinist friends look like cold-hearted robots, piece of cake. Want to find somebody who interprets a particular passage in accord with your strange preferences? This one might take a bit more work, but the Internet is a big place, and lots of people have said lots of crazy things over the years; so it can be done.
Romance Novel Religion
Perhaps the biggest danger, especially for folks who will not be dragged down the road of false teaching by obscure teachers on the corners of the Web, is what I am calling romance novel religion. When you talk with a believer who spends a lot of time during the week listening to a lot of sermons from a particular teacher or group, you will start to notice that this eager listener begins to develop a respect, perhaps even more than a respect, for the teachers on line. Like a wife reading too many romance novels and beginning to wonder why her own husband falls so far short of the fictional leading men in her books, the eager sermon consumer begins to wonder why his pastor cannot deliver a blistering, hour-and-fifteen-minute masterpiece like his favorite conference speaker.
But stop and think. Why is it that a husband cannot live up to the picture of the man in the romance novel? The man in the novel is not real. Nobody ever mentions, in the books, that the handsome and modest yet muscular Amish man who sweeps the city girl off her feet to carry her back to a simpler time also hasn’t taken a bath in 4 days and has been working the fields that whole time. Fiction is fiction. Real life goes much deeper.
Similarly, when we listen to sermon after sermon from pastor after pastor and scholar after scholar, we develop in our minds this idyllic picture of what our local pastor should be. He should be as scholarly as Mohler and Sproul, as bold as MacArthur, as passionate as Platt and Piper, as funny as a pre-fall Driscoll, as fatherly as Rogers, as sophisticated as Keller, as keen with illustrations as Swindoll, and somehow develop the accents of Begg and Ferguson. No pastor is all these men rolled into one.
Before you find yourself sad about the fact that your pastor cannot be a Frankenstein’s monster of all your favorite on-line personalities blended together, read this vital truth: God does not want you to have such a pastor. God wants you to have a human pastor who has strengths, who has weaknesses, and who knows and loves you. You do not need a perfect on-line teacher. You need a shepherd. Unless you have a few connections, none of those on-line pastors know you. They have no idea who you are or what you are going through. Neither do they know the situation of that person who sits next to you in church and who is struggling with their own particular messes—messes for which you have no patience.
Gorging without Exercise
God loves feasts. We should be able to figure that out by how often the Old Testament commands that people feast for joy in celebration of the Lord. Yet there is a problem when feasting leads to nothing but more feasting. Our bodies need movement, exercise, and breaks from constant consumption of food and drink.
Feasts are special breaks from the day-to-day work. The Sabbath was to be one day in 7, not a life of laziness. Even Jesus, when he took the 3 atop the mountain of transfiguration quickly led them back down to the ordinary.
As a pastor, I run into people who tell me about how many on-line sermons they listen to in a week. And I am glad to know that they are filling their minds with faithful teaching. But I often want to ask a question. It is not necessarily a nice question, so my wife tells me not to ask it. But, since we are all friends here and nobody will notice, I’ll ask it now: So what?
You took in an entire conference of teaching on the trinity this week, so what? You listened to 45 lectures on evangelism this week, so what? You sat through an entire biblical counseling conference before breakfast, so what? You finished a big series on marriage on Monday, so what? These all are great things to listen to. But, and here is a big question, what impact are they having on your day-to-day? Have you only filled your head with knowledge? Or is what you have listened to making you love the Lord, love your spouse, love the church, and love the lost better?
Conclusion
On-line preaching can be tremendously helpful. But it brings with it a few dangers. Watch out for false and novel teaching. Watch out for the temptation to find a teacher, any teacher, any teacher at all, who agrees with you and goes against what others are telling you. Use your resources wisely. But do not let your resources take you out of faithful Christian living in your local church. Do not daydream about having a legend for a pastor or feel the urge to reshape your pastor into your favorite conference personality. Be grateful for faithful teaching, but do not assume that simply consuming content has sanctified you.
Really, I want you to listen and learn on-line. But, how many sermons do you need in a week? Please do not consume so much content that you have no time for people and no patience for the real world. Use your resources to look up things you need to learn. But check your work by being sure your sources of teaching are also faithful teachers who hold to orthodox, biblical doctrine.
Be careful as you learn, not to turn up your nose at simple, faithful, time-tested theology. There is, after all, a reason why the church has had to battle down heresy for two-thousand years. Heresy is tempting. False teachings sometimes ring a bell in our souls. And this is why we need the protection of our own pastors and of faithful theologians of the past. No, they do not have biblical authority. But, yes, many have heard and rejected the new things that some guy on YouTube thinks he came up with long before the YouTuber ever taught it.
Bottom line, love the Lord. Love his word. Love faithful teaching. Love your church. Love your pastor. Love your brothers and sisters in Christ. Love the lost and share the gospel. Do these things, and you will use but not over-use on-line content.
Pastor Travis Peterson 