3. When teaching a passage, it’s best if you are the one to bring up the problem (without waiting to be asked) and deal with it.
This requires some preparation on your part. Just as everything else you do will require preparation, and thought and study and planning and prayer.
4. If caught off guard by a question, if you say, “I’ll look that up and get back to you,” make sure you do.
As a very young (and green) pastor, I told a questioning member I would look up something and get back to him. A man called me off to the side and said,”Preacher, your predecessor would promise to do that and we would never hear from it again. If you say you’re going to get back to us on something, make sure you do it.”
Good advice, advice which I took.
5. Develop the skill of giving brief answers to complex questions. Your congregation will rise up and bless you.
Nothing discourages church members from asking their questions-even good questions that they really want answers to-like a pastor who gives an essay-type response to a true-false question. Covering all aspects of an answer is something in our nature, and it results in 15-minute monologues from us. Now, that’s not all bad, we may need to say. After all, if you want to discourage questions-if you dread a particular question and want to avoid it-then talk the subject to death.
No one will ask you anything after that. Which reminds me of a text: “And no one was able to answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask Him another question” (Matthew 22:46). In this case, they quit asking because they didn’t like the answers!
6. Finally, keep telling yourself and assuring your congregation that if God were to write a book, doesn’t it figure that it would be deep?
That some parts would be hard to understand? And that it would not always yield its best riches to those who did not care to sit at the Lord’s feet for long but want all the answers to be short and simple?
I’m not sure why that seems hard for us to get, but it does.
In the meanwhile, pastor, keep on digging. This book is the richest, best, sweetest and mightiest of all the words ever penned on this planet.
