People often use some form of the phrase titling this post when they are speaking about issues that arise in the church. We can all have our preferences, we may even have disagreements about doctrine on a tertiary level, but more often than not we need to remember why we are here and what we are doing as believers. It can pay to keep the main thing the main thing. We want the gospel to be front and centre, not our particular tertiary or insignificant pet issues.

But I think this is true in our preaching too. I don’t mean to say that all we need are some very basic gospel messages every week and everything else can come out in the wash. I mean when it comes to the particular passages we are preaching, we really need to work hard to make sure we keep the main thing the main thing.

All too often, preachers get over-excited about some little detail they’ve found in the text. Much of the time, the little detail they think they’ve found in the text is no such thing. Rather, it is them forcing a particular interpretation, or their specific little pet issue, onto the text and reading it in to something that the author almost certainly didn’t have in mind. Not only is this failing to keep the main thing the main thing, but it is actively not teaching what the author wanted this text to say and so, by extension, failing to convey what God wants to convey. Forcing our own views into the text – what we call eisegesis – is not faithfully handling the Word of God. It is using God’s Word like a mirror that simply reflects our own views back onto us so that whatever we read always seems to output whatever we hoped it would say.

Other preachers – those who are not engaging in eisegesis – may also find little interesting details in the text. Those little interesting details may well be in the text itself so nobody is reading their own particular views and pet issues into what they are looking at. But rather than noting them in their study and moving on, they make big things out of them. The little details that piqued their interest suddenly becomes a major point of the sermon. Or, if not a major point, and fairly lengthy and quite incidental aside that doesn’t serve the sermon. They also fail to make the main thing the main thing.

The problem here is that whilst the little detail might have been interesting to you in your study, people are listening to the sermon to hear the main concern of the passage and what it has to say to them. A 20 minute excursion on the flora and fauna mentioned in the passage – that is really there and might be of some technical interest to botanists and biologists – is almost certainly not the main point of the passage and isn’t what the people in front of you need to hear. Aside from the fact that most people are not botanists and biologist – neither professionally nor as hobbyists – and will therefore be bored to tears by this information, for almost everybody the details are not relevant to the main point nor what the passage means in practice for the people to whom you are speaking. They need to know what God would say to them and what he wants them to do, say, think, feel or believe as a result and this is closely related to the main point(s) of the passage.

When we are handling God’s Word our aim is to convey what God wants us to hear and to explain what God wants us to do as a result. This means our sermons are not an exercise in showing everybody everything that we know. It is not an exercise in detailing every last observation we have made of the text. It is supposed to show people God’s purpose in this particular text and what it means for them in particular. It means trimming all the fat from our sermons that, though potentially interesting to us, do not serve the main point that God through the biblical author wanted to convey. The text may have some things to say to particular cultural issues or to our particular situation. That is all well and good. But if the main thrust of the text, and the key things God wants us to hear from the text, are not those particular cultural points – even if they are valid observations or apropos for a particular issue we face – they are not the things that ought to be included in our sermon.

Think, for example, about the foundation of the church in Jerusalem in Acts 2:41-47. We could read v46 and see that they were meeting together in the temple courts and were eating together every day. Those details are certainly there in the text. But we might get quite excited by that and start talking about how we should meet together every day and share meals with one another all the time. We might begin to think about living together communally. All of which may or may not be legitimate based on these verses but none of which are the main idea at play nor what Luke is primarily intending to convey.

But if you read Acts 2:41-47 as a unit, the main idea becomes evident. Luke is showing us what happened when people first became believers and how it affected their lives first individually, then together as a church and later in the community. His main idea here is to do with the transformative nature of the gospel. Those who believe it are changed people and it impacts their own lives personally, their corporate lives as a church and their lives in the community where they are. However you cut the details, Luke is describing the life-changing, transformative effects of the gospel upon those who believe it and those who come into contact with them.

The question we want to ask when preaching a passage like that, then, is how do these particular details serve the primary purpose. We could get very excited from v46 about communal living and eating together every day. But does that get to the heart of Luke’s main point? Is Luke suggesting that we must all live on communes and meet together in a non-existent temple court every day? If he isn’t suggesting that, but is describing what was taking place, what exactly is his purpose in sharing these details? If we offer a 30-minute sermon for or against Communism from these verses, are we conveying the point Luke wants us to grasp? If not, how do these particular details serve his main idea? Once we see Luke’s main idea is the life changing nature of the gospel upon those who believe -in their own lives, the church and the community – the main idea of the sermon is surely about the transformative nature of the gospel today. Running after the details and insisting they all apply in exactly the same way, without grasping why Luke has included them, and then devoting a significant chunk of our sermon to what is illustrative rather than central, is likely to lead us away from what God wants us to hear rather than to it.

All of which is to say, in our preaching, we need to keep the main thing the main thing. We need to be brutal in the information and detail that we leave out. If our entire sermon rests on a few words in a verse, with little regard for the rest of the context, we have probably missed the main idea being conveyed. Nobody needs to hear Greek quoted in an English sermon nor to hear what “the Greek really means” because it should be clear from the wider context. If our entire point that will otherwise be lost rests on the particular translation of a single Greek word, I suspect we are missing the main point of the passage and/or throwing in the little details to show off that we know rather than it really being helpful. If large digressions in our sermon are a series of ‘little thoughts’ that we found interesting or that ‘occurred to me’ then we are probably not conveying what the Lord intended us to convey, even if our little thoughts that occur can be found in the text. We should be focused on the main thing and making sure our sermons point in the direction of the main thoughts of the text rather than focusing on side issues, no matter how interesting we found them in our study.