Let me mention six mistakes we must avoid as we target the sheep of our flocks in preaching:

• Error One: Thinking the various targets covered in recent articles compose an exhaustive list.
  There are many other kinds of target audiences and a great deal of diversity in each audience. For example, there are suffering saints, persecuted believers, spiritual mourners, lazy Christians, temporary believers, young enthusiasts, minister-worshipers, zealous heretics, and mere moralists. In The Art of Prophesying, William Perkins, often called the father of Puritanism, divides listeners into seven categories, which include the following:

1. Ignorant and unteachable unbelievers. These people need to hear the doctrine of the Word in clear, reasonable teaching as well as by reproof and pricking of their consciences.
2. Ignorant but teachable unbelievers. These people must be taught the foundational doctrines of the Christian religion. Perkins recommends they learn from his book, Foundations of the Christian Religion, which covers the subjects of repentance, faith, the sacraments, the application of the Word, the resur­rection, and the Last Judgment.
3. Those who have some knowledge but are not humbled. To them the preacher must especially proclaim the law to stir up sorrow and repentance for sin, followed by the preaching of the gospel.
4. The humbled. The preacher must not give comfort to such people too soon, but must first determine whether their humility results from God’s saving work rooted in faith or from mere common conviction. To the partly humbled who are not yet stripped of self-righteousness, Perkins says that the law must be propounded yet more, albeit tempered with the gospel, so that “being terrified with their sins, and with the meditation of God’s judgment, they may together at the same instant receive solace by the gospel.” To the fully humbled, “the doctrine of faith and repentance, and the comforts of the gospel ought to be proclaimed and tendered.”
5. Those who believe. Believers need to be taught the key doctrines of justification, sanctification, and persever­ance, along with the law as the rule of conduct rather than its sting and curse. “Before faith, the law with the curse is to be preached; after conversion, the law without the curse,” Perkins writes.
6. Those who are fallen, either in faith or in practice. These people have backslidden in faith, in knowledge, or in apprehending Christ. If they fall in knowledge, they are to be instructed in the particular doctrine from which they have erred. If they fail to apprehend Christ, they should examine themselves by the marks of grace and then fly to Christ as the remedy of the gospel. Those who fall in practice have become involved in sinful behavior. They need to be brought to repentance by the preaching of the law and the gospel.
7. A mixed group. This may refer to the mixture of both believers and unbelievers in a church, or it may refer to indi­viduals who contain within themselves a combination of the first six kinds of listeners. If the latter is what Perkins intended, much wisdom is needed to know how much law and how much gospel to bring to them.¹

Due to Puritan influence, many preachers in the Continental Reformed tradition also developed various methods of classifying their hearers. For example, Johannes Verschuir (1680-1737), an able Reformed preacher of the Dutch Further Reformation who belonged to the Voetian circle of preachers in the Netherlands, identified four categories of churchgoers in his Dutch classic, Waarheit in het Binnenste, of Bevindelijke Godtgeleertheit (Truth in the Inward Parts, or Experimental Divinity), each of whom need to be addressed by the preacher: (1) the strong Christian (sterke Christen), who is converted and is mature in spiritual life; (2) the concerned and anxious Christian (bekommerde Christen,) who is also converted but struggles with many doubts and lacks assurance of faith; (3) the “letter-learned” (letterwyse), who are learned and conversant in truth but lack its experience or power; and (4) the ignorant (onkunde), who are untaught but who may still be persuaded to learn because they have native intelligence.²

Verschuir’s model was adopted by Theodore Frelinghuysen (1691-1747), a Dutch Further Reformation preacher who immigrated to America to pastor several Reformed churches in Raritan Valley, New Jersey. Frelinghuysen’s method of preaching to various categories of people, in turn, influenced Gilbert Tennent, who influenced George Whitefield. The blessings that Frelinghuysen witnessed on targeting his audience earned him the title of Forerunner of the Great Awakening.³

Are such discriminatory grids biblical? Sinclair Ferguson believes so.

“We do not need to appeal to the Puritans for the authority to operate with such a grid providing us with a general categorization of hearers; our Lord Jesus did so Himself,” Ferguson writes. “On at least one occasion He divided His hearers into four different categories and likened them to the receptivity of different kinds of soil to seed sown in it.”⁴

These included the pathway, or the indifferent, hardened heart (Mark 4:15); the rocky soil, or the impulsive heart (vv. 16-17); the weed-infested soil, or the preoccupied heart (vv. 18-19); and the good soil, or the responsive, well-pre­pared heart (v. 20). William Kremer (1896-1985), a minister in the Christe­lijke Gereformeerde Kerken and professor of theology in Apel­doorn, the Netherlands, proposed yet another classification of hearers. In an article titled “The Address of the Sermon,” he proposed that hearers be divided into Adamic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Christological categories. The Adamic category is that of the natural fallen sinner as an enemy of God. In the Abrahamic category, God’s covenant, with all its riches, is brought to the foreground, including His one-sided, gracious promises of full salvation for those who are recipients of the covenant. The Mosaic category refers to those who, like the Jews and Paul before his conversion, sought salvation through legal righteousness. The Christological relationship is one of pure, effectual grace, in which all things become new for the believer in Christ. In Christ, the covenanted congregation finds full salvation.⁵

These various methods of classifications show that we must be careful not to lock too rigidly into one system. We must also strive to understand and be open to the needs of our flock at any given time. It is possible to be in the ministry for many years and discover new spiritual needs that we have never addressed before. Know your flock’s dietary needs. Heed Proverbs 27:23: “Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds.”

• Error Two: Aiming for every target in every sermon. Neither Perkins nor Verschuir nor Frelinghuysen propose that every sermon should apply to every kind of hearer. Many of their own sermons often contain applications to only the saved and unsaved. Sometimes three or four groups might be addressed in the application of a particular sermon when the text being expounded lends itself to this.
  Over a period of time, however, the preacher should try to address all kinds of hearers. Which hearers are addressed in each sermon depends on the text being expounded; there is no need for a Herculean effort on the part of the preacher to aim for every target with every text.
  To our own encouragement as preachers, it is good to remember how often the preaching we intend for one type of hearer does the greatest good for other types. The most seasoned and sanctified mature Christian is often roused and re-energized by an evangelistic sermon. Non-Christians are often confronted with their true condition and need while listening to a sermon describing and giving directions for living the Christian life. In His stupendous sovereignty, the Lord has ways of re-directing our arrows from one target to strike another!
• Error Three: Calling various groups derogatory names from the pulpit. Preachers of old often committed this error, no doubt seeking to imitate Christ when he cried out, “O generation of vipers” (Matt. 3:7), “Woe unto you, scribes and Phari­sees, hypocrites” (Matt. 23:13ff.), and “Ye serpents” (Matt. 23:33). But we must remember that Christ knew each heart and could speak thus with divine authority. We speak with divine authority in His name, of course, but we do not have perfect knowledge of each person’s heart. There may be excep­tions in this matter, but as a general rule it is not wise to say from the pulpit, “Hypocrites, here is now a word for you.” Rather, we should describe hypocrisy from the pulpit, apply its tragedy without mincing words, and then let people exam­ine themselves accordingly. That is the kind of preaching the Spirit often blesses.
• Error Four: Thinking that you can determine precisely which kind of hearer each sheep is in your flock. One mistake that some preachers have made in the past, including Frelinghuysen at certain occasions, was that they often decided to whom the Lord’s Supper could or could not be given, based on their own assessment of each member’s spiritual life.
  Of course, when a person is openly living an ungodly life, a preacher (or more accurately in our day, a consistory or church session) must make a judgment. In other cases, however, charity must be used, even though a preacher may fear that some members who profess grace and walk outwardly blameless lives are still strangers of grace. John Calvin stressed the need to judge others charitably, even as he often noted that many people do not truly profit from sermons because they don’t receive them in true faith. Here is a typical comment by Calvin: “If the same sermon is preached, say, to a hundred people, twenty receive it with the ready obedience of faith, while the rest hold it valueless, or laugh, or hiss, or loathe it.”⁶If unprofitable hearing and self-deceit were problems in Calvin’s day, how much more are they so today, when listeners are bombarded with all kinds of media? Nevertheless, Calvin was not reticent to give the elements of the Lord’s Supper to those who claimed saving faith in Christ.
  Our business as preachers is not to judge each person’s spiritual state, but to continue preaching the doctrines and marks of grace so that each person may faithfully examine himself. As 2 Corinthians 13:5 says, “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?”

Since self-examination is not a pleasant task, many pastors seldom call their congregations to engage in it. When they do, they offer a rather distant approach, saying something like this: “If there is anyone here tonight who does not know the Savior, let him examine himself in the light of God’s Word and repent before God and believe the gospel.” The implica­tion is that there may be, at most, a few people in the congregation who may not be saved. By default, most people are assumed saved.

In Calling and Regeneration, Herman Bavinck warns against such an assumption in preaching. Because such preaching proceeds from the ideal, it fails to reckon with reality and ignores the lessons of history. The result is that faith in the confession is confused with the confession of faith, fostering a dead ortho­doxy in which intellectual assent is taken for faith. So Bavinck warns:

“Under such preaching, there is but little concern about the disposition of the heart and the purity of life. As Israel rested on its descent from Abraham and on the temple that was in their midst, so many members of the New Testament church are beginning to build their hopes for eternity on the external ecclesiastical privileges wherein they share: bap­tism, confession, the Lord’s Supper, and thus they fall into a false complacency. Although the church is a gathering of true believers in Christ, there must yet constantly go forth in her midst the summons to faith and repentance.”⁷

Being saved does not mean that we need no longer probe and examine our own consciences. A faithful preacher will promote proper self-examination that is grounded in the Word (Isa. 8:20), that prays to the Spirit for guidance (Rom. 8:14), and that does not divert our gaze from Christ (Heb. 12:1-2). Such self-examination is profitable because it leads believers to live by faith in Christ with a good conscience. Moreover, it is essential for assuring the believer that his salvation is based on the right foundation, Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.

Robert Dabney put it this way: “A faithful self-inspec­tion usually reveals so much that is defective, that its first result is rather the discouragement than the encouragement of hope. But this leads the humbled Christian to look away from himself to the Redeemer; and thus assurance, which is the reflex act of faith, is strengthened by strengthening the direct actings of faith itself.”⁸

• Error Five: Forgetting to separate the precious from the vile (Jer. 15:19) on the one hand, such that every hearer quite easily thinks he is saved, or, on the other hand, demanding sensational experiences together with a detailed morphology of conversion, such that nearly every hearer feels he is unsaved. The unsaved are also a major target group of preaching. ear lines of demarcation must be made between the saved and unsaved. Do not help the self-deceived to continue to deceive themselves by offering them preaching that presupposes regeneration, hyper-covenantalism, dry redemptive-historical material that never applies the Word, or any other approach that minimizes the necessity of the saving work of the Holy Spirit.
  But also be careful not to become such an idealist in expounding the marks and fruits of grace that even the most God-fearing among your flock will begin to doubt their salvation. Do not fall into the trap of “experiential-ism,” that is, insisting on remarkable experiences that are not based on Scripture. As Calvin warns, if Scripture and sound preaching based on it are not the foundation of our faith, we will only be left with vague feelings that have no anchor. True faith anchors itself in the Word. We ought not to measure the presence of God in our lives by our experiences, for that would soon bring us to despair. “If we should measure out the help of God according to our feelings,” Calvin writes, “our faith would soon waver and we would have no courage or hope.”⁹

Calvin himself took care not to be a preacher who fell into experientialism — that is, one who frequently called attention to the experiences of believers in a rather mystical manner. He well understood that experience is to be defined by the testimony of the written Word.

Experientialism can result in an excessive morphology of conversion. The Puritans are often accused of this by scholars who themselves are not believers or by people who parrot these complaints without ever having read the Puritans themselves. Concerning conversion, few Puritans expected more of their members than the basic marks of grace.

Thomas Hooker may be one exception, at least in terms of his writings. Hooker wrote several lengthy books on how a sinner is led to Christ. Though they contain remarkable insights into the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul and contain much valuable material, they are rather daunting when taken as a whole.¹⁰Then, too, a few of Hooker’s individual statements border on the extreme. A lesser-known Puritan, Giles Firmin, responds to Hooker in a book titled The Real Christian. Firmin argues that some of Hooker’s statements, such as that a sinner needs to experience such a depth of bowing before the justice of God that he is made willing to go to hell for the sake of God’s glory, can greatly discourage ordinary Christians who do not dare to claim that they have experienced such a profound submission to the justice of God.¹¹

Conversion must not be schematized. William Guthrie shows us that we must not preach about special experiences of God’s people as if they were normative and required for all of God’s children. ¹²Even when we stress, in preaching, God’s normal way of converting sinners, we must remember that God often works in different ways. In his valuable chapter on regeneration, Wilhelmus à Brakel points out five differ­ent ways that God converts sinners: “a very sudden manner,” through “great terror and consternation,” “in a very evangelical manner,” “in a very quiet manner,” and most commonly, “in a very gradual fashion.”¹³

Due to God’s various workings in the saved, we must be very careful about making generic statements that insist that every child of God has certain experiences. In my first church, a woman was deeply troubled for years because a former minister had said from the pulpit, “Every true experience of the believer begins with guilt.” Since her own conversion did not begin with guilt but rather with gratitude for Christ’s saving work of grace in dying for sinners on the cross, this woman felt that her entire conversion must be invalid. We must be careful not to break bruised reeds or quench smoking flax (Isa. 42:3). Remember the warning given by Christ in Mark 9:42.

Never insist on experiencing unusual marks of grace; rather, be biblical and realistic. Charles Bridges wisely says:

“We would remark the importance of giving vital and distinctive marks of the Christian character — yet in a state of imperfection. For to describe them in their perfect state, would be to confound the standard with the measure of attainment, and by drawing the saint as an angel, to invalidate the title, and confound the assurance of the humble believer.”¹⁴

To achieve proper discernment, ministers should study passages of Scripture that focus on the marks of grace, such as the Beatitudes of Matthew 5 or the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5. We should pray for the discerning wisdom of the Spirit and should study human nature and the human heart, including our own. We should read pastoral books that provide wise counsel and case studies, such as Ichabod Spencer’s Pastoral Sketches, and we should converse often with our own parishioners about the condition of their souls.¹⁵

• Error Six: Thinking that your targeting of sheep can produce the fruits that your flock needs. Remember that your preaching must be a Spirit-anointed and Spirit-dependent-preaching, “not in word only but also in power and in the Holy Ghost and in much assurance” (1 Thess. 1:5). Ultimately, such preaching cannot be learned in a seminary, but only at the feet of the One who calls to the ministry those who are first converted and feel the constraint of Paul: “Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!” (1 Cor. 9:16).