- Prayer- Come with your soul prepared to hear God’s Word by praying for God’s blessing.
- Appetite- Come with holy appetite.
- Tender Teachable Heart- What will you have me to do? Speak to me.
- Be Attentive- Discipline your mind to be attentive with your mind; keep yourself from distractions as much as possible. To be as involved in hearing as the preacher is in preaching (Calvin taught this).
- Receive with meekness- Receive with meekness the ingrafted word; this is a submissive frame of heart (Psalm 131). Through meekness the Word gets deeper into our souls and we are more able to receive it.
- Faith- Mingle the preached word with faith. The chief ingredient of listening to a sermon must be faith in order to apply the word.
- Retain- Retain and pray over what you have heard. Don’t let the sermon go through your mind like water through a sieve. Our memory should be like the chest of the ark where the Law was placed. Go from your knees to the sermon and go from the sermon to your knees.
- Practice- Practice what you have heard; live out what God has taught you.
- Beg- For the effectual blessing of the Holy Spirit; this is the “swallowing of the medicine to heal youâ€.
- Familiarize- Go home and speak about it to family, friends, others, so that you will become very familiar with the truths.
***Remember each sermon as if it was the last you will ever hear, because that just may be the case.***