On the other hand, theocentric, Christocentric, and redemptive sermons are conductive to worship. These sermons cause us to look heavenward and see the God who redeemed us. By setting forth these themes, these sermons do mediate the presence of God to us. We consider and exult in our God as he is set forth in a sermon. There is a second reason American Christians today are strangers to Word-based worship.
Listeners often do a bad job of listening.
Most American Christians today regard a sixty-minute sermon as criminally long, which means that Charles Haddon Spurgeon, George Whitefield, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and most Puritan pastors would have been pulpit failures by contemporary American standards. The point, however, is that we are unable to listen skillfully and profitably. I suspect that many of us simply do not like to listen. Good listening requires good thinking, which is a chore. But a major part of the problem with our listening, I suspect, is that we do not come to sermons expecting to see God.