#3 - Heralds of God

Even though I'm not a preacher and am not gifted to preach, I am the back-up preacher. And though you always want your first string preacher in the game, sometimes, he needs a break. So I have been preaching roughly every other month and now have some 10 sermons under my belt here at FHCC.

Although I have plenty to do and improve on in my "day" job, I also want to continually strive for excellence in my preaching as a herald of God. I'm not sure when I picked this book up, but it was recommended to me by my preaching professor in undergrad. I can still recall, almost 20 years later, how emphatically he recommended this book. After having read it, I am more amazed that the Lord allowed me to find this book through that professor. He must have been the most conservative professor at my college as I think most of my other professors there would completely disagree with it.

Regardless, this was a good book, written in the mid 20th century. It was inspiring to read both for the gravity of the responsibility and the glory of the Gospel. Here are a few gems:

• For your task is to confront the rampant disillusionment of the day, and smash it with the Cross of Christ and shame it with the splendor of the Resurrection.
• This is no time to be offering a reduced, milk-and-water religion. Far too often the world has been presented with a mild and underdemanding half-Christianity. The Gospel has been emasculated long enough. Preach Christ to-day in the total challenge of His high, imperious claim. Some will be scared, and some offended: but some, and they the most worth winning, will kneel in homage at His feet.
• 'No man,' declared James Denney, 'can give at once the impression that he himself is clever and that Jesus Christ is mighty to save.'
• There is no short-cut to escape the burden and the toil [of sermon preparation]. Any evasion of the cost will inevitably rob a man's ministry of power. Any refusal to accept the relentless, implacable discipline will result in diminshed spiritual influence. Put into your sermons your unstinting best.
• 'What' cries Richard Baxter, 'have we our time and strength for, but to lay both out for God? What is a candle made for, but to be burnt?'
• ...nothing could be more tedious than the preaching which is all uplift and exhortation with no food to feed the mind. Resolve, then, that your pulpit work shall represent not only your truest fervour but also your best thought. Your congregation deserves it, and will welcome it. But even with the deep and difficult themes that tax the mind - with these, indeed, most of all - the rule applies: Be clear, be direct.
• The fact is that this whole matter of [sermon] delivery can be resolved into two precepts which are not so paradoxical as they appear: Be yourself - Forget yourself.
• Bring everything that you have and are to your ministry - your best craftsmanship, your most concentrated study, your truest technique, your uttermost of self-consecration, your toil and sweat of brains and heart - bring it all without reserve. But when you have brought it, something else remains: Stand back, and see the salvation of God.
• It is a solemnizing thought for any preacher that what he speaks to men in the name of God is going to be mightily reinforced or mercilessly negatived by the quality of life behind it.
• It is one thing to set out gallantly when the flags are waving and the drums summoning to a new crusade, but it is quite another thing to keep plodding on when the road is difficult and the initial impetus has spent its force and the trumpets of the dawn have ceased to blow. It is one thing to have inspirations: it is another to have tenacity.
• Redemptive work is always costly. There is no hope of ease for the faithful servant of the Cross...if ever a man finds the work of the ministry becoming easily manageable and surmountable, an undemanding vocation without strain or any encumbering load of care, he is to be pitied, not congratulated: for he has so flagrantly lost touch with One whose ministry of reconciliation could be accomplished and fulfilled only through Gethsemane and Calvary.
• The basic reason why a minister must pray is not because he is a minister (that would savour of official piety, always an odious thing), but because he is a poor, needy creature dependent on God's grace.
• He [the preacher] is not diffidently offering men the dubious results of his private speculation: he is standing on his feet to deliver them, in the name of the King of kings, a word that cannot return void. He preaches as if the Lord God omnipotent were there at his right hand: as indeed God is. The keynote of his preaching is not 'Thus I think': it is 'Thus saith the Lord.'

Amen! I'm guessing that most of you are not preachers, but I encourage you to apply these same principles when you teach or proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ 1 on 1. Hopefully I will apply these principles myself as I preach the Word this Sunday.