Faithful Preaching is a powerful tool.
God uses it to transform lives and to glorify Himself. But pulpit ministry isn't without potential pitfalls. And today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg identifies ways that effective preaching can be derailed. And he reminds pastors of the upside to preaching.
We continue today in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. The pitfall of laziness. There's no question that if you give yourself wholeheartedly to the ministry of preaching, it will demand every ounce of your fiber.
But if you want to skive, which is a Scottish word for do as little as possible, then pastoral ministry provides that opportunity. There are a tremendous number of lazy people in pastoral ministry. If they were involved in any kind of private enterprise, they'd be belly up. They'd be flat broke.
They'd never make a dime. And they needed a good kick in the seat of the pants and back into action. Beware the laziness of just sitting around in your socks when the members of your congregation have had their shoes on for the last four hours. Stop this nonsense about how you need to be home with your family, because if you don't take care of your family, you can't take care of the church. I understand that, but that's not an excuse for sidling around and going on picnics and doing whatever it pleases you, nor me. Laziness is a dreadful thing. Look at how many ministers have got big fat tummies.
How do you get them? Sixthly, I was talking about people in Britain there. I wasn't talking about America. Sixthly, misplaced affections. The pitfall of misplaced affections, such as loving the ministry rather than loving Jesus, such as loving talking and hearing your voice, rather than loving the privilege of opening up the scriptures, such as loving the Bible and not actually loving the Christ to whom we are introduced in the Bible. You see, it's very possible to stay close to the word of the Lord and not be close to the Lord of the Word, to become a theoretician, to become able to become an answerer of questions, but to become cold and refrigerated and disentangled from the loving embrace of the Christ that we serve.
That's a pitfall. To be consumed with money rather than with contentment, to drift into immorality rather than to live in personal purity. Misplaced affection.
Seventhly, a sense of aimlessness, a sense of aimlessness. Howard Hendricks apparently had in his study a sign that said on it, what in the world are you doing with these people? And there is a great danger that we lose our way in pastoral ministry, and so it is imperative that we constantly are harnessing ourselves to the purpose-driven statements of the scriptures.
Paul is classic, is he not? He says, I want to win as many as possible in 1 Corinthians 9. He says, I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection in Philippians 3. He says, I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
In other words, he was absolutely clear about what he was doing and where he was going, and it is a shame when in the responsibility of opening up the scriptures, our friends and our colleagues, our leaders alongside us, are looking to us and they're saying, do you have any idea what you're doing? Do you have any notion of where you're going? Will you help us? Will you take the helm of the ship? Now, some of us need help in relationship to that, and people will always be glad to help, provided we're prepared to say help. But some of us want to still hold the tiller. We don't quite where to move it or how to direct the boat, and we're aimless, and we drift, and our congregation drifts with us. Eighthly, the danger of capitulation. The danger of capitulation, forgetting that the primary purpose of our pulpit is to see men and women put in a right relationship with God, for us to capitulate to the notion that it is our business to either make people happy or to see their lives integrated or to relieve their circumstances or to improve their conditions.
No, we stand between a holy God and sinful men and women, and ours is a ministry of reconciliation, and knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men. Our responsibility is to feed the sheep. It's to teach them, not to tickle them.
It's to guide them. And there is a great danger in our day that we would capitulate, and we would become just glorified cheerleaders, happy chaps that stand up and try and make everybody feel a little better about themselves. The last pitfall I want to mention, it picks up on the ramblings that we started yesterday about naked preaching, and you will remember that the question was, how right is it for the pastor to use himself as an illustration?
And I knew in the back of my mind that I had something in my files concerning this, and I found it, and I just want to use this opportunity to share it with you. Someone is writing an article about this whole notion of authenticity and being authentic, and indeed the heading of the article is, naked preachers are distracting. And he says this, have you ever decided to act authentically? I think I'll act authentically now. That's as dumb, he says, as deciding to act humbly.
You either are or you aren't. To intentionally pepper my sermon with doses of predetermined authenticity is to be inauthentic. An elderly woman complained to me that she could tell when her pastor had not had time to prepare a sermon because he would begin crying at the weakest point in the sermon. Crying, I said.
Yeah, crying, she said. He says something like, when I think of what Jesus did for us, I just, well, forgive me, I'm just overcome with gratitude. He usually is overcome with gratitude about once a month, usually related to his fishing schedule. In a society where the emotional striptease is the standard stuff of daytime television, in a culture where we are encouraged relentlessly to scan our egos as if there is no help for us other than that which is self-derived, do we preachers need to be authentic? Authenticity is more than a matter of being who I am. It is a matter of being who God calls me to be. For preachers, authenticity means being true, not just to our feelings, but true to our vocation, true to God's call. We serve God's people by laying aside ourselves, taking up the cross, preaching Christ and him crucified, whether we feel like it next Sunday or not.
That's authenticity. Now, that brings me away from the pitfalls to the other side of the coin and to the power, and I want to spend the balance of my time here. Now, we read purposely from 1 Corinthians 1 and 2. Let me just say a word or two about power. Paul is talking here about power in this section.
As you would know, you'll be familiar with that. It is a very timely message, because in his generation, as in ours, there was a phenomenal preoccupation with the notion of power. And Paul, recognizing that it was customary for people in the context in which he was moving to be intrigued by, interested in power, powerful people doing powerful things, he apparently picks that up and chooses to instruct the Corinthian church as to the nature of God's dynamite.
And in the midst of all that he is saying here, and he is saying a great deal, let me zero in on this one notion, which I believe to be true to the text, and you're sensible people, and you can examine and see whether this is accurate or not. But Paul is saying here that power, the power of God, is active on the lips of those who preach, that the power of God is manifested through the foolishness of what was preached, so that in this very act of Spirit-filled, God-anointed, Bible-based instruction from God to man through the lips of a spokesman, God's power is manifest. And that, you see, is the explanation of apostolic preaching, that Peter and the others were not on the streets of Jerusalem giving lectures on Christian doctrine. They were not on the streets of Jerusalem sharing vague generalities about Christian principles that people might like to try and appropriate and assimilate into their lives and thereby be better people. No, they were on the streets of Jerusalem conveying facts, but conveying facts in such a way that it was owned by the Spirit of God. And so there was a power, there was a dynamite about what was going on. Now there's an aside here that I think I should probably leave alone.
Now I'm just going to mention it and I'll go on. I don't believe that drama awakens faith in Jesus. I don't believe that art awakens faith in Jesus. I believe that preaching awakens faith in Jesus in a way that nothing else does. Christian preaching begins only when faith in the message has reached such a pitch that the man or the community proclaiming it becomes part of the message proclaimed. When the man or the community becomes part of the message proclaimed. So people come among your Christian community and they say these people are the message. The message is these people. This preacher is this issue. This passion is this person.
You can't disentangle the man from the communication that is taking place. These Christians must show me they are redeemed, cried Nietzsche, before I will believe in their redeemer. Thus when the apostolic church declared the hour cometh and now is, this is the age of the Spirit. The church itself in its total life was part of that dramatic truth, for men encountering that church felt, even though they were pagans, a waft of the supernatural, a mysterious power like the stirring of a dawn wind.
Isn't that an amazing little section? They encountered, even as pagans, a waft of the supernatural, a mysterious power. That's the preaching of Whitfield.
That's the 18th century awakening. That is something far different from a knowledgeable fellow speaking with emphasis. It is a divine encounter by means of the living God. Now when Paul uses power in relationship to preaching, this is his emphasis. He says God has chosen to work in such a way that his power might be displayed. That, he says illustrating it, is why he has chosen the likes of you. It's almost humorous in verse 26 and following. He says if you want to know that this principle is true, that God's power is made perfect in weakness, that God has chosen to bring down the strongholds of wisdom by the measure of foolishness, he says just think about yourselves.
He says just think about your church. What were you like when you were called? Not many of you were wise by human standards. You weren't a bunch of influential people.
You didn't come from noble birth. And he says that's the whole point. God chose the foolish to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong, the lowly things that despise things, the things that are not, so that people would stand back and say there is only one explanation for this event and that is that God's power is here.
Now that's what we want to see happen. Not that we reduce our congregations to the lowest common denominator so that pagans feel that there is something that makes them feel very comfortable. And a little band plays and a little interview happens and a little skit happens and and, you know, funny people come out and dance around and they and they go away and they say, my, you know, the church is a wonderful place.
That's not it at all. Think about the personality, he says, and think about the preaching. When I came to you, brothers, I didn't come with eloquence or superior wisdom. As I proclaimed to you the testimony about God or the testimony of God, I wasn't there to share my ideas.
I was there to speak as from God, about God, to bring you to God. Now when you do a wee bit of history and go back and read the Acts of the Apostles, read around chapter 14, 15, 16, 17, into 18, you will know that he wasn't coming off a private plane here. He had been in Philippi and he got flogged. He went from there to Thessalonica and riots broke out and they had to take him out of the city under cover of darkness.
He buzzed down to Berea and the people who came from Thessalonica stirred up the agitation in Berea. He then went to Athens, got to Athens, and his heart was breaking. He had paroxysms as he looked at the idolatrous situation there and his life was stirred within him. And then on from there and into Corinth and he begins to preach in the synagogue and they throw him out of the synagogue.
And he reminds them of these historic days. He says, when I came, you remember, I didn't have much by the way of baggage. You picked him up from the airport and he was coming to speak at your conference in Corinth, you know. He said, do you have any bags, Paul? Well, I had a couple that I left behind. What did you leave behind? I left eloquence behind. Oh, you did?
We love eloquence here in Corinth. Yeah, well, I didn't bring that. Well, you know, people are expecting that.
Yeah, I know, I didn't bring it. Well, you know, people are really into that. They're into miracles and they're into eloquence, they're into wisdom. I mean, haven't you done a kind of market research before you showed up here? I mean, you know you're supposed to give the people what they want, don't you? He said, no, I didn't bring eloquence. I'm not going to impress people. I'm not going to do all that kind of Shakespearean drivel just to impress them with my talk, you know. There's a kind of preaching that just impresses people with this stuff.
Let me tell you, you cannot impress people with yourself and impress them with the Lord Jesus simultaneously. So he left behind the bag of eloquence. He left behind the bag of wisdom. I don't have time to go into all of this.
It is Sophia. It's a very important thing. And he says, I did bring one or two things with me. I brought weakness and fear and much trembling. That was the manner in which he showed up. The message with which he came was real clear. I resolved. In crino is the verb.
It means I made the singular determination. It's not that he was unable for these things. He was exceptionally bright.
He couldn't have written the book of Romans had he not been. But I determined. I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I was weak. I had fear. I shook a bit. My message of my preaching did not say to people, man, is he wise?
Is he persuasive? But there was something about the message I proclaimed, and it was a demonstration of the Spirit's power. Brethren, is this not what we long for? That the Spirit of God would come down upon our preaching, surprise us, that even the pagans would catch a waft of the supernatural, would be caught up in some way. Now his express motivation is there in verse 5. I determined to do this so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom but on God's power. See, if he came in and just impressed them with his ideas and his notions and his skill and his eloquence and so on, then the people would have been stabilized for a wee while, but they would have been at the mercy of the next person who came into town, a little brighter, a little more eloquent.
So Paul says, when I came in, I didn't want you to respond on the basis of that. That's why I proclaimed the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, so that your faith might rest not in man's wisdom but in God's power. My dear friend and mentor, Eric Alexander, in giving an address in Canada some years ago, concluded his remarks like this. There is one thing I want to say to my brethren who are called to be preachers. There is one thing above all other things in the world that we need. That is the mysterious thing we call the unction of the Holy Spirit of God upon our lives and upon our ministry.
Charles Spurgeon used to say, unction is that, somewhat, that it is impossible to define, but you always know when it is present and you can usually tell when it is absent. We need to cry to God for the Holy Spirit's anointing upon our preaching, so that the people may not go away with the notion, what a great preacher. Instead they should say, what an amazing God, how glorious he is. We have been in the presence of God this day. Truly God is on this place.
Oftentimes God takes the most feeble, weak, despised servant of his and comes down upon him for the simple reason that it would be difficult for anybody else to get the glory. God exalts his name and glorifies his son and melts the hearts of his people, because God has come upon this particular instrument of his glory. Above all other things we are to be the instruments of his glory and honor, and we shall find expository preaching, the most amazing labor in the world. There is really nothing quite like it. It is utterly consuming. It may sometimes be utterly exhausting, sometimes utterly exhilarating, but it is the most glorious privilege in all the world. On mornings I find myself getting up from my study desk and walking around saying out loud in the study, fancy for being paid to do this. Isn't that one of the great mysteries of the world?
Fancy somebody actually paying you to do this kind of thing. I find that quite overwhelming. It is a privilege beyond my understanding. And from one of my dearest of Scottish friends to one of my dearest American friends, Alistair writes John MacArthur, preach the word brother. This is the heart of our service, not always easy but always blessed. In my oft struggles to fulfill that service, the following Puritan prayer has strengthened me. And let me finish now my address with this Puritan prayer. Lord high and holy, meek and lowly, thou has brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the heights with thee and in the depths with me. Hemmed in by the mountains of sin, I yet see thy glory. Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up, that to be lowly is to be high, that the broken heart is the healed heart, that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit, that the repenting soul is the victorious soul, that to have nothing is to possess all, that to bear the cross is to wear the crown, that to give is to receive, that the valley is the place of clearest vision. Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from deepest wells, and the deeper the wells, the brighter thy stars shine. Amen. You're listening to Alistair Begg.
This is Truth for Life. As we've been finding out, there are many pitfalls that can undermine a pastor's ministry, but we've also learned today that God's power is revealed in the spirit-filled preaching of his word. Just like every believer, pastors need to be encouraged.
They need to be reminded of God's truth, and we believe our current offer will do just that. By now you have probably heard me mention the book we're recommending. It's titled Faithful Leaders and the Things That Matter Most. This is a book that can be read quickly, but it will help you focus your ambition on things that matter to God rather than the things that can impress the world. The author is a pastor himself, Rico Tice, and in the book he looks at scripture, personal experience, and wisdom from other pastors to provide us something that can serve as a guide to effective Christian leadership. If you're new to leading a church ministry, the book Faithful Leaders will be a great help, but it's also a vital resource for seasoned ministry veterans. If you're in long-term ministry, you know the risk of growing weary and drifting from the things that matter most to God, like solid biblical teaching and faithful holy character. Again, the book is titled Faithful Leaders and the Things That Matter Most. You can request your copy when you donate to Truth for Life today.
Visit truthforlife.org or call us at 888-588-7884. I'm Bob Lapine. The Apostle Paul seized every opportunity available to him to proclaim the gospel. Are we prepared to follow his example and confront a world in need of a Savior? Join us tomorrow. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
