The Father As Our Source

Thus says the Lord, “Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord. For he will be like a bush in the desert and will not see when prosperity comes, but will live in stony wastes in the wilderness, a land of salt without inhabitant. Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is the Lord. For he will be like a tree planted by the water, that extends its roots by a stream and will not fear when the heat comes; but its leaves will be green, and it will not be anxious in a year of drought nor cease to yield fruit." (Jeremiah 17:5-8)

What a powerful warning and promise for all people to hear! But what especially peaked my interest today was the bearing that this text has on my thesis, especially the first chapter entitled, "God Transforms the Receptive Preacher." The receptivity of the preacher is crucial to be able to preach!

To paraphrase the text above, "cursed is the preacher who trusts in the opinions of others and gets by on talent, but whose heart is far from the Lord!" What a dangerous warning to those who claim to be proclaiming God's word. We may be able to fool our churches and we may be able to even fool ourselves, but we will never fool God. He gives us the refreshing we need to become trees that have something to offer, that produce fruit. Without our trusting in Him and Him being our trust, we will dry up.

How many times I have preached a dried up sermon! As Keith Willhite has said, "it is not possible to preach a vital sermon about God when God is somewhere beyond us, out past the borders of our everyday lives." In this sense, preaching is simply put, an overflow of fruit. We only have something to say when we've sought rest in the living water of Jesus Christ. When we've explored the depths of the text and allowed it to saturate our souls. When we've spent more time being transformed by the text, than by cleverly preparing the message.

It is possible to be dried up and to hold peoples attention. In fact, it happens quite often that large numbers of people are mesmerized by Godless speaking. But according to God's word, unless we are making much of Him, both in the study and in the sermon, then we are filling people up with "us". And the danger of this is quite clear, dry, dusty, death. With cleverness of tongue we can soothe people right to sleep and watch them decay before our very eyes. And because of our own dryness we won't even notice what is happening.

Instead, I pray that we might catch a vision for the necessity of drawing on God alone in preaching. It must begin with Him, because without Him our preaching is dead. He is life and has the words of eternal life, therefore let us, "live on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God."