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."

Does Our Church Have Square Wheels?

What do you see in the picture? Should we commend these two men for their hard work or condemn them for their ignorance? Hopefully, we all can see the ridiculousness in this picture. Hopefully, we want to shout at the two men, "just open your eyes and look in the cart!"

Apparently, these men fail to realize that they have all the proper tools for getting the job done at their disposal. Everything they need to make the cart get from point A to point B is already there. In fact, if they would use the round wheels in the cart, they could actually do much less work to get a much better result.

Christian Schwarz, founder of Natural Church Development, uses this illustration to reveal to churches at how "backwards" we can be sometimes. Many of our churches imitate the two men in this picture by trying to force our concepts about church into the church. We often fail to realize that God has put everything at our disposal to accomplish exactly what He wants for that time and that hour. But we seem to busy with our heads down, trying to push and pull the church into everything we know it can be. What if we got a hold of the wheels that God has already put in the cart and let Him do all the work?

The area this is most evident is in the area of "ministry". Because the preacher, elders, or some leading group deems certain activities or programs worth doing, we go out and find our volunteers to plug into those slots. We fail to ask the most important question, "who has God gifted us to be?" Rather than starting with the wheels that God has given us, we try to create our own square wheels. Instead, what if we helped the church to realize what gifts God has given them and then allowed ministry to rise out of their gifting? What would happen to the church?

I'm afraid the reason that we don't function like this is for fear. Fear of losing control. Leaders are often scared of giving up control, because they are unsure of what will happen. But that's just the point. Leaders of God's people ought to know by now that we are not in control. Only He is and He gifts His body accordingly. Maybe we could learn something from Paul's letter to the Ephesians.

"But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it says, 'When He ascended on high, He led captive a host of captives, And He gave gifts to men.' (Now this expression, 'He ascended,' what does it mean except that He also had descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is Himself also He who ascended far above all the heavens, so that He might fill all things.)

And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ." (Ephesians 4:7-13)

God Transforms The Receptive Preacher (Why It Starts With God)

"Preaching, in one sense, merely discharges the firearm that God has loaded in the silent places." Calvin Miller, Spirit, Word, and Story, pg35

In my thesis, the goal is to show why God is the author, subject, and power of our preaching. To some it might seem obvious that this should be the case. But a visit to most churches in our communities will tell us a different story. There is a lot of good sermonizing, story telling, moralistic teaching, and "showmanship." There is also a lot of bad versions of those things. However, I would contend that when we walk into these "sermons" we are not actually hearing sermons. Maybe speeches under the church guise of sermons, but they are speeches nonetheless. They may inform, motivate, or tug at our heart strings, but they rarely transform. I am convinced by the word of God that true transformational preaching only occurs when our starting point is God. Allow me to explain.

God, by being His very nature, is a free being to do whatever He pleases, as long as it does not go against His nature. Therefore, truth about God can only be known to us by whatever means He pleases to reveal Himself. The very act of God's creation of this world is His revelation of Himself. For whatever reason that He saw fit, He created all things according to His word, just as described in Genesis 1 and 2. This is the powerful revelation of Himself in creation. The psalmist praises the glory of creation in Psalm 19 and Paul says that we are all without excuse as a result of this creation in Romans 1. Our very existence begins by the power of God. And what's more, it came about as a result of His word.

8 times God speaks and something comes into being in Genesis 1. God speaks and it is done. He has the power to reveal Himself through His word(s). And this is why preaching must start with God. If all of life begins with the word of God, how much more then the preaching of God's Word? Preaching is not born out of our cleverness, nor our talent for speaking, nor our ability to grip the audience, nor our ideas that we'd like to talk about. Preaching is born out of the silence of listening for God's whispers of revelation.

In Matthew 13, Jesus tells a parable of a sower and 4 different types of soils. When asked why He spoke in parables, Jesus answered, "Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand." (Matthew 13:13). This is the state of many a preacher today. Speaking they do not speak (the things of God). In order to be able to truly preach the word of God, we must come to Him waiting patiently to hear. And if we are not careful, we will walk into the pulpit blind, deaf, and dumb. We will know that the preacher has been with God because, as Albert Mohler Jr. says, "no man can give at once the impression that he himself is clever and that Christ is mighty to save."

We must begin with God, because if we do not, we have nothing to say. Our wisdom and eloquence may be enough to captivate an audience, although usually it is not, but the wisdom of God is the only wisdom with any power. Speaking of the power of plainly preaching the Gospel Paul says in I Corinthians 2:1-13:

And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.

Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature; a wisdom, however, not of this age nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away; but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory; the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it they would not have crucified the Lord of glory; but just as it is written, “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, And which have not entered the heart of man, All that God has prepared for those who love Him.”

For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.

Truly transformational preaching is marked by the words of John the Baptizer. He must increase, I must decrease. Or to say it differently, the louder I get, the quieter God gets in my preaching. A right understanding of preaching will lead us to the same conclusion as Calvin Miller. "A great preacher brings to the pulpit great sermons from the presence of God." Only when the preacher has been with God, in prayer and the word, will he be able to come before the church body ready to preach. Anything offered not from the presence of God is at best a grand speech and at worst a pointless one. And yes, I have been guilty of both. But may God grab hold of His heralds and whisper the words of life into their ears.

God and Injustice

It has been a while since I have written anything here (having a 3rd child changes things just a bit.) Also, with the added responsibility of being the interim preaching minister at Round Lake, I am finding that I have to be even more devoted in "making time". I actually intend to step up my blogging from once a week to twice a week now. Early in the week (usually Tuesday) I will post something ministry related, things that are coming out of my sermon preparation or that we as a leadership are dealing with. This is a way for anyone who reads to stay up to date with what is going on at Round Lake.

Later in the week (usually Friday) I will return to posting thoughts that come out of my thesis work. This has been a long journey and I find myself now faced with the task of writing the first chapter. The focus of this chapter is on how the Trinity is expressed through preaching and why God is the one responsible for preaching. It should provide for some interesting material over the coming months.

As I have been preparing for our new sermon series, Habakkuk: God and Injustice, I find myself wrapped up in a concept that Charles Spurgeon and John Piper brought to my attention. It has to do with sailing. If you have ever known the joy of having a moving religious experience, you know the momentum that this can give to your spiritual life. Maybe it was a conference where you first realized your need for the salvation that Jesus has to offer. Maybe it was alone in your room studying the word and having a moment where the lightbulb came on. Or maybe in a church service, God moved in such a way that you were brought to tears. When we have these moments, we often mark our lives by them. This is like the sails of a sailboat. These experiences puff us up and give us the opportunity to catch the "wind" also known as the Holy Spirit (see John 3). As these experiences prepare us for God's work, the Holy Spirit swoops in and moves us in God's direction.

I am not a nautical man (meaning I don't know much about boats) so this next part has been interesting for me. When sailing, it is important that the ballast of the boat is equivalent to the amount of force that the wind will apply through the sails. The ballast is the weight needed to keep the boat upright. Too much and you sink, too little and the boat goes tipping forward. When we have these moving religious experiences, it is critical that the weight of the glory of God helps keep our "experiences" in check. We need the ballast of God's glory. And this is where the sin of the world comes in.

Habakkuk 1:3a says, "why do you make me see iniquity?" There are many answers and God's answer is "because if I explained it to you, you wouldn't understand," (see Habakkuk 1:5). But let us consider something. Why does God allow us to see so much iniquity in the world? The answer is so that we are reminded of the weight of what God has done and is doing. Things like cancer, earthquakes in Haiti, lying politicians, murder, rape, abortion, and suffering of all kinds exist for the glory of God. They exist to remind us of our need and this world's need for a savior. They exist to bring some weight into our otherwise weightless lives. How much time have you spent today contemplating the sovereignty of God? How much time have you spent contemplating the new season of "Lost"? Or how your favorite sports team is doing? Or how much time have you spent watching the clock to see when work ends? We need to contemplate injustice in this world more, so that we might be reminded of how Glorious our God is.