The Power of the Holy Spirit
There is an urgent need for courageous preachers in the pulpits of the world today, like the apostles in the early church who “were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldnes” (Acts 4:31, cf. v. 13). Neither men-pleasers nor time-servers ever make good preachers. We are called to the sacred task of biblical exposition, and commissioned to proclaim what God has said, not what human beings want to hear. Many modern churchmen suffer from a malady called “itching ears,” which induces them to “accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings” (2 Tim. 4:3). But we have no liberty to scratch their itch or pander to their likings. Rather are we to resemble Paul in Ephesus who resisted this very temptation and twice insisted that he “did not shrink from declaring” to them what had to be declared, namely “anything that was profitable” for them and indeed “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:20, 27). We have to beware of selecting our texts and topics—even unconsciously—according to personal prejudice or popular fashion. The medicine of the gospel has been prescribed by the Good Physician; we may neither dilute it nor add ingredients to make it more palatable; we must serve it neat. Nor need we fear that people will not take it. To be sure, some may leave, but most will respond. “People are driven from the Church,” commented George Buttrick, “not so much by stern truth that makes them uneasy as by weak nothings that make them contemptuous.”
“Courage,” said Phillips Brooks in his 1877 Yale Lectures,
is the indispensable requisite of any true ministry. . . . If you are afraid of men and a slave to their opinion, go and do something else. Go and make shoes to fit them. Go even and paint pictures which you know are bad but which suit their bad taste. But do not keep on all your life preaching sermons which shall say not what God sent you to declare, but what they hire you to say. Be courageous. Be independent.
Truly, “the fear of man lays a snare” (Prov. 29:25), and many preachers get caught in it. But once ensnared, we are no longer free; we have become the obsequious servants of public opinion.
The Christian preacher who seeks God’s grace to be faithful today can derive much inspiration from a long tradition of predecessors, beginning even in Old Testament times. Although one may look right back to Moses as the first prophet who heard, believed, obeyed, and taught the Word of God, in spite of opposition and consequent loneliness, yet the distinctive tradition of Hebrew prophecy belonged to the period of the monarchy and may be said to have begun with Elijah. True, his arithmetic was sadly awry when he complained that all the people of Israel had forsaken God’s covenant and that “I, even I only, am left.” For the faithful remnant was much larger than he had supposed, seven thousand in fact, who had “not bowed to Baal” (2 Kgs. 19:9–18). Nevertheless, we cannot help admiring the courage with which he opposed the whole national establishment in the double cause of religious truth and social justice. He challenged the prophets of Baal to a public show-down and condemned the king and queen for murdering Naboth and seizing his vineyard. In both protests he stood alone. It was a fine precedent, and the confrontation of prophet and king, divine word and royal authority, became a regular feature of the prophetic witness. Nathan dared to rebuke King David for his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband. Amos fulminated against evil even in the king’s sanctuary at Bethel, and predicted a horrible fate for the royal chaplain Amaziah for trying to silence him (7:10–17).
Jeremiah was another lonely voice. From the beginning of his prophetic ministry, God warned him of the opposition which his message of national doom would provoke, and promised to make him “a fortified city, an iron pillar and bronze walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, its princes, its priests, and the people of the land.” They would fight against him, but they would not prevail against him (1:17–19). Although we cannot condone Jeremiah’s outbursts of self-pity and despair, or his occasional longings for personal revenge, yet his courageous and solitary stand wins our profound respect. He was a true patriot, knowing that only heartfelt repentance could save the nation; yet he was called to announce God’s judgment through the Babylonians, and in consequence was accused of hating his own country and even of deserting to the enemy.
The prophetic testimony of the Old Testament culminated in that “voice crying in the wilderness,” John the Baptist, whom Jesus characterized as neither a reed blown by public opinion, nor a soft-living courtier indulging the desires of the flesh, but a true prophet, controlled by the Word of God, indeed as the greatest man who had yet lived (Matt. 11:7–11). He was the new Elijah in whose ministry the same two strands of witness—religious and social—reappeared as he both announced the arrival of God’s reign and denounced the adultery of the king. His courage cost him his life. Indeed, he was the last of the long line of martyr-prophets whom Israel rejected and killed (cf. 2 Chr. 36:15, 16; Matt. 23:29–36; Acts 7:52), though of course they went on to kill their Messiah and oppose his apostles as well (cf. 1 Thess. 2:15).
Jesus himself gained a reputation for fearless and uncompromising speech. Towards the end of his life, the Pharisees sent a deputation to him who said, “Teacher, we know that you are true, and teach the way of God truthfully, and care for no man; for you do not regard the position of men” (Matt. 22:16). It is small wonder, then, that his Galilean popularity lasted only a year or so, and that the hostility of the authorities increased until they determined to do away with him. At the same time, he warned his followers that the disciple was not greater than his teacher, and that if the teacher was persecuted, the disciples would be also. And so it happened. Luke describes in the Acts how first Peter and John were arrested and imprisoned, next Stephen and James were martyred, and then Paul suffered all manner of indignities at the hands of the opponents of the gospel. This persecution was a direct consequence of the parrēsia, the freedom and boldness of speech, or outspokenness, with which those early Christians bore witness to Jesus. This was the quality which Paul desired above all others in his ministry. From prison he wrote to ask his friends to pray for him, that he might be given “utterance” in opening his mouth “boldly” to proclaim the gospel (Eph. 6:19–20). Far from silencing him, his imprisonment would afford him fresh opportunities for courageous testimony. Luke takes leave of him under house arrest in Rome, still welcoming all who visited him and still preaching and teaching “quite openly (literally, ‘with all boldness,’ parrēsia) and unhindered” (Acts 28:30–31).
This tradition of courageous witness and consequent suffering, in the Old and New Testaments, by prophets and apostles and by the Lord of both is consistent and unremitting. It established a pattern which has continued throughout church history. A few examples may be given as illustration, to inspire us with the readiness to follow suit, and to cure us of the perverse ambition to be a “popular preacher.” I begin with Chrysostom at the very end of the fourth century, who preached with great eloquence and courage first in Antioch, and then as archbishop of Constantinople for six years, until he offended the empress and was deposed and banished. He bravely denounced the vices of the city and “rebuked without fear or favour all classes and conditions of men.” Take, for instance, his seventeenth homily on Matthew’s Gospel, in which he expounded Jesus’ prohibition of false swearing (Matt. 5:33–37). He was determined that the congregation would take their Lord’s instruction with due seriousness and obey it:
If I see you persisting [he said], I will forbid you for the future to set foot on this sacred threshold, and partake of the immortal mysteries; as we do fornicators and adulterers, and persons charged with murder. . . . Let me have no rich man, no potentate, puffing at me here, and drawing up his eyebrows; all these are to me a fable, a shade, a dream.
Every one of them, he emphasized, would have to stand before God and give an account of himself.
Let me now jump nearly a thousand years to John Wycliffe, the precursor of the English Reformation. It was no light task for him to oppose the ecclesiastical establishment almost single-handed with his forthright criticisms. He attacked the worldliness of the clergy, likening them to the scribes and Pharisees, the corruptions of the papacy, and the errors of transubstantiation. Several times he was brought to trial, but his friends defended him and he escaped condemnation. Many of his followers, the Lollards, however, were burned to death for heresy.
With Martin Luther the full light of the Reformation shone over Europe. Whether attacking the sale of indulgences or defying the authority of the pope or taking his stand on the Word of God, his courage was phenomenal. Open his published works at random, and on almost every page may be found examples of uncompromising outspokenness. As he put it in his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, “I am a preacher. I have to have teeth in my mouth. I have to bite and salt and tell them the truth.” Again,
Whoever wants to do his duty as a preacher and perform his office faithfully must retain the freedom to tell the truth fearlessly, regardless of other people. He must denounce anyone that needs to be denounced—great or small, rich or poor or powerful, friend or foe. Greed refuses to do this, for it is afraid that if it offends the bigwigs or its good friends, it will be unable to find bread. So greed puts its whistle into its pocket and keeps quiet.
No Christian preacher can have shown more courage, however, than the Scottish reformer John Knox. His contemporaries described him as little and frail, but he had a fiery disposition and a vehement way of speaking. After his return to Scotland in 1559 from his exile in Geneva, his audacious biblical preaching put new heart into the Scots who longed for deliverance from the Catholic French and for a reformed kirk. As Randolph, the English envoy, said in a dispatch to Queen Elizabeth, “the voice of one man is able in one hour to put more life in us than 500 trumpets continually blustering in our ears.” When Mary Queen of Scots was contemplating marriage with Don Carlos, son and heir of King Philip of Spain, which would have brought the pope’s power (political as well as religious) and the Spanish Inquisition to Scotland, Knox preached publicly against it. Such a union, he cried, would “banish Christ Jesus from this realm.” The queen was deeply offended, sent for him, protested, burst into tears, and vowed that she would get her revenge. Knox replied,
Without [sc. outside] the preaching place, Madam, I think few have occasion to be offended at me; but there, Madam, I am not master of myself, but maun [sc. must] obey him who commands me to speak plain, and to flatter no flesh upon the face of the earth.
Knox died in 1572 and was buried with national mourning in the churchyard behind St. Giles, Edinburgh. The regent (the Earl of Morton) said at his grave, “Here lies one who never feared the face of man.”
Preachers continued to maintain a brave witness in the following three centuries and to suffer for it, and in our twentieth century many instances could be given not only under Nazi, Marxist, Moslem, and Hindu opposition to the gospel, but in the so-called Christian west also. Here too there have been courageous preachers who have refused to edit their message in order to make it more popular. I content myself with only one example, the Rev. Martin Luther King Senior, father of the black American civil rights leader who was later assassinated. In her book My Life with Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King describes her late husband’s father in these words, he “had by that time (viz. 1964) been pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta for thirty-three years. He is a big man, physically and spiritually. He stands strong and broad in his pulpit, afraid of no man, white or black, telling it like it is, preaching the Word to his congregation and giving them his overflowing love.”
So consistent is this tradition of unpopular preaching, both in Scripture and in church history, and so contrary to the preacher’s natural inclination to be popular and to comfort people rather than disturb them, that we are prompted to enquire into its origin. We do not have far to look. The only possible explanation is that preachers like prophets believe themselves to be bearers of a Word from God and are therefore not at liberty to deviate from it. In Old Testament days even heathen soothsayers like Balaam, whatever his association with Israel may have been, knew that he was not a free man. His liberty was curtailed by revelation. Although the Moabite King Balak hired him to curse Israel, he persisted in blessing them. To the exasperated Balak he explained, “Have I now any power at all to speak anything? The word that God puts in my mouth, that must I speak” (Num. 22:38). If Balaam could thus express his lack of independent utterance and his obligation to submit to God’s Word, how much more did the prophets of Israel? To each of them God gave the same commission that he gave to Jeremiah, “Behold I have put my words in your mouth . . . say to them everything that I command you,” with its negative corollary, “do not hold back a word” (Jer. 1:9, 17; 26:2).
It is in contrast to this acknowledged obligation to receive and relay God’s Word that the other tradition of false prophecy appears so despicable. Israel’s false prophets refused the discipline of submitting to revelation and the loss of liberty this entailed; they felt free to speculate, to dream their own dreams, and to concoct their own messages. In consequence, God said, “They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord.” Again, “Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let him who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat?” (Jer. 23:16, 28; cf. Ezek. 13:2, 3).
The tragedy was that their dreams and visions were “vain hopes,” the fantasy of peace in place of the reality of judgment. To be sure, this was what the people wanted to hear. “The prophets prophesy falsely,. . . and my people love to have it so” (Jer. 5:31). They said “to the seers ‘see not,’ and to the prophets ‘prophesy not to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions, leave the way, turn aside from the path, let us hear no more of the Holy One of Israel’” (Isa. 30:9–11; cf. Mic. 2:6–11). Israel thus preferred the comfort of lies to the disturbance of truth. And alas! the false prophets were glad, even eager, to oblige. “They say continually to those who despise the word of the Lord ‘It shall be well with you’; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart they say ‘no evil shall come upon you’” (Jer. 23:17; cf. 5:12, 13; Lam. 2:14). Their stock-in-trade was “smooth things” and their refrain “Peace, peace,” even when there was no peace. As a result, they “healed the wound of God’s people lightly” (Jer. 6:14; 8:11). Like quack doctors they merely applied a dressing, when what was needed was radical surgery. Or, changing the imagery from doctors to builders, “when the people build a wall, these prophets daub it with whitewash.” That is, they gave official religious sanction and an aura of religious respectability to everything the people wanted to do, however contrary to God’s will. But human beings cannot build a wall to protect them against the wrath of God, and prophetic whitewash cannot conceal its cracks. Before the wind and rain of divine judgment it will collapse (Ezek. 13:10–16; 22:28). Both metaphors convey the same message. Unrepentant sinners are in deep trouble from the judgment of God. Their wound festers, their wall totters. Superficial remedies (a bandage on the wound, whitewash on the wall) are useless, and those who apply them are criminally irresponsible, for they shield people from the reality they ought to face. As Father Mapple cried in Moby Dick, drawing a lesson for preachers from the story of Jonah, “Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale!”
The situation is made worse for preachers who are seeking courage to be faithful to God’s Word by the fact that they find themselves alienated not only from the people but from other preachers as well. Today there is controversy in the church even over fundamental questions of doctrine and ethics on which Scripture speaks unequivocally, and the layman is treated to the unedifying spectacle of supposed experts in theology disagreeing sharply with one another on television or in the newspapers. Yet this phenomenon is not new; it is in principle the same as the clash between true and false prophets in the Bible. The prototype in this conflict was Micaiah, the son of Imlah. Judah’s King Jehoshaphat and Israel’s King Ahab (who were related by marriage) decided to join forces to recover Ramoth Gilead from Syrian occupation. Before setting out on their military expedition, however, they thought it prudent to “inquire for the word of the Lord.” (It is still a common ploy today first to reach a decision and then to seek divine endorsement in order to make it respectable.) The 400 court prophets who were consulted at once responded, “Go up to Ramoth Gilead, for the Lord will give it into the hand of the king.” The prophet Zedekiah, who seems to have been a bit of an exhibitionist, even paraded in a set of iron horns and said, “Thus says the Lord, with these you shall push the Syrians until they are destroyed.” But Jehoshaphat was uneasy. He somehow suspected that there was another prophet who might express a different message. Ahab conceded that there was another, by name Micaiah the son of Imlah, “But I hate him,” he added, “for he never prophesies good concerning me, but evil.” Nevertheless, he was fetched, and the messenger who went to find him said to him, “The words of the prophets with one accord are favorable to the king. Let your word be like the word of one of them, and speak favorably.” It was surely meant to be friendly advice for Micaiah’s own protection, yet in fact it was devilish. For which was more important: the majority view with the favor of the king, or the word of the Lord without it? Micaiah does not seem to have hesitated, “As the Lord lives, what the Lord says to me, that I will speak.” And when he stood before the two kings, “sitting on their thrones, arrayed in their robes,” he was not dazzled by their magnificence. He courageously declared, “I saw all Israel scattered upon the mountains, as sheep that have no shepherd.” This was not only a prediction of Ahab’s death in battle, but also a contradiction of the court prophets, whose counsel he attributed to “a lying spirit” in their mouths. One of them slapped him in the face for his candor (1 Kgs. 22:1–29).
Micaiah could not avoid the dilemma which faced him. He was compelled to choose. Either he must toe the popular line, find favor with the king and be false to his God, or he must stand alone against the establishment view in order to be faithful to his God, even though it would mean losing the royal favor. To his eternal credit he preferred the praise of God to the praise of men. He appears in the biblical record only in this one incident, but he deserves to be more widely known and acclaimed. He is one of the unsung heroes of Scripture. Moreover, the choice between truth with unpopularity and falsehood with popularity regularly confronts Christian preachers. I wish each of us could endorse what Hensley Henson wrote just after he had been elected head of Oxford House, Bethnal Green, in 1887, “I do not care one straw about popularity, for I know that it is generally purchased by a sacrifice of the truth.” It is surely for this reason that Jesus uttered his warning, “Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets” (Luke 6:26). He seems to have taken it for granted that, as with prophets so with preachers, popularity can be achieved only at the price of integrity. Yet few church members or leaders seem to believe this any more, or at least to be willing to bear the cost of believing it.
The fact is that the authentic gospel of the New Testament remains extremely offensive to human pride, and nobody who preaches it faithfully can expect to escape at least some degree of opposition. Paul found in his day that the message of Christ crucified was both folly to Greek intellectuals and a stumbling block to self-righteous Jews. Nobody can reach God by his own wisdom or by his own morality. Only at the cross can God be known. And this is doubly offensive to men and women of culture. They resent the exclusiveness of the Christian claim, and even more the humiliation implicit in it. Christ from his cross seems to say to us, “I am here because of you. If it were not for your sin and pride, I would not be here. And if you could have saved yourself, I would not be here either.” The Christian pilgrimage begins with bowed head and bent knee; there is no way into the kingdom of God except by the exaltation of those who have humbled themselves.
I have often thanked God that he taught me this truth very early in my Christian experience, partly through glimpses into the pride of my own heart and partly through a glimpse into somebody else’s. It was when I was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Only recently had I come to Christ myself, and now—clumsily, I am sure—I was trying to share the good news with a fellow student. I was endeavoring to explain the great doctrine of justification by grace alone, that salvation was Christ’s free gift, and that we could neither buy it nor even contribute to its purchase, for Christ had obtained at for us and was now offering it to us gratis. Suddenly, to my intense astonishment, my friend shouted three times at the top of his voice, “Horrible! Horrible! Horrible!” Such is the arrogance of the human heart that it finds the good news not glorious (which it is) but horrible (which it is not).
Alexander Whyte came to a crisis toward the end of his ministry in Edinburgh on this very point. He knew that some regarded him as “little short of a monomaniac about sin,” and he was tempted to muffle that note in his preaching. But one day while walking in the highlands—he could ever after remember the exact spot—
What seemed to me to be a Divine Voice spoke with all-commanding power in my conscience, and said to me as clear as clear could be: “No! Go on, and flinch not! Go back and boldly finish the work that has been given you to do. Speak out and fear not. Make them at any cost to see themselves in God’s holy law as in a glass. Do you that, for no one else will do it. No one else will so risk his life and his reputation as to do it. And you have not much of either left to risk. Go home and spend what is left of your life in your appointed task of showing my people their sin and their need of my salvation.”
He did. He was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. It gave him “fresh authority and fresh encouragement” to finish his course.
Preachers cannot then escape the duty of disturbing the complacent. We all know that Christ spoke many “comfortable words,” and in the Church of England we rehearse some of them at every Communion service. But not all his words were comforting. Some were deeply disturbing. We must be faithful, therefore, in expounding his “uncomfortable words” as well. This will mean preaching God’s wrath as well as his love, grace, and mercy (indeed, these shine all the more brightly against that dark background); his judgment as well as his salvation; hell as well as heaven (however tentative we may deem it wise to be about the details of both, in our anxiety not to go beyond the plain teaching of Scripture); death with Christ as well as resurrection with him; repentance as well as faith; Christ’s Lordship as well as his Saviorhood; the cost as well as the compensations of Christian discipleship; self-denial as the road to self-discovery; and the yoke of Christ’s authority under which we find our rest.
It is not only in gospel preaching, but also in teaching about the Christian life, that we need courage not to neglect the less palatable aspects of the New Testament message, but rather to find the biblical balance. For example, the apostles write of the “unutterable and exalted joy” of knowing Christ, but add that we also have to endure a certain “heaviness” as a result of various trials and Satanic pressures (1 Pet. 1:6–8). They describe the rest of faith in Christ’s finished work and the Spirit’s indwelling, but also portray us as soldiers, athletes, farmers, and boxers—metaphors which all imply strong exertion. They emphasize the exhilarating freedom into which Christ has liberated us, but add that this is also a new slavery to Christ and his will. They assure us that we are no longer “under the law” in the sense that God’s acceptance of us depends on his grace and not on our works, but add that obedience is still expected of us, indeed that Christ died for us precisely “in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3–4).
So high moral standards are set before us. Moreover, the apostles go beyond vague generalizations to precise applications, and many a congregation would be startled if a course of sermons were preached on, for example, Ephesians 4:25–5:21, or Titus 2:1–15, or the letter of James, or indeed the Sermon on the Mount. Are we faithful in teaching what the apostles taught about relations between husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants? that covetousness is idolatry, wealth is dangerous, and generous mutual responsibility is to mark God’s new society? that lifelong heterosexual marriage is the only context which God has ordained for sexual fulfillment, so that divorce (even if sometimes permitted as a concession to human frailty) is always a declension from God’s ideal, and that both heterosexual adultery and fornication on the one hand and homosexual practices on the other are contrary to his will? that work is a consequence of the creation not the fall, and is intended by God as a means to a partnership with him, the service of others, and self-fulfillment, which emphasizes the tragedy of unemployment?
If we are faithful in our preaching about “sin, righteousness, and judgment,” we must at the same time be careful to avoid any imbalance. It has to be admitted that some preachers enjoy thundering forth God’s judgments. They find a morbid satisfaction in seeing their audience writhe under the lash of their whip. Whether it is a form of verbal sadism, or gives them what Americans call an “ego trip,” it is always sick to derive pleasure from other people’s pain. Anthony Trollope in Barchester Towers very evidently despised his character, the Rev. Obadiah Slope, for this very thing. Although he was “gifted with a certain kind of pulpit eloquence,” yet, Trollope wrote, “in his sermons he deals greatly in denunciations.” Indeed, “his looks and tones are extremely severe. . . . As he walks through the streets, his very face denotes his horror of the world’s wickedness; and there is always an anathema lurking in the corner of his eye. . . . To him the mercies of our Saviour speak in vain.” In a neat phrase of Colin Morris, he used the pulpit “to purvey Good Chidings rather than Good Tidings.”
The more we feel it necessary, especially in days of moral laxity, to dwell on the judgment of God upon sin, the more we need also to dwell on his mercy toward sinners. Jesus’s own woes against the scribes and Pharisees for their hypocrisy are among the fiercest denunciations in the whole Bible, yet he was called “the friend of sinners;” they flocked round him and listened to him gladly; he invited them to come to him with their burdens and promised to give them rest; he accepted the demonstrative affection of a forgiven prostitute; and he said to the woman caught in adultery “neither do I condemn you; go and do not sin again.”
It is significant that Paul appealed to the Corinthians “by the meekness and gentleness of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:1). He could be severe. He expected the churches to discipline offenders and even excommunicate the unrepentant. But it is very obvious that he found no pleasure in these things. On the contrary, he showed the gentleness, affection, and self-giving love of a parent. Indeed, he likened himself in his dealings with the Thessalonians both to “a mother taking care of her children” and to “a father with his children” (1 Thess. 2:7, 11).
Every Christian pastor today has the same feelings of tender love toward those who have been committed to his care. As he speaks to them every Sunday, he knows something of the burdens they are bearing. One has soon to face major surgery, another has recently been told he has an incurable illness, yet another has just been bereaved. Then there is that couple whose marriage is falling apart, that man whose wife has been unfaithful, that woman whose husband is cruel to her, that single person who has been frustrated in love, those young people who are finding it hard to maintain Christian standards in their non-Christian environment. As he looks at their faces, there seems to be tragedy behind every brave facade. Almost everybody has been bruised by life and is feeling the pressure of temptation or defeat, depression, loneliness or despair. It is true that some need to be disturbed from their complacency, but others need above all else the comfort of God’s love. J. H. Jowett wrote,
I have been greatly impressed in recent years by one refrain which I have found running through many biographies. Dr. Parker repeated again and again, “Preach to broken hearts!” And here is the testimony of Ian Maclaren: “The chief end of preaching is comfort. . . .” And may I bring you an almost bleeding passage from Dr. Dale: “People want to be comforted. . . . They need consolation—really need it, and do not merely long for it.”
Somehow then we have to strike the balance, and need to pray for sensitivity if we are to succeed in doing it. Chad Walsh, the American Episcopalian, gave an excellent definition of preaching in his early book Campus Gods on Trial, “the true function of a preacher is to disturb the comfortable and to comfort the disturbed.” A century earlier John Newton, the converted slave-trader, “used to say that the point in all his preaching was ‘to break a hard heart and to heal a broken heart.’” It is this combination which seems so rare. Some preachers are great comforters. Their every sermon soothes. But they have omitted first to disturb those whom they are so busy comforting. Others make the opposite mistake. They are great disturbers of the congregation’s peace as they preach on human sin and divine holiness, but they forget to go on to comfort those whom they have so effectively disturbed. Chad Walsh’s definition, which brings the two functions together, can be well illustrated from John Wesley’s Journal. For example, on 21 June 1761 he preached in the churchyard of Osmotherley, which is in Yorkshire. “I believe many were wounded,” he wrote, “and many comforted.” Then on 17 August 1787, he preached to a large congregation near the governor’s house on the Isle of Alderney in the Channel Islands, “I believe many were cut to the heart this hour,” he wrote, “and some not a little comforted.”
A more modern example is given by Dr. Horton Davies in Varieties of English Preaching 1900–1960. Having dedicated the book to his father, a Congregational preacher, he begins his Preface with these words,
As a son of the Manse, it was a great privilege to hear the lively Word of God preached and applied with insight and compassion to a variety of families and callings. . . . Sunday was always the peak of the week, and its climax was reached when the congregation settled back into their pews to hear one who might be a son of thunder (Boanerges) or a son of consolation (Barnabas), and was often both in the same sermon.
Every preacher needs to be both a Boanerges (having the courage to disturb) and a Barnabas (having the charity to console).
The Value of Systematic Exposition
In the context of the preacher’s need for courage I commend the practice of systematic exposition, that is to say, of working steadily through a book of the Bible or a section of a book, either verse by verse or paragraph by paragraph. The first benefit of this scheme is that it forces us to take passages which we might otherwise have overlooked, or even deliberately avoided. I well remember some years ago preaching through the Sermon on the Mount and coming in due course to Matthew 5:31–32, in which our Lord deals with the subject of divorce. I have to confess that, although I had been in the pastoral ministry for twenty-five years, I had never previously preached on this topic. I am ashamed to have to admit this, since divorce is a burning contemporary issue and many people are wanting help in this area, but it is true. Of course I could have made a number of cogent excuses. “It’s a very complex subject, and I do not have the necessary expertise.” “It’s also controversial, and I don’t want to stir up strife.” “Besides, I’d be sure to offend somebody.” So, because of the difficulties, I had steered clear of the topic. But now I was leading the congregation through the Sermon on the Mount, and here staring me in the face were Matthew 5, verses 31 and 32. What should I do? I could not possibly skip those verses and begin my sermon, “Last Sunday my text was Matthew 5:30; today it is Matthew 5:33.” No, I was obliged to do what I had so long shirked, and I clearly recall the hours I had to spend in study and thought before I dared attempt to handle those verses.
The second benefit of systematic exposition is that people’s curiosity is not aroused as to why we take a particular text on a particular Sunday. If I had suddenly, out of the blue, preached on divorce, church members would inevitably have wondered why. They would have asked themselves, “Who is he tilting at today?” But as it happened, their attention was not distracted by such questions. They knew that I was seeking to expound Matthew 5:31–32 only because they were the next consecutive verses in the sermon series.
The third benefit is probably the greatest. It is that the thorough and systematic opening up of a large portion of Scripture broadens people’s horizons, introduces them to some of the Bible’s major themes, and shows them how to interpret Scripture by Scripture. P. T. Forsyth put this point well,
We need to be defended from his (sc. the preacher’s) subjectivity, his excursions, his monotony, his limitations. We need, moreover, to protect him from the peril of preaching himself or his age. We must all preach to our age, but woe to us if it is our age we preach, and only hold up the mirror to the time.
Again,
One of the great tasks of the preacher is to rescue the Bible from the textual idea in the mind of the public, from the Biblicist, atomist idea which reduces it to a religious scrap book, and uses it only in verses and phrases. . . . He must cultivate more the free, large and organic treatment of the Bible, where each part is most valuable for its contribution to a living, evangelical whole, and where that whole is articulated into the great course of human history.
Whether or not they would have expressed their reasons in this way, the fact is that some of the greatest preachers in the history of the church have expounded Scripture in a conscientious, thorough, systematic fashion. The most notable example in the first four centuries of the church was John Chrysostom, whom I have already mentioned in this chapter in connection with his courage. During approximately the last two decades of the fourth century, he expounded the book of Genesis and the Psalms from the Old Testament, and from the New the Gospels of Matthew and John, the Acts, and all the Pauline letters.
It is the sixteenth-century Reformers, however, in their anxiety to expose their congregations to the pure and powerful Word of God, who most effectively developed the practice of systematic exposition. Luther and Calvin were different in many respects. Luther was German and Calvin French; Luther’s physique was burly and strong, Calvin’s slender and weak; Luther’s style depended on his vivid, even fiery imagination, Calvin’s on cool and lucid analysis. Yet both handled the Scriptures with a diligence and a profundity which put us moderns to shame. In Wittenberg the Reformers (Luther and his clergy colleagues),
undertook an extensive campaign of religious instruction through the sermon. There were three public services on Sunday: from five to six in the morning on the Pauline epistles, from nine to ten on the Gospels, and in the afternoon at a variable hour on a continuation of the theme of the morning or on the catechism. . . . On Mondays and Tuesdays there were sermons on the catechism, Wednesdays on the Gospel of Matthew, Thursdays and Fridays on the apostolic letters, and Saturday evening on John’s Gospel. No one man carried this entire load,. . . but Luther’s share was prodigious. Including family devotions he spoke often four times on Sundays, and quarterly undertook a two-week series four days a week on the catechism. The sum of his extant sermons is 2,300. The highest count is for the year 1528, for which there are 195 sermons distributed over 145 days.
Calvin’s method was similar to Luther’s, although perhaps he was more systematic still. From 1549 he preached in Geneva twice every Sunday and in alternate weeks at a daily evening service. He tended to handle the Old Testament on weekdays, and the New Testament or Psalms on Sundays. A paid stenographer took down his sermons as he preached, and later transcribed them. In the fifteen-year period from 1549 until he died, he expounded from the Old Testament Genesis, Deuteronomy, Judges, Job, some Psalms, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and all the major and minor prophets, and from the New Testament a harmony of the Gospels, the Acts, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and the three Pastoral Epistles.
Other Swiss Reformers followed the same custom. Zwingli, for example, at the beginning of his ministry in Zurich, “announced his intention to preach, not simply upon the church lessons, but upon the whole Gospel of Matthew, chapter after chapter. Some friends objected that it would be an innovation, but he just said, ‘it is the old custom. Call to mind the homilies of Chrysostom on Matthew and of Augustine on John.’” The same conviction was shared by Henry Bullinger, who succeeded Zwingli at Zurich. According to E. C. Dargan, he was “tall of form, with a flowing beard, a benevolent and intelligent expression, a pleasing voice, a dignified yet animated bearing.” Dargan goes on to say that between 1549 and 1567, he preached 100 sermons on Revelation, 66 on Daniel, 170 on Jeremiah, 190 on Isaiah, and many more besides.
A century later Matthew Henry supplies a splendid example of faithful, biblical preaching. During his twenty-five year ministry as a dissenting preacher in Chester (1687–1712), by focussing on the Old Testament each Sunday morning and on the New Testament each Sunday afternoon, he worked through the whole Bible twice, and during his midweek lectures expounded the whole Psalter no less than five times. These expositions form the substance of his famous commentary.
The pulpit giants of the last century continued the tradition established by Augustine and Chrysostom, and developed by Luther and Calvin, the other Reformers, and the Puritans. For example, Charles Simeon’s expositions, published in the twenty-one volumes of Horae Homileticae, number 2,536; he pointed out that, if we were to read one a day, they would last us seven years.
Joseph Parker, minister of the City Temple in London for thirty-three years from 1869, preached regularly to 3,000 people. In 1884 he announced his intention to preach through the whole Bible. Preaching twice on Sundays and once on Thursdays at midday, he accomplished his task in seven years. His sermons were published as The People’s Bible in twenty-five volumes, the last one appearing in 1895.
Alexander Maclaren, the Baptist minister who attracted very large crowds to Union Chapel in Manchester for nearly half a century (1858–1903) and was sometimes called “the prince of expositors,” covered virtually the entire Bible in the thirty-two volumes of his Expositions of Holy Scripture, published during the last six years of his life (1904–10).
In our own century it is interesting that William Temple, while rector of St. James’s, Piccadilly, during the First World War, preached through the Gospel of John in nearly four years, and later published his expositions as Readings from St John’s Gospel.
For the health of the church (which lives and flourishes by the Word of God) and for the help of the preacher (who needs this discipline), it is urgent to return to systematic exposition. In doing so, however, we shall need to take due account of the characteristics of our age, and not ape our forebears with unimaginative literalism. There are not many congregations spiritually mature and hungry enough to digest the lengthy expositions for extended periods which were traditional in a bygone era. Dale mentions, for example, a “German exegetical professor who, after lecturing on the Book of Isaiah for rather more than twenty years, had reached the middle of the second chapter” Even Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s remarkable exposition of Romans which took him up to chapter 14 verse 17, and which he continued for twelve years until he retired from Westminster Chapel, could hardly be repeated in any British church. But if we make due allowances for contemporary people, and take a paragraph rather than a verse as our text, and continue the consecutive exposition for a few months rather than a few years, modern congregations will lap it up. It will also help us preachers to grow in the courage we need to unfold the whole counsel of God.
Unfortunately, the resolve to be courageous in the pulpit can result in our becoming headstrong and arrogant. We may succeed in being outspoken, but spoil it by becoming proud of our outspokenness. Truth to tell, the pulpit is a perilous place for any child of Adam to occupy. It is “high and lifted up,” and thus enjoys a prominence which should be restricted to Yahweh’s throne (Isa. 6:1). We stand there in solitude, while the eyes of all are upon us. We hold forth in monologue, while all sit still, silent and subdued. Who can endure such public exposure and remain unscathed by vanity? Pride is without doubt the chief occupational hazard of the preacher. It has ruined many, and deprived their ministry of power.
In some it is blatantly obvious. They are exhibitionists by temperament and use the pulpit as the stage on which they show off. Dr. Lloyd-Jones is surely right to call such people “pulpiteers rather than preachers,” since they are experts in professional showmanship. In Henry Ward Beecher’s ninth lecture at Yale (1872), entitled “Sermon-making,” he spoke of “Nebuchadnezzar sermons.” He was referring by this unusual expression to rhetorical discourses “over which the vain preacher stands,” repeating in effect the boastful words of Nebuchadnezzar, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power. . . for the glory of my majesty?” “Would to God,” continued Beecher, “that these preachers, like Nebuchadnezzar, might go to grass for a time if, like them, they would return sane and humble.” The analogy is telling. For there is something fundamentally “obscene” about pride, something offensive to the Christian sense of what is decent, something calculated to disgust. What is perhaps most noteworthy about Nebuchadnezzar’s downfall and restoration is that his pride issued in madness, while his sanity returned when he humbled himself.
Other preachers are not Nebuchadnezzars, however, for their pride does not take the form of blatant boastfulness. It is more subtle, more insidious, and even more perverse. For it is possible to adopt an outward demeanor of great meekness, while inside our appetite for applause is insatiable. At the very moment when in the pulpit we are extolling the glories of Christ, we can in reality be seeking our own glory. And when we are exhorting the congregation to praise God, and are even ostensibly leading them in praise, we can be secretly hoping that they will spare a bit of praise for us. We need to cry out with Baxter, “O what a constant companion, what a tyrannical commander, what a sly, subtle and insinuating enemy is this sin of pride!”
In order to expose, combat and defeat this enemy, I think the best and most positive procedure will be to make an analysis of what the preacher’s humility should be.
First of all, we need the humility to submit to the Word of God. That is, we must resist the temptation to avoid the unfashionable truths of Scripture and to ventilate our own more trendy opinions instead. “A fool finds no pleasure in understanding, but delights in airing his own opinions” (Prov. 18:2, NIV).
Christian humility begins as tapeinophrosunē, “lowliness of mind.” It has to do with how we think, both in relation to others (esteeming them more important than ourselves, and so gladly serving them, Phil. 2:3–4; 1 Pet. 5:5) and in relation to God (“walking humbly with your God,” Mic. 6:5), especially the latter. The humble mind is neither closed nor uncritical, but it acknowledges its limitations. Its language is “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great or too marvelous for me” (Ps. 131:1). Again, in reference to God’s omniscience, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it” (Ps. 139:6). This is not obscurantism, nor even anti-intellectualism. It is merely a humble, sane, sober recognition that God’s infinite being is beyond our apprehension, that his thoughts and ways are as much higher than ours as the heavens are higher than the earth (Isa. 55:8, 9), that apart from his self-disclosure we could never know him, and indeed that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Cor. 1:25). If then God’s judgments are unsearchable and his ways inscrutable, it is ludicrous to suppose that we could ever know his mind by ourselves, let alone instruct him or offer him advice (Rom. 11:33–34). We have no liberty, therefore, to contradict his revelation or criticize his plan of salvation. To be sure, the message of the cross may seem stupid to our finite and fallen minds, and we may even wish to propose alternative ways of salvation which we deem preferable. But God says, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,” and determines instead to save us through the “folly” of the gospel which, in fact, is his wisdom (1 Cor. 1:18–25; cf. 3:18–20). It is our responsibility, therefore, to do everything we can, both in ourselves and in others, to “destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).
How will the humble mind’s submission to God’s revelation in Christ find expression in preachers? Humble preachers will avoid either adding to Scripture according to their own speculations or substracting from Scripture according to their own predilections. The first often takes the form of a craze for originality. Some preachers find the Bible flat, so they try to freshen it up with their own effervescence. Others find it insipid, so they try to season it with a little of their own relish. They are unwilling to take it as it is; they are forever trying to improve it with bright ideas of their own. But this is not the preacher’s task. We have to be “original” in the sense that we take old truths and seek creatively to restate them in modern terms and re-apply them to modern conditions. But to be biblically “creative” in these ways is not to be “inventive” of new and unbiblical notions. Nor are we vain or foolish enough to imagine that our attempted reinterpretations possess the authority which belongs to the Word of God we are striving to reinterpret.
The preacher with a humble mind will avoid omissions as much as additions. We must refuse to manipulate the biblical text in order to make it more acceptable to our contemporaries. For the attempt to make “it” more acceptable really means to make “ourselves” more acceptable, and this is the lust for popularity.
Adding to God’s Word was the fault of the Pharisees, and subtracting from it the fault of the Sadducees. Jesus criticized them both, insisting that the Word of God must be allowed to stand by itself, without plus or minus, without amplification or modification, supreme and sufficient in its authority. The modern Pharisees and Sadducees in the church who tamper with Scripture, discarding what they wish was not there and inserting what they wish was, should heed these criticisms of Jesus. There is, I am afraid we have to say, a certain arrogance about the theological liberalism which deviates from historic biblical Christianity. For anyone who refuses to submit to God’s Word, and “does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness” is “puffed up with conceit,” and “insubordinate” (1 Tim. 6:3–4; Titus 1:9, 10). The Christian preacher is to be neither a speculator who invents new doctrines which please him, nor an editor who excises old doctrines which displease him, but a steward, God’s steward, dispensing faithfully to God’s household the truths committed to him in the Scriptures, nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else. For this ministry a humble mind is necessary. We need to come daily to the Scriptures and to sit like Mary at Jesus’ feet, listening to his Word.
Such “listening” is what Bonhoeffer had in mind when he emphasized the need for “silence.” He was not advocating (as some imagine) that the church should give up preaching because its failures in the area of responsible action had robbed it of its right to speak. On the contrary, what he condemned was not a “proclaiming” church but a “chattering” church. He longed that the church would become respectfully silent before the Word of God. “The Church’s silence is silence before the Word. . . . The proclamation of Christ is the Church speaking from a proper silence.”
Such a receptive and expectant mood before God’s revelation is not only proper; it is also productive. For, as Jesus plainly stated, God hides his secrets from the wise and erudite and reveals them instead to little children, that is, to humble, open-hearted seekers for the truth (Matt. 11:25).
The Glory of Christ
Humility of mind is to be accompanied by humility of motive. Why do we preach? What do we hope to accomplish by our preaching? What incentive impels us to persevere? I fear that too often our motives are selfish. We desire the praise and the congratulations of men. We stand at the door after the Sunday services and feast our ears on the commendatory remarks which some church members seem to have been schooled to make, “Fine sermon, pastor!” “You really blessed my heart today!” To be sure, genuine words of appreciation can do much to boost a discouraged preacher’s morale. But idle flattery, and the hypocritical repetition of stock phrases (irrespective of the real quality of the sermon) are damaging to the preacher and repugnant to God. Congregations should be encouraged to repent of this tradition and to be more sparing and more discerning in their expressions of encouragement.
The main objective of preaching is to expound Scripture so faithfully and relevantly that Jesus Christ is perceived in all his adequacy to meet human need. The true preacher is a witness; he is incessantly testifying to Christ. But without humility he neither can nor wants to do so. James Denney knew this, and had these words framed in the vestry of his Scottish church, “No man can bear witness to Christ and to himself at the same time. No man can give the impression that he himself is clever and that Christ is mighty to save.” Something very similar was spoken by John Watson, the “Ian Maclaren” who wrote the best-selling novel Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, “the chief effect of every sermon should be to unveil Christ, and the chief art of the preacher to conceal himself.” But the preacher’s purpose is more than to unveil Christ; it is so to unveil him that people are drawn to come to him and to receive him. It is this which led Ronald A. Ward to call his book on preaching Royal Sacrament. He perceived a parallel between the ministry of the Word and the ministry of the sacrament which he expressed in these terms, “As in the Holy Communion we give bread and wine, and the faithful receive Christ, so in preaching we give words and the faithful receive Christ.” Thus, in both the Lord’s Supper and the exposition of Scripture there is an outward sign (bread and wine, or words) and an inward and spiritual grace (Christ received by faith).
Another way of putting the same truth is to say that “preaching is in the nature of personal encounter.” Or at least its purpose is to facilitate an encounter. “The great encounter, however, is not between the preacher and the people. It is between God and the people.” Donald G. Miller puts it even more strongly. Taking up P. T. Forsyth’s dictum that “a true sermon is a real deed,” he writes, “No man has really preached until the two-sided encounter between him and his congregation has given way to a three-sided encounter, where God himself becomes one of the living parties to it.”
I find myself in complete accord with these statements. The most privileged and moving experience a preacher can ever have is when, in the middle of the sermon, a strange hush descends upon the congregation. The sleepers have woken up, the coughers have stopped coughing, and the fidgeters are sitting still. No eyes or minds are wandering. Everybody is attending, though not to the preacher. For the preacher is forgotten and the people are face to face with the living God, listening to his still, small voice. Dr. Billy Graham has often described this experience. I remember hearing him address about 2,400 ministers in the Central Hall, Westminster, on 20 May 1954, at the conclusion of the Greater London Crusade. The third of his twelve points emphasized the power of the Holy Spirit and the liberty in preaching which he had felt as a result. “I have often felt like a spectator,” he said, “standing on the side, watching God at work. I have felt detached from it. I wanted to get out of the way as much as I could, and let the Holy Spirit take over.” It is precisely here that humility of motive comes in. “I wanted to get out of the way.” For it is all too easy to get in the way, to intrude ourselves between the people and their Lord. Two helpful images have been used to illustrate this.
The first concerns a wedding. The desire of the best man is to do all he can to facilitate the marriage of the bride to the bridegroom, and to do nothing to come between them. Now Jesus took over the Old Testament imagery of the marriage between Yahweh and Israel, and boldly proclaimed himself the Bridegroom (e.g. Mark 2:19–20). In some way John the Baptist seems to have understood this. He knew he was not himself the Christ and said so plainly. He was his forerunner, sent ahead of him. He went on, “The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:28–30, NIV). In this respect the preacher’s ministry resembles that of the Baptist, preparing Christ’s way, rejoicing in his voice, leaving him with his bride, and constantly decreasing in order that he may increase. The great apostle Paul clearly saw his ministry in these self-effacing terms. “I betrothed you to Christ,” he wrote to the Corinthians, “to present you as a pure bride to her one husband.” He even felt jealous on behalf of Christ because his bride was showing signs of unfaithfulness (2 Cor. 11:2–3). Every Christian preacher understands this language and has felt this jealousy. “We are to be the friends of the Bridegroom,” said J. H. Jowett, “winning men, not to ourselves but to him, match-making for the Lord, abundantly satisfied when we have brought the bride and the Bridegroom together.” Moreover, he meant it. At the beginning of a certain service at which he was to preach, a prayer was offered for him which opened with what he called “this inspired supplication,” “O Lord, we thank thee for our brother. Now blot him out!” And the prayer continued, “Reveal thy glory to us in such blazing splendour that he shall be forgotten.” “He was absolutely right,” commented Jowett, “and I trust the prayer was answered.”
The second image which illustrates the need for the preacher to get out of the way is that of the conductor of an orchestra. I take Otto Klemperer as my example, the distinguished German conductor, particularly famed for his interpretations of Brahms and Beethoven, who died in 1973 at the age of eighty-eight. One of his biographers summed up his gift by the simple expression “he let the music flow.” And in an article which celebrated his eightieth birthday and hailed him as “the foremost living conductor,” Neville Cardus the music critic wrote, “He has never been a prima-donna conductor; never in his long life has he thrust himself between the music and the listeners. He has maintained a sort of visible invisibility on the rostrum, a classic anonymity.” I very much like that expression “visible invisibility.” It applies equally to the conductor and the preacher. Neither can help being seen, the one on the rostrum, the other in the pulpit, but neither should seek to draw attention to himself. A concert audience does not come to watch the conductor but to listen to the music; a church congregation should not come to watch or hear the preacher but to listen to God’s Word. The function of the conductor is to draw the music out of the choir or orchestra in order that the audience may enjoy the music; the function of the preacher is to draw the Word of God out of the Bible in order that the congregation may receive his Word with joy. The conductor must not come between the music and the audience; the preacher must not come between the Lord and his people. We need the humility to get out of the way. Then the Lord will speak, and the people will hear him; the Lord will manifest himself, and the people will see him; and, hearing his voice and seeing his glory, the people will fall down and worship him.
The third ingredient in my analysis of a preacher’s humility I will call the humility of dependence. Every preacher desires to be effective. He hopes the people will listen to his sermons, understand them, and respond to them in faith and obedience. But on what does he rely for this effect?
Many rely on themselves. They are extroverts by temperament and have a strong as well as an outgoing personality. They may also have a keen intellect. So they make an impression on everybody they meet, for they are born leaders. They naturally expect to use these gifts while they are in the pulpit. Are they right to do so? Yes and no. Certainly, they should recognize the powers of their mind and personality as coming from God. They should neither pretend that they lack these gifts, nor try to obliterate them, nor neglect to use them either in their preparation in the study or in their delivery in the pulpit. They should be themselves. But they should not imagine that even God-given talents can bring people to Christ without the addition of God-given blessing.
In all our ministry we need to remember both the pitiable spiritual condition of people without Christ and the frightening strength and skill of the “principalities and powers” arrayed against us. Jesus himself illustrated human lostness by the language of physical disability. By ourselves we are blind to God’s truth and deaf to his voice. Lame, we cannot walk in his ways. Dumb, we can neither sing to him nor speak for him. We are even dead in our trespasses and sins. Moreover, we are the dupes and slaves of demonic forces. Of course, if we think this exaggerated or “mythical” or frankly false, then we shall see no need for supernatural power; we shall consider our own resources adequate. But if human beings are in reality spiritually and morally blind, deaf, dumb, lame, and even dead, not to mention the prisoners of Satan, then it is ridiculous in the extreme to suppose that by ourselves and our merely human preaching we can reach or rescue people in such a plight. Let Spurgeon express it with his usual wit and force,
I shall not attempt to teach a tiger the virtues of vegetarianism; but I shall as hopefully attempt that task as I would try to convince an unregenerate man of the truth revealed by God concerning sin, and righteousness, and judgment to come.
Only Jesus Christ by his Holy Spirit can open blind eyes and deaf ears, make the lame walk and the dumb speak, prick the conscience, enlighten the mind, fire the heart, move the will, give life to the dead, and rescue slaves from Satanic bondage. And all this he can and does, as the preacher should know from his own experience. Therefore, our greatest need as preachers is to be “clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49), so that, like the apostles, we may “preach the gospel. . . by the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven” (1 Pet. 1:12), and the gospel may come to people through our preaching “not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction” (1 Thess. 1:5). Why, then, does the power of the Spirit seem to accompany our preaching so seldom? I strongly suspect that the main reason is our pride. In order to be filled with the Spirit, we have first to acknowledge our own emptiness. In order to be exalted and used by God, we have first to humble ourselves under his mighty hand (1 Pet. 5:6). In order to receive his power, we have first to admit, and then even to revel in, our own weakness.
It is this last paradox which, I confess, has struck me most among all the varied ways in which the New Testament authors express the same truth. “Power through weakness”: it is a recurring theme, perhaps even the dominant theme, in Paul’s Corinthian correspondence. The Corinthians badly needed it too. For they were proud people, boastful of their own gifts and attainments on the one hand, and boastful of their leaders on the other, indulging in a disgraceful personality cult, playing one apostle off against another, in a way which horrified Paul. They were giving him a deference which was due to Christ alone. “Was Paul crucified for you?” he cries out in dismay. “Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” (1 Cor. 1:13). He will not allow them to go on boasting either of themselves or of any human leaders. “Let no one boast of men,” he insists. Rather, “Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord” (1 Cor. 3:21; 1:31).
It is against this background of Corinthian conceit that Paul’s “power through weakness” theme stands out in clear relief. There are three main passages in which it recurs.
And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. (1 Cor. 2:3–5)
But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. (2 Cor. 4:7)
And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:7–10)
Apart from the power-weakness contrast, divine power in and through human weakness, there is something else very important which unites these three passages. It is the occurrence of the Greek word hina, “in order that.” Perhaps I could paraphrase Paul’s statements in my own words. First, “I was with you in personal weakness, and therefore relied on the Holy Spirit’s powerful demonstration of the truth of my message, in order that your faith might rest in God’s power alone.” Secondly, “We have the treasure of the gospel in fragile earthenware pots (that’s how weak and brittle our bodies are), in order that it may be plainly seen that the tremendous power which sustains us and converted you comes from God and not from ourselves.” Thirdly, “Because Jesus told me that his power is made perfect in human weakness, therefore I will gladly boast about my weaknesses, in order that Christ’s power may rest upon me. . . . For it’s only when I’m weak that I’m strong.” It is difficult to avoid the significance of this repeated “in order that,” or to resist the conclusion to which it points. In these cases human weakness was deliberately permitted to continue, in order to be the medium through which divine power could operate and the arena in which it could be displayed. Certainly Paul is explicit about his “thorn in the flesh,” whatever physical (or possibly psychological) infirmity it was. True, it was “a messenger of Satan.” Nevertheless, the Lord Jesus Christ rejected Paul’s three entreaties that it might be removed. It was given to humble him, and it was allowed to remain in order that in his very weakness Christ’s power might rest on him and be perfected in him.
We cannot, however, restrict this principle to Paul; it has a universal application. One of the aphorisms attributed to Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, is that “all God’s giants have been weak men” who (he must have meant) needed on that account to depend on the power of God. His assertion cannot be proved, for in some men and women whom God has greatly used no weakness is known. May there not, then, have been hidden, secret weaknesses? I think so. At all events, the number of outstanding preachers simply in the last century or so who are known to have had infirmities is remarkable. Take Dr. James Macgregor, who for nearly forty years was minister of St. Cuthbert’s Church in Edinburgh. He was not only small of stature but had been seriously deformed since childhood. On one occasion a pastoral theology lecturer had been insisting, as something indispensable to ministers, on “a big strong physical frame.” At that very moment, “the door opened, and he who was affectionately known as ‘wee Macgregor’ entered, as though in challenge of the statement. . . . For that figure, with short twisted legs that dwarfed him, was the triumphant vindication of the transcendent independence of the spirit over the handicap of the body.”
The infirmity of others has been more psychological than physical. F. W. Robertson (1816–53), sometimes called “the preacher’s preacher,” whose sermons delivered in Trinity Chapel, Brighton, had great influence in his lifetime and are still read today, suffered not only from bad health throughout his short life of thirty-seven years, but also from introspection and melancholy. He felt a failure and was often in deep darkness of soul. Surely it was out of these very weaknesses that the courage and power of his preaching were born. Many are astonished to hear that Joseph Parker, who preached for twenty-eight years in the City Temple, London, with commanding authority and widespread appeal was tormented with feelings of inferiority because he was the son of a Northumbrian stonemason and had received but a scanty theological education. To some the most surprising disclosure of all is that the great C. H. Spurgeon, invariably known as “the prince of preachers,” who was mighty in the Scriptures, confident, articulate, eloquent, and witty, said of himself in a sermon preached in 1866, “I am the subject of depressions of spirit so fearful that I hope none of you ever get to such extremes of wretchedness as I go to.”
I hesitate to mention myself in this connection, for I certainly do not belong to the class of pulpit masters to whom I have just referred. Nevertheless, although I do not have their power, I think I know something of their weakness. Indeed, I have had several experiences during the thirty-five years of my ordained ministry which have corroborated Paul’s Corinthian instruction about power through weakness. I will mention only one. It was in Australia in June 1958. I was leading a week’s mission in the University of Sydney, and we had come to the last day, a Sunday. With daring faith the students had booked the imposing great hall of the University for the final evening meeting. But what Australians call a “wog,” and the rest of us call a “bug,” had made a vicious assault upon me and deprived me of my voice. I was speechless. All through the afternoon I had been on the point of telephoning somebody to the effect that they must find a substitute preacher. But I was persuaded not to. At seven-thirty, half an hour before the final meeting was due to begin, I was waiting in a side room. Some students were with me, and I whispered a request to the mission committee chairman to read the “thorn in the flesh” verses from 2 Corinthians 12. He did. The conversation between Jesus and Paul came alive.
Paul: “I beg you to take it away from me.”
Jesus: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
Paul: “I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me . . . for when I am weak, then I am strong.”
After the reading, he prayed over me and for me, and I walked to the platform. When the time came for the address, all I can say is that I croaked the gospel through the microphone in a monotone. I was utterly unable to modulate my voice or exert my personality in any way. But all the while I was crying to the Lord to fulfill his promise to perfect his power through my weakness. Then at the end, after a straightforward instruction on how to come to Christ, I issued an invitation and there was an immediate and reasonably large response. I have been back to Australia seven or eight times since then, and on every occasion somebody has come up to me and said, “Do you remember that final service of the 1958 mission in the University great hall, when you had lost your voice? I came to Christ that night.”
All of us who are Christian preachers are finite, fallen, frail, and fallible creatures, in biblical language “pots of earthenware” (2 Cor. 4:7 NEB) or “jars of clay” (NIV). The power belongs to Christ and is exerted through his Spirit. The words we speak in human weakness the Holy Spirit carries home by his power to the mind, heart, conscience, and will of the hearers. “It were better to speak six words in the power of the Holy Ghost,” said Spurgeon once, “than to preach seventy years of sermons without the Spirit.” I have before me, as I write, a photograph of the massive central pulpit from which Spurgeon preached in the Metropolitan Tabernacle. The photograph is reproduced in the second volume of his Autobiography. Fifteen steps led up to it on each side, in a great sweeping curve, and I have heard it said (but been unable to confirm) that as Spurgeon mounted those stairs with the measured tread of a heavily built man, he muttered to himself on each one, “I believe in the Holy Ghost.” We may be quite sure that, after fifteen repetitions of this credal affirmation, by the time he entered his pulpit, he did believe in the Holy Spirit. He also urges us to do the same:
The gospel is preached in the ears of all; it only comes with power to some. The power that is in the gospel does not lie in the eloquence of the preacher; otherwise men would be converters of souls. Nor does it lie in the preacher’s learning; otherwise it would consist in the wisdom of men. We might preach till our tongues rotted, till we should exhaust our lungs and die, but never a soul would be converted unless there were mysterious power going with it—the Holy Ghost changing the will of man. O Sirs! We might as well preach to stone walls as preach to humanity unless the Holy Ghost be with the word, to give it power to convert the soul.
A humble mind (being submissive to the written Word of God), a humble ambition (desiring an encounter to take place between Christ and his people), and a humble dependence (relying on the power of the Holy Spirit)—this is the analysis of a preacher’s humility which we have made. It indicates that our message must be God’s Word not ours, our aim Christ’s glory not ours, and our confidence the Holy Spirit’s power, not ours. It is, in fact, a Trinitarian humility, as in 1 Corinthians 2:1–5, where the apostle writes that in Corinth he had proclaimed the Word or “testimony” of God about the cross of Christ in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.
I do not think I can conclude this chapter better than by quoting some anonymous words which were found by the Rev. Basil Gough in the vestries of St. Mary-at-Quay Church in Ipswich, Suffolk, and in Hatherleigh Parish Church in Devon. They were given to me by him, and have been hanging in my bedroom ever since:
When telling thy salvation free,
Let all-absorbing thoughts of thee
My heart and soul engross:
And when all hearts are bowed and stirred
Beneath the influence of thy word,
Hide me behind thy cross.