Week 29—Wednesday Galatians 2:6-9
Galatians 2:6-9
“I ADJURE YOU BY THE JESUS WHOM PAUL PREACHES”
This “this-ness” sets the pattern of the proclamation of the Christian gospel by its very nature. If the experience was the Word become flesh, the expression would also be the Word become flesh—it would be a witness, and Jesus said it would be: “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses”(Acts 1:8). “My witnesses”—not “my lawyers” to argue my case, but “my witnesses” to tell what has happened to you, of what you’ve “seen and heard.” This was one of the secrets of its power. If “all great literature is autobiography,” so all great preaching is witnessing.
A rector was fifty-eight years in the same parish in England, and in those years he had never preached an original sermon. The only original thing about the rector and his parish was that there was nothing original. I watched the fish in a Japanese pond crowding near the place where fresh water flowed in. They deserted the murky waters for the fresh. Congregations will gather around a pulpit from which living water is flowing. “Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to pronounce the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, ‘I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches.’ Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this. But the evil spirit answered them, ‘Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?’ And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, mastered all of them, overpowered them, so that they fled out of the house naked and wounded” (Acts 19:13-16). This was secondhand preaching: “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches.” Its modern counterpart would be, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Barth, or Fosdick preaches, come out.” But the evil spirits don’t come out by quotations or secondhand preaching. We must be witnesses, sharing facts which have happened in us and to us and not mere lawyers quoting laws or evidence from others. It must be the Word become flesh.
O Lord Jesus, brush from my heart secondhand accumulations. Let me speak out of the simplicity of experience. May my heart be a fountain of joy—gratitude ready to overflow at the slightest invitation or opportunity. In your name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am not a secondhander—I am a firsthander, by God’s Grace.