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Fresh
Thoughts on Preaching: PART 2. Secure in Ministry
ABBREVIATED
VERSION FOR FASTER READING!
1.
Secure to Minister
Insecure
Preachers?
•
Someone said, “What we intend to say and
what others hear us saying are not always the same thing.” The preacher
who is not absolutely convinced of his message will convey an uncertainty.
•
A preacher who is not absolutely convinced
of the Gospel cannot preach the Good News effectively.
•
A preacher who is not convinced of the authority
of Scripture cannot preach with authority.
•
Needed: a burning conviction that “this
is the word of God and it's the most important thing in all creation!”
•
Beware a sermon becoming routine, ordinary
and even, dare we say it, boring!
•
What we need most of all is preachers who
have just come out of God's presence who can say, “God says…” and say
it with a conviction that comes from a divine encounter.
•
When this happens the church enters into
a new level of security, secure in knowing the Truth, secure in knowing
that He has spoken, secure in knowing that He is there and speaking to
His people.
•
We may not be on fire every week and at
every meeting, but we should at least seek to be.
•
The Bible is the most exciting book in the
entire world and we abuse God if we convey His truth to us as something
on a par with the daily papers.
•
Possibly we need to go back to fundamentals,
to the fact that we preach because we are called by God to do so. We are
people who have had an encounter with God, and as a result of that we
have a divine commission to declare His word.
2.
Security through Preaching
Some
of the issues within the actual act of preaching or teaching, that pertain
to creating a secure church:
Comfort
and/or Challenge
•
Many today have made an idol of personal
peace and comfort.
•
To that end they would rather hear words
of comfort than of challenge. They need both
•
When Jesus came he came to “comfort” his
people.
•
Isaiah 61 prophecy read out by Jesus (Luke
4:17 -19) is all about coming to the poor, the broken hearted, the captives,
the prisoners, those who mourn, to bring the blessing of God to them.
•
This is all about comfort. Comfort
is all about bringing people into a place of security in God.
•
Preaching must not stop at that point; it
must always have a dimension of calling for change, calling for growth,
calling for going on in our relationship with God.
•
There must always be the challenge (directly
or indirectly) to reach forward for something better than we have at the
moment. The Christian life is not supposed to be static.
•
“God loves us just as we are, but He also
loves us so much that He doesn't want us to stay as we are, He's got something
better for us.”
Manageable
Hope
•
Jesus constantly brought hope to people
in bad places in life.
•
Jesus doesn't want us to remain in the prison
we may find ourselves in.
•
He's come to deliver us out of it, whatever
‘it' may be.
•
Sometimes he may deliver us out of
the circumstances, other times he may deliver us in them
•
The Pharisees of Jesus' day burdened the
people with lots of “You shall not” commands in every area of life, without
giving them the means to change.
•
Jesus came and brought hope for change by
bringing a new relationship with God and subsequently a new power to achieve
with God's wisdom what was humanly impossible.
•
Where we can, we should bring guidance or
the means for reaching forwards.
3.
Law and Grace
•
We need law and grace but we don't need
legalism.
•
There are many things in Paul's writings
which could be put forward as ‘laws', e.g. Eph 4:25 “each of you must
put off falsehood and speak truthfully…” i.e. you must not lie!
•
So how does this fit in with “I'm not under
the law?” To answer that we need to note two things:
•
Keeping the rules does not bring salvation.
•
Because of who we are, we will then
live in a particular way.
In other words 'behaviour' follows 'being'!
•
Our preaching and teaching needs, therefore,
to emphasise first and foremost the wonder of God's grace: what He
has done and who He has made us.
•
When there is genuine heart response to
this there will be godly sorrow for wrong attitudes, wrong behaviour etc.
and a desire to get clear of such things.
•
The purpose of the Law, therefore, is to
drive you to Christ in your awareness of your sin (Rom 7:7) and to provide
guidelines for godly living (e.g. as laid out in Paul's letters).
A
right understanding of the ‘laws' or ‘rules' we find in the New Testament
will involve two things:
1.
Understanding WHY that rule or law is given, i.e. its value or benefit
to us as God's people, why it is good to behave in this particular way,
and
2.
That it will be natural to live like that, behave like that, when we
are being led by the Holy Spirit, who is a Spirit of love, i.e. motivation
by His love within us.
Legalism
is about how we apply these things:
•
Legalism focuses on the outward behaviour,
the act, while
•
Grace reveals to us what we are and
what we can become.
•
Legalism is seen in many Christian quarters,
often those most zealous for God
•
We take what are good spiritual disciplines
and we lay them as burdens on people.
•
Because they seem to crop up so often, I
want to cover the most common ones in what follows.
Note:
The examples that follow are so important that the reader MUST read them
on the second Preaching page. It is really impossible to see there significance
if reduced to single lines.
•
Driving people by laying burdens of guilt
upon them – “you ought to be praying for the lost, you ought to
be reaching out to the lost because there's one lost soul dying every
second” – may actually motivate people into action, but the action is
then saturated with resentment and guilt, and ultimately that will backfire.
•
People who are working or serving with a
negative resentful attitude will be like the servant of Jesus' parable
who saw the Master as “a hard man” (Mt 25:24).
•
When we are preaching, teaching, prophesying,
counselling or evangelising, we must never forget that the people to whom
we are speaking are loved by God and precious to Him and this requires
us to respect and honour them, even if they are in a state of unbelief
or are in a place of disagreement with us.
•
The scriptures show us again and again that
God uses imperfect people (and even an Ass - Num 22:21-) but that should
not be an excuse to continue to accept bad ways of ministering.
•
The words may be right and the outcome may
apparently be good, but if the means or way of speaking was less that
gracious and less than godly we should not sit back and accept it.
4.
Teaching Responsibility to Think, to Act and to Live
•
This is about enabling people to think for
themselves.
•
Preachers often fluctuate between
•
imparting rules for living (often in
the “how-to” do-it-yourself style that has become so common)
•
making nice statements about who we
are in Christ but without any depth
•
Beware producing Christians who are unable
to think
•
We need to equip our people to be questioners
who will seek after the truth
•
The secure church teaches responsibility
to think, to weigh up and to face concerns, to go beyond the surface and
develop maturity of thinking that enables personal assessment and assessment
of the church situation.
5.
We will get it wrong
•
Because we're human beings we will not always
get it right.
•
There will be bad days, there will be times
when God's grace does not seem to flow through us freely, there will be
blind spots in our understanding. How do we cope with that?
•
We have to realise that is what we are like.
We would rather not be like it, we would rather be beyond criticism, but
from time to time we have feet of clay - and God allows it to remind us
that it is all of His grace.
6.
And So?
The
following cover the matters in this chapter:
• Am
I confident and certain in the truth to be able to preach with grace and
with authority?
• Do
I take sufficient times out to be with God?
• Do
I see comforting as part of my ministry as described in this chapter?
• Do
I gently lead my people on in spiritual growth?
• Do
I give manageable hope to those imprisoned by wrong things?
• Do
I teach who we are in Christ before I teach instructions for living?
• Do
I encourage by grace or by legalism (honestly)?
• Do
I drive people or lift them by love?
• Do
I respect and honour the people before me?
• Do
I allow the truth & the Spirit to convict people or try and help God
along?
• Do
I see the people before me as God's precious possession, even with their
faults and failings?
• Do
I teach people to think for themselves & take responsibility for their
lives?
• Can
I cope gracefully with my own inadequacies in ministry?
• Can
I cope gracefully with others' inadequacies?
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