Someone approached me recently after a meeting, beaming and happy. Two days before, it was the opposite; in the meantime, he had listened to God's word on the web, attended the service and heard the sermon, and God touched him with His word. Two days before, he told me, I was depressed, I was angry with everyone, I saw myself as a victim, now I have forgiven, I am free, I want to move forward. Why? Because the word of God is powerful to change lives when it is received, as in the parable of the sower, with a good and honest heart.
My word, says God through the prophet Jeremiah, is like fire that breaks the rock, it was, and it still is. I was marked a few years ago by an experience with God in the early hours of the morning during a trip. Working at length at 4 a.m. for several days in a row during a trip to the antipodes, I learned the importance of focusing on God's calling and gifts, I had to focus on preaching and teaching the word of God and avoid any deviation into other activities under the pressure of the expectations of the people around me, but which did not correspond in any way to His calling and His gifts. The anointing is manifested in obedience in the exercise of the gift and not elsewhere. I saw it come true.
The servant of God should honor the word of God and teach his listeners to appreciate and pay attention to the word that is preached, to hold it dear in their hearts and put it into practice. Our preaching cannot be entertainment that our audience enjoys for a while and then quickly forgets. And it is incumbent upon the preacher to preach with power, with determination and with the firm intention of speaking as if from God whether his speech pleases his listeners or not. We represent the people before God but more than anything we must represent God before the people, we must declare His heart, carry and reveal His word, share this word of life that saves, heals, delivers and liberates, this fire that breaks the rocks into small pieces.
She did it in the time of Moses, when God asked them to put His word in their hearts and souls, to speak of it in the house, on the journey, when lying down and getting up and thus benefit from His strength and His power; she did it in the time of Jesus who preached with an authority found breathtaking by those of His generation; she transformed Saul, the murderous persecutor, into Paul, the distinguished preacher of the same gospel he had made himself the scourge of; she transformed the cowardly Peter into a giant, she even transformed some of those who chanted 'crucify him' into disciples of the cross. She also took this pagan enemy of God, slanderer of the Bible, believing herself to be the most intelligent and transformed her into a lover of Jesus. Yes, I have seen lives radically changed, physical and emotional healings under the influence of the anointed preaching of the word of God, when we agree to receive it.
Someone asked Billy Graham what advice he would give to young preachers, his answer, 'pray and study'; and in his autobiography he states that if he had to do it all over again, he would pray more and study more. To what end? In order to preach. In some 'new wave' churches, preaching is decried as being abandoned in favor of 'conversations'; no one wants to listen to a sermon; that would be acknowledging the preacher's authority to declare a word one did not know or had deliberately neglected. After all, everyone's opinion is equally valid. I imagine a first-year medical school class where the students consider themselves qualified to argue with the professor about human anatomy and the principles of diagnosis; in every field, men recognize a truth outside themselves that they need to acquire, except when it concerns God.
So we preach, and we preach, and we preach, we explain Christ, truth, doctrine, so that men may hear; we correct, we reprove, under the impulse of the apostle Paul, so that the truth may be known to every man, and in order to be able to say like Paul with a clear conscience 'I am pure from the blood of all men', my English translation literally says 'I am innocent from the blood of all men.' God has chosen to save through the 'foolishness' of preaching. A servant of God must concentrate on preaching, he cannot do too much, and he cannot do it too well. However well we may do it, we are still faced with the frustration of preaching, and only the preacher who has little revelation of God is fully satisfied with his preaching. Who among us does not feel his inability to describe the indescribable, to say the unspeakable; to communicate the true measure of the One with whom we commune daily and who has totally captivated our hearts?
Is it not true that when all is said and done, when all is finished—the preaching, the proclaiming, and the perspiration—we are still left with the feeling in our hearts that we have not said a quarter of what we know, an eighth of what could be said, and even an infinitesimal portion of what there is to know? It is divine grace that God saves through preaching. It is a grace to which it behooves us to pay attention. We should listen to each message as if it were the first time we had heard the preacher, listen to each verse as if we had just become acquainted with it, meditate on each message as if it were, because it is, God's chosen means of shaping and transforming our lives, and this is the triumph of preaching.
Shalom:
