On Behalf of God

When I talk about preaching with Point students, with people in church settings, or even with you, should we have breakfast and decide to talk about preaching, I will say something like, “A preacher is a person of God who comes from the people of God in order to speak on behalf of God to the people of God.” That idea became a part of my thinking because of lots of excellent teaching I had along the way, none of which was more formative to that idea than Thomas Long and his excellent book, The Witness of Preaching.

If we get that idea into our hearts and minds, we can never take preaching casually. I don’t like it when people misquote me. I can’t imagine how God must feel sometimes when He listens to sermons preached in a variety of places. I have no personal delusions that I always get it right, but I do try my best – as Paul might say, “do my best” so that I can “rightly explain the word of truth.” (2 Timothy 2:15)

If that text rings a bell, you might recall in the KJV, it says, “study to show yourselves approved.” I wasn’t a particularly good student in high school. In fact, I would be embarrassed for you to see my report cards from that long ago. Every six weeks, we took “six weeks tests” and then brought home report cards soon after that. They had to be signed by your parents. On many occasions, my mother would remind me, “You know, Paul says that we should study to show ourselves approved to God.” 

I was delighted when taking Greek in college – by now a decent student – and learned that Paul’s word in this text doesn’t so much mean “to study” as it does “to do your best” or “to give all effort.” I was delighted to come home for Christmas that year and make sure my mother knew she had been misquoting Paul. I suspect in 1611, “study” was a good word for the KJV translators to use, but I doubt it really applied to high school algebra and French. 

Actually, it seems to me at this point in my life that Paul’s word is a lot bigger than study – it doesn’t take you off the hook at all when it comes to preparing to “rightly explain” God’s Word. Good preaching certainly requires competent study of the Christian Scriptures – recognizing that before I can know what a text means, I’ve got to work to discover what it meant to the author and his readers. (AI really can’t do that for you!)

But if we read the context of 2 Timothy 2:14-19, Paul wants Timothy “to do his best” in all kinds of areas. For example, “wrangling about words,” “profane chatter,” “swerving from the truth,” and “turning away from wickedness.” He even calls out a few who apparently have forgotten this.  Preaching is not merely the words we say while preaching, but it is also the life we live while preparing to preach! Our preaching should reflect that as purely and justly as we can manage. (And we know that also isn’t something AI can do.)

A few of you reading this may remember a Christian church preacher who, among other places, preached in East Point, Georgia, back in the mid-twentieth century. By the time I was privileged to know him, he had retired from a church in Cincinnati and was living in East Point, where he led in the area of advancement at Atlanta Christian College. 

I was privileged to hear him preach a number of times. He was an orator whose vocabulary seemed to always find the right word, and when you heard him preach, you walked away knowing “that was the Word of truth rightly explained.” 

More than just that – he was an incredibly good man whose way of living matched the power of his words in preaching. Or maybe his words in preaching matched his way of living.

Ironically – providentially? – while I was working on this, a colleague stopped by my office to give me an envelope from his mother-in-law. In going through her father’s files (he was also a fine man and preacher), she found a manuscript of a sermon Robert O. Weaver preached at the old Cincinnati Conference on Evangelism in 1958. She contacted me, asked if I would like it, and I said yes!

I stopped what I was doing and started reading the sermon. I could hear the voice of this great preacher. The sermon was about Christian unity; knowing where and when it was preached speaks to his courage. In the sermon, he claims “not to be a prophet,” but when you read the quote below, you may think perhaps he was.

Christian unity then is not some ethereal, idealistic desirable impossibility. It is a passionately prayed for consummation demanded by the Lord in almost His dying breath. [John 17] How the believing world can look upon the poignant prayer of Christ for the unity of His followers, and be content to maintain the divisions that bring shame and disgrace to His name and cause, is beyond comprehension.

His last comments were: “You ask me: ‘What are the Prospects for the Future?’ And I must answer: ‘Look into your heart, as I must look into mine.’  There is the answer.”

_{Image by Deborah Hudson from Pixabay}