Dave Chanski
We’ll begin this morning by turning to 2 Timothy 4:1-4:
I charge you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at His appearing and His kingdom: Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.
The preaching of God’s Word has slipped from its rightful, scriptural place of prominence. A group of Calvinistic evangelicals called “Together for the Gospel” have recognized this and have prepared a document entitled Affirmations and Denials. In this document they wrote: “We affirm the centrality of expository preaching in the Church and the urgent need for a recovery of biblical exposition and the public reading of Scripture in worship.” There’s their affirmation and then it’s followed by this denial: “We deny that God-honoring worship can marginalize or neglect the ministry of the Word as manifested through exposition and public reading. We further deny that a Church devoid of true biblical preaching can survive as a Gospel Church.” 1 I agree with this statement and with the observation concerning the present state of affairs that calls for such statements. And so my topic is “The Centrality of Preaching in Worship.”
What do I mean by “the centrality of preaching”? Basically, I mean that the preaching of the Word of God is to be given the primary or central place in our worship of God. We do not marginalize or neglect or minimize it if we hold to the centrality of preaching in worship. I want to make three introductory points before I get to the main points of today’s sermon.
A Concern about the Preaching of the Word of God
The first is a concern about a crisis in evangelicalism or a crisis in Christianity; and that of course is that the preaching of the Word of God is being eclipsed. It’s being made to seem—and this is just a definition of eclipse—less brilliant. It’s less prominent, and there are other things that have come in to outshine or overshadow the preaching of the Word. For instance, as we spoke about yesterday, that happens with other elements of worship, such as music in our day and age especially. And that has happened to the point that some people define singing as worship. I’m talking about the centrality of preaching in the worship of God. Some people don’t even look at preaching as an element of worship anymore.
I remember once being at a conference—and this was not a conference of people who were less conservative in their Christianity. The people who were leading the music were being introduced. And so they said, “They are going to lead us in worship. After that, we’re going to have the preaching of the Word.” In other words, the two things were separated.
Preaching gets eclipsed or replaced by other things. There is no evening service on Sundays in many places. Maybe it’s replaced with nothing. Maybe it’s replaced with small group meetings. There could be good purposes behind small group meetings, but when you analyze the whole situation and the whole day in such places, what has happened? You used to have two hours of preaching on a Sunday, now you have half of that, if you have even an hour. In some places it might be replaced by a greater emphasis on liturgy. It might be replaced by other elements of worship. Maybe it is replaced by the Lord’s Supper or it’s crowded out by the Lord’s Supper. I know of a Baptist church that had no preaching on Easter Sunday morning. The pastor came out dressed in what was supposed to be first-century Middle Eastern garb and did a dramatic presentation of one of the men who was on the road to Emmaus who spoke with Jesus. No sermon, period.
Preaching gets replaced or maybe it gets eclipsed in that it gets shortened. Perhaps because of some of these other things I mentioned, perhaps because of what we talked about yesterday, or perhaps because of what we see in the text here, because of people’s itching ears. Someone brought this up in a conversation. He said that there was someone who came and visited a church and said, “I would come to your church if the sermon were only so long.” Or maybe the sermon gets remade into something less than what it is supposed to be. I’ve had interaction with Christians who don’t ever refer to a sermon or a preacher anymore. They don’t have a preacher; they have a speaker. And they don’t have a sermon; they have a talk or a message, but not a sermon. There’s one sense in which I say, “I don’t care if someone doesn’t want to call it a sermon.” But on the other hand, because I know some of the motivation for calling it something other than a sermon, it does make me uncomfortable because I think it fits in this whole concern here of preaching getting eclipsed, and it’s something other than what it ought to be. It’s not a faithful, biblical explanation, exposition, and proclamation of the Word of God. So that’s the concern, there is this crisis in evangelicalism and in Christianity generally.
The Crisis Is not New
A second observation as an introductory matter is this: the crisis is not new. It’s something that has existed for centuries. You can study the Reformation and the Middle Ages, the church of Christ leading up to the Reformation, and the development of the Roman Catholic Church into what it became at the time leading up to the Reformation. There was certainly this crisis. The preaching of the Word of God had become eclipsed by all sorts of things: other elements of worship so-called, liturgy, to the point that there really was no preaching of the Word of God.
This was something that was predicted by Paul, and no doubt even began in his own day or shortly thereafter. He said in this passage that I read, “The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but…they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.” It was predicted by the apostle. This whole crisis began, no doubt, shortly after the days of the apostles, if not while the apostles were still alive. There is a crisis, but it’s not something new.
The Centrality of Preaching is the Answer to this Crisis
The third observation is this: the centrality of preaching is the answer to this crisis. The centrality of preaching is the need of the day. It is always the need of the day in the Christian church. Isn’t that what happened to a large extent in the Reformation? There’s a sense in which you could almost boil it down to this: the Reformation was a return to the preaching of the Word of God in Christ’s church. This is illustrated in the whole arrangement of the furniture in the houses of worship at the time of the Reformation: the altar had the front and central place and the pulpit was not in a central or prominent place, but was off to the side somewhere. It was a lectern where the Scripture might be read and perhaps a homily given, but the altar was the central thing. In the Reformation there was a reversal of the place of the altar and the pulpit. There was a return to the centrality of preaching. This is what we see taught in the Word of God.
So I want to address this subject of the centrality of preaching with this goal in mind: to give us, as gospel ministers, confidence that the preaching of the Word is the thing for us to do no matter what. As Paul said, “In season and out of season.” And part of the meaning of that would at least be whether people are clamoring for it or whether they are not. At all times our goal and our calling is to preach the Word of God. That really is my practical application as well, and I will give a few brief exhortations at the end. I want to stir you up to a renewed conviction of the importance of the centrality of the preaching of the Word of God and strengthen you in the inner man by the help of God’s Spirit to go forth and continue to do the thing that you already believe you’ve been called to do, that you’ve been by and large, I’m sure, striving to do in the ministries that God has given you.
Remember the Crucial Place of God’s Word in His Saving Purposes
The Key Place of the Word of God in Conversion
My first point is this then: remember the crucial place, or the key place, of God’s Word in His saving purposes. First of all, what I mean is the key place of the Word of God in calling sinners to Himself in the work of conversion. Let’s just look at a couple of passages. Most of them are very familiar passages, so I won’t be engaging, by and large, in any kind of exposition; certainly no detailed exposition. But, we need to be reminded of these things so that we don’t lose heart and so that we don’t grow weary in well-doing, so that we might constantly be convinced in our minds, in our hearts, that this is the thing that God has called us to do. Romans 1:16—notice the crucial place of God’s Word in His calling sinners to Himself—“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ,” Paul says. “For it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.” As he goes and preaches to Jews and to Gentiles as he says, there is one thing that is the power of God to salvation, and that is the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the preaching of the gospel—it is the message of the gospel in this case—that Paul says brings sinners to life in Jesus Christ.
You have a similar statement in James 1:18 that emphasizes for us the role of the Word of God in saving sinners. Look at James 1:18. It says, “Of His own will He brought us forth by the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures.” How did God bring these saints, these redeemed sinners, that James is addressing, out of darkness and into light? Well, he says it’s by the word of truth. The Word of God has a central or crucial place in God’s saving purposes, first of all, in calling sinners to Himself.
The way it states it in our confession, in the chapter on effectual calling, or regeneration, is that God does this work of bringing a sinner to saving faith, to spiritual life out of spiritual death, by His Word and Spirit. We have to remember this important thing. Are there other things that help our proclamation of the Word, our testimony in the world and in the presence of nonbelievers? Yes, there are many things. There’s the importance of a holy life. There’s the importance of a church reaching out to people, showing compassion to sinners that goes above and beyond we could say than simply preaching the gospel to them. First and foremost, we must always keep in mind the crucial place of God’s Word in calling sinners to Himself.
The Crucial Place of God’s Word in Maturing Saints
Secondly, under this heading of the crucial place of God’s Word in His saving purposes is this: we see the crucial place of God’s Word in maturing saints, in conforming them to Christ’s image, in preparing them for glory. The gospel is not only to be preached to sinners; it is to be preached to saints as well. Jesus said it in the Great Commission. You go out and you make disciple—that certainly is through the preaching of the Word. But then, once they’re gathered into churches, what is the business of the church and the pastors of the church? It is to teach them all things that Jesus has commanded, to teach them to do those things. That means the preaching of the Word, doesn’t it?
Let’s just look at a handful of texts that emphasize this point; that even once sinners have been called out of darkness, once they’ve been converted, it is the Word of God that has a key place in sanctifying them and preparing them for glory. In John 17:17 we find a part of Jesus’ prayer that we call His “High Priestly Prayer,” the prayer He prayed for the disciples. He prayed not only for the eleven that were there with Him, but for all those who would believe in Him through their word. And then He says in verse 17 as part of this prayer, “Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.” In other words, the saints of God are going to be made more and more like Jesus Christ. They are going to be less and less conformed to the image of this world and more and more conformed to the image of Jesus Christ through the Word of God and interaction with that Word.
Likewise, Romans 12:1-2:
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Now it doesn’t explicitly and directly mention that the Scriptures, the Word of God, is the means for this transformation, but it clearly is implied when it says, “that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Where is that will of God expressed? It’s in His Word. And as people interact, their minds interact with the Word, they are changed by the renewing of their mind through the Word of God, and the people themselves ultimately are transformed.
Look at 2 Corinthians 3:18. Here, again, it doesn’t explicitly mention the Word of God, but it’s implied here where it says, “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.” I don’t believe that beholding in a mirror is strictly limited to the Word of God, but I believe it’s a big part of it. And as we interact with Christ Himself in and through His Word we are beholding Him; we are beholding His glory. And the result is that we are transformed into the same image.
One other passage is Ephesians 5:25-27—verse 26 contains the words that I want us to focus upon. Paul says:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for it, that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that He might present it to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that it should be holy and without blemish.
Here it says that it’s through the Word of God that Christ sanctifies and cleanses the church. He says it’s with the “washing of water by the word.” There’s figurative language there with the washing of water, but it’s through the instrumentality of the Word of God that God’s people are made more and more like Christ and that they are prepared for glory that they are sanctified. So the point is there’s a crucial place of God’s Word in His saving purposes.
Remember the Crucial Place of Preaching in God’s Saving Purposes
Now, more narrowly and more directly to the point of my message, the centrality of preaching, the second thing is: remember the crucial place, or the key place, of preaching in God’s saving purposes. In other words, not just the key place of God’s Word, but God’s Word preached; God’s word proclaimed by His servants who are called to preach that Word. The Word of God sanctifies us when we read it, when we discuss it with other people, when we meditate on it day and night, when we memorize it and repeat it to ourselves, and so on. It can even sanctify us when we’re looking at it on the side of the coffee cup in the morning, can’t it? But my point is there’s a special place in God’s saving purposes of the preaching of God’s Word. That’s what we want to consider.
Once again, they’re familiar texts, but we need to be reminded of these things especially when we face this kind of pressure. “Well Pastor, couldn’t we do this? Couldn’t we do that?” And even if this is not someone’s direct aim and goal, you realize that the affect of it is, as I said, to at least begin to eclipse the place of the preaching of the Word of God. We need to remember these texts of the Bible that will strengthen us and hopefully help to keep us from turning aside.
First of all, Romans 10:14-17:
How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace, who bring glad tidings of good things!” But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “LORD, who has believed our report?” So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
Now notice that the way Paul states it here is not in the more general way as we saw in the last point, just the crucial place of the Word of God. Here his emphasis is on the preaching of the Word of God.
Now I know this was a day before the printing press, and before people had the opportunity to carry a Bible with them or even have a Bible on a shelf in their home, and there was a need for the preaching of the Word of God. We could argue perhaps that we don’t have that same need in our day and age because everyone has his own Bible. And it is a huge blessing to be able to buy a Bible for $4 even in some cases; to have a dozen translations sitting on your shelf. It’s a blessing. But, it still emphasizes the importance of the preaching of the Word of God when it says, “faith comes by hearing the word of God.” And it means the word of God preached or proclaimed by a preacher. That’s Paul’s whole argument beginning at verse 14. People cannot call on God if they don’t believe in Him, and they can’t believe in Him if they haven’t heard of Him. Remember that man in John 9 says to Jesus, “Tell me who he is that I might believe in Him” (John 9:36). He had to hear who Jesus was, who the Messiah is. They have to hear about Him before they can believe in Him. Then it says, “And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent?” This is Paul’s whole argument. If preachers are not called and they don’t go out and preach, then people are not going to come to faith in Christ. It’s the crucial place of preaching in God’s saving purposes.
Notice how it says there: “How shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard?” I’ve heard of at least one modern English translation—which I think is an accurate translation—that translates it this way: “How shall they believe in Him whom they have not heard?” That’s a good and legitimate translation of the Greek. If you’re familiar with Greek, you know how they say the word ἀκούω (akouō), the normal verb for hearing, takes the genitive. In other words, it doesn’t have an object. It doesn’t have the accusative as the direct object; that they have to hear Him. But it says it in a literal, wooden way: they have to hear of Him. But the point is, we translate it into English as if it were an accusative case, and it’s the direct object. Meaning what? That we translate it this way: “How shall they believe in Him whom they have not heard?” In other words, they hear the voice of Christ through the voice of the human preacher. That’s the point. You can read that in at least John Murray’s commentary, as well as others I’m certain. But that’s the point.
This should strengthen us, brethren, and convince us that when we are preaching the Word of God it’s not just Dave Chanski standing to preach. Now there’s a sense in which you don’t want to look at it this way, and you don’t want to say this to people; that when you hear my voice you’re hearing the voice of Christ. But that’s what Paul is saying here. Think of Jesus’ words in Luke 10:16: “He who hears you hears Me, he who rejects you rejects Me, and he who rejects Me rejects Him who sent Me” [emphasis added]. There’s a sense in which we shrink away from the use of that kind of language, but that is the language of Scripture. And that’s how the Reformed theologians and preachers understood what the Word of God was saying. This is why they felt compelled to exalt the preaching of the Word of God once again.
Listen to their statement in one of the Reformed confessions, one of the earlier ones, the Second Helvetic Confession, on this point. Here’s what they said:
When the Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is preached, and received by the faithful; and that neither any other Word of God is to be feigned nor to be expected from heaven: and that now the Word itself which is preached is to be regarded, not the minister that preaches; who although he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless the Word of God abides true and good.2
Do you see that? They are saying that when you hear a preacher who is lawfully called to preach, and he is faithfully preaching what the text of the Word of God is saying, and he’s not deviating out of the way in what he says, that that is to be regarded as God’s Word just as the text of Scripture itself is to be regarded as God’s Word. And that’s reflecting what Paul says when he says, “How shall they believe in Him whom they have not heard?” It’s Christ’s voice speaking through the preacher. And when they say in the confessional statement here, “neither is any other Word of God to be feigned,” what they mean is this: we don’t create a different category to explain biblical preaching. In other words, here is the Word of God, and then over here is simply the word of man, and preaching we can’t just call the word of man, but we dare not call it the Word of God, so we have to develop something that’s in between. They are saying, “No. There’s no need to develop a different category. It is to be regarded as the Word of God.” That’s why they put the pulpit back in its central place, and that’s where this doctrine—the centrality of preaching—comes from, brethren.
Another text is Luke 4:31-37. Here’s the account of Jesus in the synagogue in Capernaum on the Sabbath Day:
Then He went down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and was teaching them on the Sabbaths (or it could be translated as “on the Sabbath”). And they were astonished at His teaching, for His word was with authority. Now in the synagogue there was a man who had a spirit of an unclean demon. And he cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Let us alone! What have we to do with You, Jesus of Nazareth? Did You come to destroy us? I know who You are—the Holy One of God!” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be quiet, and come out of him!” And when the demon had thrown him in their midst, it came out of him and did not hurt him. Then they were all amazed and spoke among themselves, saying, “What a word this is! For with authority and power He commands the unclean spirits, and they come out.” And the report about Him went out into every place in the surrounding region.
We see here the power and uniqueness of the preaching of God’s Word. Now I know you can say, “Well, this was Jesus. So it was different.” And I’ll grant you, it was different, but we still have to look at this in light of the statement of Jesus I just quoted a few minutes ago, from later on in Luke. “He who hears you hears Me”. There’s a uniqueness and a power of the Word of God being proclaimed that comes out in verse 32: “They were astonished at His teaching, for His word was with authority.” It was the way He spoke it. It wasn’t just the way He read the passage of Scripture; it was the way He preached the Word of God.
And likewise in verse 36, even though this wasn’t preaching here, it’s when He commanded the demon to come out: “They were all amazed and said, ‘What a word this is! With authority and power He commands the unclean spirits, and they come out.” The point is, brethren, in true preaching it’s Christ’s voice that is heard. That’s the emphasis on the text: the speaking of God’s Word. There’s an implied contrast here, in this text, between Jesus and the teaching of the scribes. It doesn’t say it here in this passage, but in Mark 1:22 where it records the same incident it says that “His word was with authority, and not as their scribes.” I remember hearing Pastor Martin say in a sermon on Mark 1 many years ago that this man who shrieked out in the temple that day (he cried out; the demon in him cried out) “was content for many years, no doubt, with the droning of the scribes.” They were not preaching God’s Word with authority; they were engaged in what Paul talked about as “vain talking, profane babbling.”
You read about that in the Pastoral Epistles. Paul talks about how they were engaged in talking about myths and endless genealogies. You can read in commentaries what some of these guys evidently went off into. They went off into meaningless things that were not based on the text of Scripture. They used the text of Scripture to go off into drivel. But Jesus was preaching the Word of God. He wasn’t like the scribes.
I heard a guy on the radio the week I was going to teach this passage, the week of Passover. And here’s this guy, rambling on about the posture of the body in the eating of matzah for the Passover meal, and the reason it’s so important for the body to be in this position or that position. He talked about the blessing that is missed out on if it’s not in this certain position. You won’t find that anywhere in the Old Testament. But evidently, the rabbis went on and on about it. And he talked about, “If you don’t eat it in this position, you might have the matzah, but you won’t have the mitzvah.” And I thought, “This is what Jesus was facing! And this is what Paul was talking about: profane babbling, vain talking.”
Paul spoke in Colossians 2 about “things that are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.” But brethren, do you know what is of value against the indulgence of the flesh? A man standing and telling you straight what the Word of God says. We must not undervalue the importance of preaching, and of teaching our people the importance of being in a church where the gospel is faithfully preached. Listen to a commentator, Michael Wilcock, on this passage here: “It is fashionable in some circles to play down the importance of preaching in the church.” Like I said earlier, people would want to call it speaking rather than preaching. To me that’s just one subtle way in which this happens. The other ways that are worse I mentioned. He goes on to say, “It is claimed that the gospel is conveyed much less effectively by what we say than by what we do and what we are.” He says, “There is no way of avoiding the fact, however, that the way God’s message comes across is by words. One man speaks, other men hear.” We must not despise, brethren, the foolishness of preaching, as the apostle says. We must not despise what the confession calls “the outward and ordinary means of grace.”
In Acts 20:32 Paul said to the Ephesian elders, “I commend you to God and to the word of His grace, which are able to build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified.” When he commends them to the word of God’s grace he means the Word read, the Word memorized, the Word meditated on, and especially the Word preached.
Another text is 1 Corinthians 1:17-21. Here we have the words of the Apostle Paul, and again, these are well-known words and are well-known for a good reason:
For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of no effect.
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.” Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.
The word there κήρυγμα (kērugma) is emphasizing the message, but it’s using a word to describe it as the message that is preached. This is what God uses to save sinners, the message that is preached and heralded. Listen to some comments on this whole subject of the preaching of the Word in contrast to the speaking of the philosophers of the day in places like Corinth and Greece. Here’s what one commentator says:
It is impossible to exaggerate the almost fantastic mastery of the silver-tongued rhetorician (or orator) that he held in Greece. Plutarch says, “They made their voices sweet with musical cadences and modulations of tone and echoed resonances.” They thought not of what they were saying, but of how they were saying it (it was all about form, not substance). Their thought might be poisonous so long as it was enveloped in honeyed words. Philostratus tells us that Adrian, the sophist, had such a reputation in Rome, that when his messenger appeared with a notice that he was to lecture, the senate emptied and even the people at the games abandoned them to flock to hear him.
Dio Chrysostom draws a picture of these so-called wise men and their competitions in Corinth itself at the Isthmian games. He said, “You might hear many poor wretches of sophists, shouting and abusing each other, and their disciples, as they call them, squabbling; and many writers of books reading their stupid compositions, and many poets singing their poems, and many jugglers exhibiting their marvels, and many sooth-sayers giving the meaning of prodigies, and ten thousand rhetoricians twisting lawsuits, and no small number of traitors driving their several trades.” The Greeks were intoxicated with fine words; and to them the Christian preacher with his blunt message seemed a crude and uncultured figure, to be laughed at and ridiculed rather than to be listened to and respected.
It looked as if the Christian message had little chance of success against the background of Jewish or Greek life; but, as Paul said, “What looks like God’s foolishness is wiser than men’s wisdom; and what looks like God’s weakness is stronger than men’s strength.”3
And brethren, we need to be convinced of that because it is not skilled orators who are vying for attention with the preaching of God’s Word, but it’s anything and everything else under the sun, isn’t it? And we must remember that there is a peculiar power of God’s Word preached and a peculiar place given to God’s Word preached in His saving purposes.
The next text is here in 1 Corinthians as well, 1 Corinthians 2:1-5. This is a text I read almost every single Lord’s Day morning, and it’s part of my prayer before I go to preach; or if I’m not preaching on a given Sunday, it’s my prayer for whoever does preach in our church and in churches around the world. Paul says, “And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God.” In other words, I’m not like the orators you are used to hearing in the city of Corinth. Here is the difference: “For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” And I don’t take that to mean that every sermon needs to be a gospel sermon so-called. It has to be Christ-centered in that it focuses on Christ’s gospel and His message and His Word. It has to be biblical, but it doesn’t have to be on the atonement or on the cross directly and be a primarily evangelistic message. Because when Paul addressed the various problems and errors at Corinth he was not knowing anything except Christ and Him crucified. But He goes on:
I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom (like your orators), but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.
And brethren, do you believe that? You may not have the best oratorical skills, you might not be the most gifted preacher, but you are a called man of God according to a biblical calling through the church of Christ in examination of what the Scriptures say a man of God ought to be. You may not be a skilled orator, but do you believe that when you preach, as this man said, “with a blunt message”, and you are “a crude and uncultured figure” that it is in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power? We should believe that, and we should cry out to God that He will own our preaching so that it will indeed be just that to the people of God; so that their faith will not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.
There used to be a guy when I was in Minneapolis who was in a church in the upper Midwest there, a few hours south of me. He would get so discouraged because he would preach and he didn’t see conversions. He saw the same people and they had the same sins year after year after year. He wanted to leave the ministry. Eventually, he got so discouraged he did leave that place. I used to say to him, “You need to remember that if it’s the truth you are preaching and the people are hearing with any faith—even mustard seed faith—you are doing good and you are accomplishing the saving purposes of God, and you are preaching doctrines that they may have heard for years. But when you say it again and they lay hold of it by faith again, you may not see the radical changes you want to see and you may not see them immediately, but over time good is being done.” And we need to believe that, brethren. We need to believe that, and we need to give preaching its rightful and important place.
Another text is the one read at the outset, 2 Timothy 4:1-4:
I charge you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at His appearing and His kingdom: Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.
Let me just say a few things from that text. Remember the charge that Paul gives. Remember his introductory words. He says, “I charge you before God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” In other words, “Take this to heart and think of the solemn words that I speak as I give you this charge to preach. Remember that I’m telling you this before God and before Jesus Christ, who is going to judge the living and the dead.” He is saying, “This is of utmost importance what I’m about to say to you.” And then what he says is, “Preach the word!” That’s his exhortation. That’s his command.
And then he tells us about the real and strong temptations we’re going to face and that we do face in our ministries. People want to say that worship is just music; that music is what people primarily want; music is what attracts people. There’s the trend, as I said, toward liturgy and doing more of other things and less of preaching. There are people with itching ears. They want you to say other things than what you are saying, gentler things. Maybe some of these visitors will come more than once if you don’t speak so bluntly, if you’re not so rough and extreme, or if your sermons aren’t so long. Maybe some of us do need to have shorter sermons. But brethren my point is that we must preach the word.
Another text is Acts 20:6-11. It’s the text where Paul is in Troas on his way back to Jerusalem at the end of the third missionary journey. It’s such an interesting text because it says the purpose that they met for was for the breaking of bread, the observance of the Lord’s Supper. So it’s what we would call a Lord’s Supper Service. And you might be tempted to think that that means you are mainly going to just have the Lord’s Supper and you are going to shorten your sermon. That was the longest sermon recorded in the Bible, wasn’t it? It was at a Lord’s Supper Service.
But now, let me just warn you about one other thing before I close. That is, that believing and holding to and trying to practice the centrality of preaching, that we don’t make preaching the all in all of our worship. It is not all of worship. It is primary and it is central, but we don’t want to let happen in our churches what has happened in the history of the Christian church at times and in places. I’m going to read from a man named Nick Needham who is a Reformed Baptist preacher in Scotland, from a book called Give Praise to God.
He talks about the time in the 19th century where in some non-conformist circles the only reason people came to the worship services was to hear the preaching; and so they would come in late because they disregarded what went on before. They regarded what went on before as simply the prelude to preaching and so on. He quotes from someone who says that people treated the beginning of the sermon “as if everything was just beginning,” that is, when the preacher stood up to preach. He said, “Here we see the preaching experience model of worship wrecking its worst havoc in evangelical life. The congregation has become an audience, the minister has become an orator, and everything else in the service can be safely ignored or even treated with casual contempt.”
Brethren, we must not so exalt preaching above everything else that we make it as though the rest is not the worship of God and it is not very significant. He says, “Liturgy, creeds, scripture lections, confession, intercessory prayer, psalms and hymns, eucharists, all have either been dropped or emptied of existential engagement. The only thing that really matters is to be uplifted through the sermon.” He then notes, “Subjectivity, when that happens, has won its first victory.”
Final Exhortations
It’s a good reminder; a good warning. I’ll just close then with these brief exhortations. Brethren, in light of what the Word of God says about the importance of the preaching of the Word, may God enable us to give preaching the primary and central place that God has assigned to it. May God enable us to remain steadfast regardless of what trends become popular, regardless of how many of our people may call for change, and how urgently or loudly even they may call. And may God enable us to cry out earnestly for God’s blessing on His appointed means just like we heard yesterday afternoon from Pastor Piñero. We need to cry out urgently brethren that God would bless the preaching of the Word. And may God Himself pour out a great blessing of people hungering and thirsting for the Word and pressing to hear the Word of God. Amen
Notes:
1. Duncan III, J. Ligon, Mark E. Dever, C.J. Mahaney, and R. Albert Mohler, Jr. “Affirmations and Denials, Article IV.” Toghether for the Gospel. April 2006
2. “Chapter 1: Of the Holy Scripture Being the True Word of God, The Preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” Second Helvetic Confession. 1556
3. Barclay, William. The Letters to the Corinthians, Westminster John Knox Press, 2002, pp. 24
This is a minimally edited transcription of the second of two sermons on worship delivered in May 2011 at the Pastor’s Conference in North Bergen, NJ. All Rights Reserved.
