THE sweetest graces by a slight perversion may bear the
bitterest fruit. The sun gives life, but sunstrokes are death.
Preaching is to give life; it may kill. The preacher holds the
keys; he may lock as well as unlock. Preaching is God's great
institution for the planting and maturing of spiritual life. When
properly executed, its benefits are untold; when wrongly executed,
no evil can exceed its damaging results. It is an easy matter to
destroy the flock if the shepherd be unwary or the pasture be
destroyed, easy to capture the citadel if the watchmen be asleep or
the food and water be poisoned.
Invested with such gracious prerogatives, exposed to so great
evils, involving so many grave responsibilities, it would be a
parody on the shrewdness of the devil and a libel on his character
and reputation if he did not bring his master influences to
adulterate the preacher and the preaching.
In face of all this, the exclamatory interrogatory of Paul, "Who is
sufficient for these things?" is never out of order.
Paul says: "Our sufficiency is of God, who also hath made us able
ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the
spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." The
true ministry is God-touched, God-enabled, and God-made.
The Spirit of God is on the preacher in anointing power, the fruit
of the Spirit is in his heart, the Spirit of God has vitalized the
man and the word; his preaching gives life, gives life as the
spring gives life; gives life as the resurrection gives life; gives
ardent life as the summer gives ardent life; gives fruitful life as
the autumn gives fruitful life.
The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever
athirst for God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose
eye is single to God, and in whom by the power of God's Spirit the
flesh and the world have been crucified and his ministry is like
the generous flood of a life-giving river.
The preaching that kills is non-spiritual preaching. The ability of
the preaching is not from God. Lower sources than God have given to
it energy and stimulant. The Spirit is not evident in the preacher
nor his preaching. Many kinds of forces may be projected and
stimulated by preaching that kills, but they are not spiritual
forces.
They may resemble spiritual forces, but are only the shadow, the
counterfeit; life they may seem to have, but the life is
magnetized. The preaching that kills is the letter; shapely and
orderly it may be, but it is the letter still, the dry, husky
letter, the empty, bald shell. The letter may have the germ of life
in it, but it has no breath of spring to evoke it; winter seeds
they are, as hard as the winter's soil, as icy as the winter's air,
no thawing nor germinating by them.
This letter-preaching has the truth. But even divine truth has no
life-giving energy alone; it must be energized by the Spirit, with
all God's forces at its back. Truth unquickened by God's Spirit
deadens as much as, or more than, error. It may be the truth
without admixture; but without the Spirit its shade and touch are
deadly, its truth error, its light darkness. The letter-preaching
is unctionless, neither mellowed nor oiled by the Spirit. There may
be tears, but tears cannot run God's machinery; tears may be but
summer's breath on a snow-covered iceberg, nothing but surface
slush. Feelings and earnestness there may be, but it is the emotion
of the actor and the earnestness of the attorney.
The preacher may feel from the kindling of his own sparks, be
eloquent over his own exegesis, earnest in delivering the product
of his own brain; the professor may usurp the place and imitate the
fire of the apostle; brains and nerves may serve the place and
feign the work of God's Spirit, and by these forces the letter may
glow and sparkle like an illumined text, but the glow and sparkle
will be as barren of life as the field sown with pearls. The
death-dealing element lies back of the words, back of the sermon,
back of the occasion, back of the manner, back of the action. The
great hindrance is in the preacher himself.
He has not in himself the mighty life-creating forces. There may be
no discount on his orthodoxy, honesty, cleanness, or earnestness;
but somehow the man, the inner man, in its secret places has never
broken down and surrendered to God, his inner life is not a great
highway for the transmission of God's message, God's power. Somehow
self and not God rules in the holy of holiest. Somewhere, all
unconscious to himself, some spiritual nonconductor has touched his
inner being, and the divine current has been arrested. His inner
being has never felt its thorough spiritual bankruptcy, its utter
powerlessness; he has never learned to cry out with an ineffable
cry of self-despair and self-helplessness till God's power and
God's fire comes in and fills, purifies, empowers.
Self-esteem, self-ability in some pernicious shape has defamed and
violated the temple which should be held sacred for God.
Life-giving preaching costs the preacher much -- death to self,
crucifixion to the world, the travail of his own soul. Crucified
preaching only can give life.
Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man.