Here's another article I read recently and had to post. So much truth here I wonder why more churches don't embrace this? Are we afraid?
Preach the authority of God’s Word without apology.
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.Romans 1:16Read that right. The authority is in God’s Word—not the preacher. We don’t preach with authority, we preach the authority of God’s Word. And we do it without apology. Don’t spend any time thinking about what your people want to hear; think instead about what God wants said. We’ve built our whole church on the principle that if we’re saying the things that God wants said, God will fill the seats with folks to hear it. How obvious does that seem? If God looks down on the northwest suburbs of Chicago and sees our church, I hope He chooses to “get some more people over there—they want to hear My Word and they’re fired up about My Son.”
You might think, “Well, that’s easy for you to say since you’ve got a big church.” We’ve held to the priority of preaching the authority of God’s Word without apology when we had 100 people. I can still remember the stinging comments from visitors who said at the door or when I’d call them on the phone that week, “We’re never coming back to your church; we don’t want anyone to talk to us like that.”
When you apply this principle consistently over time, you’ll endure a crucible of testing and proving how committed you are to God’s Word. You’ll be systematically preaching through some passage and the week that you’re coming down hard on the topic of repentance, your board chairman tells you that his unsaved aunt is coming to church with them for the first time in twenty years. As you’re preaching you notice her sitting in the front row looking like a deer caught in your headlights. Should I have changed the topic to accommodate what I know would be easier for her to hear? No—I trust God. I preach what His Word says and give up control over topics and timing.
You can expect that people will get up and leave while you are preaching. You’ll read their faces or their lips, “Get your things Martha, we’re out of here.” Sometimes a group will leave together and empty a long row. I never think, “Well, they probably all had to go to the bathroom.” No, people hit the crash bar on the back door in a different way when they’re not coming back. As hard as that is to take, remind yourself that if you don’t have people walking away from your ministry saying “This is a hard saying, who can accept it?” (John 6:60), then you don’t have a ministry like Jesus had.
In God’s goodness and favor, there will be frequent occasions when a sermon that’s been on the schedule for months will meet the exact need of the moment. Several months ago, our church leadership was in a furnace of trials: in the span of one month, our board chairman’s son was diagnosed with cancer, another board member’s wife found out she also had cancer—for the third time. A third leader’s family lost their young adult son in a sudden, tragic, drowning accident and our son broke his neck in three places in a near fatal car crash. The sermon topic that weekend, planned months before, was “Reality Check about Suffering”, just the next installment in a verse by verse study of 1 Peter. God is in control of topics and timing. I’ve had that commitment tested and proven countless times over the years.
James MacDonald
Click here to view the article from its original site.
Click here to view the article from its original site.
