PREACHING-HOLY SPIRIT
Ultimately,
of course, the effectiveness of preaching is the work of the Spirit. The most
expertly crafted and powerfully delivered sermon imaginable will accomplish
nothing if He does not act to persuade and enable the hearer to respond to the
truth. But at the same time, we must also remember that the Spirit does not act
in a vacuum. Ordinarily, He uses means, and preaching which employs all the rhetorical
devices within the preacher’s ability is one of those
means.
Practical Wisdom for Pastors, Crossway Books,
2001, p. 244. Used by Permission.
There must be
a dread about the minister; one which works in such a way as to render him
wholly dependent upon the Spirit of God to communicate the Word of God through
him by means of his message. There must be a complete reliance on God and
an utter destitute of self, or the pulpit is nothing more than an exercise in
futility. If a preacher does not see this, then he is no preacher. If a
preacher does not live this, he is not called to preach. Butterflies
before preaching a sermon is not a warrant for understanding the weightiness of
the task at hand. You can get butterflies before you speak at a bar-b-que. There must be a day-to-day cry from the closet of
the preacher to the throne room of heaven, a besieging of heaven with a holy
fervor that this man knows he is unable to bring any good to the people lest
God is with him.
C. Matthew McMahon
The Pastor and the Pulpit, www.apuritansmind.com.
Let’s never
be intimidated or depressed by our ordinariness and inadequacy and unimpressiveness. Most of us are quite ordinary. All of us
can improve our preaching, and we will. But the sacred given is the message of
the cross, which the Holy Spirit empowers in men of the cross. Let’s not disempower it. Let’s trust God’s strategy. God Himself
entered into His own strategy through an egoless nobody named Jesus Christ,
whom this brilliant world crucified. That Christ is sending us out to preach His
message by His power. We are fully equipped in every essential with the
testimony of God, the message of Christ crucified, and the power of the Holy
Spirit. Will you decide to stake your whole ministry there?
Raymond
C. Ortlund Jr.
Pastoral Pensées: Power in Preaching: Decide (1
Corinthians 2:1-5), Themelios, April 2009. Used by
Permission of Gospel Coalition.
Why
the Holy Spirit should be restricted so that He can only be at work at the
moment a sermon is delivered and not in the thoughtful and prayerful
preparation beforehand, I don’t know. The same mistake was made by an actual
preacher who used to prepare the first half of his sermons and then freewheel
the second half, wishing to “depend on the Holy Spirit for inspiration.” One
astute lady listening to him one day was perplexed by the change that took
place halfway through the sermon. Afterwards she asked the preacher what
happened. So he explained his method to which she replied, “That is strange.
You are a better preacher than the Holy Spirit!”
Melvin Tinker
Wisdom to Live By, Christian Focus Publications, 1998, p.
38-39.
Used by Permission.
Oh,
without prayer what are the church’s agencies, but the stretching out of a dead
man’s arm, or the lifting up of the lid of a blind man’s eye? Only when the
Holy Spirit comes is there any life and force and power.
C.H. Spurgeon
8.465.
The power
that is in the Gospel does not lie in the eloquence of the preacher, otherwise
men would be the converters of souls, nor does it lie in the preacher's
learning, otherwise it would consist in the wisdom of men. We might preach
until our tongues rotted, till we would exhaust our lungs and die, but never a
soul would be converted unless the Holy Spirit be with the Word of God to give
it the power to convert the soul.
C.H. Spurgeon
Unless the
Holy Ghost blesses the Word, we who preach the gospel are of all men most
miserable, for we have attempted a task that is impossible. We have entered on
a sphere where nothing but the supernatural will ever avail. If the Holy Spirit
does not renew the hearts of our hearers, we cannot do it. If the Holy Ghost
does not regenerate them, we cannot. If he does not send the truth home into
their souls, we might as well speak into the ear of a corpse.
C.H. Spurgeon
We preach and
pray, and you hear; but there is no motion Christ-ward until the Spirit of God
blows upon them.
John Flavel
A Puritan Golden Treasury,
compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 142.
Head
knowledge is not evil in and of itself.
Most of our Reformed and Puritan forefathers were highly educated. The
Reformers never tired of stressing the value of Christian education. But this
education must be empowered by the Holy Spirit and applied to the heart. Head
knowledge is insufficient without the Spirit’s application to the inward man.
Joel R. Beeke
Feed My Sheep, ed. Don Kistler,
Soli Deo Gloria Ministries, 2002, p. 110.
We [must]
give the Spirit of God opportunity to work in their lives to enable them to
digest biblical truth. “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion
still,” but those members taught by the Spirit of God will indeed be changed.
Curtis C. Thomas
Practical Wisdom for Pastors, Crossway Books,
2001, p. 137. Used by Permission.
There is a
very real danger of our putting our faith in our sermon rather than in the
Spirit. Our faith should not be in the sermon, it should be in the Holy Spirit
Himself.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Preaching and Preachers, Zondervan, 1972, p.
230.
We all tend
to go to extremes; some rely only on their own preparation and look for nothing
more; others, as I say, tend to despise preparation and trust to the unction,
the anointing and the inspiration of the Spirit alone. But there must be no
“either/or” here; it is always “both/and.” These two things must go together.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Preaching and Preachers, Zondervan, 1972, p.
305.
You can have
knowledge, and you can be meticulous in your preparation; but without the unction of the Holy Spirit you will have no power, and your
preaching will not be effective.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Preaching and Preachers, Zondervan, 1972, p.
319.
[The Holy
Spirit brings] clarity of thought, clarity of speech, ease of utterance, a
great sense of authority and confidence as you are preaching, an awareness of a
power not your own thrilling through the whole of your being, and an
indescribable sense of joy. You are a man “possessed,” you are taken hold of,
and taken up. I like to put it like this – and I know of nothing on earth that
is comparable to this feeling – that when this happens you have a feeling that
you are not actually doing the preaching, you are looking on. You are looking
on at yourself in amazement as this is happening. It is not your effort; you
are just the instrument, the channel, the vehicle: and the Spirit is using you,
and you are looking on in great enjoyment and astonishment. There is nothing
that is in any way comparable to this.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Preaching and Preachers, Zondervan, 1972, p.
324.
What about
the people [when the Spirit is moving a preacher]? They sense it at once; they
can tell the difference immediately. They are gripped, they become serious,
they are convicted, they are moved, they are humbled.
Some are convicted of sin, others are lifted up to the heavens, anything may happen to any one of them. They know at once
that something quite unusual and exceptional is happening. As a result they
begin to delight in the things of God and they want more and more teaching.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Preaching and Preachers, Zondervan, 1972, p.
324-325.
We may preach with great eloquence, we may have unanswerable arguments, but if
we are preaching to the lost, we must remember that they are people whose minds
have been blinded by the god of this age. Our most eloquent appeals will
make no impact unless a Sovereign God causes His light to dawn upon their
hearts. Our approach in preaching should not be to say merely that we are
offering something beneficial that you our hearer can and should take up at any
time. We have a more disquieting message. We are to tell the lost,
"You are slaves. You are blind. You cannot even understand what
we are saying unless God in His mercy enables you." The Lord must
illumine. Our preaching can succeed only “in demonstration of the Spirit and of
power” (1 Cor. 2:4). That must be the starting point for preaching the
Lord God will honor.
Alwyn York
The Holy Spirit's Illumination of Scripture. Used by
Permission from www.mountainretreatorg.net.
Jonathan
Edwards's own analysis of the revivals: the Word is the occasion for awakening,
and a necessary one, but the Spirit of God does the work, and he “blows where
he wills.” His passing could be seen in lasting changes: People made humble,
faithful, prayerful, holy. Churches made earnest in
worship and hungry for the Word. Towns where, to quote
Charles Simeon, a century later, “goodness” became “fashionable.”
Stephen R. Holmes
A Mind on Fire, Christian History, Issue 77,
p. 13.
The purpose
of reading, explaining and applying a portion of Scripture is to obey the
command to “preach the Word.” In no
other way may we expect to experience the presence and power of the Holy Spirit
in our preaching. He did not spend
thousands of years producing the Old and New Testaments…only to ignore it! What He “moved” men to write He now motivates
us to preach. He has not promised to
bless our word; that promise extends only to His own (Isa. 55:10, 11).
Jay Adams
Preaching with a Purpose, Zondervan,
1982, p. 19.
You must not
exhort your congregation to do whatever the Bible requires of them as though
they could fulfill those requirements on their own, but only as a consequence
of the saving power of the cross and the indwelling, sanctifying power and
presence of Christ in the Person of the Holy Spirit
Jay Adams
Preaching with a Purpose, Zondervan,
1982, p. 147.
The anointing of the Holy Spirit helps me greatly when I
preach. I would never attempt to teach the truth of God by my own power.
George
Muller
The Autobiography of George Muller, 1984, p.
35. All quotations taken from books published by Whitaker House are used with
permission of the publisher. Whitaker House books are available at Christian
bookstores everywhere.
In all our
preaching we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit. Like frail sailing crafts with
their sails, we are helpless without the wind of the Spirit. No matter how well
we have prepared and equipped ourselves, our words fall to the ground apart
from the gracious unction that the Lord Jesus, the Head of the church, gives by
the Spirit.
Derek Prime and Alistair Begg
On Being a Pastor, Moody Press, 2004, p.
146-147.
The hidden
factor in every encouragement we give, or exhortation, or difficult piece of
advice or correction, is that God the Holy Spirit indwells the believer to back
it up, and to apply it with a force we do not possess. Our confidence that
people will react and respond in the right way is not our confidence in human
nature but our confidence regarding God’s working in them.
Derek Prime and Alistair Begg
On Being a Pastor, Moody Press, 2004, p. 169.
Accuracy, not
to speak of integrity, demands that we develop every possible skill to keep us
from declaring in the name of God what the Holy Spirit never intended to
convey.
Haddon W. Robinson
Biblical Preaching, Baker, 1980, p. 59.