PREACHING-PRIORITY
The
evangelical always gives primacy to preaching. When people cease to be
interested in preaching, they cease to be evangelical. If you put discussions
before preaching you are beginning to deny your evangelicalism. The church
starts with preaching. Revivals, reformations, have always been great
restorations of preaching. To the evangelical, nothing compares with preaching.
Even reading is very secondary to preaching – “truth medicated through
personality,” the impact of a man filled with the Spirit proclaiming the
message of God!
What is an Evangelical? The Banner of Truth
Trust, 1992, p. 60.
The first
mark of a healthy church is expositional preaching. It is not only the first
mark; it is far and away the most important of them all, because if you get
this one right, all of the others should follow… If you get the priority of the
Word established, then you have in place the single most important aspect of
the church’s life, and growing health is virtually assured, because God has
decided to act by His Spirit through His Word… The congregation’s commitment to
the centrality of the Word coming from the front, from the preacher, the one
specially gifted by God and called to that ministry, is the most important
thing you can look for in a church.
Mark Dever
Nine Marks of a Healthy Church,
Crossway, 2000, p. 25, 38.
There is no
office so honorable as that of the preacher. There is
no work so important to the souls of men. It is an office which the Son of God
was not ashamed to take up. It is an office to which He appointed His twelve
apostles. It is an office to which Paul in his old age specially directs
Timothy's attention. He charges him with almost his last breath to "preach
the word." It is the means which God has always been pleased to use above
any other, for the conversion and edification of souls. The brightest days of
the Church have been those when preaching has been honored. The darkest days of
the Church have been those when it has been lightly esteemed. Let us honor the
sacraments and public prayers of the Church, and reverently use them. But let
us beware that we do not place them above preaching.
Commentary, Matthew 4.
Committees
are necessary. Even more important is vision and the ability to move the
congregation toward the goals of the church. But when push comes to shove, it's
the ministry of the Word that gives us our greatest impact. A church can
usually put up with weak administration if it has effective preaching. But
there's nothing quite as pathetic as people coming to church and returning home
without any spiritual food.
Erwin Lutzer
Pastor to Pastor, Kregel,
1998, p. 104.
May I beg you
carefully to judge every preacher, not by his gifts, not by his elocutionary
powers, not by his status in society, not by the respectability of his
congregation, not by the prettiness of his church, but by this – does he preach
the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation? If he does, your sitting under his ministry may prove to you the means
of begetting faith in you. But if he does not, you cannot expect God's blessing.
C.H. Spurgeon
Make him a
minister of the Word! Fling him into his office, tear the office sign from the
door and nail on the sign: Study. Take him off the mailing list,
lock him up with his books and his typewriter and his Bible. Slam him down on
his knees before texts, broken hearts, the flippant lives of a superficial
flock, and the Holy God. Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities
who knows about God. Throw him into the ring to box with God until he learns
how short his arms are. Let him come out only when he is bruised and beaten into
being a blessing. Set a time clock on him that will imprison him with thought
and writing about God for 40 hours a week. Shut his garrulous mouth forever
spouting "remarks" and stop his tongue always tripping lightly over
everything nonessential. Require him to have something to say before he dare
break silence. Bend his knees in the lonesome valley, fire him from the PTA and
cancel his country club membership; burn his eyes with weary study, wreck his
emotional poise with worry for God, and make him exchange his pious stance for
a humble walk before God and man. Make him spend and be spent for the glory of
God. Rip out his telephone, burn up his ecclesiastical success sheets, refuse
his glad hand, and put water in the gas tank of his community buggy. Give him a
Bible and tie him in his pulpit and make him preach the Word of the living God.
Test him, quiz him and examine him; humiliate him for his ignorance of things
divine, and shame him for his glib comprehension of finances, batting averages,
and political in-fighting. Laugh at his frustrated effort to play psychiatrist,
scorn his insipid morality, refuse his supine intelligence, and compel him to
be a minister of the Word. If he dotes on being pleasing, demand that he please
God and not man. Form a choir and raise a chant and haunt him with it night and
day: "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." When at long last, he dares assay
the pulpit, ask him if he has a Word from God; if he does not, then dismiss him
and tell him you can read the morning paper, digest the television
commentaries, think through the day's superficial problems, manage the
community's myriad drives, and bless assorted baked potatoes and green beans ad
infinitum better than he can. Command him not to come back until he has read
and re-read, written and re-written, until he can stand up, worn and forlorn, and
say, "Thus saith the Lord." And when he is
burned out by the flaming Word that coursed through him, when he is consumed at
last by the fiery Grace blazing through him, and when he who was privileged to
translate the truth of God to man is finally translated from earth to heaven,
then bear him away gently, blow a muted trumpet and lay him down softly, place
a two-edged sword on his coffin and raise a tune triumphant, for he was a brave
soldier of the Word and e'er he died he had become a
spokesman for his God.
Floyd Shafer