Properly conceived, the goal of preaching is not the salvation of souls, it is the birth of the church. As one scholar put it, “Conversion can only be the means, the goal is the extension of the visible church.” Kari Mueller, ed. Dictionary of Missions: Theology, History, Perspectives, 431. Scholar D. J. Tidball has echoed the same thought, saying, “Paul’s primary interest was not in the conversion of individuals but in the formation of Christian communities.” Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, 885. The Frontier-Revivalists had no concept of the ekklesia.
Frank Viola & George Barna, Pagan Christianity, p. 69.
To preach the gospel in a penetrating way, then, you do not merely want to talk about an abstract concept of forgiveness and acceptance. You want to show listeners Jesus himself and all that he came to do for us. To preach the gospel every time is to preach Christ every time, from every passage. Only if we preach Christ every time can we show how the whole Bible fits together.
But while I was still in the banking business [John Ward] had told me in the simple, straightforward manner of a typical North countryman, “Stuart, preaching isn’t difficult. You study your Bible; then you stand up and tell them what it says. That’s it.” Then almost as an afterthought, he added, “And if you’re any good at it, people will ask you to do it. If they ask you, and you’re free, the answer is yes.”
Evangelism must rather be conceived as a long-term enterprise of patient teaching and instruction, in which God’s servants seek simply to be faithful in delivering the gospel message and applying it to human lives, and leave it to God’s spirit to draw men to faith through this message in his own way and at his own speed.
The Puritans as a body were clear that the preacher’s job is to display Christ’s grace, not his own learning, and to design his sermons so that they bring benefit to others rather than applause to himself. Therefore Puritan preaching revolved around the three Rs of biblical religion – ruin, redemption, regeneration – and clothed these gospel truths in the vivid dress of studied simplicity.
Of all I would wish to say this is the sum; my brethren, preach Christ, always and evermore. He is the whole gospel. His person, offices and work must be our one great, all-comprehending theme. The world needs still to be told of its Saviour, and of the way to reach Him.
John Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 153, quoting Charles Spurgeon
God’s message within us should also be like burning fire or fermenting wine. The pressure begins to build up inside us, until we feel we can contain it no longer. It is then that we are ready to preach. The whole process of sermon preparation, from beginning to end, was admirably summed up by the American Black preacher who said, ‘First, I reads myself full, next I thinks myself clear, next I prays myself hot, and then I lets go.’
With his wife’s support, Omar grabs his well-worn Bible, hops in an autorickshaw and travels to visit new villages. Whatever happens – whether his case is dismissed, he spends the rest of his life in prison, or he faces death – Omar said he will continue to share with Muslims the eternal hope that he has in Christ.
“Our life is temporary here,” he said. “I have a small amount of time to preach the gospel. I don’t believe that I will stop.”
The Voice of the Martyrs, Vol. 57 No 2., February 2023, p. 7.
In the end, preaching has two basic objects in view: the Word and the human listener. It is not enough to just harvest the wheat; it must be prepared in some edible form or it can’t nourish and delight. Sound preaching arises out of two loves—love of the Word of God and love of people—and from them both a desire to show people God’s glorious grace.
I hardly know, however, where Gibbie blundered, except it was in failing to recognize the animals before whom he ought not to cast his pearls—in taking it for granted that, because his guardian was a minister, and his wife a minister’s wife, they must therefore be the disciples of the Jewish carpenter, the eternal Son of the Father of us all. Had he had more of the wisdom of the serpent, he would not have carried them the New Testament as an ending of strife, the words of the Lord as an enlightening law; he would perhaps have known that to try too hard to make people good, is one way to make them worse; that the only way to make them good is to be good—remembering well the beam and the mote; that the time for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never departs.
George MacDonald, The Day Boy and the Night Girl. Kindle Edition.
Phillips Brooks said that “preaching is truth mediated by personality.” Surely one can substitute teaching for preaching. It’s what makes teaching and preaching and writing an activity of a human being instead of a machine.
Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet, pages 155-156.
They who speak against the Son of Man oppose mere distortions and mistakes of him, having never beheld, neither being now capable of beholding, him; but those who have transmitted to them these false impressions, those, namely, who preach him without being themselves devoted to him, and those who preach him having derived their notions of him from other sources than himself, have to bear the blame that they have such excuses for not seeking to know him. He submits to be mis-preached, as he submitted to be lied against while visibly walking the world, but his truth will appear at length to all: until then until he is known as he is, our salvation tarrieth.
George MacDonald, The Day Boy and the Night Girl. Kindle Edition.
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