"...sensed that God was saying to him, “Preach on, great preacher, without me.”

“Preach on, great preacher, without me.”

The task of true biblical preaching is not essentially intellectual or psychological or rhetorical; it is essentially spiritual. I have followed the preaching ministry of more men than I can count and have discovered that many fall into a great trap. I was truly blessed to discover that my concerns are shared with many others and have been so wonderfully articulated in this excerpt from "What is Biblical Preaching" by Eric J. Alexander, P&R, 2008:

"Left to ourselves, we may do many things with a congregation. We may move them emotionally. We may attract them to ourselves personally, producing great loyalty. We may persuade them intellectually. We may educate them in a broad spectrum of Christian truth. But the one thing we can never do, left to ourselves, is to regenerate them spiritually and change them into the image of Jesus Christ, to bear his moral glory in their character. While that is the great calling of the church of Christ, it is essentially God’s work and not ours.

So it is possible to be homiletically brilliant, verbally fluent, theologically profound, biblically accurate and orthodox, and spiritually useless. That frightens me. I hope it frightens you, too. I think it is of this that Paul is speaking when he says, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow” (I Cor. 3:6-7). It is very possible for us to be deeply concerned about homiletical ability and fluency and theological profundity and biblical orthodoxy, but to know nothing of the life – giving power of God with the burning anointing of the Holy Spirit upon our ministry. Campbell Morgan (Lloyd-Jones’s predecessor at the Westminster Chapel) divulged that at one crucial stage in his ministry he was in precisely this position, and sensed that God was saying to him, “Preach on, great preacher, without me.” Alan Redpath used to say that the most penetrating question you could ask about any church situation was, “What is happening in this place that cannot be explained in merely human terms?”

So there is a world of difference between true biblical preaching and an academic lecture or a rhetorical performance. We are utterly dependent on the grace and power of the Holy Spirit. Thank God, he uses the weak things of this world to confound the mighty, and the things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are (1 Cor. 1 :2,8). This is why it is absolutely essential to marry prayer to the ministry of the Word. In our ministries prayer is not supplemental; it is fundamental. Of course we subscribe to the principal that “this work is God’s work, not ours.” We subscribe to that because we are biblical Evangelicals, but the logical corollary of that statement is that prayer is a fundamental issue in the ministry of the Word, as in every part of our labor, and not, as we tend to make it, a supplemental matter."

The Power of Preaching

Understanding the source of the power

In Preaching and Preachers, Martyn Lloyd-Jones also speaks of what he calls "the romance of preaching." In this he uses a definition of the word "romance" that is not often employed today, but is still in the dictionary. He refers by that term to the exciting and mysterious quality of preaching, the unpredictability of it. The preacher should never think he knows what is going to happen when he enters the pulpit, he says. He never knows how the act of preaching and the content of the message will affect the preacher himself, or affect his hearers. And, the preacher should never attempt to control things to the extent that preaching becomes a sterile and clinical exercise. The preacher never knows exactly who is listening, or how they are listening. He never knows how God may use even just one particular phrase out of an entire sermon to meet a particular heart's need.

During his decades of ministry, Martyn Lloyd-Jones typically met privately for counseling with a thousand or more individuals each year. But he said that he firmly believed that God the Holy Spirit could do more in the hearts and lives of his congregation through the preaching of the Word in one service, than he could in all of those counseling sessions in an entire year.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones concludes the book with a chapter titled "'Demonstration of the Spirit and of the Power". Here he calls attention once again to "the greatest essential in connection with preaching, and that is the unction and the anointing of the Holy Spirit."

He uses the illustration of Elijah at Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18). The right way to look at the unction of the Spirit, he says, "is to think of it as that which comes upon the preparation...We are told that Elijah built an altar, then cut wood and put it upon the altar, and that then he killed a bullock and cut it in pieces and put the pieces upon the wood. Then, having done all that, he prayed for the fire to descend; and the fire fell. That is the order."

He goes on: "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." He concludes with this exhortation to the preacher and the congregation:

What then are we to do about this? There is only one obvious conclusion. Seek Him! Seek Him! What can we do without Him?...But go beyond seeking Him; expect Him...Are you expecting [this week's preaching] to be the turning point in someone's life? Are you expecting anyone to have a climactic experience? That is what preaching is meant to do. That is what you find in the Bible and in the subsequent history of the church. Seek this power, expect this power, yearn for this power; and when the power comes, yield to Him. Do not resist. Forget all about your sermon if necessary. Let Him loose you, let Him manifest His power in you and through you...He is still able to do "exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think."

 

References:

The material in this article is escerpts from:  Preaching and Preachers (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1971),  D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years (Banner of Truth, 1982).

From where does your refreshment come?

"The tragedy is that many of us are living a desperate Christian life. Sunday comes and we get some strength, and then we lose some on Monday; a good deal is gone by Tuesday and we wonder whether we have anything left. On Wednesday it has all gone and then we exist. Or perhaps refreshment comes in some other way, some meeting we attend, some friends we meet.

Now that is the old order of things, that is not the new.  He puts a well within us. We are not always drawing from somewhere outside.  The well, the spring, goes on springing up from within into everlasting life."

Lloyd-Jones

Speaking the Truth in Love

I remember once reading a phrase in an article written by a man about a meeting in which he had listened to two speakers. It was a political, not a religious meeting, but what he said about those two speakers came to me as a conviction from the Holy Spirit. He said that, as he listened to the two men, he felt that this was the main difference between them: the first had spoken brilliantly as an advocate; the second had spoken as a witness. And I asked myself, which am I? Am I an advocate of these things or am I a witness? You can be an advocate of Christianity without being a Christian

You can be an advocate of these things without experiencing them. If you have intelligence, if you have been rightly trained, you can understand the Scriptures in a sense, and you can lay them out before others. You can present all the arguments, you can put the case for a kind of Christian philosophy. And it may sound wonderful. But you may be standing outside the true experience of it the whole time. You may be talking about something which you do not really know, about Someone you have never met. You are an advocate, perhaps even a brilliant advocate. But note what the Lord said to the apostles: ‘Ye shall be my witnesses.’

Let us go on and seek knowledge and equip ourselves as perfectly as possible. But, in the name of God, let us not stop at that. Let us realize that even that, without the authority and the power of the Spirit, is of no value at all. ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love (a product of the work of the Spirit), I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal’

Let us remind ourselves that the God who in the past has come suddenly and unexpectedly upon the dying Church and has raised her to a new period of life and victory can do the same still, that His arm is not shortened, nor His power in any sense diminished. Let us wait upon Him, let us plead with Him, let us learn to agonize in prayer and let our one prayer be:

Revive Thy work, O Lord,
Thy mighty arm make bare;
Speak with the voice that wakes the dead.
And make Thy people hear.

‘O Lord, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid: O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy’ (Habakkuk iii. 2).

Lloyd-Jones - The Authority of the Holy Spirit