A Wise German Preacher

Of late my schedule has been erratic, my life hectic and my writing sporadic. Ergo, this repost from one year ago today.

So you preach a sermon or teach a lesson and nobody blinks. It's a weird feeling - of amazement, astonishment, disappointment and frustration. Delivering a timely, Biblical, powerful message and having little or no response from the hearers is sort of like standing near the check out lines at Wal Mart with a sack full of 20 dollar bills, offering them to anyone who wanted one (or five, or six), and having people ignore you. It doesn't make sense, and it can really mess with the mind of the preacher!

Well, having experienced this phenomenon several times through the years, I've come to realize that as one fulfilling the teacher/preacher role, response isn't up to me, although it would be easier if that were my only responsibility. I mean, I could preach pure fluffy nonsense and then whip people into an emotional frenzy and feel like they responded to the message. Speakers - even preachers - do that all the time.

As it turns out, I have an even tougher job: to rightly divide the Word of truth, and to proclaim it as if I were speaking the very oracles of God. Oh, and don't forget that little word of encouragement from James 3:1.

All of this is a bit reminiscent of John MacArthur's Theology of Sleep. It's really a great piece of wisdom to grasp. While reading a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer lately, it seems he had learned it early on as a pastor and preacher:

"He took the idea of preaching the Word of God extremely seriously and wouldn't have dared to speak his mere opinions from the pulpit. He also knew that a word might be delivered that had come straight from heaven and be rejected, just as the messages of the Old Testament prophets had been rejected and just as Jesus had been rejected. The prophet's role was simply and obediently to speak what God wished to say. Whether or not the message was received was between God and His people. And yet to preach such a burning message, and to know that it was God's Word for the faithful, who rejected it, was painful. But this was the pain of the prophetic office, and to be chosen by God as his prophet always meant, in part, that the prophet would share in God's sufferings."