Tuesday is for Preaching
Preaching: Use Your Head!
…Of whom we have much to say, and hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. —Heb. 5:11-12
Many a preacher would like to challenge the intellectual and thinking capacity of his congregation, but he has been warned about preaching over the people’s heads.
I ask, “What are people’s heads for? God Almighty gave them those heads and I think they ought to use them!”
As a preacher, I deny that any of the truths of God which I teach and expound are over the heads of the people. I deny it!
My preaching may go right through their heads if there is nothing in there to stop it, but I do not preach truths which are too much for them to comprehend. We ought to begin using our heads. Brother, you ought to take that head of yours, oil it and rub the rust off and begin to use it as God has always expected you would. God expects you to understand and have a grasp of His truth because you need it from day to day. —A.W. Tozer, I Call It Heresy!, 145
I am having a hard time trying to comprehend what has happened to sound Bible teaching. What has happened to preaching on Christian discipleship and on our daily deportment in the spiritual life? We are making an accommodation. We are offering a take-it-easy, Pollyanna type of approach that does not seem ever to have heard of total commitment to One who is our Lord and Savior.
I regret that more and more Christian believers are being drawn into a hazy, fuzzy kind of teaching that assures everyone who has ever “accepted Christ” that he or she has nothing more to be concerned about. He is OK and he will always be OK because Christ will be returning before things get too tough. Then all of us will wear our crowns, and God will see that we have cities to rule over!
If that concept is accurate, why did our Lord take the stern and unpopular position that Christian believers should be engaged in watching and praying? —A.W. Tozer, Men Who Met God, 31-32
“In great measure, according to the purity and perfections of the instrument, will be the success. It is not great talents which God blesses, so much as great likeness to Christ. A holy minister is an awesome weapon in the hand of God.” —Robert Murray McCheyne, quoted in The Preacher and Preaching, (edited by Samuel T. Logan, Jr.)
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If you have been trained to preach, if you have the responsibility to preach, if there are some redeemed trophies of God’s grace who depend on you to open the word of life for them—take your duties seriously. Bend your spirit to his will. Rely on His Spirit for enabling. Work your tail off in personal study. Pray your heart into an urgent passion to communicate.
And when you can’t or won’t do these things, don’t stand up to preach.
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