Real Preachers of Genius

I saw this video today and thought it was pretty funny:



I found it humorous, but at the same time I was reminded of the words of the Apostle Paul who wrote to his young protegé Timothy, "...the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions," (2 Timothy 4:3). I assume that this was the case in the first century and I know that this is the case today.

Many churches forsake the preaching of the Gospel of Christ's life, death and resurrection on behalf of sinners, instead opting for sermons that are little more than self-help seminars wrapped up in Christian trappings. Another thing we often see is what I would term a trivialization of worship, as it often seems to be more about entertainment than about worship.

Now I'm not saying that "traditional" worship is necessarily better than "contemporary" worship. I've been to "contemporary" churches where the worship was indeed very worshipful, and I've been to "traditional" churches where quite frankly it was not. Neither am I saying that a preacher needs to wear a robe and ascend into a massive pulpit in order to truly preach. In fact, I applaud what I hope (and honestly believe) is an effort to reach people "where they are" and "in a way they can understand." But there is a caution that must be noted. We must not forget that the way in which we say something says almost as much about what we are trying to communicate as the actual words we use. As Marshall McLuhan put it, "The medium is the message."

The following words from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Preachers and Preaching, pp. 85-86) do well to underline these thoughts:

The preacher must be a serious man; he must never give the impression that preaching is something light or superficial or trivial…What is happening is that he is speaking to them from God, he is speaking to them about God, he is speaking about their condition, the state of their souls. He is telling them that they are, by nature, under the wrath of God – 'the children of wrath even as others' – that the character of the life they’re living is offensive to God and under the judgment of God, and warning them of the dread eternal possibility that lies ahead of them. In any case the preacher, of all men, should realize the fleeting nature of life in this world. The men of the world are so immersed in its business and affairs, its pleasures and all is vain show, that the one thing they never stop to consider is the fleeting character of life. All this means that the preacher should create and convey the impression of the seriousness of what is happening the moment he even appears in the pulpit. You remember the famous lines of Richard Baxter:

I preached as never sure to preach again,
And as a dying man to dying men.

I do not think that can be bettered. You remember what was said of the saintly Robert Murray McCheyne of Scotland in the last century. It is said that when he appeared in the pulpit, even before he had uttered a single word, people would begin to weep silently. Why? Because of this very element of seriousness. The very sight of the man gave the impression that he had come from the presence of God and that he was to deliver a message from God to them. That is what had such an effect upon the people even before he had opened his mouth. We forget this at our peril, and at great cost to our listener.