Surmounting the Silent Pulpit
A father asked his small boy what he had heard in church that day.
“Oh, I don’t know exactly,” the boy replied. “It was from Daniel and had something to do with ‘Your shack, my shack, and a bungalow.’”
When trying to get a definition of preaching from some adults, we might not do much better. A survey of 14 professors of homiletics turned up a dozen definitions. Phillips Brooks’ “communication of truth by man to man” is probably the best known. Arthur Hoyt says that preaching is “the power of personal testimony, the Christ speaking through His messenger.”
Martin Lloyd-Jones states unequivocally, “Any true definition of preaching must say that man is there to deliver the message of God.” Charles Koller, however, may be closer to the fundamental definition when he says, “All true preaching rests upon the basic affirmation, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’” Say what we will, the “Thus-saith-the-Lord” kind of preaching is what people want and need.
The owner of a manufacturing plant told me some years ago that he had changed his church affiliation. “I went to church,” he said, “to hear the Word of God; but all the pastor talked about was Vietnam.” Notwithstanding the many addresses by Christian ministers on social, moral, and political issues, that pastor had failed to construct his theme from Scripture.
All of what needs to be said from the pulpit can indeed by drawn from the Scriptures. Human ideas and concepts that arise outside of Scripture are barren and often counter-productive. Zedekiah was looking for divine counsel when he asked Jeremiah, “Is there a word from the Lord?” Man has not fundamentally changed since Zedekiah’s day. He is still pursuing that divine counsel. The sorrowful factor is that our pulpits are often silent on “Thus saith the Lord” and those fundamental issues addressed by Holy Writ.
Why are the pulpits silent? Ignorance silences many pulpits. By definition, “ignorance” is not stupidity; it is failing to notice (wittingly or unwittingly) what ranks as first in importance. Some very articulate pulpiteers would appear to have ignored the study whereby one discovers God’s counsel. In some instances, the demands of congregations produce this default. Thus, preachers more often accomplish (albeit, quite well) the work the Scriptures assign to deacons. Subsequently, less time is devoted to the minister’s primary functions of prayer, study, and the public declaration of “Thus saith the Lord.”
Insecurity silences other pulpits. A plethora of financial pressures plague most of the Lord’s ministers. The average layman would be shocked to know how many demands are made upon his preacher’s money, to say nothing of claims upon his time. Congregational failure to regard the laborer as “worth of his hire” only deepens the minister’s dilemma. Is the man who instructs his congregation to “trust in the Lord for every need” to abandon that admonition and appeal instead to people to increase his salary?
What appears more catastrophic still is the minister’s spiritual impression of the need to address adverse conditions and attitudes that characterize those very persons upon whose giving his material support depends.
Insecurity, though indefensible under such circumstances, often occasions pulpit-defaults, and instead of receiving the Lord’s message through His minister, we learn “how much God loves all mankind.”
Is there any solution for the pulpit to be recovered for the salient messages of the Lord? Indeed there is! Expository preaching is the undeniable key to a “Thus-saith-the-Lord” ministry. Exposition occurs by first determining the Lord’s message from His word and then proclaiming it with application to the needs of the congregation.
A pastor’s exposition is best achieved through a book-by-book, verse-by-verse proclamation. Utilization of this method not only contains great value for preacher and people alike, but the method protects the preacher from the unwholesome accusation that he selects passages “with a focus upon particular parishioners.” As sacrifice is central to the Christian faith, so it is to the minister who accepts the challenge of expository preaching.
Excellence in exposition, as in all things, demands the discipline of time. Yet, for the man called of God to equip the saints, the discipline required for proclaiming “Thus-saith-the-Lord!” is hardly sacrifice, especially when he realizes the peculiar, spiritual results that accrue to believers through his public ministration of God’s Holy Word.
“Preach the Word” is more than a capricious apostolicism. It inculcates the power of God that permeates the crevices of the decadent, human heart and produces a genuinely “new creature.” The Lord alone forges new creatures, but in His grace He allows us the factor of human participation.
Gene L. Jeffries, Th.D.
