Have you ever heard one Christian reminding another Christian to preach only what he has experienced? Or one preacher advising another preacher, “Don’t preach above your experience!”
It will be a sorry day for Christianity and our world when a Christian layman or clergyman tries to preach no higher than the level of his own experience. True, one must have had a personal encounter with God in Christ, and know that whereas once his back was to God, now he is facing Him. He must know that though once he was outside in the cold without Him, now he is inside the warm shelter of His love. Once in, we are told to go on to perfection, to an ever deeper experience in the grace of God, and communicate to others our experience.
As laity and clergy, we are called to proclaim not only our own experience but the message of God in its entirety. Shame on us for not having a higher experience; but more shame will come to us and to those who hear us if we preach only our experience, and not the highest to which we must heartily and everlastingly aspire! “Preach only what you’ve experienced!” To do that we shall have to omit much of the highest and best in the Bible. For who but the most presumptuous person could claim to have attained the complete surrender God demands in Galatians 2:20—“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me”? Or who has ever found all God desires for him as expressed in Jesus’ words: “If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps, he must give up all right to himself, carry his cross every day and keep close behind me. For the man who wants to save his life will lose it, but the man who loses his life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:23, 24, Phillips)?
“Preach only what you’ve experienced!” Then the Sermon on the Mount would never have been proclaimed after Christ, for who among us has ever experienced all God is calling us to in this message? In all the centuries past, if Christians had proclaimed only what they had personally experienced, much of the Bible would never have been proclaimed to the local communities. For within the local group, there is always some experience missing which needs to be supplied by other members of the Church elsewhere. If Christians were to herald only what they had personally experienced, then probably no one but Paul would have preached on some of the greatest themes in Christian experience. If the prophets and apostles had proclaimed only what they had experienced, we would have only half the Bible, with no prophetic word, and with whole passages and chapters and possibly even whole books of eschatology missing.
To Timothy, who was young and somewhat inexperienced, Paul wrote, “Preach the Word.” Paul himself proclaimed “the whole counsel of God,” not only his experience. What a deadening, provincial, perfunctory Gospel would be proclaimed if a man preached only what he experienced, if he kept silent about what prophets and apostles and other Christians experienced and recorded, if he said nothing about what God revealed and man may experience in the future.
As Christians, we must aspire, “go on to perfection,” reach for the highest God has for us in Christ Jesus. To do this, we must hear and preach not only what is ours in experience, but the whole message of God—the whole of his Word.
To preach only what one has experienced is to assume that all who listen are on the same level with us or have not yet reached our level. Some who listen, however, may have reached a higher level of experience than ours. To proclaim only what one has experienced would be to ignore these worthy persons or continually to preach below their experience, and never give them anything to which they could aspire. Both the herald and those who listen must reach for higher things. This can be done only through proclaiming a higher experience than that which both preacher and hearer have attained. Paul wrote to Timothy, “Preach the Word.… Prove, correct, encourage,” because he knew that the proclamation of the Word leads to more godly living on the part of those who hear it.
Richard G. Dunwoody, pastor of the Grace Evangelical United Brethren Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is a graduate of Lebanon Valley College (B.A.) and of the Temple University School of Theology (S.T.B.).
