It was years ago, early in my preaching ministry. I made a broad gesture to the right, and every eye swung that direction. Wow! I thought to myself. I can do that to people! That marked the beginning of my acquaintance with the unique temptations of preaching.
Performing While You Preach
The first and greatest temptation is the one I experienced that day—to be a performer in the pulpit. In one sense, that’s exactly what you must do when you preach—perform. Anyone who dares get up in front of a group of people and take twenty-five minutes of their time to deliver a monologue must be something of a ham. If you loathe that kind of exercise, chances are you will not be effective as a preacher.
But there’s the catch. To preach well, you must constantly open yourself up to the deadliest temptation of the preacher: to put on a performance that will draw the applause and appreciation of the audience. There is no problem in all this if the audience, for you, is God. But unfortunately, God is not usually easy to see. What we do see is the crowd of people sitting in the pews. They are very easy to see, and too often the ones whose approval we seek.
Jesus laid his finger on this temptation in the sixth Beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” A pure heart is one with unmixed motives. Soren Kierkegaard says a pure heart wills one thing—to do the will of God, seeking his approval. That’s why Jesus looked at the Pharisees, who did their good works to be thought well of by others, and said, “They have their reward.” They were getting just what they were looking for: human approval.
Look for God, and you will see him. Look for people, and you will see them.
John Bunyan once preached an especially powerful sermon. The first person he spoke to afterward told him so. He said, “Yes, I know. The Devil told me that as I walked away from the pulpit.” I cannot count the number of times I have stood outside the door of the sanctuary after I have preached, ravenous for the praise of my congregation. I had worked hard the previous week to be well prepared. I gave the delivery every bit of energy and concentration I could muster. In many ways I brought to the pulpit all the intensity I would bring to racquetball. Now I am even drenched in perspiration underneath my robe. I want to know, did I win?
In moments of clarity, I know only God can make that judgment and hand out the trophy. But it seems that things are rarely very clear to me after I have preached. Bruce Thielemann put it accurately when he wrote, “Preaching is the most public of ministries and, therefore, the most conspicuous in its failure and the most subject to the temptation of hypocrisy.”
Preaching the Words of God
A second temptation for the preacher is to hear the Word of God only as something to be preached. The pressure to produce a sermon, combined with the fact that sermons are to be preached out of the Bible, can render impossible a simple reading of the Bible for its own sake, or for your own sake. Every time I pick up the Bible and begin to get some insight into a particular passage, I immediately start thinking of how I can preach it to my congregation. I almost always bypass its relevance to myself. That is deadly. Paul the apostle alluded to his struggle with this temptation when he expressed his concern that “after preaching to others I myself will not be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:27).
The Book of James uses the metaphor of a mirror to describe the Word of God. The purpose of a mirror is to reveal an image: yourself. In his brilliant essay “For Self-Examination,” Kierkegaard described how people will examine the mirror, measure the mirror, list its properties, write dissertations on the uses of a mirror; in short, do everything and anything but look at the person the mirror would reveal! So it is with preachers who hear God’s Word only as something to preach to someone else.
Preaching that has integrity comes from men and women who have wrestled personally with what they are proclaiming publicly. I fall prey to this temptation so easily that I must discipline myself to study passages devotionally before I attempt to sermonize on them. And I must do this months in advance of the actual preaching.
Turning Stones into Bread
A third temptation for the preacher is to try to turn stones into bread, to give people what they want instead of what they need. Because the preacher is, in one sense, a performer, there is always present in his psyche the desire to be liked and appreciated by those he preaches to. That desire can become so strong that he becomes as sensitive as a seismograph to the audience’s tastes. It is at this point that the preacher can turn into a propagandist.
All propagandists really do is convince you that the thing you want will be furthered by their products, their candidates, or their messages. Whenever the gospel is portrayed as something that will help people get what they want, uncritical of what they want, it is made an instrument of propaganda. “The Bible has to define your needs before it meets them,” says James Daane. “It has to tell you what you need—the nature of your hurts, pains, aches. In other words, the Bible has got to tell you what sin is, because you don’t know.”
A variety of this temptation to give people what they want is the overuse of stories and illustrations. Everyone who preaches knows how effectively a good story or joke gets people’s attention. The problem with stories is that they lend themselves so readily to being interpreted any way the hearer wants. A congregation of widely divergent points of view can hear a sermon filled with a lot of entertaining stories, and everyone will leave the sanctuary feeling edified. The pastor really told it “like it is.” Of course, if everybody’s point was made, no point was made. But the pastor came off sounding good to everyone.
Prophet and Priest
A fourth temptation for the preacher is the opposite of the one just outlined. It is the temptation to fancy oneself something of a prophet to the people, and to do so at the expense of also being their priest. A prophet, as we all learned in school, is one who stands before the people on behalf of God. A priest is one who stands before God on behalf of the people. Prophets are mouthpieces. Priests are intercessors. Prophets confront the people with God’s truth and their lies. Priests hold up the people before God’s grace.
The temptation of being a prophet at the expense of being a priest is that you can blast away at your people from a position of splendid isolation. You don’t have to go through the agony of caring for the ones you wound with the truth. You can sit in your study, do your exegesis, and give them the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But the truth you give might bludgeon someone without leading on to healing.
John tells us that Jesus came with grace and truth. Among other things, that means the Word became flesh and walked among us. It was no disembodied truth, but it came incarnate in one who shared our flesh and walked in our shoes. As the writer to the Hebrews put it, Jesus was a high priest who was not “unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are …” (4:15).
A preacher simply does not have the right to blast away at his people with the truth—especially if it is the kind of truth that wounds—unless that preacher is also himself wounded by that truth and heartbroken over the plight of his people. A very wise old pastor once told me of two equal and opposite errors a preacher can fall into. One was to neglect his study for his people. The other was to neglect his people for his study. Both are tragic. Both are in constant tension and competition with each other. But both must be done.
Making the Bible Relevant
I offer one last temptation of the preacher. It is the temptation to try and make the Bible relevant, to make it come alive. This particular temptation used to be the sole province of the liberal theological tradition. But in the past few years, it has gained a number of victims in the evangelical community.
I succumb to this temptation whenever I feel the Bible needs my help to be believed, that somehow it requires my zinger illustration or my perceptive restatement into thought forms more familiar to my congregation. Most often today those thought forms are the categories and vocabulary of pop psychology.
The sin courted in this temptation is the presumption that it is the Bible that is dead and we who are alive. Of course no preacher would admit to that formal proposition. But many act as though they believed it.
Is the Bible relevant? Dr. Bernard Ramm once remarked, “There is nothing more relevant than the truth.” The longer I preach, the more convinced I become that the best thing I can do is simply get out of Scripture’s way. The soundest homiletical advice I know is not to try to preach it well but just to try not to preach it badly.
This does not mean the preacher should not translate the message of the Bible in words people can understand. But the purpose should always be to help them see the relevance of the Scriptures, not make the Scriptures relevant. In the final analysis, the Word of God authenticates itself through the work of the Holy Spirit, often in spite of, not because of, us preachers.
One might conclude from reading this article that to be a preacher is to walk into a minefield of temptations. It is. I don’t think I have ever preached a sermon with even 30 percent good intentions. And I have despaired as I have looked inside myself and seen the many ways I have fallen before the temptations of the preacher. If the purity of my motivations were the basis of my being in the pulpit, I would have been kicked out long ago. But, thank God, that is not the basis. The basis is the call of God. I am there only because he summoned me many years ago, gave me the necessary gifts, and said, “Start talking about me.”
In our liturgy we confess our sins corporately, before we hear the Word of God through the reading and preaching of the Bible. I must also do so after ward. That is the pattern for me: confess, preach, confess again; and pray Martin Luther’s sacristy prayer:
Lord God, you have made me a pastor in your church. You see how unfit I am to undertake this great and difficult office, and if it were not for your help, I would have ruined it all long ago. Therefore I cry to you for aid. I offer my mouth and my heart to your service. I desire to teach the people—and for myself, I would learn ever more and diligently meditate on your Word. Use me as your instrument, but never forsake me, for if I am left alone I shall easily bring it all to destruction. Amen.
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