Two hundred years ago, Phillips Brooks said, “Preaching is truth through personality.” If that was true then, it’s even truer now, in the relational society we have at the end of the twentieth century. Personality shapes preaching; preaching shapes the personality.
Three of today’s premier preachers recently teamed up to co-author a book, Mastering Contemporary Preaching (CTi/Multnomah, 1990). Leadership gathered the three to explore the personal dimensions of the preaching task.
– Stuart Briscoe is pastor of Elmbrook Church in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, suburb of Brookfield, where he has served for more than fifteen years.
– Bill Hybels is pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, a church he founded in 1975.
– Haddon Robinson is president of Denver Seminary in Colorado. A student of communications (Ph.D. from the University of Illinois), he is the author of the widely read Biblical Preaching (Baker).
Leadership: What’s the worst sermon you’ve ever preached?
Stuart Briscoe: I was young, doing youth evangelism, and I preached a sermon on Jabez, who is mentioned in only two verses in the Bible, 1 Chronicles 4:9-10. He prays that God “would bless me and enlarge my territory . . . and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.” He came across to me then as a wimp, or what Margaret Thatcher would call “a real wet.” I didn’t like Jabez at all. My sermon outline was that Jabez was needy, weedy, greedy, and seedy. (Laughter)
That sermon haunts me to this day.
Haddon Robinson: A church in Dallas invited me to preach on John 14-“If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself.” That’s not an easy passage. It is filled with exegetical questions about death and the Second Coming: How is Jesus preparing that place? Does Jesus mean we won’t go to be with him until he comes back? What about soul sleep?
I spent most of my week studying to answer questions like these.
When I got up to preach, I had done my homework. I was ready to deliver solid biblical teaching on the assigned passage.
Five minutes into the sermon, though, I knew I was in trouble. The people weren’t with me. At the ten-minute mark, people were falling asleep. One man sitting near the front began to snore. Worse, he didn’t disturb anyone! (Laughter)
No one was listening. I was preaching about the theological issues, issues that intrigued me. It might have been strong stuff in a seminary classroom. But in that church, in that pulpit, it was a disaster.
I was answering my questions, not theirs. Some of the men and women I spoke to would soon go home to be with the Lord. What they wanted to know was, “Will he toss me into some ditch of a grave, or will he take me safely home to the other side? When I get to heaven, what’s there?”
They wanted to hear me say: “Jesus, who was there at Creation, has been spending two thousand years preparing a home for you. God spent only six days creating the world, and look at its beauty. Imagine, then, what the home must be like that he has been preparing for you. When you come to the end of this life, that’s what he’ll have waiting for you.”
That’s what I should have preached. At least I should have started with their questions. But I didn’t. Even today, whenever I talk about that morning, I still get an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Bill Hybels: My experience is similar. Early in my ministry, I had to give weekly talks to young people. I went to a senior pastor friend and said, “I have to speak to high school students. What do you suggest?”
He said, “Well, if I were you, I’d get a copy of Berkhof’s Manual of Christian Doctrine and just start at chapter 1 and teach these kids.” Sounded fine to me. So I read the first chapter of Berkhof, did some underlining and preparation, and that night began delivering it to a roomful of students.
Five minutes into that talk, I started to see glazed expressions. Students were looking around the room to see who was there. Others were passing notes to each other or drawing on the chairs in front of them.
Right then, I knew this teaching was not useful. I was so disheartened that I stopped about a third of the way into the message.
“I have to apologize,” I said, “for the fact that I am missing the mark tonight. What I prepared to say is obviously not on target. And I want to make a commitment to you all. If you’ll come back next week, I’m going to talk about something straight out of the Bible that is going to make a difference in your understanding of God, in your appreciation of the Christian faith, and in how you live your daily life. And if you’ll give me another opportunity, I’d like to prove that to you.”
The next week most of them returned, graciously, maybe just to humor me. But from that day on, I have lived with a sanctified terror of boring people or making Scripture-which is relevant-irrelevant.
Leadership: If those were your strike outs, tell us about a home run.
(Long pause)
Robinson: It’s easier for me to think of sermons that bombed than to think of sermons that are really outstanding.
Leadership: What does that say? Why are failures easier to remember?
Robinson: I think, theologically, what happens is that when it goes well, you recognize that God says, “I will not share my glory with another.” So in a sense, when you have preached effectively, you don’t want to talk about it. You’re not even comfortable having people say to you, “That was a great sermon.” A sacred moment resists being dissected.
Briscoe: I don’t talk much about this, because it can be so easily misunderstood. But I think many preachers can identify with this phenomenon: There are times when you’re preaching, and you experience a strange feeling of awe. I don’t know whether you’d call it a special anointing, a special connecting, or a special work of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the sermon is just particularly relevant at that time. I don’t know.
But at times, the sermon seems to carry you along. Even while you’re preaching, you sense God empowering the words.
As I say, I’m not even comfortable talking about it. I suspect it’s a little bit like pulling petals off a rose to figure out where the fragrance comes from. You destroy the beauty by trying to take it apart.
Leadership: Were you “called” to preach? If so, how?
Briscoe: I never intended to be a preacher. I was going to be a businessman. As a teenager in England, I’d just moved to a new town to start working, when a layman in the church I attended asked me how old I was.
“Seventeen,” I said.
“Its time you were preaching,” he said, which was a total surprise to me. But two weeks later, I found myself preaching my first sermon in that small church. He had given me my topic: the church at Ephesus. So I studied everything I could find on the Ephesians.
In that first sermon, I went ten minutes over my allotted time-and only got through my first point. So he told me to come back the following week and finish. Which I did. Then he said, “There are lots of little churches around here that need preachers,” and so he started sending me to different little congregations, preaching about Ephesians.
So I started preaching, and I discovered (1) I could do it, (2) I enjoyed doing it, and (3) people seemed to be blessed as I was doing it. Eventually the church affirmed my preaching, and I discovered a gifting. And I learned that where there’s a gifting, often there’s a calling. Over the years, that sense of calling has crystallized.
So after twelve years, I left the business world and went full time into ministry.
Hybels: Growing up, I had no desire to be a preacher. I think that was in part because in the particular denomination and rural church I grew up in, there were few models of strong, effective preachers. The preaching I heard was heavily slanted toward the Heidelberg Catechism. It was not expositional preaching; it was doctrinal preaching. In twenty years of hearing the creed preached, I met few people who had truly life-changing experiences.
In addition, my father owned a business, and so I grew up assuming the major league of life was the marketplace. If I wanted a challenging, action-packed life, it would not be in the church context.
But in my late teenage years, I found myself in the Chicago area. The youth pastor of the church I was attending had left, and I was asked to give some leadership to the young people. I figured part of youth ministry was to look in my Bible and give the kids some devotional thoughts from time to time.
What actually happened was that I discovered I had spiritual gifts of preaching and teaching-and at the time I’d never heard of spiritual gifts! But the kids not only were listening, they were affected by the Word of God as it came off the page through my lips. To give a twenty-minute talk and have kids make changes in their lives based on what they had heard was an overwhelming experience for me. I was amazed that this rather unconventional exercise-standing there with the Bible and talking about it-had such power for good, for Christ, in the lives of people.
I clearly could tell that the major league of life, from the perspective of eternity anyway, was seeing positive changes in peoples’ lives. That was greater than closing a real estate deal or selling produce or running a fleet of trucks. That fueled my desire to make a difference with my life. And it seemed like God had gifted me to make a difference through preaching.
Preaching can soften people to the truths that will affect them for all eternity. But if I don’t do it well, preaching can harden them and drive them away from God. I have been preaching now for fifteen years, and in many ways it’s still terrifying because I know what’s at stake. I would gladly, upon one whisper from the Holy Spirit, return to the market-place and try to make a difference for Christ another way. But right now I feel under compulsion. With Paul in 1 Corinthians 9:16, I have to say, “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel.”
Robinson: I can never remember a time when I did not want to be a preacher. I was named after Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and that may have had something to do with it.
I wasn’t much of a reader as a kid, but I had read Shadow of the Broad Brim, Spurgeon’s biography. By the time I was 12, I had read his book of collected illustrations. However, I grew up in the ghetto of Harlem in New York City, hardly conducive to the world of preaching. So for most of my youth, I planned on doing something else.
I used to keep a diary off and on. All the great people I knew kept diaries, and they seemed to have marvelous things to say, full of great insight. My entries were more of the “I got up, went to school, came home, and went to bed” sort. After a few weeks of that, I’d inevitably quit.
Several years ago, however, when I was moving my dad to Texas, I come across one of those diaries from when I was 12 years old. One entry indicated I had gone to hear Dr. Harry Ironside, the former pastor of Moody Memorial Church in Chicago. And in my diary I’d put: “Some men preach for an hour and it seems like twenty minutes, and some preach for twenty minutes and it seems like an hour. I wonder what the difference is?”
I think I’ve spent my life trying to answer that question.
Leadership: What scares you about preaching?
Robinson: One of my greatest fears is that as a result of my preaching, people will become bored, and in boring them I’ll have reflected negatively on God. When that occurs, especially in a society like ours in which boredom is the hardest thing to tolerate, instead of people being drawn to Christ, they’re driven from Christ.
In our Doctor of Ministry program recently, I had the students go door to door, find twenty people who didn’t go to church, and ask, “Why don’t you go to church?” That group interviewed almost three hundred people, of whom more than 90 percent described themselves as “religious” or “interested in spiritual things.” But they didn’t go to church because the services were too long and the sermons boring. The church experience was dull and meaningless.
If that is an accurate perception, and if we preachers contribute to that, that’s a fearsome thing.
We’re there to represent the eternal God. When people in the Bible-Moses, Isaiah-get near God, they’re usually scared stiff. They fall to the ground; they don’t know what to do. They say, “Woe is me!”
I fear preaching in such a way that when people get around to hearing about this God, they’ll want only to yawn.
Leadership: When you put it that way, preaching sounds impossible. You can paralyze yourself by thinking, I’ll never be able to do this! How could your words from the pulpit ever represent God adequately?
Hybels: I’m convinced that’s where the spiritual gift comes into play. I’m often asked, “How do you do what you do?”-as if there’s some formula. I have to say honestly, “I don’t know.”
I do two sermons every week. I sit down with a blank pad, an open Bible, and a few other sources. I look at a text, or I look at a problem people are wrestling with, and I’m always conscious that unless God activates the gift he put within me, nothing is going to appear on this sheet. I don’t have anything to say in and of myself. I’m no expert on anything.
Briscoe: I agree, Bill. The thought sometimes occurs to me in the middle of a sermon that I’ve been caught up, that I’m out of myself, and that if I really stopped to think, the whole thing would come to a screeching halt.
Leadership: Haddon, you’ve spent a lifetime studying preaching and analyzing sermons. How does this description of preaching as a mystery come across to you?
Robinson: It’s tough to teach homiletics by saying you can’t teach it. (Laughter)
Actually, I agree; there is a mysterious element that the old preachers called unction. But there are ways of putting messages together that are not magic. You can learn some communication techniques that will make you more effective as a preacher.
But having said that, preaching technique is like the loaves and fishes offered to Jesus. Nothing is going to happen without his touch. Empowering can’t be taught or captured in a bottle.
Leadership: Besides boring people or presenting the living God as a tame kitten, what else do you fear?
Hybels: I worry about imbalance due to the nature of my personality. I love a challenge. If you asked me if I could scale the outside of this building without killing myself-if you pushed me hard enough-you’d probably get me to try. I love to be challenged. I love trying something new, experiencing life. That’s the way I grow, think, and change. It was a shock for me to learn that not everyone on the planet is like that.
If I’m not challenging our people, my tendency is to think they’re going to become neglectful of the faith and fall into complacency.
By God’s grace, I’ve been surrounded by elders, and I’ve submitted my life to them. They hold me accountable in many ways, including my ratio of challenging messages versus comforting messages versus instructional messages. They make sure I’m not merely expressing the nature of my personality through my preaching.
Leadership: When was a time they alerted you to a potential imbalance?
Hybels: Each year I take a group of people away for a few days to help me plan my sermon series for the following year. One guy said, “Bill, why don’t you do a series on fear next year?”
I was unenthused, so I said, “Well, that’s a good idea. Who else has one?”
We went around the table several times. A couple more times the guy said, “Can we give any more thought to that fear message?”
“Yes,” I said, “I wrote that down.”
Finally one of our elders, a very perceptive woman, said, “Bill, why don’t you just tell him why you’re not taking his idea seriously?”
It caught me off guard. “What are you driving at?”
“You just don’t live with much fear, do you?” she said.
I thought for a second and finally had to admit that I barely know what the emotion is. I don’t fear death. I don’t fear failure. I had the enormous benefit of growing up under a secure father who believed in me, who instilled confidence in me. So the subject of fear doesn’t touch my life much. On my own, I’d probably go years without preaching on that subject.
So I said, “I’d like to hear what kinds of things the people around this table fear.” Well, two hours later . . . (Laughter)
I came away thinking, This needs to be a twelve-week series. I had no idea the subject was that pressing. They helped balance me.
So a preacher’s personality will express itself through the preaching. If you’re a very balanced person as a preacher, then everything is fine. But if you have a timid personality, then the preaching is liable to be bent toward helping the timid sheep get a little bolder. And the people who are already bold are saying, “You’re boring me. Give me a challenge!”
On the other hand, you have preachers like me who think five challenges a day keep the Devil away. And I need to be moderated.
Leadership: Many pastors would appreciate such thoughtful, informed observations about their preaching. But I suspect a number of pastors would say, “My problem is not a shortage of people willing to criticize my preaching; the shortage is of people who understand preaching and understand my particular congregation well enough to offer helpful observations.”
Robinson: It’s true that people will tell you one thing when they’re really criticizing another. They may not know enough about preaching technique to diagnose the problem or prescribe the cure, but their comments do often point out a symptom. They can tell there’s something wrong.
A person might tell me, “Your sermon was negative. You need to be more positive.” As I think back over the sermon, I don’t know what the person is talking about. I had a problem/solution structure.
But perhaps my best material, my most powerful illustration, was showing what was wrong rather than what people could do about it. Or perhaps I spent twice as much time on the problem as on the solution. After all, it’s easier to be interesting talking about problems than solutions.
So even though the critic couldn’t diagnose the error, his observation was still worth hearing.
Leadership: How do you prepare yourself to preach?
Hybels: I make a distinction between preparing a sermon and preparing myself to prepare a message to preach.
To me, the actual moments of sermon preparation grow out of the spiritual disciplines we submit ourselves to, putting ourselves in condition so we can prepare messages that God can use. So I’ve submitted myself to the disciplines of solitude and fasting, and even mechanical things such as writing my prayers longhand and journaling and being in accountable relationships. I do this to help keep my life properly yielded. Then the Spirit can be free to activate my spiritual gifts during the actual sermon-preparation phase.
Then just before I preach, the elders of the church surround me, and we have a fervent time of prayer, submission, and commissioning before I actually go into the pulpit.
But I fear, as I talk to pastors, that there is a kind of carelessness throughout the week in submitting to the disciplines necessary to put them in a condition where they can prepare messages. Then on Saturday night, there’s a desperation, a pleading with God: “Give me a word from you. Lord!” And the same thing on Sunday morning: “Give me the unction!” They’re trying a crash course in personal submission to get them through the message, and then they relax until the next time.
Leadership: So consistent spiritual conditioning is the important factor, not the thirty minutes of stretching before the race.
Briscoe: I would add something else that counters the Saturday Night Special that Bill describes. I have found preparation is a week’s business.
If I can do my exegesis early in the week, then I can be ruminating on it all week. I like to live in a message for a week until it becomes as comfortable as a pair of old slippers.
Then, toward the end of the week, I pull the rest together. That’s extremely helpful to me because I find the message is preaching itself to me all the time.
Robinson: I suspect most pastors, like me, don’t find exegesis hard. I can work my way through a passage and get the flow of thought, get into its context. The tougher challenge is “What does this mean today? What does it mean to me?” A passage has to touch you.
Hybels: One of the great things I’ve noticed in Stuart’s preaching is that he has truly wrestled with the topic-thought about it, experienced it in some way, and seen it work out in people’s lives. What he preaches is not the first thought that came out of a commentary.
Listeners sense Stuart knows more than what he says on Sunday morning.
Leadership: Since you all try to apply the message to yourselves before you present it to the congregation, do you find a given passage of Scripture will say different things to you at different times?
Briscoe: Certainly! I have preached many, many times from the Great Commission. I have a tremendous interest in missions and evangelism. But recently I was studying the passage, and I was struck by the statement, “Teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” I thought to myself, I have never bothered finding out what he commanded his disciples to do! So I went through just the Gospel of Matthew (you have to set some limits!), and I made a list of all the specific commands Jesus gave to his disciples. It was a new insight.
Here was a passage of Scripture I’d preached dozens of times. And yet it came with phenomenal force to me in that new context.
Leadership: What discourages you personally as a preacher?
Briscoe: Sundays. (Laughter)
Hybels: One thing that discourages me is that I consistently feel I never do justice to a text. I give it my best shot, do everything in my power to plumb its depths and show its grandeur . . . and then I go home feeling like I just scraped the surface and left most of the good stuff back in the Book.
Briscoe: I find it discouraging when, after a service in which I have poured my heart out and dealt with profound, eternal issues, people immediately confront me with “Well, how about them 49ers?”
Or they latch onto a detail from a personal illustration but completely ignore the point I was illustrating.
Once I had a series of meetings in South Carolina, and we planned a question-and-answer time at the end of the week. The only question I got, after a week’s preaching, was from an older woman who sat in the front row every night. She asked, “Is them your own teeth?” I was tempted to go back to banking.
Robinson: When I look at the secularism of our society and the mind-set so shaped by mass media, when people watch television twenty-four hours a week and may spend one hour listening to God’s Word-at such times I feel like we’re in a wilderness straining to hear a voice. The voice is almost drowned out. I know preaching makes a difference, but many times it seems culture rushes headlong in the opposite direction.
Hybels: The world has them for 168 hours. We get them for an hour or two. You almost feel, How can we ever compete? It’s not just the time disparity. When you calculate the dollars and the effort, the sound tracks and celebrity appearances, that go into making things glitter, all to communicate the values of the world-and then we preachers stand alone in the pulpit.
I stand up there shaking, realizing unless the Spirit of God enlivens what I’m saying, I don’t have a chance.
Again, this is why I’ve always felt it behooves me to put enormous emphasis on spiritual disciplines in my own life. I know the odds out there in the battle for souls. Unless God goes before me and speaks through me, and people are willing to be fed, the whole exercise is just futility.
Leadership: Do you ever get discouraged by the fact that it seems the people who benefit most from your preaching are the dysfunctionals who are made marginally more functional but are never going to be productive?
(Long pause)
Hybels: Let’s let the leadership staff answer that and see themselves quoted. (Laughter)
Briscoe: I think we should answer it. I think it’s an important question. And I think we’ve got to recognize the fact that in the church, we do have a high percentage of dysfunctional people.
This has been used as a criticism. I remember a man saying he’d forbidden his daughter to come to our church anymore.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’ve got so many strange people there,” he said.
“Is that a criticism?” I asked.
I discovered it was. He was serious. He didn’t want his wife or his daughter mixing with these people.
“Oh,” I said. “I thought you were complimenting us on caring and reaching out to people who have not been helped anywhere else, who’ve been disregarded by society. But, in actual fact, if you did come and have a look around the place, you’d find a great mixture of people-some delightfully strange, some respectably bland.”
We do have to accept the fact that often people come who will not be able to contribute an awful lot in terms of talent or relational skills. But we’re going to contribute an awful lot to their lives.
My experience is that there will be lots of other people, as well, whose lives do get straightened out-people who are self-starters, who have leadership qualities, who will make a difference in the church and society.
Robinson: But those people you’re describing-the stronger people-are usually individuals who don’t change dramatically on one Sunday. They didn’t get where they are by being the impulsive sorts, swayed easily.
It’s sitting under the Word of God over a period of time that enables them to view their lives Christianly. Redirection comes because they are thoughtful people, wanting to invest their lives in something that is going to make a difference.
Leadership: Is it a mistake to want short-term results? Is it wrong to evaluate our preaching based on the effect it has had in the last month or two?
Briscoe: I think so. I love the image of the farmer sowing seed. Seed doesn’t sprout overnight. The farmer plants the seed, and then, in a sense, the seed evaluates the soil. If the soil is fertile, the seed germinates.
That’s one of the things I love about the pastorate. Having spent almost nineteen years with the same church now, I have a few years behind me. I can look back and see things that have happened.
But so many times, you can’t see anything happening week to week. The spiritual growth is taking place beneath the surface.
Robinson: Sometimes, as I’m preaching, I think, What if that guy in the eighth row, four seats in, takes this sermon seriously? It could wreak havoc in his life. And I find an inner struggle not with “What if they don’t like my sermon?” but “What will happen to them if they fully accept it?”
For some men, I know that if they really believe what I’m preaching, it could cause them to lose their jobs. Or it could produce some tremendous problems in that marriage.
When I was the general director of the Christian Medical Society, I remember a physician decided to commit his life to God, totally. But for eighteen years, his wife had enjoyed the social life. She was a Christian, but she wasn’t ready for a radical commitment.
When her husband decided to forsake the pursuit of career benefits in order to serve God, it produced severe tensions in their marriage. She felt he no longer cared for her, because he had changed the rules in the middle of the game.
So as I preach, I sometimes wrestle with the cost people will have to pay to apply what I’m saying. Some people will take you seriously. And whereas a pastor (or seminary president) has the freedom to express his faith in a reasonably supportive environment, some people have to live it out there in the trenches where they may be the only Christian around. Their bosses, who are bottom-line people, may not be very happy when their employees discover a renewed sense of ethics and integrity.
Leadership: How has preaching affected you personally?
Robinson: Inherent in preaching that exposes your emotions is a dark downside. C. S. Lewis said that when he dealt with apologetics he would come away less sure of the faith after he’d preached, probably because he knew ideas he didn’t cover and couldn’t have covered.
Sometimes as I wrestle with the Bible and life-and maybe it’s because I preach too often-there are all kinds of things happening in me that would shock the people in the pew if they knew. The trumpet doesn’t give an uncertain sound, but there are times when a trumpeter is uncertain.
Many preachers seem to become vulnerable to life as a result of preaching. Part of it is that they live with emotion all the time. They feel it, and therefore questions seem more like deep doubts. They come to the place where they think, Who am I to preach this? That clouds your life.
And my wife could ruin me almost any given Sunday if she asked me, when I got home from preaching, “How committed are you? You talked today about sacrifice (or whatever), but are you really ready to sacrifice? Is that really true about you?”
Yes, it’s true. But not totally true. I can easily be made to feel like a hypocrite.
Briscoe: Paul pulls this together, doesn’t he, when he talks about “Who is sufficient for these things?” The more he looks at what it means to be a sweet perfume of Christ to those who have been saved and a deadly odor of doom to those who are perishing, he says, “Who can cope with this?”
It’s a rhetorical question, but the answer is obvious. None of us can. Fortunately, he doesn’t stay there. He says, “Our sufficiency is God.” And then he gets back to the treasure: “God, who commanded light to shine in the darkness, shined into our hearts.”
Even there, Paul’s not through, for he immediately says, “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels.” So you always have the earthen vessel and the in-shining light. You always have the total inability and yet the overwhelming sufficiency.
We can become too introspective. We can take ourselves too seriously. If we get into an introspective mood and take ourselves too seriously, we can become paralyzed.
The work will be done in the end when God, who commands light to shine in the darkness, not only shines in but shines through. We need to recognize the earthen-vessel side of our preaching, but we can’t dwell on it.
Robinson: I am an introspective person, and I sense that when I am aware of my earthenness, I preach differently than when I’m aware of the light. Part of the Sermon on the Mount is “Blessed are those who recognize their bankruptcy.” Out of that awareness is where we get the sufficiency to preach. Arrogance in preaching may be the most deadly attitude.
Leadership: When the epitaph is written on your preaching ministry, what do you want it to read?
Briscoe: I hope my epitaph is similar to the one that described Ezra: He devoted himself to studying the word and to doing it.
My wife, however, has already picked out my epitaph. She says I’m so laid-back that she’s going to put on my gravestone, “Here lies Stuart Briscoe. He never anticipated any major difficulty.” (Laughter)
Hybels: Paul said in Acts 20, “I did not shrink back from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.” There is still within me the periodic unwillingness to proclaim boldly what I know I ought to proclaim. That verse haunts me. The Spirit seems to whisper, Don’t shrink back. You know what people need to hear. They may not want to hear it; it may not create warm fuzzies for them. It may even produce some conflict in their jobs and relationships, but don’t shrink back. I hope someday people will say, “He didn’t shrink back.”
Leadership: What keeps you going when you’re discouraged?
Robinson: People who say to you, often years later, “I heard you preach, and I came to know Christ as a result.”
Many years ago I preached a series of messages at a small town in Minnesota. Several churches together had planned the event, but that week, as far as I could tell, nothing happened. But just a year ago, I was on the West Coast, when a fellow introduced himself and asked if I remembered those meetings in Minnesota.
“Do you remember on a Wednesday night two guys came forward?” he asked. I recalled they were the only two who had responded all week. “I was one of them,” he said. “My friend and I came that night, and we did two things: we trusted Christ and we decided that if he was worth trusting, he was worth giving our lives to. So now I’m in the ministry, and my friend is a missionary in Africa.”
I was moved. I had been sure it was a wasted week, but God somehow touched two lives.
Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
