(Editor’s Note: Each month Gordon MacDonald shares insights from his journals, in which he logs wit and wisdom from his reading, his study, and his travels.)
From my journal: In the Spoon River Anthology, a collection of poems written by people who reflect back upon their lives and deaths, poet Edgar Lee Masters offers the posthumous words of Rev. Abner Peet:
I had no objection at all
To selling my household effects at auction
On the village square.
It gave my beloved flock the chance
To get something which had belonged to me
For a memorial.
But that trunk which was struck off
To Burchard, the grog-keeper!
Did you know it contained the manuscripts
Of a lifetime of sermons?
And he burned them as waste paper.
The poem taunts me as I sit in my small study surrounded by shelves of notebooks containing—how many?—40-plus years of sermons. I exaggerate only a little when I confess that, in the preparation of each one of those talks, I dared to entertain (even pray for) the idea that each of these presentations, preached in its time, was going revive the church, convert a zillion people, change the world. Didn’t happen! But I kept (and keep) hoping.
Today, when I take a notebook off the shelf and thumb through a sermon here and there, preached ten, twenty-five, or thirty-two years ago, I shake my head in consternation. Did people really sit still and listen to this stuff? Objectivity comes with the distance of years, you see, and I now look at some of my sermon products and wince at the shallowness of thought, the lack of thorough application, the evidences of personal immaturity. Forgive me, dear listeners, you who had to endure all of it.
Nevertheless, here and there a life was truly altered, a marriage redirected, a young person “called,” a struggler encouraged. But with these sermons? Only the Holy Spirit must have saved me from an early end to my preaching efforts. He must have squeezed heavenly power between, in, and over the sentences and paragraphs of each delivery; he must have broadened the listener’s ears to pick up heavenly signals far beyond my preaching. Because most of these sermons, standing by themselves without his presence, deserve burning—as waste paper.
I have finally gotten around to reading Robert Webber’sThe Younger Evangelicals(Baker). I’ve been alternatively absorbed with valuable insights, a-ha’s of a kind, and angered by comments (generalizations) that seem off the wall, thoughts that probably won’t survive five years. But I’m grateful for the book because it underscores the amazing transitions going on in the Christian movement today as a new generation steps on to the stage of leadership.
A reflection: To avoid name-dropping (“Billy Graham once told me never to drop names,” he said with a smile), I shall leave the person’s identity quiet as I recall this event of a couple of weeks ago. My wife Gail and I are at a conference, and a speaker who is about to be introduced approaches us in the “green room.” He kneels before us and quietly says, “Would you be willing to bless me?”
This is a phrase—”bless me”—in short supply in Protestant vocabulary. But I love it. It suggests the process by which God allows us to pray power and grace into one another. We laid our hands on this kneeling (its own symbol of humility and receiving) man, and I prayed God’s anointing strength upon him. A few days later I spoke at a conference of college men and women, and at the end of our three days together, they put me in the middle of the crowd, and I felt dozens of hands upon me as—one by one—at least 20 of them prayed for me. There is a sweetness, a genuineness in such events that moves beyond the loudness and sensationalism of so many big, extravaganza-like meetings.
On another occasion: “Could I read this Scripture into you?” Interesting way of putting it, don’t you think? I love the quiet and empowering transactions that takes place when one says to another, “Could I give you a blessing?” “Could we lay hands on you?” “Could I press this word into you?” A small moment … or is it?
This captures my attention: “One of the saddest experiences which can come to human beings is to awaken, gray haired and wrinkled, near the close of an unproductive career, to the fact that all through the years he has been using only a small part of himself.” -V.W. Burrows.
To respond to this newsletter. Write to Newsletter@LeadershipJournal.net.
Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click herefor reprint information on Leadership Journal.
