Our Daunting Hope

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Spiritual transformation is our deepest and most profound human need: to be turned inside out (from being absorbed with ourselves to absorbing love for God and our neighbor) and right side up (from worshiping the creation to worshiping the Creator).

This transformation is the most difficult thing in the world. Why else would it require the death of God's only begotten Son? It is the the most costly change. Spiritual transformation requires death in order for there to be life.

If this were not enough, remember too that the transformation God seeks and offers through Jesus Christ is as extensive as it is intensive; it includes the re-creation of all things even as it includes the re-making of each part. Scripture assures us again and again that this intensive and extensive cosmic transformation can be counted on and will be complete.

The Bible also says it is not yet done.

This is why prophets and preachers do some of their best work when they have their mouths open and don't say a thing. Put another way, we preachers are at our best when what we do comes from standing in awe before who God is and what God intends.

Awe-full transformation

Preaching is never helped when, as preacher, I think that what God wants to achieve my preaching can accomplish. Instead, biblical wisdom teaches that the transformation for which we preach is far higher, deeper, and wider than our preaching could ever express, let alone accomplish. This doesn't sound like good news, but it is essential truth that every preacher must learn.

We must not fall prey to a spiritual sleight of hand: preaching salvation that depends on God while preaching transformation that depends on human management.

The staggering truth is that the height and length and depth of the transformation God seeks is nothing less than our lives and the whole created order being remade into the likeness and for the purposes of Jesus Christ. This means not mere mental agreement with a preacher but an inward change that alters our public lives. Fruit is not born on the inside of a plant but on the outside; it's meant to be seen, tasted, touched, experienced.

It means we become together God's people who live righteousness and justice. This is God's work. Preaching is one of God's means, but it is God's to accomplish.

A self test

By this measure then, how is God's spiritual transformation going in your life? In your congregation's life? Ask yourself:

Am I preaching a transformation my preaching could accomplish, or am I bearing witness in my preaching to the full transformation that only God could accomplish?

Am I preaching our new humanity, or am I just fostering more "church people"?

Am I calling others to live peculiar lives that increasingly bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit, or am I just reproducing people who like my personality and laugh at my stories?

As a consequence of my preaching, am I finding that people hunger for God's healing, forgiveness, and renewing love? Does it actually change what happens in daily life?

Biblical transformation is not about the form of worship we like, or the Christian books we read, or the churches we attend, or the Christian paraphernalia we have around us. "You shall know them by their love." It is evident in the cup of water, the visitation of the prisoner, the provision for the widow and the poor. In fact, Jesus said even more pointedly, we are not to love merely those who love us—for anyone can do that. It's when we love our enemies that the sign of spiritual change God seeks comes into focus. Then we are becoming like the One we follow. This is the righteousness and justice God wants from us.

Awe: perhaps this is the most needed and appropriate measure of the preacher's vision of transformation. The preacher who kneels, sits, studies, stands, and eventually speaks out of awe will point people to the One who alone is "able to do exceedingly, abundantly beyond anything we could ask or even imagine."

By all means, let's help people take practical steps forward in their discipleship, but let's not confuse those steps with the ultimate goal or forget the distance God desires to take us.

God's unexpected means

How does God accomplish such remarkable transformation? The greatness of God's intentions might lead us to suppose God will use spectacular means. Yet God's approach could hardly be more surprising. In a world where size, mass, and dominance seem to be what instigates change, God does something so different. His unexpected strategy remains personal, quiet, easily missed.

God's strategy is God's Word.

God's Word is the agency of both creation and of re-creation. The Word that spoke creation into existence is the Word who still speaks to call us into new life. God-breathed Scripture speaks by the Holy Spirit's blessing into lives that are drowned by words but are parched for a Word that gives Life.

What makes this ironic in our own day is that we live in a time when words have never meant less. Words are dumped by the gigabyte on our doorstep daily. One easily imagines that technology generates more words per day than in previous millennia. What's more, some cultural voices would argue all we have in the world is language and power—i.e., no stable meaning, no referent beyond ourselves.

Yet into just such a world of too many words and too little meaning, we are called to be changed by the Word who is our only hope. What's more, we are called to have a part in changing the world by using more words to proclaim "what was first delivered to us."

In a word-skeptical world, an unfortunate polarization is increasingly expressed in the church, pitting preaching against other means of communicating the Word. A defense of the continued importance of preaching does not have to be exclusive. Music, visual arts, drama, silence, as well as the far more powerful demonstration of love and justice in the world are also ways the Word of God can and should be communicated.

I find myself increasingly hungry for and spiritually helped by visual arts in worship. The use of images of various kinds projected on screens, painted on canvas, or displayed on walls, as well as the use of candles, liturgical installations, and more has frequently been an enormous aid to, not a distraction from, the preached Word.

Liturgically low-church Protestants have known this for a long time about music, but the same is true about arts in worship, too. They are at their most poignant when they embody the Word rather than decorate or even illustrate it. Sometimes these expressions of the Word open people's ears to hear. But preaching remains one of God's continuing, if mysterious and even peculiar, means of sharing the Word, even in this sometimes anti-word culture.

God speaks. God acts. God never ceases doing either. Nor should we.

The God who speaks and acts calls preachers who speak and act to lead disciples to speak and act.

The preacher's vocation

All this has been worth saying because without these conditions in view, we come to the task of preaching in a vacuum and fail to understand the preacher's call. If we don't get that preaching is "foolishness," we better keep our mouths shut. After all, it's only because preaching is God's appointed "foolishness" that we dare to open our mouths and speak God's Word to our congregations.

What is the "foolishness" of preaching? To lift up the "foolishness" of God in Christ crucified. How is this done? By exposing God's Word in Scripture and by the Holy Spirit in such a way that lives are recast and reformed by that Word into the likeness of the Word made flesh.

In other words, to participate as a key agent of God's transforming power in the world!

Urgent? Nothing could be more so. Unexpected? What could be less likely! Beyond us? Definitely.

I look weekly into the faces of people who know pain and disappointment, depression and struggle, imagination and joy, love and rejection, decisions and disease, pressures and hopes. And what am I going to do? Preach? What madness makes me think this is even a good thing, let alone an essential thing to do? And what would ever lead me to do it again next week—and the next? Only that my life and the lives of others I know have been changed through the preached Word.

God's work in fact.

How then should we as preachers and teachers approach this remarkable task? Let's let the apostle Paul instruct us from his letter to the Romans, chapter 12.

1. Grounded humility. "Thus saith the Lord" is the human witness to a word from beyond us. That is the preacher's vocation.

Paul says quite straightforwardly, "Therefore (i.e., in light of all that God has done and said), I urge you, my brothers and sisters, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship." This worshipful humility is the first act of transformation.

Clearly, Paul's expectation, and even more the force of the work of God from creation up to this very moment, causes him to declare with confidence: present everything about yourselves to God—your whole selves for God's holy life. Humility is not a part-time vocation. Nor is it about just an aspect of life. Humility is an open, dependent, honest, continuous position before God.

2. Tangible response. The response Paul is asking for only happens by grace through the will. Transformation is not just an attitude; it's a changed life. Transformation is actually a response to God and God's action. It requires our deliberate, humble participation. If Paul visited the church at Rome, he would be able see and hear signs of this practical humility before Jesus the Lord.

As every prophet eventually learns: you can preach yourself silly proclaiming the truth, and, if the people don't have ears to hear, they won't. If this is so even for Jesus, well, let's not be too surprised when we have that experience, too.

When we don't get the desired response, let's remember that focus groups are not the next move. Of course, it is important to know your audience, to be sure you are not missing them by unclear or inadequate communication. But, if we remember that "having ears to hear" is just another way of saying "take up your cross and die," then this is not the road to popularity.

Paul calls the Christians in Rome to respond to God, not to himself. This basic distinction can easily be forgotten by the preacher. Personal insecurities derail the preacher's purpose. Spiritual transformation in our people will be stymied if we are primarily concerned with the people's response to us. The issue is the people's response to God through the Word that we deliver.

The preacher is a pointer who says to others: "Do your business with God." This is the spiritual offering to God that will change lives. People might be in church by our invitation, but they won't be transformed till they respond to God's invitation.

Many preachers tend to be people pleasers and are all the more likely to over-personalize people's response to the Word. We all need to learn that "it's not about me" in most areas of life, and certainly that is so in preaching.

If God chooses to use my particular personality and gifts, it's only so that they become an effective lens for others to see God. If people are more taken with the preacher than with the God to whom the preacher points, transformation is hindered far more than it is helped.

Does my humor and manner of preaching cause people to focus on me? Or does my preaching help lead people to long for the grace of God?

When week after week the post-sermon buzz is more about the preacher than the message, more about the preacher's gifts than the Giver of all gifts, the Church is in trouble. Some preachers cultivate fans more than they nurture disciples. Some draw people to themselves more than they bear witness to Jesus Christ.

As a church-planter expressed it recently, "All you need in America to start a church is a great sound system and a charismatic speaker." If so, that is not the Church. If so, there will be no real transformation.

If we are preaching God's Word and not merely "tickling ears," then we will make clear that we are calling people to be "a living sacrifice," an echo of Jesus' own life and death. Transformation will involve us and our congregations in actions that will be costly and sacrificial, maybe even to the extreme.

C.S. Lewis said by contrast that sometimes the impression preachers leave is that they are simply "mild-mannered people exhorting mild-mannered people to be more mild-mannered." That is not the call of Paul. Or of Jesus.

3. Assured hope. Paul expresses confidence in the task of preaching and teaching because of his implied assurance that God intends to use it. For what? To " … not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of our minds, that we may prove what is the will of God, what is good, and acceptable, and perfect."

Preaching for deep spiritual renewal then involves at least two different elements: (1) calling people away from any conformity to the world that undermines God's work in our lives, and (2) calling them toward a fundamental change of perception that alters every dimension of how we live and causes us to do the will of God in the world.

This is God's assured plan and is the hope that is to undergird every preacher.

This negative and positive challenge disciplines our preaching. The faithful proclamation of the Word pierces our consciences, addresses all our relationships, realigns our priorities, redistributes our values, expands our imaginations.

The cosmic vision Paul paints in Romans makes it clear that the Father did not send, the Son did not die and rise, and the Spirit did not come in order for God's people to stay the same. The world waits with groaning for our salvation to be worked into and worked out from our lives.

The Word of God called into being what was not. The Word of God made flesh spoke life out of death. The Word of God preached bears witness by that same authority to a work of spiritual transformation that remakes all things in Jesus Christ.

This means the preacher will be changed. So will the congregation.

And so will the world.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.