A Recall Notice for Sermons?

Earlier this year the automaker recalled my 12-year-old pickup truck. There was concern, the recall notice said, about possible rusting at a critical point in the vehicle's frame. About the same time, I heard a rumor that, if the rusting was bad enough, I'd be given a generous discount on the purchase of a new vehicle. My imagination lit up. On inspection day at the auto dealership, I hoped for lots of rust.

But when my truck was inspected, alas, no rust was found … on the frame anyway. This meant that my pickup is likely to remain with me for another 12 years.

When I told a friend about my experience, he commiserated and then asked if I had ever preached a sermon that needed to be recalled. He thought his idea was kind of funny, and I chuckled with him.

But later, I reflected on his idea more seriously. What might a sermon-recall sound like? I wondered.

"Dear Church. There were critical flaws in last Sunday's sermon. Please delete it from your memory. The sermon will be repaired this week and re-preached this coming Sunday."

This led to asking myself if I'd ever preached sermons that should've been recalled. And the answer was, sadly, yes. How many? Only heaven knows.

I've enjoyed telling the story of the preacher whose sermon cried for recall in every way. When he realized that he'd lost the congregation, he said, most piously, "There's more to be said on this subject, but Jesus is leading me to wait until another time." The congregation stood and sang, "What a friend we have in Jesus."

I think the first sermon of mine that deserved a recall was on the biblical view of sex. I preached it at age 24, which hints at the possibility of a lack of wisdom and experience. A few minutes into the sermon I already knew I was "dying"—from lack of content, depth, and delivery. When I finally put the sermon out of its misery, I turned to the worship leader and whispered, "You end things." He nodded, and I exited the sanctuary, slipped through a side door, and sprinted to our home a block away. There I laid down on the couch, put a pillow over my head, and tried to pretend that the day had never happened.

A year or two after that disaster, I preached another recallable sermon, this time about parenting children. I was not yet myself a father, but I self-righteously pounded those who were inadequate mothers and fathers. I simply bombed. On Monday morning a father of four who had been present stormed into my office and said, "You need to go into the Army; they'd make a man out of you." Our dialogue went downhill from there.

Then there were occasional sermons where I tried to parse complicated doctrinal issues, sermons where I offered overly-simple pronouncements on sticky moral and ethical matters, and sermons where I passionately tried and failed to trigger revival in America in 29 minutes.

I'm guessing (wildly so) that over the last 45 years, I have preached 3,500 sermons. How many of them qualified for recall, I do not know, but those that did probably fit some of these categories.

• Sermons where I did all the intellectual homework but neglected the necessary spiritual preparation. In other words I brought my mind into the pulpit but left my soul at home. Or, to put it another way, I failed to first run the sermon through my own soul to see what I had to learn, where I needed to repent, how I could change. If the sermon didn't fit me, how could I be sure that it could fit anyone else?

Thanks to J.I. Packer I have these words by Puritan John Owen (17th century): "A man preacheth that sermon only well unto others which preacheth itself in his own soul. And he that doth not feed on and thrive in the digestion of the food which he provides for others will scarce make it savoury unto them; yea, he knows not but that the food he hath provided may be poison, unless he have really tasted of it himself. If the word do not dwell with power in us, it will not pass with power from us."

Rather blunt, that John Owen.

• Sermons where I succumbed to the temptation to charm the audience with my ability to tell a story, spin a joke, arouse strong emotion that smelled like spiritual conviction but wasn't.

This temptation explains why a comment by English theologian James Denney (19th century) can be found in the cover leaf of my Bible: "No man is able to show himself to be clever and, at the same time, demonstrate that Jesus is mighty to save."

• Sermons where I forgot that many of the people in the congregation had just finished a week in the larger world where they had experienced broken hearts, humiliating failures, terrible physical pain, fear and more fear, sin and more sin.

One man—a reporter for our city's newspaper—once told me, "When I enter worship, I come from a week in which I have slogged through the sludge of the city's evil in search of stories. Often my moral and spiritual compass seems frozen. What I desperately need is a word of hope, a reminder that God is still on his throne, a spiritual bath, if you please. If you can't help make that happen in your sermon, I'd rather spend the time walking the woods."

• Sermons where I pulled my punches and, because I didn't want to offend, I denied the Bible its full authority. Origen once likened preachers to "arrows of God."

"But what is rather sad is that I see very few arrows of God," he wrote. "There are few who so speak that they inflame the heart of the hearer, drag him away from his sin, and convert him to repentance. There are few who unveil the light of the future hope, the wonder of heaven, and the glory of God's kingdom to such effect that by their earnest preaching they succeed in persuading men to despise the visible and seek the invisible."

• But of those sermons which might have deserved recall, the ones that concern me most are the ones where I may have failed to call people to Jesus, where they could experience the redeeming power of his love.

Some years ago I visited with one of the most acclaimed pastor/preachers in American during the 20th century. He was an old man at the time, soon to die. At one point in our conversation he said, "In my years of preaching, I offered a lot of advice, but my greatest regret is that I didn't appreciate the importance of directing people to the feet of Jesus."

This comment can be contrasted with one made by Quaker-founder, George Fox, who said of his own preaching, "I took men to Jesus Christ and left them there."

Throughout my life I have been a distant disciple of the Rev. Dr. Charles Simeon (for 53 years the Anglican vicar at Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge, 1783-1836). Scarcely any sermon of his (and he preached thousands of them) could ever been subject to recall. Perhaps it was because he measured each presentation by these simple criteria:

"Does (this sermon) uniformly tend

TO HUMBLE THE SINNER

TO EXALT THE SAVIOR

TO PROMOTE HOLINESS"

Over the years I have tried harder and harder to regard Simeon's criteria as the ultimate measure of what I might bring to a small or large collection of worshippers. And to the extent that I have been faithful to this three-point metric, I have found it less and less necessary to concern myself with recalls.

Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership Journal and chancellor of Denver Seminary.