How we’re tempted to bend the Word to fit our words! It is a most devious temptation: to preach selectively, to avoid a lot of subjects, to slide by passages we don’t want to talk about, to manipulate Scripture to say what I would have inspired it to say had I been the Holy Spirit.
—Stuart Briscoe
Whereas, preaching is a valuable gift of God, and
Whereas, the proclamation of God’s revealed truth is a major aspect
of pastoral ministry, and
Whereas, through the preaching of the Word, people come to faith,
and
Whereas, the Enemy of souls, the Enemy of the divine plan, will
oppose our preaching, and
Whereas, the Enemy will attack preaching first through the
preacher,
Therefore, let all be warned that the Enemy will use his most ancient
method: temptation.
Like everyone else, preachers are susceptible to the notorious temptations. We need say little about that. There are enough contemporary illustrations of preachers falling into conspicuous sin.
However, Satan utilizes his delicate tools along with the blunt. In fact, subtle temptations can be the more dangerous, especially for one charged with the authority of proclaiming God’s Word. We do well, then, to examine the discreet temptations that catch even alert preachers off guard.
Pride
A woman came up to the pastor at the end of the service and said, “That was a wonderful sermon. Pastor, absolutely wonderful.” She gushed on about the brilliance of the sermon.
The pastor, a little embarrassed, demurred softly, “Well, it wasn’t me. It was the Lord.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that good!” the woman replied.
This old story pinpoints one area of pastoral vulnerability: pride. “Buttering up the pastor,” as the British would say, is practically a custom in America—a way, perhaps, for people to show the pastor they are model parishioners who listen to and are blessed by the sermon.
That makes life awkward for pastors. They should be courteous to those trying to express something genuine, but, on the other hand, they mustn’t believe everything people say.
So, how does a preacher respond to compliments? If I sense people are just saying the accepted thing, I shake their hand, smile, and reply, “Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you”—a noncommittal but gracious response.
But if someone shows obvious enthusiasm about the sermon— “That was really helpful!”—and says more than the stock compliment, I’ll ask, “Would you mind telling me what was helpful? It would improve my preaching if I knew.”
I’ve found I have to use that question carefully. If the person was only repeating a platitude, my question may embarrass him when he can’t think of anything to say in response. So I don’t use that comeback unless I’m pretty sure the person means what he says.
Pride is fostered by other sources, too—church architecture, for example. Most pulpits stand in prominent places. The congregation sits in rows seemingly designed to produce dutiful, heedful people. The amplification system magnifies the preacher’s voice. Such a setting may lure a preacher into quiet conceit—These people are here to hear me I must be doing something pretty wonderful.
And perhaps the preacher is doing something wonderful simply by filling a role. Maybe some people would be blessed even if the pastor preached on “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
But most us who preach recognize that if we want to make a lasting contribution, we must communicate not ourselves but the divine Word, depending not on vain human effort but the power of the Spirit of God. Pride can find no lodging in me when that’s my understanding.
To keep this truth before me when I preach, often, just before I leave my office, I’ll pray that hymn: “My gracious Master and my God, assist me to proclaim …” I tell God, “Lord, you’re my gracious Master and my Lord, and I’m here with your message. I’m an unworthy communicator of it, dependent upon your divine assistance.”
That prayer recognizes I am the one preaching. Truth is being communicated through my personality, my mind, my voice, and my body. I’m not an inanimate instrument but an agent of God’s working. I am involved in this enterprise. At the same time, of course, this prayer recognizes my utter dependence upon God.
Pride is an insidious enemy. Usually it doesn’t harm us brazenly. It doesn’t necessarily incapacitate ministry. Instances abound of God blessing ministries led by haughty people. That’s because it’s not the minister God blesses but the truth being communicated.
But pride can destroy preachers and eventually make them what Paul called castaways. Although God uses the truth a sorry example may proclaim, the preacher, nonetheless, should accept responsibility for living as well as preaching the gospel.
Imperiousness
A young man once came to talk to me in Britain. The subject of churches came up, and he said he wouldn’t go to church.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well, for one thing, you have to sit and listen to a guy talking who’s six feet above contradiction.”
That phrase has stuck with me. We pastors are tempted to adopt the “six feet above contradiction” mindset, isolating ourselves from situations that could contradict or challenge us. We can physically isolate ourselves by appearing from the sacred chamber, preaching from the sacred desk, and disappearing into the sacred chamber immediately afterward, never having had contact with the people. (In fact, the more known a preacher gets, the less accessible he or she may become.)
Or the isolation may be supercilious, where we listen with ill-disguised impatience to the concerns of the people and inwardly resist: Well, I’ll listen to you because I’m paid to. But quite frankly, you don’t know what you’re talking about. After all, I’m the one with the credentials around here.
Because my personal credentials are meager—I’ve never attended Bible college or seminary—I’m less inclined to pride myself in my qualifications. But I can become impatient with people when they object to something I’ve said. After all, they haven’t studied the question as thoroughly as I have. While I see their point, from my perspective, they’ve got it all wrong.
When that happens, I’m in danger of cutting them off— albeit politely. But however polite, people pick up when I’m not taking them seriously.
Those tempted with imperiousness also tend to say things with tremendous authority, like the preacher who scribbled in the margin of his sermon notes: argument weak—shout louder. Bombast and dynamic rhetoric will be shot full of holes by thinking listeners.
I aim to listen not only to what people say to me, but also to what I’m saying to them. Not infrequently when I’m speaking, I’ll say something that, upon hearing it, doesn’t make sense or is grammatically incorrect. At that point I stop and say, “Did you hear what I just said? Can you believe an Englishman ever would say anything like that?” Or sometimes I’ll remark, “I don’t know if you were listening, but I was, and I heard myself say something ridiculous.” That light humor communicates that I’m monitoring my words and I expect the people to, as well. It also gives them permission to call me up short if I become imperious.
Laziness
When I entered the pastorate, I talked to Hal Brooks, a dear pastor friend in Fort Worth, now deceased, who cautioned me that pastors can work extremes and get away with it. You can labor from dawn to midnight, or you can become bone idle.
When I pressed him, he said, “It’s easy for a pastor to do nothing much, as long as he shows up and keeps the wheels turning. People’s expectations aren’t all that high, so normally it isn’t too difficult to meet them. And if anybody in authority questions him about what he’s doing, or more specifically what he’s not doing, he can offer a spiritual answer to a practical question. That usually makes the lay person feel stupid and humiliated.”
Our preaching can also become lazy. We can keep carting out golden oldies. If people get restless, we can always rejoin, “But this is the simple gospel!”
The simple gospel, however, wasn’t meant to be a simplistic rehash of a few verses. The mystery of God’s nature, the depth of human need, the what and wherefores of salvation, and the glorious hope of eternity—these gospel truths bear fresh exploration each time we speak.
Slothful sermonizing begins with haphazard exegesis of the Scripture—reading a verse or two and stating the obvious. When we only circle our subject, our lack of preparation shows. Somebody said some preachers are like the children of Israel going around the walls of Jericho: they go round and round the subject with a tremendous amount of fanfare, and the thing falls flat.
Laziness also manifests itself in careless content. Little illustration and vague application convey that there’s been little preparation.
(Of course, in churches where there’s but one pastor who is expected to do everything, laziness many not be the fault. He or she just may not have time to prepare. Naturally, that’s a different story.)
To guard against such laziness, I take into the pulpit more material than I possibly can use in one sermon, which I then draw from as I preach.
An insightful woman in our congregation once commented, “I love attending the first service.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I enjoy seeing a sermon in the making. I’ve been to the other services, but in the first, I see the selectivity process going on. Sometimes as I watch the development of a point, I think to myself, I doubt if he’ll spend as much time on that the second time around.“
She’s right. I am working on a sermon while I’m giving it, not because I haven’t done my work before, but because I have an abundance of material to choose from as the sermon unfolds. I try to find and use that abundance to keep me from lazy preaching.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is related to sloth. Some preachers simply preach somebody else’s sermon. Although I’ve never met one who does, some preachers, I understand, literally read a canned sermon from a book.
On the other hand, I do encourage pastors to draw from others’ material. Nothing is completely original. Besides, exigencies of the pastorate sometimes demand we take advantage of others’ good ideas. For instance, my oldest son is in his first year as a pastor. He is run ragged with all the responsibilities. Since he’s a meticulous sort, sermon preparation takes hours. So when he tells me the series he’s working on, I give him outlines of the sermons I’ve preached in a similar series. I won’t give him the sermon, but the skeletons prove to be tremendous time savers.
There’s no point reinventing the wheel. All of us need to use the wheel, giving it our imprint as we go along. Most of us know the difference between utilizing other material judiciously and being so lazy that we plagiarize.
When I use someone else’s work directly, I give credit. One of Steve Brown’s recent books has a story about a flight he took in which a little girl across the aisle became ill and died. They made an emergency stop and took the body off the plane. Steve, concerned about how people were taking it, said to one of the flight attendants, “I’m a minister, and I’ll be glad to talk to anybody who might need some spiritual help.”
The attendant said something to the effect of, “Oh, I think they’ll be all right. We’ve given them free drinks.”
The week I read that account, it was absolutely right for my sermon. So I prefaced the story with, “I was reading recently a book by Steve Brown, minister of Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church, and he tells of being on an airplane when a little girl died.…” To say instead, “A while back, a little girl died in the seat across from me on an airplane …” would have been dishonest. There’s lots of good material well worth using if done so judiciously.
Word Twisting
How we’re tempted to bend the Word to fit our words! It is a most devious temptation: to preach selectively, to avoid a lot of subjects, to slide by passages we don’t want to talk about.
I’ve learned that rather than ducking a difficult passage, ifs better to say, “This is an extremely difficult passage, and I recognize a number of possible interpretations. Personally, I have difficulty with each one, and so I’m undecided.” That’s honest and fair, and people are usually satisfied with that. I can’t preach beyond what I understand, yet I’m not treating the Scripture with benign neglect.
Word twisting also takes the form of manipulating Scripture to say what I would have inspired it to say had I been the Holy Spirit. That temptation especially seduces the preacher who is enamored by a particular theme. Churchill said a fanatic is a person who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. In preaching, there’s a temptation to find our favorite subject in whatever text we take.
The temptation also appears when we preach character studies. It’s easy to read into a biblical character traits that simply aren’t supported by the facts. I’m blessed with a vivid imagination, and at times that blessing can be a curse.
People still remind me about a message I gave on John Mark and Barnabas. I preached that John Mark was frightened. In fact I called him “Chicken John Mark.” Then I started thinking about that allegation. Although Scripture says he left Paul and Barnabas in the middle of their journey, it doesn’t say why. Maybe I’m giving John Mark a bum rap. I’ll be spending eternity with him, and I don’t want him coming up to me saying, “Hey, Buddy, who are you calling chicken?“
Naturally, we can make some suppositions to fill out a story, but it’s best to soften our speech by saying, “I rather suspect …” or “I think …”
Such extrapolations from the text aren’t meant to be authoritative preaching; they’re more illustrative, allowing people to feel a degree of empathy with the character.
When I spoke of Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, I said, “And Peter pulls out his rusty sword, thinking, I’m gonna defend the Lord! When the high priest’s servant steps forward, Peter whacks off his ear.” Then I paused and asked, “Does Peter sound like the kind of guy who would just chop off somebody’s ear?” I then ventured into speculation, but let them know it: “I don’t think that’s what he was planning to do at all. I think he was out to split Malchus right down the middle—Mal on one side and Chus on the other—and Malchus simply ducked at the last minute.”
There’s absolutely no scriptural warrant for that, but it’s colorful. It paints a picture of this big, fiery, impetuous Peter swinging wildly with the sword and making an awful mess of things. As long as the main point of the character study is backed by Scripture, I feel I can take such excursions of imagination, if they are clearly labeled as such.
Self-promotion
A young preacher went to preach his first sermon. He’d done so much work on this masterpiece that he was full of his own importance. He entered the pulpit with tremendous confidence, but once up there, he blanked out and couldn’t think of a thing. Finally he came down from the pulpit utterly humiliated.
As he slumped down the steps, an old preacher said to him, “If you’d gone up the way you came down, you’d have come down the way you went up.”
The person who exudes a tremendous sense of cockiness, who’s full of himself, often is riding for a fall.
On the other hand, we’ve got an authoritative message. We needn’t be diffident or apologetic about God’s Word, or it will come across with an uncertain sound. Such authority mixed with humility is the delicate but necessary blend.
Self-promotion oozes out of our sermons when we begin to look great in all our stories, and everybody else comes across as a real dummy. I’ve caught myself doing that. Generally it’s better to tell self-deprecating stories.
Self-promotion also occurs when we use half-stories that make us look good because we tell only the good half, or when we name-drop. It also rears its ugly head when we appear always to have the right answer: “Somebody came to me with a problem, and I told him …”. Too many of these illustrations come across as self-promotion. And that’s not our business. Our task is God-promotion.
People Pleasing
Preachers have to wage a courageous battle against the temptation to become a people pleaser, especially when it comes at the expense of prophetic preaching. Sometimes the people need to hear a word they don’t want to hear, even if it puts our livelihood at stake.
There’s the old joke about the church looking for a pastor, and their job description contains such items as “a young man with the wisdom of one ripe in years” and “who visits all the parishioners and is always available in his office.” The final qualification is: “Who will expound the Word of God without fear and who will tell us with great authority exactly what we want to hear.”
That’s not far from the situation many pastors face. But I think of what Paul said to the Corinthians: “I care very little if I’m judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I don’t even judge myself. There is One who judges me, and that is the Lord.”
The only way to resist the powerful temptation to please people is to remember the simple truth that, first and foremost, we’re called to be faithful.
On the other hand, the older I get, the less dogmatic I’ve become. I like to think I’ve become more sensitive to people’s hurts and struggles. That means I’m tempted to soften the hard edges of Scripture at times.
Certainly if I’m corrupting the prophetic Word, even in tenderness, I need to resist the temptation. But if my tenderness arises from a pastor’s heart that’s aware of the pain in the congregation, and if I tailor (not adulterate) the biblical message for my people’s lives, then the mellowing is appropriate.
I was talking to a psychologist friend a few days ago. The discussion turned to the problems of pastors falling into immoral behavior. I asked him, “How should pastors guard against such eventualities?”
His answer surprised me: “Just be honest—strictly honest—with yourself at all times.”
Within the preaching context, his advice remains just as appropriate. Temptations, even the subtle variety, cannot stand against our strict, withering honesty.
Copyright © 1989 by Christianity Today
