(Finding a need to fill these days is not difficult. People can identify plenty of their emotional, physical, and social needs. Whether the gospel we preach can meet all those needs, real and perceived, is another matter.
Does accepting the gospel solve your financial pressures, rekindle romance, or prevent your children from straying? Can preachers legitimately promise that the gospel will make life work better?
LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and David Goetz asked four respected preachers what here-and-now promises we can make that God will keep:
-Charles Blake is pastor of West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, California, where he has served since 1969. He is also a bishop in his denomination, presiding over 250 Southern California churches. In 1993, “Ebony” magazine listed him among America’s greatest black preachers.
-David Jeremiah is pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church and president of Christian Heritage College in El Cajon, California. Before coming to Shadow Mountain (formerly called Scott Memorial Baptist Church), for twelve years he pastored Blackhawk Baptist Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
-Bruce Larson is co-pastor of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. Before that he pastored for ten years at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle, Washington, and prior to that served as president of Faith at Work, a church renewal ministry.
-Charles Swindoll is pastor of First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton, California, a radio preacher on “Insight for Living,” and a prolific author. In addition to his pastoral ministry, next July he will become the president of Dallas Theological Seminary in Texas.)
LEADERSHIP:
What do your listeners today expect to get out of a sermon?
CHARLES BLAKE:
They expect preaching to help them endure all the challenges life throws their way, and to do so in a more peaceful and joyous way.
CHARLES SWINDOLL:
I see an increased loneliness in the crowd, a longing in the human heart for a place to belong. The family has broken down; our friends are few, and of those we have, we’re not sure, if pressed to the wall, how deep the friendships would go. I see a longing for connectedness. Listeners today want someone to speak directly to them, with warmth and insight, about things that matter.
BRUCE LARSON:
At the same time, though, I see almost a conspiracy against true intimacy, for connectedness and belonging. People will give financially, will pray, will feed the hungry, will paint the basement walls, but still resist sitting down face-to-face and asking someone, “How are you really doing?”
There seems to be an ambivalence: “I’m lonely and dying for intimacy, but it’s too threatening.”
DAVID JEREMIAH:
The expectations of people today are largely short term. They want to know if Jesus will make their life better tomorrow morning when they crawl out of bed. They wonder, “Will all of this gunk in my life go away?”
LEADERSHIP:
Can you tell them, with integrity, that the gospel will do that for them?
JEREMIAH:
I’ve actually heard preachers say, “If you accept Jesus Christ, he will take away your troubles.” If we sell that message when we preach, we’re dishonest. Inviting Christ to take over the reins of your life, in fact, may radically confuse and complicate your life–at least in the initial stages.
SWINDOLL: We cannot promise the person whose wife has just walked out on him–and perhaps should have–that we’ve got the answer to bring her back. The gospel is not a rabbit’s foot granting us our specific wishes.
Most people do not arrive Sunday morning with the right questions. They come with an idea of what they want. They want their marriage back. They want peace. They want contentment. Or they want their business to flourish. Perhaps the best thing for them is for their business to fail. But that’s awfully hard to hear–and hard to preach.
As a preacher I can legitimately say, “If you stay with this Book, with this message of hope, your life can get straightened out.” But I can’t promise to fulfill their agenda.
JEREMIAH:
Ultimately, however, having Jesus Christ is far better than not having Jesus Christ. Life cannot be figured out unless understood in light of eternity. There’s no way to that eternal perspective apart from a commitment to Jesus Christ.
LEADERSHIP:
Besides eternity, what can we legitimately promise the gospel will do for people here and now?
JEREMIAH:
I’m constantly amazed at how the Bible speaks to our daily problems. Once I put together a list of questions and asked our people to survey informally their non-Christian friends and neighbors.
“Go to your neighbors,” I said, “and ask them, ‘If the church were to speak to an issue on the family, what should it be?’ “
The results were surprising. There were questions I never would have thought of. For instance, one of the issues young families were struggling with was peer pressure. They felt pressure to drive the right car, to be upgrading constantly to a nicer house. I’d never preached a message on peer pressure.
Yet the Bible is full of illustrations and help for handling peer pressure. God’s Word does speak to the ordinary experiences of our listeners.
BLAKE:
Life does get better when we accept Christ. Life with Jesus is better than life without him.
God has revealed his wisdom through his Word, giving us many practical principles about how we can conduct out lives. Those principles are, in many cases, very productive despite the existence of evil, pain, sickness, and death.
If the gospel were eliminated from society, society would fragment much more than it already has. The church, though not a social service institution, performs a significant social service to society. The sanctity of life, the dignity of work, the sacredness and the worth of the individual–these are values helping people function in society.
The gospel also provides guidance and direction, emotional reinforcement, and a sense of purpose, which infuses life with meaning. Without these things, people literally cannot live; society falls apart.
Someone has said that the Ten Commandments are the best economic development program conceivable. Remove murder. Honor fathering and mothering and reduce illegitimate births and teenage pregnancy. Remove stealing–and you’ve got a greatly improved society.
SWINDOLL:
We have a family in our church whose teenage son was in an auto accident. Because of the severity of the accident, the doctors did a CAT scan on him to check for brain damage and, in the process, found a tumor instead. It was malignant. They did surgery immediately and got 90 percent of the tumor. But the surgery created a swelling that caused brain damage.
Last Sunday that family, with their 17-year-old boy wearing a baseball cap, stood in front of our congregation and testified to the difference the gospel had made in their lives. The church had known that boy when he was healthy, strong, moving through life like all of our teenagers. And now he was stopped in that growth, and the family was graying prematurely, their lives suddenly changed forever. But they stood up that Sunday, not counting on some miracle to relieve them of their suffering but on God’s grace to pull them through the long haul.
I married that couple almost twenty years ago. And last Sunday I saw in front of me a much different couple than I married. Their perspective had changed. Now they see a whole new dimension of the living God. There’s no bitterness. There’s wisdom in place of a little knowledge. Patience has replaced instant gratification.
Solid, biblical preaching, I believe, has prepared them for this terrible time, giving them perspective. That’s a benefit of the gospel they wouldn’t get from the street or the office.
LARSON:
There’s a story floating around about President Lincoln during the Civil War when he would attend a church not far from the White House on Wednesday nights. The preacher, a Dr. Gurley, allowed the president and his Secret Service man to sit in the pastor’s study with the door open to the chancel, so they wouldn’t be a distraction to the people.
One Wednesday evening as Lincoln and the Secret Service agent were walking back to the White House, the Secret Service man said, “What did you think of tonight’s sermon?”
Lincoln reportedly said, “Well, it was brilliantly conceived, biblical, relevant, and well presented.”
“So it was a great sermon?”
“No,” Lincoln replied. “It failed. It failed because Dr. Gurley did not ask us to do something great.”
The great offer of the gospel is the call to adventure. God’s dream for his church is that we become a kingdom of priests (Exod. 19:6). That means we can become change agents, God’s ministers to the world. We are God’s representatives, instruments for feeding the hungry, for clothing the naked, for building shelters. We are commissioned to put our arms around the hurting person who’s just lost a spouse, whose child has brain cancer. That’s our ministry.
A year and a half ago, I had cancer surgery, during which time my grandson also died. My faith not only helped me through those dark times but gave me a message to help others. Life becomes glorious not just when Jesus helps me with my problems but when I can, in turn, help someone else.
SWINDOLL:
I would also add the great four-letter word, hope. When a preacher stands up to declare the Word of God, applying it to my life, he’s saying there’s hope for me. To the couple whose home is broken up, the gospel holds out hope beyond that home. To the woman who has just heard from the doctor that ugly statement, “It’s malignant,” the gospel message is still hope, even in death. Nothing else in the world gives people hope like the gospel.
LEADERSHIP:
What temptations do you face when putting together messages that persuasively present the benefits of the gospel?
SWINDOLL:
One is to illustrate with stories that play too much on the heartstrings. There is a place, of course, for moving illustrations: If I live to be 150, I’ll never read a more emotion-filled story than the parable of the Prodigal Son, where a father says good-bye to his son, knowing the heartache he’s going to suffer.
Still, we should be attuned to the effect of our illustrations and not use them for the wrong reasons.
Related to that would be breaking confidence in the attempt to find gripping stories. Let’s say in counseling a young couple you’ve just heard an incredible story that fits beautifully with Sunday’s text. So in a moment of weakness, or perhaps hurry, you weave it into your message.
Unfortunately, the couple is sitting in the audience, and they feel exploited. I’ve had people say to me, “I’d like to tell you this, but I’d like you never to share it in a book or sermon.”
Such a comment shows that people are aware of our propensity as preachers to use them as illustrations. After I’ve promised someone my confidence, I’ve later thought, Man, that would have been great for next Sunday or for that sermon I’m working on. But integrity required me to bury that story.
BLAKE:
Another temptation is failing to deal with the complex issues that don’t preach well, such as prejudice and racial reconciliation. Or it may be a subject you don’t really have the answer for, but it’s something the church needs to pray about, to agonize over. It could be a corporate sin of the church or even of society. It’s easy to ignore the tough stuff.
This type of preaching may get us kicked out of churches rather than growing a large church. It may ruffle some feathers and alienate some powerful people. But for the sake of integrity, we sometimes need to do so.
In my community, I preach regularly against the ills of substance and alcohol abuse. I once was confronted by a powerful man who is an executive for a large liquor company. He wasn’t happy with my preaching.
“You’re hurting my business,” he snapped. I had to resist the temptation to placate his anger and instead to tell him that perhaps his business needed to be hurt.
JEREMIAH:
Sometimes I find I’ve just tacked on Christ at the end of my message as sort of an afterthought. In preaching to the needs of the listener, though, I cannot get lost in the need, the problem they feel, so that I lose sight of the gospel. I have to move to the place where they see Christ as the answer to their ultimate questions.
BLAKE: We can also confuse God’s Word with our own opinion. The apostle Paul sometimes made clear distinctions. At times, he said, “The Lord is saying this. This is of the Lord and is authoritative.” Other times, he said, “I thought this out, and it seems entirely reasonable to me that you should do such and such, but I’m not going to impose it upon you as if the Lord himself had said it.”
It may be a deep-seated conviction we have or a personal lifestyle issue we care about deeply. But when I require everyone else to share my convictions, I blur the line between what bodes Word is saying and my own beliefs.
SWINDOLL:
Hugh Latimer was one of the great British reformers who preached to the likes of King Henry VIII. Once as he was preaching on the evils of the English kingdom, he heard a voice, “Latimer, Latimer, Latimer, the king of England is here. Watch what you say.”
Just about the time he was tempted to believe that voice, another voice whispered, “Latimer, Latimer, Latimer, the King of Kings is here. Watch what you say.”
What a privilege it is to know we have the highest authority standing alongside us. We have the King of Kings on our side. It’s helpful to remember that when we’re intimidated by who’s sitting in our audience: the King of Kings is here, and it’s his message.
LEADERSHIP:
Why do people resist the gospel?
LARSON:
Sometimes, tragically, it’s the messenger, not the message, that people resist. When we point our fingers and say, “You should … ” instead of “We should … ” we elevate ourselves above the message. Communicating, even subtly, that we have it all together turns people off. They’re only open to hearing what I as a fellow discoverer have discovered about the good news. People today need to be able to identify with the messenger.
SWINDOLL:
Recently I spoke out of Luke 14 where Jesus is eating at the house of a prominent Pharisee. After observing how the guests at the party jostled for places of honor at the dinner table, Jesus turns to the host and tells him that the next time he gives a party, he should include not just his friends and rich neighbors but the poor, the blind, the disabled.
The text provided a classic moment for me to emphasize how those with disabilities are often overlooked. It was an opportunity to spend a few minutes emphasizing the needs of the disabled.
As I was preparing, I thought, I need to be careful: I could come across as one who always is sensitive. So I decided to risk.
That Sunday morning, I said, “Let me tell you what sometimes happens to me when I’m in a busy parking lot and the only available parking space is the one with the blue wheelchair painted on the asphalt. I sometimes feel resentful. I’ve caught myself thinking, I wish I had one of those signs on my car. And then I feel ashamed of myself for thinking like that.”
Afterwards, many came up to me saying, “I thought I was the only one who thought like that.”
Over these thirty plus years of preaching, I’ve found it helpful to remember that Christ is our model. As preachers, we are to be good models, but we are not absolutely blameless. As much as we wish we were hospitable, we are not always hospitable.
When I come across as untouchable or above what I’m preaching, I create expectations I can never fulfill, and, furthermore, what I’m communicating is simply untrue.
BLAKE:
Preaching attempts to get people to change their direction. Most of us naturally resist, though, something different than what we intended to do. We’re so inclined to try to let our humanity show through–whether telling somebody off or hating a person of another race.
The preacher is saying, “Go in this direction.” That itself causes resistance to the change element of the gospel.
LARSON:
Psychologists tell us that all people perceive change as loss. Preachers are asking people to change their attitudes, their lifestyle, and how they spend their money. One of the first questions people ask is “What will I lose as a result of this change?”
LEADERSHIP:
When you cite the Bible these days, do people accept it as authoritative? Or do you have to persuade them the Bible is true?
BLAKE:
The times have certainly changed. The authority of the Bible is not as widely recognized as it might have been some time ago. Formerly preachers approached Sunday morning by saying essentially, “The Bible has authority because God said it. Accept it, believe it, live by it.”
Today people are more inclined to listen when we say, “This is what the Bible says. Go ahead and test it; you’ll find it to be authentic in your own experience.”
SWINDOLL:
In the past, folks who came to church often brought a Bible and believed most of it. Today, some arrive at church with arms folded, frowning-and without a Bible.
Years ago I was teaching a Bible class in an athletic dorm on the campus of the University of Texas. I was teaching on the Book of John and got to the section in chapter eight where Jesus says, “Before Abraham was I am.”
What a great time to emphasize the deity of Christ, I thought. So I waxed eloquent for ten minutes on the pre-existence of Christ. Finally, an athlete in the back of the room held up his big brawny arm and said, “Chuck, I’ve got a question.”
Here’s my chance, I thought, to drive home this great point of theology.
“Who is this guy Abraham?”
I was totally blown away; this athlete didn’t understand who Abraham was, much less the deity of Christ! I don’t believe the general audience today has a grasp of the Book we’ve given our lives to.
Even so, my job is not to try to make the Bible relevant; I show them how relevant it is. That’s not picking at words. Relevance comes from the text itself. In the final analysis, “Thus says the Lord” speaks for itself.
One of my mentors used to say two things that I still remember to this day: You haven’t given the gospel until you’ve given people something to believe, and you haven’t truly preached Christ until you have mentioned by name the cross of Christ. That’s convicting.
JEREMIAH:
Our church continues to see an infusion of baby boomer families. Their pilgrimage back to the church has a familiar refrain: “I walked away from the Bible and the church when I was younger, but now that I have children, I want them to have a sense of right and wrong.”
Even if they’re not interested in becoming Christians themselves, they associate morality with the Bible. Society is not so far gone that it doesn’t recognize the Bible as a form of moral authority.
LEADERSHIP:
How can we winsomely present the gospel so it touches the heart?
LARSON:
By telling stories. Preachers need to be witnesses. A witness is somebody who says, “I was there when God did something.” As the witness dimension is woven into our sermons, people begin to say, “I can understand that. That’s do-able.”
Then the gospel doesn’t have to be presented with hype or argument.
One of the greatest Christians I’ve known was a garage mechanic from Long Island, New York, named Al Granke, a simple, low-key man with little education and dirty fingernails.. We used to travel together on lay witness teams, and I once asked him how he had come to meet Jesus. He had heard about a newspaper editor named Carl Henry who was holding a Bible study at Long Island City.
“I went for two Saturday mornings,” Al said, “and after the second Saturday I stayed afterwards and said to Carl, ‘I can’t buy this Jesus you’re talking about. I can’t buy this Bible. I can’t buy any of it.’
“I sputtered on until Carl said, ‘Listen, Al. If you’re satisfied with your life the way it is, forget all this stuff. You don’t need it.’
“Of course, I wasn’t,” Al said, “I went right home and accepted Jesus.”
We must be able to say, “Here’s God’s offer. Do you want it? Is your life everything you want it to be? If not, here’s the good news.”
SWINDOLL:
The original Rocky movie is a story common to cheap novels, but I found myself irresistibly moved by it. It’s about an underdog, an absolute nobody, who takes on the impossible and becomes the world boxing champ. After seeing it for the first time, I tried to analyze why it affected me so powerfully. I think it was because it’s a story about someone who said, “I can do that,” and he did it.
Stories that touch my heart lift me out of the realm of my experience into dimensions I’ve never tapped into before. But I suddenly believe I can. Preaching that changes lives brings people to the point where they say, “I can make a difference, eternally.” And they leave determined to make it happen.
BLAKE:
Inside all of us is a longing to test the limits of our potential, to be the best that we can be, to soar. Effective preaching articulates the visions of what we can be. As our listeners reach for that, change becomes necessary, but change then becomes a small price to pay to soar.
If the Holy Spirit does not breathe upon the preacher, though, attempting to reach the hearts of our listeners is a vain exercise. What we want to have happen really won’t happen. Only God can make his Word touch the heart of his people.
JEREMIAH:
Last Christmas season my wife and I were walking through a mall. Suddenly a woman darted out of a pet store and said to us, “You’ve got to come in here. I just got a new Angora cat, and I hear your wife likes cats. You’ve got to see this cat.”
We learned she had been attending our church. She led us into her store and began telling us about her life.
“My husband owns a number of these pet stores in San Diego,” she said. “And Pastor Jeremiah, I can’t believe it, but he’s been coming to church with me. He’s Jewish, and one of the reasons he’s coming is that you’ve been preaching from the Old Testament. He loves the Old Testament.”
Ten months later, this man called my secretary, Glenda. “I want to come in and see Pastor Jeremiah,” he said. “My wife and I want to join the church, but we’ve got a problem: we’re from two different faiths. I’m a Jew, and my wife’s a Christian.” So Glenda made an appointment.
He came in last Friday and said, “I’ve been listening to you for almost a year, and I want to tell you where I’m at.
“I’ve been on a spiritual search for some time. At first I thought, If I could just get back to my Jewish roots again, so I got re-bar mitzvahed at age 40. But the next day, I felt no different. It didn’t change anything.
“I have this feeling that Jesus Christ isn’t like that. I think I understand this stuff about Jesus; I don’t have any problem with him being the Messiah. I understand him up here (pointing to his head), but I can’t get him from here to here (pointing to his heart). Maybe you can help me with that.”
So, I shared the gospel with him, and he bowed and prayed to receive Christ. On Sunday, after I had given our traditional invitation to come forward, here comes this man, whose grandfather was an Orthodox Rabbi, walking with his wife to the front of the church. It was a powerful moment. People were weeping. (His wife had been in a Bible study in our church, and the women in the study had been praying for him.)
I’ll never forget that moment. Does the gospel change people? Absolutely! If we want to touch people’s hearts, we can never lose our enthusiasm for the transforming power of the gospel.
SWINDOLL:
I’ve recently started a Sunday night series I’m calling “Golden Nuggets from Forgotten Places.” I’m deliberately digging into Kings and Chronicles for stories the hurried eye would miss. Just last Sunday night I spoke from 2 Chronicles 15. There a prophet named Azariah, who, like a shooting star, crosses the biblical sky only once in a blaze of glory, touching a king named Asa.
After a military victory, King Asa is heading back toward Jerusalem when he meets up with Azariah, the prophet. Azariah tells the king that if he follows the Lord God, God will bless him. If he does not, he will have to suffer the consequences. It’s a basic prophecy–nothing earth shattering.
But then Azariah concludes by saying, “But as for you, be strong and do not give up, for your work will be rewarded.”
King Asa takes that message and, as a result, leads an entire reformation of the nation, including dethroning his own mother because she had built a detestable idol. God then gives him twenty years of peace because in one moment of time, a preacher stepped into his path and said, “Asa, listen to what God has said.” Asa listened and changed the destiny of an entire nation.
I’d like to think that on any given Sunday, there may be an Asa listening to us, and we can offer a word of encouragement: “Take heart. Be of good courage. God will reward you.” Who doesn’t need to hear that message? It’s refreshing to hear someone say, “God is in this. He’s ready to make something of your life.”
It could turn a whole body of people around.
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
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Copyright © 1994 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
