People fail in their obedience not because we make the gospel too good but because we don’t make it good enough.
— Steve Brown
Years ago I preached a strong sermon on the subject of divorce. I held no punches, and to drive home my passion about the sinfulness of divorce, I said, “I, for one, will never get a divorce!”
Later that week, the wife of the chairman of the church board came to my office. Both she and her husband had been previously divorced, though in each case, I learned in retrospect, they had biblical justification. She was hurt and angry about the sermon, “You shouldn’t be so judgmental,” she said.
I didn’t understand what she was talking about, and I wasn’t about to “wimp out” on what I thought were clear biblical principles. So I defended myself.
What she said stuck with me, however. Years later, I looked back on that message and realized she was essentially right. Not that the teaching was wrong, but my attitude was. When I said, “I will never get a divorce!” I was acting elitist, looking down my nose at people, and they deserved better than that.
“The gospel faithfully preached meddles with everything else on earth,” said Henry Ward Beecher. Especially when we preach the hard truths of the gospel, we know what Beecher means. The gospel invades every nook and cranny of hearers’ lives: their sexuality, thoughts, dreams, bank accounts, secret sins, goals, priorities, motivations, family, work.
We want to “meddle” but without self-righteousness. We want to build up the congregation, not condemn it. We want to speak the truth but do so in love.
So how do we do that?
Grace First and Last
In an Episcopal church, an older woman came forward for Communion and knelt alongside others. She had been troubled about her own sinfulness, and as she knelt there, she felt increasingly weighed down with guilt. When the priest approached with the bread, she was overwhelmed with her unworthiness to receive the body of Christ, so she began to back away from the Communion rail. The priest, however, quickly placed the wafer in front of her lips and said, “Take it, woman. It’s for sinners. It’s for you.”
This is my fundamental approach not only to Communion but also to preaching: it is for sinners, and its basis is pure grace. This is especially true when it comes to preaching the hard side of the gospel. Unless I’m clear on the priority of radical grace, I will never be able to preach the hard side of the gospel effectively.
I once knew a preacher who had a reputation for prophetic preaching. He preached against false doctrine, against sin, against this and that, and he did so with great poise. He wielded the sword well, and everybody told him he was wonderful.
He was offered a church once, and he mentioned to me in a rather arrogant way that one of the elders of this church smoked cigars. He had called to ask me what I thought of him taking the church. We finally got around to the point.
“Do you want me to tell you the truth, or do you want me to say nice things to you?” I asked.
“Just tell me the truth.”
“I don’t think you should take that church because I don’t think you can love those people. Until you sin big enough and live long enough, you will not be the pastor they need. Your problem is everybody tells you you’re a wonderful preacher. When you make people feel guilty, they compliment you so you won’t think they’ve committed that sin. If you go to that church, you’ll think you’re the best thing since Spurgeon, but people will feel condemned and guilty all the time.”
What this preacher didn’t realize, and what a great many pastors don’t realize, is that people walk into the church already feeling guilty and condemned. I don’t have to tell a man who is sleeping with his secretary that he’s doing wrong. He knows he’s doing wrong, especially if he’s a believer. In fact, in twenty-eight years as a pastor, I’ve never met a Christian who didn’t want to be better.
Furthermore, as C.S. Lewis eloquently argued in Mere Christianity, unbelievers also have an internal moral compass. They know instinctively when they’ve done wrong, and if they bother to show up in church some Sunday, it’s not because they think everything is just fine!
So I don’t have to convict people of their sin; the Holy Spirit is already at work in their lives. But I do have to let people know what they don’t know: that grace is real, that it is unmerited, that it is unconditional. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Martin Lloyd Jones, the great British preacher, once said that if you’re not nearly antinomian, you’re not a Christian. He was preaching out of the Book of Romans at the time. He said if you don’t see grace as the first and last word of the Christian life, if you’re not a borderline heretic about grace, you’ve not understood the radical message of the New Testament.
This radical grace, of course, is frightening because it seems to open the door to sin. It’s subject to so much misunderstanding, you don’t write about it without a great deal of qualification. My book When Being Good Isn’t Good Enough is really an argument for radical grace, and I think I would have been brought up on charges of antinomianism had I not quoted Calvin, Martin Lloyd Jones, and Spurgeon a few times!
We’re so worried about people acting right that when it comes time to talk about acting right, we end up talking about just that. We inadvertently preach sermons that, if the name of Jesus were removed, could be preached by any Pharisee. We sound like common moralists.
As frightening as it is, though, we’re not going to make much progress in preaching the hard side of the gospel, and not much progress with people’s sanctification, until we preach from grace to grace.
An attractive and successful-looking woman came to me for counseling once. After a few minutes, she told me her dark secret: before marrying she had worked for years as a prostitute in Las Vegas. Though she had been a devoted follower of Christ for years, she was still weighed down with guilt.
In another instance, I spoke with a couple who later became leaders in the Key Biscayne church. But their marriage of twenty-five years had started on a perverse note, and they were deeply troubled by it: the man and his best friend had each divorced his own wife and married his friend’s wife. In essence, they had swapped spouses. It not only affected the man and his wife but their children, as well. When they finally opened up about this, they just sat there and cried.
In both these examples, these people didn’t need a moralistic chastisement — they had been living faithful lives together for years. What they needed was to understand and experience grace.
These are precisely the type of people I want to reach and raise up in Christ — sinners. Unless grace is the foundation of all they hear, they are not going far in their Christian lives. I remind myself constantly that people fail in their obedience not because we make the gospel too good but because we don’t make it good enough. Only when they see how utterly amazing and lovely is the grace of God are people thankful enough, motivated enough to give their hearts, souls, and minds to God. When grace is the foundation, speaking the hard side of the gospel becomes a piece of cake. Well, almost.
Know Thyself
When I attended classes at Boston University, a student working on his doctoral thesis at Harvard interviewed me for several hours. He wanted to find out why people went into full-time Christian service. After interviewing dozens of ministers, he concluded that most are motivated by guilt.
That’s bad for them and for the people in their churches. Guilt-laden pastors make other people feel guilty. Forgiven pastors, people who live under grace, set other people free.
The first thing pastors have to do before they preach a hard word to their congregations is to take a hard look at themselves, at their own motivations.
Latent guilt is certainly one key issue to address. We have to be aware of what I call the Scarlet Letter syndrome. We preach out of our own sense of unworthiness. If we struggle with pornography, that’s the problem we attack most often and most fiercely. Or it may be greed or pride or envy. But if we’re motivated to preach the hard news because of our guilt, we’re not going to produce much lasting fruit.
Another issue is anger. We were in the middle of a huge building program at Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church when I found myself angry with a key member. He had written letters to everybody in the congregation, letters in which he criticized me and the building committee. The building committee held thirteen meetings around the city to explain the program to the congregation, and this man attended every one! After so many attacks, the chairman’s wife came to me in tears: “I’m not doing this any more!”
My anger gradually rose, to the point that I began preaching at this man and his party in my sermons. One time while preaching, I walked over and stood on the side of the church in which he sat. I stepped as close to him as I could and practically talked to him. I don’t know if anybody else knew what was going on, but he knew. I’m not proud of that. It was totally inappropriate.
The more we are in touch with our emotions, then, the less we’ll make such blunders in the hard sermons.
There are many ways to get in touch with that part of ourselves.
Certainly prayer is the place to start. Long ago, a basic prayer of mine became, “Lord, show me myself.” Often in my morning prayers, I begin with personal confession, asking God to search me: “Lord don’t let me off the hook. I don’t want to play the game of denial. Show me what’s really going on inside me.” Much to my discomfort, God shows me!
I’ve found reading helps. Larry Crabb’s Inside Out (NavPress, 1988) and Sidney Jourard’s Transparent Self: Self-Disclosure and WellBeing (Van Nos Reinhold, 1971) have been two books that have helped me look at my motivations honestly.
The best way, though, is to find a fellow believer who can be a “soul companion.” It’s something you have to pray about, for this is not the type of thing you can do with anybody. But I, for one, have found it immensely helpful to have a friend before whom I can take off my professional mask. We tell each other what we’re really thinking and feeling, and what we see going on in the other.
Through this process, I’ve discovered many hidden motives and sins, and that has made me a more sensitive preacher against sin. It’s hard to be self-righteously judgmental when you know your own sin all too well.
More importantly, it’s put me more in touch with the wonder of grace. Evangelist and professor Michael Green once held a winetasting party as a way to reach out to non-believers. As people sipped Chablis, Christians tried to steer conversations to spiritual matters. One woman, a professor, unfortunately got a little tipsy in the process. She leaned over to Michael at one point and said, “You know, I don’t believe any of this.”
He replied, “Yeah, I know.” Then he added, “But wouldn’t you like to?” Tears began welling up in her eyes.
Sometimes even preachers find the utter graciousness of God too good to be true. But that’s what we discover again and again as we explore our selves. And when that grace is experienced anew, we’re almost ready to preach the hard news.
How Much Can They Bear?
George Buttrick, a great preacher of the last generation, said you can’t preach some things until you’ve been with a congregation three years. Others things you can’t say until you’ve been there five years. For other things still, it’s fifteen years.
That’s another way of saying we’ve got to know how much of a load our relationships with congregations can bear. And the key to that is living with them in a spirit of the gospel we long to proclaim so forcefully.
One evening my elder board did something I found particularly galling. They turned down an associate staff member’s request for help in buying a home. Then after the vote, they all got in their cars and left. I was in my study at the time, and they sent the youngest elder to tell me what had happened. I was so angry, I scared the young man, who knocked over a lamp as he backed out of the room.
I ran out to the parking lot, but everyone was gone. So I drove to the home of the nearest elder and knocked on his door. He was already in his pajamas. He came out on the front porch, and I started yelling at him.
“Now, calm down, Steve. Calm down,” he finally said, “Are you going to talk to the other elders this way?”
“You better believe it!” I said.
“Look, you yelled at me a lot, and I understand. But some of those guys are new to the board. You be careful.”
I went to another board member’s home and paced his living room floor, ranting and raving about the injustice to this associate.
The next morning, he called me and said, “How are you doing, slugger?”
“Oh, all right.”
“I want you to know that my dog was hiding under the couch last night.”
I eventually apologized for my outburst, and the board graciously forgave me.
The point is we had established good relationships on that board. They knew I did foolish things like that. They also knew that more than anything I wanted to live faithfully for Christ. We had apologized to one another more than a few times.
Only in that atmosphere of love and forgiveness could I get away with preaching the hard news of the Bible.
Know Thy People
Nothing shocks me anymore. No one, whether churched or unchurched, can confess a sin that raises my eyebrows. We’ve all heard, “Pastor, you don’t know what it’s like in the real world.” We know that’s baloney. I see more of the “real world” in a week than others see in a year. I’ve cleaned up after more suicides and buried more babies and listened to more tortured confessions than I care to remember. It’s not hard to believe in pervasive depravity.
So when I preach, I assume the worst in people. First, it’s an empirical fact that people are capable of the worst. Second, I’ve come to see that, paradoxically, people make better progress along the sanctification road when I assume they are miserable sinners.
Here are some specific ways I do that.
• Let the Bible do the talking. Just because grace is first and last doesn’t mean we don’t frankly deal with sin. We’re not offering The Ten Suggestions, after all. But I try to make sure people know that it’s not my word that indicts us but the Bible’s.
I’ve sometimes started sermons on divorce like this: “I realize that half of you have been divorced. In some ways, I wish I could skip this passage, but I can’t do that, because we’re about God here. And this is what God says.”
And I’ll introduce the sin in a non-threatening way, as in Isaiah, when God says, “Let us reason together …”
I might say, “People, come on now. You don’t want God ticked off — that’s why you’ve chosen to follow him. But this is what he says: you can’t come to worship with a prideful attitude. It’s just not going to work. As God says …”
• Place yourself in their pews. People are not going to let me be a messenger of the hard word unless I let them know that I stand under that same word myself. So I often acknowledge my own shortcomings from the pulpit.
For instance, I have often admitted my problem with anger. I even told my congregation about my prayer “hit list” I use to pray for my enemies. My goal is to get people off of my hit list and onto my regular prayer list. One Wednesday night, I announced I had gotten everybody off my hit list, and the congregation broke into applause.
If the sermon is about a sin that is not a particular problem for me, I’ll laugh and say, “I can preach a humdinger of a sermon on this, because this isn’t my sin!” I create a non-judgmental mood, poking fun at my temptation to self-righteousness.
• Identify recriminating guilt. One temptation, as I’ve noted, is to motivate with guilt. In fact, people are so used to being motivated in this way, they can’t imagine it any other way. They’ve gotten used to the oppressive sense of guilt, and they are happily surprised when the preacher suddenly turns the tables.
In seminars I teach around the country, I do one activity to help people see what kind of “prisons” they may be in: the prison of responsibility or of the past or of guilt. We look at twelve prisons in all. When I come to the section on guilt, I say, “None of you has shared your faith with a single person this week, and people are going to hell.
“Your devotional time is awful. Some of you aren’t spending five minutes a day with the One who loves you and died on the cross for you.
“And how often do you really extend yourselves for neighbors, let alone your family?”
I go on and on until I see people squirm. Some look ill as I pound on them for what they know is all too true. But then I deliver the punch line: “What you’re feeling right now is guilt pure and simple. It’s how we are so often motivated. We beat ourselves until we feel utterly lousy. But friends, let us remember, we live in Christ. We don’t have to live in the prison of self-recrimination anymore.”
That’s when people sit up, and I can nearly hear them say, “Oh yes, I understand!” And for the first time, many of them recognize how much they’ve been motivated by guilt. Once that motivation has been unmasked, people are in a much better position to respond appropriately — not merely out of guilt.
I will also make sure people know how the hard sermon is framed. If I have to spend most of my time talking about some sin, I will at some point in the sermon say, “Now, remember in everything I say, Christ died for you. I can only speak this word because we’ve already been accepted by him.”
• Speak a gracious repentance. We have to be careful how we call others to repentance. I used to say, “Confession is saying, ‘I’m sorry I spilled the milk,’ and repentance is cleaning up the milk.” I’ve realized two things, however.
First, people can’t always clean up the milk. Some have made messes they can’t wipe up as if nothing happened. Women have had abortions that can never be taken back. Men have committed adultery that can’t be undone. People have divorced and remarried, then divorced and remarried again, leaving children with wounds that will never fully heal. Christians have spoken words that have ruined reputations and divided churches. Although apologies are in order, often people have to live with spiritual scars.
Second, such a view of preaching easily turns repentance into another work. When that happens, people will be driven to despair. They seek with all their might to do the right thing they promised in an act of contrition, but they will inevitably fail in some way. Then they will wallow in guilt rather than go to God, because they are ashamed of facing the one to whom they made such glowing promises.
Michael Quoist, author of Prayers (Sheed & Ward, 1985), described his own experience of this dynamic. Once when he felt in despair about his own Christian walk, he prayed to God something like, “I’ve sinned, Lord. I’ve played with it. I’ve fondled it. It’s chased me like a dog. I can’t go on.”
Then God, he writes, spoke to him, in words to this effect: “Look up, child. Did you think I stopped loving you? The trouble is you trusted in yourself instead of me. It’s not falling in the mud that’s the worst; it’s the staying there.”
Calling to repentance doesn’t mean calling people to straighten out every wrong they’ve committed. Repentance means agreeing with God about who he is, who you are, what you’ve done, and what needs to be changed. No more, no less. The paradox of grace is that we are closer to holiness if we trust God’s mercy than if we try to be perfectly holy.
• Start with milk. If people are miserable sinners, then we’ve got to accept them where they are. This is an old principle: we can’t give them meat until they’ve learned to drink milk.
For instance, when I challenge people to establish a devotional life, I give them a moderate goal to begin with: two or three minutes in the morning. And then I’ll say, “Don’t you dare increase that! Pray the Lord’s Prayer, read a few verses of Scripture, and stop. If you want to do more, come and talk to me.”
That way I take the pressure off. Instead of challenging them to an hour a day, a challenge that will leave the majority feeling defeated and unworthy, I start slow and build on their feelings of accomplishment.
As I often say, when a dog plays checkers, you don’t criticize his game. You’re just glad he’s playing.
• Let some people off the hook. Sometimes you have to make it clear that you are not, in fact, singling someone out.
One man in the congregation was an activist for family issues. He had paid a big price for that, giving up time and money and peace of mind as he battled secular authorities about the integrity of the family. In one sermon, I was making a point about how we needed to love each other, that we shouldn’t be adversarial when we deal with non-Christians. I realized that maybe he was thinking I was talking about him.
So I stopped in the sermon, turned to him, and said, “Jack, I’m not talking about you. What you’re doing has cost you a lot, and I’m proud of you.”
Sometimes you have to give people permission to heal first before they start marching in the Lord’s army. The church I pastored in Key Biscayne was a healing church. People came to us who had been beaten up by sin and by religious institutions, and they needed a safe place. Many weren’t ready to hear the hard side of the gospel. They needed comfort, love, and encouragement.
Periodically during sermons, I would single such people out: “If you’ve recently met Christ, if your life is still in complete shambles, don’t worry about what I’m about to say. Your job for the time being is to get to know your loving Savior. There will be time enough for you to do something for him. As for those who’ve known Christ for some time …”
One man who eventually became a church leader told me, “Thank you for just letting me sit when I came here. For five years that was all I could do.”
From Judgment to Love
A fellow preacher told this story: During his military campaigns, Alexander the Great held judgment day once a week. Those accused of cowardice were brought before him, and if found guilty, they were executed on the spot.
One day the guards brought before Alexander a young man who reportedly fled the battle and hid behind a rock. For some reason, observers said, as he heard the accusations against the young man, Alexander’s face softened. Perhaps he was thinking about the soldier’s girlfriend back home, about the children he would one day have.
“Son, what is your name?” the great commander asked.
“Alexander, sir,” the young man replied.
The general’s demeanor changed, his eyes flashed with anger. Stepping down from the judgment seat, he picked up the cowardly soldier and threw him to the ground. “Young man, either change your name or change your ways.”
Unfortunately, that type of harsh attitude is what characterizes much of prophetic preaching today: “Christian: change your name or change your ways!” That will only produce more guilt and ineffectual Christian lives.
Instead, I want to foster an attitude of love, a love that wants to see people be their best and a love that cares for them where they are.
I learned something about this from John Stanton. Every Saturday when he pastored Westmont Presbyterian Church in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, he would go to the empty sanctuary and pray. One by one he would stand behind the pews, lay his hand on them, and pray for the person who would sit there the next day.
I did that for a number of years myself. And I found that as much as anything else, it developed in me a love for my people. Then preaching the hard side wasn’t so harsh. No, it’s never been a piece of cake. But neither has it turned into a sour apple.
To put it simply, by God’s power, hard preaching on hard themes has been a means of grace for this pastor and his people.
Copyright © 1993 by Christianity Today
