I Went to Church Yesterday

The third of an undetermined number in a series on the character and need for corporate worship.

Preaching is a difficult task. Contrary to lighthearted cultural braggadocio, all Black guys can’t preach, inasmuch as some White guys can indeed jump. Regrettably, throughout the land, preaching has been reduced to the pattern and practice of providing hearers with principles of success; steps to live a better life; techniques for improving self-esteem; processes for debt cancellation, wealth accumulation and health preservation; tips for overcoming fear, being better friends, becoming more sensitive employers and more faithful employees; and other similar banalities. One doesn't have to listen intently to a "sermon" from today's popular pulpit in order to detect unmistakable strands of legalism, moralism and humanism adorning current religious speech. I once attended a service in Clarkston, Georgia in which the minister spent over twenty minutes encouraging his members to invest in Coca-Cola stocks. What's worse, the people loved to have it so. Equally terrible is that I stayed all that time.

As ministers of the gospel, as those charged with the sole responsibility of preaching Christ and Christ crucified, our overall pastoral responsibility is to ensure that the gospel of Jesus Christ is central to every aspect of our ministry. It is this gospel, the good news about what God has done for sinners justly deserving his eternal wrath, in the saving Person and work of Jesus Christ, whom he graciously offers to condemned law-breakers, through faith alone in him alone, that is to be the foundation as well as the framework of our ministry. Faithful ministers must resist the temptation to "craft" their ministries by providing attractive choices and alternatives to their clients by offering different styles of worship that appeal to and attract different strata of society; by toning down the severity of sin in order to promote a user-friendly, inoffensive atmosphere in which one can be protected from the wrath of a holy God; by encouraging hearers to turn to Christ and to embrace him as their only help of achieving their personal goals and agenda in life; by incorporating forms and formats in ministry, especially in worship, that are influenced by today's consumerist society whose values are shaped by sitcoms and talk shows and whose attention span for robust truth is even shorter than the last commercial they just viewed. The faithful pastor is undoubtedly involved in a great test, a test of trusting God alone to define the direction and to determine the marks of "success" of the ministry over which the Lord God has placed him.

I believe that the temptation to cut theological corners by imbibing, even just a little bit, at the broken cisterns of this world reaches its highest levels in the realm of preaching. But it is also here that the faithful man of God receives his strength and encouragement for his task. How? It is the very Word of God that he is required to proclaim mainly through preaching and sacrament, that not only forms and sustains his congregation, God's covenant community over which the Lord has made him his under-shepherd, but that also strengthens him. If, in the words of magisterial Reformer Martin Luther, each Christian is to preach the gospel to himself every day, then how much more does this necessity devolve upon the shoulders of the minister in whose mouth lie the very words of God! God’s voice, said Calvin, resounds in “the mouths and the tongues” of preachers, so that hearing ministers preach is tantamount to hearing God himself speak. How much more should he regard his call with a gravity, sincerity and faithfulness, soberly recalling “ ..that we are [not] sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit...” 2 Cor 3:5-6, lest after we have preached to others, we find ourselves disqualified, 1 Cor 9:27. How much more should he cherish and claim this gospel, the mysteries of God's treasures in Christ, with which he has been entrusted, as the very epicenter of his life and ministry?

This is the perspective that I am so feverishly trying to adopt. These are the lofty, enduring truths that I am so carefully striving to apply. Such teaching forces me to do the unnatural – to look outside of myself unto the risen, resurrected, reigning and returning Christ alone as my only hope and strength, not only in the discharge of my pastoral responsibilities but also in all of life.

From this broader panorama of thought and armed with these comforting and challenging verities, I approached my task yesterday, still tainted with instability and insincerity and still troubled with nagging uncertainty and above all, with sin, still preaching with a limp, really, with the full handicap of a quadriplegic.
Thus I tried to preach the gospel of Christ to his sheep; thus I strove to present Christ to his people. Lord, help my preaching! Thus I tried to be faithful. Lord help my unfaithfulness! Thus I tried to be focused. Lord forgive my negligence!

I went to church yesterday… and all soli Deo Gloria. Yes, I, even I,, went to church yesterday.