HOMILETICS
LECTURE 42
IN SPIRIT & IN POWER II
Zech 4:6 Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the Lord
unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the
Lord of hosts.
The following are excerpts from the excellent article by Robert V. Rakestraw entitled:
“The Power of the Holy Spirit in Your Preaching”
First presented at the Bethel Seminary Preaching Institute, St. Paul, MN, February 24, 1992.
Wesley Duewel has written a book, Ablaze for God, that has been a blessing and challenge to many people. It is not a book about preaching; it is a book about leadership by a wise and seasoned Christian leader. He makes a statement concerning our subject that hits us all hard. " Over many a Christian leader's record, (and, we could say, over many a pastor's record) could be stamped these words: LACKS POWER. Why do so many ministers and lay leaders have a vague restless awareness that something is lacking in their leadership?" (p. 78). Duewel then identifies the missing something as the unction, the anointing of the Holy Spirit in our preaching and our leadership. In his view, " perhaps the greatest lack in most Christian leadership and ministry is this divine bestowal, the Spirit's empowerment. . . . Perhaps the greatest, and most revolutionary change that could happen to your leadership would be for you to receive and continually experience the divine dimension. Once you receive it and experience the difference it makes, you will not want to minister without it" (p. 79).
Ninety-seven percent of the population of England, according to a recent survey find church boring. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in his Preaching and Preachers, says: " If the people are not attending places of worship I hold the pulpit to be primarily responsible" (p. 52). Is boring the people the preacher's greatest sin? Yes and no. The preacher's greatest sin, I suggest, is not proclaiming the Word of God in the power of the Spirit of God. Of course, if you are not doing that you will be boring the people.
1 John 2:20 But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things.
What do we mean by the Spirit's power in our preaching? Sometimes people use the words " unction" or " anointing" to describe the power, and these are fitting terms. First and foremost it is the confidence, the assurance that God is at work in you and through you, and that your preaching - both your preparation and your delivery - is not primarily a human endeavor. Secondly, there is a sense or awareness of God's presence and guidance during your preparation and delivery. The first aspect emphasizes the assurance of God's promises. The second aspect is more the actual experiencing of God's direction.
What do we mean by the Spirit's power in your preparation? Let me suggest four things. First, a sense of utter futility unless God does the work. When this comes to you, this is the Spirit working. John Piper says: " All genuine preaching is rooted in a feeling of desperation" (p. 37). This desperation has gripped me so much in my preaching, much more in recent years than in my early years. In my earlier years I wrote a sermon and went out and preached it. I prayed, of course. But I didn't feel the desperation as I do now. It is an impossible task by human standards…
Secondly, there is an awareness of God's leading, his direction, his prompting, to specific explanations, wordings, illustrations, auxiliary scriptures, applications, and arrangements of material. In your preparation you are actually sensing that God is prompting you, directing, you.
A third element of the Spirit's power in your sermon preparation is conviction of sin. While you are preparing, you sense the need to confess before going on. This is a more important part of preparation than writing the sermon. You've got to stop and meet God. This is not a quick prayer, but biblical repentance, confession, and receiving of forgiveness. This is a glorious aspect of sermon preparation, and must be attended to if and when the Spirit convicts. And this leads to our fourth element - an excitement, an optimism about what God is going to do through this sermon. You can sense the mind of Christ in you and in the emerging sermon.
Now with regard to the preaching itself, what do we mean by the Spirit's power in preaching? Most of all, there is a strong assurance of divine authority and of your being God's voice. You know it. You know you are anointed by God, and you speak that way. There is a sense of your words striking home as you explain, exhort, and apply. There is a holy hush among the listeners. And there will be emotion in your voice, your face, and your total delivery. This is not self-induced but God-given. Sermons with good content may fall flat for many reasons. Perhaps the most common is that they are delivered with an absence of feeling" (Lutzer, 64). When the Spirit is upon you, there is feeling, emotion, passion.
How do we come to experience this power? First of all, we need to feel our deep need. Spurgeon said: " If there be any brother here who thinks he can preach as well as he should, I would advise him to leave off altogether" (p. 41). Those who attend preaching seminars are not necessarily coming because they are weak preachers, but because they know their need. And those who sense their need are - everything else being equal - the best preachers. Whether we are in our twenties, our fifties, or our eighties, God wants to revolutionize our preaching. But we must feel our need deeply.
Luke 11:13 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?
James 1:5-8 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.
James 4:2c …ye have not, because ye ask not.
As Dean Hutton remarked [of John Wesley], his sermons came straight from his heart as well as from his sound, strong head.' In this combination of heat and light lay the secret of Wesley's power as a gospel preacher. It was in the tension of the two that the Spirit worked so mightily" (A. Skevington Wood, p. 156). He proclaimed " truth on fire." That's something the devil doesn't know what to do with.
Seeking involves not only careful preparation, but prayer also. " Schools teach everything about preaching except the important part, praying" (Tozer, Renewed Day by Day, January 10). " The major part of Tozer's preparation was prayer" (Snyder, p. 104). John Piper writes that his " sermon's preparation [is] done in almost constant prayer for help, and I get up three and a half hours before the first service to spend two hours getting my heart as ready as I can before I come to the church" (Piper, p. 45).
Engraved on the front of the pulpit at Bible Baptist Church, Oak Harbor, Wa., are these words:
“PRAY FOR POWER”
2 Cor 12:9 And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.
What can hinder the power?
Alexander Maclaren said, " Power for service is second. Power for holiness and character is first. . . . The first, second, and third requisite for our work is personal godliness." J. D. Jones said, " The one indispensable condition of our usefulness and success in the work of the ministry is that we should be good men - men of pure and holy life - men of God. . . . The effect of our words on the [Lord’s Day] will really depend on our lives during the week, for it is always the man behind the speech which wields the power" (Wiersbe, p. 144).
Another obstacle may be your past preaching courses! You might need to unlearn them! If you've been taught to be a detached, dispassionate, objective-type lecturer, you need to discard that teaching. Preaching is not a lecture. Preaching is a dynamic encounter with God, and when people hear real preaching, they want it more and more, and they want God more and more.
My life and ministry were revolutionized (I do not use this word lightly) in 1982 by the realization that I could actually live the way God said I should live in the Bible and that I could have the power in my ministry that Jesus desires his servants to have. I had been a pastor for seven years and a Bible college professor for five years before I became dissatisfied enough and desperate enough to " trust and obey," as the song says. For me, the breakthrough came partly by recognizing and believing the plain truth of God's promises for victory and power in ministry, and partly through the renunciation of sin in my life - refusing to cling any longer to that which had, for years, hindered my full effectiveness for Christ.
Rom 15:19 Through mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God; so that from Jerusalem, and round about unto Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.
A final hindrance is the general tone and pattern of American evangelical churches, especially in two areas. First, there is a fear of enthusiasm. In John Wesley's day - the 18th century - the greatest sin was not adultery, fornication, or whatever. It was " enthusiasm," because you weren't calm and detached and purely rational. The Spirit's anointing and its results, however, may not be calm, sophisticated, and as controlled as we would like. " Some of us," Wesley Duewel says, " have so rarely experienced the added dimension which the Holy Spirit can give, that we hardly understand what God longs to do in our ministry. We fear it might tend to fanaticism" (p. 81).
And then there is the practice of doing God's work as a business, with our plans, our schemes, our abilities, and our sermons. " We experience little of God's touch upon us because our asking for it is so casual and superficial. . . . We tend to be more concerned to perform our part credibly than we are about God's mighty involvement in our efforts. We tend to be more hungry for success than we are for God's empowering" (Duewel, 81). God made it clear to Zerubbabel that the task of rebuilding the temple would be accomplished " not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit" (Zech. 4:6). It takes a long time for confidence in ourselves to die, but be thankful for whatever God uses to destroy it.
Where are some evidences that this power is upon you? Let's consider first the effects in your people. They want to come to hear strong preaching from the word of God. They're thirsty; they're expectant. And when they come, the expressions on their faces while you are preaching reveal a keen interest in your words and ideas, because they sense that these are not really your ideas, but God's. And then there are the comments after the service. The people are no longer just saying, " That was a nice talk, thank you." They're saying something else. Many of them will continue to offer the obligatory courteous praise, but others will say and show that they have heard from God. You can tell it in their eyes; you see in their faces that the Lord has been at work. You should be noticing some of this after your sermons.
Then, too, there is a sense of the presence of God while you are preaching. " The most privileged and moving experience a preacher can have is when, in the middle of a sermon, a strange hush descends upon the congregation. The sleepers have woken up, the coughers have stopped coughing, and the fidgeters are sitting still. No eyes or minds are wandering. Everybody is attending, though not to the preacher. For the preacher is forgotten, and the people are face-to-face with the living God, listening to his still, small voice" (John Stott, in Catherwood, 38). That can happen; it needs to happen. If there is not conviction of sin, repentance for sin, encouragement, and an increase in devotion to God, at least in some of the people most of the time, it seems that the power of God is either absent or greatly diminished in our preaching.
Mic 3:8 But truly I am full of power by the spirit of the Lord, and of judgment, and of might, to declare unto Jacob his transgression, and to Israel his sin.
[People are getting saved; it might not even be a ‘salvation sermon’, but folks who are lost are getting found! The power of God unto salvation!]
You will also see growth in your people's service to the church. Christians get excited about God, and when this happens, they get excited about God's church and God's mission in this world. [Members are becoming much more faithful…much more involved…much more united!]