The Making of a Preacher
Anonymous
What does it take to be effective in the preparation and delivery of sermons that bring glory to God and blessing to men? An unknown author penned the following stirring lines to answer this vital question:
Fling the preacher into his office. Tear the ‘office’ sign from the door and nail up the sign, ‘study’. Take him off all mailing lists. Lock him up with his books, his typewriter and his Bible.
Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities who knows about God. Engage him to wrestle with God all the night through. And let him come out only when he’s bruised and beaten into being a blessing.
Stop his tongue forever tripping lightly over every nonessential. Require him to have something to say before he dares break the silence. Bend his knees in the lonesome valley.
Burn his eyes with weary study. Wreck his emotional poise with worry for God. And make him exchange his ‘pious stance’ for a humble walk with God and man. Make him spend and be spent for the glory of God. Rip out his telephone. Burn up his ecclesiastical success sheets. Give him a Bible and tie him to the pulpit. And make him preach the Word of the living God!
Test him. Quiz him. Examine him. Humiliate him for his ignorance of things divine. Shame him for his good comprehension of finances, batting averages, and political in-fighting. Laugh at his frustrated efforts to play the psychiatrist. Form a choir and raise a chant and haunt him with it night and day – “Sir, we would see Jesus”.
And when at long last he dares to assay the pulpit, ask him if he has a word from God. If he does not, then dismiss him. Tell him you can read the morning paper and digest the television commentaries, and think through the day’s superficial problems ad infinitum, better than he can. Command him not to come back until he’s read and reread, written and rewritten, until he can stand up, worn and forlorn, and say, “Thus saith the Lord.”
Break him across the board of his ill-gotten popularity. Smack him hard with his own prestige. Corner him with questions about God. Cover him with demands for celestial wisdom. And give him no escape until he’s back against the wall of the Word.
And sit down before him and listen to the only word he has left – God’s Word. Let him be totally ignorant of the down-street gossip, but give him a chapter and order him to walk around it, camp on it, sup with it, and come at last to speak it backward and forward, until all he says about it rings with the truth of eternity.
And when he’s burned out by the flaming Word, when he’s consumed at last by the fiery grace blazing through him, when he’s been privileged to translate the truth of God to man and been finally transferred from earth to heaven, then bear him away gently and blow a muted trumpet and lay him down softly. Place a two-edged sword in his coffin, and raise the tomb triumphant. For he was a brave soldier of the Word, and ere he died, he had become a man of God.
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