The Hardest Thing About Preaching

by David McClister

 

Sometimes I am asked "what is the hardest thing about preaching the gospel?" I realize that a few people expect an answer like "Nothing at all," because they think preaching is not that difficult in the first place. Well, if you are dedicated to it, it does not seem that difficult (but that is true of everything else as well). Some preachers have said that the hardest thing is knowing what to preach from week to week - keeping your finger on the pulse of the congregation and knowing what lesson will meet the needs of the group this week. I would agree that is certainly a challenging part of the work. Some preachers set such a hectic schedule for themselves that they say the hardest part of the work is the time, the long days that are required. There is truth in that as well. Yet some other preachers would say that the hardest part of the work of preaching is the preparation that has to go into every lesson, that is presented. I can see that point also.Preparing two Bible classes and two sermons each week can easily take more than 40 hours in a week. For myself, I would suggest that the hardest thing about preaching is getting people to change.

 

Preaching is not just information-giving, and no preacher who is worth his salt is content just to address a problem. We want to see the change come about, we want to see the exhortations (and the rebukes) bear some fruit, we want to see the teaching put into practice. For example, Paul was not content just to know that the Corinthians had heard the gospel. He was concerned that they continued to follow the truth. So he wrote them letters and made personal visits to them to get them to become the kind of church God wanted them to be. He did not want to think on the day of judgment that he had labored with them in vain. Or, to use his metaphor from 1 Corinthians 3, Paul had tried to build a solid structure on the foundation of the truth.

 

If the Corinthians became unfaithful, it would be as if the structure Paul had built collapsed, making is labor in vain. This gets us to the Biblical concept of what it means to "hear" the gospel. It does not just mean that someone explained it to you, or that you were at church one time when it was mentioned in your presence, etc. To hear, in the Biblical sense, means to take the message in, to accept it and receive it. It is as Paul commended the Thessalonians, who had received and welcomed the word of God when it was preached to them (1 Thes 2:13). This is exactly why Jesus told His disciples to shake the dust off their feet as they left a city or village that would not hear the gospel of the kingdom of God (Matt 10:14). It was not enough just to show up in a town and do some preaching.

 

The Lord expected them to work at getting people to accept and "hear" the gospel, and if their audience refused to hear (accept) it, if they refused to conform to its demands, then the disciples were to go an preach to others. The disciples were not responsible for making people hear, but they certainly were to work with the audience hearing the message as their goal.

 

This, I suggest, is the hardest part of preaching the gospel - getting people to hear, getting people to take the message in and use it to change their lives. Getting this result in the correct way requires two things. First, it requires courage on the part of the preacher. Now I know that it is not the preacher's responsibility to change people. But it is the preacher's job to speak the

whole truth of God, including those parts that are challenging and upsetting and contrary to our habits. Preaching, by its nature, is partly criticism (the Bible calls this reproof and rebuke), and we all have a natural aversion to criticism, even when it is delivered in the best ways. The preacher is to reprove and rebuke when needed with the goal that people will change their lives; that is, people are to take the message that is preached and use it to change their own lives. If someone will not change and correct their faults, deficiencies, or sins, they will have to answer to God for it, and if the preacher has sounded the warning and spoken the truth he will not need to be ashamed or afraid when he stands before the Lord himself. But he must have the courage to say what needs to be said. This, brings us to the second thing required of preachers: humility. It is a constant temptation to a preacher to think "If I present this lesson really well, then it will have the right effect." But the power to change people lies not in the presentation or oratorical skills of the preacher. The power lies in the gospel. A preacher's job is to preach the gospel and not get in the way. Now it is perfectly fine for a preacher to be emotionally "connected" to his message - in fact, he should be. But what I object to is the use of things that can be described best as "theatrics" in the attempt to evoke a response to the gospel (using sales methods falls under this same umbrella .). The gospel message itself has the power, it has the elements within it that can touch and stir the human heart like no other message in the world. It needs no help from those who preach. It is benefited nothing by theatrics and is, in fact, only degraded by such tactics and methods. People will change their lives based upon their reception of the gospel. Any other motivation will be shallow and will not sustain. I have personally known people who responded to the gospel because of an exceptionally emotional or theatrical presentation by a gospel preacher. As soon as that particular gospel preacher is gone, they lose interest and become unfaithful. Now let me ask you, while you have been reading this article, what do you think I have meant by the term "preaching."?

 

While everything I have said certainly applies to the job of being an evangelist working with a local church, it has another, equally significant and valid application. The reason I have written about the difficulty of preaching is not to try to get some sympathy from you, but to raise your awareness that the thing that is difficult about being an evangelist with a local church is the same thing that is difficult when about telling the gospel to others individually, when you try to tell it to your co-workers, friends, neighbors, and family. There certainly is a (limited) sense in which every Christian is an "evangelist" - one who proclaims the gospel to others. If you hope to get them to hear the gospel, it will require that you too have courage to say what needs to be said (always in love, of course), and simply to be a humble messenger of the truth.

 

     1.1 do not mean to suggest that the job of selling products to others is inherently theatrical, hypocritical, etc.  My point is simply that we do not need to use the methods we would use to sell a product to preach the gospel.

 

How often have we fallen into the (false) notion that telling the gospel to others requires some special set of tricks of methods that we must learn before we can do it? How often have we told ourselves that we cannot spread the gospel because we don't know howl Well, friends, it is not a matter of how, not at all. The power lies in the gospel, not in you. You don't need to learn some special "tricks" to do it (there are none anyway). You just have to have the courage and the humility to do it. God will bless the effort if we stay out of His way.