Preaching As Worship

Ph i l Fu l l e r

“It is impossible to worship God and remain unchanged,” wrote Henry Blackaby in Experiencing God Day by Day. We believe preaching is integral to worship—a form of worship delivered by the grace of God so that neither the listener nor the preacher can remain the same. We instinctively understand that transformational preaching is the delivery of a message from God’s heart for all people. Preaching is worship. Genuine worship is transformation. I am not naïve enough to think every message preached rises to such a noble level, and certainly not by mere human effort can preaching attain such heights. I have listened to, and preached, a few sermons in which nothing about the message was divine and no transformation was imminent.

One Sunday evening, when I realized my speech was boring, even to me, I stopped in the middle of the message, closed my Bible, and said, “You are bored. I am bored. Let’s pray and go home.”

No one argued. That evening I vowed, with God’s help, to be a better preacher. John Wesley said, “Give me 100 preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God . . . such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on earth.” 1 Preaching that shakes the gates of hell isn’t boring at all!

We confidently affirm with pastors everywhere that despite our limited abilities, on occasions far too numerous to count, God uses our words as catalysts for the transformational work of the Holy Spirit.

Remember the parishioner who testified how a certain phrase in your message helped him come to grips with God’s direction for his life (though you are certain you spoke nothing remotely similar)? Or how another parishioner wrote to you, “Your message on Sunday was exactly for me. How did you know?”

To me, these exemplify the miracle that allows our human speech to become a message and a means of grace. The preacher is granted sacred trust by his or her people to listen for God’s message and to faithfully deliver it through words of obedience. Anything less is merely a nice speech.

Thankfully, a sermon saves no one, sanctifies no one, and is unable to change anyone. Only the Holy Spirit can do that work. Nevertheless, in the same way that we believe, as David Busic has said, “Something happens in the water [of baptism],” 2

and that, as the Manual proclaims, “Christ is present by the Spirit” 3

in the Lord’s Supper, so, too then, preaching is a pathway of God’s grace. A divine something occurs when we preach. Transformational preaching, by God’s mercy and help, engages the listeners and moves them toward Christlikeness.

May we find that we are not alone in our endeavors to preach the Word, and may the stories and insights of fellow ministers spur us onward in our holy calling.

We must never lose sight of what our Wesleyan-Holiness tradition asserts about genuine preaching; it “shake[s] the very gates of hell and usher[s] in the kingdom of heaven,” here and now.

Transformational Preaching. Is there really any other kind?

1 John Wesley, in a letter to Alexander Mather, as quoted in The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley by Luke Tyerman (London, 1871), III:632.

2 David Busic, Sermon, “Something Happens in the Water: Sacramental Practice in the Church of the Nazarene” (District Superintendent’s Leadership Retreat, Carlsbad, California, February 2018).

3 Manual, 2017-2021: Church of the Nazarene (Nazarene Publishing House, 2017), 260.

PHIL FULLER has served as superintendent of the Virginia District since 2004. He is passionate to see the Church renew her commitment to evangelism, baptism and church planting. He and his wife, Cheryl, live in Midlothian, Virginia.