PreachingfromtheHeart

Jim Gardner

Walter Jackson Bate, one of my professors in college, was famous for his teaching about the great eighteenthcentury writer Samuel Johnson. Like countless other students, I was deeply impressed by the passionate intensity and depth of response to Johnson that characterized Bate’s lectures. One comment about Bate’s teaching that was widely repeated among his students was that he had studied Johnson so thoroughly and reacted to him with such depth of emotion that it had become impossible to tell where Jack stopped and Sam began. The teacher and the subject of his teaching had become one and indistinguishable. That is what should be true of us as Christians. We ought to be able to say with Paul that it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us, not as a theological principle, but as a central fact about our lives.

Spiritual transformation in our minds will not come cheaply. Walter Scott, teaching young people in their early teens at the Pittsburgh Academy in the 1820s, had them memorize all four Gospels in the original Greek. Whether or not we choose literally to memorize the story of Christ, the level of committed study that Scott asked of his students applies also to us. If we wish genuinely to internalize the gospel and make it our own, there can be no substitute for powerful, sustained intellectual and emotional focus.

Second, the heart of preaching must consist of preaching Christ himself, and not just preaching about Christ. Protestant preachers commonly treat the Gospels as though they were merely background material for the real message of God in Romans and Galatians. The theological propositions that Paul gives us in those letters concerning the significance of Christ’s death are obviously important, but ignoring Christ’s life defeats God’s purpose in the incarnation. Christ did not come to earth only to die, and he did not die only so that we might be forgiven. He lived and died so that we might be changed, so that we might be delivered from the power of sin and not just avoid its penalty.

Jesus promised, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). Much earlier in His ministry, He had said essentially the same thing: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14). He is talking about His death and its redemptive power, but He is also teaching that His life and death powerfully draw the human heart.

Can someone go to heaven without loving God? Paul says, “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed” (1 Corinthians 16:22). On what basis could we come truly to love God? John says, “We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). How do we know that God loves us? “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him” (1 John 4:9). Far too often, preaching attempts a psychological impossibility: to make people love God without giving them the reasons that God provided.

Christ did not come to earth and die to make God love us, but because God loved us. Christ came to earth, lived a pure and noble life, taught the most exalted truths, and died an utterly unselfish death so that we might love God. To try to make disciples of Christ without holding up Christ as an inspiration and example to follow would be foolish and futile. “Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:1-2).

Finally, the heart of preaching must both have its roots in, and gain support from, our manner of life.

Paul exhorted the Philippians to “do what you learned and received from me— what I told you and what you saw me do” (Philippians 4:9). Similarly, he told the Corinthians, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:2). To be the same kind of person as Paul, much less Christ himself, can be an intimidating standard. It can become counterproductive if we burden ourselves with unrealistic demands that we would never expect others to meet. Nevertheless, we must not ask less of ourselves than we ask of others. I worked for twelve years as an executive in the mining industry. At the beginning of that period, I asked an executive who had been one of my legal clients how often he visited the mines. He said that he never went underground because it was dirty and dangerous. I resolved not ever to become like him, that I would not make my living based on the toil and danger of other men without sharing in it to the extent practical.

To preach the Christian life in a practical way, we must practice it ourselves. In no other way can we learn how Christ can actually take form within us. In the ESV, Ephesians 4:15 reads, “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” Most translations follow the ESV in using the wording “speaking the truth,” but the Greek verb is actually a causative of the noun for truth; that is, it means to cause the truth to come into being, to make the truth real. We do that by speaking the truth, but we also do it by living the truth. We learn by experience what it takes truly to be a Christian, and thus can teach others confidently and in a way that commands respect.

“Let no one despise your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12).

Jim Gardner, jgardner@fhu.edu