By Pastor Tedd Mathis
I graduated from Bible college in 1993. My major was Bible. I am the son of a pastor who ministered in the Bible church movement. That background and training certainly has influenced my understanding of what preaching should be. But in my early years as a pastor, my being genetically predisposed to being a class clown, and a love for theatrics showed up. In God’s grace, about two years into being a pastor I came under significant conviction about preaching.
I was not in the pulpit to impress. I was there to proclaim and explain the revealed Word of God. That conviction brought a change in focus and use of my time. Reading or considering the latest theories about church growth and sermon illustrations was replaced by far more intense study of the Scriptures.
Some time later I ran across the following essay. The author is anonymous; some have suspected it was written by the widow of a preacher – who had a front row seat observing her husband’s haunting. I certainly am not the biblical exegete some men have come to be. The class clown is still around. But as I wind up my time as your pastor, I trust my years of preaching the word will be known for handling the Bible for what it is – the word of God and doing so in season and out of season.
Here’s the essay:
FLING HIM into his office. Tear the “Office” sign from the door and nail on the sign, “Study.”
Take him off the mailing list. Lock him up with his books and his Bible. Slam him down on his knees before a holy God and a holy text and broken hearts and a superficial flock.
Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities who knows about God.
THROW HIM INTO the ring to box with God until he learns how short his arms are. 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. Shut his mouth forever from spouting remarks, and stop his tongue forever from 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 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 effort to play psychiatrist. Form a choir and raise a chant and haunt him with it night and day: “Sir, we would see Jesus!”
WHEN AT LONG LAST he dares 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, and manage the community’s weary drives, and bless the sordid baked potatoes and green beans, 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, and when he’s privileged to translate the truth of God to man, 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.
