Preaching and Preachers

The Character of the Messageedification and teaching it will produce church members who are hardand cold, and often harsh and self-satisfied. I do not know of anythingthat is more likely to produce a congregation of Pharisees than justthat. A further result of this wrong attitude is that such people onlyattend one service each Sunday; once is enough for them, they do notneed any more! They generally attend on Sunday morning only; theyhave become 'once-ere' as they are called.This is truly deplorable; and my first point is that it is to be tracedto this wrong assessment of people on the part of the pulpit and thepew. Both agree in their diagnosis that these people are Christians,and so they never hear preaching of the type that will make sure thatthey really are. The way to correct this, as I have said, is to ensure thatone service each week should be definitely evangelistic in a biblicalsense.That, of course, means that all this has to be explained clearly to thelisteners. This is a part of our preaching, because, acting on thiswrong assumption, many of these listeners will not come to theevangelistic service because they feel that they have no need of it, thatit has nothing to give them.This to me is of the very essence of the whole problem of theChurch today. What do we say to such people? We must convincethem of the importance of being present at every service of thechurch. Every service! Why? The first answer-and I have often usedthis argument and people have come to see it-is that if they are notpresent at every service they may well find one day that they were notpresent when something really remarkable took place.This raises again the whole question of, What is preaching? I amreferring once more to what I have called its essence, the power of theSpirit. I shall develop this further later. This is the all-importantelement that we must recapture in connection with our churchservices, the idea that you never know what is going to happen. Ifthepreacher alwaysknows exactlywhat is going to happen, in my view heshould not be in a pulpit at all. The whole glory of the ministry is thatyou do not know what may happen. In a lecture you know what is153