God's Faithfulness in Ordinary Preaching

I'm glad I don't need to think up something clever to say each time I step into the pulpit - something that I merely hope will capture people's attention, speak to issues they struggle with, or simply just give them a warm fuzzy feeling or an amusing anecdote to begin their week with. I'm even more glad that I don't need to preach my own ideas - that is, what I happen to think or feel about particular issues, or about how I've conquered or been conquered by life's particular problems. 

That sort of 'preaching' would be so exhausting to have to come up twice a Sunday, week after week after week. And it would be even more exhausting to listen to!

Rather, my task is far more ordinary: it’s to simply preach Jesus Christ as Lord. Those four words, which comprise the heart of the gospel, are on one hand simple and easy enough to communicate in a minute or less, but on the other hand are so profoundly deep that it takes sixty six books of the Bible, written by inspired men from all sorts of cultural backgrounds spanning thousands of years using three completely different languages to convey just a glimpse of what it means and how it applies to our lives in an infinite amount of ways.

Paul helps me understand what it means to be a good preacher of the gospel in 2 Corinthians 4. I simply must carefully read the passage at hand, show how it points to Jesus Christ as Lord, and then get myself out of the way. The Spirit will take it from there. This is how He ordinarily converts people.

How could God - the very One who said "Let light shine out of the darkness" - possibly need whatever pathetic wit, insights, or experiences I could offer in order to make His light shine in people's hearts? To borrow from and slightly modify a line from the great hymn, "What more could I say than to you He hath said?"

That certainly doesn't mean that as a preacher I have nothing to say, a fact which my patient congregation will readily attest to. But my job is to simply unpack the meaning and implication of what God has written to us, and illustrate how passage after passage demonstrates what it means that Jesus Christ is Lord. 

On my own I can't change any minds, open blind eyes, or soften hard hearts. Again, this is the work of the Spirit of God: to regenerate - that gracious act in which He raises from spiritual death and makes alive those whom God the Father has given to Jesus Christ. It’s work that, because it’s often so ordinary, can seem so boring to so many looking for something more dramatic.

This is the primary way God has ordained to ordinarily bring His grace, mercy and peace: through the foolishness of ordinary preaching blessed by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit. This in turn gives us the “light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ.”