We have discussed the divine call that commissions men for special ambassadorial service for the King of kings, the divine call without which no man should go forth to preach. Let us now consider the reason why God calls men into the ministry, the purpose for which they are commissioned and ordained, and the chief business in which their energies are to be engaged.
We look first at the words of the gospel commission. As these are recorded by Mark they are: "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature" (16: 15). To this Matthew adds the work of teaching converts to "observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you," followed by baptism on belief (28:20). Luke has it: "That repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem" (24: 47).
In our search for the specific objectives of the Christian ministry let me put with the texts quoted these others: "I send thee, to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me" (Acts 26:17, 18). "He gave some, . . . pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ" (Eph. 4:1113). "God . . . hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; . . . hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God" (2 Cor. 5:18-20).
Just as a collector of gems would open a jewel casket and lift gem after gem for closer examination, let me lift from these passages the statements that set forth what ministers of God are called and sent forth to do—the great objectives of the Christian ministry.
They are to go into the whole world and preach the gospel. Their converts are to be taught to observe all things whatsoever Christ commanded. That is, they are to be thoroughly instructed and completely indoctrinated. Repentance and remission of sins are to be preached in Christ's name among all nations. Christian ministers are sent to open men's eyes, to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, that sinners may receive forgiveness of sins, and may ultimately enjoy an inheritance among those who are saved. By the work of the ministry the saints are to be perfected, the body of Christ is to be edified; and this is to be continued until all come into the unity of the faith, and into the knowledge of the Son of God, unto perfect men, measured by the stature of Christ. The ministry of reconciliation has been committed to God's ambassadors, in order that they, in Christ's stead, will plead with all men to be reconciled to God.
Try as you may, you cannot conceive of any change so great or so glorious as that which the Christian ministry is thus designed to bring about. Its mission is a profound and radical change in the relations of men to God. To accomplish this there must be first an entire change of individual character and life.
A Simple Tool
To accomplish these stupendous changes that the Christian ministry is designed to bring about, God has supplied His ambassadors with a tool that He means them always to use, and never abandon for any substitute, no matter how glamorous and seemingly effective. That tool, however, which is the chief instrument for the accomplishment of the grand purposes of the ministry, is so simple, and so apparently futile, that a constant temptation exists to reach out for other instruments, to turn away from God's way of doing His work and adopt human methods and man-made instrumentalities.
The chief instrument furnished by the Lord Himself to His ministry for the accomplishment of the grand objectives of, and changes made by, the gospel is just—the Word. The minister is to come into contact with men, men who are lost and who need salvation, by means of spoken truth, and the source of the truth he is to speak is the Word of God.
What the Master has committed to His ambassadors is "the word of reconciliation" (2 Cor. 5:19). As a sower, the minister soweth the word" (Mark 4:14). As a preacher, he preaches "the word" (2 Tim. 4:2). The Word he preaches is the "word of . . . salvation" (Acts 13:26). This Word is the forerunner of faith, together with all other saving graces. "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" (Rom. 10:17).
So the Christian minister not only is a man of God, but is a man sent from God, sent from God to speak for God what God gives him to speak, to proclaim God's message, a message embodied in a book, and that Book is the Word of God.
Thus the great instrument of the minister's work is just the Word of God. Let us consider that. A "word"! Only a "word"!
How futile that seems, how light, how slight! And yet how mighty! Words have always had enormous influence and power in history. "Where the word of a king is, there is power."
And the word of God is the greatest power in the universe. It was by that word the universe came into being. All through the Bible the word of the Lord stands out as the greatest force in the world. At all times His word through His servants has been the one supreme power over men. "The Word of God is alive, and active, and more cutting than any double--edged sword. It penetrates even to the dividing line of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and is skilled in judging the heart's ponderings and motives" (Heb. 4:12, Berkeley).
The Supreme Instrument
All that the minister has to do among men, centers in the preaching of the Word. That is his chief business. It is for this that he is called, and chosen, and sent, and commissioned, and trained, and equipped. To him it should always be the most weighty and important of all human transactions and effort. His lifelong endeavor is to be a better, a more convincing, a more effective preacher of the Word.
No matter what other agencies the church may employ to accomplish the great designs of God, regardless of the institutions and organizations, notwithstanding the multiplied campaigns and drives and funds and goals that may assist in her great mission, it is still true that preaching is the supreme instrument for the regeneration of men.
The founder of the church chose men, trained them, and sent them out to be preachers. All that He said to them about their work centers in preaching the Word. No work in the world, for one fleeting moment, can be compared in importance, in nicety, in skill, in results, and in abiding satisfactions with that of preaching the gospel, standing in Christ's stead, speaking Christ's truth, clothed with Christ's spirit, teaching and persuading men to be reconciled to God.
There is positive danger today in the tendency to neglect preaching. Many things tend to crowd it out. A multiplicity of activities and drives and campaigns demand time and energy and thought and strength. It is easier to plan an entertainment than to hammer out a sermon. It is easier to administer an organization or a program than to prepare a great pronouncement. It is easier to engineer complicated human machinery than to deliver a divine message.
I appeal to our ministers, whether they are in field or departmental service, in administrative or institutional capacity, to our ministerial students and ministerial interns, to give special attention to preaching. Make it the chief feature and factor of your work. Put more labor on preaching than on anything else. Give the best you have to preaching.
Unfortunately there have been those among the ministry who have found it hard to believe that such tremendous results can possibly be obtained by the simple instrument with which the soldier of Christ has been sent forth to face the Goliath that defies the army of the living God. Through all history the wisdom of the world is inclined to despise the sling and the stone, and is prepared to advise the abandonment of the plain dress of the shepherd lad for more elaborate, glamorous, imposing, and seemingly more effective armor and weapons.
The Word Displaced
Quite early in the history of the church the Word lost its place of pre-eminence, and preaching gave way to a multitude of rites and ceremonies, vestments and miters, liturgies and forms, pageants and processionals—all designed to strike the eye, impress the mind, influence the emotions, and make the priest and the church central in religion. The Word sank into insignificance before these other means employed to produce and deepen spiritual impressions. The minister had to become more than a servant, more than a herald, more than a preacher—he had to become a priest, a member of a sacred caste, possessing among other mystic faculties the power of forgiving sin and dispensing grace, and a power more awful still, that of creating the Saviour of men out of a morsel of bread, and offering His actual body and blood as a sacrifice for the living and the dead.
The services of religion were turned into magnificent spectacles and rites, designed to make an impact upon the senses and so fashioned as to overawe the soul. The chief work of the minister, instead of preaching the Word, became the performance of these rites. The more complete he made his ritual, and the more solemn and impressive his ceremonies, the greater became his success.
The Protestant Reformation swept aside a great part of these spurious and false forms of worship, and endeavored to make the Word central once more in the services of the church. It succeeded in doing this only in part. There are a great many not only needless, but positively pernicious, substitutes in our churches for the simple Word of the gospel.
When the time came for the final message of the gospel to go to all the world, based as it is on the simple word of the living God, the time also came for the complete abandonment of every substitute for the simple weapon that God has given His ministers to use, and for the restoration of the centrality in all preaching of the living and life-giving Word.
The Christian minister today is not a minister of rites and ceremonies, of lights and litanies, a minister of pageants and processions, of shows and playlets, a minister of plot and acting, of spectacular exhibitions and theatrical demonstrations; he is not even a minister of motion pictures and visual aids. As it was in the beginning, so now he is, or should be, emphatically and exclusively, a minister "of the word" (Luke 1:2). "Christ sent me," said Paul, "not to baptize, but to preach the gospel" (1 Cor. 1:17). The baptizing was subordinate to the preaching, not the preaching to the baptizing.
In a former article I put to you the question of the propriety of ordaining any man not called of God to publicly preach the Word of God. Let us now consider another question: Are we in danger, in our public presentation of the message for the last days, of pushing aside the Word of God from its place of centrality in preaching, whether in the church pulpit, or on the evangelistic platform, or on the radio, or over television, and substituting various forms of entertainment, including active representations of things that are not real: dramatic shows and playlets of occurrences that are pure pretense, so fashioned as to impress a point or a lesson which the simple Bible, skillfully expounded, impresses a thousandfold more effectively; still and motion picture exhibitions that for the most part have no connection with and only serve to divert attention from the subject under discussion, and other similar procedures designed to enliven and modernize the preaching of the truth?
If God's ministers today have properly but one instrument with which to do the work God has sent them to do, then of what supreme importance it is that they become masters in the use of that single instrument! If "the Word"—the spoken truth of God—is indeed the chief instrument of our ministry, it becomes clearly a matter of overwhelming importance that each man who uses this instrument shall be supremely skillful in its use.
