We are preachers. That is our function as Christians. Our words, our deeds—indeed, our whole lives—are intended to proclaim that God has wrought redemption for man. . . . The ministry of Jesus opened with the words: "The kingdom of God has arrived. Repent, and believe in the gospel." Those words express also for all time the situation which is created by the preacher. He who is confronted by a preacher is confronted with the necessity of decision. His hour has come. God's sovereignty over him has, as it were, arrived. He must repent, change the basis of all his thinking and living, and trust himself to the gospel. God has loved him in Jesus Christ and, henceforth, he must live in glad acceptance of the truth that he has been so loved.
This task of proclaiming, of being preachers, is the task about which the psalmist speaks. It is a satisfying task—satisfying to give thanks to the Lord for His name by which He has revealed Himself to men, satisfying to declare to men His steadfast love for them in the morning and His faithfulness to them by night, and, above all, satisfying to be able to sing for joy because of gladness at the works of the Lord.
Thou, O Lord, hast made me glad by thy work; at the works of thy hands I sing for joy.
The Preacher Who Is Being Saved
First of all, we are preachers because God has made us such. His work with us and upon us and inside us is the context within which our preaching is set. We preach because something is happening and has happened to us.
The context of Christian witnessing is that something has happened to the witness himself. He has been apprehended. He has heard God say, "I have called you by name, you are mine.". . . Saint Paul declared himself to be a man, the boundaries of whose life were determined by the gospel of God.
When, in his letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul says, "The word of the cross is the power of God to us who are being saved," he is declaring a double truth. The preached word is active in saving the preacher, and the preacher knows it: the preacher also knows that it can save the hearer. Therefore says Saint Paul, "We preach." True preaching demands that the preacher should always be part of the congregation (he must always also be directing the word to himself); and he must also be part of the evidence that his word is true. "We are being saved," and from the sparks that fly from that process the message proclaimed draws its fire.
All of us who are Christians are involved by God in this process of salvation, and irrespective of where we have arrived in our experience, we are committed to the task of being witnesses.
In speaking, then, about "the context of our preaching" we do not mean a description of the situation within which the activity of preaching takes place: we are speaking rather of that because of which preaching becomes possible, even bearable. I can preach Christ crucified, because that word is the power of God to me, the one who is being saved. The hearer and the preacher stand side by side, otherwise preaching would be a presumption.
The Hearer Who Is Being Saved
This alongsideness of preacher and hearer because of the nature of the activity of God has also another significance. Even as we cannot preach unless God were working in us, so also we cannot preach with effect unless God were working in our hearers too. Previous to the preached word is the activity of the Word Himself. He said, "I will bring," "I will gather," "I will draw": and we work with Him and not just for Him.
During the days that I was preparing this address, an old man whom I had never known came to me one day with his elder daughter and requested me to arrange to have his younger daughter instructed for baptism. "Who spoke to her about Christ?" I asked them, and they gave me the name of a young man who, some years before that, had lived in and had been converted in the Ashram. Why did that old man come to me? Because he had known my father and had learned to respect him and, therefore, thought that he could trust me with looking after the many problems that would arise for his daughter after she got baptized. That is the way evangelism is done. Every evangelist, when he reaps, finds that, practically always, he reaps where he has not sown. Somebody else sowed the seed. And where he has sown, somebody else will reap. Did not Jesus say to His disciples, "I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor; others have labored, and you have entered into their labor"? The moment and manner of the reaping is always in God's hands who makes the seed to grow, "first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear."
This ripening of the harvest which is God's work is the context of the preacher's work, and he who has not learned to work with God can spoil that harvest by laying anxious and impatient hands upon it. The story of the Jaffna Ashram written at the close of its first decade ends with the following words: "The Ashram is still a beginning—a beginning that challenges our watchfulness, our devotion and our prayers. But above all it challenges our patience, for we who grow old so quickly are anxious to see the full flower before its time. We need to cultivate the art of waiting for God's hour."
No, it is not for you to open the buds into blossoms.
Your touch soils them, you tear their petals to pieces
And strew them in the dust;
He who can open the bud does it so simply.
The central problem of evangelism is the problem of knowing how and when to harvest. The land we can prepare in season and out of season, the seed we can sow always and everywhere, but the harvest must be given.
Jesus said to His disciples: "The harvest is plentiful . . . ; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest." The laborer who would harvest must pray that he may discern the hour when he is sent to reap.
Many years ago a friend of mind came to see me with a friend of his, a Hindu, who was a doctor, and whom he had helped to find Jesus. He came to talk with me about arranging for the baptism of this doctor friend. They lived in a remote place in Ceylon where there was no settled Christian community or church. The Baptist Church had some work there, and a Baptist minister went there periodically. Could the baptism be postponed for a few months so that it could take place at the time when the Baptist minister would come there to conduct some special services? I advised that that was all right. Today that doctor is still a Hindu. The baptism never took place. During the months that had to elapse before the date of baptism his family found ways of bringing pressure upon him and of persuading him not to get baptized. The harvest was lost. Can the harvest be lost? What a sobering question that is!
Jesus is the evangelist; He brings the soul to its harvest, and we must care sufficiently about people as to be able to discern the hour at which they have arrived in God's work with them, His search for them. Jesus said, "I am the door": thereby bidding us whom He has called to be His shepherds to go to His sheep through Him. He must allow us to enter in. We do no good when we climb over the wall and get among the sheep even though we climb over the wall in His name. We do no good either by postponing entrance when the door is wide open. The sheep cannot wait our convenience.
He is the "apostle and high priest of our confession"; and we preach because He—the Ascended Lord—is making supplication for all our hearers; we preach because He —the Risen Lord—is in search of every soul until it is found; we preach because He—the Crucified Lord—has accomplished man's deliverance from sin and a wasted life.
His work is the context of our witness.
The Witness of the Church
So far, we have spoken about preaching in terms of preacher and hearer; let us now look at this activity in the context of the life of the church to which it essentially belongs. The church lives by its mission to the world, and both preacher and hearer belong to the church's life. The church is not simply a company of witnesses, it is itself the witnessing community; so that the witness of the individual preacher must find its locus in the witness of the church as a whole. Indeed, it is to the faith of the church in Jesus as God and Saviour that our witness is borne before the world.
But this truth about the relation of the preacher to the church which we see so clearly, we often tend to forget when we think of the hearer. We call people non-Christians and forget the full implication of the fact that for them, too, Jesus Christ has already died. The foundation of our preaching is the universality of the gospel. A hymn by Charles Wesley gives significant expression to this truth:
Father, whose everlasting love Thy only Son for sinners gave, Whose grace to all did freely move, And sent Him down the world to save:
Help us Thy mercy to extol,
Immense, unfathomed, unconfined;
To praise the Lamb who died for all,
The general Saviour of mankind.
Thy undistinguishing regard
Was cast on Adam's fallen race;
For all Thou hast in Christ prepared
Sufficient, sovereign, saving grace.
The world He suffered to redeem; For all He hath the atonement made; For those that will not come to Him The ransom of His life was paid.
We do not take the gospel to someone to whom Jesus does not already belong.
It is very important to remember this truth in all our evangelistic work because it will save us from treating those who have not yet confessed Jesus to be their personal Saviour as people who are outside Jesus. In our evangelistic work we are not seeking to make people become what they are not already. We are seeking simply to tell them what and who they are. The prodigal in the far country is a son away from home. He is no one else, he is nothing less.
Evangelism is prolepsis as well as proclamation. It holds within it even now a taste of the triumph of the future. Jesus said, "The gospel . . . will be preached . . . as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come"—not that we can determine when the end will be, but that our preaching is set toward the end. Indeed, it is here that the preacher draws sustenance for his faith that his preaching is not in vain. He believes that God will win.
The Church's Warfare
We see, then, that preaching considered as an activity within the life of the church is set in the context of the accomplished work of Christ and His continuing ministry; but little is gained in emphasizing this if it is not also realized that it is precisely this truth which also determines the church's responsibility to maintain the distinctiveness of its own life in the world.
It is irresponsible to think that Christians can find time and money and strength for everything that everybody else does, and that with spare money in spare time with spare strength they can serve the ends of God's kingdom. The great pearl is bought only by selling small pearls. Where no pearl has been sold, there obedience to the demands of the kingdom has not begun.
There is also for our thinking and obedience, a deeper consequence of the truth that the church must maintain its distinction from the world. It is the consequence of believing that it matters, and matters greatly whether a person is within the church as a believer or is outside the church in his unbelief.
The Jerusalem Conference of the International Missionary Council declared that while missions of an earlier time were moved by the thought that people were dying without Christ, modern missions were moved by the thought that people were living without Him. Yes, and yet we have got used to the idea of people living without consciously accepting Christ as their Saviour, so that our evangelism has tended to become an expression of our sense of duty as Christians rather than an expression of our concern that people must be evangelized. The early church, believing that the end was not far off, was willing to turn the world upside down; we are concerned, are we not, with arriving at an arrangement of coexistence with the world. We do evangelize, but our evangelism tends to become the evangelism of a settled community and not of a pilgrim people. Do we not see that the evangelist, in proclaiming Jesus, is raising for his hearers the tremendous issue of their own destiny? He is challenging them not to coexistence but to pilgrimage.
To you therefore who believe, he is precious, but for those who do not believe, "The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner," and "a stone that will make men stumble, a rock that will make them fall."
Preaching cannot escape this context.
Christ's Continuing Ministry
Let us recapitulate our thinking so far: Preaching is set in the context of the preacher who is being saved.
Preaching is set in the context of the hearer, who, too, is being saved.
Preaching is set in the context of the life and being of the church which lives by and witnesses to the accomplished work of Christ for all men.
Preaching is also set in the context of the church's warfare with the world, which warfare is concerned with ultimate issues. And now, lastly, Preaching is set in the context of the continuing ministry of Christ in the world as its cross-bearer.
When Jesus went to Gethsemane, He turned to His disciples and asked them to watch with Him. They could not carry His cross—that, He must do—but they could minister to the cross-bearer. How easily we tend, when faced with a situation where Jesus must suffer, to wash our hands with a pious resolution and say that we are not responsible for that suffering. Someone else is to blame, and by our fixing the blame where it belongs we seek to escape our responsibility to minister to those who suffer.
"As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren," says Jesus, "you did it to me." The preacher must find a way of holding the hands of those whom the world has treated wrongfully, if he is to preach at all with any sincerity.
When we read the Beatitudes they come to us as a challenge, because we are not poor, because we are not hungry, because we do not mourn, because we are not persecuted. But suppose we had to announce the Beatitudes to the poor, to the hungry, to the sad, to the persecuted. Then would arise our difficulty. We should find it impossible to say "Blessed" until we had also found some way of getting close to those whose blessedness we had to proclaim.
Since our preaching has to be done in companionship with Him whose is the cross of life, we have to go with Him on His Via Dolorosa. To a few of us it may be given, as it was given to Simon of Cyrene, to carry His cross for Him, but to all of us it is given to keep company with Him along the way. That is our cross. Christian obedience always demands that we take up our cross and follow Him, and the obedience of preaching is no exception.
