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How to preach the gospel 1 Cor 2: 1 – 16 Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 28 Sep, 2008 IN THE first of these talks, I spoke about the kinds of people we must be. Last week, I spoke about the content of our message. Today’s topic is how to preach the gospel. I said at the beginning that Paul does not muck around. He gets right into it and carries us along from point to point to point. All along the way, he makes his aim clear. Nothing at all must be permitted to stand in the way of healthy community life and clear expression of the good news of Jesus. I went to a youth rally once, put on by the churches of our district. The speaker was the pastor of one of the more prestigious churches of the district. They had youth–oriented music... from the late 1950s. It was played on the organ — none of that wicked amplified guitar music here, thank you. Even as we came in, it did nothing to capture the imagination of the people who came. I was with a senior pastor, whose first remark to me was, “Go through those doors and you will be in 1960!” He wasn’t wrong. The meeting was a cross between a 1960s Sunday morning service and a business meeting of the Baptist Union. The sermon was full of “with it” terms, 1957–style. But it was some kind of rehash, it wasn’t his own. It wasn’t even very good theology. My companion flinched several times and whispered a correction to me. It was one of those ...wiping the dirt from his hands as he rose from the grave, situations, like the Beatles’ song said. If St Paul came to one of our Baptist services, I am sure he would not recognise a lot of what we do. But he would know if our passion was for the gospel, or if we were just going through the motions. We have to be sure of our basics. We have to understand about holiness, about grace and about the peace that comes from a close relationship with each other in Jesus our Lord. We have to be sure about our message, that the plain truth of the cross of Christ is a message which will stand up under scrutiny. But we also have to understand that a gospel without the power of the Holy Spirit is going to be a gospel which fails to transform lives, a gospel which is powerless to change anything. As Paul says, 4 My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5 so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power. Throughout the history of the church, it’s sad in a way to say that the spectacular growth has not generally been among the wise or the learned or the powerful, but among the poor, the weak, the foolish. I have told you before about what happened the time a couple came to Fairfield church who had been involved with the Rosicrucian movement. They asked a couple of us what we thought about the Rosicrucians, and I started to give a good, well–thought–out theological answer. There was a chap at the church, a labourer, who was generally considered a bit foolish. I wouldn’t be fair to him to say he was a bit slow, but he used to always be either two steps behind everyone else in a discussion, or would be so far off the track that people used to sigh with a sort of, “What now!?” attitude whenever he spoke. I’d barely said two words when he spoke up. He had an answer to this couple. “Do they tell you much about Jesus?” he asked. “No, not really,” they said. “Well, Jesus is what it is all about, so you’d better stay clear of them, hadn’t you?” Who was the foolish one then? He clicked the right button while I was still scrolling around the page.. And that’s how it has been throughout history. Many of the early Baptists in England were rural folk. No one considered them anything much, but the Baptists spread all over England during the Civil War and the Commonwealth period, because it was Baptist soldiers who preached wherever they camped, and Baptist tinkers who went door to door, sharpening knives and mending plates, who shared their testimony with the housewives and the manor servants and won them to Christ. A century later, Wesley and Whitefield went to the new industrial cities. Whitefield preached and Wesley preached and organised, and churches sprung up among the poor and the underprivileged. And they in turn went to their neighbours and friends with the life-changing message of the gospel. In the next century, William Booth found that the Methodists had lost their fire, and went out to the drunks and the prostitutes, to the pickpockets and the bookmaker’s runners, and won them to Christ with a simple message of salvation by grace through faith. And, closer to our own times, the early Pentecostals were migrant labourers, black share farmers, poor whites — people not welcomed into polite society and dismissed from the halls of power — but some of the greatest missionary efforts have come from them. God does not use human wisdom, but a bit of spiritual power goes a long way.
Just in case people like me get too discouraged, though, Paul says that there is a place for people like me. 1COR 2:6 We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. 7 No, we speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 However, as it is written: “No eye has seen, 2:10 but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. People who are won to Christ are generally won by people who are able to put the message simply. Often they are people who are not good at recognising the fine points, who are not good with subtle distinctions, but they know the facts. Jesus died, Jesus rose, Jesus will come again, and, if you trust in him and in his death, you will experience eternal life through him. And they back it up with demonstrations of Holy Spirit power. On the other hand, as we Christians grow in spiritual maturity, we do need to fill in the details, we do need to understand more depth. We were talking about how Jesus was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities. When you are trying to get someone to focus on how completely adequate Jesus’ death on the cross really is, it’s enough to know that transgressions and iniquities are basically sins. But not too many of us knew on Wednesday night what the meanings really are. Transgression is when I cut across the boundaries, when I break the rules. Iniquity is when I act unfairly, when I treat one less fairly than I treat another. For example, if I steal, I transgress the law which says, Thou shalt not steal. If I am racist, that is iniquity, because I don’t treat each one equally regardless. Even if I don’t see a commandment about racism, racism is iniquitous regardless of whether a law spells it out or not. And both transgression and iniquity are sin. We need demonstrations of the Spirit’s power to show people that the gospel message is powerful and real; we need a message of wisdom among the mature, so that we know and understand exactly what Jesus dealt with when he died on the cross. But what God reveals is still by his Spirit.
Not all ministries are the same, but it is the same Spirit who inspires them in all their diversity.
So Paul takes us on to an understanding of how central the Holy Spirit of God is to our everyday Christian living. He has shown us that the spread of the gospel is by the Holy Spirit, and that detailed biblical teaching is by the same Spirit. The Spirit of Christ is the One who makes Jesus truly real to us. That is why Paul writes, The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. 11 For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. 13 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The only one who really knows what is going on in God’s heart of hearts is the Spirit of God himself. If we want any kind of understanding of God’s real purpose, we have to let the Holy Spirit teach us. I want us to see something else here. Just as Jesus is the word by whom God is expressed in this world, the Spirit is, in a sense, the heart of God, the one who expresses the intentions and thoughts of God to us Christians as we seek God’s will. There is an intimate link between the Spirit and the Father. I once worked with a chap who belonged to the Christadelphians. He tried to convert me to his way of thinking. I didn’t know at the time whether Baptists did believe in the trinity or not. Bill wanted me to deny the trinity but, instead, he made a convinced trinitarian of me. The more I read the Bible to see whether he was telling me the truth or not, the more I saw that Jesus and God the Father and the Holy Spirit are all indissolubly and eternally liinked. But Bill could not see it, even though I was increasingly convinced that the Bible taught these things. The fact is that he was not receiving the Spirit’s teaching, because he himself was unspiritual. To him, the Holy Spirit was no searcher of hearts, but a mere impersonal force. Therefore he could not know the mind of God, because he refused to admit the Holy Spirit into his life, because he had no faith in the Spirit to bring the things of Christ to him.
In fact, what Paul says applies to people like him: 14 The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. Bill mocked when I spoke about tongues or prophecy, but he could not receive such things: they were outside his experience of God. In fact, you wouldn’t believe how good things really are for us who are Christians: 15 The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment: 2:16 “For who has known the mind of the Lord But we have the mind of Christ. That chap Bill thought he was so spiritual, so far ahead of common old Baptists and Brethren and people like that. He was truly racist about religion, if I can be allowed to mix categories like that. But he certainly didn’t have the mind of Christ. In fact, he had a truly dirty mind. The way he talked revealed a lot about how he thought, and, even when he was talking about the Bible, there was often a level of sexual innuendo, hinting about sex in an inappropriate way. He also had an iniquitous mind, because he was a key actor when a group of Christadelphians took over a combined Baptist and Brethren outreach and turned it into a Christadelphian Ecclesia. The Christians had done the hard work, and the heretics stole it. God’s plan is to bring every thought into captivity to Christ, but Bill’s mind was out of control. But, as we learn to follow the Spirit’s promptings, we don’t even need other people to tell us what to do, as Paul says, because, when we follow the Spirit’s promptings, he shows us God’s way, and God’s way is the right way. I am not saying, forget about the commandments, or forget about God’s word. Far from it. None of us is every totally Spirit–directed or Spirit–filled. So none of us is ever totally clear on God’s way. We always need to check ourselves against the standard of God’s word. But a person who habitually transgresses, or who is habitually iniquitous, that is a person who is not Spirit–controlled, and you can see it a mile off, if you look.
So our passage today tells us that, to be effective, we need to make it our goal to be Spirit–filled people. And it makes it clear that Spirit–filled people are people who accept the things that come from the Spirit of God; they are people who listen to the Spirit. Yes, we have to be sure of who we are in relation to God’s holiness, God’s grace, God’s peace. And we have to stick to the plain truth of the message of a Saviour who died for us and who rise again to live forever more. We have to stick to the plain truth that those who follow him by faith have live forever more. But if our ministry is to grow in effectiveness, it will only be as we learn to let the Spirit of God empower us and direct us. The way is simple. Very often we Baptists neglect the Holy Spirit. So let’s submit ourselves once more to the Lordship of Jesus. Let’s confess any sin which is keeping us from him. And let us ask God to fill our lives and our thoughts and our ministries with the power of the Holy Spirit and the understanding which comes from him. And then we will see our ministry begin to turn around. May it be so! AMEN |
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© Peter R. Green 2008. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.) |
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