A Word From an Inadequate Preacher

Mike Leake

All genuine preaching is rooted in a feeling of desperation. You wake up on Sunday morning and you can smell the smoke of hell on one side and feel the crisp breezes of heaven on the other. You go to your study and look down at your pitiful manuscript, and you kneel down and cry, ‘O God, this is so weak! Who do I think I am? What audacity to think that in three hours my words will be the odor of death to death and the fragrance of life to life (2 Cor. 2:16). My God, who is sufficient for these things?”  -John Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching, 41-42

If a pastor is not convinced that he is weak and inadequate for the task he is blind. Paul came to the Corinthians with fear and trembling. Our knees shouldn’t be more sturdy than Paul’s.

But…

That’s not the whole story.

If I’m not careful my self-obsessed heart will take this truth and use it to turn the spotlight on me, the preacher. Not for my awesomeness of course; I’m Reformed, after all. I know that God is glorified in my weakness. And so, I’ll make sure everyone knows how weak and inadequate of a preacher I am. That’ll get me the thumbs up that I desire.

It is true that I’m weak and inadequate. But this shouldn’t be the truth that shines the brightest. If it does, then the clay gets the attention. There is a reason why Spurgeon ascended the stairs into his pulpit saying, “I believe in the Holy Spirit…I believe in the Holy Spirit…” and not, “I’m weak and inadequate…I’m weak and inadequate”.

A knowledge of my inadequacy and insufficiency in the pulpit is only a good and helpful truth if it is married to the incontrovertible truth that the Spirit is powerful and does shine forth His glory through insufficient jars of clay.

Therefore, I keep before me the knowledge that I’m weak, insufficient, and that my manuscript is usually quite pitiful. But I proclaim that pitiful manuscript with all the boldness and force that this weak and insufficient jar of clay can muster. I do this knowing that the Holy Spirit actually does accompany the preaching of His Word and He truly does delight in shining a light on Jesus.

Yeah, I’m weak and inadequate. But He’s not! And I want that to be the truth that drives every sermon that I preach.

Why I Almost Hope They Don’t Catch the Boston Bomber

Mike Leake

The key word there is almost.

I do hope they catch the Boston bomber(s) and that whoever it may be is actually brought to justice. It’s okay to pray for justice. So long as we know what we are actually praying for.

But part of me hopes that they never catch the bomber. I say this because of the irresponsibility of our media and because of our growing culture of narcissism. At present we don’t know the identity of the bomber(s). We know nothing of his/her story. We can’t put a face to it. There are no stories asking, “What caused _____ to do this?”

Because of that our attention has to focus on the victims and the pain. On the morning after we feel the pain of a family that lost their eight-year-old son. A young man, full of life, eating ice cream one second, in eternity the next. In these moments we ask all the questions that pain causes us to ask. We grieve. We mourn. We hope. We try to make sense of shattered remains. We hurt.

Once the perpetrator is found our eyes will turn away from the victim to the person behind the attacks. We will know more about him than we know about that eight-year-old boy. His face will be plastered over every news station. He will go down in history. And our pain will turn to outrage.

Somewhere a teenager or a desperate narcissist of any age will view this perpetrator with a different set of eyes. He’ll begin seeing this perpetrator as successful, accomplishing the fame and attention that this failed narcissist would like to achieve himself. His eyes will not see the victims. His heart will not feel the pain. Mass murder, bombing, terror, will now become a means to an end; namely getting his face on every newspaper in America.

That’s why I almost hope they never catch the Boston bomber. This way we can’t make another “hero”. We won’t be able to quickly turn our hearts away from our pain or away from the victims; we will be forced to feel instead of pontificate.

Or maybe when they do find the perpetrator we’ll have the chutzpah to keep our eyes and attention where it belongs—on the victims, and not on a shameful person engaging in pathetic acts of terrorism.

Today in Blogworld 04.16.13

Mike Leake

RIP Ragamuffin

Brennan Manning has died. This is a short memoir.

Love and the Inhumanity of Same-Sex Marriage

This is an excellent piece by Jonathan Leeman. When Leeman writes a lengthy article on a topic it is usually wise to give it a read. This is no exception.

11 Myths and Misperceptions about Suicide

There are some common axioms about suicide. Bruce Ray helps us see that some of these are patently false.

The shadow of secularization and the new dawn of the church.

Good word from Micah Fries. “I think the church should approach the future with some level of brevity. We should be aware of the challenges that are ahead of us, but we should not run in fear. The future can be bright, for all the reasons I laid out, and even more. Most of all, the future is bright because God is good, he is still sovereign and he loves his bride, the church. And this is a great thing!”

John Piper on regrets and retirement:

How Does a Teenager Share the Gospel with Her Unbelieving Parents?

Mike Leake 2 Comments

One of the greatest joys (and at times pains) of working with teenagers is whenever students with unbelieving parents come to know Jesus. After only a short time of becoming followers of Jesus, these dear students begin aching for the lostness of their parents. And so they share the gospel with them.

And it gets really ugly.

The gospel is an offense. Period. But it’s perhaps even more of an offense when your arrogant 15 year old is telling her mom how wrong she is about life, the Bible, and her eternal soul. To her this new found “knowledge” doesn’t feel much different than her daughter trying to set her straight in a million other areas in life.

That’s when I get a teenager at my house at 12:30am because she’s convinced that her mom and dad aregoing to hell because they reject the gospel. My heart is grieved for this student. No matter how hard she tries she cannot get her mom to come to know Jesus. She wants to give eternal life to the one that gave her physical life. And so she weeps because mom and dad only gets angry with her when he shares the gospel.

So, how should a teenager share the gospel with her unbelieving parents?

If I am reading my Bible correctly faithful gospel proclamation includes both our life and our lips. It must be spoken (Romans 10) and it must be lived (1 Timothy 4). But that doesn’t have to mean that those two need to be totally balanced.

If you are on a mission trip to the Honduras and you will only see these people for about 10-15 minutes then it probably needs to look like this:

scales.mission

Your lifespan before these people is about as long as a moth in a refrigerator. It isn’t going to last very long. So while you can do little things in that 10-15 minutes to show the gospel, a larger portion of your time ought to be spent in speaking the gospel.

For a teenager it probably needs to look like this:

scales.teen2

That means that you share the gospel more with your life and slide the proclamation in there whenever you can. Joyously doing chores might do more for your parents seeing Christ than you sharing John 3:16. That’s not to demean a teenager sharing Jesus from John 3:16. That is necessary and it needs to be done. But for a teenager your changed life will speak far louder than your new found theological words.

So, how does a teenager share the gospel with her unbelieving parents?

Joyously take out the trash in Jesus’ name.