You're a Preacher

I know what it is like to deny Christ as my leader, Savior and friend. I know what’s like to have my faith squashed by fears – fears of the unknown and fears of the predicted. I have been down the road that chooses cursing over blessing, sinner over saint, and worldly over Christ-likeness. I know what it is like to follow Christ but see no eternal value in my praying and choosing to sleep instead. My life is just as broken, dirty, foolish, and unkempt as the next.

But that’s the beauty of our faith. We take our brokenness, anguish and despair into the pulpit with us. We own it. We use it to preach. God is not asking us to be perfect – but rather to live life fully alive. To go through our day knowing we have messed up, failed, and fallen short of the glory of God but also to know that we are forgiven by a God who is all loving, all powerful, and always present.

God is not telling us to preach from our perfection, “Look at me, look what God has done for me my whole life and how much better I am than you.”

On the contrary, God is asking us to preach from our brokenness, “It is by the grace of God and the forgiveness in God’s love that I stand before you today.”

We are all preachers. We all carry the gift of the Holy Spirit with us empowering us to do the will of our God. Our lives, because of the resurrection, are no longer our own. We are Christians – followers of the way. We carry deep within us a belief, well it’s even deeper than that, an ever-rooted conviction that we are a part of a much bigger story.

A lot of people fear preaching because it is such a strange concept. What is preaching? It is standing before someone as God’s spokesperson. We are not speaking on behalf of our knowledge, our experiences, or our hobbies. We are speaking primarily on God’s message. We are heralding the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

For some, the fear is in the sermon. “What should I say? There is no way I can reiterate the story of Christianity and formulate it with illustrations and jokes!” For others there is a real fear of not feeling adequate. This one is mine. How can anyone confidently stand before another group of people and speak on behalf of God? How much prayer must you pray in order to receive a word from God? When do you know you have the word? What gives you the right to deliver God’s word to God’s people? Apparently no one knows all the horrible things we have done and are capable of doing. If they did, they would have never asked us to preach. And here we sit, in our ontological anxiety full of fear and doubt that we do not belong in such a moment as to speak God’s words to people living today.

My word of hope to you is, “Our faith should quell our fears, never our courage.”

To accept the call to preach is not to accept the paid job of preaching in a church each week. To accept the call to preach is to continually speak out of the part of your soul in which God lives. To preach is to be in concert with that inner voice of love and what it is saying to you at the time. Preaching is connecting your experiences to the Christ event in the gospel. It is to tell people – here I stand – a broken but moldable person – ready and willing to partner with God in the ongoing Creation of the world.

As you preach remember, “Faith should quell your fears, never your courage.”