Rev. Martin Geluk. Trowel and Sword, July 1995.
Preamble: Rev. Geluk continues speaking to us in his four part discourse on the place of preaching in the church. After summarising the purpose of the first two articles he now goes on to show why: “The church must resist human substitutes for God-ordained preaching,” and in clear concise terms explains exactly what he means by that.
The Place of Preaching in the Church (Part 3)
In two previous articles we made two observations. First, that the aim of preaching is to have people call on the name of the Lord for salvation. Second, that preaching is the church’s most important calling.
Before we proceed with the next observation we need to be reminded what worship is all about. When the church gathers to worship God then the NT shows that a number of things ought to take place. Broadly speaking there is to be a speaking of God to the worshippers and a response from the worshippers to God. And so in the worship services we read the Word of God and that Word is expounded in the preaching. Then in response to God’s speaking to the church, the church speaks to God through her prayer, songs, in her confession of faith, and has an offering for the work of the Lord. Around these two main aspects – the speaking of God and the response of the congregation, the church structures its worship services and gives it a certain order. We are familiar with all these things because we have them in the Sunday worship services. In these articles we are considering just one part of the worship service, the place of preaching in the church. And we are saying that preaching is the most important part.
Without the preaching of God’s Word the church would not know what to say to God, nor know how to serve Him. Indeed, how are we going to meaningfully give God our worship if God has not first spoken to us in His Word?
In our first article we wrote that preaching has to do with calling on the name of the Lord for salvation. Romans 10:14-15 makes it clear that in order to call on the Lord to be saved you need to believe. No one is going to come to God for salvation and no one will speak to Him in prayer if that person does not believe in God. But in order to believe one has to hear Christ first. Christ has to make Himself known. But Christ is in heaven and we are on earth and so God has ordained preaching. The Word of God is communicated to us through preaching. That’s how we hear Christ speak.
And so we came to say in our second article that preaching is the church’s most important calling. It is the Word of Christ to us.
We now proceed with another observation that rests on this passage from Romans 10. The church must resist human substitutes for God-ordained preaching.
There is no doubt that we live in times in which, generally speaking, the Christian church appears to have lost faith in its own preaching. God has commanded His church in the world to: ‘preach the Word, in season and out of season’, but the preaching in the church’s worship services frequently fails in what it is supposed to do – to open the Word of God and let Christ speak.
And so it happens that sometimes the speaker gives his own view on a certain subject, sometimes there is an interesting story to tell, perhaps about an experience from his own life, or from someone else’s life.
Sometimes there is a dramatization of a Bible story in a play, or a film, or in music, or some other form of expression. A worship service can take on a whole different character and you can’t quite tell if it was worship, or a concert, or entertainment. Of course, all of life is to be a form of worship of God. Yet, when the church calls its members together for the purpose of meeting with God then there ought to be a speaking of God in Christ which is what preaching is all about.
We must be careful not to give the impression that preaching is in decline everywhere. There are many churches who open up God’s Word every Sunday and their preachers do their very best to faithfully minister God’s Word to God’s people. These churches don’t make the headlines and they are not interested in that either. They want to have Christ speaking to them and they believe God’s own Word when He says that the Scriptures are His Word. Therefore they resist the pressure to do away with preaching or to give it a lesser place in the worship service.
It is most important that the church keeps listening to the Word of God. The word of man cannot save, however interesting and entertaining. At times the words of men can be very moving, yet the word of man has not the power the Word of God has. Only God’s Word can open the sinner’s stubborn heart. Only God’s Word can move the sinner to come to Christ. Only God’s Word can make the believer persevere in his journey of faith. Only God’s Word possesses that power. God spoke at creation and out of nothing things came into being.
The whole theory of evolution is in essence nothing more than substituting God’s Word with man’s word about the origin of all things.
It is the same with many other things. In January of this year the chief justice of the family court said it was time society accepts the homosexual couple with children as a family. That was just another attempt to give the word of man more authority and truth than the Word of God. We live in a society where God’s Word about sex, marriage, family, men, women, children, work on Sunday, education, etc., is ignored and substituted with the word of men.
The Word of God has so much to say about all of life and every aspect of it. If we only take the ten commandments and the Lord’s prayer and apply them to all of life, as, for example, the Heidelberg Catechism has done, then we hear God’s Word of authority about how life is to be lived to God’s glory and to our own well being. But men think they are wiser than God and substitute His Word with their own insight and their own wisdom.
The danger of all this is greatest when the church itself is doing it. That chief justice of the family court was told by an interviewer that the church, and he named a particular denomination, radically opposed his views.
But the judge could reply that there were also many others in that particular church who shared his views.
Why are some in the Christian church speaking as the world does? It is because they have substituted the word of men for the Word of God. They really no longer believe God’s Word is unique. They have lost that conviction about God’s Word because somewhere along the line they have begun to pay mere lip service to God’s Word being divinely inspired and having divine authority. And because they no longer stand in awe of the uniqueness of God’s Word, they have reduced the Bible to being a word of men about God.
Thus many in the wider Christian church do not preach the Word of God. They may still use God’s Word but they reinterpret it so that they make it appear to say something else, so that it fits in with the wisdom of the age, of contemporary men. This sad development allows people in the world, like the judge, to use the church’s divided voice to further their own cause.
The real tragedy is, of course, that we have a society which is increasingly shaped and governed by the word of men and not by the Word of God. It is a secular society, meaning that the forces that shape the thinking and actions of people are not biblical but worldly. Not the Word of God but individualism and humanism are the deciding factors. Not the straightforward teaching from God but man’s reasoning and logic determine the way things are thought about and done in society.
We are all so familiar with the way things are done in today’s society that we are in danger of accepting it as being normal. But it is godless and also terribly sad because a society which does not listen to God’s Word is doomed. It’s people will perish.
Therefore, the church everywhere must go back to preaching the Word of God and not the word of men. For unless the church preaches the Word of Christ, people will not hear Christ, and when they do not hear Christ, then they will not come to faith, and when they have no faith then they will not call on the name of the Lord to be saved, and not saved means remaining lost forever.
Indeed, how can Christians themselves live by faith unless they regularly hear Christ speak to them in the preaching of His Word? The only way I as a Christian can surrender to God my life and my death, for time and eternity, is by putting my faith in the Word of Christ. It is only by faith that I can live and work in a society that has turned its back on God; only by faith can I say that I am righteous in Christ whilst facing my personal sins and shortcomings; only by faith do I have hope in the midst of despair; only by faith do I have the peace of God when surrounded by misery; only by faith can I go on with Christ when my experiences remind me that I am guilty, that I am the cause of the trouble and that it is I who deserves to be punished. Without faith I will sink, without faith I am lost. And unless I regularly hear the word of Christ I will not have a faith.
It is faith that makes the Christian confident that he is right with God through Christ. It is faith that enables him to say that God loves him, protects him, keeps him and will give him full salvation. It is faith in Christ that makes a Christian a Christian.
But from where do I get this faith? How can such faith stay with me? Where can I go when that faith needs strengthening and teaching? Can other people give me such a faith? Can the word of men strengthen and teach that faith? Will those, who themselves are subject to weakness, sin and death, be able to give me that powerful, marvellous faith? Of course not! The blind cannot lead the blind. All are darkened in their understanding, corrupt in heart, inclined to sin, and selfish by nature. Let us not be naive and think that among the noblest, friendliest, most wise and knowledgeable of people there will be someone who can be for me the perfect teacher, saviour, guide and protector in matters of life and death.
Each of us needs to hear Christ, the Son of God! Only when I hear Him speak to me personally can my faith in God carry me through all of life with its different situations. Only Christ can work such a faith in my heart. I, therefore, must hear the Word of God. I must hear the voice of Jesus say to me: ‘Come to me and I will give you rest.’ He must say to me: ‘Come and eat and drink.’ The Lord must call out to me in my spiritual grave: ‘Come out from the dead and live.’ The dead sinner, the forgiven Christian, and all people, must hear the voice of the Good Shepherd and only then can they surrender all to Christ and follow Him. Christians can only live by faith and only the Word of Christ can make faith live. The church, therefore, must resist human substitutes for God-ordained preaching. Next time we consider the last of our four observations.
M.P. Geluk.
M.P. Geluk. The Revd. Martin Geluk is Pastor of the Gosford Reformed Church (N.S.W.)
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