AFTER LISTENING TO YET ANOTHER SERMON CONSISTING OF BORING QUOTES AND SHOUTED COMMANDS, A LITTLE BOY QUIETLY WHISPERED TO HIS MOTHER, “TODAY I’VE DECIDED TO BECOME A PREACHER.” THE MOTHER, CAUGHT OFF-GUARD BUT OVERJOYED, RESPONDED, “VERY GOOD, BUT WHY A PREACHER?” AFTER PONDERING THIS QUESTION FOR A FEW SECONDS, THE BOY REPLIED, “I THINK I WOULD PREFER SHOUTING FROM THE PULPIT THAN BEING SHOUTED AT!”
Whether we admit it or not, the success or failure, increase or decrease of membership, and life or death of a congregation’s spirituality depends on the quality of the preaching. A church can have a harmonious choir, an incredible outreach program, and a tasty potluck, but if the sermon bores or scares its members, the church walls may not crumble, but the excitement on Sabbath morning will.
We must remember that preaching plays a central part in the salvation of human beings. It isn’t something to be taken lightly. There is power in preaching if only we make a concerted effort to tap into it. The apostle Paul had a very clear concept of this: “Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in His wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb—preaching, of all things!—to bring those who trust Him into the way of salvation” (1 Cor. 1:21, The Message).
H.M.S. Richards further expressed this with wonderful passion: “I tell you, preacher friends, it is a serious thing to preach. Many eternal decisions for right or wrong, for life or death, are in our hands. . . . Read your church history. Read not only what the lines say, but read between the lines, and you will see that in every age the fortunes of the church of God on earth have risen and fallen with the fortunes of preaching. Wherever preaching came up, the welfare of the church came up; whenever preaching has gone down, the church has gone down.”1
I firmly believe in the importance and power of preaching. I believe that, under God’s guidance, the relevance, transcendence, preparation, and presentation of God’s message deserves our very best! What this requires is every ounce of our energy, every atom of our intelligence, every drop of our talent, every spark of our personality, and our full and total submission to God. We want that little boy to have the desire and heart to become a preacher one day—but for the right reason!
1 H.M.S. Richards, Feed My Sheep (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 2005), 27.
Pablo Perla is the director of the Inter-American Division Publishing Association.
