WHY PREACH?
High above the Tarn River in southern France stands a spectacular and breathtaking feat of twenty-first-century engineering—the Bridge of Millau. Opened in 2004, it showcases the beauty of the French countryside. The aim of the bridge was to remove the bottleneck on autoroute A75 between Clermont Auvergne in the north and Béziers in the south, thus ending a four-hour trek through the small town of Millau at the height of summer. The significance of the bridge’s construction is the sheer enormity of its seven slender, elegant concrete and steel pillars suspending eight road sections. The highest pillar is three hundred meters (984 feet) tall, surpassing even the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Designed by the English architect Sir Norman Foster, the viaduct spans the valley at a height of 270 meters (885 feet) with the “delicacy of a butterfly.”
Deuteronomy 4:39 reads, “The Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.”1 The preacher’s primary task is to link heaven and earth, like the Bridge of Millau links the two sides of the gorge. The bridge provides an apt metaphor for the preacher, who is seeking to reach the world on behalf of Christ. These days, spreading the Gospel requires more than a hop, skip, and jump. It requires first understanding the constantly shifting culture and presenting the everlasting Gospel of Jesus Christ to people in a genuinely sincere manner.
We have been given the mandate of Jesus: “And He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.’” (Mark 16:15). Isaiah 55:11 promises, “So shall My word be that goes out from My mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”
You have been asked to preach next Sabbath. Don’t panic; help is on the way. This series of articles is just for you. Whether you are a seasoned pastor or a dedicated layperson, sermon construction can be stressful. But it doesn’t have to be. Essentially, a sermon is storytelling. Telling God’s story. He chose you to proclaim the good news. “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor 1:27). God could have proclaimed the Gospel through a myriad of ways to reach the world, including angels; but instead, He chose you, a sinful human being created in His image. Motivated by love. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
Since Genesis, we have been recalling and sharing stories. Humans were wired for stories and storytelling. People like stories. Hollywood producers like to tell stories, which is why they produce movies. But the preacher is presenting the greatest blockbuster of all time in that the Creator of the universe sent His Son down to redeem humanity. The stories we share from the Bible are God’s story, involving sin and salvation, and how God rectified the problem caused by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden by giving us Jesus, His beloved Son.
The preacher’s task is to present the truth of Luke 19:10: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” Everything flows out of this statement; it is the raison d’être (sole purpose for something) for preaching. The preacher is called to follow through with what Jesus started and what He expects those following Him to do. Matthew 24:14 reads, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” The Gospel is the good news. Preaching is and always will be God’s means of reaching people.
I have a friend, not by choice but possibly by divine intervention. Parking my car one day to go up one of my favorite mountains, Mark came up to me and asked if I wanted a companion. Why not? I agreed, and we spent most of the day together scrambling up and down some tricky terrain. Mark is a Munroist. A Munroist is a person who climbs the 282 Munros in Scotland, which were classified by Sir Hugh Munro (1856–1919) as having the magic height of over three thousand feet (914.4 meters). Munros attract people from all over the world to complete all 282. I told him I was a Christian, but not much else. Mark vaped on his e-cigarette all day; it was like being followed by a dragon. At the end of the day, he told me he didn’t swear around me that day because I was a Christian. In a later article, I will tell about another adventure that almost ended in disaster.
One might say, “I just need to witness, and the rest will follow.” But that is incorrect; no one’s actions are sufficient. We need to preach. There is only one person who has lived an exemplary sinless life, and that is Jesus Christ.
“Our testimony must be both in deed and in word. The spoken word is never really effective unless it is backed up by the life. The living deed is ultimately inadequate without the spoken word. The reason for this is obvious. No life is good enough to speak for itself. Any person who says, ‘I don’t need to witness; I just let my life speak,’ is unbearably self-righteous.”2
We are to unconditionally reach out into our topsy-turvy world which desperately needs a Saviour. We are bombarded by media outlets whose main agenda is to undermine God and His world. Social media platforms and their digital technology such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Telegram, and TikTok, have become juggernauts that are influencing every aspect of life, all seeking our attention. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these platforms; however, it is important to understand that they have an impact on society, including our church. The world we live in is saturated with AI (artificial intelligence), algorithms, bots, likes, dislikes, thumbs-up, thumbs-down, percentages, and statistics, all of which influence how people live and the choices they make. These platforms have a hold on shaping our worldview. They influence what we choose to believe. They dictate what is and is not important; consequently, many people are chasing the wrong things instead of seeking God. So far removed from Philippians 2:5: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus.” We need to preach about the God of our ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Hosea proclaimed, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hos 4:6). The prophet Hosea wrote this at a time in Israel’s northern kingdom when it was at its lowest point in its history. Soon, the kingdom of Israel would be taken captive by the Assyrians. “Because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God” (Hos 4:6). In 2024, the situation is similar; the world has rejected God and is fast reaching a tipping point in its history. Fortunately, as God’s chosen remnant, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has the true Gospel of the Three Angels’ Message to share with a broken, anthropocentric world (putting humanity at the center of the universe) that desperately needs Christ—the same world that “God so loved.” Why preach? Because it is God’s chosen method to reach humanity. It is about changing lives for eternity.
1 All Scripture references are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
2 Rosalind Rinker, You Can Witness with Confidence (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1975), 47.
Malcolm Perry, DMin, is a retired pastor and teacher residing in Crieff, Scotland.
