Blah Guy

So then, what is the preacher’s job?

One guy at our church was famous for saying, when he saw a brother or sister in the faith, “The Jesus in me sees the Jesus in you and says, Hello Jesus!” That sums up preaching.

The preachers job is to find out what Jesus is doing in people and say something about it. That is why a preacher must have a relationship with the people he is preaching to. If he does not, it would be like a fly fisherman loading up his bag, tying a fly, driving to Montana, casting his line in the water, pulling up a big ole’ stick and saying, “Whew! Imagine that”, because he has no dam blabbed idea what a fish looks like. We can’t be fishers of men until we learn to be men and know what they look like. But when we know the struggles of the people, the dirt, the skinny, the jokes, the laughter, the frustrations, those are all things Jesus is desperately dying to teach the people about. So when we preach, we first find what Jesus is doing in people, then have the guts to say something about it.

Practical preaching for the sake of practical preaching is a sin. But practical preaching because the preacher knows that is what Jesus is doing and that is what He told you to talk about is obedience. The difference cannot be told except by the preacher. That is why some of the biggest churches in the world get bigger while the smaller churches in the world keep getting smaller. When people can make their consumeristic choices between some message that is going to be safe and contain something that can help them live better over a very unsafe message that was born out of obedience, they will make the same choice every single time. Not because they are bad, but because Western consumerism is branded into their brain. Buy the best product out there. The problem with prophetic preaching is it is rarely the best product on the market. At least not in their minds because “best” equals “feels or tastes best”. Best does not mean any more “Best” in terms of the truest. Prophetic preaching can be a message of hope like Jonah or a message of wrath like Isaiah. Our job is to be what God has called us to be, no more no less

Here is what I think. I think that God can put a Jonah and a Isaiah in the same city. What? Wouldn’t God want the whole city to hear about salvation or their coming destruction. God has a way of putting more than one preacher in the same city because it will be Jesus inside of them who will draw the hearer to where they need to go. We must stop focusing on how to get people into our doors and focus on what Jesus is telling us to say and he will do the job of drawing people (The Apostle John…”I draw people through the Father”). The magnetism of the Holy Spirit works and we should let it.