1.21 blog

…Continuing our thoughts from yesterday on why mediocre preaching can be a good thing (from 1 Corinthians 2.1-5). We’ve seen that Paul refused to use his rhetorical know-how to woo the Corinthians over, but instead sought to know nothing among them except for Christ and him crucified, because often “good” preaching can detract from Jesus.

Paul has explained how he wasn’t among the Corinthians, now he explains how he was among them. With weakness, fear, and much trembling. This is not the guy your church would want to hire to do its preaching. This is not the picture of a guy we’d want to follow. But he’s not getting us to follow him, he wants us to follow Christ. He explains once more, he wasn’t using persuasive words of wisdom. Instead, his preaching was in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. With the advent of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, we tend to hear “Spirit” and “power” and think of the extraordinary: miracles, healings, tongues, etc. But those phenomena don’t really fit with what Paul has been saying about the way he preached. Here’s what I think he’s getting at, as he preached (poorly it might seem), and people were converted, that this demonstrated the Spirit’s power. The fact that people came to believe this stupid sounding message, preached by this unpersuasive, ugly, trembling man demonstrated that the power belonged to God.

Through preaching, God speaks, judges, converts, and saves. It’s because of this that Paul is able to preach without feeling the need to pull out his rhetorical guns. It’s because of this that mediocre preachers like Pastor Stephen and myself can get up in front of people and preach in all our mediocrity, because ultimately the things preaching aims at can’t be done by us anyway, even if we were good preachers. No matter how good we are at it, God’s the one who has to accomplish anything worthwhile. That’s because preaching is more than instruction. Preaching is an address from God through the preacher. Preaching gives life. Preaching delivers Christ. This requires a strong doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit can and does work in a variety of ways. But he has specifically tied himself to the preaching of the gospel. He may work by other means. He will work by this means.

In verse 5, Paul explains a final reason for his weak preaching of Christ crucified: so that the Corinthians’ faith would not rest on human wisdom, but on the power of God. At the end of the day this is what we want. We don’t want to win people over, and have their faith be based on us. We want them to be entrusting themselves to God. We want to preach in a way that’s compatible with the message we’re to proclaim. There are some people who are good at preaching. There’s nothing wrong with that as such. God calls us with various skills, talents, etc. However, each set of preachers has their own struggle and temptation. Good preachers have to struggle against relying on themselves, or preaching in such a way as to draw attention to themselves. If after a sermon we’re thinking, “Oh that [insert name of your favorite preacher], he’s sure witty,” Or, “It was hilarious when he said this,” then there might be a problem. We mediocre preachers have to be careful not to rely on ourselves too, but we also have to fight against the desire to be good preachers. It’s not wrong to want to improve. It’s not wrong to want to offer Jesus your best. But it is wrong to assume that if we were better speakers God would be better able to use our preaching or be more glorified by it. God uses crappy preaching all the time, and he’s not limited to our skills. And when God saves people or sanctifies them through crappy preaching, he gets all the credit. So he wouldn’t get more glory if we were better: we would. Instead, God uses the particular skills of particular preachers to accomplish his particular purposes in the lives of his people. So rejoice in mediocre preaching as long as it’s preaching of the cross.

Posted by: Gene Schlesinger