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“Not Preaching Too Low”
Categories: Bible, preaching, Sunday Family Report articles“The Preacher sought to find delightful words and to write words of truth correctly.” (Ecclesiastes 12:10, NASB)
I sure wish that I could say I’ve always spoken words of truth correctly and that they were spoken in a way that was delightful to my listeners. But I haven’t. My preaching has often been filled with far too much of my own thoughts on the world and far too little of the words of truth that God has spoken. May God help me do better.
“The Preacher” that’s mentioned in the verse above is King Solomon, who did his best to share the wisdom of God with audiences from all over Creation. And yet, even in the life of Solomon, there must have been times when he gave a teaching and then later realized that there was a better way that it could have been spoken. But the point of the passage is that he tried to do it right, for the glory of God.
And that’s what all faithful preachers do: We try to speak for God in a way that gives befitting honor to his own spoken words. We try to give knowledge, clarity, motivation, and inspiration to our hearers so that they will turn their hearts toward God and glorify him all the more with their lives. This is a tall order for fallible men to fulfill, but if that’s the way that God’s determined to disseminate his message, we’d better do it right.
One evangelical teacher has well said, “No [minister] lives up to what he preaches. If he does, he is preaching too low.” To fix that, we dare not lower the level of God’s oracles to make them easier for us to attain. Rather, we’d better learn to teach the truth in its righteous height and depth, with words of truth spoken in a divinely delightful way.
- Dan Lankford, minister
