A Study in Preaching (Part
1)--The Miracle
We recently published a series of articles on the
Vital Signs of church ministry, and sought to make the point that
the book of Acts, as an inspired historical narrative, provides
valuable insight into the specifics of church planting as well as
church health in general. Acts also provides a corresponding ability
to identify a few of the basic by-products of apostolic preaching as
seen in the “so” preaching of Paul and Barnabas at Iconium.
We now pursue a more in-depth study of preaching as
we follow our “so” preachers into the regions of Lystra and Derbe,
where “they preached the gospel” (Acts 14:7). The Greek for
“preached the gospel” combines two verbs: the imperfect of eimi (to
be) and the present middle participle of euaggelizo (to announce
good news) in nominative case. A slavish translation: “They were
ones who were continuously preaching the gospel and acting in their
own interest by doing so.”
The Greek verb combo teaches us three very important
truths. (1) Preaching the gospel is a pattern of life for the gospel
preacher. The message delivered at Iconium was the same one preached
at Lystra and in every other city on the itinerary. At NO TIME did
they modify the message in order to mollify hearers with more
‘user-friendly’ content. (2) The gospel preacher IS something before
he DOES something. What they were was fundamental to what they
did.
Gospel preachers preach the gospel. It’s hard-wired in their
spiritual DNA! (3) The preacher who would touch the lives of others
must first secure the touch of God upon his own life.
And nothing secures the blessing of God upon a preacher like magnifying the Lord
Jesus in his vicarious death and glorious resurrection! Thus is the
force of the middle voice.
Now, Paul and Barnabas had shaken the dust off of
their feet in Antioch of Pisidia against the adversarial Jews, and
moved on to the city of Iconium…70 or so miles to the
east-southeast. Luke is careful to contrast the envy that filled the
Jews (13:45) with the joy and power that filled the evangelists
(13:52). The detractors and dangers that emerged at Iconium
precipitated a departure to Lystra and Derbe…cities located 30 miles
to the southwest and southeast respectively. And there they
continued to preach the gospel.
Our study in preaching derives from Acts 14:8-18.
From that narrative we can identify at least three of its core
characteristics. They are: the miracle that fulfills it, the
mountain that faces it, and the message that fires it. In this Pen,
we will consider the first of the three: the miracle that fulfills
preaching.
The miracle of which we speak is the phenomenon that takes place
when the PREACHED word is first HEARD and then BELIEVED! It is the
preached-and-heard word that germinates in the human heart and
springs forth as faith! One of the bedrock principles of scripture is
that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God (Romans 10:17).
Most of us are familiar with the exclamation of
“Yes!” accompanied by a fist pump. It’s what the tennis player does
after ripping a forehand cross-court to win a game, set or match.
It’s what the golfer does after launching a five-iron from 190 yards
that carries the front bunker and stops inches from the flag for a
tap-in birdie. It might be what the software developer does after
pouring over thousands of lines of code to find-fix that illusive
syntax error that puts a critical program back online. For the
gospel preacher, it’s the jubilation and perhaps exultation that he
experiences when the spoken word brings a faith response that
transforms the life!
There are two miracles disclosed in our text: healing
and believing. The latter is by far the greater! It is a known fact
that seeing can often be the
enemy of hearing, and our text provides the contrast. The impotent man
“heard Paul speak” (14:9), but the people “saw what Paul had done”
(14:11). Hearing resulted in faith for the one whereas seeing led to
a vociferous celebration by the many that was rooted in false
worship. Many of the Lycaonians were convinced that the gods had
come down. But seeing void of hearing led them to connect the
healing with the wrong god.
Do you suppose this is still happening today? If it’s
possible to attribute genuine miracles to a false god, isn’t it also
possible to assign fictitious miracles to the true God? It
seems to me that this kind of “cross-wiring” is one of the potential
pitfalls for any “healing” ministry that is heavily dependent upon tele-VISION for
its revenue stream. The logic: No miracles to SEE on our end will
result in fewer monies sent from the VIEWER end!
Make no mistake! The God of heaven is still in the
business of granting genuine healing on earth, and should be given
the glory due him for every such intervention. But the fact remains
that a lot of alleged healing is attributed to him concerning which
he has had no part. Scripture teaches us that there is a
Satan-inspired mystery of iniquity already at work. It
includes supernatural power manifested in the form of signs
and lying wonders, but NEVER leads anyone who SEES them to
fall in love with and believe the truth of the gospel (2
Thessalonians 2:7-12). For this reason, I question the auspices of
any ministry that clamors over physical healing as evidence of
divine power at work. It just might be a satanic counterfeit
intended to misdirect VIEWERS to another Jesus, another spirit, or
another gospel (2 Corinthians 11:3-4).
The primacy of preaching was captured in these words
from Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher: “God had only
one Son…and he made him a preacher!” No preacher worth his salt, who
would follow in the steps of his Lord and those of the apostles,
should ever be content to preach without apostolic power! One of the
core characteristics of NT preaching is the miracle of
hearing-believing that follows in its wake. It’s what causes the
“Yes!” to erupt in the preacher! It’s what fulfills the preaching
ministry like nothing else can! In our next Pen, we will examine the
mountain that always faces the gospel preacher and his preaching.
Top |
