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A question for modern churchgoers: when your pastor steps to the pulpit, what are you hoping for? What is your honest desire that he do?
Are you really hoping to be fed a Word from the Lord?
Are you really desiring a text sharper than any two-edged sword (Hebrews 4:12), penetrating to the division of soul and spirit, judging the thoughts and intentions of your heart?
Scripturally, the man God calls as pastor is to preach and teach the fullness of His Word. So the question becomes: is that what you really want?
Candidly, I don’t think most people do.
I think most people operate with the mindset that “so long as the Pastor says what I’m already inclined to hear, then we’ll get along fine.” Most people would rather not be challenged, but affirmed. Given a choice between a Biblical sermon on discipleship and a man-centered message on how God loves people just as they are, most will take the latter.
As a result, pastors face an unspoken mandate to preach likeable, porous sermons, thereby creating a vacuum of truth in the house of the Lord. The Word of God is replaced with the siren song of man’s wants, and churches echo with carnal rhetoric. Meanwhile, a pagan society looks on, comforted in the idea that they aren’t missing out on anything.
Again, this problem stems from man’s heart and his innate desire for self-glorification. Itching ears seek to have their own worldview validated… not to be challenged by the worldview taught in Scripture. So what do those with itching ears do to ensure teaching that they like? They heap up for themselves pastors and teachers who share their views (2 Tim 4:3). And as a result, the modern evangelical world has become like a thanksgiving goose stuffed with man-made doctrines, unable to fly, and its churches have become shrines to Ichabod, absent of God’s glory.
The renewal and reformation we seek requires our pastors to be bold men. It also requires those in the pews to settle for nothing less than the full exposition of God’s Word.
So this Sunday, what do you desire when your pastor opens the Bible to the day’s text?
And if it is a sermon that correctly exposits the Word, are you prepared to yield?
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Toby Holt is organizing pastor of Harvest Reformed Presbyterian Church in Gillette, Wyoming (www.harvestrpc.org).
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