The preachers whose names have endured most powerfully across the centuries are very often the ones who fought hardest against their own legacy in their own lifetimes. Whitefield, Calvin, Edwards, and others all share this instinct. They wanted Christ to be the only Name lifted up. The Lord, in His providence, has often kept their names alive in the church anyway, but always in service of the Name that is above every name. 

There is a question I find myself asking more often the longer I am in ministry. Not “How am I doing?” That question rarely provides any benefit. The better question, the more searching one, comes from the apostle Paul, and it has the power to expose any pretense if I linger with it long enough.

“What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as though you did not receive it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7)

Paul is writing to a Corinthian church given to comparison and party spirit. The quarrels among them, “I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, I am of Cephas,” were not really about apostles. They were about pride. They were about who had the better gifts? Who was more spiritual? Who was the better, most relatable preacher?

So Paul puts a question to them that reduces every such quarrel to dust. And it is this: What do you have that you did not receive?

The answer, of course, is nothing. Not the Apostles themselves or their gifts. Not the calling. More than this, not the breath in our lungs. Not even the faith by which we receive the gospel itself. Every part of life on both the natural and the spiritual plane is something given. For the Christian, the first stirring of conviction in our hearts, to the preacher, even to the last sermon he will ever preach, the whole arc of Christian life and ministry is gift.

If that is true (and it is), then there is no place left for boasting. There is only thanksgiving.

This reality should govern every preacher’s heart. And it is the foundation that two great voices in church history pressed home in their own ministries with a force that ought to humble every one of us who stands behind a pulpit.

A saying often attributed to Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the Saxon nobleman whose Herrnhut estate became the launching point for the Moravian missionary movement in the eighteenth century, captures the burden well. The exact source of the wording is uncertain, but the sentiment is thoroughly Christian, and many Moravian missionaries shaped their lives by something close to it. The Moravians sent missionaries to the West Indies, to Greenland, to South Africa, to Native American tribes, often at great personal cost and with no expectation of recognition. The saying takes the shape of three commands. Each one more difficult than the last.

“Preach the Gospel, die, and be forgotten.”

The first command is the calling. Preach the Gospel. It is what every minister of the word is set apart to do. It is not difficult to articulate. It is much more difficult to do so faithfully across decades, when fashions change, when itching ears multiply, and when the temptation to preach something else, something easier or more popular or supposedly more relevant, is constant.

The second command is the inevitable end. Die. It is what every minister will do, sooner or later. To say this out loud is not morbid. It is simply honest. The grave makes no exception for the preacher.

The third command is the hardest for the human heart to receive. And be forgotten.

It is one thing to imagine preaching faithfully. It is another to imagine dying. It is something else again to imagine being forgotten. It means laboring for years with no monument left behind. It means pouring out the gospel into a generation and watching the next generation forget your name. That is a kind of death that runs deeper than physical death. It is the willingness to be a faithful but unremembered servant in the service of the Master.

And yet this is exactly what most preachers in church history have been. The names we remember, men like Spurgeon, Calvin, Edwards and Whitefield, are a small handful out of the hundreds of thousands of faithful pastors who have preached the gospel, died, and been forgotten by the world (while being remembered by the Lord). I suspect that most of those forgotten preachers are precisely the ones who would have been most pleased to be forgotten, because they understood what the saying captures. The work is the Lord’s. Every last aspect of it. All the glory is the Lord’s. Ultimately, His approval is the only one that matters.

The second voice is George Whitefield. And what he said about his own legacy is more striking still, because of who he was when he said it.

By any measure, Whitefield was the most famous preacher of the eighteenth century. He preached an estimated 18,000 sermons over his ministry, an average of about ten a week for thirty years, mostly to fresh audiences as he travelled. He crossed the Atlantic thirteen times, when transatlantic crossings were dangerous, lengthy, and miserable. He preached to crowds in the open fields without amplification.

Benjamin Franklin, the printer and skeptic, was so doubtful of the reports about Whitefield’s voice that he conducted an experiment. While Whitefield preached from the Philadelphia courthouse steps, Franklin walked backward away from him in a straight line, listening for the point at which Whitefield’s words ceased to be intelligible.

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