July 17, 2009

• our insufficiency for ministry

  Quite a while ago I'd spied an old hardcover book, "Puritan Preaching in England" (published in 1900), in the used bookstore, but it was a little pricey and I wasn't really sure if I'd really read it or not. Well, we had a 40% off coupon yesterday and since it was still there, I snagged it. It's a book of nine lectures the Rev. John Brown gave at Yale in 1899. (Before Yale became, well, you know . . .)
  
  I've not read that much of the book, but already I've found lots and lots of wonderful things in it.
  
  Tonight I'd like to post something from the first lecture about our insufficiency. I'm dedicating this to those of you out there who are engaged in Christian ministry and are struggling. It's taken me nearly fifty years of my life to begin to understand how totally insufficient I am (please notice, I said "begin" since I keep having to relearn that lesson over and over!). If you are feeling insufficient tonight, you are truly blessed, even though you may not feel blessed. Jesus tells us that those who are poor in spirit are blessed for theirs in the Kingdom of heaven. Yes, to be poor in spirit is disconcerting and uncomfortable for us since our flesh seeks to work from a position of power and strength. But it is only when we begin to see how poor and needy we really are, only when we understand we are not at all sufficient, it is only then we will begin to rely on God as our strength and portion. And it is only then that we can know the power of God in our weakness. This is the same lesson the apostle Paul had to learn and the very same lesson any man or woman of God who will be used greatly by God must learn:

  My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10 For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
  

  
  I am praying as God shows you your insufficiency, He would give you the grace to embrace your insufficiency so you might run to Him and rest in the yoke of His blessed and perfect sufficiency.
  
  
  Rev. Brown starts out his first lecture as follows:

  Gentlemen of the Divinity School:
  
  In entering upon the series of Lectures I begin to-day let me do so with a preliminary word of personal sort. When a preacher consents to lecture on Preaching he is apt to be haunted by a fear lest that consent should be interpreted to mean that he presents himself as an example of the ideal he is about to hold up to others. Lest my consent to speak to you should be so construed let me hasten at once to shelter myself behind the modest words with which even so great a Church Father as Augustine felt it needful to conclude the fourth book of his treatise on Christian Doctrine. This work, intended as a manual for preachers, thus concludes: "I give thanks to God that with what little ability I possess I have in these four books striven to depict not the sort of man I am myself (for my defects are very many), but the sort of man he ought to be who desires to labor in sound, that is in Christian doctrine, not for his own instruction only, but for that of others also."
  
  The men who have been longest engaged in the work of preaching will be those most ready to understand the feeling expressed in these words. They are painfully conscious how imperfectly they have been able to realize their own ideal. For the work of the Christian ministry grows greater to our thought the longer we are in it, and with the growing sense of the greatness of the work there comes a deepening consciousness of our own insufficiency for it. One of the greatest — perhaps the greatest — personality in the pulpit of English Congregationalism during the forty years between 1829 and 1869 was Thomas Binney, the well-known pastor of the Weigh House Church in London. during the years I have mentioned he not only largely shaped the character of some of our foremost laymen, but also inaugurated a new era of preaching for the younger generation of preachers. Year after year students for the Christian Ministry gathered round that far-famed pulpit to catch the living inspiration he gave them for their own life-work. Among those often found there in that earlier time was one now know on both sides of the Atlantic as the great Manchester preacher — Alexander Maclaren. Indulging in some early reminiscences on the occasion of his Jubilee as a minister, he spoke of Thomas Binney as "the man that taught me to preach." He went on to say: "I remember when once, with the enthusiasm of the student, I went to him to thank him for all that I had learned from him, he said to me with tears in his eyes — 'Don't speak about it! It's all such a poor thing — it's all such a poor thing.'" After being for fifty years a preacher himself, Dr. Maclaren said, I understand his point of view now as I did not then." In like manner the late Dr. Dale after preaching Christ's Gospel to his people for forty years, wrote to them at the end of that time, saying: "It seems to me sometimes that I am only just beginning to catch a faint glimpse of the glory and power of the redemption which God has wrought for us through the incarnation, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ."

  Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, 6 who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. II Corinthians 4:5-6.
  

  
  

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  Related posts:
  

  • the Lord God must be my strength and portion
  • Blessed are the poor in spirit
  • Tonight I am weak
  • for the sheep for are in distress

  
  Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  • 12:36 AM
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