Persuaders or Proclaimers?

A fantastic preacher named Smedly Yates preached at our church last Sunday. Our regular pastor was at a conference, and as Pastor Yates grew up at our church and has family here, he graciously came here from Tempe, AZ, where he pastors a church, and spent the weekend—first preaching to the men at a Saturday morning breakfast, then feeding us the Word on both Sunday morning and evening.

And boy, were we fed.

He preached from 1 Corinithians 1 and 2…on the foolishness and power of both the gospel message (morning sermon) and the method of bare proclamation (evening). This post is borne out of that evening message, and I’m going to quote liberally and shamelessly from my notes (I’ll share links to both messages at the end of this post). This sermon was EXCELLENT.

One of the best things about it was that he put his finger directly on one of the biggest problems with modern churches today, besides false doctrine/watered-down, erroneous, eisegetical preaching (that which uses the Bible to back up teaching rather than drawing out of the Bible that which it is actually saying and teaching that). This problem could be described in many ways: seeker-sensitive preaching, programs, and/or gimmicks; worldly church growth methods; catering to the unsaved in order to get them to come to church.

What’s wrong with this?

“You cannot package the gospel in a method that undermines the gospel.”

Christianity has fallen into the trap of trying to get people to come to Christ using human and natural means. This does not, and cannot, actually work. Why? Because “a man persuaded and a man transformed and born again by the power of the Holy Spirit are two very different things.” One is a work of man’s effort: rhetoric, reasoning, emotional manipulation, persuasion, logic. The other is entirely a work of God: the work of conviction, repentance, and faith in the heart. We might reasonably evaluate these two methods by asking, who, in each scenario, gets the credit?

Pastor Yates spoke of the two kinds of public speakers that they were familiar with in the Greco-Roman culture of the Corinthians’ day. First, there was the rhetorician, the orator, the speaker-artist, whose job it was to entertain his hearers and to persuade them to agree with their point of view. These might be lawyers, politicians, entertainers, or activists. This kind of speaker was what the people of this culture prized. They loved eloquence. They judged a speaker’s skill by how well they “played” the audience and were able to get the desired response from them. At the same time, these speakers were dependent upon their audience’s favor for continued success. In order to do this, they had to make sure they kept their finger on the “pulse” of the audience, so to speak, in order to be able to establish credibility, lead their emotions, and persuade them to agree. A very interesting note was that the Greek definition of “faith” was “the yielding of the intellect to the persuasion of another.” When an orator was successful, the audience was willing to place their “faith” in his point of view. This kind of speaker is goal oriented; the variable was the method, the goal was to get consistent, positive results.

There was, however, another kind of public speaker. This was the herald. The herald had no goal in mind other than to clearly proclaim the message of his master, whoever that might be. The herald’s job didn’t depend on successfully getting people to respond positively to his message. His job was to make sure that the message was faithfully communicated. This kind of speaker is obedience oriented. The consistency was in both method and message; the variable was found in the hearer’s response.

Guess which kind of speaker Paul was?

“When I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified….my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.”

1 Corinthians 2:1-2,4

We don’t need to impress or please. Human strategies will never arrive at what God has planned. The things we proclaim are of divine nature and has the power to change hearts. Paul didn’t deliver these truths in the packaging of human wisdom…and neither should we. We ought to learn to communicate the gospel CLEARLY, faithfully, and simply, trusting God to do the work of heart transformation through its message.

What has happed in modern day churches is this: we have cajoled, petted, emotionally led, baited-and-switched, manipulated, pressured, promised, reasoned, argued, and eventually persuaded people to agree with the Christian message…intellectually, emotionally, and/or guiltily. But many…MANY…of these have never experienced true heart change. They don’t see themselves as guilty beggars before their holy God and Creator, with nothing to offer and needing total transformation. They don’t see (and love) Jesus as their Lord and Savior from their own sin, who gave us His own righteousness…they see Him as a choice that makes sense to their natural, human intellect. They aren’t filled with gratitude and humility, seeking to mortify their own sin and live to please Him; they are filled with pride in how wise they are to have made this choice, and how great it is that God has them in His camp, well pleased with how much they do for Him. Many of these eventually “fall away from the faith” and leave the church. Many within the church live in active disobedience to God and live lives of defiant sinfulness, without qualm. These were and are never truly saved.

Another area in which I see this thinking is an alarming one, because it’s not as obvious. It’s in homeschooling. As a homeschooling mom of 17 years, with 8 children, I’ve tried and been privy to many different curriculums, conferences, and co-ops. And I’ve found myself disturbed by the number of people who believe, teach, and have organizations that promote the idea that a certain type of education or a certain type of training will make our children more effective for Christ in the world. I especially find this train of thinking in the push for classical education, and so many Christian homeschoolers have jumped on that train, convinced that it’s “biblical”.  I don’t know to what extent those who join in are aware or even buying into this kind of thinking, but if their churches are run this way, who is going to discern that this isn’t a good thing?

It’s one thing to train our children to understand our world and how to think about it biblically, but to believe that training them in rhetoric, debate, and logic will somehow make them better witnesses for Christ is nonsense. We cannot “win” people to Christ by human means of persuasion.

I have a whole lot more to say about the topic of “Christian education”, but that will have to be for another post. Onward.

So, what drives us? Are we obedience driven or results driven? Are we more concerned about clearly giving our Master’s message to people regardless of response, or getting people to make decisions for Christ?

What is our method? Obedience or pragmatism? Are we orators or heralds? Are we engaged in persuasion or proclamation?

“…but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the strong…so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, ‘Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.’”

1 Corinthians 1:27, 29-31

Links:

Embracing the Foolishness, Part 1 https://vimeo.com/387303327

Embracing the Foolishness, Part 2 https://vimeo.com/387453108