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Further, as we sit at our desks in our studies, we must experience the Spirit’s ministry as the spirit of illumination, enabling us to enter into the mind of God in any given text or theme of Scripture. When we pray at the beginning of the preparation of our sermons, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (Ps. 119:18), it is the Holy Spirit who brings God’s answer to our minds and hearts.
First, I presuppose that the Holy Spirit is a person. When dealing with any aspect of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, whether His gifts or functions, we must always remember these are the operations, gifts, and functions of a person. This truth is particularly vital when considering preaching.
Second, I also presuppose that He is a divine person. He is God in the fullest sense. All that constitutes the essence of the Father’s deity and the Son’s deity can and must be equally attributed to the person of the Holy Spirit.
1) its indispensable necessity, 2) its specific manifestations, and 3) its restrained or diminished measure.
Rather, His agency and operations in the act of preaching are an indispensable necessity for every preacher of the Word of God if his ministry would meet the biblical standard of what preaching ought to be.
First, it is clear from the Scriptures that such an immediate agency and operation of the Holy Spirit was indispensable to the preaching ministry of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach (Isa.
There is no record that He uttered a single word of public ministry until He received a special endowment of the Holy Spirit that, among other things, equipped Him to speak as God’s authoritative prophet, as well as setting Him apart and sustaining Him so that He finally, by the same “eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God” (Heb. 9:14). This,
If even the Lord Jesus needed the Holy Spirit in this way for preaching ministry, so do we.
Jesus still told them of their need to wait for the promise of the Father, that is, the Holy Spirit, by whom they would be clothed “with power from on high” (Luke 24:49).
“they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak…as the Spirit gave them utterance.” This is the fundamental paradigm for new covenant ministry. Filled with the Spirit, they spoke as the Spirit gave them utterance. Here was a work of the Spirit that was immediate in connection with their speaking “the wonderful works of God” (Acts 2:11).
No, both Paul and the Thessalonians knew that the Spirit’s special agency and operations were present in Paul’s preaching to them.
When Peter describes the preaching of the apostles, he uses these words: “them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven” (1 Peter 1:12).
such an immediate agency and operation of the Spirit is an indispensable component of any God-appointed ministry of the new covenant.
to be made a minister of the new covenant is to be constituted a minister of the Spirit.
it is available to us in the act of preaching through the virtue of Christ’s own commitment to His servants and in virtue of our union with Him.
Spurgeon says concerning the indispensability of the Spirit’s agency and operations in connection with our preaching ministry. To us, as ministers, the Holy Spirit is absolutely essential. Without him our office is a mere name. We claim no priesthood over and above that which belongs to every child of God; but we are the successors of those who, in olden times, were moved of God to declare his word, to testify against transgression, and to plead his cause. Unless we have the spirit of the prophets resting upon us, the mantle which we wear is nothing but a rough garment to deceive. We ought to
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First, if and when the Holy Spirit is resting upon us as we preach, He will often give us what I have chosen to call a heightened sense of the spiritual realities in which we are trafficking as we preach.
As you do these things, you experience a felt impression of the truth on your own spirit. It may be truth that causes your spirit to groan with spiritual pain. It may be truth that causes you to back off from your desk and raise your hands and give vent to a spontaneous “Hallelujah!”
in the process of your preparation, you experience genuine emotional as well as intellectual engagement with the truth you are preparing to preach.
The Lord’s Day comes and you stand before the people of God in a prayerful frame, having met with God in the early hours of the morning.
As you begin to preach, your mind begins to experience the warmth that comes from the friction of the truth on your own spirit.
In living interaction with the people of God to whom you are preaching and in the promised special presence of God among His gathered people, you are conscious of a spiritual current that has bee...
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The truth that exerted its emotional energy on you with heaviness, joy, grief, and other pressures on your spirit in the study is now greatly intensifying its pressure on the entirety of your inner life.
You preach the truth of hell as one who senses and feels the reality of what you are preaching.
This is why George Whitefield said, “I would not for one thousand worlds preach an unfelt Christ.” This is what Whitefield was talking about.
If I were forbidden to enter heaven, but were permitted to select my state for all eternity, I should choose to be as I sometimes feel in preaching the gospel. Heaven is foreshadowed in such a state: the mind shut out from all disturbing influences, adoring the majestic and consciously present God, every faculty aroused and joyously excited to its utmost capability, all the thoughts and powers of the soul joyously occupied in contemplating the glory of the Lord,
We may not attribute holy and happy changes in our ministry to anything less than the action of the Holy Spirit upon our souls. I am sure the Spirit does so work.[1]
“And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness.”
Note that the apostle asks them to pray that boldness would be given to him. He knows the mystery of the gospel. He does not ask them to pray that God will unfold that mystery to him. However, he is deeply concerned that he will be enabled to speak that mystery as he ought to speak it. This “boldness”
has everything to do with an immediate agency and operation of the Holy Spirit on the preacher that he might experience unfettered liberty and a heightened facility
The Holy Spirit at times even gives us an ability to draw words out of the storeroom of our vocabularies—words we may not have used for many months or years—yet suddenly they flash into our consciousness when we are preaching.
It was this person, God the Holy Spirit, operating in and on our persons in conjunction with the proclamation of His glorious truth. Marvelous, wonderful, blessed experience!
The people of God desperately need and should expect fresh, potent words from the Lord, and such will be found in the careful exposition and penetrating application of biblical texts under the influence of the immediate agency of the Spirit’s power on godly and gifted preachers.
“My brother, you have tasted this reality and you will never be satisfied with anything less again.”
the Holy Spirit gives us in the act of preaching an enlarged heart, presently suffused with increased measures of selfless love that yearns to do our hearers good by means of our preaching.
Sitting at our desks, we are conscious that the eyes of our Master are on us as we are preparing to handle His Word of truth.
“Lord, how can I make this truth plainer to the children, and how can I make it resonate more with the man behind his workbench and the stressed young mother seeking to care for her little ones and her husband?
Lord, how can I construct arrows fashioned out of this truth to pierce the hearts of the careless and the wandering? How can I bring a word of comfort to the grieving and the distressed?”
These prayers reveal that there are measures of divine love for your people operative in your heart while you are at the desk in your sermon preparation.
The Spirit of God, whose fruit is love, expands your heart and fills it with new dimensions of yearning love for your people.
The worst counsel to give any preacher is to tell him that he needs to put more earnestness into his preaching. No, we must feel more deeply the impulses of divine love that, in turn, will produce genuine earnestness and passion.
Do we really desire to see sinners saved? Do we genuinely long to see the people of God brought to greater maturity in Christ? Do we believe that the things we convey in our preaching will, with the blessing of God, produce those very things for which we yearn?
“To me, preaching without passion is not preaching at all.”[3]
“The same truths uttered from the pulpit by different men, or by the same man in different states of feeling, will produce very different effects. Some of these are far beyond what the bare conviction of the truth so uttered would ordinarily produce. The whole mass of truth, by the sudden passion of the speaker, is made red-hot and burns its way. Passion is eloquence.”[4]
God has given this unique place to preaching because in preaching, the effect of truth on the redeemed man who preaches is both manifested and embodied in the very act of conveying that truth. Alexander
If you are a preacher, surely you have felt as I have many times while preaching the Word of God that you stood forty feet tall with a sword ten feet long and six inches wide.
Rather, we come before them as heralds of the living God to announce the message of our King. As we do so, and as the Holy Spirit rests on us in power, we will experience in our own hearts this blessed and wonderful sense of a heightened conviction that we are indeed bringing the message of our King.
am bold to assert that there are yet general and discernible patterns and principles that we must acknowledge and with which we must honestly reckon when we ask the question, “Why have I not attained a greater measure of the Spirit’s immediate agency and operations in my preaching?” or, “Why do I experience less of that agency now than I have known in the past?” I will now address some basic reasons for this reality.
