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The reading of the morning is in 1 Corinthians, the 14th chapter. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 1. "Follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy. For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men, but to God. Indeed, no one understands him; he utters mysteries with his spirit. But everyone who

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prophesies speaks to men for their strengthening, their encouragement, and their comfort. He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself, but he who prophesies edifies the church. I would like every one of you to speak in tongues, but I would rather have you prophesy. He who prophesies is greater than one who speaks in tongues, unless he interprets so that the

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church may be edified." May God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Marge and Joe Packer of our congregation vacationed once again this summer in Scotland. They brought back the newspaper clipping to me which concerned the installation of the Rev. Mr. Andrew Jones

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as the new pastor of St. Giles Church. It seems that the high point of the installation came when Dr. Jones was taken to the bell tower and the archdeacon of the church intoned the words, "You may ring the bell," whereupon Dr. Jones reached over his head to the bell rope which was about 12 inches above his head, took hold of it, and pulled down. It came

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down about six inches, and then the weight of the 4,000-pound bell above reversed itself, and suddenly Dr. Jones vanished from sight. He was pulled straight up, and were it not for the quick moves of some of his members who grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him back to earth again, he might be up there still.

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I could identify with Dr. Jones because ever since I was installed as the pastor of this church, my feet have hardly touched the ground. That's because I've been working harder than I've ever worked in all my life, but also because I have been happier in this ministry than any ministry I have ever known.

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Now if you were to ask me what part of my work in this church which I enjoy the most, I would answer immediately and without any hesitation, preaching. I have shared with you from this sacred desk before that every Christian is gifted by God. Some have many gifts, some have only one, but all Christians are gifted by God. And I have been given the

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gift of prophecy or preaching. Now no one gift is better than any other gift. No gift is to be exalted above any other gift. The gift of prophecy is one of many gifts, and it's mine. And when I think of it, I always think of it in terms of what Peter says of it in 2 Peter chapter 1. He says that we have the prophetic or the preached word made more

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sure and that we ought to pay attention to it as it is a lamp shining in a dark place. That is what preaching is to me, holding up a light in a dark place. Now preaching has always been central to our Christian faith. Jesus came preaching. His preaching is what made his greatest impact upon the society of which he was a part. Interestingly

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enough, in the Gospel according to John, Jesus is referred to as the Word of God. The Greek word for word is the word logos. He is the logos of God. But when that's translated into Latin as it came to us, the word which is used to translate logos is sermo, the root of our word sermon. In other words, John chapter 1 verse 1 would read, "In the beginning was

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the sermon, and the sermon was with God, and the sermon was God." In other words, Jesus is God's perfect sermon. Preaching then was central to his life. It was central to the disciples. It reads in the New Testament that they preached the name of Jesus with boldness. In Acts chapter 6 we are told that deacons were elected to care for the other matters

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of the church in order that the disciples might give themselves to preaching and to prayer. In Acts chapter 8 we are told that the disciples went everywhere preaching the word of God. Preaching, you see, is central to us, not only historically but also theologically. Our theological system swings about three pivots. First, man's need, his weakness and

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his wickedness. Second, God's love for man in spite of this and his giving Jesus Christ as the answer to man's problems and predicament. And thirdly, about the fact that the Holy Spirit of God is still active in the world, bringing God's love into waiting hearts. The great event of Christian history, you see, is when God came into time, left the roads

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of infinity to come to the highways of Galilee. And God, just as he came into history yesterday, comes into history today. And the way that he comes into history today, the way he impinges on the hearts and minds of people is by preaching. Preaching is God's loving assault on all those who will listen. Preaching is God's ceaseless endeavors to reach those who will

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hear. A preacher is one who heralds the event over and over again of the coming God. This is what led the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer to say in some unpublished lectures on Christology that the preached word is Christ present again. That when preaching really occurs, Jesus walks up and down the aisles of the place in which the message is being

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held up and taps people on their consciences, gaining their attention. This is what is to happen in preaching. That's the reason a sermon is not a theological essay and it's not a moral lecture and it's not a discussion of the social or political economic views of the preacher. It's not even a dissertation on Christian morality. A sermon is an attempt

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on the part of the preacher to be the channel by which the spirit of the living God touches people at the very center of their lives today. Luther put it in rough but absolutely accurate terms, "Pratikopio verbi dei es verbum dei." The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God. And that's the reason you can study the history of the church and find that no

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great movement in the history of the church, be it a revival movement or an evangelistic movement or a missionary movement, no great movement has ever occurred in the history of the church without the stimulus of preaching. This is why Romans 10 reads, and Paul's great words here ought to be carved on the wall of every minister's study, "What will be the

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destiny of men if they do not hear the Word of God? And how will they hear the Word of God if it is not preached?" I often think of it in terms of something that happened many years ago now. King George V of England was going to give a speech, a radio broadcast, and it was being carried here to the United States. He was addressing a congress there,

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but it was to be heard here. And just a few minutes before the broadcast was to begin, in the radio station in New York City, which was to receive the transmission and to amplify it and send it out across our country, a crucial wire in the radio mechanism broke. And there was no way in which that wire could be replaced in time to catch the beginning of the king's

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speech. Most of it would be missed. But there was a young radio engineer in that studio whose name was Harold Vivian. And Harold Vivian took one end of that broken wire in one hand and the other end of that broken wire in the other hand, and he allowed 250 volts of electricity to flow through him, completing with his own body that cycle. And holding those wires,

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the connection was complete, and the king was heard by the people. That's what preaching is. It's when a servant of God seeks to put one hand into the hand of God and the other hand into the hand of his people, and sometimes, even at the cost of great pain, make it possible for the people to hear the king. That's the reason every preacher acknowledges at least

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five trinities. There's the trinity Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whose word is preached. There's the trinities of the scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Peter, James, and John, the book that is preached. There's the trinity of those who gather about him in his colleagues in ministry and the officers of his church. And

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the fifth trinity is the people, Tom, Dick, and Harriet, all together, you see, necessary to make the preaching. And that's the reason I want to say to you this morning something very special about your role in preaching. You see, preaching is not a skill. It is an art. If I gave you all the parts that were necessary to build a bicycle and I gave you

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the directions, you could do it. You would follow the directions, and when you were done, the bicycle would be there. But it's not like that with preaching. I could give you all of the books. I could give you all of the lectures. I could give you all of the notes. You could go to all of the classes. You could do all of the things that you are taught as

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being prerequisite to real preaching. And when you are done, you might or you might not have a sermon. Because a sermon, you see, is something which becomes what it is on the basis of the power of God's Spirit moving through it. In the end, it doesn't depend upon you. It depends upon God. If you know anything about the philosophy of aesthetics,

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you know that a work of art is not something dead. It is not something inert. It is something alive, something that forms itself. An artist does not begin with an idea of what the finished work is going to be, totally developed in his mind. No. It develops as he goes along. And he discovers that as he serves it, it also begins to serve him. As he moves, it

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begins to absorb him. He becomes the midwife to something which in the end might be quite different from what he began with. The work of art, you see, has its own integrity. What he tries to do is to make himself a servant of it, and that takes time. And I want to say to you that because it takes time, there are days when you will discover

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that I have locked my study door and that I have not answered my mail and that I have taken the phone off the hook and that I have not come out to meet visitors, no matter how well-intentioned they might have been, and I have slipped in some of my ecclesiastical priorities and I have turned away from glad hands and I have put water in my gas tank

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so I cannot go anywhere, and I stay in my study. Because that is where it happens if it is going to happen. And I want to thank you this morning very publicly for giving me the call and the privilege of this desk from which to preach, of providing for me a salary so that I do not have to worry about taking care of my bodily needs. You take care

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of those so that I can give myself to preaching. And you provide me with an office and a secretary and all the necessary equipment that goes with it. And you give us a phone system and a tape ministry which reaches out, and a radio broadcast by which we can reach more than 27 states. And you provide colleagues who work with me in the ministry and who do a

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lot of the things that I do not have the time to do because I have to spend time going up the mountain, trying to meet God there, to bring back the Word. I thank you for these things, and I also plead with you to be patient with me. For many times when I come down from the mountain, I bring very little light. And that is not God's fault, it is mine. I often

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think of the little priest of Brittany in France. The other priest who served about him did not think he was adequate, so they wrote a letter accusing him of his inadequacies. 35 signed the letter, and they sent it to the bishop. When the bishop got the letter, he sent it to this little priest whose name was Jean-Baptiste Marie Venais, the Curé

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d'Ars. And when the little priest got the letter with the list of his 35 accusers on it, he made only one notation on the letter and then sent it back to the bishop. And when the bishop opened the letter, he discovered that the one notation was this. The little priest had added his own name to the list of those who accused him. When I wake up on

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Monday morning, I know that before me there is a high mountain to climb, and I may or I may not come back with light. Be patient with me in that, I beg you. Preaching you see is a great and a solemn task. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14 that he who preaches is to preach to the edification, to the exhortation, and to the consolation

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of the church. Now when you try to edify somebody, that means you try to build them up. You try to teach them. And the pulpit is to be a teaching thing. And as soon as I think of the pulpit as a teaching place, two difficulties immediately come to mind. The first one is you. You represent such a vast variety. You are not all the same. When I step up into this pulpit in the morning,

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I'm aware of the fact, for example, that some of the older ones among you turn up your hearing aids, and a young mother hands a crayon and a tube of lifesavers to her eight-year-old, and a college kid kind of slumps down in his seat because his parents made him come, and there's a business executive who has a thousand things on his mind but now makes a real effort

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to concentrate his attention, and there's someone here who seriously contemplated suicide this last week, and there's a homosexual here who has deep and profound hurts, and there's a pregnant woman that even as I begin to speak, she feels the signs of life within her, and there's someone here that cheated in the last seven days, and there's a person here who

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fed his flesh on pornography, and there's a person here who fed himself again and again on the promises of Scripture, and there's a visiting minister here who's almost burned out and he's come for some word of encouragement and hope, and there's a woman here, well, it's not that she doesn't love her husband anymore, it's just that this young man suddenly

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took her by surprise, and there's one with egg on his tie and another with a two thousand dollar wristwatch on his wrist, and I step up into the pulpit and I deal out my cards, and I don't know what cards you're holding in your hands. All I know is that the stakes are very high, because within two minutes of my beginning to speak, you will have decided

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whether you're going to listen or whether you're not going to listen. And the only reason you will listen is because you wonder what I have to say, and I wonder about that too, because I spoke about that word of art, and when I begin, the words are not carefully planned, they are not written out in detail. It is a living moment, and that's awesome.

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And the other thing that I think about when it comes to the teaching role of the Church is judgment. You see, in James chapter 3 we are told, "Let not many give themselves to teaching, for he who teaches is liable to stricter judgment." As a Christian, I know that God has lifted from me my sin, but I still have the profound sense of my own sinfulness,

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and believe me, that is no pious hyperbole. I am not engaging here in some maudlin exaggeration, the fruit of a morbid, introspective soul, not at all. I know my theater of play. I know my weaknesses far better than any of you. And that's the reason when I preach, I must stick to His Word, and not to my own, and help you to hide that Word in your heart,

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that you might not sin against Him. And that's the reason it's important for you, like the Bereans of old, to study the Scriptures, to see if these things are true. And that's the reason I will come to you with different approaches, sometimes with many Bible verses, sometimes with almost none, sometimes with humor, sometimes with tears, sometimes with prophetic zeal,

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and other times with pleading. Not all doors open to the same keys. And this is part of the up-building function of the pulpit. But Paul also says that the pulpit is to challenge and to exhort. That's where a sermon differs from a lecture. A lecture deals with a subject to be explained. But a sermon deals with an object to be attained. And my object in preaching

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is the salvation of your souls. You know, there are some sermons that are like shining meteors. They go through the sky and they're very bright and very splendid and spectacular to see. But the light of a meteor never causes anything to grow. What you have to have in a preaching ministry is the light of the sun. That's the light that brings life. The continuous

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illumination of the sun, that's what brings eternal life. And that's what I struggle to bring. I am determined that no one in this parish shall perish. I would stay out of heaven for 200 years if by doing so I could be sure that all of you would be there before me. I identify with John Welsh, that's Scott's preacher of many generations ago. At night

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he would pray for his people and he would kneel beside his bed with just his plaid about him and his wife would say to him, "John, come to your bed. It is too cold." And he would say to her, "Woman, I have the souls of 3,000 to answer for and I do not know how it is with many of them." And I echo his words. Peter, the New Testament tells us, ceased

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not preaching Christ. Paul, it says, went straightway into the synagogue and preached Christ. Philip went down into Samaria to preach Christ. And so I shall present him here. I will not each Sunday extend the words of invitation because when the invitation is given too regularly and too glibly and too easily, it is too easily refused and too easily turned aside. There

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are times and there are seasons. The Holy Spirit moves as He wills, but I entreat you, come to this pulpit seriously. Don't come here expecting me to give you some kind of Coca-Cola sonnet that's effervescent and sparkling and scintillating and sweet and saccharine, a kind of pause that refreshes. I ask you to come here with the same earnestness with

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which I come. I am exhorting you to matters of ultimate and eternal destiny. And then Paul says too that the pulpit is to be a place of consolation and comfort. The poet is far within the mark when he says, "Never morning wears to evening, but some heart does break." And there's awful suffering amongst our people. And Vance Meener and Bill Ettinger and Gary

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and Sherry and Brian and Lowell and Jim, all of that can testify. All of them can testify to the truth of that. You've seen in the newspapers this last week, just as I have, this remarkable archaeological discovery they made up in Edmonton. They found the bodies of two English sailors that had been buried 140 years ago. They're perfectly preserved. They were frozen in ice.

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And they had pictures of one of the bodies in the paper looking out at you this week. And as I looked at that picture, I thought to myself, "Here we are in the center of this great city," and it is a great city, "with all the hustle and bustle and activity of our lives. And there, staring at us out of the newspaper, is the picture of death. A

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death 140 years ago, but it haunts us still today. Death haunts every chapter of our lives. And that's the reason the pulpit must have a ministry of consolation and of comfort. I have been with death many times and been with suffering many, many times. I kept a record in my first pastorate that there was never a time in nine and a half years when

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I didn't have at least nine people dying of cancer. And I have lingered beside the death bed long after the families have gone, until the last signs and warmth of the departed spirit has gone. I know what it's like to be in those times. I think this morning of George Sneddon. He was a big Scotsman, came over to the United

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States when he was 16, started working in the mills, ended up being an engineer in the National Tube Works of the United States deal, and a very good engineer, and he had a magnificent bass voice. He could sing the praises of God, a thoroughly Christian man. And it came to his last illness, and he was in a coma in an oxygen tent, and the members of his family

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did not think he was aware of what was going on about him. But you learn very early that many times what you think is true is not true. I went over and I sat down by George's bed, and I opened the little zipper on the side of the oxygen tent and put my hand in so that I could rest it on his. And I wondered what I was going to say.

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And then I remembered how from the pulpit some years before I had quoted the 23rd Psalm, but not in the way in which we're used to hearing it, rather in the broad Scots, the way I heard a man say it in Scotland. And George, having come out of this Scots heritage, had come up to me that day and told me how much it meant to him. So that's what I did.

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The Lord's my hair, I'll never want, he hoots me heely dune. And as I said those words, his lips moved and said them with me. I could bring Christ into the moment because there had already been consolation from this desk. So I must say the words here that will prepare you for your shadowed times. He who preaches, Paul says, speaks to men for their edification,

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for their exhortation, and for their consolation. And that's my job. And that's why I love it. And that's their job. And that's why they love it. We love you and we love Christ and we want to bring you together. And I promise you that I will labor to make every sermon a kind of Bethlehem with the stars shining above it and the angels singing about it.

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And I will try to be like some Virgin Mary over which the Holy Spirit might brood in the hopes that I might bring forth in these words the word of God. And if and when I do, I pray that you, like the shepherds and the wise men of long ago, will fall on your knees and adore him, not me and not the sermon, but to the Christ who is alive and with us

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again in the solemnity of the preaching moment. Let us pray. Once again, Father, I come to the end of the time and do not know what has happened. Has anyone heard? Has anyone been touched? Has the Holy Spirit blessed? Is the Spirit of Christ moving in this place? Thou knowest. And to me, that must be enough. I pray it in his name. Amen.

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[Music] [Music] The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to

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all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves his peace. Amen. [Music]