Unpredictable Preaching

Tolerance for truth can be both time (when I want to hear) & topic (what I want to hear) sensitive. There is a great need for us to guard our hearts in case we are only open to hearing what suits us. 2 Timothy 4 leaves us with the picture of a pile of discarded teachers left by people who listen for a while and then move on because the teacher didn't fit with some personal preference, challenged some private passion or maybe even just reminded them of a particular person (probably the previous person to challenge them on that area of personal sin or spiritual stubbornness). They won't put up with sound teaching. Instead of teaching that will make them spiritually healthy or safe (sound) they are content to pursue that which will make them spiritually sick or at risk. Often it's not about what I want to hear, it's about what I need to hear and sometimes we need God to do something remarkable to get our attention.

Something like that happened on our recent trip to Canada. I had been asked to preach at our partner church in Barrie on one of the Sundays. I picked one of my favourite messages from the past year from Psalm 32. You can listen to it from when I preached it in Glasgow here. You can also listen to it from when I preached it in Barrie here. There was one significant difference between the Glasgow and Barrie versions. It arrived as I was preaching verse 4 which says 'For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.' In Glasgow I offered no real illustration. In the first of Barrie's two services as I arrived at this verse I felt an urgency to provide a more tangible illustration. It wasn't in my notes, I didn't use it in Glasgow but I had one of the guys sitting near the front come and join me at the front and had them walk along the front while I pressed down on them as hard as I could. The point is that if we are walking away from God it is a kindness when we feel Him weighing upon our souls in order that our lives may be turned around towards Him. It is that sometimes when we think we have the weight of the world on our shoulders we need ot wake up to the reality that God is pressing upon us in order to restore us to Him. The guy in the first service was part of the youth ministry team, there was something different about the guy in the next service.

As I pulled him up the eyes of his wife were like saucers. I did exactly the same by way of illustration in that service as I had in the previous one, sent him back to his seat and finished the message. Immediately after the service I was told that the guy in the second service wasn't a believer. His wife had trusted Jesus last year, he had beeen coming to services, people had been praying for him. the saucer eyes were probably because she thought this Scottish preacher was going to mess her life up. How amazing then to turn and see him at the front receiving prayer and hearing that He too had turned to Jesus for salvation. I heard his wife held a party for him the next night. All that said, God has a way of arresting our attention when we are far from Him.

Here's another thing too- Being well prepared to preach involves being prepared to move off script for a moment trusting that God may use it for His glory. Sometimes it is the not-in-my-notes, laid-on-our-hearts, still-faithful-to-the-text (for those who are twitching nervously) that God will use to speak into a persons life in order to transform a person's life in a way that nothing can prepare you for the joy that it brings.