Ep 15: The Spirit and the Preacher

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There are two truths about preaching that sound like they're in tension — and learning to hold both is one of the most freeing things that can happen to a preacher.

The first: you bring yourself fully to the pulpit. Your personality, your story, your voice — God wants all of it. The second: you depend on God entirely. Your gifting, on its own, can't do what a sermon is supposed to do.

In this episode, Jonathan McClintock walks through what the preacher brings to the task and what he can never accomplish without the Spirit. Drawing on Phillips Brooks, Paul's confession of weakness in 1 Corinthians 2, and the vision of maturity in Ephesians 4, this is a conversation about the internal life of the preacher — the part of preaching that no framework or technique can touch.

You'll work through:

• Why your personality is a gift to steward, not a problem to manage
• What it means to prepare like it depends on you and preach like it depends on God
• The two aims every sermon is reaching for: persuasion and maturity
• Why clarity is directly tied to persuasion — and why an unclear sermon adds an obstacle of your own making
• One honest question to ask about this Sunday's sermon

This is the first in a three-part series drawn from Course 3 of the Clear Preaching Academy — a full theology of preaching.

Whether you've been preaching for two years or twenty, this episode will free you to bring your whole self to the pulpit — and re-anchor you in the One who makes preaching more than speech.

Transcript

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You know, most conversations about preaching focus on either technique or structure or clarity or delivery, and all of that matters, and it's what you hear most of the time on this show. But today I want to go underneath the technique to something a little more personal. There are two truths about preaching that sound like their intention, fighting one another, but learning to hold them both is one of the most freeing things that can happen to a preacher. But before we get to that topic, today I want to briefly mention a new self-assessment that is available on my website. This assessment in about five or ten minutes will help you determine what area of clarity, whether thought or structure, language, delivery, is hindering you the most. And then the follow-up sequence after completing the assessment will help you begin working on that area right away. So visit clearpreaching.com/slash assessment. And then if you'd like to go deeper in your growth as a preacher, check out the Clear Preaching Academy, and the link to both of these will be in the show notes today. Welcome to the Clear Preaching Podcast. My name is Jonathan McClintock, and today let's talk about what you bring to the pulpit and what you can't do without. The first, you bring to the pulpit yourself. You bring yourself fully to the pulpit, your personality, your story, your voice. God wants all of that. The second thing, you depend on God entirely. Your gifting on its own can't do what a sermon is supposed to do. But you bring yourself fully, you depend on God entirely. You gotta hold both of those, and preaching becomes something you can do faithfully for a lifetime. But you drop either one of those, and preaching can get distorted real fast. So let's start with this first one because a lot of preachers carry a quiet lie about it. And here's the quiet lie a lot of preachers believe that their personality is a problem to be managed. That the goal, you've heard people say this, the goal is to get themselves out of the way so that the word can come through cleanly. But that's not how God designed preaching. In fact, Philip Brooks gave probably the most classic definition of preaching more than a century ago. He said, preaching is truth communicated through personality. Two essential elements, truth and personality. Not truth in spite of personality, but truth through it. See, God does not call generic communicators. He calls very specific people with specific voices, specific histories, specific ways of seeing the world and communicating. And that specifically isn't incidental to your sermon. It's part of how God intends you to preach, your sermon to be preached. Your personality is not a problem to be managed, it's a gift to be stewarded. I love this. H.B. Charles Jr. put it sharply. He said, to proclaim truth dressed up as someone else's personality is not preaching. In fact, he called it pulpit identity theft. You see, when you try to preach like your favorite preacher instead of like yourself, you're not being humble. You're actually robbing the people you're preaching to of the preacher God actually gave them. But, and this is the guardrail here, personality is not the same as preference. Bringing yourself fully doesn't mean your story replaces the text's story. In fact, Wayne McDill wrote this. He said he warned that a preacher's personality can carry so much weight that it actually overwhelms the words. So there's an extreme to go on both sides. Here's the balance. Your first task outside the pulpit. Your first task is outside the pulpit. And it's this live in such a way that your voice earns the right to be heard inside it. The character you build off the platform is what gives weight to your words while you're on the platform. So bring yourself fully. But here's the truth that keeps that from becoming arrogance. You also completely depend upon God. You depend upon God entirely. And that's really the heart of this episode today, because here's what's strange about preaching. You prepare as if everything depends on you, and then you preach as if everything depends on the Spirit. And it's hard to grasp this, but both of these things are true at one time. You got to preach as if it's dependent upon you, and you got to preach as if you're totally dependent upon God. Listen how Paul describes his own preaching to the Corinthians, the church full of people who valued polished, persuasive speakers. Paul said this. He said, And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. My speech, my message, was not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. Why? So that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. First Corinthians 2, 1 to 5. Paul came to them in weakness. He came in fear and in trembling. And he set aside the persuasive rhetoric he was definitely capable of. Not because clarity didn't matter to him, but because he understood something every preacher has to learn. No amount of skill can do what only the Spirit could do. No degree of rhetorical polish or it won't create faith where there is no faith. No clever turn of phrase produces conviction where there's hardness. No structure, however clean, will manufacture transformation where there is resistance. That is the spirit's work every time. The author Jared Alcantara has a line I love. He says, preaching without depending on the spirit is like sitting in a sailboat without relying on the wind. You can rig the sails perfectly, you can point the boat in exactly the right direction, but without the wind, you're not going anywhere. Dependence on the Spirit is not a substitute for preparation. It doesn't mean you wing it and let the Spirit bail you out. It means this: you prepare as fully as you possibly can, and then you preach an absolute dependence on the one who makes preaching more than just a speech. Prepare like it depends on you. Preach like it depends on him because it does. Now, if you're bringing yourself fully and depending on the Spirit, what's all this actually for? Here's the question we're sitting with. What is your sermon actually trying to accomplish? Not the topic, but the aim. What's the aim? Because a sermon can be biblically accurate and beautifully delivered and still not finish or accomplish its work. Two aims of the sermon. The first aim of the sermon is persuasion. We preach to persuade. Biblical preaching seeks to persuade. Jesus' own mission was to seek and to save the lost, and preaching serves that. Augustine named three duties of the preacher. He said they were to instruct, to delight, and to move people to action. All three of these. Instruction without persuasion leaves people informed but not changed. The sermon that never calls for a response hasn't really finished its work. It's not done. Because we understand our fearful responsibility to the Lord, we work hard to persuade others. Paul said that in 2 Corinthians 5 11. That phrase fearful responsibility, it's a preacher's phrase, isn't it? It's the weight of standing before God entrusted with a message whose reception has eternal consequences. And that weight doesn't produce paralysis, it produces urgency. And here's where it connects to everything that this podcast was about. Clarity is directly tied to persuasion. Clear speech doesn't guarantee a response. That's the Spirit's work. But clear preaching guarantees the listener understands what they're being called to do. And an unclear sermon can be completely faithful to the text and still fail to bring anyone to the point of conclusion. Think about that. When you're unclear, you haven't removed the offense of the gospel. The gospel keeps its own offense. Paul said that. But you've added an obstacle of your own making on top of it when you're not clear. Persuasion's not manipulation. It's faithfulness, it's bringing the listener to a place where they have to decide. They come face to face with decisions. So the first aim of the sermon is persuasion. The second aim of the sermon is maturity. Preaching doesn't only call the lost to come in, it calls the found to grow up. Ephesians tells us, and he gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, or shepherds, and teachers to equip the saints for the work of the ministry for building up the body of Christ until we all come or attain to mature manhood, to the measure of the fullness, stature of the fullness of Christ. Ephesians 4, 11 to 13. See, Paul's vision here in Ephesians, it's breathtaking in his ambition. The whole church growing up into Jesus Christ, every member working properly in its own way, the body building itself up in love. And the preacher has a specific role in this vision of what happens in the maturity of the church. Equip the saints, build the body, and press people toward maturity, which means the preacher who only informs hasn't finished preaching. The goal of the sermon was never knowledge. The goal, the goal's transformation into the image of Christ. Information that never presses or becomes formation has stopped short of the point. So thinking of all this, let's pull this all together because these four threads that I've just talked about make one grand picture here. So look at what we've covered. You bring your personality, you depend on the spirit, you persuade the lost, and you mature the saved. Again, look at look at this, what we covered. You bring your personality, you depend on the spirit, you persuade the lost, you mature the saved. Four threads, one preacher. And notice the shape of it. It moves from what you bring to what you depend on, to really what it's all for. From you to God to the people. That's the whole life of a preacher in one arc. You, God, the pre and the people. So one thing to kind of take away from this this week. Ask yourself one honest question about upcoming Sunday sermon. Am I aiming at information or transformation? If your sermon ends when the people understand, you're stopping one step short. Add the next step. Because what you, what do you want them to do? What do you want them to become? What do you want them to decide? Build towards that. Now, before I close today, a word about where this kind of growth happens best. Because everything I just walked through really comes through the third course you'll find inside the Clear Preaching Academy, a full theology of preaching built lesson by lesson. It's really the foundation underneath everything that is taught and discussed and in our forums and our courses and our cohorts in the Clear Preaching Academy. It's not just how to preach clearly, but why preaching carries the weight that it does. The Academy is open now. You can check it out at ClearPreaching. And here's what I want to leave you with today. You don't have to be someone else in the pulpit. God called you. Your voice, your story, your way of seeing things. Bring all of it and then lay it all down in front of the Lord with the Spirit's help. Because the one who called you is the one who makes the preaching work. Bring yourself fully. Depend on God entirely. I'm pulling for you. I'll see you next week.