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Till our tongues rot


Gospel ministry is 'prayer and the ministry of the word' (Acts 6:4). So Christopher Ash has written very helpfully on the danger of the shorthand 'Word ministry' (read the article here). The prayer bit is absolutely vital.  Why?  Well, for all sorts of reasons but, in terms of preaching in particular there are three parts of the process that particularly need prayer:

  1. The message.  I need to pray for light and understanding - for the Spirit to open my eyes to the big thing the text is telling me about Christ.  And I pray for that Word to grip me, to change me, to get inside me, to become a fire in the bones that cannot be held in (Jer. 20:9).  So in practice often my preparation goes through a 'U'-shaped journey of thinking that I know what the passage is about, then finding that I don't understand at all, that I'm completely lost and helpless, then being forced to cry out for help and light, and then starting to feel the force of the passage, and finally coming out feeling 'this is the most important and wonderful passage about Jesus in the whole Bible!'
  2. The communication.  It's so striking at the end of Colossians that Paul wants above all to proclaim the mystery of Christ (4:3) and that particularly he wants prayer, 'that I may make it clear' (Col. 4:4).  That's what he was aiming at - not oratory or entertainment - just clarity.  And he realised that clarity is very very difficult - he needed God's help to achieve it.
  3. The hearing.  We are naturally blind to the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.  The door of our mind and heart is naturally slammed shut and only God can open it.  So the other thing Paul asks the Colossians to pray for is an open door for the message (Col. 4:3).  Charles Spurgeon is brilliant on this:

“The gospel is preached in the ears of all men; it only comes with power to some. The power that is in the gospel does not lie in the eloquence of the preacher otherwise men would be converters of souls. Nor does it lie in the preacher’s learning; otherwise it could consists of the wisdom of men. We might preach till our tongues rotted, till we should exhaust our lungs and die, but never a soul would be converted unless there were mysterious power going with it – the Holy Ghost changing the will of man. O Sirs! We might as well preach to stone walls as preach to humanity unless the Holy Ghost be with the word, to give it power to convert the soul.” (quoted in Stott, I Believe in Preaching, 335)

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