Wy in the world do you need a preacher anyway? With that question we concluded last time, leaving you to think about your answer in preparing for this installment.

Jobs come and go. Occupations flourish and then fade into oblivion.

Remember the milkman? In pre-dawn darkness he would trace his route through the neighborhood to deposit bottles of cold, fresh milk in the milk-box guarding the back step. We don't need him anymore, now that the supermarket has come along to provide one-stop shopping for all our grocery needs.

Today, automobile dealers face a challenge from "automalls" which promise to change the way we shop for our cars. Journalists have been gushing lately about the burst in online (internet) holiday shopping. Radio ads for online vendors ask us why in the world we'd put up with rude clerks and mobs of people, when we could make our purchases sitting at our computer in our pajamas? Wouldn't it, be ironic if, after the mall mania of the '70s and '80s has helped close mom-and-pop stores, e-commerce now forced the suburban malls to follow the neighborhood shops into oblivion? No occupation is unaffected by the development of the computer, with its capacity for desktop publishing, internet marketing, and (as yet) tax-free purchasing.

Milkmen and ice-haulers who needs them anymore?

And what about preachers and their work of preaching?

Why do you need a preacher? Some popular notions⤒🔗

As we continue developing a biblically Reformed perspective on preaching, it may be useful to expose several common cultural expectations about preachers that surely influence Christ's church in North America.

One of the most pervasive views about why we need preachers says: We'll always need preachers for their "golf course effect."

The "golf course effect" happens every time a minister intro­duces himself and his occupation to the strangers in his golfing foursome. Until the moment of introduction, they've enjoyed fouling the air with their language. Now with the introductions out of the way, these poor fellows are trapped for the next eighteen holes with the discom­fort of the preacher already knowing what they're really like, while having to act unlike the persons they really are. So they abruptly stop cussing or start apologizing every time they swear. That's the "golf course effect": having a minister in your foursome helps keep the language clean and the players nice. Unnatural, but nice.

Occasionally people in Christ's church view preachers that way, too. He's the guy you get to bless your reception; he's the fellow you want around to sanctify your community service programs, because his high morals can help "balance" the looseness of others. At bottom, the preacher is the token religionist in the group, paid to be pious, whose profession is holiness. His holiness is thought to elevate the religiosity of the group.

This cultural and ecclesiastical expectation of preachers is but one in a long list. The following list of "needs" that people want to be met by preachers is no exaggeration.

• The preacher as Coach: helping people be all they can be
• The preacher as Manager: coordinating people and programs, clarifying objectives and setting goals
• The preacher as Motivator: a spiritual sparkplug, someone to pick us up when we're down, to keep us going when the going gets tough
• The preacher as the church's face to the community: he's the paid professional we send to the rotary luncheons and inter-church planning meetings
• The preacher as savior of our Youth: we need a preacher who is "good with young people," to keep 'em off drugs and outta jail

The sad reality is that although each of these expectations con­tains a grain of truth, nevertheless, as they stand, each description falls woefully short of the fully biblical perspective for the church's preacher-pastor. Grains of truth add up to a pile of sand, but we need a coherent, integrated portrait. Preachers today are suffocating under multiple, dis­connected, competing expectations of people whose religious wants have been translated into ecclesiastical demands.

Why do you need preaching? To receive divine grace←⤒🔗

Perhaps you noticed that I've changed the question, thereby changing our focus from the person (the preacher) to his activity (preaching). We want to avoid any notion that an individual holds the keys of the kingdom or owns the means of grace. Rather, we need to understand that divine grace and its blessings — forgiveness, assurance, peace, life — are communicated, bestowed, and dispensed through and by means of an activity called preaching.

Here is the expectation missing in so much religion today! How many of us believe that people need preaching in order to receive through the verbalized gospel God's grace and blessing, to hear from God's lips His declaration of forgiveness, to obtain through the spoken word the announced reality of peace with God?

Surely God can use many means to accomplish His purposes with us. To bring us to maturity in faith, God blesses us with nurture by godly parents, with Christian education, with catechism instruction, and with the example of other believers. So in a certain sense, almost everything can be a means of grace, from Bible reading to a beautiful sunset, from evening prayer to a morning walk, from a severe temptation to a sports victory. "And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose" (Rom. 8:28). God works through all things for the good of those called.

We may even say that God can use any means He wishes to create in us saving faith. Because He is sovereign, God is bound to nobody and to nothing in the accomplishment of His purposes. If we need to get hit by light­ning in order to fall to our knees in penitent faith, God can arrange that. If it takes a car wreck to turn you back to God, please wear your seatbelt. But none of these events becomes the means of turning us to God apart from His Word. Only by the light of that Word of God can we understand and interpret aright God's purpose in our suf­fering.

But we don't recommend that people stand in open fields during thunderstorms or drive carelessly.

Why not? Because God has ordained something else by which to bestow His grace of repentance and His blessing of renewal, namely, preaching.

Here's the point: the means of grace entrusted to the church in the world are those instruments or activities through which God has promised to work living faith in us, along with firm assurance and a quiet conscience, all issuing in childlike obedience. Central to this discussion are the divinely revealed promises to which we may appeal in connection with the function of preaching and sacraments in human history.

How, then, do preaching and the sacraments function in your life and mine? How should they function? Listen to this explana­tion given by L. Berkhof:

...Strictly speaking, only the Word (preached) and the sacraments (administered) can be regarded as means of grace, that is, as objective channels which Christ has instituted in the Church, and to which He ordinarily binds Himself in the communication of His grace. Of course these may never be dissociated from Christ, nor from the powerful operation of the Holy Spirit, nor from the Church which is the appointed organ for the distribution of the blessings of divine grace.Systematic Theology, pages 604-605; emphasis added

Such heavy language underscores the seriousness of preaching and sacraments; they are "objective channels" to which the Lord Jesus Christ "ordinarily binds Himself" for the purpose of communicating His grace. Talk about a voice crying in the wilderness! The church is God's appointed organ for the distribution of the blessings of divine grace?! How many radio preachers or TV evangelists have you heard say that?

If you find these claims hard to swallow on first reading, try mixing them with Berkhof's description of the Word as means of grace:

...Strictly speaking, it is the Word as it is preached in the name of God and in virtue of a divine commission that is considered as a means of grace in the technical sense of the word, alongside of the sacraments which are administered in the name of God.Systematic Theology, page 610; emphasis original

Up to this point in this series of articles, all of these emphases we have heard in Scripture, from a choir of confessional witnesses, and now from a representative Reformed theologian.

Preaching: God's means of grace←⤒🔗

The Holy Spirit sovereignly employs external means for our salvation. Against Rome, the Reformers insisted that the Holy Spirit — not the church, not the priest, not the pope — is the Agent who employs these instruments. In addition to its faulty view of God and man, of sin and grace, Rome sees the church as the primary agent of grace. To this the Reformers said: No! The Holy Spirit is the primary Agent.

Against the Enthousiasts and Anabaptists, the Reformers insisted that the Holy Spirit employs external means for our salvation. These groups tended to disparage the organizational, institutional church with its offices and its official activities, and clearly their influence has not diminished during the centuries since the Reformation. Together with Rome, this "left wing" had misconstrued the bib­lical doctrine of the means of grace.

These means of grace remain God's instruments of action. Although He puts them in the hand of the church, neither the church nor the minister owns them or has the original or ultimate authority over them.

All of this we hear in the Canons of Dort, Chapter III/IV, Art. 17, "God's Use of Means in Regeneration":

Just as the almighty work of God by which he brings forth and sustains our natural life does not rule out but requires the use of means, by which God, according to his infinite wisdom and goodness, has wished to exercise his power, so also the aforementioned supernatural work of God by which he regenerates us in no way rules out or cancels the use of the gospel, which God in his great wisdom has appointed to be the seed of regeneration and the food of the soul. For this reason, the apostles and the teachers who fol­lowed them taught the people in a godly manner about this grace of God, to give him the glory and to humble all pride, and yet did not neglect meanwhile to keep the people, by means of the holy admonitions of the gospel, under the administration of the Word, the sacraments, and discipline. So even today it is out of the question that the teachers or those taught in the church should presume to test God by separating what he in his good pleasure has wished to be close­ly joined together. For grace is bestowed through admonitions and the more readily we perform our duty, the more lustrous the benefit of God working in us usually is and the better his work advances. To him alone, both for the means and for their saving fruit and effectiveness, all glory is owed forever. Amen.

"Grace is bestowed through admonitions" — the holy admonitions of the gospel administered in the activities of the preaching, the sacraments, and the discipline of the church.

Ears to hear: Time for a quiz←⤒🔗

Let's finish this discussion with a quiz on what you've been reading. Here's the question: In terms of Scripture, the Reformed Confessions, and Reformed theology, which activity ought to have priority in nurturing your experience of God's salvation as you live before Him: hearing a good sermon every Lord's day or having a daily quiet time?

As I repeatedly tell students: Read the question carefully!

What's being proposed is not a choice, not a dilemma, not an either-or. What is being investigated is not what you enjoy more, not what gives more blessing, not even where you feel closer to God.

Here's a hint to get you started: the answer is in the title.