The following sermon was delivered
on Wednesday morning, October 23, 2002, at Trinity Baptist
Church in Montville, New Jersey, during the annual Pastors' Conference. The preacher is Pastor Albert
N. Martin, and this is the first sermon in a series entitled,
The Immediate Agency and Operation of the Holy Spirit upon the Preacher. It's a sobering thought, brethren. and I try to carry it with me
every Lord's Day, even on days like these when I climb those
stairs instead of those, that one time will be the last time,
and this time may be the last time. Very sobering. Now, the reason that you men
got your brochure and the outline of the program without anything
written next to these sessions except my name, is that when
the invitations and when the brochures were sent out, I had
not yet settled in my own mind and heart what I should do with
these two sessions. However, I come to them this
morning with a deep sense of peace that God has heard your
prayers and the prayers of His people in my prayers that we
might be guided by him with respect to the subject matter in all
of the sessions, as well as the prayer that the Spirit of God
would attend the labors of those who minister to us in those sessions. And my subject matter for this
morning in the two sessions is this. I want to make an attempt
to lecture slash preach to you on the subject of the immediate
agency and operations of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher
in the act of preaching. The immediate agency and operations
of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher in the act of preaching. Now, by way of easing us into
this vital theme, I want to do two things. First of all, to
exegete the language of my title, and then secondly, to identify
several crucial presuppositions relative to the person and ministry
of the Holy Spirit in general before we narrow in upon this
very specific focus of the person and ministry of the Holy Spirit
in conjunction with the act of preaching. Now, what in the world
do I mean by this combination of words, the immediate agency
and operations of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher in the act
of preaching? Well, this is what I mean. I
am concerned to address the agency and the operations of the Holy
Spirit with reference to the act of preaching itself. I am not addressing the necessity
and reality of the agency and the operations of the Holy Spirit
in our preparations for preaching. We must experience His work in
preparation for preaching as the spirit of wisdom and counsel
in the selection of our sermonic materials. We must know His ministry
in the study as the spirit of illumination. enabling us to
enter into the mind of God in any given text or theme of Scripture,
answering our earnest prayer, Open thou mine eyes, that I may
behold wondrous things out of thy law. We must experience His
ministry in our preparation as the spirit of grace and of supplication,
sustaining in us a prayerful disposition from the beginning
to the end of our preparation. However these necessary ministries
of the Spirit may be, And they are necessary. However real they
are in our experience, I'm not addressing them. I am bypassing
those dimensions of the agency and operations of the Holy Spirit,
focusing upon the agency and operations of the Spirit, upon
the preacher. not upon the congregation in
the act of preaching, that's another whole field of study. I bypass it, I am not addressing
it. Furthermore, we will be concerned
to demonstrate that his agency, that is, his active power, and
his operations, that is, the effects of that power, are immediate
in the act of preaching, as opposed to and in contrast with those
secondary operations of the Holy Spirit, both in preparation for
preaching and in the act of preaching. This, then, is the very focus
of our concern, and I trust that terminology has delimited the
field of our concern with some measure of precision. we're to address the immediate
agency and operations of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher
in the act of preaching. Then secondly, by way of introduction,
I want to briefly highlight several presuppositions with respect
to our doctrine of the Holy Spirit in general. These are realities
drawn from a scripturally based and historically orthodox doctrine
of the Holy Spirit. I will not take time to prove
these things, only to highlight them that they may act as a kind
of present quality control as we think our way through and
grapple with this often neglected but crucially important dimension
of the work of preaching. As we take up this subject, these
are my presuppositions concerning the Holy Spirit. First, that
He is a person. when dealing with any aspect
of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the gifts of the Holy Spirit,
the functions of the Holy Spirit, we must always remember that
we are dealing with the operations, the gifts, the functions of a
person. And this is particularly vital
when we are dealing with the ministry of the Spirit in conjunction
with the act of preaching. When I read statements such as
these, how to obtain the power of the Spirit in our ministries,
or Holy Spirit power, something in me, the bells within me go
off in an alarm system because it seems to me it takes us perilously
close to the language of Acts chapter 8. Give me this power! My money perish with thee. We
are dealing with the agency and operations of a person upon this
person called the preacher as he is engaged in the act of preaching. Secondly, he is not only person,
but I'm presupposing that we believe that he is a divine person. He is God the Holy Spirit. and all that can be attributed
to and predicated of the Father that constitutes the essence
of deity, all that can be attributed to and predicated of the Son
that constitutes the essence of deity, all of this can be
and must be attributed to the person of the Holy Spirit. Hence, all of the reverence The
awe, the submission, the love that flow out of renewed hearts
to the Father and to the Son must constantly flow out to this
divine person, God the Holy Spirit. And then my third presupposition
is this, that He is not only a person, not only that He is
a divine person, but that He is a sovereign divine person. And it's especially necessary
when thinking of the agency and operations of the Spirit in conjunction
with gifts of utterance to remember this aspect of our general doctrine
of the Holy Spirit. It is nowhere more highlighted
than in that very setting in Paul's treatment of spiritual
gifts in 1 Corinthians chapter 12 where he says, now concerning
spiritual gifts, I would not have you ignorant, and in his
treatment of that subject we are told in verse 11, but all
these work the one and the same Spirit, capital S, dividing to
each one severally, even as he will. Therefore, we must beware
of any attempt to establish ironclad rules within which the Holy Spirit
must be expected to operate and to function. He does not work
in any perfectly predictable pattern in his agency and operations
in the act of preaching. Now, having exegeted my title
and identified these three fundamental presuppositions with respect
to the person of the Holy Spirit, we now take up our subject, the
immediate agency and operations of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher
in the act of preaching. And let me say at this point,
lest some of you think I will be contradicting something I
say later, I do not regard this as a sermon. This is a lecture
in which precision of statement is crucial, and therefore my
nose will be in the direction of my notes far more than I would
permit in a sermon and walk away from it with a good conscience,
and I want you to understand that. All right, then, as we
take up our subject, two major heads in this first hour, time
permitting, and a third major head in the next hour. First
of all, I want to address briefly the indispensable necessity for
the immediate agency and operations of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher
in the act of preaching. We are dealing with that which,
in my judgment, we can see in the Scriptures is an indispensable
necessity. And we're going to look at three
categories of biblical witness that I will set before you that
I trust will persuade you, if you're not already persuaded,
that the immediate agency and operations of the Spirit in your
preaching is not a luxury, It is not a desirable option, and
certainly it is not the prerogative of a fanatical fringe to experience
and claim that they experience. But it is an indispensable necessity
for you, if your ministry is to have any claim to being biblical. Indispensable necessity. And the three lines of witness
I lay before you briefly are these. First, such an immediate
agency and operation of the Spirit was indispensable to the preaching
ministry of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ Himself. According
to the Scriptures, our Lord was conceived by the immediate agency
and operation of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit shall come upon
you, the angel says to Mary, and that which is conceived in
you shall be of the Spirit, and you shall bring forth a son,
and you shall call his name Jesus. The same Holy Spirit that conceived
him in the womb of the Virgin is the Spirit who nurtured the
holy humanity of our Lord Jesus as He grew in wisdom and stature,
in favor with God and with men. And if you have never read Owen,
Volume 3, his masterful treatise on the work of the Spirit, I
urge you to read the section in which Owen demonstrates the
ministry of the Spirit in the development of the perfect humanity
of our Lord Jesus. There was a constant and an immediate
agency and operation of the Holy Spirit in that development described
in Luke 2 and verse 52. When the time came for him to
begin his public ministry, what was the defining work of God
with respect to his beloved Son? Well, when we look at the Old
Testament prophecy concerning Messiah, the answer is very clear. Chapter 61 of Isaiah. For the
sake of our Brits, Isaiah. 61 verse 1. The Spirit of the Lord God is
upon me because the Lord has anointed me to preach. Conceived by the Spirit, His
holy human nature developed and expanded and brought to maturity
by the Spirit, and in the process such wisdom given to Him that
the doctors of the law are amazed at this twelve-year-old boy.
But when he comes to mature years to begin to speak those words
of wisdom, there is an additional, a distinct operation of the Spirit. The Spirit of the Lord God is
upon me because he has anointed me to preach, to preach good
tidings to the meek. sent me to bind up the brokenhearted
to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison
to them that are bound to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor
and the day of vengeance." We have the record of the historical
fulfillment of that prophetic utterance in the Synoptic Gospels. I refer to the account in the
Gospel according to Luke Chapter 3, verses 21 and 22. Luke chapter
3. Now it came to pass, when all
the people were baptized, that Jesus also, having been baptized,
and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended
in bodily form as a dove upon Him, and a voice came out of
heaven, You are my beloved Son, In you I am well pleased. And then He is driven by the
Spirit who has come upon Him into the wilderness, there to
be tempted forty days and forty nights of the devil. He comes
out of that temptation victorious, and we read in verse 14 of chapter
4, And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit unto Galilee,
and the fame went throughout the region, and He taught in
their synagogues, being glorified of all Think of it. Incarnate wisdom. Pure, unsullied,
unpainted humanity. Gifts of insight and gifts of
expression of such a nature that at age 12 he astounds the doctors. Surely all he needs is a further
unfolding of that process of maturation under the agency and
operations of the Spirit. No, he utters no word of public
ministry until there is an indument by the Holy Spirit which, among
other things, equips him to speak as God's authoritative prophet,
as well as to be set apart and sustained so that he may, by
the eternal Spirit, offer himself up without spot unto God. So, I lay out that first line
of evidence of the indispensable necessity of the immediate agency
and operations of the Spirit as we see it in our Lord. Secondary,
such an immediate agency and operation of the Spirit was indispensable
for the Apostles. According to the scriptures,
they had been given special endowments of power in conjunction with
their appointment as apostles and sent forth into their Judean
ministry. They could cast out demons. They
could raise the dead. They could heal the sick. Furthermore,
they had had their Lord to instruct them in the remainder of his
earthly ministry and then subsequent to his death and resurrection
for 40 days. He is enlarging their understanding
of the very heart of His mission. According to Acts 1 in verse
3, the primary focus of those 40 days was instructive. It was didactic. And after appearing
and demonstrating by many proofs that He was indeed the risen
Christ, appearing to them by the space of 40 days and speaking
the things concerning the kingdom of God. He's now helping them
to make sense out of so much of Scripture which hitherto was
obscure or they couldn't fit it together. And now they begin
to see as they ought to see with respect to the nature of the
kingdom, with respect to the great concerns of his messianic
mission, and yet He says to them at the end of Luke chapter 24,
in a kind of summary statement of what he was doing during that
period, Luke chapter 24, and verse 44, These are my words
which I spoke unto you while I was with you, that all things
must needs be fulfilled that are written in the law of Moses
and the prophets and the Psalms concerning me. Then he opened
their mind. Here is illumination. given by
an immediate operation of Christ. He opened their minds. This was not some generic illumination. It was specific. It was an immediate
operation of Christ upon the mind. He opened their mind that
they might understand the Scriptures and said to them, thus it is
written, that the Christ should suffer, rise again, repentance
and remission preached among the nations. You are witnesses
of these things. And behold, I send forth the
promise of my Father upon you, but Wait in the city until you
be clothed with power from on high. Now I'm fully aware that
there are dimensions of passages such as these that have no one-to-one
equivalence, because in redemptive history we are in a period of
transition. I'm fully aware of that. But
what I want you to notice is this. In contrast to the broader
aspects of the ministry of the Spirit laid out so wonderfully
in the Upper Room Discourse, and may I say so helpfully by
Pastor Fisher in a recent men's conference here, when he spoke
on the person and ministry of the Spirit. Here the focus is
upon the Spirit's ministry in conjunction with power power
directly related to their bearing witness to the central truths
of the gospel. And that is precisely the same
emphasis given in Acts chapter 1, where we read in Acts 1 verse
7, It is not for you to know times and seasons which the Father
has set within his own authority, You shall receive power, the
Holy Spirit coming upon you, and you shall be my witnesses. It is power for witness bearing
that is highlighted by our Lord in this promise of the Pentecostal
blessing. Then when Acts records the actual
coming of the Spirit, where does the emphasis lie? Acts chapter
2. When the day of Pentecost was now come, they were all together
in one place. Suddenly there came from heaven
the sound as of a rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled
all the house where they were sitting. There appeared unto
them tongues parting asunder like as of fire, and it sat upon
each one of them. And they were all filled with
the Holy Spirit, and had an immediate sense of the wonder of their
union with Christ. According to the Upper Room discourse,
that would have been one of the immediate operations of the Spirit
and many of the others. But notice what is highlighted
by the Spirit of God. They were all filled with the
Holy Spirit and began to speak as the Spirit gave them utterance. And I suggest that this is the
great paradigm for the New Covenant ministry, filled with the Spirit
spoke as the Spirit gave them utterance. Here was an agency
and operation of the Spirit that was immediate. Now granted, there
was a supernatural dimension to it. They speak in dialects
and languages that they had not acquired in the ordinary way
of acquisition. I know that. But the great emphasis,
as we see in the unfolding of the book of Acts, is that the
Spirit is present in His agency and operations in conjunction
with utterance that again and again is described as bold utterance. There is utterance in which there
is a present operation of the Spirit. And this operation, this
agency of the Spirit in the act of preaching, was a conscious
experience to the apostolic band. It was not something they, quote,
took by faith and believed it was happening outside the realm
of their spiritual consciousness. First Thessalonians, chapter
1. Knowing, brethren beloved of God, your election, how that
our gospel came unto you not in word only, but also in power,
and in the Holy Spirit, and in much assurance or conviction. First Corinthians 2, and I, brethren,
when I came unto you, yes, I was with you in weakness, and in
fear, and in much trembling, conscious, personal, internal,
dispositional experience. And, and, my preaching was not
in wisdom of words, conscious experience in utterance, but
in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, conscious religious
experience. And when Peter describes their
preaching in 1 Peter 1.12, These who preach the gospel unto you
with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven. So I say, the necessity
of the immediate agency and operation of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher
in the act of preaching is not only seen with reference to our
blessed Lord and to the apostles, but thirdly, Such an immediate
agency and operation of the Spirit is an indispensable component
of any God-appointed ministry of the new covenant. And here
I commend to you a careful evaluation and study of 2 Corinthians 2.14-4.18. This rich distillation of the
apostles' teaching on the nature of the New Covenant ministry
that has greater glory than the Old Covenant ministry. And in
the heart of that section, chapter 3, verses 1 to 8, there is this
dominant emphasis upon the ministry of the Spirit so much so that
the term ministry of the Spirit is synonymous with New Covenant
ministry. We are not sufficient of ourselves.
to think anything is from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God,
who has made us able ministers of the new covenant, not of the
letter, but of the Spirit. He has made us ministers of the
new covenant, ministers of the Spirit. So, my brethren, I lay
before you, very briefly, the threefold testimony concerning
what I've called the indispensable necessity for the immediate agency
and operation of the Holy Spirit upon us as preachers in the act
of preaching. And just as this immediate agency
and operation is described and promised in conjunction with
prayer in Romans 8, verses 26, verse 26, so in the act of preaching
There is available to us, in the virtue of Christ's own commitment
to His servants, an immediate agency and operation of the Holy
Spirit. We know not how to pray as we
ought. What's the answer? The Spirit helps us. Immediate,
personal agency and operation. The Spirit helps us in the situation. of our helplessness in prayer. At this point, I give you the
first of several quotes from Spurgeon's marvelous article
in lectures to my students, the one entitled, The Holy Spirit
in Conjunction with Our Ministries. And listen to what Spurgeon says
concerning the indispensability of the Spirit's agency and operations
in our preaching ministry. To us as ministers, the Holy
Spirit is absolutely essential. I probably got the words of my
heading from Spurgeon. Without Him, our office is a
mere name. We claim no priesthood over and
above that which belongs to every child of God, but we are the
successors of those who in olden times were moved of God to declare
His Word. to testify against transgression
and to lead his cause, unless we have the spirit of the prophets
resting upon us, the mantle which we wear is nothing but a rough
garment to deceive. We ought to be driven forth with
abhorrence from the society of honest men for daring to speak
in the name of the Lord if the Spirit of God rests not upon
us. We believe ourselves to be spokesmen
for Jesus Christ, appointed to continue His witness upon earth.
But upon Him and His testimony, the Spirit of God always rested.
And if He does not rest upon us, we are evidently not sent
forth into the world as He was. Remember John chapter 21? Chapter
20? breathed on them and said, Receive
the Spirit as the Father has sent me, the Anointed One, so
send I you. At Pentecost, the commencement
of the great work of converting the world was with flaming tongues
and a rushing mighty wind, symbols of the presence of the Spirit.
If, therefore, we think to succeed without the Spirit, we are not
after the Pentecostal order. If we have not the Spirit which
Jesus promised, we cannot fulfill the commission which Jesus gave. Now then, having considered this
matter of the indispensable nature, or the indispensable, what term
did I use? Let me look at my heading. I got away from lecturing and
started preaching. Yes, the absolute necessity.
And gave you the three lines of evidence. All right, now I
come to the second division of my subject. The first time I've
given this, folks, so bear with me as I try to work between lecture
and preaching. Here's my second heading. I want
to address some of the specific manifestations of the Spirit's
immediate agency and operations upon the preacher in the act
of preaching. Some of the specific manifestations,
I don't claim to be comprehensive nor exhaustive. If time permits,
I want to consider with you four of these, some of the specific
manifestations of the Spirit's immediate agency and operations
upon the preacher in the act of preaching. First, the Holy
Spirit gives us, in the act of preaching, a heightened and felt
sense of the spiritual realities in which we are trafficking as
we preach. First, the Holy Spirit gives
us, in the act of preaching, a heightened and felt sense of
the spiritual realities in which we are trafficking as we preach. Now let me describe the process.
You've been sitting at your desk in a prayerful frame. As you
believe you have been guided by a number of strands of influence,
both without and within, to settle upon the given text, you may
be preaching through a book of scripture, you may be preaching
a series on a given vital theme of scripture, and you're now
at that point where you're focusing in upon the exegesis, the organization,
the homiletics, the illustration, all that goes in to sermon preparation. You're sitting there in a prayerful
frame. pondering the truth as you seek
to come to a more accurate grasp of it and the ability to lay
it out before your people. And as you do, there is a felt
impress of the truth upon your own spirit. It may be a truth
that causes your spirit to groan. It may be a truth that causes
you to back off from your desk and raise your hands and bellow
out a hallelujah. There may be a truth that causes
you to shed a tear. There is a felt experience of
that truth in the process of preparation. Preparation time
is done. The moment of truth has come.
And I know we'd all like to have an eight-day week. We always
feel, by one more Saturday, how much better I'd preach. If you
haven't felt that, then come and tell me your secret. But
now you stand before the people of God in a prayerful frame. And you begin now to share with
them the fruit of what went on in the study. And as you begin
to preach, your mind begins to experience the friction of the
truth upon your own spirit. And in living interaction with
the people of God, and the promised special presence of God, and
that electric current that is established between you and your
people, the truth that was flooded in the study with a hundred watts
of divine influence and light, not another truth, certainly
not an error, but that very truth is now flooded with a thousand
watts of light. And though you saw it in the
study, you see it now in preaching. It stands out in such bold three-dimensional
relief before your mind in the act of preaching. That truth
that exerted its emotional energy upon you with a heaviness, with
a joy, with a grief, there was a thousand BTUs of spiritual
heat in the soul, in the study. Now as you live with that truth
and preach it, you feel ten thousand watts from that same truth in
the You've been meditating on the
glories of Christ in the study, feeling so incompetent to set
forth His glory with a thick tongue and a slow mind and a
wandering heart. But the Spirit of God, by His
immediate agency and operation, enables you to get a sight of
Christ as you preach of that glory that was hammered out in
the study. And as you behold His glory,
there's a sense in which you wouldn't care if everyone got
up and walked out, just soliloquizing about your Savior in an internal
rapture, in the act of preaching. You may have been reflecting
upon the horrors of hell. There was heaviness. And you
felt, how can I preach this horrific doctrine? And in the act of preaching,
it's as though you can smell the brimstone and your soul feels
the horrors of the pit that awaits the impenitent. It may be that
you're opening up some dimension of the provisions of grace, the
duties and privileges of the Christian life, whatever it is
the preacher experiences in the very act of preaching. What does he experience? A heightened
and felt sense of the spiritual realities in which he is now
trafficking as he preaches. The result of that is it will
give at times an unforced glow to the very countenance of the
preacher. You experienced that last night
in this building. No actor can produce it. Nothing
in the notes that says glow here can anticipate it. It will evoke an unplanned tear
in the eye, produced the unplanned pathos and pleading power in
the local courts. My friends, if you don't know
anything of what that is, I pity you. And I pity your people. This is why Whitefield said,
I would not for a thousand worlds preach an unfelt Christ That's
what he was talking about. That's what he was talking about.
Again, I quote my friend Spurgeon. I'm hiding under Spurgeon's skirt
on these matters. He writes, The Divine Spirit
will sometimes work on us so as to bear us completely out
of ourselves. From the beginning of the sermon
to the end, we might at such times say, whether in the body
or out of it, I cannot tell. Everything has been forgotten
but the one all-engrossing subject in hand." And now only Spurgeon. I wonder how God put the man
together so he'd even think these thoughts. He's meditating on
if God said, you can't come to heaven, but you can choose whatever
state you'd like to be in for eternity, what would you choose,
my son? Listen to Spurgeon. If I were forbidden to enter
heaven, but were permitted to select my state for all eternity,
I should choose to be as I sometimes feel in preaching the gospel.
Heaven is foreshadowed in such a state, the mind shut out from
all disturbing influences, adoring the majestic and consciously
present God. Every faculty aroused and joyously
excited to its utmost capacity. the truth that was flooded in
the study with a hundred watts of divine influence and light,
not another truth, certainly not an error, but that very truth
is now flooded with a thousand watts of light. And though you
saw it in the study, you see it now in preaching. It stands
out in such bold three-dimensional relief before your mind in the
act of preaching. That truth that exerted its emotional
energy upon you with a heaviness, with a joy, with a grief, there
was a thousand BTUs of spiritual heat in the soul in the study. Now as you live with that truth
and preach it, you feel ten thousand watts from that same truth in
the preacher. You've been meditating on the
glories of Christ in the study, feeling so incompetent to set
forth His glory with a thick tongue and a slow mind and a
wandering heart. But the Spirit of God, by His
immediate agency and operation, enables you to get a sight of
Christ as you preach of that glory that was hammered out in
the study. And as you behold His glory,
there's a sense in which you wouldn't care if everyone got
up and walked out, just soliloquizing about your Savior in an internal
rapture, in the act of preaching. You may have been reflecting
upon the horrors of hell, and there was heaviness And you felt,
how can I preach this horrific doctrine? And in the act of preaching,
it's as though you can smell the brimstone and your soul feels
the horrors of the pit that awaits the impenitent. It may be that
you're opening up some dimension of the provisions of grace, the
duties and privileges of the Christian life, whatever it is
the preacher experiences in the very act of preaching. What does he experience? A heightened
and felt sense of the spiritual realities in which he is now
trafficking as he preaches. The result of that is it will
give at times an unforced glow to the very countenance of the
preacher. You experienced that last night
in this building. No actor can produce it. Nothing
in the notes that says glow here can anticipate it. It will evoke an unplanned tear
in the eye, produce the unplanned pathos and pleading power in
the vocal cords. My friends, if you don't know
anything of what that is, I pity you. And I pity your people. This is why Whitefield said,
I would not for a thousand worlds preach an unfelt Christ That's
what he was talking about. That's what he was talking about.
Again, I quote my friend Spurgeon. I'm hiding under Spurgeon's skirt
on these matters. He writes, The Divine Spirit
will sometimes work on us so as to bear us completely out
of ourselves. From the beginning of the sermon
to the end, we might at such times say, whether in the body
or out of it, I cannot tell. Everything has been forgotten
but the one all-engrossing subject in hand." And now only Spurgeon. I wonder how God put the man
together so he'd even think these thoughts. He's meditating on
if God said, you can't come to heaven, but you can choose whatever
state you'd like to be in for eternity, what would you choose,
my son? Listen to Spurgeon. If I were forbidden to enter
heaven, but were permitted to select my state for all eternity,
I should choose to be as I sometimes feel in preaching the gospel.
Heaven is foreshadowed in such a state, the mind shut out from
all disturbing influences, adoring the majestic and consciously
present God. Every faculty aroused and joyously
excited to its utmost capacity. And all the thoughts and powers
of the soul joyously occupied in contemplations of the glory
of the Lord, and extolling to listening crowds the beloved
of our soul, and all the while the purest conceivable love toward
one's fellow creatures, urging the heart to plead with them
in God's behalf. What state of mind can rival
this, alas? We have at times known this ideal,
but we cannot always maintain it, for we know also what it
is to preach and change or beat the air. We may not attribute
holy and happy changes, may we not attribute these happy and
holy changes at our ministry to anything less than the action
of the Holy Spirit upon our souls. I'm in good company when I talk
about the operations and agency of the
Holy Spirit upon the preacher in the act of preaching. But
not only is this immediate agency and operation of the Spirit such
as to give us a heightened and felt sense of the spiritual realities
in which we're trafficking as we preach, but secondly, the
Holy Spirit gives us in the act of preaching the blessed experience
of an unfettered liberty and heightened facility of utterance. He gives us in the act of preaching
the blessed experience of an unfettered liberty and heightened
facility of utterance. I said earlier that the paradigm
for preaching In the New Covenant is Acts 2.4, filled with the
Spirit, speaking as the Spirit gives utterance. And I'm so thankful
we have chapter 4, where tongues are no longer in the picture.
But notice how the paradigm obtains. The servants of God gather to
pray. And who it was to whom they went, whether it was the
company of the apostles or the larger church, is unclear from
the text. But they gather, they pray, And
as they're praying, you remember the Spirit of God comes upon
them afresh, and we read in verse 31 of Acts 4, When they had prayed,
the place was shaken wherein they were gathered, and they
were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word
of God with boldness. And that word, noun, sometimes
adverb, and its verbal form, paresiazomai, is the dominant
word to describe the quality of their preaching throughout
the book of Acts. Take your concordances and follow
it out, trace it out, and again and again, this matter of preaching
boldly. preaching with boldness, culminating
in the apostle's request of the Ephesians that this great experienced
apostle would be given boldness of utterance, that it would be
given to him. He knew he didn't carry it in
his pocket. And he's asking these Ephesians Christians, pray for
me. I know the mystery. I'm not asking
you that God will unfold the mystery to me. I know the mystery. But I want to speak it as I ought
to speak. And what I need is a constant,
ongoing gift of utterance. In one sense, it has nothing
to do with native loquaciousness. It has nothing to do with past
enablements. It has to do with an immediate
agency and operation of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher that
he might experience unfettered liberty and a heightened facility
of utterance. When the mind of the preacher
is seeing with that clearer light of the Spirit's assistance in
the act of preaching, And as we'll come to the third manifestation
of his work, the heart is expanded with greater measures of what
the old writers would call disinterested benevolence, genuine selfless
love for people. What greater frustration could
there be than to see with heightened clarity and to feel with intense
yearning and to have it all damned up in the vocal cords and the
tongue? I know that frustration. When
the tongue feels sick thick as dry leather, and the mind convoluted
in terms of getting out what God has given in the study, in
the labor of the secret place, but now flooded with fresh light
and exerting fresh and immediate heat, what does the Spirit do? He delights
to come and give us in the act of preaching. the blessed experience
of unfettered liberty and a heightened facility of utterance. So that
times without number, if we could, we'd say to the congregation,
please just hold it for a minute. I want to write down what I just
said. You couldn't say it that way
in the study. You did your best in the study.
It's in your notes. But in the act of preaching,
there was an heightened dimension that affects even the ability
to draw words out of the storeroom of vocabulary. You may not have
used them for donkey's years. And suddenly, they flash into
the consciousness. And when you're sanctified, you
say, yes, Lord, that's it. That's it. That's what I was
fishing for in the study. It didn't come. Thank you, Lord.
There are times you want to tell the congregation, pause. You
want to get on your face and worship. and say, Oh God, thank
you. Thank you. And you're humbled. You don't swell with pride. You
know that didn't come from you. You'd be as stupid to think you
created yourself to think you did that. You know that that
is the result of an immediate agency and operation of God,
the Holy Spirit, His person. operating upon your person in
conjunction with his glorious truth. Marvelous, wonderful,
blessed experience. I remember when we had the academy.
And again, I don't want to romanticize this thing and touch up facts. So easy to do that. But something
like this happened more than once. One of the young men would
go off to preach on the weekend. And I would try, if he was a
novice at preaching, to get to him sometime shortly thereafter
and say, brother, how'd things go? Then I'd listen. And more
than once they would describe, well, pastor, I prepared such
and such a sermon. And you know, I was about a third
of the way into the sermon and something strange happened. And
they begin to try to describe the spirit of God came in a special,
immediate, agency and operation in this area of utterance. And
I'd play dumb like they were some kind of fanatic. What are
you talking about? Come on, tell me some more. And
here they are struggling to describe the indescribable. And when they'd
done it enough that it was clear they knew there was such a reality
and they had known it, then I'd smile and say, my brother, you've
tasted it and you'll never be satisfied again. Some call it unction. Some call
it liberty. Call it what you will. You've
known it at the level of your experience. You can never treat
it as something that is in the realm of fanaticism. And you
can't be satisfied without it. Again, I hide under the skirt
of my patron saint, Mr. Spurgeon. Brethren! We require the Holy Spirit also
to incite us, immediate agency and operation, to incite us in
our utterance. I doubt not you are all conscious
of different states of mind in preaching. Some of those states
arise from your body being in different conditions. A bad cold
will not only spoil the clearness of the voice, but freeze the
flow of the thoughts. For my own part, if I cannot
speak clearly, I'm unable to think clearly, and the matter
becomes hoarse as well as the voice, the stomach also, and
all the other organs of the body affect the mind. But it's not
to these things that I allude. Are you not conscious of changes
altogether independent of the body? When you're in robust health,
do you not find yourself one day as heavy as Pharaoh's chariots
with the wheels taken off? and in another time as much at
liberty as a hind let loose. Today your branch glitters with
the dew. Yesterday it was parched with
drought. Who knows not that the Spirit
of God is in all of this? I'm going to call him a raving
fanatic. When you've got 5,000 people
coming an hour early or twice every Lord's Day for 30 years
to hear you, then you've earned a right to judge my blessed brother. Until then, perhaps some of you
need to get on your face before God and say, Oh God, is this
the cause of my barren ministry? It's a barren preacher trafficking
in divine truth. without the immediate agency
and operation of the Holy Spirit. But then thirdly, not only does
this immediate agency and operation give us a heightened and felt
sense of the realities in which we traffic, a blessed experience
of utterance and heightened facility of speech, but thirdly, the Holy
Spirit gives us in the act of preaching an enlarged heart presently
suffused with increased measures of selfless love that yearns
to do our hearers good by means of our preaching. The Holy Spirit
gives us in the act of preaching an enlarged heart presently suffused
with an increased measure of selfless love that yearns to
do good to our hearers by means of our preaching. I remind you
of 1 Corinthians 13.1, If I speak with the tongues of men and of
angels and have not love, it profits me nothing. While at
our desks The dominant disposition of the heart is often, and rightly
so, being able to labor in the study of II Timothy 2.15 before
us, an imperative of spudazzo. I love that word because it sounds
what it is. Do your utmost. Marshal all of
your faculties to show yourself approved unto God. A workman
who has no just cause of shame before his master, and what will
help him to do that? Cutting a straight course in
the word of truth. The eye of your master upon you
in the handling of his truth is often, and rightly so, the
dominant pressure upon the soul in the study. And when we have
so labored as to believe we could present to our master what we
are saying in his name, Then the disposition that dominates
to a greater degree, though you can't put them in categories,
is how will this do good to my people? And you bring your congregation
into the study and you see their faces and think of their states
and conditions, and especially in the area of application and
illustration, you say, Lord, how can I make it more plain
to the kids? And how can I make it more stickable to the man
behind his workbench? And Lord, how can I see arrows
fashioned out of this truth to pierce the heart of the careless
and the wandering? There are measures of divine
love for your people, the love that is willing to enter into
the sacrificial labor of thoughtful application and illustration. So the measures of love are there
in the study, however. When you stand to preach and
you look into those faces, and they're no longer an image imported
by an activity of the mind into the study, but sitting in front
of you in the place of meeting. And you look at their faces and
you, as it were, relive those glimpses of them that you had
in the study. And the spirit of God, whose
fruit is love, expands the heart, fills it with love. That love
at this point yearns to do them good by means of that preaching. And it is that yearningness of
love that enables us to say with Paul, O Corinthians, our heart
is open, our mouth is open. The conjunction of an open heart
and an open mouth is forged by enlarged love. And it is that
enlarged heart suffused with fresh measures of love, hear
me now brethren, that is the mother of genuine earnestness
and unfeigned passion. It is the heart suffused with
love that is the mother of genuine earnestness and unfeigned passion. The worst counsel to give to
a preacher is, you've got to put more earnestness into your
preaching. Hogwash! You must feel more deeply the
impulses of divine love that in turn will produce earnestness
and passion. One has defined earnestness as
follows, it is the energy of the soul intent upon a given
object. I like that. What is earnestness?
It's the energy of the soul intent on a given object. We've got
a young man sitting here who's becoming intent on a given object.
It's one of the young ladies in our church. And if he wasn't
in earnest, he'd have been scared away already. So she got a protective
pappy. But he's got an intention in
his soul and it's producing some earnestness. He's willing to
sit down and go eyeball to eyeball with Papa and not be spooked
away. Couldn't help but think of him
when I wrote this. Energy of the soul intended to give an
object. Oh brethren, what are we doing
in the pulpit? Earning a living. Trafficking
in ideas? Then dump it on them and go home.
But if we yearn to do them good, we want to see sinners saved.
We want to see saints brought to maturity in Christ. And we
have a yearningness, and we believe what we're trafficking in under
God's blessing can produce it. How can we help but be passionate
and earnest? Remember the words of Professor
Murray, quote, to me, preaching without passion is not preaching. Listen to the words of J.W. Alexander,
page 20 of his book. The same truths uttered from
the pulpit by different men or by the same man in different
states of feeling will produce very different effects. And this
is no Arminian talking. This is no manipulator. This
is a solid experimental Calvinist. The same truths uttered from
the pulpit by different men or by the same man in different
states of feeling will produce very different effects. Some
of these are far beyond what the bare conviction of the truth
as uttered would ordinarily produce. I get sick and tired of these
men with this notion of God's fruit, and if He's going to bless
it, He'll bless it. My friends, the reason God's ordained preaching
as His unique method for dismantling the kingdom of darkness and building
the kingdom of His Son has something more to do than bear truth. It's because in preaching, the
effect of that truth upon a redeemed man is embodied in the man conveying
it. Alexander recognizes this. The
whole mass of truth by a sudden passion of the speaker is made
red-hot and burns its way. Ask yourself your own consciousness.
When has God burned his truth into your heart so as to elicit
a righteous response? Was it by the take-it-or-leave-it
preacher? It was Bible. It's objective truth. No matter
how it comes, it's Scripture. Was it when that truth, as it
were, gathered to itself the energy of the soul of the preacher,
and it came throbbing with that energy to your ear, registered
here, and by the blessing of the Holy Ghost found its lodgment
down here? It's the Spirit's work to do
this. I personally believe that few men can live long if God
were to sustain that energy of that measure of selfless love
24 hours a day. It kills people like Brainerd
and McShane at an early age. But I do believe we ought to
expect it, pray for it, and bless God when he grants it in the
act of preaching. On my fourth head, I'll give
you a little P.S. when we come, God willing. I've already gone
ten minutes over. If I had an hourglass, I could
say I didn't read it too accurately, but I have a watch. So I must
be done. Let's pray. Father, we've talked about things
so sacred, so precious. that we fear lest we should in
any way defile them by our misstatement of them. So we can only ask you
to take the chaff and blow it away, and whatever has been the
wheat of your truth, may it be stored up in our hearts and worked
out in our lives and ministries. Hear us and continue with us
for Jesus' sake. Amen.