Most of us who preach understand the soul panic when you are not entirely sure what the Lord wants you to preach on a given occasion. There have been times when I have had one sermon in the front flyleaf of my Bible and another in the back, and I am praying during the entire service prelude for the Lord’s direction.
A fellow missionary tells a similar story that I found very encouraging. His church in a suburb of Edinburgh, Scotland, was holding its regular evening service. He had prepared an eight-page sermon that he was sure the Lord would use. During the song service, however, the Lord spoke to him (so clearly it almost seemed audible) that he was not to preach that sermon. Well, then, what was he supposed to preach? He had nothing else prepared.
Still totally unsure what to preach, he stood up to the pulpit and did something he had never done before and has never done since. He told the audience to open their Bibles. At the same time, he randomly opened his and announced his text from where it fell open. It fell open to Isaiah 53, and that became the text for his sermon that evening. No notes. No preparation. Just Isaiah 53. That night, a young man, contacted through a gospel tract, came to Christ.
The young man’s back story later came out. As the missionary read Isaiah 53 that evening in preparation for his unplanned sermon, three questions stood out to the young man. All three questions were answered during the course of the message. First, he came to see that the Bible was not an ordinary book; in fact, it foretold events that were uniquely fulfilled in Christ. Second, he understood more clearly why Jesus had to die. Third, having grown up on a farm, he knew well how sheep stray. Only now he saw himself as the sheep that had turned to its own way; he had tried to save himself when, ironically, Jesus had already paid it all! As the missionary gave the altar call that night, the young man knew he had a choice to make: would he call what he had learned interesting, or would he believe on the One who was bruised for his transgressions? He chose to believe, went forward, and received Christ as his Savior. The young man went on to train for the ministry and become a missionary himself. He serves today as a missionary with GFA.
I share this story not to encourage us to homiletical haphazardness or laziness in preparation, but to remind us that fruit comes in our ministries not primarily because of our prowess, personality, or diligence, but because of the inherent power in God’s words. I thought of this parable, found only in the Gospel of Mark:
And He [Jesus] said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground, and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he himself does not know how. For the earth yields crops by itself: first the blade, then the head, after that the full grain in the head. But when the grain ripens, immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come” (Mark 4:26–29, NKJV; emphasis mine).
In this parable, the harvest comes not because of the ability or diligence of the farmer, but because of the life inherent in the seed itself. The farmer has confidence in what happens when seed hits soil, so he scatters seed on the ground. Similarly, the seed of God’s Word works when it hits the good soil of a man’s heart. “Of His own will, He [God] brought us forth by the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures” (James 1:18). We, like Peter to Cornelius, speak words by which people will be saved (Acts 11:14).
At the end of the day, I hope this story motivates us to greater diligence, not less, and simultaneously greater dependence on the Lord and His Word for fruit. Scatter seed even when it seems most random or most pointless. You never know what God will do with the Word you scatter. So, “in the morning sow your seed, and in the evening do not withhold your hand; for you do not know which will prosper, either this or that, or whether both alike will be good” (Ecclesiastes 11:6).
Photo by Beyza Yalçın