I was listening to a well known pastor on the radio recently. He was lamenting the fact that he had all this information he couldn’t share.
He spends hours a week reading and studying, but only gets 1 hour a week to present his sermon.
There’s so much he wants to tell people, so much he’s learning that no one will ever know.
If I remember correctly, this was distressing for him.
That just caused me to question if that’s a healthy outlook on the Christian faith?
We Are Swimming in Sermons
My church does an annual cleaning day. The members get together and clean.
And on one of these days, I was throwing out cassette tapes of sermons recorded in the early 2000s.
Literally months/years of prep work, years of sermons, just being thrown away.
Sermons and learning about God definitely have their place. But for the first time in human history, we have access to almost infinite knowledge. Almost every church records their sermons and posts it online for free. Name a pastor or influential speaker and you could probably get tons of their content instantaneously.
Yet our culture seems to be becoming more hostile to Christianity. Less receptive to hearing God’s word being taught. Why is that? Why aren’t our swimming pools of sermons changing people’s lives?
Because it’s easy to prep a sermon (or write a blog post, lol), it’s harder to lead people to God.
How Did Jesus Do It?
When we think about Jesus’s ministry, it’s easy to think he left his disciples unprepared.
Here’s Jesus, the son of God. He knows so much about our faith and the Bible. But he only spent 3 short years with his disciples and then he left.
Of all that he said and did, we only have 4 short books worth of stories and experiences (that were written by his disciples much later).
He didn’t leave them a book, or set of instructions for what to do, or notes about what each verse in the Old Testament means.
They were left with the shared experience of being with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Those 12 men continued the movement that transformed the Roman world.
What That Means for Us?
I think it’s easy to give lip service to Kingdom values while just promoting worldly values.
We read scripture, pray about it, and just go do the opposite. I’m not immune to this. I do it everyday. I do it to the people who are closest to me. The ones I love the most.
I think we need to acknowledge that reality, be humble about it, let that temper our accusations and judgements.
Information is not going to save us. Judging the “evil” people of our society won’t save us. Having people to blame won’t save us.
Jesus will save us. Leading people to Jesus will save them. As our society falls further from God, lets not double down on the things that don’t work. The things that years of practice has been shown to be ineffective.
Lets re-evaluate what we spend our time on, what we think of ministry and lead people to Christ.
That’s an infinitely harder challenge than writing a blog post every week. But it’s really the only thing that works.