Teaching, Testifying, Sharing, Preaching: Don'ts and Do's

Don’t be Clever.                   Do be Careful. 

Don’t be Controversial.       Do be Consecrated. 

Don’t be Conceited.             Do be Concentrated.

• The Gospel has to move men to do what they are dead-set against doing, namely, giving up the right to themselves.
• The central, difficult requirement of the Gospel is for individuals to stop claiming rights to their own lives, ambition, and self-direction.
• The core challenge of Christian discipleship is separating mere belief from actual transformation.

Don’t Be Clever. Never choose a text, let the text choose you. Cleverness is the ability to do things better than anyone else [speak impressively, know more than others]. Always hide your cleverness and your natural ability. The Holy Spirit is never clever. In a child of God the Holy Spirit works as naturally as breathing, and the most unostentatious [modest, unassuming] choices are His choices. Unless your personal life is hid with Christ in God (Col 3:3), natural ability causes pride and leads to God's chastisement. When a text has chosen you, the Holy Spirit will impress you with its inner meaning and cause you to labor to bring out the meaning for your audience.

Do Be Careful. Nothing that has been discovered by anyone else is of any use to you until you re-discover it. Be careful to use your own mental eyes, and the eyes of those who can help you to see what you are looking at. Drummond [Scottish evangelist] said that Ruskin [English polymath] taught him to see. Be careful to develop the power of perceiving what you look at, and never take an explanation from another mind unless you see it for yourself. 

Don’t Be Controversial. Never choose disputed texts; if you do, you are sure to cut yourself. The spirit that chooses disputed texts is the boldness born of impudence [audacity, rudeness], not the fearlessness born of morality. Remember, God calls us to proclaim the Gospel. A man may increase his intellectual vim [vigor, enthusiasm] by controversy, but only 1 in 1,000 can maintain his spiritual life. Never denounce a thing about which you know nothing. Controversy harms spiritual life and is rarely productive.

Do Be Consecrated. Never forget who you are, what you have been, and what you may be by the grace of God. When you try and re-state to yourself what you implicitly feel to be God’s truth, you give God a chance to pass that truth on to someone else through you. 

Don’t Be Conceited (Rom 12:16). Conceit means my own point of view [usually with proof-texting] and I don’t care what anyone else says. “Do not be wise in your own eyes” (Prov 3:7). Conceit makes the way God deals with me personally the binding standard for others. We are called to preach the Truth, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and we get decentralised from Him if we are overly confident about ourselves and our own dogmatic interpretation and understanding.

Do Be Concentrated. Strenuous mental effort to interpret the word of God will fag us out physically, whereas strenuous mental effort that lets the word of God talk to us will re-create us. We prefer the spiritual interpretation to the exegetical because it does not need any work. We are to be “workmen” for God, not just take God’s word to feed ourselves. The preacher has to concentrate on what God’s word says; he is dealing with a written revelation. The reason we have no “open vision” is that in some domain we have disobeyed God. Immediately we obey, the word is opened up. The atmosphere of the Christian is God Himself in ordinary times and exceptional times when He brings words to us. When He does not, never deceive yourself, something is wrong and needs curing, just as there would be something wrong if you could not get your breath. Supernatural manifestations of guidance are exceptional. The normal way of the Spirit of God is the way He worked in the life of Christ. Maintain your personal relationship with God at all costs. Never allow anything to come between your soul and God, and welcome anyone or anything that leads you to know Him better. Maintain a personal relationship with God above all else to guide your preaching and teaching.

• The Gospel challenges humanity's default desire for self-sovereignty, demanding instead the surrender of one's own rights and to surrender to will to God. This profound transformation calls for dying to selfishness and finding life by losing it in Christ.