Preaching in Faith: Four Stays for the Pulpit

Much preaching today is not faithless in doctrine but faithless in action. The sermon is orthodox, the exegesis is sound, the outline is clean, and yet the whole enterprise is carried out as if everything depended on your craft. You prepare as though faith were a mood to manufacture rather than a gift to receive, and you preach as though the congregation’s confidence should rest in your competence rather than in God’s Word. But Paul’s axiom still stands over every pulpit: faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ (Romans 10:17). Preaching in faith is not one homiletical option among others. It is the only kind of preaching that has any right to expect faith as its fruit.

What follows is less a method than a rule of life: four stays for the preacher who would preach in faith. Stay in the Word. Stay in the moment. Stay in the Spirit. Stay in the eternal.

Stay in the Word. Faith has an address, and it is the text. Before you are a man with a word for others, you must be a man mastered by the Word. Spurgeon insisted that the sermon must grow out of the text as naturally as a plant grows out of its soil. When you stay in the Word, your congregation learns where to place their trust, and faith grows, because faith feeds on the Word. Here is a small discipline with large consequences: make it your refrain, “Look back down at the text with me.” Every time your finger returns to the page, you teach your people where authority lives. Stay tied to the text, visibly and repeatedly, until they learn to do the same.

Stay in the moment. Preaching is an event before it is an artifact. Lloyd-Jones called it “logic on fire,” and fire is always in the present tense. Yesterday’s faith will not preach, and tomorrow’s faith cannot be borrowed. But there is a deeper direction still: while you are preaching, remind yourself that God is present with you, working in that very moment through the preaching of the Word. The sermon is not a lecture about what God once said, delivered in God’s absence. The man who remembers this preaches differently: unhurried without being casual, bold without being brash, because he knows the burden of the moment does not rest on his shoulders alone.

Stay in the Spirit. Text-driven preaching that is not Spirit-led preaching is machinery without breath. You may stay in the Word and stay in the moment and still preach in the power of the flesh, and the result, as Baxter warned, is that you may keep your hearers awake without ever waking them. Faith is the Spirit’s gift, and the sermon that aims at faith must be carried by the Spirit from study to pulpit to pew. So prepare thoroughly, and then hold your preparation loosely. Listen for the Spirit’s promptings, sometimes before the sermon, sometimes in the middle of it. Prepare as though everything depended on your diligence, and preach as though everything depended on God’s presence.

Stay in the eternal. Baxter’s charge has lost none of its edge: “Preach as a dying man to dying men.” He did not mean every sermon should be a funeral oration. He meant you should never forget what is at stake. The eternal perspective guards your preaching from triviality. Much contemporary preaching fails not because it is untrue but because it is small, addressing felt needs while leaving ultimate realities untouched. Faith reaches for the unseen, and preaching in faith must point there. It also steadies you against the demand for instant results. The farmer does not dig up the seed on Monday to check whether Sunday’s sowing took. He trusts the soil, the seed, and the Lord of the harvest. So preach, and trust the Word that does not return void (Isaiah 55:11).

Stay in the Word, stay in the moment, stay in the Spirit, stay in the eternal. These are not techniques to master but postures to maintain. The Word keeps the moment from becoming performance. The moment keeps the Word from becoming lecture. The Spirit keeps both from becoming human effort. And the eternal keeps all three from becoming small. Faith comes by hearing. Preach so that hearing may come, and having come, may believe.