Proclaimer Blog
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers #2
Chapter 2. No Substitute
A key principle set out in this chapter is: ‘the ultimate justification for asserting the primacy of preaching is theological’. What he is particularly thinking of is that natural man’s deepest problem is his spiritual blindness, to which God’s salvation in Christ is the only answer. And only the preaching of the church is fitted to address this problem.
That is why ‘social-gospel preaching’ empties churches, whereas in fact proper gospel preaching stirs believers up to great acts of compassion and social justice.
Personal counselling ought to be seen as secondary to preaching, in which the preached message is followed up with individuals.
Reading a Christian book or watching some Christian teaching on television can never replace preaching. There are two reasons for this:
– in reading or watching, the individual is ‘too much in control’, since they can put the book down or switch the TV off whenever they like;
– ‘the very presence of a body of people is part of preaching’, and that exerts spiritual influences on the listeners – influences which are hard to describe, but nevertheless are very strong.
Reflections
His understanding of the relation between a church’s preaching and ministries of mercy is one which has been effectively re-articulated well for us in recent controversies, and is not an issue likely to go away.
The final section was for me the most stimulating. I don’t think that many of us have been trained much to understand preaching as essentially and particularly defined by the corporate setting in which it takes place. At this point he makes his argument from reason and experience, as well as from Scripture (he quotes 1 Thess. 1.6ff). I’m not sure if that passage makes the point as strongly as he thinks it does, but I do think that overall he is right: there is something essentially different about sitting in a body of people who together receive a preached message, that isn’t exactly replicated in other settings.