First off, I want to apologize profusely for the absurd length of time since my last blog update. Internet has been difficult to come by, but I’m hoping to get caught up with a few blogs from the last month before we set our eyes and words upon Kenya.
I think what I presented in my first blog here in Rwanda continued to capture arguably the most prominent way God has been working on my heart this month. However, like all good lessons, it has been a process, and has continued to evolve as a revelation. As my eyes have been renewed in an attempt to reproduce all that God has revealed to me, it has continued to be an amazing rich season in His Word. In this context of constant sermon preparations, I was reading through some of Spurgeon’s lectures and stumbled upon the convicting words of John Owen:
“No man preaches his sermon well to others if he doth not first preach it to his own heart.”
That certainly has been the danger. I pray that no words have escaped my mouth from a pulpit (or anywhere else) this month without having passed through the thickest sinews of my heart, but I know the readiness with which a revelation can be a mere product of head knowledge and not absolute personal conviction. It is much easier to recognize something as truth in word without the difficult, occasionally painful task of pressing it specifically into the application of your own life. I can raise up a rudder and tell a congregation how it ought to steer a ship and be entirely doctrinally and theologically sound, but I live the same hypocrisy as the Pharisees when I have not yet affixed that same rudder to my own ship and have the further testimony of a well-directed life to bolster my words.
“God forbid that we should offer to the Lord that which costs us nothing.” – Spurgeon
-Psalm 51:17
Like in all of our worship, God does not desire this insulting lip-service, particularly from His appointed teachers of the Word. When unchecked, the consequences will be the same as with the Pharisees of old, scorning the Son of Man and preferring eloquent words and human wisdom to the Spirit’s power and the perfect wisdom of He who created mouths and minds. Our enemy desires to keep wisdom as words alone, but our kingdom comes with power. The Words of God are empowered to convict hearts and change lives, and I certainly don’t want to deprive myself or any of my hearers of that power. God has revealed His truth to me, He has shown His light upon my dark soul, that I may embrace His light and subsequently reflect it back out to a darker world beyond. Whereas before I saw the danger in basking alone in the light, I have continued to see that it is possible to be a mere reflector of the light. We let God’s truth bounce immediately off us to others, without absorbing any of it’s rays upon ourselves. Let us strive towards being a people consumed by our God, that our lives along with our words glow with the glory of God.
“For the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power”
