Preaching in Perilous Times
By Vance Havner

Delivered Wednesday, February 4th, 1953 during the 47th Founder's Week Conference at Moody Bible Institute

I want you to think with me about three brief admonitions of Paul to Timothy.
1. "Take heed.. . unto the doctrine" (I Tim. 4:16).
2. "Stir up the gift of God" (II Tim. 1:6).
3. "Endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ" (II Tim. 2:3).

These verses furnish a pattern for preaching in perilous times. Let me say at the outset, preaching is the supreme item on God's program. Churches today often require so much of their ministers - so many things God never requires - that he has no time to preach the preaching that God bids him.

It was an English preacher who said that the difference between English and American preachers is that in England a preacher is a preacher, and in America he's head of a department store.

The first business of a preacher is to preach. He has other functions, but he is first of all a preacher. I have heard a great deal about "let the church be the church, " but I believe it is high time the churches learned to let the preacher be a preacher. He was never meant to be a mere bellboy and button pusher.

Paul says, "For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake."
Look at the triangular arrangement of the last half of that verse --
"ourselves ...your servants ...for Jesus' sake. "
The preacher is not just the servant of the church -- period. He is not a church flunky; he's the servant of the people only insofar and inasmuch as it is for Jesus' sake -- that qualifies it.

Preaching is God's appointed means of getting out the gospel, and I believe that when it's done right, you don't have to prop it up with anything else. God didn't say, "How shall they hear without a brass band ?" He said, "How shall they hear without a preacher?" Paul said that when he was called, "immediately he conferred not with flesh and blood." Now we do it the other way around. About the first thing we do is to confer with flesh and blood to get man's approval and approbation.

Alexander Whyte said that Paul went through Arabia with Moses and the Psalms and the Prophets in his knapsack, and came back with Romans and Ephesians and Colossians in his heart. That was a good trip, and many a minister needs to make some excursion. The devil hates a man who gets his orders from heavenly headquarters. Blessed is the man who can make his way through this tricky age today, saying with old Micaiah, "What the Lord saith unto me, that will I speak." But to be that, and to do that, he will need the mind of a scholar, and the heart of a child, and the hide of a rhinoceros.

1. Doctrine

Paul makes a threefold appeal to Timothy, and through him to all preachers and concerning all preaching. First of all he would have him give attention to doctrine, take heed unto doctrine, and to exhort with all long-suffering in doctrine. Furthermore, he tells him the time will come when people cannot endure sound doctrine -- and I might add that we have arrived.

Doctrine is frowned upon in many quarters today, and it is considered the unpardonable sin in some places to be dogmatic. But when I get sick, I want a dogmatic doctor. I don't want a doctor who says, "Now it could be this, and it could be that. We'll try these pills and if they don't kill him, we'll try something else." I want a dogmatic doctor, and when those pills arrive I want them to come from a dogmatic pharmacist. Of all days, I don't want that to be the day when he says, "I am tired of these old formulas--I'm going to try something brand new, " and he puts in five times more strychnine than it calls for.

I don't want to be around when some undogmatic chemist decides that he is weary of all the old arrangements. He says, "Now just once--I know these two things are not supposed to go together, but just once we will try it." And in they go...and up he goes...and you pick him up in a basket around over the premises.

I don't want to get on a train when the engineer decides to be undogmatic. Tired of the old timetable, so today--O boy--we are going down the line! We are not going to regard any signs--we are going right straight through.

Beloved, too many preachers all over this land have thrown away their heavenly instructions, and are going by guess work instead of God's Word, and the wrecks are strewn all along the line.

We have been entrusted with a sacred deposit--we have a treasure in earthen vessels. We are to fight a good fight of faith, and we are to contend for the faith. I am glad that Paul was not only faithful to the faith--"I have kept the faith"; I am glad that he was faithful to the fight--"I have fought a good fight. " Some folks are faithful to the faith, but they are unfaithful to the fight. And then Paul was not only faithful to the fight, but thank God he was faithful to the finish, because he said, "I have finished my course." The best time to check a man's batting average is the end of the season, and Paul kept up a good average right on through.

It is easy today to grow rather weary of the battle and sink into a twilight zone, and into conditions of low visibility, where black and white become a blend of indefinite gray. My Bible says that we are to walk in white, and it is a sad day when any preacher begins to wear the gray garb of compromise.

What am I to preach ?
"Preach the word"!
When am I to preach it ?
"In season, out of season."
How am I to preach it ?
"Reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long-suffering and doctrine. "
Why am I to preach it ?
Because the time will come when they can't take it, and that time has come!

I wrote an article the other day for one of our papers on "The Art of Almost Saying Something." That's quite in vogue today. It is in the legislative halls, and the politicians have given us good examples of it. And around Christmas and Easter, you know how secular writers turn into preachers and get out some dissertations that are a thousand miles away from the meaning of either of those days. And it gets into the pulpit.

The preacher gets off to a good start, and you think, "Now he is going to hit the nail on the head," but just before he gets to the point, he swerves and executes a neat detour. He almost says it -- but not quite!

Old Erasmus must have been pretty good at that. They said he could shade up a yes till it sounded like no, and burnish up no until it would pass for yes. Joseph Parker said, "No man makes progress who deals in generalities." Sir Robertson Nicoll, after recovering from an operation, visited several leading pulpits in the south of England, and he said later, "They were all good men, and earnest men, and they said good things, but not one of these sermons would have converted a [mouse]." And it might be said pretty generally maybe today.

Mr. Finney used to have a sermon on "How to Preach So As to Convert Nobody." He said, "One way to do it is to talk about sin in general, but never name the sins of anybody in your present congregation."

When Jesus was talking to the woman at Jacob's well, He talked about the best place to worship, and about the water of life, but she did not get under conviction until He particularized -- "Go call thy husband." That was what the trouble was. When she went home she said, "Come, see a man who told me about the water of life"? No! "...About where is the best place to worship"? No! "Come, see a man who told me all things that ever I did. Is not this the Christ?"

Some of that vague preaching sounds all right. It offends nobody, and it will take you a long way in this world, but this world is not the right world to get a long way in! At the end of that road you meet God, and God always says something. This old Book does not almost state the case--when it says it, it stays said!

In the conflict between liberalism and conservatism, or fundamentalism and modernism -- whatever you want to call it -- some of the old school may have made some mistakes, but it was better to blunder in defense of sound doctrine, than to sink into that supreme blunder of a lukewarm amiability, as though nothing matters enough to get excited about it, and it doesn't matter much what we believe as long as everybody is in a good humor.

I've told it all over the country, how that years ago down in Kentucky there was a rather illiterate old lady up in the mountains who had an expression -- "nor nothing." Instead of saying, "not anything," she always said, "Nor nothing." On a certain occasion she went to church where they had one of these modernistic preachers who preached a little lavender and rose-water sermonette, that started nowhere and ended in the same place. After it was over she came up and said, "I surely enjoyed your sermon. It didn't have no doctrine in it, nor nothing!"

And I tell you when a sermon has no doctrine in it, it has nothing in it.

Now that liberal theology has been discredited until even some liberals are ashamed of it and are trying to take refuge in neo-orthodoxy. The tendency is to drop the fight, and say, "Well, it doesn't matter so much after all." Then there are those who say, "Well, I used to take a firmer stand about such things, but I want to become more mellow as I grow older." That's all right, but the trouble is that some things get mellow just before they spoil! It does matter!

Just because we have a generation of itching ears instead of burning hearts is no reason we should trim our doctrine to suit general unbelief.

If Timothy was not ready doctrinally, he was not ready ... period! I know a lot of church members wouldn't know the difference if you took a text from the Koran on Sunday morning; but God expects us to know the difference, and God expects us to preach doctrine, good doctrine, sound doctrine -- no other doctrine.

2. Dynamics

The second admonition of Paul's had to do with dynamics -
"Stir up the gift of God that is within you."

I believe Timothy was a timid boy. Paul said, "God has not given us the spirit of fear." He wrote to the Corinthians, "Now if Timotheus come, see that he may be with you without fear." I think Timothy had the faith and the facts, but he was out of fire, he was missing in dynamics. He wasn't like John the Baptist, who was a burning and shining light. John the Baptist had heat and light both. Some of the saints have heat and don't shine, some shine but they don't generate any warmth. I don't know which has done more harm -- hotheaded ignorance, or cold-hearted intelligence.

Bishop Moore has said he'd rather try to cool off a fanatic than to warm up a corpse!

There is such a thing as having the facts without the fire.

Dr. Mullins used to say:
"It is strange and very significant that for nearly 2000 years Christians have so generally neglected the New Testament teaching as to the Holy Spirit; the creeds of Christendom have done scant justice to the doctrine, and some of the greatest of them have scarcely done more than barely mention His office work. The Philadelphia confession of faith, used by so many Baptists, and the New Hampshire confession, also quite generally used, are without separate articles on the Holy Spirit, although both make reference to His work in connection with other doctrine.
The Westminster confession of faith is also lacking in any adequate setting forth of the work of the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is so interwoven and intertwined with the whole of the Old and New Testaments that it is one of the strangest oversights that Christians have neglected it for so long."

We have efficiency, but efficiency without His sufficiency is only a deficiency! We are afraid today in some quarters even to talk about being filled with the Spirit, just because some extremists may have gone overboard on the subject. Whatever it is, brother, most folks don't have it! I'd rather a fellow have the wrong terminology and the right experience, than to have it the other way about, though we ought to have both to be sure!

Some time ago I was asked to come over to Southern Methodist University and talk to the preacher boys. I said to them, "Now, John Wesley had an Oxford education. He had a godly ancestry. He was a man of prayer. He was a separated man; he did his dead-level best to live a godly life. He was a missionary -- he even tried to convert the Indians to the Lord. But for all that, he was not ready to preach.
I don't know just exactly what happened to Wesley at Aldersgate, but I know one thing, he was not ready to preach until it happened! He was a tireless preacher, but he was a fireless preacher!

A little later there was another tireless preacher -- a human steam engine he was. He was called of God; never ordained, but always foreordained. He preached with plenty of fire... He had crowds, and results, and success. But two old ladies kept praying for him, that he might have still more. It must have irked him at first, but finally, like Apollos of another day (and it takes a lot of grace to do that, incidentally), he was ready to sit at the feet of two of his own congregation and learn the way of the Lord more perfectly.
D. L. Moody humbled himself under the mighty hand of God and was exalted in due time. He had the faith, he had the facts, but they needed to be set on fire.

When I say a dynamic preacher, I don't mean what we mean today by dynamic. I don't mean this snappy, go-getter, high-pressure, super-salesman type that looks like he had just finished reading How to Win Friends and Influence People.

We face a generation today that does not know good preaching when it hears it, and won't do anything about it when it does hear it. People today like it preached in rather shallow fashion without too many demands on the congregation -- like that filling station operator who said, "Oh, oh, yonder comes another of the "I.W.W." You know what he wants, a road map, air in the tires, water in the radiator -- Information, Wind and Water."

We have a lot of folks who don't want any more than that in the church -- just something very light, without any demand upon them. But if you are going to do New Testament preaching, it has to be done in supernatural power. God save us from modern Samsons who go out shaking themselves, and "wist not (don't even know) that the Spirit of the Lord has departed." A great many Sunday morning services are just old Samson going through his calisthenics -- so many uprisings and so many down-sittings, and they know not that the Spirit of the Lord has departed.

You rnay have the gift of God, but it may be like sugar in the bottom of the lemonade glass -- it needs stirring, or better still, to use the figure Paul had in mind here, a fire that needs rekindling.
Let me ask you, Has the fire of God died down in your soul, and is so covered with ashes that you are scarcely aware of its presence? You don't need to ask God to scrape off the ashes -- He won't do it. You will have to do it! And you will have to rekindle the fire! You will have to expose the coals and let the breath of the Spirit blow across until the fire is rekindled in your heart! That is what Paul is telling this young preacher.

Old Christmas Evans was on his way to a preaching appointment one Saturday afternoon. He said, "God convicted me of a cold heart. I tethered my horse, and went out into the woods, and for four hours I waited on God, and I could feel as it were in my heart the breaking up of a hard winter." Then he went on ... and on Sunday God was pleased to send a gracious visitation to that Welsh community. Are you guilty of a cold heart? I don't think anything is doing the cause of Christ more harm today than hot heads with cold hearts.

3. Discipline

Finally, Paul exhorts Timothy with regard to discipline.
"God gave us not a spirit of fearfulness; but of power and love and discipline" (A.S.V.).
"Endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ."
I believe that as weak as we are doctrinally, and as weak as we are in dynamic, we are weakest of all on this.

A New Testament Christian is a believer, a disciple and a witness. Our churches are full of believers; but if you tell those believers that God expects them to be disciples, and if you call on them to deny self, take up the cross, keep the body under and bring every thought captive, and keep themselves unspotted from the world, they'll resent that intrusion. They'll say the preacher is meddling and interfering.

After all, the great commission does not send us out into the world to make believers -- it sends us out to make disciples! Of course you have to be a believer in order to be a disciple, but notice it says disciple. God is not out today just to save sinners; He's out to make saints out of sinners.

Too many people today have taken a stand for God fifteen years ago and are still standing. They have taken a step, but they are not walking. Crisis must be followed by continuance. "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed. " It is a wonderful event when a child is born into a home, but it takes twenty years after that to make a man or a woman out of that child. Evangelism is great business, but it is only the beginning.

I think we preachers, without meaning to do so, are guilty of having created an artificial distinction in the minds of a great many people between taking Jesus as Saviour and confessing Christ as Lord. After all, that verse in Romans 10 says, "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord ..." Paul, when he met the Lord Jesus, said, "Who art thou, Lord?" "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?"

I don't believe you can get saved on the installment plan. I don't believe you can get saved with your fingers crossed and one hand behind your back saying to yourself,
"I'll take Jesus as my Saviour, and then I won't have to go to hell. I won't do anything now about confessing Him as Lord; sometimes maybe at a Bible conference, I'll go down the aisle and shake hands with the preacher and submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
If I never do ... I'll go to heaven anyhow, and the only thing I'll lose will be my reward." I don't believe you can get saved that way. I believe you must take Jesus Christ for all that you know Him to be at that time, and as the Word of God presents Him.

We are in such an everlasting hurry today to get prospects into a lot of our churches! Why, bless your hearts, Jesus lost some of the best prospects He ever had. He lost three in a row in the ninth chapter of Luke. And what about the rich young ruler? That boy had manners, because he came kneeling; he had morals; he had kept the commandments; and he had money, for he wouldn't turn it loose. If he started to join some churches today, they'd get him in, in a hurry and make him treasurer -- and not ask him any questions! But Jesus wasn't out for joiners, He was out for disciples!

Let me make this plain to you: salvation is free; not cheap -- it is free! A thing can be free and not be cheap. It cost plenty! It cost God His Son, and it cost the Son His life; but it is free to you -- the "Gift of God is eternal life." But discipleship will cost you everything you've got! I think we ought to be fair with folks today; they ought to understand what they are in for. The moment they get saved they are under new management.

You have but one option in this world. You can receive the Lord Jesus, or you can reject Him; but if you ever receive Him, you don't have any more option -- that's the end of it. You belong to Him. "Ye are not your own; for ye are bought with a price."

This idea that if I want to go to church on Sunday, it is my business;
if I want to stay at home, it is my business;
if I want to give a tithe to the Lord, it is up to me;
if I want to serve in this capacity or that, it is up to me.
You don't have any rights if you have become a Christian, you belong to Him! Why is it that we have to wear ourselves out going up and down the country telling church members what they ought to have known the day they got saved -- that Jesus is Lord of all!

The early Christians used to say, "Jesus is Lord." They died for that! They paid the price! But today we have a crowd of believers, many of whom show no evidence of being disciples, and of course if not disciples, they are not witnesses.

Discipling calls for disciplining. And if a preacher is going to preach discipline, he has to practice it on himself. He cannot "entangle himself with the affairs of this life..." if he is to "please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier." I believe that the seriousness of the hour and the shortness of the time and the shallowness of our hearts demand as never before that we walk circumspectly, "because the days are evil."

Some time ago I was in a Bible conference where there was a Christian athlete taking part on the program. After the service everybody went over to another building for refreshments. I saw the saints go in there and load up -- and, brother, I mean load up--on banana splits. But I watched this boy. He didn't have ulcers; there wasn't a thing in the world the matter with that boy, he could have eaten anything on the menu; but he was running for a crown, and so he partook very light. I sat there and said to myself, "If a fellow can do that for the crown that this world bestows, should we get offended when some man of God stands in the pulpit and calls on God's people to pay a greater price for an incorruptible crown that fadeth not away?"

No preacher has any business allowing anything in his life that has even a question mark after it

Jesus Christ deserves even the question mark. And some of you have argued for something you are doing for so long you think it is right - maybe. You have excused yourself for years, and you will not pay the price to win the crown; you will not discipline yourself so God may properly use you.

Well, there you have it -- doctrine, dynamic, discipline, and it is the only combination that is equal to the task before us. For both preacher and people, both in pulpit and in pew, we need doctrine that we may believe, we need dynamic that we may burn, and we need discipline that we may behave! This is God's combination. It is a high standard, but I believe we can reach it by the grace of God.

The tendency today is to look for a standard to suit us. I heard of [a military] engagement where the flag got way ahead of the soldiers. The officer called to his superior that the flag should come back to the regiment, but the superior thundered, "No -- make the regiment catch up!" Beloved, the flag has gotten away ahead of us -- the flag in doctrine, and the flag in dynamic, and the flag in discipline; and it is becoming quite fashionable in all three cases to bring the flag back to the regiment. I beg of you, if you belong to the regiment of the soldiers of the cross, whether as preacher or layman, instead of accommodating these high standards to your manner of living, ask God to enable you by the Holy Spirit to catch up with the flag!