Incarnational Preaching

Years ago, I was asked to co-teach a Sunday school class at my church with a physician who was on call a lot and he wanted his class covered. I was fine with it until he asked me to take the class through the Book of Job. I didn't like that.

To tackle the Book of Job and teach it was a daunting task, and I wasn't up to it at the time. For one thing, I didn't have a proper understanding of Job, and secondly, I couldn't relate to Job. At that point in my life, everything I touched turned to gold.

I had a beautiful wife and a very successful business. I had a good reputation within my community. I had my health.

I had wealth. I was living in a mini-mansion in the country with a second home in Florida, which I used for regular golfing trips. You could say I had it all.

I was like Job before his troubles, as in Job 29.6. It was a time when I washed my steps with butter. Now, looking back on what has transpired in my life since that time, if I were asked to teach the Book of Job now, it would be from a higher perspective. I am intimately familiar with the trials of Job, for I lost my wife to suicide.

I lost my business. I lost my wealth. I lost my homes, to where for a time me and my daughter, my 14-year-old daughter, were homeless.

And to top it off, I lost my reputation and eventually my health. I have walked the solitary pathway of deep suffering and want, and I have a better handle on what the man, Job, passed through. I believe I could teach the Book of Job a little better today than I handled it back then.

What I'm talking about, friends, is a principle my homiletical mentor, Dr. Stephen Ofer, taught me as I was trained in his school of expository preaching. Dr. Ofer drilled in me the principle of what he termed incarnational preaching, meaning preaching to where the text is real or incarnate in the life of the preacher, so as the Spirit of God can bring the reality of it to the hearers in an experiential and transformational way. I will give you two real examples of this, friends, as to how I personally witnessed this and came to have a deeper understanding of it.

First, in my own life, I attended an expository preaching institute in Memphis, Tennessee, where at the time I was a successful Christian businessman, and during the week of sitting under Stephen Ofer's preaching, something happened deep inside of me. I saw, for the first time, my life being wasted in a vain pursuit of money and pleasure. That week under Dr. Ofer's preaching, my life was flipped upside down and inside out, and my entire life was rerouted by God into a life lived on the full stretch for Him, to where I ended up with a prodigious pen ministry of over 30 published books and a global preaching ministry that I still can't explain to this day other than God did it.

So that's the transformation in my own life from an anointed preacher preaching to me. Secondly, I learned it one-on-one in a teaching moment with Dr. Ofer. We had become colleagues, and we were writing a book together on his homiletical mentor, Dr. W. Graham Scroggie.

The book was published for preachers under the title Ofer on Scroggie, and as I sat in Stephen Ofer's study waiting for him, he came in looking haggard, and he plopped himself down in his chair with the following apology. Pardon me, brother. Pardon me.

I must have a moment to regather myself. I must regather myself as I have just finished preaching, and virtue has left me. As soon as Dr. Ofer said that, my mind raced to the passage of Scripture in the Gospel of Luke, where the woman with the issue of blood touched the border of his garment, and immediately she was healed.

And Jesus remarked in verse 46, and Jesus said, Somebody hath touched me, for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me. Well, that word virtue in the Greek is the Greek word dunamis, where we get our English word dynamite from, and it means power, especially inherent power. That's what Dr. Ofer meant, and that is the principle he was teaching me, his student, that if I wanted to be a preacher used by God, I needed power in the pulpit, a power beyond me, an anointing of the Holy Spirit, of whom alone can bring change.

I know this is a very foreign concept to our modern pulpit today, where the pastor relies more on personality and education and funny stories to get his message across, but that is the very reason why so little transformation is taking place, because the modern church lacks power from on high by ignoring the Holy Spirit altogether. But if you won't believe me, friends, or if you won't believe Stephen Ofer, perhaps you'll believe two other preachers who grasp this concept clearly. The first was the Apostle Paul, who wrote in 1 Corinthians, and my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.

And there we have that little Greek word again, dunamis, speaking of this inherent power, the kind of power that brings transformation. But the other preacher making the same argument might get your attention, friends, none other than Martin Lloyd Jones, who wrote, and I quote, The outstanding temptation, the besetting sin of every preacher, myself included, is that after you have prepared your sermons, you feel that all is well. You have your notes, and you can speak, and you can deliver your message.

But that is not preaching. That can be utterly useless. Oh, it may be entertaining.

There may be a certain amount of intellectual stimulus, but that is not preaching. Preaching is in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. And a man has to realize after he has prepared his sermons, that however perfectly he may have done so, that it is all waste and useless unless the power of the Spirit comes upon it and upon him.

He must pray for that. Well, I'll stop there, friends, and I'll say this. Brother preacher, can you honestly say that when you preach, that virtue has left you? Or is what you've been presenting to your people nothing but waste and useless? Or do you long for reality and power?