The Preacher's Hammer

We are in the Preaching Institutes of Evangelism Awakening, and in this series of three lectures, we will look at the Word of God as a hammer, a fire, and a sword. In Jeremiah 23-39, God describes His Word by two symbols, fire and a hammer. We read, It's not my word, like as a fire, saith the Lord, and like a hammer, that breaketh the rock in pieces.

We will study today how God's preached Word should be like a hammer. Let me first ask you a question. What does a hammer do? It pounds away on a thing to either build up a thing or to break it down.

When Noah built the ark, you could hear the sound of his hammer in the woods as he pounded and pounded on that gopher wood as he built the ark to God's specifications. And there should be specifications to how we preach the gospel. The gospel of the Son of God should be preached in its purity and proper order.

We must preach it in its purity and not dilute it to make it more palatable to sinful man. The whole counsel of God in the great doctrines of the gospel should be proclaimed. We should preach ruin, redemption, regeneration, and repentance.

But as there is a purity to the content of the gospel by making sure it is never debased, so too there is a proper order to the gospel to bring sinners to Christ for forgiveness of sin. Men lie under the dominion and government of sin. Their corruptions must be exposed under the light of the gospel.

They have no love to God, yet they are afraid of hell. Yet there is not a spark of grace in them. Their false perceptions of God and His requirements for heaven must be hammered away.

I'll never forget sitting in my very first institute of preaching at the Stephen Olford Center in Memphis, Tennessee. And up on the platform preaching was a white-haired man by the name of Stephen Olford. I sat there spellbound as I listened to his powerful preaching as he kept hammering away on each of us there that week.

Well, it was customary to have a class photo taken in front of the institute with Dr. Olford. And as we students were walking down a hallway to go outside to have the photo, a fellow pastor said to me, first he beats you up with a baseball bat and now he wants to take our picture. I wasn't the only one there that day who'd been hammered on.

The hardened hearts of sinners must first be plowed in a work of preparation. The preacher and his hammer must be the right instrument to use the Word of God like a hammer that pounds away on the conscience of man, that pounds away on all false foundations of carnal security to make way for the Spirit of God to work to reveal Christ to the sinner. Modern evangelism has watered down the gospel message and crusade evangelism has broadened the way of salvation in ways Jesus never did.

And the result of all these man-centered methodologies has been an influx into our churches of individuals who are baptized but who are yet unconverted, multitudes today mistake church membership for salvation, thousands who comprise the majority of our congregations are yet unsaved individuals because all they have is an empty religious profession. I place the blame on the fleshly tactics used by modern evangelism to make converts. I remember having a conversation with the evangelist Jim Wilson and he related to me the following story about his uncle Billy Graham.

He was with Dr. Graham up at his home in North Carolina and they were out back sitting on the porch and Jim Wilson asked the aged Billy Graham a question. He said, Uncle Billy, if you had to do it all over again, what would you do different? And Billy Graham got a faraway look in his eye and after a thoughtful pause he answered, I would have preached repentance more. You go back friends and listen to a young Billy Graham when he first started out and you will hear him press man's duty of repentance.

But as he got older and as he got more famous, he stopped preaching it altogether. Now, as an old man, his main regret was not preaching repentance. The gospel must be preached in its purity and proper order to get sinners savingly to Christ Jesus.

And the work of preparation upon the sinner's heart is a foreign subject to us today, but the Puritans understood this to be one of the most important aspects of the gospel presentation. Go study men like John Shepard and Solomon Stoddard and you will soon realize, friend, the importance of a preparatory work upon a sinner's heart, the fallow ground must be plowed up. In Hosea 10-12 we read, So to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy, break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord, till He come and reign righteousness upon you.

The heart must be prepared to receive a revealed Christ. An unprepared heart cannot receive the word of truth. The ministry of John the Baptist was to prepare the people's hearts to receive Jesus Christ.

And in Matthew 13-8 we read, But other fell into good ground and brought forth fruit, some a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. We are told that in the parable that he went out and sowed seed, and the seed was good, that there was nothing wrong with the seed or the sowing of the seed. The trouble was he sowed it on four kinds of ground, and only one ground was prepared.

A person must come to know the rightness of his own heart, that he is born with a ruined nature and a bent toward sin, that man fits the description of him in Job like a glove. How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water. An unprepared heart will fight against truth.

God's word must come as a hammer that breaks up all preconceived false notions of God and of man. The main problem for a preacher is that our audiences are not nice people. They look nice enough all dressed up, but they are not nice.

We preach to people who are born in sin, conceived in iniquity. They are cesspools and hotbeds of rebellion against Almighty God. They hate everything that is high and holy.

They are not nice people because they are ruined people. And if we only preach to them nice little messages that don't disturb anybody, we are doing them a great disservice and a horrible injustice by helping send them to hell. The ground of the heart must be broken up.

Their consciences must be hammered upon by the great doctrines of the gospel. All false foundations of an empty religious profession must be broken down and done away with. All false foundations of self-righteousness must be broken up and hammered away, so a sinner can be pointed only to the righteousness of Christ.

The preached word as a hammer must pound and pound away until a preparatory work is done. Men must use it wisely and apply it to sinners' hearts and pound with all their strength to make the nail enter the hardened heart or to pound away on the stony heart until God's Spirit comes to turn it into a heart of flesh. Well, this ends this session today, friends.

We will now prepare for session two on the preacher's fire.