Beeson Podcast, Epsidoe 448 Richard Bewes June 12, 2019 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Just a few days ago, we lost one of our great friends, Dr. Richard Bewes. He was a member of our advisory board, had preached at Beeson on numerous occasions. He went home to be with the Lord. Richard Bewes was an amazing preacher, Bible teacher, scholar, and a person who had such a good influence across the Lord's church all over the world. For many years he was the rector of All Souls, Langham Place in London, following the great John Stott. Timothy George: Well, we miss Richard in this world, but we're going to listen to his voice again today on the Beeson podcast. We're going to hear a re-podcast of a message Richard first preached at Beeson as a part of our William E. Conger Jr. lectures on biblical preaching back in 2001. The topic was the romance of preaching. We played this podcast in 2013 when Richard Bewes came back to speak on the occasion of our 25th school anniversary. Timothy George: Well, we miss him in this world. We send our condolences to his wonderful wife, Pam, to all of his friends around the world, and we honor his memory and his ministry by listening again to a great sermon by a great preacher, Dr. Richard Bewes, the romance of preaching. Timothy George: Hello. You're listening to the Beeson podcast today. My, what a great treat we have for you. We're going to listen to a lecture presented by the Reverend Dr. Richard Bewes as a part of one of our preaching lectureships here at Beeson Divinity School several years ago entitled The Romance of Preaching. Timothy George: Dr. Richard Bewes was born in Africa, the son of missionary parents. He comes from a great lineage of Godly ministers in the Church of England. His grandfather was actually converted in one of the great missionary evangelistic campaigns of D.L. Moody in Plymouth, England. His background and his work in ministry over the years has just been splendid in every way. For many years, he was the rector of All Souls, Langham Place in London, in succession to the Reverend John Stott. Timothy George: This sermon on preaching is really a lecture on preaching. It begins with a fantastic panorama of preaching in Christian history. Then he comes to focus on four biblical images, concrete images, about preaching drawn from the scriptures. These are the rod that Moses held in his hand, and the live coal that Isaiah received from the altar of the Lord, and the mantle of Elijah, and finally the scroll that Ezekiel saw. He said, "Thy words were found and I did eat them." Timothy George: Oh, what a masterful presentation. If you're a preacher or if you know a preacher, if you ever listen to a preacher, then you're going to really gain a lot from this marvelous talk, this lecture by Reverend Dr. Richard Bewes, the Romance of Preaching. Richard Bewes: It's such an honor to be with you as we take up this theme of the romance of preaching. There was a spot on Blackheath, in southeast London, only yards from where our family lived when my parents returned from missionary service in east Africa. [inaudible 00:04:08] just near a natural pond and now surrounded by protective fencing. I frequently passed it as a teenager on my way to the tennis courts. You can visit it to this day. Richard Bewes: On the day when George Whitefield was preaching there over 200 years ago, to some 30,000 people, a man and his wife saw the crowd and went up to listen. Whitefield was proclaiming the cross and the man said to his wife, "Come, Mary. We won't stop any longer. He's talking about something that took place 1800 years ago. What's that to us?" In spite of themselves, however, they stopped and were fascinated by the relevance of the Bible's message to themselves. They got home, took down their Bible, and marveled. Is it possible that this old truth had been here so long and we've not known it? Richard Bewes: To this day, visitors can see that part of the original heath where Whitefield stood and preached those many years ago. It's known as Whitefield's Stump. Similarly, tourists in England can make a pilgrimage to Haworth in Yorkshire, when a mighty revival broke out under the preaching of William Grimshaw in the 18th century. They'll still show you in Haworth Parish Church, the extra large pewter [inaudible 00:05:45], specially made for the vast services of holy communion for which there would be required between 20 and 30 bottles, 30 and 40 bottles. Richard Bewes: There still stands today the Black Bull Inn from which the fiery apostle of the north, as Grimshaw was called, would drive his parishioners into church, whip in hand. The top section of his famous three decker pulpit where he and such contemporaries as Wesley and Whitefield preached their sermons is still in use in Stanbury Parish Church just two miles down the road fro there. Richard Bewes: To this day then, you can visit Haworth in Yorkshire, Aldersgate Street in London, associated with the conversion of John Wesley, the collapsed tin mine Gwennap Pit in Cornwall, a favorite preaching venue of the Wesleys, Blackheath, or Holy Trinity Clapham, made famous by John Venn, William Wilberforce, and the reforming Clapham Sect as they were called. These names are enough to set the pulses racing in all for whom preaching has become the romance in our lives. Richard Bewes: The true preacher of the good news of God and Jesus Christ joins hands with Martyn Lloyd-Jones. There's nothing like it he said of the call to preach. It is the greatest work in the world. For preaching goes back to the very beginning of our human story. Why we even maintain that God in preaching the world into being set the model for all time. He speaks and a beautiful blue green ball with oceans and forests and mountains and light and color comes into being. That is powerful speaking indeed. Richard Bewes: In the nature of God himself, it is really that nothing that He speaks can be anything but powerful. You can't have a work of God that's feeble. If the words that He said before us is feeble, devoid of power to inspire and redemptively transform then we may be sure that it's not the word of God. Richard Bewes: The apostle Paul declared that he was not ashamed of the gospel, because it possessed universal saving power. There's no need to look for some outside ingredient to make it powerful. God's word is powerful of itself. The preacher then today is humbly aware of being part of a grand procession that has marched through the Bible and from there, across all of history, taking these words of God, given through patriarchs, prophets, kings, and apostles and announcing them to a dying world. Richard Bewes: Richard Baxter, that fearless puritan creature of the 17th century, imprisoned at one point for his beliefs, expressed the urgency of the great imperative that drives the true preacher. In his memorable words, I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men. Noah was one of the first of the great global visionaries of the Old Testament, remembered in the New Testament as a preacher of righteousness to a world that perished. Abraham followed close behind, welcoming from a distance the city that was to come. Nor can we forget Jonah, the reluctant preacher to a people in trouble who repented, or Isaiah who preached to people in darkness, or Solomon, the philosopher, the preacher, who is called to address a generation lost in meaninglessness. Richard Bewes: The indomitable gospel preacher from the New Testament onwards fanned out across the Mediterranean basin and into Europe itself. Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea in the third century, who has been described as the father of church history, attributed the remarkable growth of the early church to evangelism and preaching. He hailed and I quote, "Those who in each generation have proclaimed the divine word, either orally or in writing." Richard Bewes: It is by preaching and supremely by the preachers who have suffered that the church has grown. We students of preaching look back over the centuries and we marvel at the courage of the martyr Polycarp of Smyrna, at the challenging of [inaudible 00:11:03] by that champion of apostolic preaching, [inaudible 00:11:07], at the inspiring Bible expositions of the golden mouthed John Chrysostom of Constantinople. We salute the precursor of the reformation, John Whycliffe as a mighty protagonist for the word. We find a source of confidence in Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Newton. We draw strength from Jonathan Edwards, Torrey, and Moody, from the prolific Spurgeon, and from the tireless Billy Graham. Richard Bewes: Indeed, as we refer to the last names, we can perhaps draw parallel between Billy Graham in 1957 and the apostle Paul back in 50 AD. Visualize Paul, there in Athens before the areopagus, defying an entire continent and the towering pluralistic worldview that dominated all of it, far more daunting that new age or post-modernism can present today. When Paul then proclaims the resurrection of Christ, his listeners begin to laugh. Why they've only got to look behind Paul and there stands the mighty temple of the Parthenon that had been there already for 500 years. It's white marble looking as fresh and beautiful as though it had been carved only yesterday. They might not have laughed so readily had they known that by the year 435 AD the Parthenon itself would have become a Christian church and a Christian church it remained for 1000 years. It changed hands a number of times, and then in 1687 a Venetian shell aimed by a German cracked through the roof of the Parthenon and left it very much looking as it does today. Richard Bewes: But the Christian faith held the Parthenon longer than the Greeks, longer than any other belief system. And Paul stands there using as a visual aid an altar dedicated to an unknown god as he proclaims Christ among the numerous idols of pagan Athens. Richard Bewes: And then we look back to September 1, 1957 and to Billy Graham preaching to 120,000 people in New York's Times Square. All around him are the towering structures of the world's fastest and most challenging city. His text, Acts 17:23, to the unknown god, and his visual aids, not Greek altars in this instance, but four nearby American cinema holdings, all of them visible to his listeners. The evangelist's first point was taken from Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments that was then showing. The second point was made by a reference to a film called The Lonely Man. A third stabbing truth was illustrated by the title The Walking Dead, and to round up a sermon that lived forever in the minds of the listeners was Love In The Afternoon. Preaching Christ in the 20th century from Acts 17 and through movie titles, the apostle Paul would have approved. Richard Bewes: Preaching is always going to be primary and the reason is that it is God's appointed way of bringing people into obedience to His revealed word. It's a word of authority that calls for submission. Debate and discussion have a place of validity as do the daily discussions of Paul in the lecture hall of Tyrannus make clear in Acts 19. But the debate, like the lecture, must be differentiated from preaching. Preaching is essentially an authoritative word from above albeit spoken by a fallen human being. Richard Bewes: John Stott has outlined a variety of Biblical images that describe the preacher. The preacher is a herald or town crier he writes. The preacher is portrayed as a sower of good seed, the preacher is also an ambassador in a foreign environment. A further image is found in the steward in charge of the provisions for God's household. Preachers are also described as shepherds entrusted with the protection of the flock from the wools of false teaching, and lastly they are to be seen as approved workers, who cut a straight path for the [inaudible 00:16:15] through their diligent handling of God's word. Richard Bewes: It's at this point however that I propose we look not so much at the person, but the task itself. As we do so, we should be aware of certain contrasting elements that give to preaching at its best the intriguing fascination, yes, and a romance that has always clung to this highest of callings. By way of illustration, and indeed inspiration, we shall turn not to images of the preacher's person so much as to full, vivid symbols that highlight the preacher's authority and confidence, and all of them wonderfully found in the Old Testament. Richard Bewes: I think they're found there rather than in the New Testament simply because a great deal of the Old Testament consists of little other than preaching. In all those outpourings of the prophets what were they doing if not preaching? When you read the book of Deuteronomy, what is it if not a series of sustained sermons on the part of Moses? Preaching is certainly present there in the New Testament, but more in the form of edited highlights. While the apostolic letters are what they set out to be, inspired letters to churches and individuals. Richard Bewes: So, to my first contrast. As we look at the preacher's credentials, I describe it as the contrast between the human and the divine. We preachers aren't always aware enough of this remarkable combination that comprises the activity of preaching. We're not called to be on our feet in order that we may tell the listeners what is on our heart this day, but rather that we may disclose the heart and mind of God as revealed in His word. That is a daunting and awe-inspiring prospect. Richard Bewes: I referred already to Billy Graham. At the outset of his historic mission to the city of New York, he declared on May the 15th, 1957 in Madison Square Garden, "Night after night here in this garden I intend to be only a messenger, to give God's message to the people of New York. My messages each evening will be based on the Bible, which I believe to be the inspired word of God. I am not here to give you my thoughts, but God's thoughts." Richard Bewes: [inaudible 00:18:56] has written, "Preaching has a dual aspect, the word of God and human speech." He goes on, "It is the exercise of sovereign power on the part of God and obedience on the part of man. Yes, the human and the divine belong together in the activity of Christian preaching." It's this fact that should make the aspiring preacher shrink and even shake. God's thoughts as given in scripture are to be faithfully imparted on His behalf and in His name without embellishment, without addition or subtraction and delivered by an individual who was once on the broad road that leads to destruction. Richard Bewes: A sense of utter unworthiness and sin overwhelmed the young Isaiah when faced by the call of the enthroned Lord. "Woe to me," I cried, "I am ruined for I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty." Richard Bewes: But the messenger is then reassured by the divine symbol that changes everything. What is it? It's the live coal taken from the altar. Theologically, fire in the Bible usually features in the context of the wrath of the Lord, His inaccessible holiness and the blazing purity of His law and covenant. It is the fact that the live coal is taken from the altar that reassures the prophet of his acceptance before the Lord, because the altar was the one place where the divine wrath was propitiated by the shedding of blood. The attendant, Seraph, of Isaiah's vision makes the interpretation plain in Isaiah 6 verse 7, see this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away, your sin atoned for. Richard Bewes: Every true preacher of the Lord needs such an assurance before true and valid service can be given. Grimshaw of Haworth is a prime example. Ordained in 1731, he was a stranger to the doctrine of justification until early in 1742. At that point, everything changed. To Joseph Williams, a clothier who knew Grimshaw, the transformation in his preaching was so great that in Williams' words, it was as though God had drawn up Grimshaw's Bible to heaven and sent him down another. Haworth became a notable center of the evangelical revival. Richard Bewes: The teenage Jeremiah similarly was to receive the touch of the Lord upon his mouth in Jeremiah 1 verse 9, while Ezekiel in his only vision is aware of the lightness of burning coals of fire, Ezekiel 1:13. So for these reasons, the Christian preacher though fulfilling the highest of all callings will never compete for any designation of public honor or acclaim. Having said this, I note that the Times newspaper in London actually holds an annual competition for preacher of the year with a money prize of 1000 pounds. Can we imagine any preacher of real authenticity entering such a competition, knowing that the eyes of the Lord Jesus Christ are going to be upon them? From the beginning, John Wesley could only describe himself as a brand plucked from the burning. Richard Bewes: I recall Billy Graham's mission '89 in greater London of which I was privileged to be chairman. Shortly before one of the meetings, two of our Christian policemen, responsible for security, were required in a certain part of the stadium. As it happened, without knocking, they mistakenly entered the wrong door. This happened to be Dr. Graham's room. They found the 69-year-old evangelist spread eagle in prayer on the carpet, flat on his face. That's something of the spirit of Isaiah and Jeremiah, of the prostrate Daniel by the River Tigris or John the Evangelist in Patmos on the Lord's Day collapsed at the feet of the once crucified and resurrected Christ. The power stems from that vital touch of divine grace, and so does the authority. Richard Bewes: Preaching is always considered in this combination of the human and the divine and can only be ignited by the live coal taken from the altar of God. But it's with our second contrast that I discern in this action of preaching. It's a contrast between the absurd and the majestic. We find this everywhere, wherever preaching is taking place. We recognize this phenomenon in the call of Moses. Like others, he has his experience of the fire of God in the encounter of the burning bush, but then comes the moment where the divine commission must be accepted, when the preacher's credentials must be established. Richard Bewes: Moses, who had become one of the greatest men who ever lived, is always beside himself with fearful hesitation. What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say the Lord did not appear to you? Moses would become the shepherd of Jethro's sheep out in the wilderness, was needing credentials. He was a fugitive from Egyptian justice, an alien, a nobody in a foreign land engaged in casual labor. He wasn't aware of any great skills. What was there that he could possibly offer? Richard Bewes: The next sentence of Exodus 4 have provided clergy and Sunday School workers across the world with a preacher's paradise. When the Lord says to Moses, "What's that in your hands?" The answer comes back, "A stick." The sermons and children's lessons that would come out of that text are legend. What more absurd than a stick in the desert? If by this stick Pharaoh's magicians would be confounded, the natural life of Egypt would be disrupted, waters would be parted, rocks split, victory secured, and a whole nation set on the move. Yet that staff is nothing by itself. Moses for his part was abject in his lack of confidence and skills of oratory, though it's clear by the time we reach the famous utterances of Deuteronomy 32 that he had become one of the most eloquent of all preachers that ever lived. Richard Bewes: Moses's staff, Moses's stick does indeed present prospective servants of God across the ages with an object lesson. What is that in your hand? It may not be much. That feeble, absurd stick stands for disappointing academic records, lack of funds, poor prospects, few natural aptitudes, social disadvantage. What of it? God seems to have chosen the absurd, the foolish things to confound the wise, and supremely what more embarrassingly foolish an emblem than a cross of wood on execution hill outside Jerusalem? Richard Bewes: Those of His disciples were no more than unschooled members of the Israeli fishing industry, yet scholars over the centuries have struggled to plumb the depths of their preaching and writing. The citizens of Jerusalem were astonished to note that these apparently fearless heroes of the gospel were simply ordinary men. What is that in your hand? Richard Bewes: I sometimes play tennis with an African evangelist called [inaudible 00:28:03]. Initially, Steven had nothing in his hands at all except petrol bombs, knives, and revolvers. He was leader of a gang in Zimbabwe called the Black Shadows, illiterate, sleeping under bridges, eating out of trash cans. He was converted to Christ at the very meeting he'd gone to blow up with explosives. For weeks following, he still had nothing. Yet today he can preach in seven languages, including Dutch. Richard Bewes: Only months ago, I read of a great crowd of 300,000 people were gathered to hear him preaching far up in the north in Ethiopia and when Steven [inaudible 00:28:51] gave the invitation to receive Christ, thousands of men, women, and children ran to the front to make their response. What is that in your hand? Richard Bewes: Arthur Stace of Sydney, Australia had only a piece of chalk. He was a down and out, tramping the streets, rescued from alcoholism and brought to Christ in St. Barnabas Church in Sydney's Broadway back in the 1930s. He became the city's anonymous pavement artist. He would write in beautiful copper plates a single word, eternity, on the sidewalks and walls of the city. Sometimes as many as 50 times in a single night. The next morning, people as they went to work would wonder at the appearance of this word. Arthur Stace kept it up night after night after night for many years. Though in the daytime, he would often preach in the open air, nobody knew who was the nocturnal author of this single word sermon that kept appearing on the pavements. Richard Bewes: Eventually after doing it for a full 25 years, the secret got out and Arthur Stace became known in Sydney as Mr. Eternity. It's estimated that he must have written that word in chalk at least half a million times. He died in the 1960s and then when at midnight on December the 31st, 1999 the magnificent millennium fireworks over Sydney's Great Harbor Bridge died down, there was left shining out into the night across the vastness of the Harbor Bridge in neon lights 90 feet high, the majestic word eternity still in the same copper plate style. Even though Arthur Stace had died 30 years earlier, Sydney never forgot this one word preacher and chose to honor him on its most public day ever. Richard Bewes: Moses's stick is a reminder to the preacher that the absurd and the majestic coalesce in the economy of God. What more absurd than a tin mission hut thumping out Moody and Sankey hymns, yet more people heard Sankey singing in the one year of 1875 than listened to the works of J.S. Bach across the entire 19th century. The hymns were like sermons in themselves. Around the world, destructive German theology was flooding everywhere, but those hymns held the saints of God firm in their faith, and 18 million copies of sacred songs and solos were printed and glory rules in the simplest of settings just as it presided in a dark stable in Bethlehem 2000 years ago. Indeed, Paul the apostle, while brilliantly equipped academically disdained all reliance on oratorical tricks or what he called wise and persuasive words. His concern was that his reader's faith would not rest on human wisdom but on God's power. Moses's stick leaves the preacher with a vivid reminder of this principle. Richard Bewes: We must move on now to our third example of contrast in the work of preaching. From the contrast between the human and divine, between the absurd and the majestic, we now turn to the contrast between what I term severity and grace, or between falling and rising, condemnation and blessing, demolition and construction. Richard Bewes: Severity and grace, because there's an edge to the authority of preaching of God's word. It will make you or break you. It divides the listeners into two camps, the attentive and the careless. The apostle Paul made this very point when writing of the task facing himself and his fellow preachers. He says, "For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one, we are the smell of death, to the other the fragrance of life." 2 Corinthians 2:15 and 16. Richard Bewes: True preaching will force a verdict. It's life or death, [inaudible 00:33:55] the pulpit stands on the edge of hell. Our supreme testimony example is found in that bulldozer of a prophet, the prophet Elijah. And for this point we would add to the emblems of the preacher's authority already referred to, Isaiah's live coal taken from the altar, Moses's staff, we now need look no further than the mantle of the prophet. Here are Elijah and Elisha by the banks of the Jordan, 2 Kings 2, verse eight. Richard Bewes: Now Elijah took his mantle, rolled it up and struck the water and it was divided this way and that so that the two of them passed over on dry ground. So here's a rerun of Moses and that earlier parting of the waters, but now it's the mantle of Elijah that is instrumental. And what did that mantle represent? Reflect that Elisha had requested a double portion of the spirit that had empowered Elijah and as the mighty seer is carried away from his companion and rolled up in the chariot of fire, Elisha's eyes then fall upon the discarded mantle and he takes it over. Richard Bewes: The significance of these events is not lost on the prophets of Jericho. The spirit of Elijah, they observed, is resting on Elisha. We're talking about spiritual power of authority then. The power as Revelation 11 puts it, to shut up the sky so that it wouldn't rain, as exemplified in Elijah, and to turn the waters into blood, as illustrated in Moses and the judgments upon Egypt. These spirit empowered two witnesses as they're called in Revelation 11, a figurative of the preaching witnessing church that is us. The prophet's mantle is a [inaudible 00:36:08] for the preacher of every generation. Richard Bewes: When the spirit of the Lord is empowering the messenger, there will be a dividing cutting edge to the delivery, both severity and a blessing will result. How long will you waiver between two opinions, Elijah asked of his listeners, the very judgment of God resulted from his preaching and actions and also the divine grace within a rejuvenated Israel. A verdict had been forced that was to stamp itself upon the covenant people for all time. Richard Bewes: But preaching isn't always like that. John Wesley had this recollection to record after a visit to Glasgow. My spirit was moved within me at the sermons I heard, both morning and afternoon. They contained much truth but were no more likely to awaken one soul than an Italian opera. Richard Bewes: Consider the 19th century evangelist, D.L. Moody for a moment. My grandpa was converted through him. I'll tell you about it tomorrow. A learned Chicago theological professor at that time wrote, "It is perfectly astounding to me that a man with so little training should have come to understand the public so well. He cannot read the pre-testament. Indeed, he has difficulty with part of it in the English version, but he excels any man I have ever heard making his hearer see the point of a text to scripture." Richard Bewes: Around the same period, the great evangelical [inaudible 00:37:56], Lord Ashley Cooper, in England compared Moody to the greatest Tractarian preacher in England of the day, [inaudible 00:38:04] of St. Paul's Cathedral London and wrote, "Moody will do more in an hour than Canon [inaudible 00:38:12] in a century." The question is why. Why is self preaching no more effective than an Italian opera? While should a single sermon by one preacher accomplish more than a century of sermons by another? Given that the preachers are, we are comparing, are indeed people of the spirit and the gospel, I think it's too simplistic to claim that one is anointed and the other not. As I understand the New Testament, if I am a Christian at all, I have been anointed for the service of Christ the day I was converted. Richard Bewes: Once we get past Pentecost, all the tenses of the New Testament are in the past tense, as in 2 Corinthians 1:21 to 22, when we're talking about the initiation into the life of the spirit. Naturally we're to see to it that day by day we are filled with the spirit, that we're walking in the spirit, that we're not grieving him. So is there for the [inaudible 00:39:17] something to do with expectation? It ought to be possible that even the novice preacher who has a confidence in the power of the Bible can expect God to speak through the sermon and to challenge and even divide the listeners first time off. It does happen. In my book, Speaking in Public Effectively, I try to spell out this maxim, namely the preaching glows with life transforming energy when listeners and sometimes the speaker are aware that another voice has taken over. The apostle Paul put it vividly in Ephesians 4:20 and 21, in the King James Version it reads, "But ye have not so learned Christ if so be that ye have heard him and have been taught by him." Richard Bewes: It is a pity that all the modern versions have translated the Greek to read surely you heard of him, but that's not correct. The King James Version has it right. You heard him. But surely it might have been argued, those distant Ephesian Christians never even saw Jesus, let alone heard him. They heard preachers, Paul, Silas, Timothy. No, insists the apostle, you Ephesians listened to a preacher, but you heard Jesus. That's the miracle of the gospel, of the spirit, and of Biblical preaching that will flatten one here and raise another. Richard Bewes: From time immemorial, gospel preachers have had their listeners coming up to them at the close and saying, "That was for me. Christ spoke to me through that." We have an example in Kate Booth, eldest daughter of General Booth of the Salvation Army. She was born in 1858. When she was only four, her mother, Catherine Booth, would put her to bed with these words, "Now Katie, you are not here in this world for yourself, you have been sent for God and for others." Then she would add, "The world is waiting for you." Richard Bewes: Extraordinary words to send a little girl of four to bed with, but Kate grew up with a conviction in her heart. Mother says that the world is waiting for me. When she was still in her teens, her father, William Booth, would call her up to speak when the crowd was getting out of hand. She is my [inaudible 00:41:59] said William, using that Waterloo analogy. When all else fails, put on Katie. She represented a combination of pathos and sheer spiritual power. Faced at 16, the age of 16, by a noisy, jeering, spitting crowd of 1500 people in the north of England, Kate first of all sang the rocks and the mountains will all flee away and you will need a hiding place that day. Oh may we be ready. Total silence fell and then Kate announced her text, let me die the death of the righteous and let my last stand be like his. She spoke for 40 minutes and over 30 people responded to her call to a new life. Richard Bewes: It was the start of what turned out to be a world ministry. She and her Hallelujah Lasses took the brothels and taverns of Paris by storm when Kate was still only in her early 20s. It was in France that this extraordinary and totally fearless missionary was given a military name, la Marechale. If there was violence, she outfaced it, she had an answer for everyone. A tipsy Frenchman tried to make a date with her. "Where should we meet?" he leered. Her devastating reply was [inaudible 00:43:33], before the throne of God. My parents heard her when she was an old lady and they said she was electric. She died in the 1950s. Richard Bewes: Once an English bishop, John Taylor Smith, asked an attender at one of the Marechale's meetings, "Why do you all flood to hear the Marechale?" The answer was enlightening. We have never heard anyone who made Jesus so real before. She brought Him right to us. He was there. He was speaking to you. You were touching Him and His life was enveloping you, His purity and His power seemed to burn through you. It was preaching such as we had never heard in our lives before. That's it. He was speaking. He burned through you. That is severity coupled with grace. Richard Bewes: No one was ever bold as a preacher than the martyr Stephen where he was noted in Acts 6 verse 8 that he was also a man of grace. If much of our modern preaching is lacking in the power to convict and transform, this may in part be due to a general and widespread sacking of confidence in the power of the word of God, including, I fear, among some of us evangelicals. I may decide as a modern preacher to carry a mobile phone with me into the day. But it is more important that I should carry a pocket Bible with me everyday, everyday, and to have it with me at all times, and that act alone demonstrates expectation. I as a preacher should always carry a Bible around with me and always expect that Jesus Christ will be speaking as I make the attempt to explain the word of God. This should happen every time I'm on my feet. If I'm preaching in a church, I should ask the congregation please open your Bibles at the very start. The authority must be seen to lie there from the very beginning. Richard Bewes: The phenomenon of Christ speaking through his words cannot be manufactured or contrived. Some try to fake it, but the result is that the listeners would go away thinking what a great performance, such oratory, and terrible funny as well. We had a great time. Ladies and gentlemen, you cannot pass on a great time to the next generation. Richard Bewes: So would some of us wear the mantle of Elijah in some small way? Or the prophets of those who followed after? Then we must address ourselves humbly and expectantly so the text of their inspired messages, only then can we be prophetic. Would we desire to be truly apostolic in our public speaking, then we must address ourselves prayerfully to the infallible gospel and doctrine of the New Testament apostles. Only then can we be apostolic. Richard Bewes: Let's remind each other that there's no substitute for hard work in the ministry of preaching. We who preach or are going to preach ought to see to it that as far as in us lies, there be no lack of industry, indeed no unforgiven moral fault within us to hinder the touch of the spirit upon our speaking. Our hard work, our personal preparation to provide the spirit of God with our mouthpiece that is honoring to Him and usable. Richard Bewes: And in the last analysis, it's up to the sovereign Lord through us to touch and speak to who He will. Preaching that is irradiated with the presence of God, exercising both severity and grace, has at its background this expectation that God is going to speak coupled with prayer, meditation, personal accountability to our master, and I think suffering. No amount of natural abilities or the gift of the gab can cover for the absence of these factors. We can't, simply cannot, pick up the disc of a stored sermon, mechanically print it off, and think like Samson of old that we can go out as in other times before and walk to the podium with any real assurance that the power of heaven will be in our preaching no matter how great the cascade of human praises may come our way. Richard Bewes: What is our main point of reference? What is burning within, our innermost convictions? Where is the lasting evidence that the mantle of our forebears does indeed in some small way rest on us now? Suffering has been mentioned. The Bible. The Bible and Christian history clearly indicate that suffering and glory go hand in hand in the life and the service of the believer. This leads me then to our fourth and last contrast that I invite you to consider in the preaching ministry. We touched on the human and the divine, the absurd and the majestic, severity and grace, here's the last, I entitle it the bitter and the sweet. We turn now to the prophet of the exile, Ezekiel. Richard Bewes: One of the priests of the Temple of Zion, whose calling it was to preach and minister to his own people at the old time low in their fortunes. Carried off by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, here he was with the exiled Jews that God had given him to address far from home, 500 miles from the temple in Jerusalem that meant so much. Is there a symbol of encouragement once again, for us who preach hearing the prophesy of Ezekiel that can be added to Isaiah's live coal, Moses's stick, and Elijah's mantle? Oh there undoubtedly is. We turn to God's commissioning of Ezekiel in Chapter 2 verse 8 onwards. Richard Bewes: But you, son of man, listen to what I say to you. Do not rebel like that rebellious house. Open your mouth and eat what I give you. And I looked and saw a hand stretched out to me. In it was a scroll which he unrolled before me. On both sides of it were written words of lament and mourning and woe, and he said to me, son of man, eat this scroll that I am giving you and fill your stomach with it. So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth." Richard Bewes: Ezekiel's commission to preach to his people is symbolically underlying them with this vision of a scroll, completely covered with writing. The implication is that there's no space for any human edition. The words that Ezekiel is to eat and absorb are God's words alone. The action of eating indicated the words to be preached are not to be the prophet's own words and thoughts, no, they've been put into his mouth by the Lord. Richard Bewes: It's a bitterness that he has to speak at a time of national calamity, and yet because they're God's words, they still prove to be sweetly satisfying to the preacher. A similar phrase in Jeremiah 15:16, thy words were found and I did eat them and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart. In Revelation 10 John the Evangelist received the same vision as Ezekiel's. There it clearly expresses what fear in Ezekiel is to be inferred, namely that while the scroll tastes as sweet as honey in the mouth, it becomes bitter to the stomach. This bittersweet scroll is associated with a commission to preach. In Ezekiel's case to the house of Israel, in John's case to peoples, nations, languages, and kings. Richard Bewes: In both instances, it's personal for the messenger. It's not to be confused with the scroll and its seven seals in Revelation 5. That scroll is evidently the all embracing scroll containing the meaning and the explanation of all history. I've heard Anne Graham Lotz describe it as the scroll that contains the title deeds of the world. It's a scroll whose interpretation defied the attempts of every philosopher and guru, faith system going until at length in John's vision that scroll is opened and its contents finally unraveled by a single figure, the once crucified Lamb of God, and then the singing begins in Revelation 5 verse 9. Richard Bewes: The scroll of Revelation 5 with its universal explanation of all history has its seals broken, its secrets revealed, and thus the whole of life interpreted by the Cross of Calvary. That's what it says there. The Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world. The cross is the key to the understanding of our entire existence. Richard Bewes: Ezekiel's personal scroll, and that which is described by John in his turn as the little scroll, why these two separate, these two scrolls seem to be pocket versions of the scroll of Revelation 5. They represent individual ministries, they convey this revelation to the world. Scrolls that are personal to the preacher. In each case there's this bittersweet element. Richard Bewes: Every preacher should find this encouraging and confirming. Is it not our experience that preaching the word of God is the most privileged, most satisfying, sweetest thing we have ever done? At the same time, has it not been the experience of some of the most powerful preachers in history that their preaching brought them pain, conflict, opposition, and even death? No preacher should ever be surprised when preaching brings the taste of bitterness into the service of Christ. The reason is obvious. The very leader we are serving was Himself rejected and killed and we in turn must carry his cross. Richard Bewes: Charles Simeon, a wonderful preacher at Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge, began to preach in 1783 and continued for 54 years. For several decades the work was anything but easy. War was waged on Simeon by city and university alike. He installed seats in the aisles of his church at his own expense. They were thrown out by the church ordinance. The same church ordinance locked the church and made off with the keys leaving the congregation to worship in the street. For a full 10 years, the listeners to Simeon's preaching were obliged to stand throughout the service in the gangway of the church. Eventually he won through by the power of the gospel and Cambridge has never forgotten this intrepid worker. Richard Bewes: One day in a conversation with a Mr. Guerney, Simeon spoke of a cross that he had to bear. He described how he was looking for something from the Bible and he opened his little New Testament and he found there the first text, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name. Him they compelled to carry his cross and Simeon said, "Simon is the same as Simeon. What a word of instruction was here. What a blessed encouragement to have the cross laid upon me that I might bear it after Jesus. What a privilege. It was enough. Now I could leap for joy." Richard Bewes: So seemingly when Ezekiel and the apostle John in their own time reach out to grasp and then to bear the scroll of commission that was being offered to them. They had an inkling from the start that it would be bitter as well as sweet. It's as well we understand that from the start. Richard Bewes: I see John Bunyan, the tinker, tentatively beginning to preach around Bedford in 1655. Did he foresee that five years later he would be arrested and put in jail for 12 years? That the first part of Pilgrim's Progress would be written in a later jail sentence? I see John Wesley, arrested by [inaudible 00:56:23] Romans 1 as he sat in that preaching house in Aldersgate Street and I see his brother Charles accepted the scroll of commission to the evangelist to resolve together we're going to change the course of history. Could they foresee the riots that awaited them? The banishment from pulpit after pulpit? The traveling, the storms, the infirmities, the controversies? Richard Bewes: I see Charles Haddon Spurgeon on that snowy first Sunday of January 1850, referred to in Lewis Drummond's wonderful biography as he stumbles into the primitive Methodist Church in Artillery Street in Colchester. Did he have the faintest clue that his life was about to be instantaneously transformed and that he would become public property and that his sermons would fill 50 books? I see Billy Graham on the 18th green at Temple Terrace, Florida that night in March 1938 kneeling in prayer as he finally surrendered to the call and reached out to accept the scroll of God's commission. A mandate that would propel him and his wife, Ruth, into 50 and more years of the most taxing and exhaustingly far flung schedule of service to the world that has ever been undertaken across all six continents. Richard Bewes: The scroll of God, the bitter and sweet. Was it all worth it? Everything depends upon which scroll and whose call. If it was handed down from heaven, everything was worthwhile. Nothing was lost. The live coal that touches the preacher's mouth, the absurd stick that we hold in our hand, the mantle that one day must be donned by every new generation of preachers, the bittersweet scroll that represents your call and mine. There is encouragement and romance in every one of these vivid symbols. So I close. Richard Bewes: Gladys Aylward, that diminutive London parlormaid who became a missionary and evangelist in China spoke in considerable physical weakness for a full hour to women at the US Army base in Taiwan one day in 1970, same night she died. Some words she once wrote to a teenager could be applied as much to a parlormaid as to a patriarch, prophet, or professor or to any modern day preacher listening. These words, "God won't ask you for certificates. He'll only ask if you've been faithful to your call." Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.