Idol-Smashing Preaching

I believe most of us preachers should be ashamed by how we preach such an anemic brand of Christianity, how when we preach that the best we can hope for is that somebody will come up to us after our meeting and shake her hand and say, I sure enjoyed the message. We cause no small stir today with our feeble attempts at preaching, friends, and it cannot be said of us as it was the early Christians. These have come here also, have turned the world upside down.

The only thing we turn upside down is our hamburger after the meeting to see if it's cooked all right. When I read my Bible, I see that preachers like Peter and Paul would cause a stir wherever they preach the gospel of the Son of God. Turn, if you will, friends, to the book of Acts.

I want to read us a portion of one of Paul's preaching engagements. Please turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter 19, and we'll begin in verses 23. Let me read this striking passage of scripture to us at this time.

And here is the word of God, and may the Spirit of the Lord be pleased to attend the reading of his holy word. And the same time, there arose no small stir about that way. For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, which made silver shrines for Diana, brought no small gain unto the craftsman, whom he called together with the workmen of like occupation, and said, Sirs, we know that by this craft we have our wealth.

Moreover, you see and hear that not alone at Ephesus, but almost throughout all Asia, this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people, saying that they be no gods which are made with hands, so that not only this our craft is in danger, to be said it not, but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshipeth. And when he heard, and when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians. And the whole city was filled with confusion, and having caught Gaius and Articus, men of Macedonia, Paul's companions in travel, they rushed with one accord into the theater.

And when Paul would have entered unto the people, the disciples suffered him not. I will stop there, friends. While I have been to the ancient city of Ephesus, maybe some of you have as well.

When I was there, I actually visited this amphitheater where the Ephesians gathered, and cried out, Great is Diana. I climbed up to the top bleacher, and I dropped a dime, and it could be heard all over that big coliseum, for it was acoustically perfect. That old apostle Paul had the sitting uproar with his brand of preaching, which was idle smashing preaching.

And that's the title of my message this evening, friends, idle smashing preaching. And that's exactly the kind of preaching we need back in our pulpits today. Rolf Barnard made a comment in a sermon, which has always stuck with me.

Rolf Barnard said that most folks have a God that they've whittled out for themselves, and they are comfortable with, and they serve that little God. But he's not the God of the Bible. And in preaching, the first thing an evangelist must do is to kill the gods that people have set up for themselves, because you have to kill somebody's God before they can see the God of the Bible.

Then Barnard said this, he said, now when you start killing somebody's God, they'll come after you. And it's true, friends. When I was doing my research on my biography on the life and ministry of Rolf Barnard, I realized he was a man who was in the idle smashing business of preaching, and his kind of preaching got to folks, got under their skin, to where they either got saved or they tried to run them out of town.

Listen to his comments about one of his meetings. I went some years ago to hold a meeting where I had been in a town in a church meeting, and God was pleased to bless him. There was no small stir in the city.

On Tuesday night in my first week, they started a petition down at the big mill where everybody worked, and they had several hundred people sign it by Wednesday, and the petition was to run me out of town. Well, that story about Evangelist Barnard is a true representation of his ministry, friends. And when I study men whom God has used in revival to shake a town, men like Sam Jones and Mordecai Ham, they each share a common denominator in their preaching.

They each preached hard against sin, and they faced high persecution for it because they believed in idle smashing preaching. It was said of Mordecai Ham that he would strip the bark off his hearers until they began to squirm and holler under his preaching. Listen to this newspaper clipping describing a Mordecai Ham meeting in a Texas town in the early 1920s.

For several weeks they have had the time of their lives watching the preacher peel the church folk, seeing the miserable Pharisees and hypocrites writhe and wiggle and squirm and do the snake dance in their utter discomfort. They said they hated that dreadful denunciator of their dark and damnable doings. They said they'd cuss him out of town.

They said he mustn't pastor with their little gods or monkey with their little pig pens, but he did. And for 10 days or more, the idle smashing business has been epidemic in town, and many a Demetrius, the idol maker, is out of a job. But God is getting himself a great name in the salvation of people, for scores have burned their idols and hundreds are being saved.

Man nor devils can't stop it. It is of God. Let me tell you, friends, God honors that kind of preaching, but it's the hardest preaching a man can do.

It's the hardest preaching because when you begin to get under a sinner's skin by pointing out his idols and uncovering his little god, that person will come after you. Mordecai Ham was pistol whipped for his brand of preaching. He was attacked in a lobby of a hotel by a man with a chain who struck him on the back of the head.

He was run over in another town by a car driven by the liquor crowd. In a small town in Texas, a band of men invaded his meeting, kidnapped him, and dragged him down the street, and in their hands was a bucket of tar, a bag of feathers, and a rope to hang him. The only way he escaped was that the local sheriff had to call in the cavalry to come and rescue him, and the soldiers put him on a train with their rifles pointed at the angry crowd of people who wanted him run out of town.

But do you know what, friends? They appointed a federal marshal to ride with the evangelists on the train to the next city, and this is what the marshal said to Mordecai Ham. How can you stay so calm in the midst of a mob riot? I want what you have, sir. How can I be saved? Well, we have to ask ourselves, what did Mordecai Ham preach that so enraged his hearers? He preached the double-barrel doctrines of repentance and the utter lordship of Jesus Christ.

Let me ask you, friends, how many evangelists do you know today where they are run out of town because they've turned the town upside down with their preaching? How many evangelists do you know who've caused a riot recently by their preaching? George Whitfield, the great British evangelist, when he preached his very first sermon in St. Mary the Crypt in the town of his birth in Gloucester, England, it was reported to the bishop that Whitfield's sermon had driven 15 people mad, and the good bishop replied that he hoped the effects of the sermon wouldn't wear off soon. But I'm afraid, friends, with much of our preaching today, the effects of it wear off too soon. Why aren't we shaking the town for God today? Our gospel still has power to save.

Our God is a dynamite God. I remember Vance Havner saying the following, how come if we serve such a dynamite God, how come so many of us are living firecracker lives? I believe part of the answer, friends, is that too many of us don't believe God can still work wonders today. Listen, brother preacher, we still have the same Bible as Mordecai Ham.

We have the same Holy Spirit as the Apostolic Church. We have the same Almighty God. We have the same gospel which has power to save.

Why isn't our preaching causing a stir? I believe it's because what we leave out of our message, we don't want to preach the hard doctrines of Mordecai Ham or Sam Jones. We won't preach against sin like they did and face the consequences. I was in Sam Jones' house in Cortisville, Georgia, walking around and looking through his personal artifacts, and there was a poster of him on one of his walls advertising a meeting, and someone had scrawled on it in big letters, hang him.

Sam Jones was at a train depot when a man with a cane walked up to him and asked him if he was Sam Jones the evangelist, and when he replied in the affirmative, the man began to violently strike Sam Jones about the face with his cane. That's the kind of opposition he faced for preaching the gospel of the Son of God and calling sinners to repentance. But we preachers today like to be liked too much by our hearers to preach anything that will upset them and interfere with our love offering.

We don't want to be run out of town, much less lose our reputations. But let me tell you, friends, it is the brand of idol-smashing preaching that gets the job done by reclaiming backsliders and reconciling sinners to an Almighty and Holy God. It's high time in the sad country that we live in today that has fallen into such a large open gutter and cesspool that we preach against sin, that we call hell hot, that we call sin black, that we call sinners to repentance, and that we preach that you have to live a holy life if you want to call yourself a Christian.

Preach that the utter Lordship of Jesus Christ is the only way to call yourself a Christian. You must surrender everything to him. He must be a complete and utter master.

But many will cry out today, we won't have that man reign over us. But friends, we must bring back the idol-smashing preaching of former days to the sad day in which we live in the church who's had such a sad spiritual declension to such a sad degree that many are sitting in our congregations today who need nothing better than to have the bark stripped off of them by a Mordecai ham. Oh, where, oh, where are the Mordecai hams for this hour? Oh, where, oh, where are the Sam Joneses and the George Whitfields? I believe they're out there, friends.

I believe God's raising up a band of young preachers to go on out and do some idol-smashing in our day. Let us pray that the great God of the Bible will raise up men like that for our day so we can see revival again. Let us go now to a time of prayer.