Ministry Crises of Soul

In Ezekiel, chapter 37, we see the prophet carried by the Spirit of the Lord to the valley of dry bones. And I believe this is where many of us preachers are today. It's awful dry in here.

It's like the story Vance Havner used to tell, where a pastor met one of his delinquent members on the street with, I haven't seen you at church lately. No, was the reply. We've had sickness, and then the weather's been so bad.

You know, pastor, it's just rained and rained. The pastor replied, I reckon that's so, Joe, but it's always dry at church. Well, there was a pastor in Scotland who was a dry preacher.

He was so dry, his nickname was the ale minster, because when he rose to go into the pulpit, some members of his congregation would rise to go to the ale house. This man's name was William McCulloch, and one day he changed his preaching, and it so altered his church that George Whitfield was invited to come to see what was going on there in Cambuslang, Scotland, and a great awakening broke out, which was the famous Cambuslang revival. The scenes of that revival were incredible.

30,000 people gathered below the church by a stream on what became known as the preaching braze. Whitfield said it looked like a battlefield where the wounded lay strewn on the hillside, crying out for salvation at 3 a.m., and it all began when William McCulloch changed the way he preached. It wasn't his preaching style that changed, but his message.

He began preaching on the doctrine of regeneration for weeks at a time, until his people came under conviction that they were unsaved, and revival broke loose in his church in Cambuslang. I've been to that church, and I've been to his grave. I've stood out on those preaching braze down below the church where God sat down in revival.

I believe Charles Spurgeon had an influential ministry. I believe Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones had an influential ministry. I believe that any sincere pastor can have an influential ministry if he really wants to see God receive glory from his preaching.

When we make God's glory the object of our preaching, then we will begin to see a change take place in our pulpits. I believe you can have a popular and influential ministry like a Spurgeon or like a Lloyd-Jones, but you don't need popularity to be an influential preacher. God can give you 10 or 20 people to influence for good and for his glory.

The key is depth rather than width. I remember reading that D.L. Moody cried out to God one time to give him a deep ministry, where his ministry would cut a channel so narrow and deep that others would feel the impact of it. I'm going to share a story with you this evening, friends, because I believe a pastor can fall into the trap of popularity in the sense that his popularity becomes a thing of importance to him, that he molds his sermons to be popular with his hearers, that his own acceptance with his congregation begins to shape his entire ministry, the messages he prepares and the subject matter he brings before his people is geared more for their acceptance of it and their acknowledgement of him.

I believe this is a very dangerous place to be in ministry, to have a popular but uninfluential ministry. The story I'm going to share with you this evening, friends, is about a popular preacher who was willing to change his message and it transformed his church. Here now is that story.

There's a big Baptist church in Memphis, Tennessee and one of the former pastors was R.G. Lee. He's more known for preaching a famous sermon called Payday Someday. In the midst of his early popularity as a preacher, R.G. Lee faced a crisis in his ministry that changed the way he preached.

There was a member in Dr. Lee's congregation, an attorney, who had to be out of town on business frequently, but no matter where this lawyer went, he made sure to catch a train back to Memphis on Saturday night so he could listen to R.G. Lee preach on Sunday. Why, he loved to hear that man preach. Well, this lawyer got cancer and he was in the hospital dying and he called for his pastor to come to his bedside.

Dr. Lee entered the hospital room whose window overlooked the Mississippi River. The lawyer told R.G. Lee, I want you to know how much I've enjoyed your preaching through the years and I've never missed a Sunday. If I could help it, I lie here dying with only a few weeks left to live.

So they tell me I'm going to look you in the eye right now and reprimand you, sir, for never telling me how to be saved. You never preached the cross to where I could see it. You never put the blood out there where I could reach it.

I am dying and I die in my sins and I chastise you, sir, for your lack of preaching the true gospel. R.G. Lee left that man's hospital room with his head down, feeling berated and guilty as charged. It was now dark outside as he walked down to the banks of the Mississippi River.

There he got down on his knees in the mud, getting his white suit pants dirty in the process while he dipped his hands in the muddy river. He knelt there a while, reflecting on what this dying man had told him. And right there and then he promised God from that point forward he would fear God more than man.

He would preach the cross and the blood and he changed his message that night beneath that moonlit sky. And in three weeks time there was such a move of grace at that church that three blocks of downtown Memphis were shaken with revival. Now share that story with your brother pastor.

It chokes me up to tell it, but I tell it to you because I know firsthand what it's like to fall into this trap of popular preaching. You want to be liked. You want to be accepted.

So you leave out a few disturbing doctrines out of your messages and folks love to come and hear you. They shake your hand when you're done and they have a good time, but there's something lacking. Something's missing.

It's the felt presence of God in your midst where you and your people are so empty of self and so broken before God that you all are carried to the very verge of eternity and quite suddenly you are face to face with the God of that eternity and lives begin to be transformed for eternity. Oh how we need to be in the grip of the Almighty and it starts when we enter that crisis of soul and ministry and change our message for his glory. Come hell or high water, let us pray.