It is always interesting when you are preaching and someone in the audience gets mad at something you said. After the sermon, they come to you and say, “I am mad at you! I didn’t appreciate your talking about things in my life publicly.”
You, of course, are taken aback. You may not even know who they are, or if you do, you weren’t talking about them. However, they took what you said to heart.
The scripture you read and the application judged the thoughts and applications of their hearts and they didn’t like it.
That is a problem with preaching. If you are preaching the Word, everything you say fits someone.
People who are aware of God working within their lives know that and they know that occasionally things will be said that will fit them.
I have been to churches where I knew no one knew me, yet the preacher says something that goes right to my soul. You feel like running away, but you don’t. The preacher doesn’t know you or that you are there, but God does; and if one is in God and desires the heart of God, God will move into his or her heart and judge.
Real preaching can be life-changing if people will respond. The problem is that they do not. They figure it is for someone else, or ignore the still small voice of God in their own hearts, or just refuse to change.
When they do time after time, it becomes like the boot I had with a nail in the bottom sticking up into my foot. After a while I didn't notice it. One day I took off my boot and there was a very small, round, perfectly formed callous on the bottom of my foot where that nail had been poking me. I no longer felt it because I had worked to not feel it by forming a callous. The nail was still sharp, but my foot had become dull.
The two sided blade is handy also. You can hack and hack and hack in your fighting of evil, and if the blade gets dull, you turn it over and there is a new blade ready to hack again. Kind of like those old razor blades.
The weapon of our warfare is never dull and is never useless, as long as we keep it sharp within our lives.
Of course, even dull preaching can hit home. I did cut myself one time on a butter knife, but you do kind of have to work at that. It is a shame that so many preachers use such dull equipment, never sharpening or learning their weapons.
I suppose that you can hurt a person in combat by throwing a rifle at them, throwing it just right, hitting them in the head. But what a stupid way to use a rifle.
In the same way, a bad preacher can show someone something good by bad and ill-informed preaching and study, but what better stuff could he do if he had good equipment and good preparation.
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