God vs. My Bright Ideas

1 Corinthians 2:1-2 – “Dear brothers and sisters, when I first came to you I didn’t use lofty words or brilliant ideas to tell you Gods message. I decided to concentrate only on Jesus Christ and his death on the cross.”

Does this approach still work? I spend about 8 hours each week getting ready to share a message in front of the church. To those of you who have heard me speak you may be shocked by this. You may be thinking “he should have much better stories if he is spending 8 hours on it,” or “it seems like he is making it up as he goes along.” The bottom line however is that it takes a long time for me to prepare to deliver a message.

This passage doesn’t say how long it took Paul to come up with his messages, but from the sound of the passage it wasn’t very long. As I said in some of my previous posts We have a special preacher at church this weekend. He has the gift of healing and wants to teach about it and pray for people. When we asked him what he was going to talk about he said, what ever the spirit leads, implying that he is just going to get up there and start, talk and finish 45 minutes later. In our culture this is completely unacceptable. In Pakistan there seems to be no thought about it. This is how it is done, and that’s how he does it. I am excited to see how it comes out.

As for my preaching style, I don’t plan on drastically changing it to shooting from the hip the whole time, but there is something for me to learn here. No matter how good your powerpoint is or how perfectly told your illustrations are, without the power of God, the Holy Spirit, the message is a complete waste of time. I want God to live through the way that I teach, so I am going to pray that way.

Lord, keep teaching me about how to effectively communicate to your people. Better yet just use me as a vessel. Let me be your mouth piece. Continue to humble me to a point where I am completely reliant upon you. I don’t want to be forced to use stories of old, quotes and clichés. I want your power to flow though me. Please do that in Jesus name.