I am as many of you are, a messenger of the Word of God, nothing more. I do not tell people they have to be saved, but that they need to be saved, my responsibility is not their response to the Gospel, but the telling of it. “For though I preach the gospel, I have nothing to glory of: for necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!” (1 Cor. 9:16)
I fear that today there are not many messengers, I know that as the Lord told Elijah He always has a remnant, but there seems to be more people that profess Christ as Lord than there are speaking openly about Him.
I cannot once recall a church who, for whatever reason, has lost their pastor, that then congregate together and choose amongst themselves who will be the next to stand behind the pulpit, it seems as if today a piece of paper from an accredited school is required by them, presuming because that man has fulfilled the required courses and attained the proper credit hours, he is now fit to assume that position of leader of the flock. They will search far and wide, call in men from other areas to lead them for one or two Sunday mornings until the “appropriate” man is found.
My lovely wife and I attended a church for a year or so whose pastor went out of town for the weekend once. In this church there are five “elders,” and I put that revered title in quotation marks because all of them were voted in and in no way fulfilled their Scriptural obligations while we were there. When the pastor was gone, instead of one of these five men rising to preach the good news to the assembly, they played a video on the large monitor of a pastor giving a sermon, recorded some time ago, a man who probably did not even know that church existed.
Every man of God is a messenger, whether he was saved by the grace of God through faith in Christ that morning or years before, we are commanded to go into all the world, not commanded to first spend a small fortune on an education, and then apply to preach somewhere. I stand on what I have said numerous times, if you are not speaking to people of their need of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are either fearful of people, and thereby seeking to please men instead of God, or you are embarrassed to be associated with the Savior.
You may offer the excuse of not being called, of not feeling as if you were to speak to that person, of being in a hurry, but not one excuse will be seen as viable to the Lord on your day of accounting, and He will demand an answer to His question, “Why did you not speak about me?”
The message could not be simpler, everyone is a sinner, Christ Jesus went to the cross to pay the penalty for your sins, and “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” (Romans 10:9) It does not get any easier than that.
What is the average length of the actual sermon given from behind the pulpit today, twenty minutes? Twenty-five? Can you not speak of the One who gave His life for you for twenty minutes, is there not enough love in you for the Savior to speak for twenty minutes on the One who died for you? Who left the glory of heaven to take on the form of a servant so that you could have eternal life in the presence of His joy for all eternity.
It is a sad state of affairs that we find ourselves in, when those that profess that Jesus Christ is Lord sit mute in the pews, when those who claim to know Him as their personal Savior do not speak of Him in public, when messengers do not give the message.
