The empty pulpit in many of our church buildings well displays the spiritual reality. We run around seeking life for our churches and life for ourselves through a million different methods, and the one means God has given for bringing people into a relationship with Himself stands neglected and disdained. In the act of preaching—a congregation hearing the voice of one man who stands behind the Scriptures—God has given us an important symbol of the fact that we come into relationship with Him by His Word. Just as surely as Abram was called to God by the word of promise addressing him, so we as Christians are made God’s people by believing God and trusting His promises. In a word, we come into relationship with God through faith, and “faith comes,” Paul tells us in Romans 10, “from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”
There is only one God, and He is a relational and communicating, personal being who speaks to us and initiates relationship with us. Those powerful, life-giving truths are not only proclaimed but also powerfully symbolized by the preaching of God’s Word. He speaks, and therefore we preach.As Mark Dever says in an endorsement of Al Mohler's book, He is Not Silent: Preaching in a Postmodern World, "Where are the Spurgeons of this generation?"
May our Lord Jesus, in His great love for His church, send this generation many such monologue preachers who speak as God's mouthpieces to a dying, Hell-bound world.
In Christ, and for His glory to the ends of the earth,
Pastor Ryan
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