Preach It!

I must give thanks to Jeff Peterson of The Light Hearted Calvinist for this quote (and directing my attention to such a great book) of William Still:

It is to feed sheep on such truth that men are called to churches and congregations, whatever they may think they are called to do. If you think that you are called to keep a largely worldly organisation, miscalled a church, going, with infinitesimal doses of innocuous sub-Christian drugs or stimulants, then the only help I can give you is to advise you to give up the hope of the ministry and go and be a street scavenger; a far healthier and more godly job, keeping the streets tidy, than cluttering the church with a lot of worldly claptrap in the delusion that you are doing a job for God. The pastor is called to feed the sheep, even if the sheep do not want to be fed. He is certainly not to become an entertainer of goats. Let goats entertain goats, and let them do it out in goatland. You will certainly not turn goats into sheep by pandering to their goatishness. Do we really believe that the Word of God, by His Spirit, changes, as well as maddens men? If we do, to be evangelists and pastors, feeders of sheep, we must be men of the Word of God...Courage is the greatest lack today. If all men in the ministry acted upon what they know we would have a far better ministry. Yet, the ignorance is colossal. Your ignorance of the Word may be colossal. And what can we do to help that in one sermon? I have little hope of anyone learning categorically, decisively, from me unless he or she is prepared to sit consistently, almost exclusively, for years under the ministry of the Word of God: thereafter, he or she will spend their whole life digesting it. This is what I wrote recently about spiritual ‘vagrants’ amongst the students who drop into our church:

 I despair of some who come to our church and who read our literature, because what they hear and read is only one item of their spiritual diet. Indeed, they eat very little of anything but like children play with their food. That is why they are so thin. They juggle with it as if it were something to sell, not eat, and are not very sure which item is the best-selling line.

 The advice to them was: Eat it, eat it whole. All or nothing. For it is only ‘all or nothing’ devourers of the Word of God who will ever be or do anything for God.*

Soli Deo Gloria!


*Still, William (2010-05-01). Work of the Pastor (Kindle Locations 227-257). Christian Focus Publications. Kindle Edition.