THE PREACHER AND HIS PROCLAMATIONS
BY C. E. LOTT, SR.

I yield the word processor to a friend and fellow writer from our neighboring district.

Brother C. E. Lott, Sr. pastor’s Blanchard Charity Tabernacle near Livingston, Texas. The words stirred my heart. I feel they will stir the heart and mind of every child of God to pray for their pastor as well as every preacher to have the right kind of proclamation when he goes to the pulpit. God have mercy upon the saints if the preacher hadn’t heard from God. God have mercy upon the preacher if he does not declare the whole counsel of God.

How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? Romans 10: 14

The Hebrew word for preacher is “goheleth” which implies a collector of sentences for the purpose of speaking in an assembly. The Greeks use the word “kerux” expressing a messenger vested with public authority who conveys the official messages of a king or commander. Does this not describe and delineate the preacher as one whose sentences to an assembly express a message from our King, and Commander, the Lord Jesus Christ.

A DEDICATED MAN

The preacher must be a man with a dedicated heart, a devoted soul and a divinely led life. The first and highest ideal in preachers, in spite of the clamor of educators and some ministers, is not the intellectual ideal. It is the dynamic and dogmatic efficiency of the heart, a passion and out-flow upon the hearers of an infinite affection.

Centuries ago, Solomon said, “Keep the heart … for out of it are the issues of life.” The fact of the heat and energy power of the sun in the natural universe is an unspoken divine rebuke to religious cold-bloodless. Just as nature come out of a hot mold, so every thought which has made history began with a passionately hot heart. In St. John 3:16 we find redemption is not the product of cold-blooded intellectualism. It is the product of a heart filled with divine love.

HEAVEN SENT PROCLAMATION

The preacher must have a heaven-sent proclamation. We believe even the sermon theme should be divinely suggested and prayed about. God knows who will be in the audience and what they will need.

The proclamation must be God’s own truth, no fad nor fancy of man; no sugar-coated sermonette spewed out upon the assembly to drug them to sleep in their sins and send them on their way to eternal doom. It must be the old rugged gospel once and for all delivered to the saints for the salvation of a doomed and damned world.

TRUTH NEEDED IN THIS AGE

Never was there a time in all human history when such truth was needed more than in this generation. This age is sick. Sick with booze. Sick with sex. Sick with drugs. Sick with godless pleasures. It is sick unto death. Nothing but a thundering of “old” Mt. Sinai’s law and Calvary’s gospel can save us from the doom and destruction that caused nations to fall in the past.

We must not preach for self-glorification but for the glorification of Jesus Christ. God filled men will scorn (as in the past) such unworthy motives.

Our sermons must be God given messages to save sinners, sanctify, strengthen and solidify the saints of the almighty God, King of all kings. We must not tone down, nor dilute the message to please carnal thinking people in the church or in the world.

God-owned, God-filled preachers will not preach in vain. Too often we are brought in contact with reports of churches and preachers without converts. How sad and sorrowful this should effect us. With a broken heart and bended knee we should retreat to our closet of prayer.

May God save us from our leathery and apathy toward the lost and dying, the doomed-and damned, who are on their way to an eternal hell. We owe an indebtedness to mankind to give them our best.

God direct us to be holy preachers with a righteous proclamation. This is our true and only justification for existence.

==================================================================

THE ABOVE MATERIAL APPEARED IN THE TEXAS SENTINEL, APRIL 1994, AND WAS PUBLISHED BY LOUISIANA CHALLENGER, JUNE 1994, PAGE 2.

THIS MATERIAL IS COPYRIGHTED AND MAY BE USED FOR STUDY & RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY.