Humility, Whether I Like It Or Not

So, I had decided to write a blog post on humility. I’d been mulling it over and thinking about some various things to write, and decided I had something to say on the subject. Then I got to my Hebrew class this afternoon. Let me tell you, I’m not sure I’ve had many more humbling experiences in my life than this first foray into Hebrew.

Look, I’m not very good at languages in the first place. I took my 2 years of German in high school and got out. Now, I'm excited about the idea of learning Hebrew. I think it'll be super-cool once I'm done, and I know it's important to preaching. The learning part though, that I'm not excited about. Have you ever seen the Hebrew alphabet? They all look the same. Seriously, take a look at these letters:

Those are all different letters. Crazy, right? That's not even accounting for the vowels or pronunciation. It's hard enough to just learn how to differentiate letters, much less learn full words. So Hebrew is going to be humbling for me, and that's a good thing.

I find that very often these days, as I look forward to learning how to be a better preacher, I have to reign in my pride. I slip into "I want to preach well so that others praise me" instead of "I want to preach well to be an instrument of God." It's something I wrestled with sometimes in preparing talks for youth group, unconsciously slipping into "Will people like this? Is this sufficiently clever and witty?" mode. Not to say that there's no place for wit in a talk or sermon, it just can't be the end in itself. There's a fine line to be walked, and it's especially dangerous in an environment where I'm learning so much. It's going to be easy to slip into thinking all this knowledge makes me better than others, makes me important. "Knowledge puffs up", and all that.

So Hebrew is good for me, keeps me humble. Another thing that keeps me humble is the reading we've been doing for my preaching class, which continual reminds, in no uncertain terms, that we are weak. Left to his own devices, even the greatest preacher in the world can't bring a single soul to Christ. It doesn't matter how much Greek and Hebrew you know. It doesn't matter how dynamic a speaker you are. If the Holy Spirit doesn't move people, if you aren't combining preaching with an urgent prayer for the Spirit to move through your words, then it's all for nothing. Here are a few great quotes on the matter.

"Ultimately, preaching accomplishes its spiritual purposes not because of the skills or the wisdom of a preacher, but because of the power of the Scripture proclaimed...The human efforts of the greatest preachers are still too weak and sin-tainted to be responsible for others' eternal destinies." - Brian Chapell

"A man's 'natural' gifts cannot add up to a probability that he should choose the ministry. God has chosen the weak and foolish, not the mighty and wise, so that it might be quite clear that he alone is the savior." - Edmund Clowney

"Apart from the quickening power of the Holy Spirit in the act of proclamation, even the best and most essential technique falls miserably short of transforming those to whom we preach." - Arturo Azurdia

"The best man here, if he knows what he is, knows that he is out of his depth in his sacred calling." - Charles Spurgeon

Adding on to that, I recently finished a fantastic book about the Reformation (it's call The Unquenchable Flame, and I highly recommend it). I started reading the assigned chapters, then just couldn't put it down. One of the things that is striking about the Reformation is that all these great men you associate with it: Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, Knox, etc. They were all great theologians, great preachers and expositors of the Word. They were galvanizing figures, and yet it wasn't really them that fueled the Reformation. No, the fuel for the Reformation was the Word of God, and getting it into the hands of people. Men like Erasmus, whose translation of the New Testament which differed from Rome's Latin Vulgate would be the basis for much of Luther and Zwingli's theology, and Tyndale, who was dedicated to translating an English bible and getting itin the hands of the people, were as influential, if not moreso, than any of those preachers. The Reformation was not a human-driven movement, and in fact the humans often threatened to clog it up royally. The Reformation was unstoppable because once people started getting their hands on the Word of God, Rome's days as the dominant power were numbered. Luther himself said "I simply taught, preached, and wrote God's Word; otherwise I did nothing...the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything."

So pray for me. Pray for humility. Pray that I would constantly be reminded of these things that I'm writing here. Not just in preaching or my studies, but in everything. Ultimately, living by the Word through the Spirit is the only thing that's going to produce anything worthwhile in my life. I've tried to do things on my own enough to know that I'm really a great big screwup. I can't seem to remember that most days, but it's still true. God's going to do the work, he just needs me to get out of the way.