The city of Corinth was filled with outstanding speakers. In that time, entertaining orators were pretty much the only show in town. They would draw crowds like bugs to a floodlight as people came out in droves to hear their favorite speaker. Not surprisingly, this favoritism carried over to church. Imagine a phone ringing at Corinth First and a voice asking, “Will Apollos be preaching this Sunday?” or “I heard Cephas (Peter himself!) is coming through town—I can’t wait to be on the front row with all my friends.”
Illustration by Hokyoung Kim
As harmless as that sounds, it was dividing the church. The Paul fans were fighting with the Peter fans, who were fighting with the Apollos fans. Folks were even bragging over which preacher had baptized them. This inspired Paul to take pen in hand and dash off a letter saying—and I’m paraphrasing here— “Listen, friends. Apollos, Peter, and I chair one another’s fan clubs. We are one for all and all for one. You must stop dividing the church over which one of us happens to be your favorite.”
Then Paul used an image to help drive the point home. He essentially said, “You are God’s field. We preachers are just field hands. I planted. Apollos watered, and someone else is going to harvest. We preachers aren’t star performers. We’re more like gardeners who grow people.” (See 1 Cor 1:10-17, 1 Cor. 3:5-9.)
Ordinary People, Extraordinary Listening
As a young pastor, this came as great news to me. I didn’t have to be a spellbinding orator like the Sophists, only a faithful expositor of God’s Word. I could throw a few seeds in the field over here, some water over here, sprinkle fertilizer here, and watch God grow the fruit. In the act of preaching, I got little and God got big.
What made the difference? I cannot find a single place in Scripture where God needs a good speaker. What I do find again and again is that we’re to be good hearers, that we’re to receive Jesus’s words. Put too much emphasis on the speaker up front, and we may come to church in a passive frame of mind, shifting all responsibility to the preacher and feeling no obligation to listen unless the speaker “engages” us or “speaks to our concerns.” We may even think it’s up to us to determine whether or not he’s “good enough.” But the most important activity in worship—even more essential than the speaking—is our listening! God brings us into the sanctuary to sit us down and talk to us.
But it’s not guaranteed that we’ll hear God’s voice. In order to connect with Him in worship, worshippers must take three leaps of faith every Sunday.
First, believe God is speaking.
As an ordinary church member, trust that He is communicating through the human preacher who stands before you. You say, “But of course, my pastor preaches from the Bible, and the Bible is the Word of God.” But what I'm saying is even more spine-tingling than that. Christ is preaching through your pastor. If your pastor is faithfully expositing Scripture, Jesus snatches those words out of thin air, tailors them to your life, supercharges them with His power, and sends them with pinpoint accuracy into the deepest recesses of your soul.
It never ceases to amaze me how several hundred people from all walks of life will emerge from the same service saying, “Man, he spoke directly to me this morning.” One woman even left worship muttering, “Who do you preach to when I'm not here?” To me, that is the ultimate confirmation of a miracle. Every Sunday, a pastor is explicating an ancient Jewish text from the archives of Middle Eastern history, and all these people are saying, “He has my number today!” You can’t tell me the Holy Spirit isn’t really the One who’s preaching.
Second, come as a participant and not a spectator.
Each attender must listen to God with love. My senior year of college, a beautiful young woman walked into my Shakespeare class. I was smitten. But as love grows, it moves from eyes to ears. From “Wow, look at that” to now, 54 years later, “I love the sound of her laugh.” In a similar way, as our love of God grows, so does our attention to hearing His voice.
In his book Caring Enough to Hear and Be Heard, pastoral care and counseling authority David W. Augsburger writes, “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.” Making eye contact, responding with good questions, nodding along—in other words, giving someone our full attention—is a profoundly loving act. In listening, we show how we exist for that other person. We take their reality into us.
How can you show your love for God during a sermon? Listen; hang on to every word. The second leap of faith is to believe that what you’re hearing is at the heart of worship—and it matters a great deal to God.
Third, believe that the sermon is more than a speech—it brings down the power of God.
Nowhere has that ever been said better than Isaiah 55:11, where the Lord proclaims, “So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; it will not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.”
Will not return empty. Those four words are what keep us preachers going. Sometimes it feels as if the opposite is the case. The seed we’re casting out into the field doesn’t seem to grow. The hearers don’t seem to be hearing. I spent the early years of my career in youth ministry along the coast in Southern California. As sweet as that sounds, the surf culture was hard to break into, and those were wild years. I bailed a lot of kids out of police custody for things like drug possession and shoplifting.
There was this one sullen surfer named Troy. His family didn’t have the wealth others did, and I think he may have felt he had something to prove. I kept trying to connect with Troy but never did. Eventually, I moved away and lost track of most of those kids. But not long ago I received an email that began with, “Are you the Vic Pentz who did youth ministry in the 70s in Palos Verdes, California?”
I had adults sit next to known troublemakers like Troy. Some nights, I’d have to stop my talk and call for quiet. But as Troy would sit there on the floor, back propped against the wall—bored, as always, by the evening’s talk and counting the seconds until his dash out the door to freedom and fun (and mischief)—a gospel seed or two landed between the rocks in Troy’s heart. At first? Nothing. But in that email, he told me, “I saw no point, so I took my leave. Yet, there was a haunting that followed me, Vic. By God’s grace, over time, the many seeds began to germinate.”
He continued, “Those seeds are bearing fruit in the lives of my daughters, Emily and Madison. Many nights you shared a meal with us as my family listened to one of your sermons on the internet. We lovingly called then ‘Pasta and Pentz’ or ‘Pizza and Pentz.’ And Emily is continuing this tradition with her college suitemates via your podcasts. Who would’ve thought you’d be working with college kids again after all these years?”
Even we pastors who plan, prepare, and preach are continually surprised by our sermons’ impact (Oh, we of little faith!) What’s more, we have no way of anticipating what the fruit of a particular sermon will be. Even our listeners don’t know. But either way we can trust, whether the fruit is immediately clear or not, that God is working in us. After all, the Word never returns empty. God will be faithful—through every ordinary Sunday sermon, for every ordinary person.
