Dr. James White:
“To preach the gospel with speech marked by human wisdom and insight is to seek to remove from the gospel the offensiveness of the cross. It is to shift the focus from the power of the gospel, which lies in it’s God-centeredness, to a man-centered “plan” that is devoid of offense for the natural man. This is why it empties the cross of it’s power, making it null and void.
The cross is MEANT to offend! That offense is part of the very divine power that breaks that hardened heart and makes room for a heart of flesh. It crushes so that it can recreate.
When we distrust the Holy Spirit so as to come up with our own “better” means of preaching, means that avoid the offensiveness of a dying Savior, we are not only insulting God the Father, the source of the gospel, God the Son, the object of the gospel, and God the Spirit, who brings dead sinners to life, but we are engaging in the most serious pulpit crime of all.
For God has given us only one thing that He calls “the power of God”, and that is the gospel itself. {Romans 1:16} When we are ashamed of that gospel so that we edit it, shorten it, shave off it’s rough edges, disguise it as human wisdom, we are not just showing our own disbelief. We are robbing our hearers of the only message that truly saves.
Indeed, one of the greatest reasons the church today is engorged with self-righteous men and women who have no earthly idea of what it means to be truly changed in repentance and faith is because we have used a shallow impersonation of the real message to trick them into a self-satisfied religiosity that will put them squarely under the wrath of God someday. As it has been well said, what you win them with is what you win them to.
“Win” them with a message that pleases their self-righteous unrepentant hearts and you will find them to be horribly consistent within the church. They will never allow you to bring the Word of God to bear upon them without loud cries of complaint. They will ever want nothing more than the thinnest gruel, the shallowest pablum: 20 minutes of stories, a pat on the back, a smiling assurance of how good they are and how God loves them and has a wonderful plan for their lives. That’s as far as you will be allowed to go. This is hardly the result of the powerful gospel of the cross of Christ.” – Pulpit Crimes
It is a false dichotomy to say that we must choose between the moving of the Spirit OR the preached word of God. If I lived in the time of the early Church and lets say that the Apostle Paul came to my home church, I for one would not want to run around the building, dance, or sing a song 100 times, thinking we were all being “Spirit led.” I would want to sit quietly, reverently, listening to every word to hear the Spirit anointed word of God proclaimed, correctly and with power… and, I would want the exact same thing next time too, and the next. That IS the moving of the Spirit.
Some years ago I read of a poll of Americans who were asked what their greatest fear was. To my surprize, number one on the list was “Public Speaking” and number two was “Death.” That meant that at a funeral, most people would rather actually be dead in the casket than having to give the eulogy!