Whose Authority?

A preacher has authority whether he wants it or not. He stands where everyone can see him. He speaks for twenty or forty minutes and nobody interrupts. He is often the most educated person in the room, or the one with the title, or the one whose family has led the church for a generation. People bring him their marriages and their griefs. And he speaks in the name of God. All of that is power, and the first thing a preacher must settle is where his share of it comes from, because it will decide how he uses it.

The New Testament's answer is that the preacher's authority is borrowed. The words it uses for the role are words for people who carry someone else's goods. A herald, kerux, announces what the king has decided. An ambassador speaks for the government that sent him: 'Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making His appeal through us' (2 Corinthians 5:20). A steward manages property that belongs to his master: 'So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Now it is required of stewards that they be found faithful' (1 Corinthians 4:1-2). In each picture the authority is real. A herald can command a crowd's attention, an ambassador can bind his country, a steward can give orders to the household. But in each picture the authority stops at the edge of the commission. The herald who adds his own clauses to the king's decree is no longer a herald.

Set that beside the one preacher whose authority was his own. When Jesus finished the Sermon on the Mount, 'the crowds were astonished at His teaching, because He taught as one who had authority, and not as their scribes' (Matthew 7:28-29). The scribes quoted authorities; Jesus said, 'But I tell you.' After the resurrection he says, 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me' (Matthew 28:18), and only then sends his followers out. The order matters. Every Christian preacher stands under that sentence, not beside it. Our authority is the authority of people sent by the one who has it all.

This is why the anchor verse is so carefully balanced. 'For we do not proclaim ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake' (2 Corinthians 4:5). Two things are proclaimed, and they are not equal. Jesus Christ is proclaimed as Lord. The preachers are presented as servants, and the Greek word is doulos, slave. Paul is writing to a church that was comparing him unfavourably with more impressive speakers, and he does not answer by asserting his rank. He answers by saying that his whole job is to point away from himself. Presbyterian church orders have a phrase for this that is worth remembering: the church's power is only ministerial and declarative. Ministerial, because it serves another's will. Declarative, because it declares what God has said and cannot make new law. A preacher who has absorbed that phrase will be both bolder and humbler than one who has not.

The practical test follows directly. A preacher's authority extends exactly as far as he can show his hearers that the text says what he is saying. Where he can show it, he may speak with all the confidence of a herald, and he should. Where he cannot, he may still speak, but he must speak as what he is in that moment: a brother offering counsel. Paul himself makes this distinction in 1 Corinthians 7, where he separates what he says as a command of the Lord (7:10) from what he says as his own judgment (7:12, 7:25). If an apostle marked the difference, a village pastor can.

The Old Testament prophets used a formula that every preacher is tempted to borrow: 'This is what the LORD says.' It marked their words as revelation, given directly, and binding. The Christian preacher stands in a different place. He is not receiving new scripture; he is explaining scripture already given. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), in its first chapter, puts the boundary sharply: the whole counsel of God concerning what is needed for his glory and our salvation is either expressly set down in scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture, and nothing is at any time to be added to it, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men. You do not have to be Presbyterian to find the distinction useful. It gives you two levels of authority that a preacher can claim, and by implication two that he cannot.

Think of everything you say in a sermon as falling into one of four registers. The first is what the text plainly says. 'We have this treasure in jars of clay' is in 2 Corinthians 4:7, and a preacher may say so with the full authority of scripture. The second is what follows from the text by good and necessary inference: since the power is from God and not from us, the success of a ministry is not to be credited to the minister. That is a step beyond the words, but a short and safe one, and most believers who read the passage carefully would reach it. The third is application: so perhaps a pastor should be slow to announce his attendance figures as if they were his achievement. That may be wise. It is not what the text says, and a faithful hearer could weigh it and decide differently. The fourth is the preacher's own experience or opinion: in my own ministry I found that the weeks I felt weakest were the weeks people were most helped. That may be true and helpful. It carries no authority at all beyond the preacher's honesty.

All four registers belong in a sermon. A sermon with only the first is a reading; a sermon with no fourth is often a sermon with no human being in it. The fault is not in using the lower registers. The fault is in delivering the third and fourth in the voice of the first. Listen for the moment when 'the Bible says' is attached to something the Bible does not say: that a believer should vote a certain way, that a particular business venture will prosper, that a woman should leave or stay in a specific marriage, that the church needs a new building. Those may be questions on which a pastor has wisdom to offer. When he dresses that wisdom in the formula of the prophets, he has done what Jeremiah 23:31 describes: 'I am against the prophets who wag their own tongues and proclaim, "The LORD declares it."'

The simplest discipline is in the language itself. Use different words for different registers, and use them every time. 'The text says.' 'This means.' 'I would suggest.' 'In my experience.' Congregations learn quickly. When they have heard you mark the difference for a year, they will trust your 'the text says' more, not less, because they know you do not say it lightly. And when you are wrong in the third or fourth register, as every preacher sometimes is, you will not have taken the authority of God down with you.

There is a harder case, and it divides the church. Many preachers, especially in Pentecostal and charismatic churches, which now make up a large share of Christians in Africa, Latin America and Asia, speak in the pulpit of things the Lord has shown them: a word for the congregation, a sense of what God is doing, a specific prompting. Others regard any such claim as out of bounds. This is a live disagreement among Christians who hold the Bible with equal seriousness, and you need to know both positions at their strongest before you decide how you will speak.

The continuationist position holds that the gift of prophecy described in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 continues in the church until Christ returns. Paul tells the Thessalonians, 'Do not extinguish the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt, but test all things. Hold fast to what is good' (1 Thessalonians 5:19-21), and he tells the Corinthians that 'you can all prophesy in turn so that everyone may be instructed and encouraged' (1 Corinthians 14:31). Peter's sermon at Pentecost announces that in the last days 'Your sons and daughters will prophesy' (Acts 2:17), and the last days run from Pentecost to the end. Wayne Grudem, in The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today (1988), argued that New Testament congregational prophecy was different from Old Testament prophecy and from apostolic scripture: it was a human report of something God had brought to mind, mixed with the speaker's own understanding, and therefore to be weighed rather than simply obeyed, which is why Paul says 'the others should weigh carefully what is said' (1 Corinthians 14:29). On this view a preacher may say that he believes the Lord has impressed something on him, provided he presents it as weighable and never as equal to scripture. Grudem also argued that the 'prophets' of Ephesians 2:20 are the apostles themselves in their prophetic role, so that the verse describes the foundation without ruling out the congregational prophecy of 1 Corinthians 14, and many continuationists read Paul's 'when the perfect comes, the partial passes away' (1 Corinthians 13:10) as pointing to the return of Christ, not to the close of the canon. Classical Pentecostals frame it differently, speaking of the anointing on the preached word and of gifts of prophecy and words of knowledge, but share the insistence that every such word must be judged by scripture.

The cessationist position holds that prophecy, like the apostles, belonged to the foundation of the church and was not meant to continue once the foundation was laid. Paul says the church is 'built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the cornerstone' (Ephesians 2:20), and a foundation is laid once. Hebrews 1:1-2 contrasts the many ways God spoke through the prophets with the final word spoken in his Son. Richard Gaffin, in Perspectives on Pentecost (1979), argued that New Testament prophecy was revelatory, belonging with the apostles to that foundation, and so tied to the period in which the foundation was being laid. When Grudem's proposal appeared, critics on this side answered that the category of a fallible prophecy is not found in the texts: the test of a prophet in Deuteronomy 18:20-22 is whether his word comes true, not whether it is mostly true. On this view, when a preacher says 'God told me' in the pulpit, he is either claiming revelation that scripture itself does not lead us to expect, or using the language of revelation for something that is in fact his own sense of things, and either way he has confused the congregation about where God's authoritative word is found.

Notice how much the two positions share. Both hold that scripture is the final judge of anything said in God's name. Both hold that nothing a preacher says may bind a believer's conscience beyond what scripture binds. Both condemn the preacher who uses 'the Lord showed me' to settle an argument, raise money or silence a critic. And both can accept a practical rule for the pulpit that this lesson commends to you, wherever you come down: never attach a claim of private revelation to an application that the text does not itself make. If you believe God has impressed something on you, say so plainly as an impression, and then show the congregation where scripture says the same thing. If scripture does not say it, the congregation is under no obligation to receive it, and you should tell them so.

The Bible is not naive about religious leaders. Ezekiel 34 is addressed to the shepherds of Israel: 'Woe to the shepherds of Israel, who only feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed their flock?' (34:2). The charges are specific. They eat the fat and wear the wool; they have not strengthened the weak, healed the sick or searched for the lost; 'Instead, you have ruled them with violence and cruelty' (34:4). And the sentence is that God will remove them and 'deliver My flock from their mouths' (34:10). The flock was food for the shepherds. That is what abuse of authority is: the people who were given to the leader to be cared for become the means of feeding him.

Jesus addressed the temptation directly. When the disciples quarrelled over rank, he said, 'You know that those regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their superiors exercise authority over them. But it shall not be this way among you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant' (Mark 10:42-43). Peter, writing as an elder to elders, repeats the instruction and adds the motive that most often corrupts it: 'not out of greed, but out of eagerness; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock' (1 Peter 5:2-3). Paul writes to a church that had given him reason to assert himself, and says, 'Not that we lord it over your faith, but we are fellow workers with you for your joy' (2 Corinthians 1:24). Three apostles, one instruction.

From the pulpit, abuse usually takes recognisable forms. The sermon is used to attack a person in the congregation without naming him, so that everyone knows and he cannot reply. Giving is extracted by promises the text does not make or by threats of curse; 2 Peter 2:3 has already described the type: 'In their greed, these false teachers will exploit you with deceptive words.' The preacher becomes the hero of every illustration, which is the opposite of 'we do not proclaim ourselves.' Questions are treated as rebellion and the questioner as an enemy of God. Scripture is bent to protect the preacher, as when Psalm 105:15 is quoted to mean that the pastor may not be corrected, when the psalm is about God protecting a vulnerable family of wanderers from kings. And the man in the pulpit is accountable to no one, like Diotrephes in 3 John, 'who loves to be first' and who puts out of the church those who do not do as he says (3 John 9-10).

Here is a composite picture, drawn from patterns that recur across many churches rather than from any one. A gifted young pastor plants a church that grows quickly. He is the only one trained, so he preaches every week, chairs every meeting and counsels everyone. Over a few years his sermons begin to include remarks about disloyalty. People who raise concerns find that their concerns appear, unnamed, in the next Sunday's application. Elders are appointed from among those who never disagree. When a family leaves, the sermon is on Judas. Nobody in the story set out to do harm, and the pastor would be shocked to hear himself called abusive. But the structure has made him unanswerable, and the pulpit has become the instrument by which he stays that way. David Johnson and Jeff VanVonderen's The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse (1991) describes this pattern at length, and its central observation is worth carrying: in such systems, the person who notices the problem is treated as the problem.

If you have been on the receiving end of anything like this, you are not required to pretend it was the voice of God. Scripture itself gives you the categories to name it. If you recognise any of it in yourself, the remedy is not a better argument but a change of structure: share the pulpit, put yourself under people who can say no to you, and let your congregation see you corrected and receive it well.

There is an opposite failure, and in some places it is the commoner one. Having seen authority abused, a preacher may decide never to use it. Every sentence is hedged. Every application is offered as a possibility. The sermon never says 'this is wrong' or 'you must', because that would sound like the preachers he has learned to distrust. The result is a congregation that has never heard God's word addressed to it with any force, and that concludes, reasonably, that the preacher does not think it matters very much.

The same letters that warn against lording it over the flock command the preacher to speak with authority. 'Speak these things as you encourage and rebuke with all authority. Let no one despise you' (Titus 2:15). The anchor of the previous lesson told Timothy to 'reprove, rebuke, and encourage' (2 Timothy 4:2). Hebrews tells believers, 'Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they watch over your souls as those who must give an account' (13:17), and the last clause explains the command: the leaders' authority is tied to their being answerable for the people. Paul speaks of 'the authority the Lord gave us for building you up rather than tearing you down' (2 Corinthians 10:8). That sentence contains both the warrant for authority and its limit. It is given, it is real, and it is for building up.

Authority that is real rests on three things, and the preacher can do something about all three. The first is the text: the more clearly he can show that he is saying what the passage says, the more freely he can press it, which is why the next module is on exegesis. The second is his life. Paul's instruction 'Pay close attention to your life and to your teaching' (1 Timothy 4:16) puts the two in one sentence. Augustine, in the fourth book of On Christian Teaching, admitted that a man who lives badly can still teach truly and profit his hearers, and he cited Jesus' words about the scribes, 'So practice and observe everything they tell you. But do not do what they do' (Matthew 23:3). But he also argued that the life of the speaker carries more weight with hearers than any eloquence, and that the preacher who lives what he says is heard with far more obedience. The third is accountability. A preacher who is answerable to elders, to a wider body, or to a congregation that is free to test him has an authority that his people can trust, because they know it is not unlimited.

Phillips Brooks, the Boston preacher who gave the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale in 1877, defined preaching as the bringing of truth through personality. He did not mean that the preacher's personality is the message. He meant that God's truth reaches people through a particular human being, with his voice, his history and his character, and that the two cannot be separated. That is why the question of authority cannot be settled by technique alone. The text gives a preacher the right to speak. His life and his accountability decide whether anyone believes he means it.

Take the notes of a sermon you have preached, or, if you have not preached yet, notes you have taken on a sermon you heard. Go through it line by line and write a number beside every claim: 1 for what the text plainly says, 2 for what follows from the text by close inference, 3 for application, 4 for personal experience or opinion. Use a pencil; you will change some of your numbers as you go.

Now look for two things. First, any claim marked 3 or 4 that was spoken in the voice of a 1, with 'the Bible says' or 'God is saying' in front of it. Rewrite each one in words that match its register. Second, any place where the sermon never got to 3 at all, where the text was explained and nothing was pressed on anybody. Write one application for that passage, in your own words, and mark it 3.

Then write the second paragraph on your page, under Before I preach. Title it: What I will not say from the pulpit. Write three plain commitments, each one tied to a verse from this lesson. For example, you might commit never to use a sermon to answer a personal critic, and tie it to 2 Corinthians 4:5. Keep them short enough to read in thirty seconds, because you will read them again before you preach.