When Grace Makes Things Worse

Faithful preaching does not improve people. Often it makes them worse.

When Grace Makes Things Worse

Here is something a preacher is not supposed to admit: faithful preaching does not improve people. Often it makes them worse.

That is not cynicism. It is Jeremiah. He stood in the pulpit God gave him, shouted “Violence and destruction!”—and the only thing his sermons reliably produced was contempt. “I have become a laughingstock all the day,” he said. “Everyone mocks me.” So he made the decision a great many preachers have quietly made since: I will not mention Him. I will keep the pulpit and leave the subject matter alone.

Why would a man called to preach decide to stop? Not because the insults stung, though they did. Because his preaching seemed to make otherwise good, community-minded people lose their minds. Call it TDS—not that kind. Truth Derangement Syndrome. The Word exposes the rot in us, and the rot does not thank you for the diagnosis. It belches. It mocks. The wife who’s had the affair throws it back: “Let him who is without guilt cast the first stone.” The son who says he’s gay throws it back: “Judge not, lest you be judged.” Hit a man with the Word of God and he will hit you with it.

But here is the thing Jeremiah understood: the insult is never really aimed at the preacher. The full measure of it goes past him, to God. The part of the Bible we find most embarrassing was never the law. It is the God who gave it.

So wouldn’t it be a mercy to stop? Wouldn’t it be a grace to withhold this grace? Nobody enjoys being shown who he really is. The church has never really managed it. Neither have I. Jeremiah tried to quit and found he couldn’t—“there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” That fire is not temperament. It is union with Christ. It is why a real Christian, a real church, cannot finally keep silent, however much less silence would cost.

Because grace does cost. Jesus said: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword”—not a line for a lawn sign. That sword is His word, and it cuts. It has cut me. It drives a wedge between mother and daughter, father and son. It pushes as many people out of a church as it brings in. This very week a Pride event turned up on the town green. I preach against pride and the town grows prouder. The Word made things worse, exactly as Jesus said it would.

And yet. “Such were some of you,” Paul says—which is the whole hope. We all begin in the rebellion; some of us are simply called out of it. The same Christ who sends His preachers to break hearts cares, down to the sparrow, for the people whose hearts He breaks. There are finches nesting in the holes of the Woodbury parsonage in which my wife and I live, their little ones peeking out for the worm. If God finds a home for them, how much more are you worth to Him? Fear not.

So the only real question is whose acknowledgment do you want? When someone freezes you out because you said something true, ask yourself plainly: is that the respect you were after—the approval of the rotting corpse inside the whitewashed tomb? Or would you rather be acknowledged by the Son of God, who sits even now at the right hand of the Father? Everyone who acknowledges Him before men, He will acknowledge before His Father.

We are not above our Master. We were baptized into His death—not a ritual with water but a death we live through, the death of this dying world, while the fire goes on burning. We die like Him. We rise like Him. To the world that looks obsessive, compulsive, like an old-fashioned prophet. Let it.

It would have been better, maybe, had I never come here, or having come, preached you softer words. But I grew weary holding them in, and I could not. So I came. So I preach. So must you.

This is an adaptation of a sermon preached by the Rev. Jake Dell called “Inextinguishable Fire” at the First Congregational Church of Woodbury, Connecticut.