When you elevate the task, you make the servant very lacking in confidence. Once you elevate the task so high, once you say that this is the main thing to be done, then people who are about to do it feel very inadequate. That sounds nice, until you consider the responsibility this puts on you. Thus preaching is, in a sense, elevated to the highest position. That purpose is to equip us to feed others, because this is really the means by which we ourselves will know and grow fully in the understanding of the grace of God that He intends for us. But homiletics is the queen.” He was reminding us that everything we do in the curriculum-whether it is New Testament studies, Old Testament studies, systematic theology, or church history-is feeding a purpose. Rayburn, who taught this course for 25 years and was the founding president of Covenant Seminary, would always remind us in his first lecture, “Now there is only one king of your studies, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. For us to really know what God is saying, we have to be actively involved in communicating it to others. The idea is that God is saying, “What I desire from you is not simply your knowledge of the Word but your ability to communicate it to others.” I mentioned this in our school’s convocation the other day: when the apostles prayed for others, they said, “We want you to know everything that we know, that you may know how wide and deep is the love of Christ Jesus.” But in order for that to be true, you have to be active in sharing your faith.
It will not ultimately benefit us-it is actually harmful to us unless there is some way in which it is being used for God’s purposes. I think you would recognize that if you were here just to gain knowledge, the Scriptures themselves tell us the consequence of that: “knowledge puffs up.” That is all it does if there is not some release, some mechanism by which God enables us to share that knowledge.
It is both sides of that, gaining the knowledge and the skills for what God is calling you to do, that is important. If I were to ask why you are taking this course, why you would go to seminary, I hope you would have some sense of gaining the knowledge and the skills for what God calls you to do. What is really important in preaching may surprise you as we move forward. The goal for this lesson is to understand how important preaching is, and then what is really important in preaching.
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