My first sermon was pretty awkward. There were a number of factors contributing to this, some expected and others not. Leading the charge for unexpected awkwardness was my emotion. In the midst of preaching I was overcome by emotion and tears began falling as I pleaded for people to be reconciled to God. It surprised my friends because I am not an overly emotional guy, quite the opposite actually. However, in this very public venue something changed.
Subsequent preaching opportunities brought the same result, with lessened or increased intensity. Over the years this has continued and I have, as a result, wrestled with emotion and passion in the pulpit. I have had people jokingly mock it, rebuke it and appreciate it. All of this to say: I have had to work through it. Here are some thoughts…
1. Passionate, emotional preaching can be abused. Manipulation is always pulpit felony. If the preacher is manufacturing emotion in himself or his hearers only to get a response (however ‘good’ his end-goal) this is a foul. Preachers, of all people, must not manipulate people. We proclaim truth!
But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. (2 Cor. 4:2)
2. The Holy Spirit should not be quenched. If after working through #1 above you decide that you are not aiming to manipulate but genuinely are moved by God the Holy Spirit, how can you suppress that? Isn’t this hypocritical? Think about it. We preach and pray for “God to work in your lives!” only to resist him in our own? What an insult to the Trinity for me to mitigate the divine passion for his glory and honor by trying to preserve and promote my own (assuming this is because I don’t want people to laugh at me or otherwise ridicule me).
3. It is biblical, historical, and logical that preachers should be moved emotionally. I’m just going to quote Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones here because he is so good:
To use a term that is common today, the preacher must never be ‘clinical.’ So often the preacher is. Everything he does is right, is indeed almost perfect, but it is clinical, it is not living; it is cold, it is not moving, because the man has not been moved himself. But that should never be true of the preacher. If he really believes what he is saying he must be moved by it; it is impossible for him not to be.
That leads to warmth of necessity. The Apostle Paul tells us himself that he preached ‘with tears’. He reminds the Ephesian elders of that in Acts 20:19. And as he refers to certain false preachers in Philippians 3 he does so with ‘weeping’. Now the Apostle Paul was a giant intellect, one of the master minds of the centuries; but he often wept as he spoke and preached. He was often moved to tears. Where has this notion come from that if you are a great intellect you show no emotion? How ridiculous and fatuous it is! A man who is not moved by these things, I maintain, has never really understood them. A man is not an intellect in a vacuum; he is a whole person. He has a heart as well as a head; and if his head truly understands, his heart will be moved.
This has been true, of course, of all the great preachers of the ages. Whitefield, it seems, almost invariably as he was preaching would have tears streaming down his face. I feel we are all under condemnation here and need to be rebuked. I confess freely that I need to be rebuked myself. Where is the passion in preaching that has always characterized great preaching in the past? Why are not modern preachers moved and carried away as the great preachers of the pastors often were? The Truth has not changed. Do we believe it, have we been gripped and humbled by it, and then exalted until we are ‘lost in wonder love and praise’? (Preaching and Preachers), p. 89-90
4. Self-awareness for the preacher is deadly. I heard John Piper say this some time ago when speaking about his passion and gestures. His argument is that if the preacher is aware of how he is saying what he is saying when he is saying it then he is dead. It then becomes a performance rather than a proclamation. And we must be proclaimers before we are anything.
After thinking, praying, examining, reading, and listening, I believe I have come to a place where I can embrace and rejoice in emotion in the pulpit. At the same time there needs to be discernment and caution with respect to motives. The preacher can never let himself become the spectacle. He cannot be the show. He gets out of the way by being wrapped up in and carried away in the God he is proclaiming. I think this is what God the Holy Spirit is doing when he makes men passionate and moves them emotionally. This then can be rejoiced in rather than repressed.
