Galatians 1:15-16

‘THAT I MIGHT PREACH HIM’

‘It pleased God, … to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him.’

Galatians 1:15

So St. Paul recalls his Divine ordination time, his crisis of consecration to the apostolate, that office which summed up all ministerial orders in it, and out of which they were unfolded by God’s providence. Called to be an Apostle, St. Paul was called not only to inspiration, but to daily duties for others, for body as well as soul, and to patient and laborious government of one little mission-congregation after another. Deacon, presbyter, overseeing pastor of pastors, he was always all this in one, and more than this. But all other functions of his apostolate are for him overshadowed and dominated by this: he was called to preach his Lord.

I. The pastor’s message.—‘That I might preach Him.’

II. The pastor’s qualification.—‘It pleased God … to reveal His Son in me.’

III. God’s sovereignty.—‘It pleased God’—sovereign, though with a sovereignty of love. Every sight that any one of us has, or has ever had, of Christ’s supreme reality, His mighty tenderness, His finished work. His indwelling presence, is ours because—in the last analysis—‘it pleased God.’ ‘It pleased God to reveal His Son’; to lift the veil from the soul’s face, and show it the Jesus Christ not of theory only, not even of holy orthodoxy taken by itself, but of experience, of trust, of love. ‘To reveal His Son in me.’ Wonderful phrase! We might have expected to read ‘to reveal His Son to me’; but the thought, the experience, the word, goes deeper: ‘To reveal His Son in me.’ Such is that unveiling in the depths of the soul’s consciousness that the Lord, Who is Divinely and for ever objective, not ourselves, to be dealt with as not ourselves, to be appealed to and leaned upon as One Who does not mean to move and vary with us, but is the same today and for ever in Himself, is yet so seen and known by the believing spirit that He is within it. He is not an element of its personality, indeed, but He is lodged by faith in its depths, to give peace, and strength, and holiness, and heaven.

IV. Here is the open secret behind a living ministry; the spring shut up, the fountain sealed, out of which flows the pure river of power for God. ‘He revealed His Son in me.’ Shall not that secret be the possession of every minister? Shall we not humbly purpose, and then diligently seek, that nothing short of that shall animate our work and witness, till we enter, through great mercy, into the joy of our Lord? What a force, strong as it is gentle, goes with the ministry which somehow indicates that indeed the minister hath seen the Lord! The man may be anything but eloquent. His literary equipment may be far from perfect. His manner may be the very opposite of impassioned. But if it is found out that he is always speaking of Jesus Christ as the soul of his message, and speaking of Him as One Whom he knows, Whom he has seen and does see with the inner eye, as One Who is to himself a glorious—let me simply say a solid—fact: then that man, deacon or presbyter, shall be found, whether it is known here below or not, to have worked supernatural results as his Master’s implement.

—Bishop H. C. G. Moule.

Illustration

‘Is it unreasonable to say, as I find myself often saying in my soul in the pulpit “What else is there to preach about?” What am I here for if not to preach Him? These human souls, made in the Lord’s image, and for endless life, but wrecked in the Fall, in danger lest they die “the death that cannot die,” exposed every hour to temptations that may strike deep as their being, liable at any moment’s notice to overwhelming griefs—these men, these women, capable of God’s own indwelling by His grace (His grace which is in Christ Jesus and nowhere else); capable of learning the joys and Divine surprises of a present and known acceptance, a present and joyful triumph, against the devil, the world, and the flesh; capable of living in this world as not of it, and so of being its riches and its blessings—what do they want at my lips? Whether they know it or not, they want me to preach Him. They want to know Him as their peace, their light, their life, their power, their everlasting hope, full, quite full of immortality. They want Him, evidently set forth, crucified amongst them, in a Gospel which does not dismiss the Cross to the background or to the middle distance, but erects it in all its bleeding glory in the front of truth, and cannot get away from it. They want Him as their living and interior power, dwelling in their hearts by faith, as the Holy Spirit strengthens those misgiving hearts to hail their sacred King of Glory to come in.’