So, you want to teach or preach the word of God
James 3:1 – 12
Rabbi Rev. Dr. Michael H. Koplitz
[Warning about teaching] 3:1 Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment. 2 For we all stumble in many ways. If anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to bridle the whole body as well. 3 Now if we put the bits into the horses’ mouths so that they will obey us, we direct their entire body as well. 4 Look at the ships also, though they are so great and are driven by strong winds, are still directed by a very small rudder wherever the inclination of the pilot desires. 5 So also the tongue is a small part of the body, and yet it boasts of great things. See how great a forest is set aflame by such a small fire! 6 And the tongue is a fire, the very world of iniquity; the tongue is set among our members as that which defiles the entire body, and sets on fire the course of our life, and is set on fire by hell. 7 For every species of beasts and birds, of reptiles and creatures of the sea, is tamed and has been tamed by the human race. 8 But no one can tame the tongue; it is a restless evil and full of deadly poison. 9 With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in the likeness of God; 10 from the same mouth come both blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be this way. 11 Does a fountain send out from the same opening both fresh and bitter water? 12 Can a fig tree, my brethren, produce olives, or a vine produce figs? Nor can salt water produce fresh.
There is a similarity between teaching and preaching the word of God. That similarity is that in either situation, part of what you’re doing is teaching people what the word of God means and how they should react to it. Because you want to do this, there is an extra burden placed upon you, as explained in the third chapter of the book of James. Ask yourself the question: why do you want to teach or preach the word of God? There are so many people that are doing this because they feel it edifies them and, frankly, that’s the wrong reason for doing it.
Now I can say this because in my doctor of ministry studies on leadership in the church, I discovered that three-quarters of the pastors were pure egocentric people or had a very strong egocentric part of their personalities. What this means is that it was more important for them to be the center of attention on Sunday morning than it is to actually teach what the word of God is truly about. Now I am not saying that they were not teaching the word of God properly. I’m talking about the motivation to teach the word of God.
Therefore, a good question for you to start with is what is motivating you to do this. Frankly speaking, when the Lord Jesus called me to preach the original meaning of Scripture, he did not show me this passage. My response was that I did not know the Bible to be able to preach it. I did not want to go out and tell people falsehoods. However, I was told in my calling that I would learn what the scripture was about. I would learn how to discover the original meaning of the Scripture, and I could explain it in a way that people today could understand and accept it. I was not told in the calling or even as I explored the calling that there is an additional responsibility placed upon an individual who is going to go out and either teach or preach or do both for the word of God.
If you’re going to do this, you really take on an enormous responsibility. According to the author of the third chapter of James, if you teach or preach the word of God, you will be held to a higher standard than a normal person. Why? You are instructing people how to live by God’s word. Therefore, if you get it wrong, people could behave in a way that is contrary to the word of God. This is an exceptional responsibility to take on, and it’s something that you have got to take seriously.
Early on, as I explored my calling, I was sitting in a church where I heard the preacher talk about Trinity in a way that did not seem right to me. They referred to the lady as the angel lady and she talked about Trinity in an angelic form. When I took my theology class at seminary, it was very clear that angels had nothing to do it Trinity. In other words, angel lady was 100% wrong in our understanding of the doctrine of Trinity and should not have been out there preaching about it because she was telling people heresy. Now how God and Jesus deal with her is, of course, up to them, but how many people did she infect with falsehoods?
A lot of the fallout about the judgment of teachers came that there were several forms of Christianity in existence in the first through fourth centuries after Jesus' death and resurrection. Of course, each expression of Christianity said that the other expressions were false and that if a person preached those other forms of Christianity, they were certainly going to hell. We take that into account when we read chapters like the third chapter of James. However, now that we have established an understanding of Christianity. We still have to be careful about spreading falsehoods.
Let me give you an example. Rob Bell is out in Michigan preaching that there is no Hell. He says everyone’s going to heaven no matter how bad you are or how good you are. I’m not even sure he believes you must have faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior in order to get into heaven. If there’s no idea of hell, then where do you send the people who did not come to know Jesus and the sinners who say they believed in Jesus.
In the book of the watchers, which is the first 36 chapters of the book of 1 Enoch, there is a description of what’s called the mountain of the dead. People believed that when someone died, the soul would be placed into one of four caverns inside the mountain of the dead. One cavern was for the purely righteous and pious people who spent their entire lives fulfilling the laws God gave us in the Bible. Then there was a chamber for those people who were100% sinners in that they totally ignored God’s word and did evil and sin. There was another chamber for those who committed the sin and needed to be judged for that sin because what they did could not have been avoided. For example, an accidental death. Then there was a chamber for people that needed to be judged, and it was not determined right up front whether they were good or bad. So even before Jesus' time, there was this belief about the mountain of the dead. Scholars believe that the Book of the Watchers was authored around 250 BCE.
So now you think about going out in preaching or teaching the word of God. How educated are you to do it? If you do not have proper education to go out and preach and teach the word of God, but you feel called, like I did, then you need to go out and educate yourself. This means more than just reading a simple article or simple commentary on the passage that you’re going to teach or preach about. It means learning what Christianity is all about with all its doctrines with all its pluses and all of its minuses. It also means that you must never stop learning about Christianity.
I know so many pastors who are preaching the word of God who haven’t cracked open a book since they left the seminary. In fact, you can find sermons and teaching lessons out on the Internet and download them and use them. I am sure that there are many people who plagiarize sermons. I know one pastor who was using his father's sermons for his entire career. Even though his father was preaching back in the 1940s and 1950s, he used the same sermons. They were outdated and pretty much useless to today’s society, but that’s what he did. Should that person of been preaching the word of God? I will let you decide that.
The more you study and learn about the Bible, history, and doctrine, the better you will get a teaching and preaching the word of God. That does not mean that you won’t stumble here and there, maybe say the wrong thing, but the more you study, the less often that will ever happen. We must ensure that we get the right information in people’s hands.
One of my pet peeves about the church is the lack of proper education for the people. Jesus' great commission is to go out and make disciples and teach them about the faith. The mission of the United Methodist Church, in which I am ordained, says that their mission is to go out and make disciples for Jesus Christ to transform the world. That sounds very nice, however, they forgot about the fact that we have to educate people about what the faith is all about. That is where the church fails.
In my 25 years of pastoral ministry what I have discovered is that the teachers of the church’s Sunday school is anyone who will pick up the book that goes with the lessons, read the lessons, and try to run some kind of discussion about the lessons. I sat in on a Sunday school class at one of my churches and I watched this happen. When the discussion time came, I raised my hand and asked about a question that was not in the book but was pertinent to the subject being discussed. The leader of that Sunday school group stopped me and said we only discuss the questions that are in the book. By doing that, you limit yourself to only discussing what some author has put in a book. You assume the author got it right? And that is not good for education.
We need to allow people to expand their thinking and to explore questions that they might have about Scripture that are not in the books. That is one of the scariest things to most preachers and teachers of the word of God. Even when I was in seminary, I would ask questions that went past the bounds of where the PhD instructors were.. In the middle of my experience seminary, I had to sit in an evaluation of how I was doing. The leader of that inquiry said that teachers that I had in the seminary all said the same thing about me. Well, what was that I inquired? The answer was you asked too many questions and you try to expand the topics. I asked what was wrong with that? I never got an appropriate answer about it.
Exploring the Scripture beyond what a single book tells you is important that you get a much better and clearer picture of what God’s word is all about. Therefore, if you’re going to preach or teach about a passage or a narrative in the Scripture, you need to look into several sources and merge it together and present it coherently. I enjoyed presenting multiple points of view because there are many things that the church believes in and has doctrine about that Jesus never spoke about.
In one’s Sunday school class on theology, an older gentleman stood up screaming at me. He demanded that I needed to tell him what to believe about the Trinity and then stormed out of the room. I refused to tell them what to believe about the Trinity and said they need to pick which doctrine they think, is correct or blend any of them together. This older gentleman just could not handle that and that got him unbelievably angry.
I believe that’s what we’re supposed to do when we teach or preach on the word of God. Here’s a secret I need to share with you in conclusion of this paper and that is there is no one right answer. There are multiple answers to every question except for questions of facts. Opening a discussion about the Scripture and showing multiple interpretations will enrich people and hopefully get them to want to learn more about the meaning of God’s word.
If you are going to preach or teach about the word of God, then you need to be ready to expand not only your own understanding, but also to help people to do the same. If you’re going to go out and preach and teach the word of God, you must learn as much as you can. Understand that there are multiple interpretations for the different passages of Scripture and the different narratives. Seek them out and do your best to learn all you can about them. Then when you make your presentation, you can share those different points of view and help people to determine what they feel is the best answer for them.
