It was about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday when I was asked to preach Wednesday night. Fortunately, I tend to have a small batch of mini-sermons pre-prepared, so I pulled out two of them, combined them, spliced in a rant about the frequent abuse of the word “religion” (which I ranted about here) and there ya go. With how fast I usually talk, I had a nice 15-minute sermon.
Some charismatic Christians I know are quite offended at the idea of pre-prepped sermons; they believe that when you have some last-minute preaching to do, you should expect the Holy Spirit to drop something into your mind and wing it. It comes from a sloppy and out-of-context interpretation of Matthew 10.16-20:
Look, I’m sending all of you out like sheep into the middle of wolves. Become discreet, like snakes; yet simple, like doves; but be on your guard against people. For they will hand all of you over to their councils, and flog all of you in their synagogues. Before rulers, even kings, they will bring all of you because of me, and all of you will testify to them and the gentiles. Yet when they hand all of you over, don’t worry about what you’ll say, for at that moment you’ll be given what you’ll say. For it isn’t you speaking, but your Father’s Spirit speaking through all of you.
And since I wasn’t witnessing under duress, nor prophesying (I know non-charismatics say that preaching is prophesying, but they don’t know what they’re talking about), but teaching a lesson, it seems fairly stupid to get up there and wing it. Besides, if I didn't think the subject was important, I'd pick a different subject and preach on that.
I used to go to a church where the pastor would chuck his sermon and preach out of his ass. I know that’s a rather crude way of describing it, but when a man is preaching crap, that’s probably one of the more accurate ways of putting it. He’d get up in front of the congregation, start jabbering, and presume it was good stuff because he could say it so forcefully and get enough of the congregation to say Amen to it. Sometimes he’d actually prepare a sermon, then chuck it because “the Spirit told me I should preach on this instead.” This sounds nice and spiritual, but really means he wasn’t listening to God all week, and now that he’s finally listening to his Lord, he doesn’t have the patience to sit down and meditate on God’s word before he presents it to the church.
Totally unacceptable, yet no one had the nerve to call him on it. I think it was just another example of people blaming their bad behavior on God, who did after all inspire St. Paul to tell a pastor be diligent so that he could handle the scriptures without embarrassing himself, unlike the jibbering idiots in his church. [2 Timothy 2.15-16]