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       CALLING ALL JONAHS: DON'T RUN IF YOU ARE CALLED TO SPEAK! BY J. 
       LEE GRADY
       By: lastdayschristians Date: August 22, 2013, 1:30 pm
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       CALLING ALL JONAHS: DON'T RUN IF YOU ARE CALLED TO SPEAK! BY J.
       LEE GRADY
       I did it again. On a recent Sunday I stood in a pulpit, looked
       out over a congregation of mostly strangers, cleared the lump in
       my throat and preached a message that the Lord had laid on my
       heart from the Bible.
       Thousands of men and women speak publicly like this every week.
       It’s what preachers do. No big deal. But even though I speak
       often, I’ve found that preaching the gospel is one of the most
       frightening assignments anyone could attempt. I feel as if I die
       a thousand deaths right before I do it, and I die several more
       times after I go home and evaluate what happened.
       After one discouraging experience in which an audience stared
       coldly at me with their arms folded, I determined that preaching
       surely must not be my calling. I shared my struggle with an
       older pastor.
       “Sometimes I feel discouraged after I speak,” I said. “Does that
       ever happen to you?” I was sure he would counsel me to stop
       preaching.
       His answer shocked me. “Son, I feel that way every Monday
       morning.”
       When I tell friends that I stubbornly resisted the call of God
       to preach because of my lack of confidence, they act surprised.
       They think most people who stand in pulpits want to be there.
       Think again! We assume God chooses gifted orators who hone their
       skills like doctors who learn surgery or actors who learn to
       perform on stage. But true preaching is not a natural
       exercise—it is one of the most supernatural tasks anyone can
       ever be called to do. It requires an imperfect human vessel to
       yield himself (or herself) to speak the very words of God.
       If we do this in the flesh, the results are miserable; if we
       wholly trust the power of the Spirit, prophetic preaching
       unleashes supernatural anointing.
       Most preachers in the Bible were reluctant. Moses made excuses
       about stuttering, Gideon tried to disqualify himself, and
       Jeremiah complained about the responsibility of carrying a
       prophetic burden. Jonah bought a one-way ticket to the other
       side of the Mediterranean Sea so he wouldn’t have to give his
       unpopular sermon.
       And the apostle Paul, who was a silver-tongued Pharisee before
       he met Christ, was stripped of his eloquence before he preached
       throughout the Roman Empire. He told the Corinthians: “I was
       with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my
       message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom,
       but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your
       faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of
       God” (1 Cor. 2:3-5, NASB).
       Charismatic revivalist Arthur Katz, who died seven years ago,
       wrote about the power of true preaching in his 1999 book
       Apostolic Foundations: “The only one qualified to preach ... is
       the one who wants to run the other way, like Jonah. ... The man
       who sighs and groans when called upon to speak, who does not
       want to be there, who feels terribly uncomfortable ... is the
       man out of whose mouth the word of true preaching is most likely
       to come.”
       That is certainly not the way most of us view pulpit ministry in
       contemporary America. We celebrate the smooth and the polished.
       We measure the impact of a sermon not by whether hearts are
       slain by conviction but by how high the people jump when the
       preacher tells them what they want to hear.
       That kind of carnal preaching may win the accolades of men,
       boost TV ratings and even build mega churches. But the kingdom
       is not built on smug self-confidence. We need God’s words. The
       church will live in spiritual famine until broken, reluctant,
       weak and trembling preachers allow His holy fire to come out of
       their mouths.
       If you have a message from God, die to your fears, doubts and
       excuses, and drink the cup of suffering that accompanies the
       genuine call of God.
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