We don’t come to church to hear a commentary on the latest political issues in America. If we want that, we can turn on CNN or Fox News. We come to church to hear a word from God. We don’t want your opinions. We want to hear a prophetic ministry that prefaces the sermon with the words, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’” This is how Luther and Calvin understood the task of the minister. The greatest awakening in the history of the church took place when, after darkness had eclipsed the truth of the gospel and hidden the Word in obscurity, the light burst forth and awakened Christendom in the sixteenth century. That light was carried to churches by men who saw it as their task to present the unembellished, undiluted, unvarnished Word of God and were bold enough to do just that.

In the mid-twentieth century, a full-length film was made about the life of Martin Luther. It included a scene that I found particularly provocative. The scene took place after Luther’s historic meeting with the authorities of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Roman Catholic Church at the Diet of Worms. When Luther was called upon at Worms to recant of his teachings, he made his epic stand, stating: “Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason . . . my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. God help me.” He then left the assembly hall and was taken on horseback by his friends to Wartburg Castle, there to be hidden and protected from the authorities, who were soon to put a price on his head. At the castle, Luther grew a beard and disguised himself as a knight known as Sir George. Then he set to work on the task of translating the Bible into German.

While Luther was hidden away in the castle, his colleague, Andreas Carlstadt, in his zeal to promote the Reformation, went to churches and smashed stained-glass windows and other pieces of art. It was a reckless work of vandalism in the name of reformation. When word of Carlstadt’s destructive activity got back to Luther, he was horrified, for this was not what he intended by the Reformation. Despite the fact that Luther was wanted dead or alive, he got on his horse, left the castle, and came back to the church in Wittenberg. The scene in the movie shows Carlstadt, Philip Melanchthon, and others meeting quietly behind closed doors. Suddenly, Luther enters, dressed as a knight in chain mail. They look at him and ask: “Brother Martin, what are you doing? Why are you here?” Luther replies, “I want my pulpit.”

I don’t know whether that event actually took place in church history or whether this represented the director’s creativity in producing the film, but that scene thrilled me because it captured the spirit of Luther. One of the most significant things about Luther’s life is that after the Reformation began and he had become a celebrity throughout Western Europe, he did not spend his time traveling around the Continent trying to consolidate the movement. Rather, he returned to the primary vocation to which he had been ordained. He spent his years teaching and preaching in Wittenberg, just as John Calvin did in Geneva. So when Luther writes and comments about what a preacher should be and about the task of preaching in the church, I listen. Surely we all can be instructed from his insights.

One of the great gifts to the church is a large book titled What Luther Says. The corpus of Luther’s Works consists of fifty-five thick volumes, so I utilize this anthology to survey Luther’s writings topically. In this book, one can find collected statements from the various works of Luther regarding the preacher and preaching. What follows is the distilled essence of that collection.

The Preacher: Apt to Teach

The first thing that is required of a preacher, according to Luther, is that he be “apt to teach.” At this point, Luther is simply echoing the apostolic qualifications set forth in the New Testament for the position of elder (1 Tim. 3:1–7). The person who is elevated to a position of leadership in the church of God, and is given oversight and supervision of the flock of God, must be able to teach. Luther saw this as the primary task of the minister.

This concept is all but lost in the church today. When we call ministers to our churches, we frequently demand that they be administrators, skilled at fund-raising and project management. We also hope that they might know a little bit of theology and a little bit of the Bible, and we expect them to preach interesting and often entertaining sermons. But we often don’t make it a priority that pastors be equipped to teach the congregation the things of God.

Not only is this tendency contrary to Luther’s admonition, it is against scriptural teaching. Think of Jesus’ confrontation of Peter following Peter’s three public denials of Jesus:

So when they had eaten breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me more than these?”

He said to Him, “Yes, Lord; You know that I love You.”

He said to him, “Feed My lambs.”

He said to him again a second time, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me?”

He said to Him, “Yes, Lord; You know that I love You.”

He said to him, “Tend My sheep.”

He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me?”

Peter was grieved because He said to him the third time, “Do you love Me?”

He said to Him, “Lord, You know all things; You know that I love You.”

Jesus said to him, “Feed My sheep.” (John 21:15–17)

Three times Jesus instructed the Apostle to be engaged in the tending, leading, and feeding of His sheep. Why? It was because the people of God who are assembled in the congregations of churches all over the world belong to Jesus; they are His sheep. Every minister who is ordained is entrusted by God with the care of those sheep. We call the position “the pastorate” or “the pastoral ministry,” because the pastor (from the Latin pastor, meaning “herdsman” or “shepherd”) cares for the sheep of Christ. What shepherd would so neglect his sheep that he would fail to feed them? It is the feeding of the sheep, according to Luther, that is the prime task of the ministry. And that feeding comes, principally, through teaching.

I make a distinction between preaching—which involves exhortation, exposition, admonition, encouragement, and comfort—and teaching, which involves the transfer of information. I practice both in my own ministry, and sometimes I obscure the distinction. The students in my seminary classes will testify that sometimes, in the middle of my lectures, when I’m trying to communicate certain doctrines and information about theology, I’ll start preaching, because I’m not interested in the mere transfer of information. I want that information not only to get in their heads but in their bloodstreams. In fact, I warn them at the beginning of each course: “Don’t think that I’m in this classroom as a professor in a state of neutrality. I’m after your mind and your heart. I hope not only to instruct you, but to persuade you. I want to move you to grasp not only the truth of this content, but also the importance and the sweetness of it, so that you will take it with you for the rest of your lives. It is not my goal simply to transfer information from my brain to your notebook, because learning doesn’t take place until it gets in your head and into your life.” Likewise, when I preach, I often sprinkle some conceptual education into the content of my sermons. So I have a tendency to skate back and forth across the line between preaching and teaching. However, I’ve always thought that the primary thing, as Luther understood, that I’m responsible to do as a minister is to teach the people the things of God.

The Content of Teaching

Here we may well ask Luther: if the top priority of the minister is teaching, what is he to teach? Luther would reply: The Bible, the content of Scripture. Calvin wrote commentaries on almost every book of the Bible, and those commentaries grew out of teaching seminars he gave to his congregation in Geneva. Luther also wrote many commentaries based on his lectures to his congregation and students in Wittenberg. These Reformers gave much of their time and effort to teaching the Bible, and all pastors should do the same.

Some years ago, when I was on the faculty at a theological seminary, we reviewed the curriculum. We asked ourselves: what does a man have to know in order to be a godly pastor? We decided that the main thing was the content of Holy Scripture. So many seminary courses are designed to answer academic questions of background, of authorship, and technical problems that we never get around to the English Bible. Our future ministers are coming out of seminaries not fully conversant with the content of the Bible. So we began to develop a curriculum from ground zero. We said, let’s step out of the academic world for a minute and design the curriculum not to train professors in the areas of their specialties, but to serve the church and thereby to serve Christ.

Many ministers are frankly afraid to teach the content of Scripture to the people because they haven’t learned it themselves. The people of God need to say to their pastors, or to their prospective pastors, “Feed us the Word of God.” Congregations must be careful to choose pastors who will open up the Scriptures to them.

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