Thus Says The Lord

After preaching in east Texas a couple of weeks ago, the pastor took my friend Jimmy and I to supper. The pastor told us a story I still find hard to believe. 

A pastor in a large church in another part of the state got called out for stealing another pastor's sermons. Word for word. Point for point. Week after week. For fourteen years!When asked why he did it, he said it was easier. He did not sit before the Lord in prayer. He did not exegete the passage to dig for the gold mine of truth. Most importantly he did not allow God to preach the message to himself first as he prayerfully prepared before he ever delivered it to the congregation. 

I wonder how many other preachers do the same thing. There are actual books of sermons from heavyweights like Charles Spurgeon and George W. Truett as well modern day preachers. You can preach them word for word. No work. Even more convenient is to get sermons off the web. That is what the pastor did I mentioned earlier for 14 years. He got those messages straight off the internet. We probably would not even know it but the original preacher who had his sermons stolen found out and called the offending pastor to account. 

What strikes me about this as I red through the prophetic books is those prophets received fresh words from God. The messages were often hard but they came straight from God. I can imagine those prophets lingering long in prayer before the Lord until they received a fresh word. I am confident is never Jeremiah's mind to try to steal another prophet's message. In fact God called out many other prophets for telling the people what they wanted to hear and not hearing from God. He called them out as false prophets. 

They preached those messages with fearless authority. You may not have liked the message but you would not have been able to leave one of those messages without knowing you heard a word from the Lord. 

When you hear your pastor proclaim God's word do you have confidence that he received that message from the Lord and therefore he can say, "Thus says the Lord."I talked with a Sunday School teacher from another town yesterday who complimented the powerful preaching of his pastor. May that become the norm all across the land. May pastors stand and boldy proclaim, "Thus says the Lord," because they have been with Him in the prayer closet and received fresh words from Jehovah the Lord of Hosts.