God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
We must reject our well-meaning but misguided spiritual determinism. As it turns out, it doesn’t all depend on us. The Bible is full of examples of spiritual giants producing rascally children and noble kin coming from polluted loins. While the proverbial wisdom of Scripture (Prov. 22: 6) and the promises of the covenant (Gen. 17: 7) tell us that good Christian parents and good Christian children normally go together, we must concede that God is sovereign (Rom. 9: 6– 18), salvation is a gift (Eph. 2: 8– 9), and the wind of the Spirit blows where it wishes (John 3: 8).
[The preacher's] aim, rather, will be to stand under Scripture, not over it, and to allow it, so to speak, to talk through him, delivering what is not so much his message as its. In our preaching, that is what should always be happening. In his obituary of the great German conductor, Otto Klemperer, Neville Cardus spoke of the way in which Klemperer 'set the music in motion,' maintaining throughout a deliberately anonymous, self-effacing style in order that the musical notes might articulate themselves in their own integrity through him. So it must be in preaching; Scripture itself must do all the talking, and the preacher's task is simply to 'set the Bible in motion.'
