Fire in the bones

Brian Colmery recounts the story of a seminary professor who was asked, at the eve of his ordination, what he would do if he were not allowed to be ordained.

My professor replied, “I don’t know. But I won't stop preaching. I don’t need a pulpit. There will still be souls going to hell out there, and they'll still need to hear.”

He continued: “I don’t need a piece of wood. Just give me a box, or something, something to stand behind or in front of or on top of. I don’t need a building, I just need enough air to carry the sound of my voice. There are pagans everywhere, no? There are souls going to hell everywhere. I don’t need to be ordained to get out there and preach to them. When you are going in front of elders to send you to the mission field, and they ask you how many souls you’ve led to Christ, you should be saying, ‘thirty,’ or ‘sixty,’ or whatever it was that God did when you got out there and preached. When you say, ‘None…but I’m deep in the Greek, and the Hebrew.’ No one cares about that out there.”

Amen. Preaching the word is not about certification. It's about a fire in the bones (Jer. 20:9), and the redeeming, transforming Gospel of Jesus Christ.