Let me answer this question from the very beginning. There is no such thing as relative truth. You either have the truth, or you don’t. It’s not a popular thing to say in today’s culture, but it is true nonetheless.
I will prove it to you. All you have to do is look at the life of the prophet Jeremiah. He is a true hero that rarely gets talked about when we address heroes of the faith. But Jeremiah was a champion for truth, even when it cost him everything. He was beaten, imprisoned, and even had his life threatened, but none of this stopped Jeremiah from preaching.
He didn’t have much of an audience, and the audience he did have wanted to kill him half the time. There are very few, if any, instances of anyone converting at Jeremiah’s preaching. In today’s results-driven world Jeremiah would have been classified as a massive failure. But that classification could not be further from the truth.
You see, what matters most to God is faithfulness. Preachers are not judged based on the size of their congregation, or the amount of money they make. They are judged based on their faithfulness to the word of God. Jesus said that the phrase God will speak to those who make it to heaven is, “Well done, good and FAITHFUL servant.”
In the book of Jeremiah, God commanded Jeremiah to not change one word of what He spoke to him. Yikes. I wonder if today’s preachers could keep that level of commitment. In this era of shallow sermons and silly songs, the real measuring stick of a preacher is how faithful we stay to the word of God.
There is no relative truth. There are no blurred lines. There is no room for a preacher to decide what he can and cannot preach. Jeremiah was told to preach impending doom to his own nation. There is no message more difficult than that. Imagine standing up in your church next Sunday and telling everyone that within a few months the church would no longer exist, and the church building would be burned to the ground. That’s essentially what Jeremiah’s message was!
The truly great preachers throughout history have not changed their message, even when faced with death. None of us in western society are threatened with death for preaching the truth. Not yet anyway. But if we were, would we remain faithful? That is the most important question you will ever have to answer.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
