This is Part 2 of a sermon series titled “How Should We Preach the Gospel?” preached at Mt. Gilead UMC in Georgetown, KY.

If you want to listen to the whole worship service, click this first link below.

If you want to listen only to the sermon, click this second link below.

1 Peter 2:9-12

You Are a Preacher

• Are there any preachers here this morning? I said, “Are there any preachers here this morning?” Good. That’s better. Yes, June and I aren’t the only preachers here this morning. Every single one of us here is a preacher, because preaching is far more than just getting in front of a group of Christians and speaking a sermon or teaching a Bible lesson. Preaching is something that we do with our lives and actions every moment of every day. And so, we are encouraged to preach with our lives the good news of Jesus defeating sin and death at all times, and if necessary, we use words.

The Priesthood of All Believers

• Well, this morning the Apostle Peter tells us a remarkable truth, that we are a royal priesthood. Last week, I told you that you are a preacher and that shocked some of you. Well, this week I am telling you that you are a priest. Hold on a second preacher; you aren’t even a priest. Well, yes, there are no priests in the UMC, except for Jesus who is our High Priest. So I’m not a priest in that sense. We’ve got Deacons, Elders, District Superintendents, and Bishops though. But you’re right; no priests in that sense.
• A priest is someone who stands in the gap—a mediator between two estranged parties. A priest is someone who helps two different groups or people meet in the middle. And in the Bible, a priest specifically meant someone standing in the gap between God and us sinful humans. A priest atones for sins and makes sacrifices on behalf of the guilty party, thus absolving them of their sin and restoring the relationship between the two parties, between God and humans.
• And so, I say it again: you are a priest. You are! You are a priest! You stand in the gap between God and other people. We all do this, because we are Christ’s ambassador’s on earth, as Paul says in 2 Cor 5:20, “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.” God uses us to plea with the world, “Come back to the Living One! Come back to the Fountain! Come back to your Creator who loves you!” We are priests, and we stand in the gap between God and others, representing God in this world.
• So let’s practice saying it together, because it’s really helpful to internalize things by saying them out loud: “I am a priest.” “I am a priest.” “You are a priest.” “He…” “She…” “We…” “I…”
• Every believer is priest, and we represent God to the world, and that is one of the most important parts to being a preacher—representing God by preaching through the actions and attitudes of our lives.

The Ethos of Preaching

• There’s a fancy word for this, ethos, which means rapport or trust. In fact, there are three fancy words for how we should preach the Gospel; they are ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos, as I just said, is where the audience trusts the speaker. Logos is making sure that what you’re saying makes logical sense. And pathos has to do with the feelings, emotions, and conviction of our communication and preaching. Every good preacher needs these three things in his or her toolbox: the audience’s trust, making good sense, and feeling it from the heart. It could be argued that ethos is the most important thing for a speaker or preacher to have. They trust the speaker. They know the speaker to be reliable. Without this, without ethos, it is very, very difficult for a preacher to have any effective or meaningful communication with his or her hearers. “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” Nobody wants to hear the Gospel from you unless they know that you actually care about them. And so, if you—the preachers—don’t have people’s trust, then you can’t speak the truth into their lives. Well, I guess that you can try, but it won’t work. Without ethos, you can’t do the other two.
• And so, Peter says in vv. 11-12…Did you hear that? (read v. 12 again).
• Live such good lives among the pagans. Now that is ethos. And that is what we need.
• But you know what? That’s what we are lacking so much of in the church today. We’ve got lots of logos—plenty of arguments ready against anyone who will doubt the Bible. Sometimes there’s even lots of pathos in church—emotions and sensationalism, mere fleeting feelings that are here one moment and gone the next. There is plenty of logos and pathos in church today, but what we are lacking is most important, because without ethos, without the world viewing us as trustworthy and reliable, our words about the Gospel will go in one ear and out the other.
• We just don’t have the world’s trust. We’ve spent so much time beating them over the head with Bible verses and religiosity that we’ve turned them away and turned them off. We’ve just been so annoying. (At least we don’t go door to door like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons.) And like we talked about last week, we’ve also been pretty hypocritical.
• The point I’m trying to make is not that we’re terrible and that there is no way to fix things, instead my point is that we as the church need to recognize this and make our adjustments. We need to put most of our efforts today toward building that trust with the world, so that we can earn the right to speak with power the good news of Jesus Christ raised from the dead, the descendant of David as Paul defines the Gospel (2 Tim 2:8).

And So?

• For what it’s worth, arguments and logos played a big factor for me coming to Christ. That’s probably not the normal way of coming to Jesus, but I was an atheist and lots of my problems with God were intellectual. “What about the dinosaurs? How can pornography be a sin if there were no TVs back then?” These were my annoying questions for Christians. And they answered them: we’re not exactly sure how dinosaurs fit into Genesis (maybe they were wiped out in the flood; maybe something else—they were transparent in how they weren’t exactly sure and I appreciated that instead of them being prideful know-it-alls) and at the root of sexual sin is lust (any lust is wrong and sinful whether you’ve got a TV or not). And so, these Christians had some answers for me. They had the logos of preaching. But that’s not what kept me in the faith. Instead, it was the ethos of preaching: it was their love for me, their care, their unwavering commitment to helping me regardless of how mean and vicious I was against them with my words and actions. They really turned the other cheek with me. And had I found out that these Christians were involved in some scandal or terrible unethical behavior, all probably would’ve been lost. Shoot, I was lost and probably still would be lost. But the people, the kind of people who brought me to the Lord, that is what sustained me and that is what inspired me to want to know and love Christ too, because they weren’t just talking the talk; they were walking the walk. They had ethos. They cared. I trusted them. I saw God in them. And I wanted to be like that, where God’s love was in me too, where I too could be used by God to show his love, not just merely tell his love. It’s called show and tell for a reason. You can’t have one without the other. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
• You are a preacher. You are a priest. Go show and tell the world Jesus Christ raised from the dead. Amen.